The United Kingdom’s handing over of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius “raises questions” over the future of the country’s sovereign base areas in Cyprus, former United Nations special adviser on Cyprus Alexander Downer said on Friday.
In a column in British magazine the Spectator, Downer, also a former Australian foreign minister, said the UK’s withdrawal from the Chagos islands “raised questions about whether it will be prepared to maintain its sovereign bases in Cyprus and Gibraltar”.
“The Cypriots would like the British to give up their sovereign bases there because they, too, are an Empire legacy,” he added.
On the matter of the Chagos Islands themselves, he said their transfer to Mauritian sovereignty is “symptomatic of a country that no longer has geopolitical perspective”.
“Britain is obsessed with its own shame over its imperial history – and has been for some time,” he said, before referring to his time in Cyprus as an example.
He said that while in Cyprus, he had called on a senior aide to then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to discuss progress being made in negotiations to resolve the Cyprus problem.
“One of the issues was the 99 square miles of British sovereign bases there. Much to my astonishment, [Brown’s aide] told me that [Brown] would be happy to give up those bases as part of a settlement,” he said.
“The official conceded that there would be huge resistance from the intelligence and defence establishments to such a surrender,” he added, saying that the UK relinquishing its bases would “clearly limit” the country’s “capacity to contribute to peace in the Middle East”.
This, he said, is “not only because those bases act as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Royal Air Force, as demonstrated by their role in shooting down the Iranian missles heading for Israel recently, but also because to give them up would deny the western alliance access to intelligence.”
Downer served as special adviser on Cyprus to former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon between 2008 and 2014.
He was a controversial figure during and after his time on the island, particularly among Greek Cypriots.
Former Cypriot High Commissioner to Australia Achilleas Antoniades had in 2013 told the Cyprus Mail Downer had erupted into an “explosion of anger” when, as Australian foreign minister prior to his appointment to Cyprus, Downer had been confronted about the visit of a Turkish Cypriot politician to Australia.
He had also described Downer as “abusive”, and accused him of saying “f**k the European Union. Who is the European Union?”
More recently, he caused a stir in May this year by visiting Ersin Tatar at his official residence in northern Nicosia and telling him, “my view is that this is a time that requires fresh ideas. There is no point in continuing to repeat the same mantras of history. It is a time for imagination, creativity and new ideas.”
