By Yusuf KANLI
TDN - Late friend and colleague Kenneth McHenzie, who was covering Turkish news for a variety of British newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s before settling in Cyprus, was often joking that Cyprus was like a plane which keeps on taking off once in a while but never lands.
Take-offs, Ken was saying, have always been majestic, with grandiose expectations which somehow always preceded some sort of tension on the island, while the end of the process has always been a disaster, with either of the two sides finding a pretext of burying in the annals of history of failed Cyprus bids whatever achieved through lengthy discussions.
Cyprus diplomacy, indeed, is very much like a ping-pong game. In turn the two sides have kept on rejecting each and every peace proposal either offered by the other side or prepared by an army of international mediators.
Now, depending on the mood of the reader, we are either about to see the Cyprus plane taking off once again or about to watch a new set of ping-pong game.
If we are to be frank, we have to concede that a settlement to the Cyprus problem is long overdue. In the Cyprus mess we have today, neither the British, nor the Greeks and the Greek Cypriots nor Turks and the Turkish Cypriots can claim they do not have a share in the gangrene on the island.
There has not been any single detail of the Cyprus issue which has not been discussed by the representatives of the two peoples on the island since the kick off of the inter-communal talks process in mid 1960s in Lebanon. If after almost 40 years of talks we still do not have a settlement, it is obvious that there is lack of political will to compromise and without making some bitter compromise, it is impossible to reach a settlement on the island.

The key: Power sharing
The key to a settlement on Cyprus, irrespective of how difficult it might be to swallow for the Greek Cypriot side, is their recognition of the reality that there are two equal people on the island and they have to share power with the Turkish Cypriots. And, for the Turkish Cypriots, though it will be rather painful to concede, they must understand that there is a direct relationship between the amount of land they will have and the administrative power they will share in a future settlement. Secondly, both Turkish Cypriots and Turkey must realize that withdrawal of the Turkish troops and at least a sizeable amount of the mainland Turks who have settled in northern Cyprus is in the cards if we want a settlement. Number of Greek Cypriots to be resettled in north, giving back pre-1974 properties, compensation and such other issues will not pose a serious difficulty if an agreement can be reached on power sharing, troops and settlers issues. Obviously, the end result will be a compromise deal, and neither side will be fully satisfied with it.
Since his election, particularly in his statement last Thursday as he was swearing in as president, Demetris Christofias put forward some hard-line conditions for peace. Similarly, in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General - just two days before the run-off presidential elections in southern Cyprus - Turkish Cypriot President Mehmet Ali Talat insisted that some demands of the Greek Cypriot side, through the media, condemned as not helping a settlement on the island.
While such developments made Cyprus observers rather pessimistic, indeed it is nothing abnormal for the two sides of the island to withdraw to their harshest rhetoric before indulging in any sort of a give-and-take process. That is why before the Cyprus talks plane take off each time we have identical flare ups on the island. The two sides are just preparing to negotiate...
Christofias is now in Athens, soon will travel to Brussels and early next week he will be on the island to finish of his last preparations for a meeting with Talat expected to be held in the Ledra Palace hotel - the U.N. headquarters in Nicosia buffer zone - before the end of this month.
Talat, on the other hand, will be traveling to Turkey today. After attending an event in Istanbul where he will receive the "statesman of the year" award by the Marmara University and then proceed to Ankara Thursday for a series of fine-tuning talks with President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdodan.
All these indicate that there is a serious effort on both sides for the resumption of the Cyprus talks process. Indeed, this might be the last chance for a federal Cyprus.

(Yusuf Kanly can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected])