HAVING failed spectacularly to use the EU to bring the barbaric Turks to their knees and their promises of a European solution and having also been exposed as an unfunny joke, the radio-show hawks have wiped the egg from their faces and immediately found new patriotic themes for their defiant rhetoric – the National Guard and the Turkish settlers.
You have to admire their never-say-die spirit and sheer determination. No matter how many times they get things wrong and are shown up as sad, clueless fools, they will find some other noble cause to recycle and re-sell to the morning radio audiences and shamelessly advertise their undisputed intelligence, courage and patriotism. When it comes to recycling rhetorical rubbish, these guys are true environmentalists, as committed to recycling as George Perdikis.
With the veto rhetoric earmarked for the recycling plant, we are now being served the bolstering of the National Guard as the means of punishing Attila’s hordes. The great thing is that we do not have to spend hundreds of millions of bananas on buying missiles and tanks. All we need to do to is to start holding the big, annual military exercises – Nikiforos and Toxotis – once again. The exercises had been cancelled the last three years because of the peace efforts and the Satanic UN plan to partition the plantation.
Now the radio-show liberators are calling for the re-instatement of the exercises, which were held this month, but they are also demanding that Greece’s air force and navy should take part as had happened in the glorious period of the unified defence myth, when we had tilted the military balance of the region in our favour.
Helped by the leading media hawk, radio-show presenter Lazaros, who has been campaigning for the holding of the exercises every morning, the freedom-fighters got the house defence committee to call for the return of Nikiforos and Toxotis. All votes aside, the government – who has shunned playing the military muscle-flexing game like the old sea-wolf liked to do – had said nothing by Friday evening.
THE RADIO demagogues and liberators also unearthed a vile foreign conspiracy behind the government’s failure to hold the exercises this year. The Turk-loving Yanks were putting pressure on our government, via the Greek government, to forget about the exercises, because they would allegedly destroy the good climate in Cyprus.
Just trust the Yanks to step in to protect the occupiers from our exercises. How just is this world when the world’s only superpower tried to prevent our troops from carrying out exercises, in case we scare the poor Turks? But why has our government put up with this hostile action by the superpower, after it has given it the two-finger salute so many times.
It could be that things are not exactly as the hawks are claiming – they never are. Informed sources say it is Greece’s government which has vetoed the military exercises because it does not want to jeopardise its improving relations with Turkey. Greece’s defence minister, Spilios Spiliotopoulos, who was on the plantation for yesterday’s military parade, avoided mention of the word ‘Nikiforos’ in his public comments.
This is perfectly in keeping with the Greek government’s line on Cyprus, which was evident at the EU, where Athens eventually sided with the other countries on the counter-declaration. It would support our government’s choices, no matter how stupid, as long this would not put at risk Greek-Turkish relations.
The Ethnarch could bow to the hawks’ pressure and hold the military exercises, but what impression would be given if Greek forces were not participating? That militarily we are on our own? Under such circumstances, even the most hawkish, radio-show, freedom fighter would have difficulty claiming we were capable of kicking Turkish arse.
NOW IF WE managed to raise the discipline and morale of our troops it would be a different story. Both were at a worryingly low level, admitted certain hawks, citing the crash of the PC-9 at Kolossi, the near-mutiny at a Paphos camp and the explosion of mortar shell during training as proof.
Of course, as one of the leading hawks, DIKO’s Zacharias Koulias, pointed out, the lack of discipline was a consequence of the A-plan which, if accepted, would have dissolved the National Guard. This had caused officers to lose interest, he explained, with the result that morale and discipline had suffered. Only later did he realise that this was not the most patriotic admission (not to mention that he was giving away valuable information to the enemy) and refrained from uttering it again.
But how do we establish the discipline and morale needed? Do we attack a Turkish guardpost and create a little tension? Will the plethora of senior officers then be motivated to do the job they are being paying two to three grand every month to do?
MORALE would certainly be sky-high if the army command took a more liberal approach to sex in the barracks. Last week it imposed harsh punishment on a group of conscripts and their officer because they had taken a young mother of three into their barracks on the Nicosia Green Line and had a jolly good time together.
The army command refused to accept that the conscripts had performed a little community service and punished them, despite the fact that the young woman never actually filed a complaint. The community-spirited soldiers, received jail terms and ‘unfavourable transfers’, which meant they were sent to some hell-hole of a guard-post in the middle of nowhere, where only sheep and goats roam, and the prospect of sexual encounters is non-existent. Their morale has now fallen to the low level prevailing in the rest of the army.
WHILE the radio-show hawks were protesting about Nikiforos, embarrassing the government they support, hawk mouthpiece Simerini was waging an unholy war against the interior minister Andreas Christou, an unrepentant dove, for approving citizenship applications by kids with one Turkish parent.
The paper blamed Christou – instead of the government – as if he had his own agenda and was secretly giving citizenship to all the settlers’ kids. The paper also recruited its favourite legal minds to expose Christou’s treachery.
First legal eagle Andreas Angelides, who is capable of reducing everything, including going to the toilet, to a legal matter. He insisted that any Turkish citizen found on the plantation could be a settler. It was “nonsense” to say that because a Turk married a Turkish Cypriot abroad and then arrived on the plantation he was not a settler.
Loucis Loucaides, a judge at the Council of Europe, put it more bluntly – a Turkish subject who arrived in the occupied area was, on the evidence, a settler. Loucaides went further: “The children of settlers are the product of the crime (of settlement) and cannot be legalised.”
But what if one of the parents was a Turkish Cypriot? Would the kids still be the product of a crime? According to Loucaides’s legal logic, it is a crime for a Cypriot citizen to marry a Turk because, on the evidence, he is a settler and therefore a criminal.
But is there any law at the Council of Europe which prohibits marriage to a criminal and penalises any kids the marriage produces? Judge Loucaides should tell us if there is any European law that persecutes children as the ‘product of a crime’?
If all this was uttered by some uneducated hawk it would be understandable, but from two experienced law professionals, who are constantly pontificating about respect for human rights, it is more difficult to accept.
A bit strange for such a committed human rights campaigner to be openly urging the state to discriminate against kids who have a Turkish parent, and labelling them ‘a product of crime’.
NOBODY had the guts to publicly support Christou, for refusing to discrimi
nate against the kids of Cypriot citizens who had married Turks. Even his party leader, Commissar Christofias, distanced himself from the minister. He would never accept AKEL being lumbered with the blame for the granting of citizenship to settlers’ kids, because Christou came from the party.
The government did not exactly back Christou, either. Spokesman Goldenmouth said that each case was examined separately and there was no general policy as regard the criteria for granting citizenship. However the final decision belonged to the interior minister, he said, implying that his government had nothing to do with it.
THE GOOD people of Polis Chrysochous could give our government a few lessons on how to practice racial discrimination effectively. A week last Friday, parents with kids at the Polis primary school decided to close down the school because they had heard that one of the gypsies living out in the open in the Makounta area, had been diagnosed with hepatitis last August. As some gypsy kids from Makounta went to the Polis school, parents were afraid their kids would catch the disease.
Government officials headed down to the area to assure the parents that the one person with hepatitis had been cured and there was no danger for their kid. Parents insisted that all the gypsy kids undergo hepatitis tests and only if they were clear should they be allowed back to school. They also threatened to close the school down on Monday if the gypsies turned up.
They kids did turn up, but they were not allowed into the school. Instead all gypsy kids were taken on an excursion and returned to the school when lessons were over. The same happened on Tuesday. On Wednesday they were allowed back into school, as the hepatitis test results were all clear.
COMMISSAR Christofias has been behaving very peculiarly in recent months. Earlier in the week he had told the AKEL-controlled radio station, Astra, that he would like to speak with any interruption and questions. His monologue lasted about 15 minutes, prompting one listener to call the station and ask what was going on. The person who answered the phone showed a healthy degree of disrespect for the commissar, telling the caller, “do you think there is only one Fidel Castro in the world?”
During this monologue, he took great exception to a throwaway comment made in Politis about “moving his ample bum in his chair”. Writing about his “ample bum” was an outrage and indicative of how the paper was out to get him
“How dare they write about my ample bum?” Castro Mark II complained. “Is my ample bum really an issue that needs to be written about?”
We didn’t expect the Commissar to be so hurt about the reference to the size of his bum. OK, it is quite a ‘ample’ but as his meteoric political rise has proved, neither the electorate nor the state discriminates against men with big bums, as long as they are not the product of a crime, of course.
A YEAR after urging all the recipients of UNOPS funding to hang themselves in Eleftheria Square, DIKO deputy, Nik the Pitts resumed his campaign to name and shame the agents of foreign embassies, working against their country. His claims were carried by the authoritative Ant1 TV news, which described them as “shocking revelations”.
Pitts revealed that about a year ago, immediately after a National Council meeting, a party leader went to the Hilton Hotel where he met with the ambassador of a foreign country. He was implying that the party leader (a couple of days later on Mega TV he announced that he was referring to DISY Führer, Agent Nik) went there to tell the ambassador everything that had been discussed at the National Council.
The Antenna reporter, told us that the party leader gave the ambassador a “full briefing” about what had been discussed at the National. What he knew, he did not say, but he was certain that the Führer was betraying his country.
And where? At one of the busiest meeting places in Nicosia – the Hilton Hotel lobby – so he could be seen by Pitts and other agent-hunters.
THE PITTS got another thing wrong this week, in announcing on his favourite TV station that the Ethnarch would be seeking a second term. The palazzo issued a strong denial, through Goldenmouth who said: “He (the president) has not thought about this, has taken no such decision, has not even discussed the matter with himself… the matter was never discussed at the DIKO executive meeting and he has authorised nobody to talk on his behalf about the matter.”
In short, Pitts was not telling the truth. Unless the Ethnarch was being economical with the truth – maybe he had discussed the matter with himself and had been overheard by Pitts, who, some say, has bionic ears.
OUR BROTHERS the Turks have taken up archaeological excavations, but their digging could be described as a bit unconventional. Visitors to the Apostolos Varnavas monastery in the Famagusta district, were dumbfounded when they saw how the Turks were carrying out excavations of an area close by. One workman was digging the hole with a pick-axe and another was removing the dug-up earth with a huge shovel. Not for them the scalpel and brush, normally used at archaeological digs. How many ancient pots and relics were shattered or ended up under a pile of earth nobody knows.
