ONE IN TWO drivers had their picture taken for breaking traffic rules last weekend, as the police switched on the recently acquired traffic cameras at selected spots for a trial run. The good news, according to one newspaper, was that the traffic violations had gradually decreased from 50 per cent to 30 per cent by Tuesday and 10 per cent on Thursday.
This was not the impression you got at the traffic lights at the intersection of Grivas Dighenis and Demosthenis Severis Avenues in the early evening on Friday. The cameras were flashing so often, people will have thought they were at an open air disco with a seventies lights system. It was non-stop flash, flash, flash. The violations of the law must have hit 99 per cent on Friday evening or the cameras were on blink.
If they keep flashing like this, they will be causing rather than preventing accidents. Drunken, drugged or dopey drivers are bound to crash into something when faced with the flashing of disco lights. It may just be that Cypriots have decided to carry on driving like they normally do, as nobody is being booked or fined yet. You can’t deny the pleasure of being photographed while driving – it makes you feel like a celebrity being chased by the paparazzi.
On a more serious note, it has been reported that drivers were confused about when they will be fined. A meeting was held by the traffic police on Thursday to address this confusion. Questions raised included: what if a driver passes while the light is green, but by the time he fully crosses the stop line, the light turns red; will he be booked if he stops the car over the line?
What happens if someone is waiting to do a right turn at the lights and by the time he can go the lights turn red? Will he have to stop in the middle of the intersection and block the traffic or go and be fined for driving through a red light? Another problem discussed by the traffic cops related to motor-bikes – the way the registration number is placed on a motor-bike it cannot be recognised by the camera.
A metrios drinker asked another question which was not addressed by Thursday’s meeting. Why will the cops not be sending out the photograph to the driver caught committing a traffic violation, together with the ticket demanding payment of the fine? Only if you contest the fine will they send out the photo. But considering we will be paying a 50-quid fine, the least the cops could do is send us the snapshot of our transgression as a little memento. It will create a lot of good will.
WHEN IT comes to uncovering conspiracies against the Greek Cypriot people, the Cyprus Republic and the interests of Zeus, the Zeus media group is in a class of its own. Its fearless, investigative reporters nip in the bud half a dozen conspiracies a week. And it is not always the Anglo-American axis of evil which is behind them.
One of these reporters, by the pseudonym of Ritsos, revealed in Zeus’ organ Simerini last Tuesday that the introduction of the traffic cameras is part of a plot “to take the money” of “poor wage-earners”, who “forgot to wear their seat-belt or answered their mobile because they had an urgent call.” After all, when a poor wage earner drives through a red light, he does not cause accidents, wrote the rebellious Ritsos, asking why the cops were hell-bent on stealing from the poor.
“Tell me how many accidents, with how many dead, there have been as a result of violating a red light? Especially in the centre of town. Have you ever heard of anyone being killed on Makarios Avenue, outside the Lykavitos police station, because he drove through a red light? Please, do not take us for fools.”
Ritsos advertises his world-class stupidity, but asks the cops not to take him for a fool, because he is so clued up, he knows that car crashes do not occur when poor wage earners drive through red lights, speaking on their mobile phone in the centre of town.
And like all the morally superior, idealistic, conspiracy busters employed by Zeus, Ritsos also took a stand on principle. Being photographed while we drive was a violation of our personal life, he astutely observed and concluded, “in the end we are a police state”.
OUR APPEAL for the Cyprus Airways pilots proved a spectacular flop. Not a single person applied to adopt a pilot or contribute to the charity fund we had set up for them. It seems the public does not realise that after the pay cuts imposed on them they will not even be able to afford to pay the fine of driving through a red light.
We thought our readers were caring and compassionate, but we were wrong. After the publication of our ‘Adopt a Cyprus Airways pilot’ appeal, we received just two telephone calls, both from angry pilots who complained about our establishment’s insensitivity and callousness. “My wife does not have a single Prada bag,” one of them informed us.
The pilots did not win many friends yesterday, after deciding to strike without any warning in an effort to turn the screw on the airline’s board, which they consider incompetent, deceitful, short-sighted and peddling a hidden agenda.
Hearing about the board’s plans to renew its fleet over the next couple of years, I started thinking that maybe the much-maligned pilots have a point and that they are more clued up than we think. What company, with accumulated losses close to £100 million, in desperate need of £40 million worth of loans to continue operating, starts making plans to buy new planes? Especially considering that one of the reasons for its financial woes was the purchase and leasing of new planes, four or five years ago. Does this make any sense?
The plan to renew the fleet, according to reliable sources, was not mentioned in the proposed rescue plan submitted to the European Commission, which has to give its approval before the government guarantees the loans needed by the airline. The renewal of the fleet is not the kind of cost-cutting measure Commission technocrats would have expected to see in the rescue plan.
FLEET RENEWAL means kickback time for the parties, their hangers-on and the politicians in the government. Planes were purchased by Cyprus Airways during the Clerides presidency despite the strong objections of the opposition parties AKEL and DIKO, who were, quite rightly, complaining, at the time, that it was a terrible business decision, which would burden the company with huge debts.
Their real concern was that they would not get a piece of the kickback cake. So now they are in government, with the company losing millions and needing huge loans in order to service the loans it made to buy new planes, they consider it a good business decision to buy more new planes the airline cannot afford.
A more sensible solution would be for the government to calculate how much money would be made in kickbacks and commissions for the purchase of new planes, share the amount among those entitled to it, and spare the airline of having more debts that it cannot pay off. Either way, it would be the taxpayer who would finance the kickbacks.
“WE’LL always have Paris,” indeed. The celebrations about our Ethnarch’s historic triumph in Paris are continuing despite the government publicity hype and propaganda, suffering some minor setbacks in the past few days.
Carried away by the euphoria of the triumph, the state propaganda service, the CyBC, reported last weekend that Turkey’s foreign minister Abdullah Gul had rejected the “Paris agreement”, struck by our Ethnarch and Kofi Annan. Was any agreement actually signed in Paris or are we talking of a verbal understanding?
Gul’s alleged rejection brought out the government’s cheerleaders, in full force, to inform us that Turkey was cornered and had been exposed as intransigent. Commissar Christofias told CyBC radio: “With the rejection of the Paris Agreement, Turkey revealed its real occupation face and proved that what it was in
terested in was not the solution or the creation of the conditions of the solution, but the upgrading of the occupation regime.”
A couple of days later, it became apparent that Gul had rejected nothing; he had not spoken about the Paris agreement, let alone rejected it. A CyBC hack, perhaps on instruction from above, had invented the story. The Commissar’s response, when asked how he could have criticised Turkey about the rejection, which never happened, was that he had never claimed that Turkey had rejected the Paris agreement.
IN ORDER not to spoil the celebrations, the government also managed to suppress a clarifying statement, about what the technical committees would be discussing made on Thursday, March 2, by the UN Secretary-general’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
Dujarric explained that the technical committees would be dealing with “discussions which are aimed at improving the daily lives of the members of the two communities. No mention of the issues of substance – the settlers, the return of Famagusta, demilitarisation – that the Ethnarchic propaganda machinery was claiming would be discussed.
The statement was released by the Public Information Office on Tuesday evening, five days after it was made. The CyBC reported only half of it on Wednesday, saying that the “list of issues to be discussed was being worked out”, while omitting to mention what Dujarric had said would be discussed by the technical committees.
Our Ethnarch did not mince his words when informed by hacks about Dujarric’s comment. “His statement is wrong. I was there and I know what was said and it is what I have told you.” When we have to decide whom to believe – our Ethnarch or some clueless foreign spokesman – we always choose Tassos because he never lies.
ETHNARCH junior, Nicholas, who is a parliamentary candidate, came to his dad’s support on the issue in a television appearance on Friday. Junior, who is all airs and graces, informed that we could not possibly believe Dujarric. “We should not take into account what an employee of the UN says,” the jumped-up junior, who thinks he has the wisdom of the Dalai Llama, announced.
So when the charmless, unsmiling acting government spokesman, Christodoulos Pashiardis was rubbishing a scholarly study by the International Crisis Group – a European-based think tank which laid the blame for the Cyprus stalemate squarely on Tassos – we should not have taken him too seriously. Because we should not take into account what an employee of the palazzo says.
We should only take seriously what the Ethnarch and his son say, because they are nobody’s employees.
WHAT A lunatic asylum this plantation is. On Wednesday, we witnessed another plantation special production. Paphos’ biggest developer, Theodoros Aristodemou, big boss and owner of Aristo Developers, held a news conference to demand that a mass development project for Yermasoyia be stopped.
The Yermasoyia project, which envisages the development of 1,100 donums, is being undertaken by another big developer, Leptos Estates, which plans to create a small town. At the press conference, Aristodemou, who has made hundreds of millions of pounds from turning Paphos into concrete jungle of holiday villas, was seated under a banner which read, “No to rampant development”. Need we say more?
OUR ESTABLISHMENT would like to ask the Cyprus Football Federation (KOP) what is the point of its pathetic, annual International Tournament which brings to the plantation great powers of world football such as Kazakhstan and Belarus? It is almost as pathetic as the tournament for unrecognised pseudo-states played in the north.
This year’s tournament featured eight internationally recognised national sides and produced some fascinating ties, including Kazakhstan v Finland, watched by about four people, and Slovenia v Romania, which attracted 100 fans. Euro champions Greece were the main attraction, but even their clash against Belarus attracted just a thousands fans.
The question local fans were asking was why Greece’s coach Otto Rehagel vetoed a clash between the European champs and Cyprus during the tournament? Rumours have been circulating the German feared Greece might throw the match in order to help Cyprus accumulate ranking points and move higher in the FIFA rankings.
In the end, the spirit of fair-play triumphed and the joke of a tournament was not turned into a footballing Eurovision song contest whereby Greece would award the plantation ‘douze points’.
OUR ESTABLISHMENT has unearthed yet another Anglo-American conspiracy aimed at undermining the Cyprus Republic and its democratically-elected Ethnarch. Surfing the web I came across a web-blog, named ‘Stravara Mas’, which ridicules some of our top institutions, like Shistris Tavern, the CyBC, and George Iacovou . There is also a spoof autobiography of ‘Tee Pee da Man’, which we could not possibly reproduce here because of the libel laws. You check it out at http://stravara.blogspot.com.
