http://www.cyprus-mail.com/opinions/you ... y/20100103
You can’t accomplish in six meetings what you couldn’t in sixty
By Loucas Charalambous
Published on January 3, 2010 +-Text size
IT HAS now become blatantly clear that for the 22 months he has been in office, President Christofias has been playing silly games with regard to the national problem. Unfortunately he has managed to fool a lot of people.
Now, faced with an impasse, even many members of the Left have realised that his behaviour all this time was nothing more than a cleverly orchestrated communications game. He pretended to have been working, night and day, for a settlement, but in reality his objective was to never reach a deal.
This column has the right to boast that it identified this game from the start. On March 9, 2008 – nine days after he assumed office – we had written that Christofias would follow in the steps of his predecessor, Tassos Papadopoulos.
All the president’s efforts were aimed at wasting time. And now that he has achieved his objective, now that the party is over, he is ready for intensive negotiations. He knew, from the beginning that he had 18 months ahead of him. He knew that in April 2010 the Turkish Cypriots would have had ‘presidential’ elections. He knew there was a good chance that Mehmet Ali Talat would lose these elections.
You did not have to be a great politician to realise what he was playing at. We had written this as far back as 22 June 2008. But the objective was the passing of the time. He wasted 16 months of negotiations and more than 60 meetings, talking about one issue, which he still has not managed to complete. And he has decided now – now that everything is over and Talat is on the way out – to engage in supposedly intensive talks.
To do what? To discuss the same issue he has been discussing for 16 months? Since the talks started in September 2008, Talat had on countless occasions requested the speeding of the process and the holding of more meetings, but Christofias simply repeated the familiar tune – he would not accept ‘suffocating time-frames’. On a couple of occasions, he also said that he had other serious business to tend to.
The president has an obligation to give answers to the following questions: What is the thinking for going to intensive talks now? And what could six meetings produce, considering that after 60 meeting he failed to close the one chapter that was considered the easiest of all? What would be achieved at six meetings with a representative of the Turkish Cypriots who, in all likelihood, would not be representing them three months after January? And why has he now accepted ‘suffocating time-frames’?
Why had he never accepted Talat’s proposal for intensive talks before December? It had been made on countless occasions, before then. Is it because this January is the only month of the last 16 that he did not have more serious business to tend to?
It is high time the president stopped taking us for a ride. Most people have understood his game by now. And if there was anyone who had not understood what he was playing at, all was revealed, unintentionally, by AKEL chief Andros Kyprianou, who said the following about the president’s critics: “All those who accuse Demetris Christofias want to prevent his re-election.”
This is the real issue. Christofias has just completed 22 of his 60 months in office, but his main concern is his re-election in three years’ time. Now, even the biggest fool could understand why he had been filibustering for 16 months. He plans on seeking a second term so as to complete the negotiations for a Cyprus settlement with Dervis Eroglu.
