PASOK: ‘Yes’ to UN plan
Greece’s opposition PASOK party, which had supported UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s efforts to reunify Cyprus while in office, yesterday backed his proposal, hours before Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos rejected it. Although acknowledging that it contained «difficult adjustments,» PASOK leader George Papandreou stressed this should be seen in the light of Cyprus’s EU accession. «The large democratic faction says ‘yes’ to cooperation and ‘no’ to division, ‘yes’ to hope for the development and ‘no’ to inertia,» he said after a meeting of senior party officials. He said that Greece would respect the decision of the Cypriots but stressed that no one should sit on the fence. «No responsible leadership has the right to wait for the decision of someone else to make things easier,» he said. In an opinion piece in Eleftherotypia, former Prime Minister Costas Simitis said the EU would not like to deal with the Cyprus issue if the plan fell through.
