I FELT the urge to applaud the statement made by President Christofias before his departure for London for his meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
He said: “We are trying to secure a normalisation of our relations, but Britain must also accept its responsibilities. Britain is a guarantor power and of course we will stress her responsibilities and also ours, with regard to the efforts to solve the Cyprus problem and reunite our country on the basis of principles. I have already met the British Prime Minister and we laid down the foundations to tomorrow’s visit. Cyprus-Britain relations should not just be normalised but must be developed further.”
Thursday’s meeting, I am happy to report, went extremely well – each side said what was expected of it, the leaders came to a good understanding and Britain pledged to help efforts for a settlement. From what was said after the Browne-Christofias meeting, we could conclude that relations have been normalised and their further development is in the offing. I am certain that if Christofias wants better relations he will certainly have them because Britain has no reason not to want them.
The question is whether we genuinely want these good relations with Britain, because the recent past tells a different story. We were always heading in the opposite direction, with Christofias and his party playing a leading role in this. Until a few weeks ago, they would never have passed the opportunity to strain these relations, systematically cultivating a climate of unjustified hostility towards Britain.
We had reached the low point of our president refusing to meet the British Foreign Secretary when he visited Cyprus a few years ago on the pretext that he had visited Mehmet Ali Talat at his office. Yet the former president had no problem with other officials visiting him at the Presidential Palace, after they had been to see Talat at his ‘presidential office’. A Russian deputy foreign minister was granted an audience despite committing the same crime as the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
It was also a pleasant surprise that Christofias, who, in the past, made countless fiery speeches demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British Bases from Cyprus, suddenly remembered that Britain is a guarantor power and is calling on her to “accept her responsibilities for a solution of the Cyprus problem”. It is to be hoped that all those who have made a profession out of the cultivation of hostility towards Britain would be encourage to have a re-think by Christofias’ change of stance.
Christofias’ change of stance was expected. As a party leader he had no trouble practising demagoguery on the perimeter of the bases, but he realised that as President of Republic he had to act more responsibly and get serious.
Hopefully the journalists and columnists of Phileleftheros will eventually get serious as well. The paper seems incapable of publishing an opinion article which does not feature idiotic accusations and abuse against Britain and its ‘lords’. In fact, your will never read a news story related to Britain, which does not refer to conspiracies, traps and back-stabbings against Cyprus. For Phileleftheros, the English have nothing better to do than to think of ways, from morning to night, to harm Cyprus. Even in their sleep they seem to be conspiring how they will stab us in the back.
I have written in the past that Britain is, potentially, our best ally in our effort to prevent partition and ensure the withdrawal of the Turkish troops. Britain is the only country in the world with which we share a common interest on these two things. But our stupidity has never allowed us to understand this very simple truth, which Greece understood close to two centuries ago. In the geographical location our country is in, Britain should be our natural ally.
Let us hope that relations will improve now that even the leader of AKEL has understood this point.
