Annan plan was last chance to reunite Cyprus, says former Spokesman

The Annan plan was the last opportunity to reunite Cyprus under a federation, former Government Spokesman under President Clerides, Michalis Papapetrou, said in an interview in the Cyprus Mail. 

“I consider that Christofias and AKEL committed a crime in 2004 by voting against the Annan Plan, which, in my humble opinion, was the last opportunity to reunite Cyprus under the auspices of a federation.”

Furthermore, he added that he believed that President Papadopoulos negotiated the plan he received from Clerides with the aim of being in a better position to kill it.

“The ‘Annan III’ plan that Mr Papadopoulos received from Mr Clerides – and I was in the negotiating team of Mr Clerides at the time – was a miracle,” he insisted. “It was much, much better than the one Mr Papadopoulos, after strong negotiation, presented to the people to vote in the referendum. It was much better. And I’m sure that, if somebody honestly wanted to make it even better, he could negotiate further in 2003 to make it better. But my opinion is that Mr Papadopoulos was negotiating with an aim to be in a position to more easily kill it. That’s obvious.”

He praised President Clerides highly as being “a university” when it came to negotiating skills and added that he had supported Christofias’ presidential bid in 2008 in order to help remove Tassos Papadopoulos from the presidency , who he considered “a political disaster for our country”, though he also admitted that Christofias himself had played a part in that disaster, first in helping Papadopoulos to power, then allying himself with the ‘No’ camp.

In his view, the dream of federation ended in 2004, or at best a few years later, “when Mr Christofias treated Talat as Denktash … and let things shift to Eroglu, where things are impossible”. Even after the Plan was rejected, there was hope; the National Council unanimously asked for it to be re-negotiated – but Christofias, he says, hammered the final nail in its coffin by refusing to go to Talat with the half-dozen issues identified by the Council and insisting instead on starting from scratch, wasting valuable time.

“And I want to remind you that just before the elections in the north – which Talat lost – the UN Secretary-General came to Cyprus and was begging Christofias to sign together with Talat, in order to lock up the issues they had agreed so far. And Christofias refused. Do you know why? Because he had one eye on the negotiations and the other eye on what the Archbishop would say, or his allies in government, DIKO and EDEK.”

He acknowledges, however, that he is out of step with the man in the street. “It’s obvious that, at least for the time being, the majority of the people of Cyprus do not share the way I think.”

The Mail’s satirical weekly column Coffeeshop says there has been a concerted effort by the comrade’s poodles in AKEL and the government over the last week or so to make the Cyprob the main issue of debate in order to shift public attention away from his grand project of destroying the economy and sending living standards to 1970s levels. 

Last weekend the commies held half a dozen news conferences to attack comments about the Cyprob, attributed to the DISY Fuhrer by a Turkish newspaper, whereby he had expressed a preference for a ‘loose federation’ to an MEP who mentioned this to Hurriyet daily. The comrades were apoplectic - you could see smoke coming out of their ears as soon as the TV camera focused on them - and managed to keep their self-righteous rage going for the cameras until Wednesday. They were helped by Nik’s stupid decision to respond through his party deputies with an intensity that made you think AKEL had accused him of expressing a preference not for loose federation but for loose women. 

The comrade spoke about the ‘danger of loose federation’ outside a church on Friday night, warning that this would lead to a two-state solution. His commitment to a tight federation on the other hand, had averted the two-state solution. This insistence on talking about the Cyprob at time when everybody wants to know what the president plans to do about the economy that is in free-fall gives rise to fears that he has a screw loose.