LUNACY has been scaling unprecedented heights in the People’s Republic lately and I am not just talking about the lawless city-state of Paphos, which will hopefully be granted independence when we finally agree with our Turkish Cypriot brothers how many states the virgin birth would produce.
As with everything else on the sunshine isle, there is no measure in our madness, which is always taken to its logical (or should I say illogical) extreme as if this is a national duty and we would be letting our Republic down if we exercised some restraint or showed a hint of self doubt. Then again, loonies do not do self-doubt, as any psychiatrist would tell you.
In which other country would sleaze merchants like the cabaret owners be organised into a Pancyprian association and give us all public lessons about democratic rights and ethical political behaviour? True, our politicians might not be paragons of virtue, but even they do not deserve to be lectured about respecting human rights by owners of vice dens at which pimping is the main activity.
The cabaret owners issued a statement in the last week protesting against the unfair treatment they were receiving by politicians, NGOs and the media. The House Equal Opportunities Committee, which had been discussing the flesh trade and sexual exploitation of women, made all types of allegations against cabarets, but had not invited the owners to defend themselves.
All the accusations were false, the statement insisted, adding: “In democratic states, the right of reply is given, something that does not happen in Cyprus.” The cabaret owners may have strong grounds to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights. And if the case is not deemed admissible, they could report this undemocratic behaviour to the European Institute of Pimps and White Flesh Traders.
SANCTUARIES for battered and abused women were “hatcheries for false witnesses”, the statement announced before demanding that Ombudsperson Eliana Nicolaou apologised and resigned. Her crime was that she carried out an investigation, on her own initiative, about the treatment of women in cabarets, which was full of falsehoods.
The wronged sleaze merchants also attacked deputies, NGOs and the unethical Eliana for making defamatory allegations against them that ruined their reputation. Can things get madder than cabaret owners worrying about their reputation? Had nobody told them that they would have to sacrifice their claims to social respectability and moral rectitude once they chose to enter the cabaret industry?
What is needed is the establishment of a cabaret-owners support group that would offer help and guidance to these wronged individuals as they try and deal with the social prejudice and discrimination they face in their struggle to scrape a dishonest living.
CABARET-OWNERS had a point in complaining about not being invited to air their views at the legislature. The previous week, the House Environment Committee invited representatives of the Friends of Lime-sticks Association, a group that breaks the law, and is proud of it, to give its views on a proposed amendment to the bird-trapping law.
Deputies, whose lunacy cannot be disputed, had invited supporters of law-breaking to the legislature to give their opinion about amendments to the law they were defiantly breaking. It gets better. Seven Famagusta district deputies had proposed the amendment, that would reduce the punishment of people caught trapping birds with nets or lime-sticks.
Instead of charging the bird-trappers and taking them to court, where they would pay a big fine, the seven sensible deputies suggested that the law-breakers were made to pay a small on-the-spot fine. This would spare the poor old law-breakers the inconvenience of appearing in court, paying lawyers’ fees and losing valuable bird-trapping days.
According to Birdlife Cyprus, a million birds had been trapped in the past year, which meant the sentences under the existing law, despite the inconvenience of appearing in court, were not an adequate deterrent. The Famagusta Seven wanted to make the deterrent even weaker, because the bird-trappers were not meeting their annual target of 1.5 million birds.
THE MADNESS does not end there. The spokesman of the Friends of the Bird-trappers Association told lawmakers that his friends would continue to use lime-sticks “even if you put us in jail.” So he was not just a friend of the lime-sticks, but also a user, proudly announcing that he would carry on breaking the law.
The spokesman of the law-breakers fully supported the proposal of the magnificently intelligent seven for on the spot fines. At the next meeting of the House Legal Affairs Committee they could invite the spokesman of the Pancyprian Association of Friends of Child Abusers to express an objective opinion about the sentences being imposed on paedophiles.
ANOTHER form of lunacy – the type that assumes that the entire population of Kyproulla has undergone a lobotomy – was showcased by our ruling communist party AKEL in association with comrade presidente Christofias.
Earlier in the week, the central committee of the party met in the presence of the AKEL leader and presidente to decide what position to take regarding the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. When it was time for the comrades to vote, the presidente who, a few days earlier had assured the European Council that Kyproulla would ratify the treaty, left the meeting and the Central Committee unanimously decided to vote against it at the legislature next Thursday.
Never before in the history of communist totalitarianism had an entire Central Committee gone in the completely opposite direction of its leader. Was this a coup or a revolution? No it was just a bit of poor-taste political theatre of the ‘vote a soft no so we can cement the yes’ type, at which our presidente thinks he is very good.
The message was that AKEL and its leader were against the Treaty, but Christofias would honour his election promise to grudgingly support it. In other words, he is against it but as presidente he supports it.
CONGRATULATIONS to tree-hugger Giorgos Perdikis for calling the commie bluff on Thursday and raising the issue of holding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty at the morning meeting of the party leaders in the House. He wanted to submit a proposal for a referendum on the Treaty for discussion at the plenum.
This outraged all the party leaders, as the holding of a referendum would infuriate our EU partners. Kyproulla had made a commitment to ratify the treaty through a parliamentary vote like the rest of the member states with the exception of Ireland. A lot of pressure was put on Perdikis not to persist with his proposal. According to a press report, the bird-lover was also informed of the presidente’s wish for a referendum to be avoided.
The AKEL hypocrisy was laid bare by the publicity-seeking turtle-fondler. If the commies were seriously opposed to the Lisbon Treaty they would have supported the holding of a referendum as it was the only way to defeat the appalling treaty that was aimed at oppressing EU workers. And in their campaign for a no-vote, they could explain to us why this Treaty is such a bad thing.
THE SELF-RIGHTEOUS turtle-fondler, apart from wanting to re-live the referendum era, is determined to make life hell for smokers. He has drafted a bill which, if passed, would ban smoking in all public places including bars and restaurants.
As the spokesman of the Pancyprian Association of Friends of Smokers, I hope I am invited to the House Committee meeting that will discuss this illiberal bill drafted by the green health fascist. I assure him that our association will fight it. The fact that people can smoke in Kyproulla’s restaurants, taverns and bars is what makes us a much more civilised country than France, the US, Britain and Italy.
And as more and more countries impose blanket smoking bans, allowing smokers a free rein could give our tourism sector the comparative advantage it so desperately needs. We can market it abroad as a smokers’ paradise, using the slogan ‘Love smoking, Love Cyprus’.
IF YOU can’t beat them join them. It seems that our good friend and finance minister Charilaos Stavrakis has decided to follow the cliché and join the lunatics. Asked about the deep divide between salaries in the public and private sector, Charilaos said that the solution was not to reduce the wages of public servants.
It was to increase the wages of private sector workers in order to bring them in line with those being paid by the government. This view is as serious as AKEL’s position on the Lisbon Treaty. If wages in the private sector begin to approach those paid to the public parasites, half of Kyproulla’s businesses would go bankrupt.
But we would have a fairer society, which is our finance minister’s number one objective.
STATE school kids might not be very good at critical thinking and their command of the Greek language may be steadily declining, but when it comes to militant union studies they are ‘A+’ students as they showed on a Cyprus Airways flight on Monday.
A group of Limassol teenagers, going on a school holiday to Greece, staged a mutiny on the plane as it was preparing for take-off on Monday morning because one of their classmates, whose travel documents had been lost, was left behind.
The kids, all from a Limassol secondary school with a poor disciplinary record, took off their seat-belts and begun chanting for the pilot to stop the plane as it was heading for the runway so that their classmate could join them. According to reports, they had been encouraged to take dynamic measures by the teacher accompanying them.
The Cyprus Airways supervisor had to board the plane and order the kids to behave; he also had shouting match with the teacher in charge. The next day, the teacher had the nerve to complain on a radio show that the airline’s supervisor had shouted at him and had spoken very rudely.
The teacher had encouraged mob rule on a plane, the kids he was in charge of ignored flight safety rules and he expected the CY officer, who had to board the plane to restore order, to speak to him politely. Someone should inform the teacher that the customer is always right in restaurants, not on planes.
THE PROBLEM, according to the teacher, was caused because the Swissport ground handling staff had lost the travel document of the one student, who was eventually left behind. The teacher claimed he had given the teenager’s ID card to the check-in staff, but they had somehow misplaced it.
This would surprise nobody who has been to Larnaca Airport since Swissport has taken over ground handling. The cock-ups and delays are daily, with everyone yearning the good old days when Cyprus Airways was in charge of ground handling.
A company that collects freight from the airport every day is fast losing its patience. In the past, a company worker would collect air cargo within an hour of its arrival. Now it takes between four and five hours. The problem is that most of the workers dealing with cargo are lowly-paid Poles who speak neither Greek nor English.
Swissport should consider hiring a couple of interpreters.
LUNACY is not restricted only to our politicians, teachers and cabaret owners. We, the wider public, are pretty crazy as well. Why else would we regard the National Guard as Kyproulla’s most trusted institution, as the latest Cyprobarometer survey reported? Because we are all nut-cases. What has the National Guard ever done to enjoy this trust? It has never been tested on the battlefield. It may have carried out a few military exercises with a degree of competence and made a contribution to fire-fighting efforts, but is this reason enough to trust it more than the police force (excluding the Paphos cops, who cannot be trusted to do anything competently)? If there was a Turkish attack tomorrow, would people stay in their homes confident that our most trusted institution would repel it, or would they all head for Paphos and the mountains?
THE BIGGEST lunatic of all, Archbishop Chrys, in an interview on CyBC television on Thursday night, said that he would not be stepping down in five years’ time as he had promised before his election to the throne. An Archbishop stayed in his position for life, he explained to the bemused interviewer, a fact he has only just remembered.
During the show he also revealed his plans to set up Church schools. However these would be fee-paying schools as the Church could not afford to offer free education, he pointed out. But what about poor children, asked the interviewer. “They can go to the state schools,” said Chrys, indicating that for him, Christian charity is as important as telling the truth.
