Two Mediterranean wars for the price of one

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The Eastern Mediterranean can now rejoice in the prospect of two needless wars. In both cases, the anti-Moslem prejudices of people born far away play a big part in making them likely.

The failure of U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke's mediation mission in Cyprus on May 3 was unambiguous. It set the stage for war between Greece and Turkey next August or September, when the Greek Cypriots take delivery of new Russian anti-aircraft missiles.

The failure of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's last-ditch mediation between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in London on Tuesday is being urgently air-brushed away by the spin doctors: there's even talk of another meeting in Washington on May 11. But it is just as dead an end -- and it makes another intifada almost inevitable.

This does not mean that either conflict is insoluble. Indeed, the shape of the final peace settlement has been visible for years in both cases. Netanyahu's and Arafat's successors, after some thousands of people have died, will ultimately have to carry out the Oslo deal. The Cyprus settlement that was sketched out between the late Archbishop Makarios and Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Denktas 20 years ago will eventually be accepted and enforced.

It's just that neither deal can be sold politically yet, because the more powerful community -- Israelis in one case, Greek-Cypriots in the other -- has not yet been convinced that it has to accept the compromise. Why not? In both cases, it has a lot to do with the mindset of Central and Eastern Europe.

Netanyahu won the last Israeli election on an anti-Oslo platform because the previous Israeli political balance was upset by the arrival of a million 'Russians'. These Jewish immigrants from the old Soviet Union now account for one-fifth of Israeli voters -- and with the traditional Russian hatred and contempt for all things Moslem, they tend to vote against Oslo and compromise.

In Russia, there is a long history that explains, though it does not justify, those attitudes: the Russians spent their formative centuries struggling to free themselves from various Moslem conquerors from Central Asia. But the 'Russian' Jews arrived in Israel with these attitudes intact, and the majority naturally wound up on the hard right of Israeli politics, convinced that there could be no reason to make deals with Palestinians.

Since most of the 'Russians' arrived after the intifada ended, they have no personal experience of the cost of such attitudes. They will learn, in the end, but perhaps not before voting Netanyahu back into office in 2000.

Another round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians seems almost natural (though it isn't). A war between Greece and Turkey is so preposterous that it would take monumental stupidity to bring it about. Unfortunately, the stupidity is available in the requisite quantities -- and most of it is German.

Germany's anti-Moslem and specifically anti-Turkish sentiments have some historical roots too: Turkish forces besieged the German-speaking city of Vienna as late as 1688. But mostly they are about the several million Turkish immigrants who live in Germany now.

Over half the 'Turks' were born in Germany, but in a nation with no tradition of assimilating immigrants, many see them as an alien presence. So it's good politics in Germany to be anti- Turkish -- and that affects German foreign policy in very unfortunate ways. For it was the Germans who got Turkey dropped from the list of candidates for membership in the European Union last year.

After 35 years of promises from Brussels that Turkey would eventually be allowed to join, the Turks found themselves dropped just as the EU was welcoming 11 new candidates, all of them Christian. Worse, one of the candidates was Cyprus, divided between Greeks and Turks since 1974 -- and Cyprus would be represented in the entry talks only by the Greek-Cypriot government.

In case any Turks missed the point, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, a close ally of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, made gratuitously insulting comments about Turkey. The Turks went ballistic, with Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz accusing Kohl of pursuing the same strategy as Hitler: "(His) final goal is to divide Europe between Bulgaria and Turkey." All this would matter a lot less if there were not a confrontation brewing over Cyprus.

The obvious solution of a bi-zonal, federal Cyprus republic has been on the table ever since an Athens-backed coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece triggered a Turkish invasion to protect the Turkish minority in 1974. But for 20 years the Greek- Cypriots have overplayed their hand, reckoning that Greece's EU membership, plus general Western sympathy for fellow Christians, would win them a better deal.

To increase the pressure on Turkey, Athens is upgrading Paphos airport in Cyprus to take Greek Air Force planes -- and the Greek-Cypriot government has bought S300 anti-aircraft missiles from Russia. After they are delivered late this summer, the Greeks might be able to deny Turkey access to Cyprus airspace -- so Turkey has said it will not allow the missiles to be delivered.

Greek Foreign Minister Theodore Pangalos (who recently described Turks as "thieves, rapists and murderers"), clearly thinks he is a diplomatic genius, but he is setting the region up for what could be a terrible shock. The stage is set for a military confrontation later this year, and the EU has just told the Turks, in effect, that they have nothing to lose in going for broke.

A new intifada, like its predecessor, would be a strictly local event, destroying lives and hopes only within a 60-mile (100- km) radius of Jerusalem. A Greek-Turkish war over Cyprus would involve 10 times as many people and destabilize the whole region.

But the two disasters would have one thing in common. Some wars actually settle things, but at the end of these conflicts the two sides would face exactly the same choices they face now.