A locked entry for now, as I intend to write a public commentary on the first (but not the second) of these two problematic cases, and obviously they are both sensitive.
I’m really sad that Mehmet Ali Talat lost the election in Cyprus last week. I’ve been working with him for just about three years; I found him committed, intelligent, witty, and vigorous in defence of his own views – as well as ready to admit his own mistakes. Unfortunately he never had a negotiating partner on the Greek Cypriot side who was as serious about reaching a settlement as he was. Tassos Papadopoulos, who was the Greek Cypriot president from 2003 to 2008, was committed to deadlock and stagnation; Dimitris Christofias, who defeated Papadopoulos on a moderately pro-solution ticket in 2008, has been too scared of his own hardline government coalition partners to cut the deal. Meanwhile the EU failed to deliver on the commitments it made to the Turkish Cypriot people after they voted in favour of reunification (and the Greek Cypriots voted against) in 2004. None of this was Talat’s fault, but the Turkish Cypriot voters have nobody else to punish; so he lost.
I see some commentators saying that a Cyprus settlement is so important to Turkey that Ankara will surely not let Talat’s successor, Derviş Eroğlu, slow down the process. I have to say that the idea that Ankara decisively controls the political process in northern Cyprus has surely been dealt a fatal blow by last week’s election results. I really don’t see any reason for optimism that the Turkish government will decide to bully the new Turkish Cypriot leader into accepting the agenda of candidate he has just defeated.
Much farther south, my main interlocutor in the Government of Southern Sudan, General Oyay Deng Ajak, failed to win a seat in the parliamentary elections held two weeks ago (which were deeply flawed, but the fact that three ministers lost seats suggests a more complex picture). He’ll survive – fortunately (and sensibly) you don’t have to be in parliament to hold ministerial office in Southern Sudan – but it has meant that he is rather distracted from his ministerial duties at present.
I’m fundamentally in favour of democracy, but applying it to peace-making is not always straightforward, and sometimes actually the wrong thing to do.
I don’t have a problem with a federally-based upper house for states that actually are federal, like the USA and Germany. But the UK is not a federal state.
That’s why I put the world “ideally” at the start of my sentence. I don’t think it’s impossible that the UK could become a federal state, if there were any political will behind it, but I’m aware that there isn’t. More likely we’ll limp on with a devolved (except for England) UK for a little while yet, before terminal break-up. And, this being the UK, “a little while” may well mean 100 years or so.
Again, I used the word “mitigate” rather than “solve” advisedly, regarding the extent to which a federally elected upper house could reverse the strong tide of Londoncentricity within the UK political/cultural/financial establishment. It’d take a good deal more than that to solve the problem, but it could change the weather, and perhaps help stem the gushing flow of tribute that the Capitol exacts yearly from the Districts. (Personally I think “the provinces” is a phrase best avoided, tinctured as it so often is with a degree of contempt.)
I said nothing about 15-year non-renewable terms. Seven-year renewable terms would be preferable, in my opinion, if we were to go down the broad route of the current proposals – to which, I as I said, I am far from wedded..