Niels Kadritzke
There was a lump in President Tassos Papadopoulos’s throat as he addressed Greek Cypriots on television on the evening of 7 April: "I call on you to reject the [United Nations] Annan plan. I call on you to say a resounding no on 24 April. I call upon you to defend your dignity, your history and what is right. I urge you to defend the Republic of Cyprus, saying no to its abolition."
The Greek Cypriot president then removed his spectacles to make sure everyone could see his tears and wished his compatriots a happy Easter. The melodrama was designed to make Greek Cypriots see the UN plan as a dangerous trap. Papadopoulos spent 55 minutes outlining its flaws and barely five seconds on its advantages. The state television station RYK then split its screen - on one side a nationalist crowd noisily saluted its hero in front of the presidential palace; on the other, party representatives debated the pros and cons of the deal. Then, in a telephone poll, 81.2% of viewers declared they would give Papadopoulos his hoped-for resounding oxi (1).
But media management (2) alone does not explain why the majority of Greek Cypriots rejected the Annan plan in Cyprus’s April referendum. It is true that Papadopoulos made great play with Greek Cypriots’ memories of the struggle against British colonial power in the 1950s and against the Turkish invasion of 1974. But rejection of the Annan plan is entrenched in the republic’s mind because of the need for security and a fear of all political risk, as well as a perception of Turkish Cypriots as competitors rather than as partners in the shared wellbeing of a re-unified island.
These factors predisposed Greek Cypriots to underestimate the advantages of a UN plan that makes everyone a winner. To Turkish Cypriots the plan offers a recognised state within a federation, independent of Ankara, with good prospects for economic development within the European market. To their Greek compatriots it offers the opportunity for two-thirds of those who fled their land in 1974 to return to it; and either take back and cultivate one-third of the property they lost or receive indemnity payments.
After joining the European Union, a united republic would gradually enjoy EU standards in human rights and social policy. Far from rubber-stamping Cyprus’s current shortcomings in meeting EU regulations, Brussels representatives have made sure that the EU will have a continued role, for as long as Turkey wants to join, in supporting harmonious development in line with its rules.
Papadopoulos failed to mention the part played by the EU in the negotiations, as one might expect from an old-school Greek nationalist stuck in the past, by no means a committed European. That he feels this way is unsurprising: he is the only surviving active politician from the generation that launched guerrilla warfare against the British in the 1950s. The stated aim of the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (Eoka) was not independ ence for Cyprus, but enosis (union) with Greece. After independence in 1963, it started a bloody civil war for this purpose. Papadopoulos played a decisive part in the secret Akritas plan to obtain arms imports from the head of the Greek secret service, George Papadopoulos, who led the military putsch in Athens on 21 April 1967.
These schemers had their counterpart among the Turkish Cypriots: Rauf Denktash. The Turkish Cypriot leader and his Ankara masters wanted the island divided, but its 1960 constitution had ruled out both division and enosis. So they welcomed the outbreak of civil war in 1963, when Greek attacks on Turkish areas allowed them to relocate Turks from the south of the island. By 1964, 60% of Turkish Cypriots lived in enclaves controlled by Turkish officers.
Separation came in 1974: when a junta of enosis supporters overthrew Archbishop Makarios’s government, Ankara took advantage of the situation and invaded the north. Northern Greek Cypriots then fled south, while the remaining Turkish Cypriots in the south went north. This completed the ethnic remodelling begun in 1963-64 and was orchestrated by the same politicians who now head the no camp on each side.
Their arguments are similar. While Denktash denounces the federal model for its potential extermination of Turkish Cypriots, Tassos Papadopoulos sees it as the end of a Greek-dominated republic of Cyprus. For more than 20 years the two men have been rehashing the same statements in response to every possible political solution.
Papadopoulos owes his current position to one of the strangest coalitions in history. He is leader of the centre-right Democratic party (Diko), the third-largest political grouping with 15% of the vote. He came to power in February 2003 thanks to the former Communist party (Akel), the largest party in the republic, with 35% of the vote. Alliance with Akel offered Papadopoulos a majority over his predecessor, the liberal conservative Glafkos Klerides. But Akel’s leaders had promised their members that the new president would push for Cyprus to enter the EU as a reunified country.
This ideal crystallised in the UN plan, which Kofi Annan put forward in November 2002. The climate had never been more favourable:
In Brussels a consensus decided to make solving the Cypriot problem a condition for Turkey’s entry into the EU, something the United States strongly favoured because it would strengthen Turkey’s image as a model of successful democracy within a Muslim nation:
In Turkey Tayyip Erdogan’s moderate Islamist Party of Justice and Development (AKP), which had won the elections of 3 November 2002, had attacked the intransigence of the Kemalist establishment and the Turkish military over Cyprus;
Denktash was losing the support of the Turkish Cypriots, who had pinned hopes of an end to isolation and poverty on EU membership.
This was confirmed by the December 2003 elections in northern Cyprus. Opposition parties came out on top, though without a clear majority in parliament. The leader of the main opposition party and incoming prime minister, Mehmet Ali Talat, had to form a coalition with the party of Serdar Denktash, the president’s son. Nevertheless, the Denktash clan could still be neutralised with the help of Ankara. Erdogan has made it clear that the obstinate attitude of the army, the Kemalist nationalists and the opposition People’s Republican party (CHP) is blocking Turkey’s chances of entering Europe; yet this December Turkey must decide whether or not to restart negotiations for EU membership.
So on 26 January the AKP government ordered the reopening of talks on the UN plan, previously blocked by Denktash. If the Cypriot leaders proved unable to reach a compromise, Erdogan had suggested that Annan should simply override the disagreements and submit his plan to a referendum in both the north and the south. This was checkmate for Papadopoulos and Denktash. For as long as the Turkish Cypriot president made dialogue impossible, his Greek counterpart could happily accept the UN plan as a basis for negotiations. But when talks reopened in New York, he could no longer dodge the issue; the time for bluffing was over. Mr No and Mr Never, as Turkish Cypriot opposition leader Mustafa Akinici called the pair, had been clinging to questions of form to avoid dealing with substance. Getting them to sit down took the full weight of Greece and Turkey, under EU and US pressure, plus that of the UN deadline: if the talks failed, Annan would put his plan directly to Cypriot voters on 24 April.
For Papadopoulos to oppose this decision would have meant defying both the UN and the EU, which wanted a reunited Cyprus on 1 May. The 7 March change of government in Athens added to the pressure, with Kostas Karamanlis’s newly elected conservatives also pushing for a compromise. After weeks of dialogue in Nicosia the talks transferred to Bürgenstock, near Lucerne in Switzerland. Denktash, unwilling to sign any form of capitulation, had been replaced by Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Talat, who had agreed to the final Annan plan, as had Turkey. But no progress was made because Papadopoulos now showed his true colours (3). His systematic refusal to budge riled not just the UN representatives and the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, Günther Verheugen, but also the Athens delegation. Only Karamanlis stopped short of publicly breaking with the Cypriot president.
When Annan put forward his own plan (known as Annan V), backed by Turks and Turkish Cypriots, Papadopoulos had a spokesperson call it a "catastrophe" and claim the plan fulfilled almost all the Turks’ demands but hardly any of the Greeks’ conditions. Papadopoulos denied significant gains that had been made in the course of negotiations thanks to pressure from Brussels. This first, negative impression of the plan stuck. Things might have changed if Annan V’s supporters had gone on the offensive immediately, but both Akel and the opposition party Disy, both of whose leaderships broadly favoured a yes vote, postponed their decisions until conferences scheduled for shortly before the referendum. Therefore Papadopoulos made his televised speech to people who had heard only one side of the argument: the no camp. The Orthodox synod then further backed Papadopoulos’s position in its Easter message, warning the faithful against "our country climbing its own Golgotha" and facing humiliation (4).
The result was an almost irreversible negative climate of opinion. Realising that a third of its voters had been persuaded to vote no (5), a majority in the Akel party’s central committee withdrew its support for Annan V. Some dissenters even spoke of a split. The party leader, Dimitris Christofias, was so worried that he asked for the referendum to be postponed. Cyprus’s former communists deserted the fight against the division of Cyprus to avoid the risk of dividing their party.
As the party of workers, Akel always supported cooperation between Greeks and Turks against nationalist tendencies. Its support for Papa dopoulos had rankled with its partners in the Turkish Republican party in the north. The referendum on the Annan plan was the party’s last chance. But its leadership did not have the courage to campaign for a yes vote; indeed its newspaper Haravghi commented negatively about the UN plan. For want of courage and time, Akel abandoned the process to Papadopoulos.
And yet a few simple points would have been enough to explain to the population what it was voting for. No solution could have made everyone happy, especially not all the refugees. While the Annan plan cannot make up for the historic injustice, it does create better conditions for the future. No better plan is likely to emerge in the near future. And the UN plan is highly flexible. Even restrictions on the right of return on both sides could be softened or removed if a clear north-south major ity supported such a change. The future depends on the will of individuals on both sides to live together in peace.
It is important to ask just how the no camp intends to achieve what the Annan plan could have done. It complains that the plan stops short of enabling all refugees to return to their villages, but a no vote prevents 100,000 from going home. It rails against the presence of 950 Turkish soldiers but effectively allows 35,000 to stay on Cyprus. It criticises the decision to naturalise 45,000 Turkish settlers in the north, but rejecting the plan will lead to further emigration by Turkish Cypriots, countered by settlers from Turkey moving in (6).
Europe will have to get used to this topsy-turvy situation in which Turkish Cypriots can successfully bypass their old-school leadership (Denktash), while Papadopoulos still manages to convince Greek Cypriots to support his archaic position. By saying no to the Annan plan, 76% of Greek Cypriots have abandoned the solidarity with their Turkish compatriots that they so often used to invoke, which now rings hollow.
Meanwhile 65% of Turkish Cypriots in the north voted for a united future. They had taken great risks in demonstrating against Denktash and in favour of Europe, watched and harassed by a Turkish secret police still under military control. These are Cyprus’s true Europeans, who have been deprived of their future by their Greek compatriots. They did not deserve such punishment.
* Niels Kadritzke is a journalist based in Berlin
(1) For Greeks, the word oxi (no) evokes resistance to aggression. Dictator Yannis Metaxas roused his people to resist Mussolini’s invasion in October 1940 with oxi.
(2) According to the Mass Media Institute of the Nicosia Intercollege, both the RYK and the three private television channels described the Annan plan as a defeat for the Greek side. See Cyprus Mail, 10 February 2004.
(3) A detailed analysis of the Bürgenstock talks was published in the Athens daily Ta Nea on 9 April 2004. Papadopoulos had even refused to supply Kofi Annan’s representative, Alvaro de Soto, with a list of his essential demands for a resolution to the dispute.
(4) Cyprus Mail, 11 April 2004.
(5) According to a survey on 6 April 2004, 37% of Akel voters and 38% of Disy voters had already decided to vote no, Ta Nea, 9 April 2004.
(6) See Niels Kadritzke, "Cyprus, north and south", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, April 2002, and "Turkey, price of alliance", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, March 2003.
Translated by Gulliver Cra
