IF FOREIGN observers had been monitoring the elections for Archbishop, they would been declared the vote null and void a long time ago. Fairer elections have taken place in Saddam’s Iraq and Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Much as it pains me to do so, I have to agree with the money-bags bishop of Kykkos, Nikiforos, who has been complaining about the shenanigans perpetrated throughout the six-week procedure by the caretaker of the throne, Paphos Bishop, Chrysostomos.
You have to admire Chrysostomos’ chutzpah. He has done everything in his power – cheated, lied, deceived, schemed – to ensure that nobody could ever describe the elections for Archbishop as fair. Yet today, despite having received just five per cent of the public vote, he could become our new Archbishop, thanks to his willingness to resort to every dirty trick in the unholy book.
He might have proved beyond all reasonable doubt that he is not a holy man, but when it comes to scheming and tactical manoeuvring, he makes Machiavelli look like a naïve idealist. He has no qualms about lying, personally shovelling dirt on his opponents, changing the Church rules in accordance with his needs and making deals he refuses to stick to. Such an impressive record in deviousness and duplicity cannot go unrewarded.
Today is the big day for him. The electoral council made up of clergy and laymen will choose between crafty Chrys and the pious Bishop of Limassol Athanassios. The two men struck an electoral pact which excluded AKEL candidate Nikiforos from the final round of the voting at yesterday’s final voting at the Archbishopric.
Athanassios, with the backing of Chrys’ electors, won the contest of the lay voters and Chrys, with the backing of Athanassios’ electors, won the vote of the clergy. The unholy alliance which resulted in Nikiforos’ defeat, prompted his electors to walk out in protest. The final vote for Archbishop between the two finalists should have been held immediately after, but if it were, Athanassios would have won easily, so Chrysostomos arranged for it to be put back 24 hours, even though this was a clear violation of the Church Charter. It was the only way he would have a chance of winning. Before yesterday, he had assured us that an Archbishop would have been elected on Saturday, but he was proved a liar yet again.
Now he has 24 hours to persuade Nikiforos’ disaffected electors to come to the Archbishopric and vote for him rather than Athanassios, who has the guaranteed backing of a much bigger number of electors.
Having ruthlessly manoeuvred his way to the final showdown, it would be a great shame for Chrysostomos to lose today. He might be a complete rogue who cheated his way to the Archbishop’s throne but at least he never pretended to be anything else. In a perverse way, he was the most honest of the candidates.
THREE CHEERS for Chief of Police Charalambos Koulentis, who annoyed the feminists, women’s groups and right-on new men with his politically incorrect warning that the rising number of women cops was weakening the force.
The chief’s remarks, though well-argued and rational, provoked a general wave of hysteria from the neo-European custodians of sexual equality who did not even bother to think about what he said, restricting themselves to the predictable knee-jerk reactions and breast-beating.
All the guy had said was that the number of female cops was rising because women did better than men in the police entry exams and this would cause big problems for operations in the future because the majority of the lady officers wanted to do office jobs and work civil service hours.
So a day would come when the force would not have enough cops to do all the crap jobs – after-midnight patrols, controlling football hooligans, murder investigations, drug raids, defusing explosives, dealing with drunken, violent maniacs etc – because the precious princesses in the force refuse to get out on the streets.
One woman, according to police sources, who was transferred to an operational position three months ago has still not turned up at her new job, securing one sick leave after the other. She has also been using political connections to have her transfer cancelled so she could stay at her cosy desk job.
Another woman has informed her superiors that she can only work mornings because in the afternoon she has to look after the kids of her sister who is divorced. Some women have said they are afraid to work at night, but the top excuse for not working afternoons is that there is a mouse in the police station.
Presumably, in the mornings the mouse goes out to work but is back at the station every afternoon because it refuses to do shift work, terrorising the female officers.
THE QUESTION is why are all these female cops who refuse to obey orders not disciplined, or even better, sacked? What kind of discipline is there if lady cops can refuse to work nights or afternoons with impunity? Because this is Kyproulla and in Kyproulla nobody is sacked from the public service for disobeying orders – there must be serious breaches of discipline for dismissal procedures to be set in motion.
The police command does not even bother entertaining the idea of sacking women cops for insubordination because top cops know that they would not get anywhere. They would be bombarded with telephone calls from politicians – deputies, party leaders and ministers – koumbarous and relatives demanding that no action is taken.
And then of course there would be the women’s groups and our right-on ombudswoman accusing the force of sexual discrimination and persecution of female officers. Suffice it to say the police’s political boss, Minister of Justice and Public Order, Appomenos Appomenou was too scared to back the Chief on the matter, saying “knowledge is superior to physical strength”.
What a load of nonsense. Answering a few more questions correctly than male candidates in the police entry exam that people with lobotomies could pass is not exactly a mark of intelligence. And neither, I suspect, is being appointed justice minister.
LET’S FACE it, if you are a cop confronted with a dozen testosterone-driven football hooligans smashing up everything in sight, great intellectual powers are a handicap because the intelligent thing to do is to start running. Or try to picture a bunch of women cops stopping angry potato farmers or hairy truckers from entering the palazzo grounds in order to protest about some state injustice perpetrated against them.
Female cops cannot give suspects a good beating or sit in a seedy tavern eating and drinking when they are on patrol. Could they go into a cabaret to have a few free drinks and chat with the artistes, or play cards in one of our many illegal gambling joints? Feminists and my friend Haji Mike, who believes the Chief should have resigned because of his politically incorrect remarks, must accept that there are some jobs that most women cannot do as well as men. This is a fact even though we should not say it publicly.
I AM INFORMED that nut-case conspiracy theorist Gregory Copley, whom we had written about last week, issued a statement defending his unsubstantiated claims about Greek and Greek Cypriot missing being used as guinea pigs for the testing of chemical weapons by the Turkish army.
His statement, while referring to Politis and this paper, was not sent to us to publish, but instead was given to the unfunny satirical rag To Pontiki, that is the semi-official government mud slinger. Nobody at our establishment reads it, but I am informed his main line of argument is that by questioning him and his allegations, we were siding with the Turks and trying to get them out of the dock.
But were the Turks in the dock as a result of his story, which nobody apart from Phileleftheros and its Washington correspondent, our old friend Michalis Ignatiou, took seriously? Not even the head of th
e Relatives of the Missing Nicos Theodosiou took the story seriously, telling Astra Radio last week that there was no truth in it. This should not stop us reporting Copley’s revelations, he advised, as they helped our cause.
We would not have dreamt of undermining our subtle campaign had we known the story was published for propaganda reasons, but our establishment, quite stupidly, thought that the relatives of the missing did not have to be made to suffer yet again because Ignatiou likes to report the unsubstantiated claims of some nut-case in the US.
Next time Ignatiou writes a story that is meant to put Turkey in the dock he would do well to include a pre-agreed catch-phrase so we know that it is not to be taken seriously and we will not question it.
SINCE LAST Monday Phileleftheros has carried seven articles in order to prove that its dubious revelations about the missing being used as guinea pigs were reliable. Our friend Ignatiou wrote four of them, his main effort to prove that Copley is a reliable analyst who was highly regarded in Washington and was the darling of the Pentagon.
The paper’s editor wrote two enlightened opinion pieces – one defending Copley for always siding with Christians and another accusing the doubters of the story of being Turk-lovers – both implying we had a patriotic duty to believe the allegations. There was also a report with some comments by Copley.
If the paper’s report about the missing was so reliable, and the source so authoritative, Phil would not have published seven articles in five days, trying to convince us that the story was kosher – it would have let the facts do the talking. The problem was its story did not contain any and the paper is not big enough to admit it.
ONE LAST thing – I hope all this Copley stuff has not taken up too much of our friend Ignatiou’s precious time because it might further delay the completion of his book about the bribery of Greek Cypriots by the US during the referendum, the publication of which we are all eagerly awaiting.
SPEAKING of bribes during the referendum, the House Institutions Committee’s investigation into the matter is not going very well as nobody is prepared to give any evidence.
On Thursday, the Jay Edgar Hoover of Cyprus, Tasos Tzionis, the Ethnarch’s right-hand man appeared before the committee and said the president had important information about the briberies but it could not be made public, because it would be unconstitutional. Believe that and you’ll believe anything – if the government had any info it would have been published in Pontiki a long time ago.
Faced with the committee’s failure to find any concrete evidence chairman Rikky Mouse announced that he would be writing to UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan demanding that he handed over all the relevant documentation, so we could establish the exact amount of bucks spent in support of the ‘yes-vote’.
First we have Tzionis’ theatre – I know but I am not telling you – and then we have Rikky’s – the UN is not telling us the truth – to contend with. In short, despite the fuss the committee has not a shred of evidence. The McCarthyites’ only hope now is to wait, like us, for the publication of Ignatiou’s book on the subject.
But Rikky is not one to give up, informing hacks in a heroically defiant tone that was reminiscent of the late Spy Kyp that “any attempt being made inside and outside Cyprus for the discussion of the issue to stop, will not succeed”. We are with you all the way.
“CYPRUS is counting on Malta” was one of the messages uttered by AKEL Commissar Demetris Christofias in his speech at the official dinner given in honour of the visiting Speaker of the Maltese Parliament Anton Tabone. During his speech, our House president also referred to the “active involvement of Malta in the initiatives for the region of our sea, the Mare Nostrum”.
The Commissar, in an effort to push his claim as a world statesman, thought it wise to use some Latin, which is the mark of an educated and sophisticated person. Nobody, however had informed him that mare nostrum, which means our sea, was one of the slogans of Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who wanted to recreate the Roman Empire by taking control of the Mediterranean Sea. We thank Alecos Constantinides for pointing this out, because the Coffesshop’s Latin sucks big-time.
After this brief flirtation with Mussolini’s ideology, the Commissar returns to his communist roots this week. He will give a speech on Wednesday to mark the Great Socialist October Revolution and repeat his resolve to stop the “advance on neo-liberalism, the imperialist new order and the globalisation of the multi-nationals…”
With Malta on our side neo-liberalism will be kept out of mare nostrum.
OUR ETHNARCH heroically saw off another vile attempt by the evil foreigners to help Turkey get out of its obligations to the EU. This time it was the efforts of the Finnish presidency that he had to resist and resist he did, even though he was helped by the Turks who were also opposed to attending a meeting in Helsinki aimed at forging a compromise deal.
The Finns, according to diplomatic sources, were at the end of their tether after experiencing our Ethnarch’s negativity on a regular basis. According to our palazzo mole, one meeting between Tassos and Finland’s ambassador Risto Piipponen just stopped short of degenerating into an exchange of punches. The shouting though was unprecedented, with our heroic leader yelling in Piipponen’s face and the ambassador also losing his cool and yelling back.
Our mole at the palazzo said that physical violence was only narrowly averted. We should warn the Finns to go easy next time because the Ethnarch has a lethal left hook.
