Oxi means no—to Cypriot sovereignty

Op-eds Cyprus problem Oxi means no—to Cypriot sovereignty File Nicosia Green Line 10 Relevant News Oxi means no—to Cypriot sovereignty 26 August 2026 A hugely significant development 26 August 2026 Turkey is called upon to prove it, not just say it 26 August 2026 Newsroom 26 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber By Matthew S. Miller I remember the OXI signs. “In the spring of 2004, I was living in the United States but visiting Cyprus shortly before the referendum on the Annan Plan for my son’s baptism.” What I remember most vividly is how completely that one word seemed to take over the landscape. OXI. OXI. OXI. No. My memory, twenty-two years later, was that the outcome had still seemed uncertain before that campaign took hold. Memory is unreliable, so I went back and looked at the polling. The record is more complicated than my recollection. But it is also revealing. In March 2003, an AC Nielsen poll for Politis actually found Greek Cypriots narrowly favoring an Annan-based settlement: 40 percent Yes, 38 percent No, with 23 percent undecided. By February 2004, opinion had moved against the plan, but the question was hardly settled. Another AC Nielsen/Politis poll found 40 percent opposed, 31 percent in favor and fully 29 percent undecided. Public opinion was fluid. And Greek Cypriots were not simply rejecting the concept of a settlement. In early March, when AC Nielsen asked how people would vote if President Tassos Papadopoulos succeeded in incorporating the changes he was seeking into the plan, 57 percent said they would probably or definitely vote Yes. A late-March poll produced something similar. With negotiations still underway, respondents opposed the plan then on the table 66 to 10 percent. But if the Greek Cypriot side’s principal demands were incorporated, the result reversed: 53 percent Yes, 39 percent No. Then came the final plan. Then came the campaign. Then came President Papadopoulos’s appeal for a “resounding No.” On April 24, Oxi became a landslide. Nearly 76 percent of Greek Cypriots rejected the Annan Plan. Nearly 65 percent of Turkish Cypriots accepted it. Twenty-two years later, perhaps it is time to ask a question that has never received a satisfactory answer: What, exactly, did Oxi achieve? That question has returned because of Averof Neophytou’s recent criticism of the political leadership of DISY and AKEL and what he describes as a history of lost opportunities on the Cyprus problem. Responding in these pages, Kostas Venizelos asks: “To whom is Mr. Averof Neophytou addressing himself?” He raises several objections. First, Neophytou himself participated in the political history he now criticizes. Perhaps, Venizelos suggests, this is less an exercise in historical reflection than positioning for another presidential campaign. Perhaps. But Averof Neophytou’s motives do not determine whether his position is true. A politician can be opportunistic and still be correct. He can also change his mind. Indeed, if Neophytou now believes that decisions he once defended contributed to missed opportunities for settlement, I would rather hear him say so than insist that he remain wrong for the sake of consistency. Venizelos’s more important argument is that the entire theory of “lost opportunities” misidentifies the problem. The problem, he says, is Turkey: its occupation, its geopolitical interests and its ambitions in Cyprus. The 76 percent who voted No in 2004 did not lose an opportunity; according to Venizelos, they prevented the dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus and its transformation into a Turkish protectorate. There is an obvious truth here. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974. It maintains troops in the north. Ankara pursues strategic interests in Cyprus and throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. No serious account of this conflict can pretend otherwise. But “Turkey is the problem” is a diagnosis. It is not a strategy. Turkey did not disappear after Oxi in 2004. Turkey did not disappear after Crans-Montana in 2017. Turkey will not disappear if the present effort fails. Another twenty years of waiting will not make Turkey disappear either. The relevant question is therefore not whether Turkey has strategic interests in Cyprus. Of course it does. The question is: What attainable policy most effectively reduces Turkey’s ability to determine the future of Cyprus? That is where the politics of Oxi deserves much harder scrutiny. Venizelos says the 76 percent saved the Republic from becoming a Turkish protectorate. Then let us look at what twenty-two years of that decision have produced. Does the Republic of Cyprus exercise greater sovereignty over the northern part of its internationally recognized territory than it did in 2004? Has Ankara’s influence there diminished? Have Turkish Cypriots become less economically and politically dependent upon Turkey? Has Turkey’s negotiating position become softer? Has reunification become easier? Has waiting produced the better settlement for which Greek Cypriots were supposedly preserving their options? If so, where is it? This is the central weakness in the politics of rejection. An imperfect proposed settlement is compared not with the probable consequences of rejecting it, but with an ideal settlement that does not exist. There were serious objections to the Annan Plan. Security, guarantees, property, governance, implementation and economics all presented legitimate concerns. Reasonable people could—and did—conclude that the risks were too great. But the actual choice on April 24, 2004 was never: The Annan Plan or an ideal settlement. It was: The Annan Plan or whatever history would produce after its rejection. And history does not stand still. Time is not neutral. Every year without settlement changes the conflict that the next generation will inherit. Property changes hands. Economic relationships deepen. Political identities harden. People who once lived together, like my father-in-law, die and are replaced by generations who have known only division. Turkish Cypriot dependence upon Ankara deepens. A division once regarded as temporary gradually begins to look permanent. Saying No, therefore, is not the absence of a decision. No is a decision. Waiting is a policy. And policies must be judged by their consequences. Crans-Montana and the history we choose to remember Crans-Montana provides an even more recent test of this argument. Venizelos presents 2017 as essentially an open-and-shut case: Turkey blew up the negotiations. Those who describe Crans-Montana as a lost opportunity, he suggests, refuse to accept what the record demonstrates. But that is not how António Guterres, the man actually mediating the conference, described what happened. In his September 2017 report to the Security Council, Guterres wrote that the parties had essentially resolved the key issue of effective participation in the federal government. Differences concerning the treatment of Turkish nationals had narrowed considerably. An agreement on territorial adjustment was emerging. The basic property regimes had largely been agreed. Even on the most difficult question—security and guarantees—the Secretary-General reported significant progress. Guterres’s framework explicitly treated the existing system of guarantees, particularly the unilateral right of intervention under Article IV of the Treaty of Guarantee, as “unsustainable.” He proposed replacing the existing security arrangement with a new system and an implementation-monitoring mechanism. On the final day, Guterres reported that confidential meetings produced important indications of possible openings, particularly concerning security and guarantees. At the dinner that night, he told the delegations that he believed there was a “broad understanding of the parameters of the potential strategic agreement.” The negotiations nevertheless collapsed. And Guterres’s subsequent judgment is worth reading carefully. The parties, he wrote, had come close to a strategic understanding on security and guarantees and on the other core elements of a settlement. The essence of a comprehensive settlement was “practically there.” His conclusion was equally clear: “A historic opportunity was missed in Crans-Montana.” Guterres did not say Turkey was blameless. He did not say the Greek Cypriot side destroyed the conference either. He deliberately did not reduce a complex negotiating failure to the culpability of one party. Instead, he wrote that although the parties were moving closer on substance, they remained far apart in the trust and determination required to reach common ground. If one wishes to argue that Turkey alone destroyed Crans-Montana, one must at least explain why the United Nations Secretary-General, who chaired the conference and conducted the confidential discussions, did not say so. But there is another part of the 2017 story that we should not conveniently forget. Only months before Crans-Montana, the Cyprus House of Representatives approved a proposal to commemorate in public schools the 1950 Enosis referendum—the plebiscite for union of Cyprus with Greece. The proposal originated with ELAM. AKEL opposed it. DISY abstained, allowing it to pass. Think about the message. Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots were engaged in perhaps the most promising negotiations in years to create a bicommunal federal state. Turkish Cypriots were being asked to trust that they could live securely and with political equality inside a state whose population would remain overwhelmingly Greek Cypriot. And at precisely that moment, the Greek Cypriot parliament decided that public schools should commemorate the historic campaign to make Cyprus part of Greece. What possible purpose could that serve? The reaction from the Turkish Cypriot side was angry and, one can certainly argue, excessive. But the damage was real. The negotiations stopped for approximately two months. Guterres himself later described the episode as a “setback.” The sides, he wrote, “lost crucial time” at a moment when they had achieved significant momentum, and the episode damaged trust both between the leaders and between the communities. This was not Turkey imposing something upon the Republic of Cyprus. This was a self-inflicted wound. Greek Cypriots have an obvious response to this. Look north from Nicosia. There, across Pentadaktylos, an enormous Turkish-Cypriot flag and Turkish nationalist symbols have been carved into the mountainside, deliberately positioned to be visible across the Mesaoria and illuminated at night. I see them too. They are provocative. They are an assertion of nationalism literally written across the landscape. But that is precisely the point. One community’s nationalism does not neutralize the other’s. They reinforce each other. The Turkish symbols on Pentadaktylos do not make commemorating Enosis wise. The commemoration of Enosis does not make the symbols on Pentadaktylos legitimate. Both communicate essentially the same poisonous message to the other community: Cyprus really belongs to somebody else. To Turkey. To Greece. To Turks. To Greeks. Anything, it seems, except to Cypriots. And every time one side indulges that nationalism, it strengthens the nationalists on the other side. Look what they did. See? We told you. They can never be trusted. And the cycle begins again. Cyprus belongs to Cypriots This is not an argument that Greek Cypriots are responsible for the Cyprus problem while Turkey is innocent. That would be historically absurd. But the opposite claim—that because Turkey bears enormous responsibility, Greek Cypriot political decisions cannot also have worsened the situation—is equally absurd. History permits more than one actor to make disastrous decisions. Indeed, Cyprus should understand that better than almost any country. The catastrophe of 1974 was preceded by a coup against Archbishop Makarios, supported by the military dictatorship in Athens and undertaken in pursuit of Enosis. That fact does not justify the Turkish invasion. It demonstrates something else: Neither Greece nor Turkey can be trusted automatically to place the interests of Cyprus above its own. Perhaps after fifty-two years, that lesson should finally become the foundation of Cypriot politics. Greek Cypriots do not need to stop being culturally Greek. Turkish Cypriots do not need to stop being culturally Turkish. Nobody needs to surrender language, religion, family history or cultural inheritance. But politically, something has to stand above those identities. Cyprus belongs to Cypriots. Not to Athens. Not to Ankara. The objective of a settlement should therefore be straightforward: maximize the ability of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots to govern their island together, while minimizing the ability of either outside power to govern it for them. Consider 2004 from that perspective. We cannot know what would have happened had both communities voted Yes. Counterfactual history requires humility. A reunified Cyprus would have had disputes. Constitutional arrangements would have been tested. Some provisions might have failed. Others would undoubtedly have required renegotiation. But consider what happened next. The development of Eastern Mediterranean natural-gas resources transformed the strategic environment around Cyprus. Energy became entangled with the Cyprus problem, maritime claims, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Egypt and the wider geopolitics of the region. Imagine instead that Cyprus had confronted those developments as a reunified member of the European Union, with a federal government constitutionally representing both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. We cannot know what that Cyprus would have achieved. But it would have begun from a fundamentally different strategic position. Instead, twenty-two years after Oxi, the island remains divided. The Republic still exercises no effective control in the north. Turkish Cypriots remain isolated and heavily dependent upon Ankara. Turkey remains deeply involved in Cypriot affairs. And the negotiating environment has not become more favorable. The Turkish side now openly advances sovereign equality and a two-state solution. So perhaps the burden of proof should finally begin to shift. For decades, supporters of compromise have been required to prove that each proposed settlement is safe enough, fair enough and advantageous enough. They should be. But rejection is also a policy. Those advocating it should therefore answer for its consequences. Show us where waiting has worked. If rejecting the Annan Plan strengthened Cyprus, show us the improvement produced by twenty-two years of rejection. If Crans-Montana’s collapse improved the Republic’s strategic position, show us that stronger position. If today’s imperfect opportunity should be rejected because a better one will eventually appear, explain why tomorrow’s circumstances are likely to be more favorable than today’s. Simply repeating that Turkey is responsible does not answer these questions. Turkey’s responsibility is precisely why Cyprus needs a strategy capable of reducing Turkish power over the island. Nor can patriotism consist indefinitely of saying Oxi. Sometimes patriotism means recognizing that an imperfect compromise today may be preferable to a worse compromise tomorrow. Eventually, tomorrow may offer no compromise at all. To whom is Averof speaking? Which brings me back to Kostas Venizelos’s question. To whom is Averof Neophytou addressing himself? I cannot know whom Neophytou has in mind. Nor do his political ambitions particularly interest me. But I know to whom this argument should be addressed. It should be addressed to Greek Cypriots who want the Republic eventually to exercise sovereignty over an undivided island. It should be addressed to Turkish Cypriots who want a future that is not determined in Ankara. It should be addressed to people on both sides who do not want fifty years of separation to become a hundred. It should be addressed to anyone willing to ask whether repeating the same policy while the strategic environment steadily deteriorates constitutes prudence—or merely habit. It was addressed to me. I am an American-Cypriot dual national. My sons have both served the Republic—one on the Green Line in Kaimakli, the other at Stavrovouni. I want them, and whatever children they may someday have, to inherit a Cyprus more secure and more peaceful than the one their grandfather knew. In other words, it should be addressed to Cypriots. I remember those OXI signs from 2004. At the time, Oxi was presented as an assertion of Cypriot sovereignty. Twenty-two years later, I wonder whether its historical consequence has been precisely the opposite. Sovereignty is not simply the power to reject an agreement. It is the power of a people to govern themselves. Cyprus cannot fully possess that sovereignty while its island remains divided, while the Republic exercises no effective authority over part of its territory, and while the futures of both communities remain entangled with the strategic interests of Greece and Turkey. Perhaps the most sovereign thing Cypriots could eventually do is not say Oxi to one another. It would be to say something else, together, to Athens and Ankara: This is our island. We will govern it ourselves. Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News A hugely significant development Turkey is called upon to prove it, not just say it From Mevlut to Tufan: yes at dinner, no by breakfast Pamboridis’s megaton bomb on organised crime and politics, or just a flashbang? 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