THE ELECTION campaign turned serious this week, with the big parties at last concentrating on an issue of genuine importance – football.
It was not planned by the communications gurus, but slipped into public debate after a barrage of text messages by Omonia fans (all of whom are Akelites), claiming that the last football matches of the season had been fixed by DISY officials to prevent Omonia from winning the league championship.
For those not aware of the politics of Cyprus football, clubs are either left-wing or right-wing. There are significantly more of the latter but these clubs are not right-wing because they field only right wingers (it would be a bit stupid having a right winger as a goalie) nor because they support Milton Friedman’s economic ideas. Clubs like Apoel, Anorthosis, Olympiakos and Apollonas are considered right-wing because they have traditionally been run by Greek nationalists.
Omonia, by far the best-supported club in the country, is left-wing because it is controlled and run by AKEL through the appointment of party apparatchiks to the board. All Akelites, as soon as they can walk, support Omonia, Christofias, Lenin and Marx in that order. Even though the club’s colours are green and white, fans always carry red banners to matches in contrast with the supporters of the right wing clubs who take Greek flags.
Anyway, the text messages that sparked the football debate alleged that DISY had arranged for matches to be fixed among the right-wing clubs so that one of these could win the league title and help the party’s election showing. Three clubs were in with a chance – Apoel, Apollonas and Omonia. Apollonas had to beat Anorthosis last night to become champs and the Akelites were claiming that the latter would throw the match to help Limassol’s nationalist club, which is supported by no lesser figure than the DISY Fuhrer, to win the title.
This prompted DISY to issue a scathing denial lambasting “the actions of certain circles which, guided by petty party interests, have tried by sending text messages and circulating devious rumours to involve the party and its officials in the determining of the decisive results of matches played in the Cyprus first division championship”.
I am sure that the statement is correct and DISY never tried to fix any matches, but I have to question the wisdom of boasting about it in public. Surely DISY would attract more right-wing votes on May 21 if the electorate were led to believe that the party has the power to prevent the much-hated commie club from winning the league title.
IT WAS NOT a good week for the comrades, who were hoping a title for Omonia would give them a few extra votes and rally party supporters. Alas, on Wednesday, Omonia were knocked out of the Cyprus Cup semi-final by Apoel.
Omonia blamed the allegedly biased referee (a rabid, right-wing nationalist on the CIA payroll, and close friend of the DISY fuhrer, according to text messages we have received) for their 3-1 defeat. Needless to say, the commie club lost because they were crap on the day but this is never accepted as a possible reason for defeat by club supporters on our plantation. Our team never loses because they played badly.
A group of the more intelligent Omonia fans, took a chapter out of Commissar Christofias’ book, blaming our bad demon, Britain, for Wednesday’s resounding defeat of communism. They found an official British target at which to direct their anger and frustration – the hapless High Commissioner Peter Millet who was at the match, seated next to comrade Katsourides.
The fans threw plastic cups full of water at the hapless Millet, while chanting ‘fascist’ at him. He took the abuse with British good humour and stoicism. Afterwards, he very diplomatically said that he did not feel he was the target of the abuse. He was sure the targets were the Apoel supporters who were sitting close to him.
AS WE ARE on the subject of football and politics, we have to bid a fond farewell to the great Silvio Berlusconi, a virulent anti-communist and football man, who finally accepted defeat in last month’s elections and resigned as Italy’s prime minister this week.
Silvio was a rock ‘n’ roll politician whose political incorrectness, crudeness and irreverence will be sorely missed. There are hundreds of anecdotes about the Forza Italia leader but one of my favourites relates to his mischief-making at an EU summit that he was chairing. The great man, reportedly, found these summits intensely boring.
At a Brussels summit at the end of Italy’s presidency of the EU in December 2003, Silvio did not feel like discussing Union business and decided introduce a different agenda. He said: “Let’s talk about football and women.” Turning to Germany’s four-times married Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder Silvio said: “Gerhard, why don’t you start?”
BERLUSCONI made the front-page of Machi newspaper on Wednesday but not because he had resigned the previous day. The rag’s banner headline read, “Christofias the ‘Berlusconi’” likening the Commissar to the great man as a result of the commie party’s plans to start its own TV empire.
According to the report, AKEL has secured the funds from wealthy sympathisers for a terrestrial station which would be called Plus TV instead of Astra TV as had been originally planned. It was expected to start broadcasting later this month, Machi said. In addition to this there will be another two TV channels that would be on the MiVision platform – Activ TV and Omonia TV.
The establishment of Omonia TV is a smart move as it is guaranteed to attract the tens of thousands of the club’s fans, ensuring their continuing, blind loyalty to AKEL which could slip in a little commie propaganda in shows about players’ injuries and forthcoming matches. The comrades will no longer need to resort to text messages to report DISY’s alleged match-fixing exploits but could do it through Omonia TV.
And if fans pay a monthly subscription fee for the channel, the commies could even make a handsome profit, even though it will not be enough to finance a Berlusconi life-style for Christofias, as Machi implied.
THE HEADLINE was inaccurate in several ways. First of all, as the Pancyprian Association of Berlusconi Supporters pointed out in a text message sent to all its members, the Commissar could not in his wildest dreams be compared to Silvio – not even if he used the same hair-gel – because he is completely bereft of style.
Second, it is not the Commissar who will have control of the AKEL media empire but his second lieutenant Nik Katsourides, who controls the party’s newspaper and has been doing all the hiring for the stations. It is said that Nik, whose official party responsibilities include monitoring dissident behaviour among comrade ranks, has been recruiting hard-liners, who will be spreading the Ethnarch’s word.
More importantly though, Kats is keener on the Berlusconi lifestyle than the Commissar, and, like the Italian, adores chatting about football and women, especially in the lobbies of luxury hotels.
WHEN IT comes to making a big fuss about nothing and creating unjustified expectations, this government is in a class of its own. Exclusive credit for this should go to spokesman and commerce minister Giorgos Lillikas who is by profession an advertising man and is behind all the government’s generation of hype.
This is the man who had once said that he was trying to bring formula one racing to the plantation. It came to nothing. More recently he said he would set up big studios in the plantation in order to attract film-makers, like Malta had done. His other grand design was the establishment of a technological park that would attract the world’s leading scientists to our plantation and turn it into a pioneer in advanced technology.
This week we were subjected to the Lillikas-generate
d hype about the extracting of natural gas from the sea south of Cyprus in co-operation with Egypt. An agreement was signed during the Ethnarch’s official visit to the land of the Pharaohs regarding exploration but it is not as if we will start selling natural gas to the world in the next couple of years. In fact it is not yet clear if extracting natural gas would be economically viable.
For now the only natural gas we can sell, is that produced by Lillikas, whose daily output is big enough to justify commercial exploitation. Soon he will announce a deal with a multinational which would undertake the marketing.
ANOTHER of Lillikas’ grand schemes was to bring Harvard University to Cyprus. At least this was how he had presented the project – Harvard would open a school in Cyprus dealing with the environment and public health. The taxpayer is paying millions of pounds for this project and so far the only person to benefit is Lillikas’ cousin, Professor Phillip Democritou, who was made director of the Institute.
The agreement of the co-operation has been shrouded in secrecy, with the government refusing to release any details about how it would work. It is gradually becoming apparent that we paid far too much money for what we got. The institute is not a Harvard subsidiary as was originally implied by Lillikas, nor could it be described as the Harvard institute as Tass news agency reports.
The title of the institute is “Cyprus International Institute for the Environment and Public Health in Association with Harvard School of Public Health”. We have paid millions so that the institute could have an “association” with Harvard. How we will benefit from this association we have still to be told by the government hype generator.
THE INSTITUTE organised an open lecture on Wednesday, which was given by Harvard University’s David Ropeik. The subject was ‘The role of the media in effectively communicating public health risks’.
The lecturer argued that it was “vital that journalists report accurately about issues like smoking, obesity and food safety among others” because the “news media are the public’s only source of information on health matters”.
He maintained that journalists, “who want their stories to enjoy widespread attention” often gave “more emphasis to the frightening and threatening aspects of health stories and less emphasis on facts that put those stories in perspective”.
I hope Lillikas had the time to attend the lecture because he could have learned a thing or two about giving more emphasis to facts.
WHY ON earth did our Ethnarch bring up the third Annan plan, also known as Annan 3, in an interview he gave to an Athens newspaper? He implied that he had no problem with Annan 3 because it was the result of negotiation between the old sea wolf and the Denktator, in contrast to versions 4 and 5, which resulted from arbitration. This confirmed the suspicion that as far as the Cyprob is concerned we will always want what we cannot have. After going on about the A-plan in the interview, the Ethnarch told us that “nobody is any longer interested in the Annan plan, apart from the opposition in Cyprus”.
So why are all the politicians that support him talking about nothing else in the election campaign apart from the Annan plan?
MORE THAN 20,000 invitations have been sent out by Ethnarch junior for his big pre-election bash that will be held in one of those massive State Fair exhibition halls on Friday. Invitees apparently include all the EOKA and anti-coup heroes who received medals and certificates at special ceremonies held by the Ethnarch. The mailing lists of the supposed heroes, were used so that maximum numbers could be invited to junior’s bash.
SPEAKING of junior, we would like to remind DIKO voters among our readers, to make sure that on election day, they vote for number 16, ‘Nicholas Papadopoulos, Tassou’ and not any other Nicholas Papadopoulos who might be on the DIKO ballot paper.
