BEFORE I start on my nonsense, I feel obliged to introduce a serious note. I would like to ask all our customers to observe a minute’s silence, in honour of all those ordinary people who sacrificed five minutes of their lives, five years ago, defending the Cyprus Republic from the threat of extinction.
It is thanks to the bravery of these men and women, who defied the danger of being run over by a car or being struck by lightning on a sunny day and went to the polling stations on April 24, 2004 to cast the ‘no-vote’ that prevented the Republic from being transformed into an Anglo-Turkish protectorate.
For our tribute, we have chosen psalms two, three and six from the new Lazarus testament, which eloquently illustrates the role of ordinary people in the defeat of Satan’s plan five years and two days ago.
“People, by right and deservedly, with a capital ‘p’. Because they wrote with the indisputable triumph of 76% the NO of national and democratic and cultural Dignity and Resistance.
“People whose love of country quashed impertinent threats, dirty blackmail, briberies of silver, the propaganda of plotting foreigners, internationally and locally renowned cowards.
“People who gave the strength to our gruff leader, Tassos Papadopoulos, to transmit the resounding and thunderous NO of panhellenic pride.”
Amen. And now, a minute’s silence, please.
OUR MAINLAND Greek brothers and sisters have always looked down on us Kyproullians, regarding us as provincial peasants, totally lacking in style and sophistication – a bit like we Nicosians see Paphites.
This view will have been reinforced during the two-day visit of Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and his glamorous, elegant wife Natasa. It did not fill one with national pride to see our frump of a first lady exchanging pleasantries with Natasa. Anyone who saw the TV pictures and did not know who they were may have thought that Mrs Karamanlis was being accompanied by her nanny.
And what did Elsi, who has obviously remained loyal to her neighbourhood kommotria even after the election of her hubby, give Natasa as a gift? A set of stylish, silver teaspoons, presumably to use as ornaments in her living room.
Natasa would have got an idea of how to display the teaspoons when she visited the presidential holiday home in Kellaki for dinner on Thursday night. She must have spotted many useful, interior design tips there.
THE OFFICIAL state banquet, in honour of the PM and his wife, on Wednesday night at Nicosia’s Hilton Hotel, was a tour de force in provincial grandeur and I bet our guests from Greece are still laughing about it.
The some 200 guests who were invited to the banquet were all sent into a big waiting area, like a herd of goats and made to wait until their name was called out by a female master of ceremonies. Once the title and the name of the guest was called out by the MC the guest and his partner would go into the banqueting hall where they would shake hands with Mr and Mrs Christofias and Mr and Mrs Karamanlis and then be shown to their table.
“The Chief of Police Iacovos Papacosta,” the MC would announce and the chief would enter the dining room and shake hands with the two couples. The protocol was observed which meant the poor old chairmen of semi-governmental organisations were among the last to go in.
“It was like we were at the Palace of Versailles and were going to have dinner with Louis XIV,” remarked one guest, who added: “The only omission was that the MC did not have one of those wooden clubs to bang on the floor every time she announced the entry of a guest.”
THE ANNOUNCED entries were not the only surprise in store for the guests of the official dinner. Once everyone was sat at their table all the guests were told to stand up. Would they be asked to say a prayer before they started eating or were they about to participate in another custom of the Bourbon court?
Once everyone stood up, the Greek national anthem was played through the speakers. It was a rather bizarre decision which had many guests wondering what was going on. People who know about these things inform us that the national anthem before an official dinner is a no-no, even if the guest of honour is the Greek PM.
HOUSE president Marios Garoyian also advertised his rude provincialism on Thursday when he played the host to Karamanlis, who had been invited to address the House of Representatives. The speech made by Garoyian lasted longer than the speech of his guest, the publicity-mad House president unable to resist the opportunity to be the star of the show.
The House session was broadcast live on television, so Garoyian, showing complete disregard for his official guest, seized the chance to torture everyone with an interminable patriotic lecture about the Annan plan. He sounded like he was giving orders to Karamanlis about how the Greek government should handle the Cyprob. It was as if the House session had been arranged for the benefit of the clueless motor-mouth instead of for the PM.
For Karamanlis, the highlight of his visit must have been the drive back to Larnaca airport on Thursday night.
WANNABE newspaper publisher Demetris Lottides, who is responsible for the publication of the Cyprus, Sunday edition of Greece’s newspaper Kathimerini, suffered another small embarrassment in his ongoing attempt to be taken seriously as a media mover and shaker.
Not content with being a publisher of fluffy life-style magazines, he decided to go into newspaper publishing, in order to move up the media pecking order, but his new enterprise has not gone very smoothly. Last December Kathimerini published an obituary of the late Tassos Papadopoulos several days before he had passed away. Two weeks ago there was another embarrassment. One of the glossy magazines given free with the paper, K, was missing its first two pages, which contained the editor’s note.
This was no printing error, as the pages had been ripped out. Some copies of the magazine given away at kiosks still contained parts of the ripped out pages.
Lottides apparently had smoke coming out of his ears when he read the editorial note in the front of the magazine, which had a dig at the EOKA struggle.
He told the rag’s editor, Marinos Nomikos, who had penned the article, that the struggle was sacrosanct and that his views would outrage Kathimerini’s readers who were predominantly nationalists. The liberal Lottides then brought in a team of workers to tear the pages with the offending article out of the rag, before it went to the news-stands and alienated his open-minded readers.
Angered by his publisher’s censorship, Nomikos resigned and is now working for Politis. As for Lottides, he has our sympathy as the latest episode dealt a severe blow to his quest for promotion to the publisher’s premier league.
WE WERE bitterly disappointed by the poor turn-out for Friday’s gathering, outside the Ledra Palace Hotel, to mark the fifth anniversary of the heroic ‘no-vote’. The gathering, attended by a few hundred people, most of them senior citizens, was also intended as a warning about the Annan-type settlement being negotiated.
The main speakers were two professional windbags – our very own Dr Faustus, who has taken the mantle of ‘invincible leader of the resistance’, after the passing of the Ethnarch, and former defence minister of Greece, Gerasimos Arsenis who sold us the myth about the Unified Defence Dogma.
It was a disappointing gathering in terms of fighting spirit, but the crowd was kept entertained by the verbal fireworks of the two windbags. Dr Faustus warned of the “orchestrating of vampire plans that forge the substance of the Cyprus problem” while Arsenic said we had “to nullify the devious plans for the return of the Annan plan under a new guise.”
TWO WEEKS
ago we had written about the firebrand, father of all anti-Annan plan bash-patriots Panos Ioannides (aka Pip), whose Movement for Freedom and Justice for Cyprus had put together a book about the history of Cyprus, titled Bloody Truth.
In this book, written in Greek and English, Pip a regular patriotic preacher on the Lazarus religious show, boasted we could find the absolute truth about our history. However one customer, who read the book, contacted our establishment to complain that there was nothing in the Bloody Truth about Pip’s heroic actions during the 1974 coup. We explained to our customer that Pip’s modesty did not allow him to use the book to advertise his personal heroism; it would have been in poor taste.
But we have every right to praise his brave actions. On one occasion the gun-toting Pip stormed into the house of a hapless man in Kythrea threatening to execute him unless he revealed where he had hidden his guns. No guns were found, but the man was taken to a police station where Pip was discussing with other coupists how they would execute the prisoners.
No execution took place but in 1976 the Kythrea man filed a law suit against Pip. There was no trial as the case was settled out of court, thanks to the intervention of the late Spy Kyp and the payment of a hefty compensation by the bash-patriotic Pip.
THERE was nothing pseudo about the way the pseudo-prime minister of the pseudo-state Ferdi Soyer reacted to his party’s defeat in the pseudo-parliamentary elections. Soyer reacted like a true Cypriot, refusing to accept any personal blame for the defeat, which was quite clearly the fault of the foreigners.
“The EU is to blame as it did not keep its promises to the Turkish Cypriots,” he said. The popularity of the EU in the north has definitely faded recently. Only the other day, a Turkish Cypriot pseudo-official was complaining about the arrogance of EU officials who arrive in the north to administer the structural funds being given by Brussels.
Apparently, the number one priority of the EU officials posted in the north is to find a massive house with a swimming pool in the Kyrenia area and they are willing to pay any amount being asked in rent. This is not surprising, as the rent is paid out of the structural funds intended for the north.
EVERYBODY seems to have missed the latest case of government rusfeti which unfolded at the Cyprus Tourism Organisation. Just before Easter, the organisation announced the appointment of Yiannis Kouis as head of the administration department, one of the top executive positions.
Kouis had been a failed AKEL candidate in past elections and had served as a member of the CTO board for several years. He resigned from the board, when the vacancy for head of the admin department was advertised, so he could apply. Nobody was bothered that his fellow board members would be interviewing him for the job. AKEL always ensures that the correct rusfetology procedures are followed.
After he applied, Kouis started writing articles in newspapers about tourism to show his prospective employers that he was an authority on the issue, even though he was unable to come up with a single original idea.
Seven CTO employees, all in management positions, also applied for the vacancy and were interviewed by the board for the job. The interviews were likened to Stalin’s show trials, by applicants, who were left in no doubt about what the board’s decision would be. The nine members of the board, carrying out the interviews could not even pretend to be interested in what the applicants had to say. The decision that Kouis was the best man for the job had been taken long before the interviews were held.
WE ARE happy to introduce a new feature this week, as a tribute to the journalistic prowess of Phil’s correspondent in the US, Michalis Ignatiou, whose scoops never fail to send shock-waves across the western world. Below is the first installment of the Wisdom of Ignatiou, taken from an article published eight days ago.
“Mehmet Ali Talat is worse than Rauf Denktash. Because while he may appear with an ‘angelic’ face, he has more hard-line positions than his predecessor. We are talking about a man with a bad character who does not have sincere feelings for the Greek Cypriots, and has been heard, many times, to speak condescendingly about the servility of Greek Cypriot politicians and journalists who caress and worship him, behaving like spineless nobodies.”
