IT’S the time of the month when the bully boys come out again. It’s been a regular fixture since the referendum, with members of the governing parties queuing up to lash the opposition for its latest act of betrayal to the cause.
A few weeks ago, we had the president’s outburst against those who had booed his henchmen at a Famagusta memorial event. Then, he taunted his opponents as ‘Nenekides’ – a word coined from the name of a Greek traitor in the 1821 uprising against Ottoman rule, but also punning on the word ‘nai’ to deride those who had voted ‘yes’ to the Annan plan.
Now it is the turn of DISY deputy Katy Cleridou. Her crime: to have said that President Tassos Papadopoulos did not want a solution. Nothing new there: members of the opposition have been saying just that for months on end. Papadopoulos, of course, will repeat to the end of time that he is fighting for a solution to the Cyprus problem, but it’s fair criticism to suggest that in setting the bar for a solution so high that it is unattainable, he is in fact fighting for the maintenance of the status quo.
So what was it that made the usual presidential suspects (Cleanthous, Omirou et al) climb on their patriotic high horses and cry treachery? Cleridou had spoken to the enemy in making her comments in an interview to Kibris. She gave the game away, she revealed to the Turks our best kept secret, that we are not all marching hand in hand to battle, united in purpose behind our great leader. She showed them that there was dissent in Greek Cypriot ranks, that some people doubted Papadopoulos’ sincerity!
The gnashing of teeth from DIKO and EDEK is no surprise: what is more curious is the strident tone adopted by AKEL. The communist party lambasted the policies of the previous government that had resulted in the heinous Annan plan, which contained so many concessions that the people had no choice but to reject it, and roasted DISY officials for encouraging foreign mediators and the Turkish Cypriot side to insist on the return of a plan that had been so decisively rejected.
Was it not the AKEL central committee that voted to approve the plan in April? Was it not Demetris Christofias who made a positive assessment of the plan before he changed his mind on that notorious Good Friday? Was it not AKEL’s general assembly that complained it did not have enough time to sell the plan to the people, and eventually ordered a supposedly reluctant ‘soft no’ in order to cement the ‘yes’? Surely they should approve of DISY attempts to resurrect the ‘yes’ – or have they grown too comfortable in their patriotic guise as standard bearers of rejectionism?
