Greeks vote down Cyprus unity plan; more trouble brewing

Greeks vote down Cyprus unity plan
Helena Smith Nicosia
Sunday April 25, 2004
The Observer UK

An historic attempt to reunify Cyprus after three decades of division was torpedoed last night when the island's majority Greek Cypriot population overwhelmingly defied international pressure and rejected a United Nations peace plan.

Despite appeals from President Bush, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan and the European Union, three-quarters of the Greek community voted to reject the accord.

Diplomats said the scale of the rejection left little room for a second referendum, confirming their worst fears - that Cyprus would enter the EU on 1 May as a partitioned nation. The EU's eastern borders will now end in the infamous 'dead zone.'

In stark contrast to the Greek vote, 69.1 per cent of Turkish Cypriots endorsed the complex deal, opening the way for the international community to lift crippling trade blockades.

Last night, in what will be a blow to 30 years of Greek efforts to block international recognition of Turkish Cyprus, the EU Enlargement Commissioner Gunter Verheugen announced he would immediately look at ways of easing the embargoes.

The prospect of the EU's borders ending at a heavily- fortified frontier will cast a shadow over forthcoming celebrations to mark its eastward expansion.

'It seems as if the Cyprus problem is going to continue and that makes us very sad,' Feder Soyer, the deputy leader of the breakaway Turkish Republic's ruling Socialist Party, told The Observer from his office in northern Nicosia.

'We Turkish Cypriots want reunification. A "no" from the Greek Cypriots will be very bad news. It will lead to all kinds of frightening scenarios being played out, here and in Turkey.'

In what appeared to be the first signs of a political crisis in the self-declared state Rauf Denktash, its veteran leader and opponent of the UN blueprint, angrily insisted he would retain his position despite the result.

Furious UN officials and diplomats, who had worked around the clock to devise the 9,000-page peace plan, had desperately hoped both sides would endorse it in time for Cyprus's EU accession.

Reacting to the international disappointment over the result, the leader of the largest party in the Greek Cypriot coalition government, Dimitris Christofias, said: 'The result does not mean we don't want a settlement... What is needed is to resume negotiations to clear up points [in the plan] that need clarification in order to make it acceptable and with the guarantees on security that we feel are so vital.'

Although European law will technically extend across the whole island under its treaty of accession, EU laws and benefits will be suspended in the northern enclave until a solution is found.

The UN plan envisaged the creation of a loose federation of two largely autonomous, and politically equal, states on the island under a weak central government. But Greek Cypriots felt the plan was impractical and unjust.

'It breaks my heart to have to vote no. We want a solution but not this one,' said Panayiota Panayidou, a baker's wife, after she cast her ballot.

'We are the majority on this island, the Turks are a minority. Under this UN scheme we'll have to share everything 50-50 with them and I don't think that's fair.'

EU officials and politicians backing the plan had hoped to win a big enough percentage of the vote to hold a second referendum in the autumn, ahead of a crucial decision to allow Turkey to start EU membership talks. Ankara had been told in no uncertain terms that it had to show willing over Cyprus if it wanted to win a start date for the talks. Although implicit, the threat partly accounted for Ankara's extraordinary volte-face in the hardline policy it has traditionally pursued over Cyprus.

'It is true that the Greeks have had to confront the reality of a solution for the first time and that the whole process has been very quick, but frankly there's also been a lot of misinformation about the plan, too,' said one EU diplomat based in Nicosia.

'This is a huge, huge disappointment. The EU, after all, is meant to be the biggest peace project on earth. Sandbags and barbed wire are not what it is about.'

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he was 'saddened' by the Greek Cypriot vote, while the European Commission issued a statement saying that it 'deeply regrets that the Greek Cypriot community' had rejected the plan.