By Loucas G. Charalambous
SOME of my friends censured me for being excessively critical at times of the new president, Tassos Papadopoulos, before he was elected. The gist of their objections went like this: “Despite his many faults, Tassos also has significant virtues. And you will see them if he is elected president. He is intelligent, resourceful, well-read and decisive, and does not care about the political cost. He is a man of action.”
I would invariably counter that their evaluation was mistaken, either because they did not know him very well or because they could not understand him. To some of these friends, I showed articles written by Papadopoulos in Kyrikas newspaper, which he used to publish in the 1980s. I asked them just to read the articles, because I think someone’s writings are a reflection of his personality. Even if you try, you cannot hide behind yourself in your writing. The written word always exposes the writer’s personality.
I challenged my friends to read the articles and to tell me if the style and content revealed great intelligence and political capability. Could they even detect any common sense in these incoherent texts? My view was that this was just another conventional Cypriot politician, superficial in his thinking, who had — like all his colleagues — made a political career out of defiant verbosity and platitudinous patriotic rhetoric.
I remembered all this after hearing the absurd gaffes our president committed on his visit to Athens last week. In the space of just a few hours, he managed, very clumsily, to get mixed up in Greece’s domestic political feuding, incurring the wrath of the country’s two big political parties. I thought of my friends, and wondered how much intelligence was hidden in his decision to deliver a speech — he being a head of state — to a PASOK meeting, without considering the implications and the reaction this would provoke.
I then wondered how much political wisdom was required for his second gaffe, which was an attempt to correct the first. He more or less publicly congratulated the leader of the opposition New Democracy party for being the favourite to win next year’s general elections in Greece, as he is ahead in the opinion polls. A head of state must be blessed with great political wisdom to go to another country and congratulate the leader of the opposition, in front of the TV cameras, because opinion polls suggest he will be the next prime minister.
This tragicomic story in Athens served one purpose at least. It showed the real strengths of our president and reinforced the view that with Papadopoulos in charge of the Cyprus problem our future is not in safe hands. This is very worrying. A president who cannot take a rational decision about a simple matter, and who ends up making a fool of himself, cannot be trusted to handle correctly much more complex and difficult issues such as the national problem. A president with these limitations in thought and judgment cannot possibly comprehend what the US ambassador to Cyprus said a few days ago — that “the absence of a settlement is not without cost to the two sides”. Nor can he grasp the importance of the warning issued by former president George Vassiliou, who said that we are in danger of creating the impression that we are as culpable as Rauf Denktash for the lack of a solution.
The problem is that Papadopoulos is still living in the past. The speech he gave in Athens was a nightmare return to his well-known meaningless rhetoric of old. He said, among other things: “In Cyprus we are the frontline of the Greeks against Turkish expansionism and its plans to remain master of the north and equal partner in the south.” This is the same wooden verbiage he came out with in the 1980s. In his next speech, I am certain, he will also remember the “long and unyielding struggle for vindication”.
This is why I remembered my friends who spoke about Papadopoulos’ political virtues. These days, there has been a lot of talk about collapsing myths. One of these is the myth about our president. At least this column has never had any doubts. We are now seeing the real Tassos Papadopoulos, who contrary to pre-election myths, has not changed. He is the same man he always was and we should have no illusions about him. He was and remains the man we saw in Athens last week.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
