THE FOREIGN Minister of the Russian Federation, Sergei Lavrov who left yesterday evening was the third high profile visitor to Cyprus in the last few weeks. His visit had been preceded by those by the British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and German Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier and will be followed today by the arrival of US Secretary of State John Kerry. Later in the month China’s foreign minister Wang Yi will also be here on a visit.
There has never before been such a congestion of visits by the foreign ministers of powerful countries four of which are permanent members of the UN Security Council. Is it just a coincidence or are the visits related to what is happening in neighbouring Syria? Or perhaps there is a connection with the Cyprus talks which have been making rapid progress and there is talk about the possibility of settlement in the near future. Interestingly, the high profile visitors are from both the West and East, suggesting that the Anastasiades government is pursuing the so-called multi-dimensional foreign policy all the anti-West parties had been demanding.
Admittedly, all these visits by important foreign officials are good for his government’s standing as they are perceived positively by people even if they do not know what is being discussed behind closed doors. What people see is that Cyprus is taken seriously enough for the world’s most powerful countries to send their foreign ministers here. Inevitably, the opposition parties have been at pains to destroy the positive image of the government by finding petty issues to complain about.
The Greens and EDEK, quite ludicrously, have been urging the government to offer military facilities to Russia, DIKO leader Nicholas Papadopoulos attacked the government for allowing foreign officials to cross north and see the Turkish Cypriot leader in his office. The only notable exception was Lavrov who took a ‘principled’ stand of refusing to visit Mustafa Akinci in his office. Rather than preventing other foreign officials from going north the Anastasiades government was encouraging it, complained Papadopoulos.
It did not occur to him that this is the reason so many foreign officials are visiting Cyprus now. Their governments are no longer obliged to bicker with our foreign ministry about where, when and how they should see the Turkish Cypriot leader, as was the case in the past. Even the ‘principled’ Lavrov would have crossed north if there had not been such a major falling out between his country and Turkey.
The Anastasiades government’s sensible approach in not making an issue about meetings with the Turkish Cypriots is one of the reasons there have been so many visits by foreign ministers recently. It was time the diplomatic pettiness of past was abandoned.
