April 16, 2002	Tuesday	Safar 2, 1423

LONDON: There are some things Colin Powell can’t say on his struggling mission, some scripts George Bush can’t afford to read, some truths Tony Blair can’t stir into his familiar stew of pieties. Here are a few of them.

Take, to begin with, a country a few hundred miles from Jerusalem.

Twenty-eight years ago, one of the world’s most powerful armies came to call. It blasted a pathetic defensive militia to smithereens, drove tens of thousands of innocent civilians into refugee camps, raised two fingers to a bleating “international community” and took what it wished. America, utterly implicated, looked the other way. We saw a country - a beautiful country - divided.

Today the invader still sits where it sat all those decades ago. The dispossessed of yesteryear remain dispossessed; settlers from abroad have been imported to live in their old houses and till their old fields, walls of exclusion ruthlessly built. And apart from occasional yakking - by UN diplomats or State Department “special co-ordinators” - nothing happens. The fruits of force hang heavy on the bow.

That is, to be sure, an over-simplistic rendition of the continuing Cyprus crisis. It doesn’t give full weight to the fear and oppression Greek Cypriot militias once inflicted on the Turkish Cypriots. It fails, perhaps, to invest full hope in the latest rounds of “intensive negotiation” between Glafcos Clerides and Rauf Denktash, which thus far have yielded a low-intensity boredom. It doesn’t factor in the pressures on Ankara that may or may not flow from Nicosia’s impending membership of the European Union.

But there is still that brutal truth. Without military threat, without what we would currently call “terrorism”, the Greek Cypriots have made no progress at all in reclaiming their homes or property through almost three decades of striving. International law is on their side. International opinion does not recognize Denktash and his “independent state”, with thousands of Turkish troops camped in its back garden.

Words, words, words. The diplomatic wordsmiths, on current form, may toil forever; but they will never spin out a solution unless they can find a pressure point, a weapon which can’t be ignored. In the 1950s, the terrorism of Eoka gave Cypriots their freedom from Britain. Flatulent pledges and UN resolutions have not given them justice since.

So to the aftermath of Ramallah and Jenin, to Colin Powell and - just possibly - the prospect of a ceasefire. Yasser Arafat bargains in his shattered bunker. Constructive bromides ensue. But “peace” here has no value unless it leads inescapably to a solution which involves the dismantling of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the return of the occupied territories to a viable Palestinian state protected against instant invasion.

Will that happen? Nothing Ariel Sharon’s spokesmen say gives any such hope. The “negotiating table” may be routinely hymned, but there’s nothing worthwhile on its menu. Sharon has always put the settlers first. The massive demonstrations of the intifada followed naturally. Israel hasn’t yet confronted the totality of the concessions it will have to make. Jaw-jaw is not an alternative to war-war, merely its precursor. Only formidable outside pressure can alter the equation and impose the Saudi plan.

But pressure from where? The second sad truth is that America has destroyed its own credibility. George Bush wanted Israeli withdrawal “now, without delay”. Instead, he got Jenin.

Terror made Makarios president of Cyprus and Kenyatta president of Kenya. The terror of the Stern gang was there at the birth of Israel. Terror sits behind ministerial desks in Belfast. This terror is not uniquely evil. Terror is a known and tacitly accepted means to a regional or national end.

But the question we all have to answer is what kind of alternative we can provide? Will it be Cyprus squared, more decades of yak in search of a pressure point? Will it be the inert failure to broker a Kashmir peace as real weapons of mass destruction gather on both sides? Do we just seek a Middle East ceasefire as some staging post on the road to Baghdad?—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.