After scare, Cyprus peace hopes survive EU-Turkey migrant deal

By Alastair Macdonald

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Amid all the arguments about the feasibility, legality and morality of the European Union's migrant deal with Turkey, one positive result, say EU officials and diplomats, is that at least it hasn't wrecked the Cyprus peace process.

But it remains to be seen whether that can, as one EU senior official hopes, "turn a threat into an opportunity" to use intensified contacts between Nicosia and Ankara to secure reunification of the island's Greek-speaking EU member state and a breakaway, Turkey-backed north after four decades of division.

The migrant deal is intended to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara. European Council head Donald Tusk, who chaired Friday's EU-Turkey summit, said a compromise accepted by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to avoid a Cypriot veto on the migrant deal was a "very promising signal for the future".

Rapprochement between the Greek- and Turkish-speaking halves of the island in the past year have raised hopes of a deal that could bring a rare bright spot of peace in a troubled region.

Last week, however, Turkey's demand to open five negotiating topics, known as chapters, in long-stalled talks on its distant membership prospects with the EU set Ankara -- along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU leaders keen for a deal -- on a collision course with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades.

Cyprus had blocked the five chapters for years over Turkey's failure to recognize its right to access Turkish ports as part of a customs union deal with the entire EU and vowed to veto any deal it disliked. In the end, in return for taking back migrants from Greek islands, Turkey settled for - among other benefits - opening just one chapter, which Cyprus had not frozen.

"We really dodged a bullet on this one," said James Ker-Lindsay of the London School of Economics, who has advised U.N. negotiators seeking a settlement on Cyprus. "It could have got very, very nasty if Turkey had decided to dig its heels in."

Turkey's EU affairs minister had warned Europeans not to let Cypriot "caprice" block a deal and EU officials acknowledged that Merkel and other leaders, under huge pressure at home over the arrival of migrants from Turkey, were impatient with Cyprus.