HE MAY HAVE made a monumental mess of the economy, he may have satisfied all the Denktator’s demands at the negotiations, as Junior claims, and he may have alienated our EU partners with his anti-West bigotry, but on one count, our caring, people-friendly president’s record has been impeccable.
When it comes to rusfeti, not only has he maintained the proud tradition cultivated by his predecessors, but he has broken new ground. Comrade Tof has pushed the boundaries so far that he has made the Olympian rusfetologist of the early ‘80s, the late Spy Kyp, look like a clumsy apprentice by comparison.
So committed is the comrade to this political practice, that he has tried to introduce it to the Cyprus University, which had been a rusfeti-free zone, at least as far as academic affairs were concerned. Appointments to the University Council had always been rusfetological, with the president of the day giving seats to his ‘people’, but until now there was no interference in academic appointments.
Our great leader’s red, yes-men on the Council have been trying to change all this and scored a small victory when on Monday they cancelled the appointment of a man hired a couple of months ago as lecturer in European History. Chairman of the Council and AKEL apparatchik Charis Charalambous discovered that the ratification of the man’s appointment by the Council was irregular.
He based his decision on a ruling by the Supreme Court in August. The ratification of the appointment would have been valid only if the majority of the 14 voting members of the Council had voted for it. But at the Council meeting that ratified the appointment only nine members were present so the appointment had to be declared null and void.
Violations of procedural rules are only tolerated if they benefit Akelites.
THERE WAS no way the appointment would have been cancelled over such a technicality, if the loyal Akelite who had applied for the job, Rolandos Katsaounis, had been appointed. Katsaounis, a Tofias protιgι, had failed to land the job, despite direct pressure on academics by the government.
Another Tofias poodle, Education Minister Andreas Demetriou, we hear, made several phone calls to help Katsaounis land the job but his pleas were ignored. The five member evaluation committee, consisting of three academics from the university and two from abroad, unanimously agreed to give the job to a Nicos Christodoulides.
He was much younger than Katsaounis, who is in his fifties and way too old for a junior post – he would have been eligible for promotion when he was nearing 60. We do not know if the age played any part in the committee’s decision and do not care.
Charalambous will probably make one last attempt to give the job to Katsaounis at a meeting between the University Council and the Senate this week.
THIS WAS not the first time the AKEL-controlled council has interfered in academic affairs. A little while ago, the Senate voted to terminate the services of Associate Professor Lefteris Papaleontiou, from the Department of Byzantine Studies, following the recommendation of an evaluation committee.
But because Papaleontiou is an Akelite, the University Council, at the behest of Chairman Charalambous, refused to ratify the decision. Result. Papaleontiou is no longer working at the university, but because the termination of his employment was not ratified, he is being paid his full salary, by the taxpayer, for doing nothing, apart from being a loyal Akelite.
I THINK we were a bit unfair on Spy when we compared his rusfeti record with that of the comrade president. Rusfeti under Spy had nobler motives – he engaged in it so as to boost his support in elections. The comrade, with his Stalinist background, is more interested in having total control of everything.
After all, the reds would vote for him irrespective of whether he gave them public post or not. Control is his objective and he recognises the importance of turning the state universities into hot-beds of mediocrity run by rabid reds. He appointed an Akelite, Elpida Keravnou as President of the Interim Governing Committee of the applied sciences university TEPAK and is now trying to place a red in charge of the Open University as well.
His choice is Professor Yiannos Ioannou of the Cyprus Uni’s French Studies department. Ioannou’s academic work and administration skills hardly deserve such a reward, but he has taken the required oath of allegiance to our great leader which is all that is required. The only problem now is that the comrade has to figure out a way to get rid of the current President of the Open University.
SIMILAR difficulties have been encountered in efforts to re-hire a bona fide red at the Ports Authority. Demetris Fellas had left the Authority during the stock exchange bubble to seek his fortune elsewhere, but our government has currently been violating all the procedures in order to get him re-appointed.
This makes a bit of a mockery of Akel’s hypocritical moralising about respect for the appointment procedures at the university. The commies have ignored Supreme Court decisions and the existence of better-qualified and more capable candidates for the post, in an effort to give the job to Fellas whose only real qualification is that he comes from an Akelite family that has strong links with the party leadership.
Giving well-paid government jobs to losers, because they are commies, is what our great leader’s vision of building a fairer society consists of.
WAS THE state broadcaster’s special feature about the Berlin Wall on its main evening news show last Monday a case of re-writing world history? The reporter informed us that the Wall had been built by the Allies! Did the CyBC reporter get his information from the Cuban News Agency?
And why did none of the highly-paid, news editors at the station not correct the report before it was broadcast? Did they not know either that the Wall was built by the totalitarian GDR regime in 1961, to prevent its oppressed citizens from escaping to the free world?
The hack’s distortion of history, I am certain, will not go unrewarded the next time there are promotions at the corporation.
COMRADE president gave in to political pressure at home and grudgingly went to Berlin for the celebrations. However TV pictures of him at the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Wall showed that he was untouched by the celebratory party mood that marked the occasion. In fact the last time he looked so miserable and depressed in public was when he attended Ezekias Papaioannou’s funeral.
Meanwhile his comrade Aleka Papariga, leader of Greece’s Communist Party, who was equally depressed last week, added substance to the CyBC report about the creation of the Berlin Wall. “The Wall was imposed by imperialism, just before the NATO troops were threatening to invade Berlin, particularly East Berlin, in the territory of the GDR.”
In the Middle Ages a wall could protect a country from invasion but I doubt it would have been an effective defence in an era of nuclear weapons. The Wall may have crumbled, but as we know from Kyproulla, Stalinist stupidity cannot be defeated.
GUESTS at last weekend’s official ceremony for the opening of the new Larnaca Airport terminal, apart from witnessing the obligatory, religious blessing by the Archbishop, waving a bunch of wet basil or coriander, were also treated to a short film about the construction of the terminal.
One of the guests was quite surprised by what he saw and voiced suspicions that the producer had been given instructions to leave the late Ethnarch out of the film. The Ethnarch’s Communications Minister Haris Thrasou, an AKEL apparatchik, was shown signing the contract for the new airport and he was also shown laying the foundation stone.
Yet, from what we know, the late Ethnarch had laid the foundation stone for the new Larnaca Airport, not his minister. Thrasou had laid the foundation stone for the new Paphos airport and that was the footage shown to guests at last weekend’s ceremony.
Showing a minister laying the foundation stone at the wrong airport, was peculiar, to say the least, but I suspect this was a calculated attempt to give no credit to the poor old Ethnarch for the new airport.
Perhaps the film-maker feared that inclusion of Tassos in the film would have renewed the calls for naming the new airport after him. His film, instead, made a strong case, for calling it the Haris Thrasou International Aiport.
THE GOVERNMENT took all the credit for the Thrasou International Aiport, which AKEL mouthpiece Haravghi described as a ‘jewel’, but a few years ago the commies were beating their breasts because the airport project had been given to a private firm on a Build Operate Transfer agreement.
As Alecos Constantinides reminded us in Alithia, back in 2001 the comrade had lambasted the decision to give the project to the private sector, while his mouthpiece Haravghi wrote: “This decision is tantamount to selling off not just our airports, but the country’s credibility and wealth. It is a theft of the people’s wealth with the guilty going unpunished.”
I MUST admit that I have taken some guilty pleasure from the Ethnarch Junior’s daily public outbursts against the comrade’s supposedly incompetent handling of the peace talks. I say guilty, because I am seriously concerned about the mental state of the crown prince, who appears to have developed a Tofias psychosis.
He appears to have developed a psychological compulsion to launch vicious attacks on Tofias on a daily basis. While these are extremely enjoyable, most people are not accustomed to such intensity and some are wondering whether Junior has gone mad. Not only has he has accused the comrade of selling out to the Turks, but he has also claimed that Tof has submitted proposals to the talks that had originally been made by the Denktator back in 2002 – regarding rotating presidency and weighted voting, not to mention the settlers.
And when the Akelite officials respond, he accuses them of exercising intellectual terror and of trying to silence him. He also mentioned something about a frog, but we were unable to find the full transcript of the frog allegory to bring it to you.
Phil, reckoned that Junior was “building his leadership profile” with his daily assaults on the comrade, but I reckon he is turning into the new Madsakis.
THE HATRED the Papadopoulos clan have for Tof is no secret. They will never forgive him for standing against the Ethnarch in the last elections, as they hold him personally responsible for the deterioration of Tassos’ health in the aftermath of his defeat.
Now that Junior has been given the opportunity to take revenge, he has seized it with both hands. And he can argue that there is nothing personal – his concerns are exclusively patriotic as he fears that the comrade was leading us to an unfair settlement that would not treat the Turks as second-class citizens, just like the Denktator demanded.
THE SON of our other great leader, Foreign Minister Marcos Kyprianou, had a public dig at Junior, accusing him of waging a personal vendetta. He had a point but Marcos has done very well out of DIKO’s alliance with AKEL and has an interest in keeping it alive, because there are still foreign lands he has not visited, at the taxpayer’s expense.
If he loses the foreign ministry, his travel plans would be wrecked. And after all he has a much bigger claim to the ownership of the DIKO business than Junior. Afterall, it was his dad who founded the party, built it up and was leader for much longer than Tassos. It would be a gross injustice if Tassos’ son takes over the party which rightfully belongs to the Kyp family and wrecks Marco Polo’s world tour plans for the sake of the rotating presidency.
DIKO’S caretaker leader Marios Garoyian has hang Junior out to dry, announcing that his comments do not reflect the position of the party (DIKO is in favour of rotating presidency?) and he was expressing personal views.
The other patriotic opportunists in the government alliance – EDEK – have announced that they would leave the government if the comrade does not withdraw his proposals about rotating presidency, the stay of settlers and weighted voting. Even though the government spokesman said this was out of the question EDEK has not left the government.
The socialists’ behaviour is a bit a like a husband, whose wife is openly cheating on him with his friends and work colleagues, and he keeps warning her to stop or he would leave her. But he never leaves, because she has the money and he is terrified of losing his status, his big car and wealth.
At least when he has the wealth and status he can pontificate about his principles and his abhorrence of adultery.
