WHEN I wrote on June 20 that Alexander Downer’s comments on June 5 suggested that he had understood he was dealing with lunatics, I had not read the interview he had given to the Turkish Cypriot paper, Cyprus Observer. The interview confirmed the fact that he has got our number.
What Downer said, quite courageously, was the quintessence of the Cyprus problem. The man has understood that we do not want a settlement and that we are taking the UN, the EU and everyone else for a ride. This was the reason he became the target of a nasty attack by all the hardliners as well as representatives of the government.
The intensity and viciousness of the attacks was the direct result of their fear – for once someone had the guts to publicly utter the truth about their real objectives. We should congratulate him because he is the first UN envoy to Cyprus – in 50 years – who calls things by their name and does not hide behind diplomatic platitudes.
His words were damning both for the politicians and citizens. He said: “If you want to solve the Cyprus problem you will solve it. No worries. If you want to sabotage it, that’s tremendously easy. You can take words that people use, and you can take formulas, think about political difficulties – and you find a thousand reasons not to make an agreement with the other side, it’s easily done. On the other hand there’s a simple and clearly designed agreement on the table, if you want to make the agreement you can embrace that and Bob’s your uncle, you’ve done it”.
The word games have always been a favoured tactic of the rejectionist politicians who always see big traps in words and phrases. The directness of Downer, who does not mince his words, was truly impressive. Instead of hurling abuse at him, the supporters of partition should point out any element of his comments that were wrong or exaggerated. Had he got anything wrong in the views below?
“Do you want to wander through a verbal minefield or do you want to solve the Cyprus problem, that’s a choice. A lot of people love the verbal minefield, for many of them it’s an excuse never to reach an agreement. They have different definitions of the same words, they’re mainly English words, they define them differently, they debate them differently… If you want Cyprus to be the global capital of semantic debate, that’s one option for Cyprus. If you want to solve the Cyprus problem, that’s another.”
Even more impressive was that Downer did not hesitate to note the responsibility of the leaders. “They need to make a decision, are they going to reach an agreement, or aren’t they? The point of decision has to be made. It’s easy to sound in favour of a solution – you can train any parrot in a pet shop to say that. That’s not the question. The question is: are you in favour of an agreement with the other side with which they could live as well as you, and with all that it implies?”
I have read the Australian’s CV but nowhere did I see that he had studied psychology. Yet I am certain that no qualified psychologist has reached so deep into the Cypriot’s weird political mind. Everything he said was an accurate analysis of the way we think and what we want. We have been trained, like parrots, to insist that we want a settlement, deluding ourselves that, in this way, we are hiding our real desire – partition.
