MUCH AS we dislike advertising it when we are proved right, we always give in to our human weakness and do so anyway. In the last edition of the Shop, it was reported that the Communications and Works Minister Haris Thrasou had reacted with defiance to European Union snooping about the government’s BOT deal for the airports with the Hermes consortium.
He had repeatedly said that if the deal was finalised it would be signed before the European Commission expressed its satisfaction with the clarifications it had sought from the government regarding the tenders procedure followed. We had asked why “none of our patriotic politicians criticised this sacred cow of a company for reporting the Cyprus Republic to the European Commission as they had done when the DISY führer did something similar last year”.
The sacred cow we were referring to was the giant construction firm J&P, which had submitted an unsuccessful bid for the airports’ contract and subsequently reported the Republic to the Commission for violating the tenders’ procedure. But did we hear a single, mildly critical word about the company for this führer-scale betrayal of the plantation? No, because J&P has almost religious status on the plantation, revered more than Orthodox Church, which, come to think of it, is not difficult.
Interviewed on CyBC radio about the Commission’s intervention, Thrasou steered well clear of the sacred cow in apportioning blame for what had happened. It was all the fault of two newspapers, an English-language and a Greek-language one, he said, because they had written that the government was ignoring the Commission. And when his ministry’s representative went to Brussels to discuss the issue, he was presented with articles from the two papers, a wounded Thrasou said. He was referring to the Mail and Politis, but did not name them.
At least now we know who is to blame for our woes in Brussels. It was certainly not the venerated company which reported the government to the Commission, nor was it the minister who publicly announced that he would go ahead with the signing of the deal irrespective of whether the Commission found the government’s clarifications satisfactory or not – it was the treacherous newspapers, which had unpatriotically reported the fact that he was showing contempt for the EU.
THIS NEAT little theory was developed by the blundering Thrasou so he could cover up his own mistakes. How clever was it for the minister to appear on TV announcing the fact that he would ignore the Commission and go ahead with the signing of the deal once it was ready? Even if that was his intention, was there a reason to advertise it, bearing in mind that some people might take his defiance seriously?
And he did not leave the matter there. He came back a few days later to inform us that the government had sought the advice of international law firms and been told that it could go ahead with the signature of the contract. So why has tough-guy Thrasou, who doesn’t care about the Commission, not signed the deal yet? I suspect the deal has not been finalised yet, nor will it be before the Commission gives the go-ahead.
Someone may eventually have whispered to the defiant minister, that all types of punitive measures, including hefty fines, could have been imposed on the plantation by the EU if he failed to comply with Brussels’ instructions.
IN AN ATTEMPT to protect the Republic from the national harm caused to it by newspapers reporting what ministers say on TV, our establishment would like to propose certain techniques, which, if adopted by the government would prevent a repetition of the airport fiasco.
When a government minister says something that is intended exclusively to impress TV audiences, the Public Information Office must immediately send out a warning message to the newspapers, informing them not to take it seriously. It could have a seriousness grading system, so as to help papers evaluate ministerial pronouncements. For instance, if what they say is complete nonsense that would harm the country if it were reproduced in print, a red alert message should be sent to the papers and they would refrain from publishing it. For some ministers (Doros) the red alert message would be sent every morning, before they had even opened their mouth.
This is the only way to help newspapers avoid exposing our country abroad. If this practice were used in Thrasou’s case, officials in Brussels would never have found out that he was snubbing the Commission. This would have posed another problem – who would Thrasou have blamed for Brussels’ intervention in our affairs, considering that J&P is untouchable? I think the DISY führer would have been a good choice, as he had reported us once already.
THE BLAME-game we are so good at was given academic gravitas in the recently-published book by Dr Claire Palley, the ageing constitutional expert, who has been advising our presidents on how to solve the constitutional aspects of the Cyrob since 1980. But nobody has ever blamed her learned advice for never leading to some kind of breakthrough, which makes her the human equivalent of J&P.
Her book, An International Relations Debacle, is a classic of the blame-game genre, according to customers who had the courage to read it. It blames the failure to reach a settlement on the UN Secretary-general, his Special Advisor Alvaro de Soto and the latter’s team. And of course, the US and Britain who were telling Kofi Annan and the de Soto team how to conduct the negotiations. As for her employer, Tassos, he emerges as the only infallible character in the book; according to Palley he had never once in his life set a foot wrong.
Admittedly, you cannot bite the hand that feeds you, but how much more convincing her arguments would have been if she had presented her boss as a human being, capable of making the odd error of judgment. I will not go on because I do not have the intellectual powers or the appetite to carry out the review that this scholarly tome merits.
I will only mention that I really liked the bitchy captions under the many photographs published in the book and the gossipy style of Dr Palley’s footnotes, which may account for more words than the actual text. For instance, we are informed that the de Soto team referred to our Ethnarch as ‘Papadoc’ and ‘Shrek’, which is probably as funny as her referring to Cyprus Goldenmouth and his sidekick Marios Karoyian in one of the captions, as “press educators”.
THE STATE information services, CyBC and Tass news agency have both carried interviews with the Ethnarch’s unofficial hagiographer in order to help promote the book. There was a one-hour TV interview with Costas Yennaris on Monday night, in which Palley turned politician. But nobody asked her the six million dollar question: had she written the letter sent to the UN Secretary-general by Tassos last year in which he lambasted the partiality of de Soto, the rigged negotiating process and the UN’s obsession with satisfying Turkey? Her book, according to our customer who read it, is a detailed elaboration of what was said in the letter. Which brings us to another question – were our Ethnarch’s negotiating tactics last year devised by Palley? We demand an answer.
SPEAKING of negotiating tactics, you have to take your fez off to our Ethnarch, if the rumours doing the rounds of the cocktail party circuit have any truth in them. Apparently, one of the constructive proposals he had made to Kieran Prendergastly when he was visiting the plantation was for the island to return to the constitution of the 1960 Zurich agreement for a transitional period of three years. This would give us the time to improve the climate between the communities and negotiate a mutually acceptable settlement, he reportedly argued. We do not know if Dr Palley had come up with this ingenious idea, but if he said this to the ghastly giant, then all we can say
is, ‘respect’. Such craziness deserves our applause. I assume that if, after three years, of the Zurich agreement, we failed to reach an agreement, Turkey would be entitled to re-invade the island and re-occupy the territory it is currently in control of.
WHO WOULD ever have believed that the adjective ‘sexual’ would have been included in a UN Security Council resolution about Cyprus? Has the Security Council decided to make bland resolutions that no sane person would read, more interesting by inclusion of sex. Was it advocating ‘sexual’ encounters between members of the two communities as a confidence-building measure or had it decided that the Cyprob was a sexual problem? Nothing of the sort. Paragraph 5 says that the Security Council “welcomes the efforts being undertaken by UNFICYP to implement the UN Secretary-General’s zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse…”
THE ZEUS media group’s witch-hunt of the Politis proprietor Yiannis Papadopoulos continues with unyielding ferocity. On Thursday, he was in Nicosia court, where he was charged for the minor offence dug up by the Central Bank governor, and the Sigma TV cameras were waiting outside the court grounds so they could film him for the evening news show.
The film crew was kept informed about his movements by a hack who was in court to cover this earth-shattering story. This non-story was big news for Sigma TV and Simerini the following day. Why such a fuss about such a trivial matter? Is it because Politis is now selling more copies than Simerini on Sundays, as well as the rest of the week? Or is the Zeus group taking pre-emptive action – destroying the Politis man’s reputation in advance for fear that the court might not find him guilty?
The crusading Zeus group was not so keen to cover the case of Yiannos Andronikou, boss of the Suphire, the company being investigated for the disappearance of £9 million from the EAC pension fund, which it was managing. Andronikou is a patriotic shareholder of the group and cannot be treated in the same way as a business competitor with suspect political views.
A WORD of sympathy for those charming Eliades brothers, whose Wednesday night TV show did not go according to plan. Their guest was the maverick Turkish Cypriot journalist Sener Levent who is a bit of an unguided missile. The brothers Grimm have been around and should have known this, yet they still took the risk. Towards the end of the show, they decided to ask Levent about the notorious Akritas organisation, hoping that he would repeat the Cyprus government line on the group.
He let them down badly as he immediately linked the Ethnarch to it and accused the organisation of targeting Turkish Cypriots. Considering that the only purpose of their show is to advertise the greatness of the Ethnarch and pillory anyone who dares criticise him, Wednesday night was a disaster. Kokos, who is the Ethnarch’s symbetheros, changed colour when Levent started saying things that were unflattering to the leader and cut him short, telling him that there was not enough time to discuss the issue properly. However, Kokos promised Levent to have a whole show devoted to the discussion of the Akritas organisation in the future. When in the future he did not say, but I am sure it will be very soon. We shall keep customers posted.
THIS brings us to the man appointed by the Council of Ministers to investigate the disappearance of the £9 million from the EAC pension fund. His name is Kikis Ergatoudes and he is the brother-in-law of none other than Kokos Eliades – he is married to Kokos’ sister – who is the symbetheros of the Ethnarch. Why do we mention this? To fill space as we are running out of time and things to say.
A CUSTOMER called up with a great line after hearing that Bishop Nikiforos and Dr Faustus had gone to Cuba to unveil a statue of Archbishop Makarios. Considering that during the Cold War, Cyprus, because of its close ties with the Soviet Union, used to be called by the Yanks, “the Cuba of the Mediterranean”, should we now be calling Cuba, which has its own Makarios statue, the “Cyprus of the Caribbean”?
