WHEN President Christofias goes to New York for the UN General Assembly, we hear all kinds of boasts. This week we were informed that, during a meeting at UN headquarters, the president had told the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Turkey was not ready to solve the Cyprus problem. He also accused Turkish Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu of engaging in a blame game and of being used in Ankara’s communications game.
After exposing Turkey’s ‘unacceptable’ behaviour, he asked Ban to urge the Turkish leadership to translate words into deeds and the Secretary-General, reportedly, agreed to do so. But there was no evidence to suggest that Ban made such a request at his subsequent meeting with President Abdullah Gul. On the contrary, according to a UN spokesman, Ban encouraged Gul and Turkey to carry on helping maintain the momentum of the Cyprus talks while Gul said that Turkey would carry on co-operating with the UN in the negotiations.
Not everything said in these meetings is made public, but it is doubtful that Ban would have reprimanded Gul for not translating words into deeds, as Christofias had claimed. A few days earlier, at his meeting the Greek PM George Papandreou, Ban had reportedly asked for the talks to be intensified and would have made the same plea to Christofias, even if this was not reported by the latter.
The problem however is that every time the UN has proposed the intensification of the talks, it is the Cyprus president who is resistant and not the Turkish side. In this way Christofias is assisting Ankara’s communications game, because he is allowing Turkey to appear as being more committed to a settlement than the Greek Cypriot side. While this is not necessarily true, it is the main impression created among third parties, no matter what Christofias says about communications games and Turkey’s unwillingness to solve the Cyprus problem.
He should know that words count for nothing, as the DISY leader Nicos Anastassiades pointed out on Thursday when he called on Christofias to stop deluding himself about what was actually happening. Unless Turkey was tested at the negotiating table, we would never establish whether she was playing a communications game or was sincerely interested in a settlement. This was something that Christofias had failed to do and was the reason why everyone outside Cyprus was praising Turkey’s allegedly constructive approach to the talks.
The president is deluding himself if he genuinely thinks that by reporting Turkey to the UN Secretary-General, of playing a communications game and not being ready to solve the Cyprus problem, he is winning diplomatic victories. He also needs to translate words into deeds if he is to expose the games that Ankara has been playing so successfully in the last few years and have earned kudos from everyone.
