A DEGREE of the national unity that President Christofias craves was achieved at Monday’s National Council meeting. It was the first time in years that the party leaders had taken a united stand with regard to the peace talks, prompting the government spokesman to say that the consensus would strengthen the president’s position at Greentree.
Of course, if the leaders had their way, Christofias would have turned down the UN Secretary-General’s invitation to talks next week, as all, apart from the AKEL chief, maintained that he should not go. This was not an option for the president, so the Council agreed on what was described by the press as ‘three nos’. He would reject ‘tight time-frames’, UN arbitration and a multi-party conference without agreement first on the core issues of the problem.
Trumpeting your positions before going to talks is not very clever as it allows the Turkish side a free hand at Greentree. Dervis Eroglu can adopt a seemingly constructive stance, agreeing with the Secretary-General’s arbitration and the setting of a time-frame for a multi-party conference, safe in the knowledge that Christofias would agree to nothing. Is this how the president planned to expose the Turkish side’s intransigence, which he has been blaming for the lack of progress for months now?
If next week’s talks are deadlocked because he rejects the UN’s proposals for reaching an outline agreement, which side would be blamed? How convincing would his claims of Turkish intransigence be when he adopts a negative stance to any attempts by the UN to break the deadlock? He may earn praise in Cyprus for sticking to the decisions of National Council, but the likelihood is that he would be blamed for a possible deadlock.
And what of his credibility as a negotiator? During the last meeting with Ban Ki-moon, he not only agreed to the January time-frame but he also agreed to submit an outline settlement to the UN, as had Eroglu. Both sides submitted their outlines, which the UN would presumably try to combine into a compromise deal, the final details of which would have been bashed out at Greentree. Would he now go to the meeting insisting that he refuses to play ball because the National Council was unanimously opposed to time-frames and arbitration?
It is such an amateurish approach it defies belief. Even the opposition to time-frames, after almost four years of talks, sounds absurd. Would Christofias at least have a counter-proposal to the time-frame and the arbitration? If he does, it must be something more convincing and imaginative than a proposal for the continuation of the talks with the intransigent Eroglu in Cyprus, without time-frames and UN mediation.
