THE DISAPPOINTMENTS in last Monday’s televised election debate were not the presidential candidates, but the four journalists who stayed glued to the Annan plan.
Until 2003, the 1974 coup featured prominently in the election agenda. From 2004 onwards, after the rapprochement of the hard core Makarios and Grivas supporters, the main agenda of elections has become the Annan plan.
In reality, this agenda has no takers outside the political and journalistic communities. It is out of place and time and those who invest politically in the ‘no-vote’ of nine years ago have no contact with current reality.
If the Annan plan had to be discussed in the election in this campaign, the issue should not have been who voted for or against it. The debate should have focused on the revelation by Giorgos Lillikas that Tassos Papadopoulos, in his five years as president was handling the national issue under ‘false pretences’.
During the TV debate Lillikas made two important revelations. First, he said that condition – ‘with the right content’ – for accepting a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation (BBF) by Papadopoulos was a ruse for indirectly rejecting bi-zonal federation. Second, the July 8 agreement, by which Papadopoulos committed himself to BBF with his signature, was also a ruse to ease the pressures that followed the rejection of the Annan plan. However, according to Lillikas, the (UN Under-Secretary General Ibrahim) Gambari letter followed and it annulled the commitment to BBF.
If Lillikas made these revelations out of honesty rather than stupidity, he would also have said that the interpretation given to the Gambari letter was also a scam. In this letter the UN Under-Secretary General explained the implementation procedure for the July 8 agreement. How could a third party, annul an agreement that was signed by the leaders of the two communities?
The letter contains an ambiguous reference (Lillikas knows well how this slipped into the letter) which the Papadopoulos government interpreted in the way it suited it, because at the time, as Lillikas admitted, the government was not engaging in conventional politics but in trickeries.
Lillikas assertion that BBF was never on Papadopoulos’ agenda is an admission of the following:
- When in 2002-2003 he was pledging that, if elected, he would negotiate the Annan plan he was consciously lying to the electorate.
- When he sent letters to the UN Secretary-General which circulated as official UN documents, claiming he wanted a settlement based on the Annan plan he was lying to the international community.
- When he was declaring in Brussels that he wanted a settlement based on the Annan plan, before Cyprus’ accession to the EU, he was taking EU officials for a ride.
- When he went the Burgenstock he refused to engage in negotiations because he did not want any improvements made to a settlement plan he did not believe in.
- The poisonous reports against the plan filed from Burgenstock by reporters, briefed by the Papadopoulos government, were just another act of the government-staged theatre.
Lillikas told us that Papadopoulos did not want BBF but did not have the political courage to say so, hiding behind the condition for the ‘the right content’ instead. Through continuous tactical manoeuvring and trickery we arrived at decision-time. Instead of the president taking responsibility, he played with people’s emotions, fuelling their fears so that this political farce could acquire popular legitimacy.
In these conditions, with Christofias staging his own theatre, there was one political leader, who had the guts to go against the flow, standing up and taking a clear position. And instead of this honest stand being respected, our journalists have been demanding, for the last eight years, that he apologise for staying true to his beliefs.
They should apologise together with Lillikas for the false pretences and not Anastasiades for a position that was not tested. Theirs was and we all know where it has led us.