WITH the ‘no’ vote a near certainty in the Greek Cypriot community, yesterday’s pre-donors’ conference in Brussels seems a tad pointless. A few weeks back, it did make sense, assuming a close-run race and the possibility that generous pledges might tilt the balance among those worried about the economic cost of a solution (remember, that was a big issue back then…).
As it is, there is a touch of surrealism about the gathering of top ministers, bankers, international financial institutions, all pledging huge sums of money in the event of a solution we all know has hardly any chance of being approved next Saturday. Indeed, the international community has made it quite clear that the money is only on the table in the event of a double ‘yes’ vote in the referendum.
Perhaps President Tassos Papadopoulos was simply driven by a realisation of the pointlessness of it all when he chose to send two civil servants — Cyprus’ ambassador in Brussels and the head of the Planning Bureau — to Brussels yesterday, in contrast to the senior politicians sent by other interested parties.
That is the generous interpretation, because the impression given out to European circles is one of shocking arrogance and plain rudeness, compounding a sense that Papadopoulos has taken the international community for a ride in a process he had no intention of honouring when it came to the final hurdle.
Finance Minister Marcos Kyprianou was in Brussels on Wednesday for a hearing before the European Parliament in his capacity as Cyprus’ European Commissioner from May 1. Could he not have been asked to stay on for a few hours and stroll across the street to the donors’ conference, just for the sake of being polite, even if we all knew the exercise was pointless?
The government keeps talking about preparing the ground to counter the negative effects of a ‘no’ vote on Cyprus’ standing in the world, yet here it is sticking its finger up at the international community, before whom we have been pleading our case for 30 years and to whom we will again have to turn if we are to get the “better solution” our politicians shamelessly insist is round the corner.
Worse still is the suspicion voiced by DISY leader Nicos Anastassiades that the snub is the continuation of a tactic carried out throughout the talks to be as uncooperative as possible in the fear that, if we played along too much, the international community might be tempted to give us a better deal that we would find it harder to undermine in the eyes of the voters.
Yet even if the world was giving us a $100 billion we would still probably say ‘no’. Papadopoulos has achieved his objective. Surely this was the time for a bit of fence-mending. Or has the triumph of his negative campaign got the better of him?
