AFTER a few months of relative anonymity, the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy Alexander Downer was back in the limelight this week, as he became the target of a full-scale political witch-hunt. All Greek Cypriot party leaders, the government, every television station and each newspaper columnist took part in a merciless, concerted attack on the Australian diplomat for a response he gave to a journalist after Tuesday’s Christofias-Eroglu meeting.
A look at the transcript of the question and answer session indicated that the hostile reaction was completely out of proportion. Asked by a journalist whether the proposals about the hydrocarbons given to Ban Ki-moon by Eroglu had been submitted to Christofias, Downer said among other things:
“Mr Eroglu did indeed put proposals directly to the Secretary-General, and we received a paper now from the Turkish Cypriot side. How the Greek Cypriots respond to this is a matter that I’ll leave to them. But certainly we’re familiar with the proposals. As I said already, in terms of any role for the United Nations, that is something we would think about in the context of us being asked by the two sides to play a role. If we were asked by the two sides to play a role, we’d refer that to the Secretary-General and the Secretary-General would make a decision about that. But that hasn’t happened yet.”
Could these words be interpreted as an attempt to turn what was a sovereignty issue into a bi-communal issue that would be discussed at the Eroglu-Christofias meetings, as all the parties and the government spokesman subsequently claimed? Downer did not even say that the UN was willing to mediate on the matter; if both sides asked for such an involvement, the request would be referred to the Secretary-General for a decision. Could this entirely theoretical point, be described as a devious, unacceptable attempt to put the hydrocarbons on the negotiating table as the parties claimed?
And if the politicians took the trouble to read the rest of Downer’s answers, they would have known that the United Nations did not want the issue of the hydrocarbons to derail the talks, because a settlement would resolve the dispute. None of this was considered by the Australian’s critics, who seized a few words, quoted out of context, to launch another attack on the man who is seen as public enemy number one.
It was not the first time Downer has been on the receiving end of a Greek Cypriot hate campaign, for no good reason, nor will it be the last, because our politicians and opinion-formers decided a long time ago that he is an enemy of our cause, as were all the other UN envoys helping settlement efforts.
