THE FALL OF THE FEDERAL SOLUTION WITH PAPADOPOULOS |
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Prof. Dr. Ata ATUN |
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The contents of Mr. Tassos Papadopoulos’ speech to the UN Gen-eral Assembly on Dec. 18, 2005, and an interview published in the weekly French magazine L’Express dated May 4, 2006 clearly reveal the real target and vision of the Greek Cypriot leader.
Papadopoulos stated his vision for the future, the solution of the Cyprus problem through the absorption of Turkish Cypriots into a Greek Cypriot state, at the UN General Assembly. And in his interview in L’Express, he clearly defined his goal of establishing a unitary state run by the Greek majority: “We reject a state constituted of two distinct zones and two differing communities while the Greeks are 82 percent of the population. I cannot accept a system allowing a blockage to the validity and smooth running of a unitary state. All the new propositions should take this reality into consideration.”
This means leaving aside the “bizonal, bicommunal federal sys-tem” agreed on in the 1975 and 1977-79 summit agreements that all subsequent negotiations were built on. For the past 43 years, the Greek government of Cyprus has monopolized the false title of the “only recognized government of Cyprus.”
Although at a Sept. 5, 2007, summit Papadopoulos rejected Tur-kish Cypriot President Mehmet Ali Talat’s proposal to establish the necessary committees mentioned in the Gambari agreement and to set up a program to settle the Cyprus issue as stated in the summit agreements by the end of 2008, the UN, the EU, the US and Turkey are sympathetic toward this proposal.
For years Papadopoulos used all kinds of trickery, lies and mi-srepresentation to take the Cyprus problem off the UN agenda and to place it with the EU in the hope that he could use the EU for the benefit of the Greek Cypriots during Turkey’s EU accession negotiations. Turkey, which was previously only in the screening process, started actual negotiations with the EU as of June 12, 2006. But the member-ship negotiations turned out to be a “psychological torture process,” with Turkey being treated quite differently than other countries that underwent the accession process.
The EU’s policy of changing the core of the Cyprus problem into a condition of her talks with Turkey has caused frustration in Turkey. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said, “Unless the isolation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KKTC) is stopped, whether it will cause a breakdown in the talks or not, there will be no steps backwards on the airports, the seaports or on the additional protocol.” This hints at a dead end in the near future for the accession talks as well as the Cyprus issue.
When looking at the situation from the other side, it is clear that the Cyprus problem need to be solved to carry on the with the EU talks. Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the UN, pointed out, “The membership of the Greek Cypriot administration in the EU further complicated the UN’s efforts for a solution.”
The problem is not only the rejection of the Annan plan on Apr. 24, 2004 or the insistence on new conditions before sitting down for negotiations. It is the rejection of all the parameters set by the UN Se-curity Council, to overthrow all the possibilities leading to a Federal Solution and to pave the road towards a “unitary Greek Cypriot repub-lic.”
There is no solution in the minds of Mr. Papadopoulos, or the rest of the Greek Cypriot politicians, built on a “federal system” formed by politically equal Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot states.
