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| Cypriot president Glafcos Clerides, left, greets Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash at the United Nations as Richard Holbrooke, center, looks on. |
Marwan Naamani/Agence France-Presse
Glafkos Clerides, the president of Cyprus from 1993 to 2003, who as
leader of his nation’s Greek Cypriot majority was a frustrated
peacemaker in futile talks with Turkish Cypriots to reunify their
long-divided Mediterranean island, died on Friday in Nicosia, the
capital. He was 94.
Glafkos Clerides, former president of Cyprus, was regarded as a fair and skillful negotiator.
His death was confirmed by Yianna Shiatou, the press attaché at the Cyprus Consulate in New York.
In a land torn by ethnic, religious and cultural rivalries, tugged by Turkey to the north and Greece
to the west, Mr. Clerides (pronounced cleh-REE-dess) was a national
leader for more than four decades after independence from Britain in
1960. World statesmen and both sides in the Cypriot tinderbox regarded
him as a fair, skillful negotiator, seeking compromises for the elusive
goal of reunification.
Mr. Clerides had been a World War II
hero, a lawyer and fighter in the anti-British resistance, and an ally
of Archbishop Makarios, primate of the Cypriot Orthodox Church and first
president of the Republic of Cyprus. He also headed a Greek Cypriot
delegation that helped write a new Constitution, was the leader of
Parliament for 16 years and won two terms as president.
As Cyprus faced a succession of crises — a Greek-inspired coup, an
invasion by Turkey, a 1974 partition into unequal zones, years of
intercommunal fighting — Mr. Clerides negotiated cease-fires, accepted
international peacekeeping buffers and sought to pacify militants with
concessions, offering to cede territory and even to rewrite the
Constitution in search of peaceful solutions.
In talks with Rauf Denktash, a Turkish Cypriot leader who had been his
friend since childhood and his negotiating opponent for 25 years, Mr.
Clerides — a voice of calm in a nation known for volcanic orators — won
some tactical agreements, and came close to a breakthrough in their last
reunification talks, in 2002.
But he was ultimately stymied by forces beyond his control: by allies
and foes fearful of giving away too much, by governments in Athens and
Ankara with their own agendas, and by walls of distrust between Greek
and Turkish Cypriots that had taken generations to erect.
After losing his 2003 re-election bid, Mr. Clerides supported a plan by
Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, to reunify Cyprus and
allow hundreds of thousands who had been displaced by partition to
return to their homes. Turkish Cypriots, hoping to end their isolation,
supported the plan overwhelmingly in a 2004 referendum. But Greek
Cypriots, the vast majority of the population, soundly defeated it.
While reunification eluded Mr. Clerides, as it has all Cypriot leaders,
he was credited as president with easing sectarian tensions, presiding
over a prospering economy and leading Cyprus to the threshold of European Union membership, a process that he began in 1998 and that was achieved in 2004.
Mr. Clerides was the author of a four-volume memoir, “My Deposition”
(1988-91), which he called “the anatomy of a national tragedy.” Mr.
Denktash, his fraternal negotiating rival, who died in 2012, often quoted from it, saying it was a scrupulous record of events.
Glafkos John Clerides was born in Nicosia on April 24, 1919, the son of
John and Elli Clerides. His father was a teacher who became a London
lawyer. Glafkos grew up under British colonialism. Cyprus, settled by
Greeks and conquered by Alexander, the Persians and the Ottoman Empire,
had been placed under British rule in 1878, annexed in 1914 and made a
colony in 1925.
Glafkos, like his father, went to London to study law. But when World
War II began in 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force and flew bombing
missions as a tail gunner. His plane was shot down in a 1942 raid on
Hamburg, and he was captured by the Germans. He escaped three times from
prison camps, but was recaptured each time. After the war, he was cited
for distinguished service.
In 1945 he married Lilla Erulkar, an actress born in what was then
Bombay who took the name Lilla Irene Clerides. She died in 2007. The
couple had a daughter, Katherine, who survives him. She became a member
of Parliament and a leader of his Democratic Rally Party.
Mr. Clerides resumed law studies at King’s College London, graduated in
1948 and returned to Cyprus to practice. As Britain rejected postwar
calls for self-determination, Greek and Turkish Cypriots in 1955 formed
separate resistance groups with divergent goals and plunged into four
years of guerrilla war against the British and each other, aiming less
at independence than at unions with their motherlands.
Mr. Clerides joined the Greek EOKA resistance, defending its fighters in
courts by day and planning strikes with them by night, using the nom de
guerre Ypereides, after an ancient Athenian orator. He accompanied
Archbishop Makarios to London in 1959 for talks that led to a cease-fire
and independence, and became minister of justice in the transition.
In 1960 he was elected speaker of the House of Representatives and
became Nicosia’s chief negotiator in the conflict between Greek
Christians, who with 80 percent of the island’s 750,000 people occupied
the southern two-thirds of Cyprus, and the mainly Muslim Turks in the
north, protected by Turkey 50 miles offshore. Intercommunal fighting in
1963 led to military intervention by the United Nations.
In 1974 Athens briefly deposed Archbishop Makarios, Turkey invaded
Cyprus and United Nations peacekeepers partitioned the island. About
230,000 people were resettled. In the turmoil of shattered communities
and threatened civil war, Mr. Clerides became acting president for five
months until Archbishop Makarios returned.
It was only a bitter taste of the office he would occupy two decades
later. He lost presidential races in 1983 and 1988, then narrowly won in
1993. (He was also a candidate in the 1978 election, but when his
rival’s son was kidnapped, Mr. Clerides withdrew in a gesture of
sympathy.)
His rapport with Mr. Denktash raised hopes that he might succeed where
his predecessors had failed to unite Cyprus, but their 1996 talks
crumbled. He was re-elected in 1998, but his last hope for reunification
during his term faltered in the 2002 talks.
After losing the 2003 election, Mr. Clerides retired to Larnaca, on the
southeast coast. His life and the history of modern Cyprus were
re-examined in “Glafkos Clerides: The Path of a Country” (2008), by
Niyazi Kizilyurek, a Turkish Cypriot professor.
Cyprus is still divided. The Turkish side favors a two-nation state in
loose federation, while the Greek Cypriot government wants a unified
state that grants fair distribution of social and political rights to
both communities.
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