WE WERE overjoyed to see that the man elected leader of the communist party AKEL for the next 20 years, Andros Kyprianou, met all the moral requirements set by our saintly comrade presidente, who wanted his successor to be just like him.
There is little doubt that Andros is “ideologically consistent, an honest politician with a good name and record, a discreet life, modest, moderate, reserved, team-spirited and not individualistic, accessible and human,” as the great leader prescribed.
And just like his morally irreproachable comrade, he is not handicapped by great intelligence which would have made it difficult to communicate with the comrade plebs of the party and to unquestioningly obey the orders from the people’s palazzo.
The defeated candidate for the leadership, Nik Kats, did pretty well despite his moral deficiencies, deplorable bourgeois habits, smartness and lack of modesty. He still managed to take 48 of the 105 votes cast by the members of the Central Committee, just five short of becoming the winner, if we ignore closet votes (see below).
The result was a bit of slap in the face for comrade presidente who, apart from his Delphic-style pronouncement about the leader’s qualities, had also contacted central committee members to urge them to vote for the nice but deadly-dull android.
Kats’ high support was proof that divine intervention had failed, which could only mean that a significant number of the sheep had revolted and refused to follow the instructions of their benevolent comrade shepherd.
Their rebelliousness may have been stimulated by the thought their great leader could not black-list them for dissent now that he had officially left the party. A grave miscalculation, as he can still advise Andros to carry out a purge of the Central Committee.
THE CENTRAL Committee does not number only 105 members, we found out on Friday, but 110. It has five closet members who also voted on Wednesday. Three of them came out during the voting but two stayed in the closet, because they are Turkish Cypriots and could be persecuted in the north if their identity was revealed.
But what of the other three closet cases? Did they not want their wives to know about their communist faith? Doubtful, as the three Greek Cypriot closet members are all dyed-in-the-wool Akelites, who follow all the party life-style directions – drink Loel zivania, support Omonia and buy their clothes from Esel and Fashion Mart.
A more plausible explanation for the existence of the closet members is that they can be outed by the party leader when a vote at the Central Committee is close and he needs extra votes to pass his view. The five were outed on Wednesday, presumably, to ensure that the presidente’s chosen candidate prevailed. It was that close.
IF HE WANTS to be taken seriously, the new AKEL general secretary should change his name back to its original form – Andreas – which might be very common but it’s a damn-sight better than Andros, which is so villager.
It is one of those awful derivative names that is unique to Kyproulla and is used nowhere else in the Greek-speaking world, for very good aesthetic reasons. Other names in this category are Bambos, Panikkos, Andrikkos, Rikkos, Panais, Androulla, Kyproulla, Stavroulla, Nitsa etc.
He would not be the first politician to do so. MEP, former foreign minister and presidential candidate, Ioannis Kasoulides entered politics as a Yiannakis – which implied immaturity and lack of substance – which he changed back to its original form when he realised that such a name would handicap his political career.
And as we all know from experience the name Yiannakis has become a synonym of loser in our island’s politics.
CRYING in public has become very fashionable among our ruling elite. The latest man to embrace this fad was Archbishop Chrysostomos, who produced a few genuine tears for the cameras after the 40-day memorial service for the late Ethnarch, last Sunday.
As if the tears were not bad enough, Chrys also revealed that he was feeling very emotional. He was so emotional he was unable give the sermon he had prepared for the service, he said.
It was a shame, he said, as the day’s sermon would have been very appropriate, being about the ingratitude of the nine people healed by Jesus. The poor turn-out at the service showed the ingratitude of the Cypriot people to the man who had saved Kyproulla and the Republic, said an emotional Chrys, lamenting that “this is the fate of great men.”
His tears were very appropriate and could have been seen as a fitting tribute to the man who had set the trend of grown men crying in public like little girls. And when you see a hard-nosed, brutish, Paphite peasant shedding tears like a sensitive, new man you know that something is seriously wrong with our society.
THERE WERE different types of public tears, wrote EUROKO municipal councillor Andreas Matsas, in a fascinating article published in Alithia 10 days ago. According to Matsas, not all tears were the same.
He argued that Tassos’ tears on the night of his referendum address were nobler and of better quality (less salty) than those shed by commissar president when he was announcing his intention to step down as AKEL chief. This was because the former’s tears were for his country whereas the comrade’s were for his party.
Matsas was also annoyed because nobody had “commented, doubted or mocked” the comrade’s crying in contrast to the late Ethnarch’s which had become the subject of continuous ridicule, “as if great leaders cannot cry.”
We are eagerly awaiting Matsas’ next article in the hope that he would enlighten us about the nature of the Archbishop’s tears and their salt content.
THINGS are going from bad to worse at The English School where efforts to forcibly impose a spirit of peace and love by some misguided left-wing teachers has met with strong opposition from a group of parents who oppose the staff’s methods.
The parents have set up a website slamming the Stalinist methods adopted by a group of teachers led by the self-righteous member of the management team, Antonis Antoniou, who has been at pains to impose his personal political agenda at all costs.
Many parents, understandably, are unhappy with the situation as they fear that their kids would be paying a high price for Antoniou’s clumsy social engineering experiments, which are not restricted to imposing a multi-cultural ethos.
Antoniou has inaugurated classes for older students in which he gives political lessons about the inter-communal troubles, offering his left-wing version of what had happened in Kyproulla, and angering parents who do not approve of this type of political indoctrination.
Ironically, Antoniou’s confrontational, uncompromising, Trotskyite mode of operation rather than bringing the desired love and harmony to the school has turned it into a battleground, causing continuous squabbling and deep divisions at all levels. It is quite an achievement to piss off everyone when your alleged objective is to foster tolerance and better understanding.
THE OBVIOUS question is what is the headmaster’s role in all this? It just seems odd that he has allowed a few bolshy, left-wing teachers to run the show, behaving as if they own the school.
Antoniou and his comrades appear to have been tightening their grip on the school since the election of the comrade presidente and the appointment of several Akelites to the board. Akelites are so keen to take control of the school that they went to the elections for the Parents Association Committee with their own candidates’ list and got them all elected.
At this rate, in a few years’ time the school’s proud, century-old tradition of liberal education will be wiped out and its graduates will be card-carrying members o
f the AKEL youth wing EDON, campaigning for the overthrow of capitalism.
ANTONIOU and his progressive followers, meanwhile, have hit back at the parents’ initiative and declared war on the website. In a statement, the English School Staff Association (ESSA) said the website (www.englishschoolnews.com) was “riddled with lies and misinformation” as well as “intimidating content”.
The trenchant tone of the statement is a perfect illustration of comrade Antoniou’s confrontational style and also revealed the Stalinist mentality. It said: “ESSA demands the immediate shutting down of this website. If our demand is not met, we are prepared to take legal action against those responsible and industrial action…”
If the teachers go ahead with their threat, this would be the first ever strike against a website.
It is all part of the general lunacy prevailing at the school. A lunacy, to which, a handful of hard-line nationalist parents have also made a valuable contribution with their demand that Turkish Cypriots should be subjected to the Greek national anthem and sit in classrooms with icons of Orthodox saints.
NOTHING is more irritating than listening to Omonia fans moaning and shouting because their team had, in their view, been wronged by the referee or the ref’s assistant, who had presumably been bribed by their opponents to perpetrate the great injustice against them.
And it is not just the lumpen proles among Omonia fans who suffer from this pathetic persecution complex, but the educated supporters as well. After last weekend’s defeat to Apoel, every Omonia official was claiming that their side lost because of the referee’s decisions, in particular, the sending off of one of their players.
In Kyproulla, a coach will always blame the ref for his side’s defeat. Perhaps one day we will hear the Kenny Dalglish response. When he was manager of Blackburn, he was asked at the post match conference why his side had lost and he replied: “Because the other side scored more goals than us.” Why can’t our coaches ever say that?
A BIG debate has been raging about whether Greek Cypriots should take any blame for the inter-communal fighting of 1963-64. Education minister, Andreas Demetriou sparked the debate when he said that extremist groups on both sides were responsible for the bloodshed and the ensuing strife.
Nationalists were outraged with his comments, taking the line that the troubles and the fighting were caused by Britain and Turkish Cypriot terrorist group TMT. Greek Cypriots were totally blameless was their line. There were no extremist organisations on the Greek side which, as always, had done nothing wrong.
It is the same approach adopted by the football community – when our team loses a match neither the players nor the manager’s tactics are ever to blame. It is always the ref’s fault, because a manager cannot blame the evil Brits.
THINGS are not looking good for Kyproulla in Washington, according to Phil’s correspondent Michalis Ignatiou, who has been so busy covering the presidential elections he has still not completed his book about the bribery of Greek Cypriots by the US government during the referendum.
A worried Ignatiou reported last Sunday that two members of President Obama’s administration dealing with the South European desk would be promoting Turkey’s interests. Phillip Gordon, who will take over from the much-despised Daniel Fried, and under-secretary at the State Department “will prove worse than Fried for our issues”. He did not explain what can be worse than handing Cyprus over to Turkey, which was what Ig accused Fried of plotting.
The second official, Elizabeth Randall, who “hoped be appointed to the National Security Council as director for Europe” is also bad news because she had written “an article in favour of Turkey and against Cyprus.”
The source of these fascinating revelations by Ignatiou is an unnamed member of the Greek lobby, who added that the “views of Mrs Randall and Mr Gordon are absolutely and blatantly pro-Turkish.”
I suppose we will have to wait until after the next US presidential elections for a fair and lasting settlement of the Cyprob, because we are not going to get one while Obama and his Turkophiles are in power.
AYIA NAPA municipality has been trying to attract visitors with a newly launched advertising campaign. The radio advert features a few lines from a poem about a tree in Ayia Napa, written by Greece’s Nobel prize-winning poet Giorgos Seferis.
If we had an advertising standards commission this advert would have been immediately stopped and the Napa municipality would have been fined for grossly misleading advertising. Seferis visited Cyprus in the fifties when Ayia Napa was a tiny backward village in the middle of a wilderness without a pub, a disco, a hotel or restaurant in sight.
SEVERAL alarmed customers contacted us after reading last week’s item about the possibility of the Louis Vuitton shop in Stassikratous Street being closed down. They suggested that our establishment organised a public campaign to raise cash to save the shop, as the Nicosia Mayor refused to help. We felt we had a social responsibility to do something, because we did not want Nicosia to go down as the only capital in the world in which a Louis Vuitton shop closed down. Details about where to send your money will be published next week.
