BEFORE embarking on this week’s celebration of our wonderful plantation, I would like to subject myself to the humbling experience of admitting that I got one of my facts wrong last week.
I reported that US ambassador Michael Klosson had greeted three US Congressmen, on an illegal visit to the occupied north, at Ercan pseudo-airport. I am reliably informed that while Ambassador Klosson met the congressmen in the north he was not at Ercan to greet them when they arrived as this establishment had mistakenly reported last Sunday.
Before anyone points an accusatory finger in our direction, I would like to make it clear that I am not to blame. It was the fault of outside forces, unfortunately not foreign. I heard politicians on the radio having a go at Klosson and read newspaper articles claiming that he had gone to the pseudo-airport. In fact this is what our most serious and reliable paper, Phil said in a leader article on June 1.
As there had been no official denial of this info, our establishment, which often relies on unreliable press reports to fill this page, assumed it was accurate. I therefore blame Phil for misleading us by legitimising the misinformation. I hear that the embassy called Phil and asked it to print a correction but the paper, defiantly, refused, insisting that the essence of what it had argued was valid, even if the ambassador had never set foot at the pseudo-airport.
The million dollar question is who spread this bit of misinformation? Was it the Cyprus-splitting jerks, our secret services, our government or one of the TV stations, which love to offer their audiences a bogeyman every so often? And you can’t find a more eligible figure than the ambassador of the much-hated, Turk-loving Yanks to throw to the TV lynch mob.
WE SHOULD not be too harsh on ourselves as our government was promoting this bit of misinformation as recently as Tuesday, even after the State Department had called in our ambassador to Washington to complain about the personal attacks by the media and political parties against Klosson.
Apparently, Washington was pissed off big time with the Klosson-bashing and made its feelings known to our ambassador. Acting government spokesman Marios Karoian confirmed the meeting had taken place but tried to present it as being “within the framework of the regular contacts which take place at the US State Department”.
Even after this “routine” meeting in Washington, Karoian continued to peddle the myth that Klosson had been at the pseudo-airport. He said that our ambassador “explained the position of the Cyprus Republic, that the presence of the American ambassador at Tymbou airport sparked feelings of frustration and concern among the Cypriot people.”
Asked again about the ambassador’s “presence” at the airport, Karoian replied: “I have said that the presence of the ambassador at Tymbou airport was a provocation to the feelings of the Cypriot people…”
On the very same day that Karoian was saying this (Tuesday) foreign minister George Iacovou said that he had spoken to Klosson and was told that the ambassador had not gone to the pseudo-airport. Had he not informed Karoian about this, or does the government not believe Klosson?
My guess is that Karoian knew that the ambassador was not at the airport (the point must have been raised at the Washington meeting) but decided it was better to maintain this little lie because the government would look very stupid after all the breast-beating fuss it had made.
HOUSE president Christofias, maintaining the anti-US spirit of his late predecessor Spy Kyp, has publicly demanded that a démarche was made against Klosson for going to the airport. I doubt the government heeded his advice despite the ambassador’s alleged provocation to the Cypriot people.
In Tuesday’s briefing Karoian also denied press reports suggesting that the government had instructed the personal attacks against the ambassador. He was probably telling the truth about this but rather stupidly undermined his assertion by repeating the lie about the airport presence, which had sparked the personal attacks in the first place.
ANTI-US hysteria over the last couple of weeks has also affected our university. On Wednesday, its senate took a patriotic decision thwarting efforts by the US government to poison students’ and faculty members’ minds with American propaganda.
Some months ago, the Humanities School had asked the US embassy in Nicosia whether its government could donate books to the university library. The embassy agreed, gave a list and members of faculty ordered more than a thousand books of American literature and history.
However, the embassy set a condition, which is standard practice when a donation of books was made – that a corner of the library be named the ‘American corner’. In this corner there would be two or three computers on which library users could access US databases for their research. As the university carries out research this would have been very useful, or so some academics thought.
When the senate met on Wednesday, certain patriotic academics were outraged that there would be a ‘US corner’ in the library and argued that the request should be turned down and the books, which had already been place in the library, returned. A discussion followed with most members arguing that it would not only be stupid but also extremely rude to return the books, considering it was university which had asked for them.
The matter was put to the vote but was not passed. Four voted in favour and four against while some eight brave, independent-minded academics, who supported accepting the books during the debate, abstained for fear of being tainted as pro-American. Nice to know our free-thinking, independent-minded academics refuse to be intimidated by the patriotically correct camp.
ONE OF the most outspoken opponents of the ‘American corner’ during the senate meeting was a student. Yes, our plantation is so democratic that students have a couple of seats in the university senate. And in this democratic scheme of things students are perfectly entitled to intimidate academics.
The student I refer to is one of those fanatical communists who was christened an Akelite at birth and will remain one until his last day. He expressed his disgust at the deal done with the American imperialists. “Would we establish a Cuban corner in our library, if a book donation was made to by the Fidel Castro government?” the apparatchik asked.
‘Yes’ was the answer, even though it was pointed out to the young comrade that Cuba was unlikely to donate any books in the foreseeable future, unless the US government was willing to pay for them.
OUR ETHNARCH and his disciples were proved right when they were playing down the prospects of a new peace initiative. UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan made a statement earlier this week that put an end to speculation, fuelled by Sir Kieran Prendergastly’s visit to the plantation, about the start of a new round of talks.
After meeting prime minister Erdogan, Annan said he would submit the report about Cyprus that he had drafted in May last year. The report blames the Greek Cypriot side for the failure to find a settlement and calls for an end to the isolation of the Turkish Cypriots. This is international confirmation that the Turkish Cypriots have been officially given the role of victims of the Cyprob.
The report will probably be vetoed by Russia when it goes to the Security Council but its submission is significant in that it shows Annan has decided against a new initiative after the ghastly giant’s meetings on the plantation. The government and political parties were furious over the re-emergence of the report, which is now being used to apply pressure on our side.
Nobody was particularly disappointed that Annan saw no justification for a new initiat
ive after the ghastly giant’s contacts in the Athens-Nicosia-Ankara triangle. According to diplomatic circles, Tassos went out of his way to stave off a new initiative by giving Prenderghastly an extra-long list of proposed changes to the A-plan, most of which would never have been accepted by the Turks.
And he did not leave it there. He told the UN envoy that his list was not final. If the Turks raised new issues he reserved the right to make his list even longer. And he obdurately refused to agree to the setting of any timeframes for an agreement – not even three years – presumably because he had forecasted that the road to a solution would be very long one.
AWARE that the UN was unlikely to start a new initiative, the government’s propaganda machinery began work last Monday. Unnamed sources were quoted by the papers saying that Turkey was no longer interested in a settlement and had set as its objective the securing of some form of recognition for the pseudo-state.
Then we had Marios Karoian informing us that our diplomacy was achieving results. “The feeling that exists is that the Turkish side is on the defensive,” he announced. We do not know if he said this with a straight face as he was speaking on the radio. So on the defensive was Turkey that after meeting Erdogan, Annan announced his intention to submit his wretched report calling on states to end the Turkish Cypriots’ isolation.
Admittedly, Annan said this before he had been informed about the DIKO announcement warning him to tread carefully. “If Annan serves strategic and other interests, the Cypriot will consider his actions hostile,” it warned.
OUR GOVERNMENT’S defiance has not only been directed at the Yanks and the UN bureaucrats. Last week we gave our two-finger salute to the European Commission as well after it had written to the government ordering it not to sign the contract for the upgrading of the airports with the Hermes consortium, before responding to a list of questions put by Brussels.
The Commission entered the fray after receiving a letter from the J&P-led consortium, which complained that the tenders’ procedure had been violated and initial conditions set by the government had been changed. J&P are currently involved in a court battle with the government over the issue. Strangely none of our patriotic politicians criticised this sacred cow of a company for reporting the Cyprus Republic to European Commission as they had done when the DISY fuhrer did something similar last year.
But I digress. The initial reaction by communications minister Haris Thrasou to the news about the letter was that he did not know anything about it. Then he said that the contract would be signed this Tuesday as had been scheduled. He was not snubbing the Commission, he said, but merely expressing the confidence that all clarifications requested by Brussels would be provided before Tuesday.
The latest reports claim the government would go ahead with the signing before responding to the Commission, as the Attorney-general and international law firms had advised that it had every right to do so. All of a sudden, the government is in a big hurry to close the deal, which should have been signed and finalised two years ago. Will another two weeks make a difference, considering the contractor is not scheduled to begin before the autumn?
Press reports claim that the government had given far too much to the contractor during the negotiations. This may have been because the contractor’s legal advisors were from the well-known Tassos Papadopoulos law office.
RUMOURS suggest that the government has not taken the Commission’s intervention very seriously because it has strong backing from a powerful EU member-state, which has told it to go ahead with the signing of the deal. French companies are part of the Hermes consortium and the government of France, understandably, would like to see the deal finalised as soon as possible. Now if our government gets a slap on the wrist by the Commission for going ahead it would not be the end of the world.
BACK TO the Cyprus University which is on the verge of making history by becoming the first-ever academic institution in the world to promote someone to full professor by court decision. Yet on our plantation court judges seem eligible to judge academic excellence and decide who is entitled to promotion.
The man at the centre of this test case is Associate Professor Andreas Papapavlou of the Humanities School, who applied for a full professorship, but was turned down unanimously by the evaluation committee, consisting of five academics from foreign universities. The committee examines the publications of the applicant for originality etc before taking its decision.
The evaluation committee’s decision was upheld by the Senate and the Faculty appointment committee so Papapavlou took the university to the Supreme Court, which ruled that he should have been promoted. The university’s hierarchy is furious about the court decision as it creates a precedent that makes a mockery of the principle of academic excellence, and has challenged it.
The next step would be for the mediocre academics to set up a trade union to demand professorships for everyone who has been at the university for six years, read five books and published an article about meritocracy in a newspaper.
As for Papapavlou, how proud can he be of his professorship, when the whole world will know that it was given to him by a judge because his fellow academics thought he was not good enough for it?
ASYLUM tourism is on the rise. Our Tourism minister Giorgos Lillikas announced on Friday that some 30,000 Chinese will be visiting our plantation this year. He did not say how many will be returning to China. In fact he lost his temper when a hack asked if he was worried about the tourists seeking asylum, dismissing the suggestions as “pure racism”. He asked: “How can people assume that just because they are coming from China there is more of a chance that they will be asylum seekers? That is purely racist speculation.” But is it, considering that a couple of hundred Chinese tourists have already applied for asylum? Do British, German and Swedish tourists also seek political asylum?
