Cyprus referendum unity vote collapses

A young woman holds a candle during a Greek Cypriot Citizens Movement demonstration opposing a UN unification plan in the center of Nicosia, Cyprus, on Thursday. PHOTO: EPA

After 40 years of false starts, the international community thought it had the perfect formula for a Cyprus settlement, but the tight timetable and imposed compromises have prompted a backlash from an unexpected quarter.

Opinion polls suggest a referendum today on a hard-fought UN plan to reunify the island as a loose confederation in time for EU accession next week will be lost among Greek Cypriots, whose support foreign mediators had long taken for granted.

For the best part of two decades, it had been the Turkish Cypriot leader -- veteran nationalist Rauf Denktash -- who angered the international community by blocking any settlement.

Denktash still opposes the UN plan, but opinion polls in his Turkish-protected breakaway state suggest he has lost the support of his own people, who are poised to embrace the blueprint in a bid to join the European club and end years of pariah status.

By contrast, Greek Cypriots look set to follow the urging of their nationalist president Tassos Papadopoulos and vote down the plan, despite warnings from the international community that they would never be offered a better deal.

Nothing can now stop the Greek Cypriots being admitted to the EU on May 1 -- their leaders have formed the island's internationally recognized government ever since the UN first deployed peacekeepers here following communal disturbances in 1963 and 1964.

But to the barely concealed irritation of the EU, it looks almost certain to be a truncated island that is admitted, with the bloc forced to cold-shoulder the Turkish Cypriots despite their conversion to the cause of reconciliation.

A poll carried out for the state-owned Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation this week found 54 percent of Greek Cypriots said they would definitely say no to the UN plan and another 12 percent said they would probably do so.

Definite and probable support combined amounted to a paltry 18 percent.

With the gap in the polls so stark, the fading hopes of peace supporters have come to rest on a silent groundswell of support undetected by the pollsters.

But University of Cyprus political analyst Christoforos Christoforou dismissed such hopes, despite the prevailing climate of sometimes intimidatory nationalism which has largely drowned out the yes campaign.

"Of course, the nos may be over-represented in the polls for those reasons, but the margin is just too big for that sort of factor to affect the final outcome," he said. "All this outside pressure has just been counterproductive. It was always going to spark a backlash."

Ironically, it was the Greek Cypriot president who first appealed to the international community to have one last go at brokering a settlement late last year.

But when the UN and the EU eventually came up with a final blueprint, he rejected it in an emotional address to the nation in which he accused the foreign mediators of seeking to foist it on the majority community.

"It appears there is an attempt to influence the vote of the people of Cyprus," charged government spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides, after a raft of EU officials accused Papadopoulos of "cheating" them with his about-face on a settlement.

"We have said that any pressure or blackmail will not be accepted by the Greek Cypriot people," said Andros Kyprianou, spokesman for the communist AKEL, Cyprus' largest party.

Greek Cypriot nationalists from both left and right have always had a strong sense of antagonism toward what they perceive as meddling, particularly by the West.

But the sheer ferocity of the backlash from a community which for so long championed a UN settlement has shocked even its longstanding friends.

"There is nothing unusual about people resenting being told what to do by foreigners," one diplomat said. "What is unusual is to keep relevant information away from the public ... and it should be relevant that people whose help they have asked for for the past 30 years think it's a balanced plan which deserves their support."