President led Cyprus into EU
Tassos Papadopoulos, 74, the hard-line former president of Cyprus who ushered the divided island into the European Union after rallying Greek Cypriots to reject a United Nations peace deal, died Friday of lung cancer.
Papadopoulos served as president from 2003 to March 2008. A longtime chain smoker, he was hospitalized last month with severe breathing problems.
During his tenure, he oversaw the island’s entry into the EU and its adoption of the euro currency.
Papadopoulos will be remembered best for an emotional televised appeal to Greek Cypriots to reject a reunification plan brokered by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He vilified the plan, saying it would entrench division rather than end it. Three-quarters of Cypriots obliged him in an April 2004 referendum.
A British-trained lawyer, Papadopoulos served as the youngest cabinet minister in the island’s first post-independence government, at 26.
Papadopoulos was for a time the chief Greek Cypriot negotiator in settlement talks with the breakaway Turkish Cypriots after 1974, when Turkey invaded the island in response to a coup by supporters of uniting the island with Greece.
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