Turkish Cypriot daily Kibris newspaper (07.02.14) publishes statements by Alper Mehmet, British ambassador of Turkish Cypriot origin, who said he has no hope that the Cyprus problem will be solved and argued that the breakaway regime in the occupied area of Cyprus “is insufficient in explaining itself”.
According to Kibris, Mehmet noted that the explorations for hydrocarbon resources in the sea of Cyprus have changed many things and added that this wealth might make finding an agreement more difficult.
Mehmet expressed the view that the best solution formula for Cyprus passes through the exchange of land, the payment of compensation by both sides and security. He went on and argued: “At the same timeTurkey’s army should get out of the island and the Turkish Cypriots should have their autonomous administration, their elections and economy”.
He said that the Turkish Cypriots living abroad could help in the lobbying activities of the regime, but financial problems exist on this issue.
Mehmet was born in 1948 in occupied Louroudjina village, went to London in 1956 and he is, inter alia, member of the so-called “Embargoed Group”.
Alper Mehmet is a former British diplomat and one of the United Kingdom‘s first two ethnic minority ambassadors, along with Anwar Choudhury.
Mehmet arrived in the United Kingdom from Cyprus in 1956 when he was aged eight, as a British citizen but unable to speak English. He was educated at Parmiter’s Grammar School near London, and at Bristol Polytechnic (now the University of the West of England). On graduation from Bristol, he became an immigration officer (1970–79) and then an entry clearance officer in Lagos, Nigeria (1979–83). In 1983, he entered Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, serving in Romania, Germany and Iceland (twice) and leaving in 2008. When he was appointed as Ambassador to Iceland in 2004, he became one of the first two British ambassadors from ethnic minority backgrounds to be appointed (the other being Anwar Choudhury, who was appointed High Commissioner to Bangladesh). He sits on the advisory council of MigrationWatch UK
Mehmet, born in Cyprus 55 years ago, is the first immigrant to represent the UK at ambassadorial level. Slightly balding but still fresh-faced, he is the highest-profile product of the efforts the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have made to become more representative. Until 1972, women had to resign on marriage and there were restrictions on people whose parents came from certain countries. Since 1997, however, the FCO has doubled the number of ethnic minority staff from to 6.8%, although this figure falls to below 1% for senior positions.
“Thirty years ago, the FCO drew the bulk of its ambassadors from privileged backgrounds,” says Mehmet. “No one from ethnic backgrounds was applying to join the FCO. One reason was the nationality requirement – in the past, at least two generations of your family before you had to be British.” Because Mehmet’s family came from a British colony, the rule didn’t apply to him.
Born in 1948 into a mainly rural society , and where elevating one’s social status was, and still is, everything, Mehmet recalls the early emphasis on betterment. “In Cyprus in the early 50s, education was everything, the objective of every parent was to get their child educated and into a career, into a profession. To be a doctor or a lawyer was the pinnacle of their ambition at the time. My mother had taken the trouble of teaching me to read and write before I started school, which was very unusual in Cyprus in those days.”
But as the troubles with Greek Cypriots escalated in the 1950s, Bekir Mehmet decided to take his family to England. The family set sail in the summer of 1956 on a ship to Dover, stopping off in Greece and Italy. But for eight-year-old Alper, the climax of the journey in London was tinged with disappointment. “I remember getting the train to Victoria Station and looking out of the windows and seeing my first double-decker bus. But it wasn’t red, but green, and that sort of let me down. I had heard that this was part and parcel of the culture, like snow all the year round, and that children were very polite and said “thank you”, and that they looked before crossing the road.”
He set about learning English from scratch, aiming to master it in time for his 11-plus exam. “I went from not being able to speak a word to suddenly speaking it. It was like going from being in the dark to having the lights turned on.” He went on to Parmeter’s Grammar School in Bethnal Green, east London, where he was head boy, before reading business at Bristol Polytechnic. It was here that he met his future wife, Elaine, a Welsh student in the same department: “An unusual thing to do in those days – to marry outside the community.”
With new responsibilities and, soon after, a young child, he needed a steady job. At the time, he was working as a labourer for his uncle, laying bricks and mortar, and on a construction site. He applied to become an air steward but was turned down because of the calluses on his hands and the cement under his finger nails. He would owe the eventual change in his fortunes to his mother in law.
“She was at the hairdresser’s reading a newspaper while waiting for her hair to dry, and she saw an ad that said: ‘Would you like to interview American bankers one minute, Swedish au-pairs the next and do you have a flair for languages?'” He applied for the job of immigration officer at Dover.
“Because I spoke Turkish I was in great demand. In the 1970s the first mass of immigrants from Turkey were mainly economic migrants. Most of them came in with work permits either for the catering industry or the rag trade.” For the next nine years, he worked at the port of Dover. Of all the people he dealt with, the applicant who sticks in his mind is an illiterate father who had travelled by coach from the former Yugoslavia to find his son, whom he had not seen for more than three decades. “He didn’t know any English and he couldn’t read or write. He had a piece of paper with the details of someone in Wolverhampton. I telephoned this number and this chap answered, and I said that there was this individual here who had come to see him and did he want to speak to him. And he said, ‘Yes, I haven’t spoken to him for 35 years.’ It was a very moving moment. I handed the phone to this old boy and he just started crying.”
After almost a decade of working at the UK’s ports of entry, Mehmet was desperate for a change and took up his first overseas post in Lagos, Nigeria as an entry clearance officer, issuing visas for visitors to the UK. He returned briefly to Britain after four years, before taking up his second overseas appointment in Romania during the brutal Ceausescu regime. “It’s easy to talk about democracy and freedom,” he says, “but when you experience the lack of it, you appreciate it more in your own country. I get really upset with people now who say life was better then [in the communist era] in countries like Romania – it jolly well wasn’t. As much as everything, that time in Romania helped determine my own personal way of thinking.”
He left Romania just before the fall of the Berlin Wall to undertake his next, starkly different assignment as deputy ambassador to Iceland. Meeting the Queen in Reykjavik was one of the highlights of his career. “I remember waiting at the Ambassador’s residence with a group of journalists who were going to take tea with the Queen. All of a sudden there was this person that for all our lives had been there, and there she was standing in front of me.”
Postings to Britain and Germany followed before his most prestigious to date, which he takes up this month. A Radio 4 programme recently described Mehmet as the “quintessential Englishman”. So how does he feel about representing the UK at the highest level?
“I was born in Cyprus in to a Turkish Cypriot family, and that’s something that is . . . a sense of pride. But Britain has given me a home, it has given me the good life. I have a sense of patriotism in serving Britain overseas.”