LIFE IS better now we have stopped agonising and losing sleep over whether our much-loved Ethnarch would decide to seek re-election. The uncertainty we had to live through these last few months, not knowing whether the saviour of the Republic would still be protecting us from foreign conspiracies after February, was sheer psychological hell that not even a double dose of extra-strength horse tranquilisers could relieve.
But after Tuesday’s announcement by Commissar Christofias, the anguish was gone and we once again began to view the future with the hope and optimism that only a truly strong, visionary leader could inspire in his people. Our Ethnarch is the guarantee that we will never deviate from the path to nowhere he put us on, as a safeguard against a premature settlement to the Cyprob.
He may have engaged in a bit of old-fashioned scheming to stitch up his commie partners, who were foolishly labouring under the illusion that the Ethnarch would, at least for appearance’s sake, enter mock-consultations with them before announcing his candidacy, but it was no more than the na?ve comrades deserved.
Their monumental stupidity in believing they could trust him, when in his four years as Ethnarch he had never given them the right or the grounds to do so, had to be exposed to the masses, so they could see what a bunch of mugs was leading them. I am beginning to believe that the Commissar enjoys the role of Tassos’ long-suffering victim and takes a perverse pleasure from being publicly humiliated.
He is acting a bit like a wife, who regularly finds out that her husband openly cheats, but always forgives him by deluding herself that each time was the last. And she would rather suffer the regular humiliation than consider divorce as this would be an admission that she had chosen the wrong man for a husband.
MARRIAGE counseling could be a way of bringing Demetris and Tassos together again and saving the relationship for the good of the country, but the latter refuses to go, for two reasons. First, he knows everything and would learn nothing from a lowly counselor; second, he believes that his partner would never file for divorce and is not prepared to make any concessions to him.
Four years in office have further boosted our Ethnarch’s colossal arrogance (many of us mistakenly thought it had reached the limits and had no room for growth), which does not allow him to make any deals with his partners in exchange for their electoral support. He made it clear the three-party alliance would not have an election programme this time and that in his next term he would decide everything on his own and give an account of his actions to nobody, which is perfectly understandable for someone who had repeatedly proved his infallibility and omniscience in his first term.
There is no need for our great ruler to promise things to the party chieftains or draft a policy programme in exchange for their electoral support. Now they simply have to get down on their knees and humbly offer their unconditional support for his candidacy, begging him to accept it. The personality-challenged leaders of EDEK and DIKO have already done this and Euroko is expected to follow suit soon.
We look forward to seeing Christofias, on his knees, in the not too distant future as well. His request to have a private ceremony, without camera crews and witnesses, so that he could salvage a little dignity, was turned down by the Ethnarch. In fact, I hear he has sent a message to Christofias telling him that if he does not take his oath of allegiance by the end of the month, he will reject AKEL’s offer to vote for him.
FEARS that a second term, without a pre-agreed policy programme, would elevate Tassos from Ethnarch to Emperor and make his behaviour more autocratic and arrogant are exaggerated. As his longest serving and most loyal disciple, Giorgos Colocassides pointed out last week, Tassos had “big political stature”, had proved himself as president and “could not be the passive enforcer of a programme.”
I never thought I could agree with Colocassides but on this point I do. It is an insult to want to impose a policy programmed to a man of the Ethnarch’s stature and Dalai Lamaesque wisdom. I also think it is an insult to expect him to have to win his second term through the election process, forcing him to take part in an election campaign and having to make promises to the masses in exchange for their vote when they should be grateful that he was willing to act as our saviour for another five years.
We support the scrapping of elections because we must eliminate the risk, however tiny, of Tassos not being our enlightened despot come March.
THERE is nothing enlightened in the behaviour of our bullying union bosses, who have managed to turn our plantation into the only capitalist country in the world that is under the dictatorship of the proletariat. These complex-ridden losers, who became union officials because they were not very good at their jobs, are essentially running the madhouse.
Teaching unions are ruining the education system, the state doctors union is mismanaging healthcare, Pasydy ensures we boast the laziest and best paid public service in the EU, while the banks are being autocratically run by the megalomaniac ETYK union boss Loizos Hadjicostis. As if this were not bad enough we now have the Electricity Authority (EAC) union telling the government where it should build the facility for processing liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The union has threatened to strike if the government went ahead with the plan to build an offshore unit which would cost less and be completed much sooner than a facility on land. Even if union boss Andreas Panorkos is an expert on LNG processing units, which I very much doubt, who put him in charge of the government’s energy policy?
If he wants to make a positive contribution to our society, why doesn’t he order his bosses to reduce electricity rates?
ALL UNION bosses are timid pussycats compared to the ruthless, megalomaniac Hadjicostis, who runs ETYK like a protection racket in the service of his personal ambitions. The crippling strike he called at the National Bank of Greece (NBG) because the bank’s bosses refused to be bullied and intimidated by him has now entered its third week and is causing big problems for staff.
Hadjicostis, like some tin-pot dictator, had vetoed the continued employment by the bank of staff it had brought from its Greece operations on the pretext that this would be a violation of the collective agreement. In short, EU rules about the free movement of labour did not apply to Cyprus because the ETYK boss has decided that they were superceded by restrictive collective agreements imposed on weak bank boards through blackmail and threats.
The bank’s board refused to give in to him and he ordered four employees at the IT department to walk out, which meant no transactions could be processed. The majority of the bank’s employees are opposed to the strike but Hadjicostis has his henchmen at the bank reporting any dissent back to him. At the last staff meeting, there was a punch-up between workers who wanted the strike to end and ETYK’s enforcers.
The bank’s board has now decided to take legal action against the union and while we all wish it success, it should not raise its hopes too high because in a dictatorship of the proletariat there are not many judges who will issue a judgment against a union.
WHILE the strike was on, the Bank of Cyprus board shocked everyone by announcing it had offered ETYK a seat on its board. How’s that for solidarity with the beleaguered NBG? The union was destroying another bank, over a trivial issue, and the B of C was rewarding it by giving it a seat on its board. Was the B of C endorsing the strike?
Even putting aside the strike, this was a lunatic decision that could only be attributed to abject cowardice by
the board’s members. In the last year, ETYK has been orchestrating a dirt campaign against the B of C board, accusing it of shady dealings, incompetence and corruption (without ever substantiating its accusations); it has also openly sided with the Marfin Popular Bank in its efforts to merge with the former.
And instead of showing a little pride and some guts, telling Hadjicostis to piss off, the B of C bosses offered his union a seat on its board! We have found out that Hadjicostis had blackmailed the bank’s board into handing over a seat to ETYK.
On June 6, the B of C will have its AGM, at which the Marfin Popular head honcho, Andreas Vgenopoulos, who holds 8.9 per cent of the B of C shares will try to persuade shareholders to support his proposal for a merger of the two banks. In order to defeat Vgen’s proposal, the B of C board initiated a campaign to collect a maximum number of proxy votes from shareholders who will not attend the June AGM.
Proxy forms were sent out to all shareholders who are unlikely to complete them and send them back. The responsibility of collecting them is given to the bank’s branches, the employees of which chase up the shareholders, most of whom are customers, for the proxy forms.
Realising how important this was for the bank, Hadjicostis issued the following, thinly-veiled blackmail to the board – if you do not give ETYK a seat on the board I will instruct the employees at the branches not to collect the proxy forms from the shareholders. In no time he was given a board seat.
OUR SYMPATHY goes to our establishment’s dear friend Michalis Ignatiou, who was recently accused – not for the first time – of reporting inaccurate information. Athens paper Avgi, informed us that Ig sent a report from the US claiming that representatives of a Greece-based minority group, known as Ouranio Toxo, had visited Washington for meetings with State Department officials and members of Congress.
The aim of the representatives was to report the governments of Athens and Sofia of “violating their human rights” wrote the authoritative Ig. He gave his story the obligatory conspiratorial twist by claiming that the Greek embassy in Washington had been kept in the dark about the visit of the Ouranio Toxo delegation.
The report, it transpired, contained as much truth as his revelations about the Greek Cypriot missing being used as human guinea pigs by the Turks. Not only was the Greek embassy in Washington informed about the visit, but the minority group had written in advance to arrange a meeting of its representative with embassy personnel.
I take this opportunity to ask my friend Mike Ig, what is happening with the publication of his eagerly awaited book? Has he got a date of when it will be ready yet?
LACK OF PERSPECTIVE and hyperbole are Cypriot diseases that affect both communities. Tree-hugger chief Giorgos Perdikis, for instance, felt obliged to announce that he would not be a candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections. “Even if God comes down to earth and tells me to stand in the elections for President of the Republic, I will not do it.” Why would God make such a request of the pathetic Perdikis, when we all know He wants Tassos to be president for another term? Ask Ig if you do not believe us.
MEHMET Ali Talat left Allah out of his speech in a Brussels meeting last week but he showed that when it comes to hyperbole and lack of perspective, he is a true Cypriot. He told MEPs: “The termination of our isolation is inevitable. It is a shame for humanity.”
Humanity has much more important things to be ashamed of than TC’s alleged isolation.
A NEW BOOK is being advertised in Simerini. Its author is another megalomaniac with the surname of Hadjicostis, Kostas, the supreme ruler of the Zeus group, who also sees himself as a saviour of Cyprus. The book is titled ‘STRENGTH – the only hope’. I have not read it but I suspect Zeus’ main theme is that if Cyprus becomes militarily, economically and diplomatically strong it would defeat Turkey. Amen.
