LAST SUNDAY, we put the following question: “Is he (Tassos) truly the defiantly heroic hard man willing to stand up to his Turk-loving European colleagues for what he believes to be right and just or will he go with the flow, helping the invader get into the Union?”
On Friday we got the answer. He was defiantly heroic in Brussels, standing up to his Turk-loving European colleagues for a few hours, but then he surrendered. Not only did he agree to the invader getting a date for the start of accession talks, but he got next to nothing in exchange.
All he could secure was a verbal promise by Turkey’s PM Tayyip Erdogan to sign the customs union agreement with the 10 new member states before the start of accession talks. Was this tantamount to recognising the plantation? Not according to Erdogan and the Dutch PM who said, on behalf of the EU presidency, immediately after Tassos’ capitulation, that signing of the customs union agreement did not constitute recognition of Cyprus.
It gets worse. The paragraph relating to the signing of the customs union agreement is vague and could lead to any number of interpretations by the Turks, who, according to some Brussels sources, could even dispute the fact that the Cyprus government represent the whole of Cyprus when the time comes to agree terms and conditions.
Still, our Ethnarch told hacks on the plane bringing him back to the plantation on Friday night that the signing of the agreement would mean recognition of the Republic by the Turks. He would say that, because how could he sell the freezing cold shower he received in Brussels as an ‘honourable compromise’?
But at the news conference, at which he said he was satisfied with the outcome of the summit, he looked anything but satisfied. He had the look of someone defeated, dejected, humiliated and bitter, but as they say, appearances often deceive. And at least he didn’t cry.
I AM BEGINNING to believe that the two-day summit was used quite ruthlessly by the ‘dumb Franks’ of the EU to cut our poor old Ethnarch down to size, because he had been getting ideas above his station, behaving as if he was the equal of Chirac, Blair, Schroeder and thinking he could dictate EU policy. What they did to him was cruel, but it may have taught him a bit of humility and reminded him that leaders of small countries do not mess with the big boys of the Union.
Here was our Ethnarch thinking that he could use the EU to bring Turkey to her knees and force her to sign a Cyprus settlement that he dictated. And he had calculated that the EU would provide him with the legal tools with which to extract concessions from Turkey on the Cyprob. Every time he did not get what he wanted, he would threaten to block Turkey’s accession negotiations.
This was not just Tassos’ thinking. All the bash-patriots on the plantation who support him – Lyssarides, Omirou, Koutsou, Perdikis, Kleanthous, Prodromou et al – reckoned that as an EU member state we would be handed a rod with which to beat the barbaric Turks into submission. And if we were not given the rod by the EU, we would simply veto the start of accession talks. At least this was the plan of our simpleton politicians who, like the Ethnarch, have no concept of our plantation’s size and grossly overestimate our power.
The summit started out very well. The draft declaration about the start of accession talks, prepared at the dinner of the 25 leaders on Thursday night, gave Tassos everything he wanted. Turkey would have to give a written commitment to signing customs union with the 10 new member states, including Cyprus, before the start of accession talks. This would be a form of recognition of the Republic and the Ethnarch would have been able to return to a triumphant hero’s welcome.
But Friday’s events wrecked all plans for a victorious return to the plantation on Saturday. The flight home was brought forward, the Ethnarch and his entourage arriving in the early hours of yesterday, at a time at which he would not have to face the cameras and make statements to journalists.
NOT EVEN his highly-paid communications guru, it seems, could think of a positive spin to put on Friday’s humiliation. On Friday, all the myths he and his supporters have been feeding the public about a solution based on European ideals and values collapsed before our very eyes.
Was this the EU that would help us secure a European solution? Erdogan only had to threaten to walk out for our partners to change the summit’s declaration, dropping the provision for a signature by him and exempting Turkey from having to recognise the Republic, even indirectly. Is this the EU that would pressure Turkey into agreeing to a European solution to the Cyprob, as our wise politicians have been claiming?
On the contrary, the big boys of the EU saw Friday as payback time for Tassos. This was the man who had been blocking direct EU trade with the Turkish Cypriots, threatening to take the European Commission to court if it went ahead. This was the guy who has been putting obstacles to the granting of financial aid to the Turkish Cypriots, trying to maintain their isolation.
More importantly, it is the guy who threatened to mess up the regional security and strategic plans of the EU and the US, by vetoing the start of accession negotiations if Turkey did not recognise the Republic. Given this record, he was not going to get a shred of sympathy from his EU partners, who cruelly showed him his place.
Not only did they change everything to satisfy Turkey, they then forced him to accept this, by resorting to a mixture of pressure and threats, and claim he was satisfied. He even shook Erdogan’s hand in the end. You almost felt sorry for him, after such a traumatic, humbling experience.
BACK on the plantation all the veto-mongers were in shock because their great leader had failed to exercise the veto. Dr Faustus felt that it was an undignified end to the summit. The crazy Dr Madsakis said he was unable to sleep on Friday night, because he knew our humiliation in Brussels was the beginning of the end for us.
Top comment came from the EDEK vice-president Marinos Sizopoulos, who accused the Greek PM of acting as “the ambassador of Turkey’s interests”. DIKO deputy Andreas Angelides, who is Tassos’ soul-mate on the Cyprob, admitted he was not happy with the outcome, but not all was lost. “It is still possible for one more drive for a common European future and there is a significant date ahead, October 3”.
This is the day when Turkey will begin accession talks. As long as we have a new date for exercising our veto right nothing is lost.
IT GOES without saying that the duplicitous Brits were behind all our woes. Why we joined the EU, considering that it is run by Turk-loving Britain, described by the crazy doctor as “our number one enemy”, I do not know. Incidentally, the next opportunity to exercise our veto will be under the British presidency of the EU, which will be eager to get accession talks started.
Even after Thursday night’s dinner at which Tassos got everything he wanted, his personal CyBC spokesman Yiannakis Nicolaou reported that the government “expressed its displeasure at the action of Britain.” On Friday night, Sigma TV reported that the “British mask has fallen off”. What mask? Didn’t the Brits always say that they wanted the Turks in the EU at all costs? On this score they were honest.
Meanwhile, on Friday, when the final compromise had been worked out, British officials were visiting both delegations to persuade them to accept it. They were reportedly telling the Cypriots that the compromise was tantamount to recognition of the Republic, and the Turks that it in no way constituted recognition, direct or indirect. We don’t call them duplicitous for nothing.
THERE had even been reports on the radio that Tassos was involved in angry exchanges with foreign secretary Jack Straw and Tony Blair. When I went to my neighbourhood periptero to buy some tobacco on Friday night, my peripteras informed me that Blair and Papadopoulos almost exchanged punches in Brussels.
I suggested that this may have been a slight exaggeration by hacks, but he was adamant. “It must have happened,” he insisted, “because the National Guard was put on full alert at lunch-time today. I know for sure, but don’t tell anyone.”
THE MEDIA circus that we had not seen since Burgenstock and the referendum was back on our TV screen this week, with a plethora of experts on EU politics and the right of veto, imparting their wisdom. Since when has the mukhtar of Lefkara, Sophocles Sophocleous, become an expert on diplomacy and the EU, deserving to sit alongside intellectual heavyweights such as Perdikis, Koulias and Kleanthous and talk about the veto?
TV stations should be more picky about who they invite to these discussion shows, because people might stop taking them seriously. The mayor of Nicosia was also invited but he was having too much fun riding the brand new carousel he has placed in the moat below Solomou Square to show up.
PRESIDENTIAL hack Yiannakis Nicolaou deserves a special mention for giving angry looks to his CyBC colleague, Panikos Hadjipanayis, during a live-link-up from Brussels, because the latter’s report lasted longer than 30 seconds. Once he stopped, Nicolaou gave him another dirty look and spoke for five minutes non-stop.
Nicolaou, who is not the brightest spark in the world, came up with his obligatory gem on Friday morning. On hearing that Erdogan had threatened to walk out if the summit statement was not changed, he was ecstatic with joy, telling other hacks that “the Turks will veto their accession themselves”.
HADJIPANAYIS, as if to confirm that the CyBC is a centre of journalistic excellence, was beaming on Friday night, as he reported the big turnout of journalists for the Ethnarch’s press conference. “Cyprus was the centre of the summit,” he gloated, unable to hide his pride. Some one hundred journalists turned up for the president’s press conference he said. To explain what a triumph this was, he compared it to the Swedish PM’s press conference, to which a paltry nine hacks had turned up.
THE STATE propaganda machinery appeared to have been switched off yesterday. The CyBC led its lunch-time radio news broadcast with a report about the contaminated honey and dried apricots brought from Turkey, relegating the Brussels summit and the local reaction to secondary importance. Could they have received orders from Polakis of the Palazzo, who regularly calls the newsroom with instructions to downplay the reaction to the Ethnarch’s humiliation?
The Cyprus News Agency was even more blatant in its suppression of news. Whereas on Thursday, it bombarded its subscribers with reports from Brussels about the triumphs of our Ethnarch and the favourable climate that had been created, on Friday the number of reports was drastically cut. There was a low output yesterday as well, when everyone was eager to read what sort of reaction there had been to the summit.
Perhaps Polakis has got them to practise the well-known Soviet principle of news-reporting that “bad news is no news” .
SPEAKING of journalistic excellence, we must give warm congratulations to our establishment’s favourite Washington correspondent, Michalis Ignatiou, who was named ‘TV journalist of the year’ by the Zeus group’s rag Man. Ignatiou was the man who had reported back in February that the Americans would spend millions, in briberies to Bananiots in order to get the A-plan accepted. His biggest story proved totally unreliable – we have not yet received a buck, let alone the millions.
IT IS WITH great joy that we welcome the arrival to our barren political hinterland of yet another prospective national saviour and enlightened Party leader – Prodromos Prodromou. The former Disydent deputy was last Sunday elected unopposed as leader of the European Democracy party (in short, Euro.De).
We would like to explain that we have arbitrarily used ‘De’ for the abbreviation of the word ‘Democracy’ for a very good reason, even though it is inconsistent with the transliteration of other abbreviated party names, which include the word Democracy in some form (e.g. Disy and Diko). If we had written the abbreviated name of the new party as ‘EuroDi’, it could have been taken to stand for Euro-Disney, the venue at which we will find the European solution that Prodromou and his colleagues have been promising us.
THE NEW party’s deputy leader, former Disydent deputy, Rikkos Erotokritou – also elected unopposed – may compete with Micky Mouse on ear-size, but this would not justify using the EuroDi as the party’s acronym. But I digress. The third Disydent deputy, Christodoulos Taramoundas – in the Goofy role – also needed an important-sounding post and was elected unopposed as vice-president.
The electoral congress did not exactly overdose on democratic choice for its members, with all three Disneydents being elected unopposed. All that remains now is for it to find supporters to wave banners and applaud when the leadership is speaking. The turnout for Sunday’s congress, according to our information, was far from encouraging; it would not have filled the Eurodisney train.
This was confirmed by the failure of the TV stations covering the conference on their news-shows, to show any shots of the delegates. All pictures were of the leadership sitting on the podium.
EURO-DI’S misguided leaders have done a lot of stupid things in the last few months but there is one thing we can never forgive them. And that is electing Yiannakis Matsis as Euro-MP. Of course, as soon as he was elected, Matsis, who belongs in Eurodisney, turned his back on the Prodromos and Rikkos, insisting that he was an independent Euro-MP.
One morning this week, Matsis was informing the listeners of Radio Veto how he and his Bananiot colleagues had reversed the negative climate towards our plantation that prevailed at the European Parliament since the referendum. He had explained to his colleagues how bad the Annan plan was, he said. “We told them that by rejecting it we had saved Europe.” From what he did not say, but it was a shame that the Ethnarch did not take Matsis with him to Brussels. He could have saved Europe from the barbaric Turks a second time.
THE ETHNARCH is planning to make an address to the people at 10.30 tonight to explain what happened in Brussels and why he did not veto the accession talks. Don’t forget to have a pack of Kleenex handy, because he might refer to the Annan plan.
