CYPRUS: UN efforts to broker a settlement in the nearly 30-year-old division of Cyprus have been abandoned in the face of Turkish obduracy.
After 20 hours of last-ditch negotiations on a proposal to reunify divided Cyprus, the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, announced yesterday in The Hague that his efforts had "reached the end of the road". After marathon all-night talks with Cyprus President, Mr Tassos Papadopoulos, and the Turkish Cypriot leader, Mr Rauf Denktash, Mr Annan gave up.
Beforehand, he warned the Cypriots that "decision time" had arrived: "The choice is not between my plan and a radically different one. The choice is between my plan and no solution at all."
Last month Mr Annan gave the two leaders until Monday to agree to hold separate referenda on March 30th on a settlement plan for a Swiss-style federation of two largely autonomous cantons linked by a central administration. At dawn yesterday, he said that Mr Papadopoulos was ready for a referendum "as long as the people knew what they are being asked to vote on" and legislative gaps were filled. However, the secretary general said Mr Denktash "answered that he was not prepared to agree to put the plan to referendum. He said he had fundamental objections to the plan on basic points. He believed that further negotiations were only likely to be successful if they began from a new starting point."
Mr Denktash, backed by the military in mainland Turkey, asserted: "The plan was unacceptable. This was not a plan we could ask our people to vote for."
Writing in yesterday's Turkish Daily News, columnist Mehmet Ali Birand called Mr Denktash "one of the most successful politicians Turkey has seen" because he has managed to "keep up the [policy of the] 'lack of a solution'."
The overwhelming majority of Turkish Cypriots support the Annan plan and have staged mass demonstrations over the past three months calling for Mr Denktash to resign. Politicians who oppose his hardline stand are threatening to boycott parliament, where his allies have a narrow majority. The opposition also plans to organise its own referendum at the end of March.