Greeks don't need an enemy

When angered by the inappropriate attitudes of friends, don't we often say "With friends like you, who needs an enemy?" Seeing the awful performance of Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias ever since he assumed the foreign minister portfolio in Alexis Tsipras' government, perhaps that expression should be reworded as "With Kotzias as foreign minister, do the Greeks need an enemy?"

If anyone wants to find an excuse why the bright hopes for the latest round in Cyprus talks were recently replaced with a "Probably not this time as well" pessimistic realism, perhaps they should consider the Herculean contributions of Kotzias. Kotzias apparently lives in his own obsessive world with a grasp of reality totally different than the rest of the world.

Most recently, Kotzias made a number of statements between March 25 and 28 during a visit to the southern Greek Cypriot-administered part of Cyprus regarding the quagmire on the island, which has been defying all resolution efforts since the 1968 start of intercommunal talks. Not a single one of these statements reflected the realities on the island; on the contrary, they were all so distorted that it is difficult to know where to begin when taking them up. Let me nevertheless attempt this daunting undertaking.

First, Kotzias said, "The sense he gathered from the negotiations in Geneva was that Turkey was not ready." In fact, as my well-placed Turkish and Greek Cypriot sources assure me, if that was the sense Kotzias got, then he was the only person in Geneva to get it. Everyone else got the impression that the side which was not ready - or perhaps was not willing would be a better description - were the Greeks.

Second, Kotzias claimed that the right of intervention under the 1960 Guarantees and...