Anastasiades breaks free from naysayers

The Cyprus Mail’s editorial says the futility of President Anastasiades’ hope to forge a united home front on the Cyprus problem was exposed during Wednesday morning’s meeting with the party leaders.

At the meeting, the president had presented his proposal for a joint declaration which featured one change to the document submitted by the UN the previous week. Also present were the members of the negotiator’s support team, all of whom gave their backing to the president’s proposal.

Predictably, the leaders of the hard-line parties – Diko, Edek, Euroko and Greens – expressed strong opposition to the proposal, arguing that the Greek Cypriot side was giving up too much in order to secure agreement. Calls for a disengagement from the talks and the preparation of a Plan B, first voiced at the Saturday meeting, were repeated, without any of the naysayers elaborating. However Anastasiades stuck to his guns, forcibly arguing there was no alternative to negotiations and giving up his hopes of achieving a united front with the rejectionists.

This decision was underlined in a telephone conversation he had that afternoon with the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, whom he informed that he would be presenting a new proposal for a joint declaration, despite the objections of the National Council. It was high time Anastasiades gave up the idea of consensus and a united front with parties that have been consistently opposed to a settlement.

Did he really think there was even a chance in a million that he would secure the support of the professional rejectionists of Diko and Edek? Probably not, but he believed that he should have given it a shot.

He did and now he is free to take his own decisions without considerations to keeping Papadopoulos, Perdikis and Omirou happy. They can continue to demand a Plan B and utter the tired rhetoric about “placing the Cyprus problem on its correct basis as an issue of invasion and occupation.” But what Plan B is, nobody has ever said, because even they do not know. It sounds good, as it creates the impression that we have an alternative to negotiations, when in fact it is support for partition. If only the hard-liners had the honesty to say so openly, we may even have a constructive public debate.

Anastasiades has done the right thing in ignoring the hard-liners and pressing ahead without them. At last he is showing qualities of strong and decisive leadership, which is necessary if there is to be any hope of solving the Cyprus problem. The Turkish side might still refuse to play ball, but the president has shown that he means business.

Fifty years later, we still don’t accept what we did in 1963

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the blackest day in the modern history of Cyprus, says Loucas Charalambous in his column in the Cyprus Mail.

If we Greek Cypriots realised the role the events of December 21, 1963, played in our history, every year on this day we should go to the moat that surrounds the Venetian wall in Nicosia (which we should have re-named ‘wall of tears’) and hit our head on it, just like the members of the Jewish faith do at the ruins of the temple of Solomon.

There is no similar event in the history of any other country. On that day, the head of state, using an irregular and illegal army he set up and armed, launched an attack on his own state and destroyed it. In the space of a few hours he had split it into two parts.

The saddest thing is that not only did we learn nothing from that stupid blunder – we have not even realised the lasting harm we did to our country – but we still view the story as a heroic fight instead of feeling some shame.

It requires an incredible level of nerve, for the state broadcaster to present the events of 1963 as supposed resistance against the Turkish ‘rebellion’, a rebellion that exists only in the imagination of the journalists of the CyBC and of some of the surviving protagonists of this unforgivable, blood-stained story.

In reality it was a Makarios rebellion, but nobody dares say such a thing. There is nothing more infuriating than the idiotic shows, usually broadcast during these days by CyBC’s radio and television stations, in which some of the protagonists of the events, such as Nicos Koshis, Christodoulos Christodoulou, Vassos Lyssarides and others give their triumphant version of what happened.

I do not blame them for their actions. Most, apart from Lyssarides, were immature and irresponsible youths in their twenties who had been led on by a callow, 50-year-old monk – Archbishop Makarios. They did not know what they were doing, unaware of their actions. But what is less forgivable is that even today, half a century later, they carry on pretending that they are still unaware of the irreparable damage their actions had caused the country.

In a way this is to be expected. What I find very difficult to accept is the irresponsibility of CyBC’s big-wigs who continue to perpetuate the myths, massacring historical truth.

This column has mentioned the events of December 1963 many times in the past. The Akritas organisation (with Makarios as its invisible leader, as Christodoulou revealed a few years ago) embarked on armed attacks against Turkish Cypriots, having first stepped up the tension between the two communities by placing a bomb at the monument to EOKA hero, Marcos Drakos at Paphos Gate and setting fire to the Ayios Kasianos primary school.

Plans to set up the Akritas organisation had been set in motion just six months after the establishment of the Cyprus Republic, and among its policy objectives, drafted by Tassos Papadopoulos (according to the late Glafcos Clerides’ testimony) was the overturning of the Zurich-London agreements which established the Cyprus Republic – in other words the dismantling of the state.

These are the facts which have been conclusively supported by documents and testimonies by members of the organisation. One of the members, former officer Takis Chrysafis, had the guts to tell the truth about the Akritas organisation, revealing that he had personally heard then government minister Polycarpos Yiorkadjis giving instructions for the bomb to be placed at the Marcos Drakos monument on December 3, 1963.

Only the CyBC bosses and the self-styled chieftains of 1963, who have not grown up yet, are still repeating the myth about the Turkish rebellion, when they should be at Nicosia’s Venetian wall, every year on this day, banging their heads against it seeking to absolve their sins.

Coffeeshop

The Cyprus Mail’s satirical column Coffeeshop says the breakthrough on the joint declaration that was expected last weekend never materialised and Downer headed Down Under feeling very down, having pissed us off big-time by meeting Turkey’s mousy foreign minister Ahmed Davutoglu, who was visiting Kyproulla illegally, at Turkey’s illegal embassy in the pseudo-state.

Apparently the government made official protests to the UN for Big Bad Al’s provocative behaviour but Ban Ki-moon has declined to tell us what his punishment would be. Our sources at the UN inform us however that Ban will not be sacking him because he is so fed up with everyone in Kyproulla he believes we deserve to have to deal with the bolshie Aussie.

Unfortunately, our collective hatred for the Turk-loving Aussie did not keep us united for very long. Big divisions appeared at Wednesday’s meeting of the party leaders, during which Prez Nik presented his latest proposal for a joint declaration that was very similar to the proposal submitted by Al.

Worse still, Nik defended the proposal informing the moaning leaders that he would submit it to the UN and if Eroglu accepted it, start negotiations. The professional naysayers were apoplectic, with Ethnarch Junior, whose already sizeable arrogance was given an unneeded boost by his election to the DIKO leadership, leading the barrage of criticism on the poor prez. Junior is turning out more hard-line than his late dad, if that were possible, said someone attending the meeting. The bash-patriotic resistance fighters of DIKO, EDEK, EUROKO and Perdikis left the meeting very disappointed and began calling for the preparation of a Plan B.

This cunning Plan B would ensure the solution of the Cyprob without negotiations with the Turks, because it would place the problem, as EDEK never tires of saying, “on its correct basis, as an issue of invasion and occupation”. And if Plan B does not work, we could prepare Plan C and then Plan D. And who knows there may be an agreement on the text of the joint declaration before we have exhausted all the letters of the alphabet.

If anyone was wondering why so much fuss was being made about the joint declaration, the answer was provided by Movement of Lillikas supporters. In a sombre statement the party warned that before long there would be “another text based on the last one submitted by Mr Downer so that the problems caused by some words could, supposedly be overcome.”

It added: “We want to inform Cypriot citizens that these words are the whole essence of the Cyprus problem. These words will determine the content and the quality of the Cyprus problem.” And we have been wasting all these years thinking that lawyers and diplomats could help us solve the Cyprob, when a couple of semantics professor would have completed the job in a couple of days.