WHEN DISY leader Nicos Anastassiades crossed the Green Line for talks with Mehmet Ali Talat, he was pilloried for conducting parallel negotiations with the Turkish Cypriot side, for bypassing the President and the National Council, for insulting the democratically expressed verdict of the Greek Cypriot people, who had issued a resounding ‘no’ to the Annan plan at referendum in April.
Now, it emerges that the President himself has conducted secret negotiations with Turkish Cypriot politicians. That he should have held discrete contacts in the run-up to the referendum was to expected; what was odd was that he should have chosen to see Serdar Denktash while refusing to meet with Talat. For all the government’s attempts to portray Talat as the new (Rauf) Denktash, there is no doubt that Serdar is politically far closer to his father than Talat, who drove the campaign for a ‘yes’ vote in the north and insists – unlike Denktash father and son – that his aim is not partition but reunification.
The government says Papadopoulos met Denktash to explore the possibility of improvements to the functionality of the plan and postponement of the referendum. Yet the President’s emotional televised address urging the people to reject the plan made clear he saw it as irretrievably flawed. Far more likely is the explanation suspected by many that he met Denktash to try to convince him to join him in sinking the process by having a joint walkout from the talks in which both sides would have shared the blame and the Annan plan would have been buried for good.
And what of the contacts since the referendum? Papadopoulos refuses to meet Talat for now. Yet on Monday the Government Spokesman said Papadopoulos had met Turkish Cypriot politicians after the referendum. Who did he see and why? Denktash says he only saw the President before the vote, but then he had denied any contacts with Papadopoulos until yesterday.
It could of course be that the President is pursuing humanitarian issues or exploring a resumption of talks. The secrecy was merely intended to achieve maximum results away from the public eye and without being suspected of conducting a PR stunt – as the President’s collaborators have accused Anastassiades of doing.
But given this government’s track record, many are likely to suspect less palatable motives: at best an attempt to ensure that no new political initiatives get off the ground until such time as conditions are more favourable to the Greek Cypriot side; at worse a cynical move to ensure Papadopoulos can sit out his term with the Cyprus problem maintained in the kind of convenient patriotic limbo where it has hung for the past three decades.
Most worrying, however, was Serdar’s quip yesterday when asked why he, rather than Talat, had met Papadopoulos. “Our stars are more aligned with him than Talat’s,” he said. For years, the Turkish side argued no solution was the solution. Could it be that Papadopoulos agrees?
