CYPRIOT voters, who today take the most important political decision of their lives, have been badly let down by their government, their media, and the international community, an Irish referendum expert said yesterday.
In an interview with the Cyprus Mail, Quentin Oliver, who has studied referenda worldwide and ran a ‘yes’ campaign in Northern Ireland’s 1998 referendum for the Good Friday Agreement, said not enough time had been given to Cypriot voters to digest the 9,000-page Annan plan.
He said the short three-week period since the March 31 end of negotiations in Switzerland was not standard practice in referendums and that the attitude of the government and media since then had merely served to confuse voters.
“In all referenda there are strong ‘yes’ people and strong ‘no’ people and they are entitled to their views, but the people in the middle, the voters who are undecided and who are persuadable, can be persuaded if they hear the arguments and listen to them,” said Oliver. “They deserve respect and a rational debate and discourse, not just a slanging match. The undecided voter requires persuasion and arguments and evidence, and in three weeks and without broadcasting balance that becomes very difficult.”
Oliver, who reads Greek, has studied the media in Cyprus very carefully since arriving on the island. He said the ‘no’ campaign had been brilliantly organised, even from before day one, and that the ‘yes’ campaign, which only effectively got down to business a week ago, had been very disorganised.
He said it was standard practice in any referendum to allow voters six weeks to digest the issues, and in a real democratic process, the government would have stepped back from the campaign completely. Its role was to hand over the information only, “in order to create a completely credible atmosphere of objectivity”, letting people decide for themselves.
Oliver said that in Northern Ireland, every single household in the country had been given a copy of the agreement.
“But three weeks is not long enough for voters to digest and it does raise a question about the UN’s supervision of the exercise. I guess that there was the deadline of May 1 for the European Union but frankly that is not good enough an explanation because voters deserve more.
“Citizens deserve to know what is happening, deserve to be able to digest the enormous change that they are being asked to make a decision on,” he said.
Oliver doesn’t accept the argument that the third version of the Annan plan, which contains much of the basic provisions of Annan 5, has been out in the public domain for a year. “I don’t because of the complexity of the issues here,” he said. “In our case in Northern Ireland there were many similarities. The talks took place behind closed doors and people knew roughly the shape of the agreement but then they were allowed six weeks.”
Oliver said there had not been an open and transparent debate on the plan in Cyprus and added it was very disturbing to hear reports about intimidation.
“The climate should be one of openness, transparency. People have to make a major national decision of great importance and they should be given space and respect,” he said adding he had never seen anything like what has been going on in Cyprus. “I’ve covered referenda across Eastern Europe in the past few years. I’ve observed hotly contested referenda in my own country, about peace and war and the future, about releasing prisoners, about the disposal of guns and weapons… very emotional issues… just as emotional as settlers and refugees and land but here the debate has been very shallow, very negative, very emotional and heavily influenced by the Church,” he said.
Oliver said he had addressed a conference of referendum experts in Tel Aviv earlier in the week and that delegates had been shocked over the stance the Cyprus Church had taken in the campaign.
He also said the role of President Tassos Papadopoulos, and particularly his emotional speech to the nation on April 7, where he called for a resounding ‘no’, should not be underestimated.
“I have observed the president taking a strongly partisan position, which is his right, but I find it unusual in referenda I have observed around the world for the elected political leader who had been taking part in the negotiations to be so clearly partisan,” he said.
He said the differing stances of the remainder of the political leadership had also confused voters “because of the different voices from the people who were there… from people who took part in the negotiations behind closed doors”.
Oliver said the media had failed in their role to inform the people. “In modern society, most people get their current affairs information through the broadcasting and print media, and good practice would suggest some rules should apply to the broadcast media, and certainly the state-controlled broadcast media,” he added, referring to allegations of media meddling.
“What I’ve seen here is an emotional debate rather than a rational one. A campaign that appears to be very well resourced and funded on the ‘no’ side and very poorly funded and resourced and organised on the ‘yes’ side. That may be market forces… it may be because there are too few people who want to say ‘yes’, but I observed a strong and well funded ‘no’ campaign with paid advertising right from the start.”
Oliver said the ‘no’ campaign had been excellent because it had the top authoritative leadership of the President. “I think the President had clearly decided before day one and this caused certain things to happen in a way that was very difficult to counter. It’s always easier to say ‘no’ because ‘no’ is for the status quo. It’s for no change. It’s for no risk,” he said.
Had the ‘yes’ campaign got its act together earlier and been as well funded as the ‘no’ campaign it could have been much more successful, Oliver said, pointing out that once it got off the ground, the ‘yes’ vote moved from 6.6 per cent to 20 per cent, “which is evidence that as people listened and learned and asked questions and discussed it with friends and family and colleagues, they shifted their allegiance.”
“The reason the ‘yes’ vote was so slow getting off the ground was because there were no champions. AKEL and DISY undertook their own internal party discussions, which is correct and democratic, but in three weeks its hard to do that,” he said.
He also said the ‘yes’ messages he had seen used different words, different images, different colours and different approaches. “From a campaigning point of view a coherent integrated unified approach tends to be much stronger, like with the ‘no’ campaign. The colours were the same, the ‘oxi’ is very positively displayed visually, with the white on black and the black on white, and the presence on the streets is much more visible,” he said.
Oliver said that in a worldwide league of 9,000 referenda, 51 per cent had been ‘no’ votes first time around.
“There are different actors in this case. There are Greek Cypriots who will vote ‘yes’, there are Turkish Cypriots who will vote ‘yes’ and have a stake, and there are the international players who are not domestic players but are also stakeholders.
Therefore it is perfectly reasonable for the EU to decide, ‘well what does this mean? Was this the settled will of the people of Cyprus?”
