The art of avoiding real debate on real issues

THE ABILITY of politicians, state officials and other so-called opinion leaders to avoid any discussion of the important issues facing the country beggars belief. All appear to follow the same remedy for the problems – hide your head in the sand, pretend they do not exist, and they will eventually go away. When they do take their head out of the sand, they devote themselves exclusively to muttering platitudes about trivialities and non-issues that nobody cares about, except TV stations looking for sound-bites for their evening news show. Hearing them in the last couple of weeks, anyone would think that they have solved all serious problems and now have the luxury to indulge in the debate of lighter issues.
In the last couple of weeks, there has been heated debate about the transfer of lowly employees of the presidential palace, with opposition DISY accusing the government of persecuting them. Then we had DISY kicking up a major fuss because the president had appointed a man it did not approve of to the Public Service Commission; the row and exchange of accusations has been dragging on for days. All parties have strong convictions when it comes to the composition of the Commission, which decides the appointments and promotions in the public service.
In the legislature, deputies were rowing over whether General Grivas should be included in the official list of men who had served as Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, while the communist party AKEL has been demanding that the state should investigate the killing of leftists by EOKA during the liberation struggle almost half a century ago! This is just a small sample of the weighty issues that have been featuring in public debate (if we could call it that) in the last few days. We have not even mentioned the elusive nine-year-old drug user that the president spoke about at an anti-drug campaign event, sparking a barrage of alarmist platitudes.
This mindless toying with the inconsequential and irrelevant is of course preferable to having to deal with the critical problems faced by the economy, the long delays in the enforcement of EU harmonisation measures and the tough choices relating to the national issue. As regards the economy, everyone is aware of the problems – the three main indicators (fiscal deficit, public debt and inflation rate) are way above the Maastricht limits – but nobody is willing to discuss the need for remedies. On the contrary, the government continues to squander public money, to the applause of the political parties, when the overriding concern should be reducing expenditure.
It has decided to offer child benefit to all families at an annual cost of £84 million, and devised the absurd plan for compensating investors who lost money on the stock exchange without a politician voicing a single critical word. Nobody seems to care that the country could be driven to bankruptcy, happily praising, instead, the mindless spending at a time when responsible politicians should be talking about belt-tightening. EU harmonisation measures, which will have many negative short-term consequences on the economy, are being delayed for as long as possible, as if they can be avoided, while deputies discuss whether Grivas should be considered a National Guard chief or not.
As for the Cyprus problem, there has been a triumphant return to the defiant rhetoric and patriotic posturing of the past. After The Hague and the signing of the accession treaty we are behaving as if there is no Cyprus problem and that everything will work out fine, without us having to do anything apart from advance arcane legalistic argument to defend the inaction. The hackneyed legalistic rhetoric almost negates the very small and cautious openings that the government, grudgingly, has been making to the Turkish Cypriots. For instance, it is absurd for the government to announce measures for helping the Turkish Cypriots while tacitly discouraging Greek Cypriots from spending money in the occupied north.