I WOULD like to apologise that we have nothing about yesterday’s meeting of the DIKO executive bureau but I was working to an early deadline. I had to finish by 9am because I was going to drive up to Stavrovouni monastery to pray that DIKO would decide to stay in the government tent, for the good of the country.
Prayers do not always work, especially when the Archbishop is praying for the other side in what has become a struggle for the soul of the historic party founded by the great Spy Kyp. In one camp we have the hard-line opportunists, represented by party leader and personality of the year Marios Garoyian who has been valiantly upholding the party’s proud traditions and values, bequeathed by his mentor Spy.
In the other camp are the narcissistic, hard-line lawyers who see themselves as the keepers of the late Ethnarch’s proud legacy of negativity and have been agitating for an acrimonious divorce from the government – they generously waived the legal fees – ever since the rotating presidency scandal hit the news. This legal tendency is represented by Junior, Colocassides, Angelides and Associates, and has the full backing of two TV bosses – the Archbishop and Loukis P.
It goes without saying that Spy’s son and heir, foreign minister Marcos Kyprianou, is in the Garoyian camp and wants to maintain the alliance because he is very fond of foreign travel. And he has a bigger claim to the party than Junior who, like his father, never embraced the traditional values and ideals of DIKO – horse-trading, rusfeti and total focus on the spoils of power.
Has it not occurred to the smart, idealistic lawyers who put their patriotic principles above everything else that they might be in the wrong party? If they want to belong to a party that sacrifices power for nebulous principles they should join EDEK instead of arrogantly trying to impose an alien ideology on their hard-line opportunist comrades.
THERE IS a class element to the DIKO struggle, as any Marxist scholar would tell you. The Garoyian camp, with the exception of Marcos, consists of men of humble origins who enjoy the status and importance linked to being part of the government.
The lawyers on the other hand, with the exception of Zacharias Koulias who is a bit of a loud-mouthed peasant, are from wealthy backgrounds, have social status and earn loads of cash from their practices. They can afford to take narcissistic stands on principle and demand a grand patriotic exit from the government because they are spoilt rich dudes with nothing to lose.
But they should spare a thought for their colleagues – Paschalides, Fotiou, Garoyian, Patsalides etc – who are from poorer backgrounds (one is from Paphos and would have to go back there if he leaves the ministry) and are not prepared to sacrifice everything for reckless stands on principle about the Cyprob, advocated by the lawyers.
It is just as well we have the Cyprob as it allows members of the legal profession to show the public that they have some principles.
COMRADE president Tof had no problem accepting suffocatingly intensive talks for two evenings in succession with Garoyian in his bid to persuade DIKO to stay in his tent. He even set a suffocating time frame, demanding that the party’s central committee met tomorrow to decide whether it would accept his improved offer for staying in the tent.
DIKO’s decision will depend on how many more ministries and other public sinecures have been offered by the comrade. If he has offered enough posts to buy the support of an adequate number of the hard-line opportunists, the principled lawyers will suffer an honourable defeat.
Our establishment has heard of two DIKOites who have been approached by Garoyian and offered ministries in the Tof government. A third, deputy Fytos Constantinou, yesterday denied he had been offered any ministry. A fourth, less influential member, was offered one week’s free holiday for him and his family in a three-star hotel in Protaras but was holding out for four-star accommodation.
The comrade has even agreed to propose amendments to the rotating presidency that is a red rag to DIKO’s principled lawyers. He will not withdraw the proposal but will suggest amending it so that it would stipulate that one of the two presidential terms reserved for the Greek Cypriot community, would go to an Armenian DIKO member.
That should persuade the lawyers to stay in the tent, assuming Talat would agree to having an Armenian president.
IF ALL goes well and the majority of the DIKO central committee on Tuesday votes to stay in the tent for now, the comrade will have to start planning his next moves for keeping the alliance going.
His safest bet would be to help the dour Dervis Eroglu get elected pseudo-president as he would ensure the talks ground to a halt. With prospects of a settlement hitting zero, the comrade’s concessions would be irrelevant and DIKO would stay in the alliance and help the comrade get re-elected. EDEK might even return when the threat of a settlement ceases to exist.
All that remains now is for the comrade’s poodles to find out how to send money to the Eroglu election campaign fund. They should ask the Archbishop, who is a big admirer of dull Dervis and may have already contributed to his election kitty.
TALAT would have been certain to be pseudo-re-elected if the international community were allowed a say in the pseudo-elections. I do not know how he does it, but for the international community his farts smell of Chanel No 5. He is the darling of all our EU partners, the US and the UN, and it just doesn’t make any sense.
Last week he gave a lunch at his pseudo-palace for the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and they all attended. Why had our government not written to them urging them not to go as it had done in the case of the EU ambassadors a couple of months ago?
Surely the ambassadors of our close allies – France, Russia, China – would have respected our wishes, if our government had bothered to intervene.
I LOVE the evening television news on Green Monday. This being a public holiday, TV news bosses are hard-pressed to find enough nonsense to fill their 60-minute shows, as they would on a normal working day. They therefore broadcast news items that do not even qualify as nonsense, but which enjoy a cult following.
Nobody does Green Monday news better than Antenna, which has camera crews combing the villages around Nicosia to bring us pictures of people sitting outdoors eating vegetables and grilled squid. Then there are the interviews, in which the reporter asks people what they had eaten, and he gets revealing answers such as: “Tomatoes, cucumbers, olives…”
The interviewees from Tseri are more articulate. “We ate artichokes, tashi, moungra and laganes..” or “We put some squid and octopus on the charcoal and they were very nice,” or “fasoulia, greens, tomatoes, moungra and of course halva.”
Now if the newshounds found people eating souvla, loukanika, pastourma and halloumi on Green Monday that would be worthy of leading the TV news. The hack could ask the Archbishop for his views on this provocation and make an intriguing report.
I should also mention the other standard news story of this day – the long queues of cars on the highways, heading back to Nicosia. This year Antenna did not interview the drivers, stuck on the highway, to ask them how they felt – a big disappointment for viewers who cherish the Green Monday TV news tradition.
THIS YEAR we also had what criminologists would refer to as Green Monday crime. An artichoke farmer from Alamino reported that last weekend thieves had stolen some 5,000 artichokes from his field. He went to his field to cut the artichokes, two days before Green Monday, and found nothing there.
You had to feel sorry for the farmer who said the value of the artichokes stolen was €7,000. But if he was charging the wholesaler €1.2 per artichoke how much would the consumer have had to pay for them in the shops? The thieves probably helped keep artichokes competitively priced on Green Monday.
The second Green Monday crime took place in Paralimni where thieves broke into a snail farm and, according to police, took huge quantities of what we Cypriots call karaoli. The karaoli can also be eaten on Green Monday, even though none of Antenna TV’s interviewees admitted having eaten karaolous.
IT WAS nice to see AKEL’s intellectual heavyweight Nicos Katsourides back in the limelight recently. Kats, although a deputy, appeared to have gone into hiding since his narrow defeat by Andros Kyprianou in the elections for the AKEL leadership 13 months ago. He was probably ashamed and who could blame him? I would go into hiding for a year if I lost a game of tavli to Andros Kyprianou.
Time is a big healer and Kats is now back in the spotlight defending the party that betrayed him and the comrade president whom he passionately detests for helping the lightweight Andros win the leadership contest.
When a few weeks ago Andros conspiratorially announced that he knew the identity of the man co-ordinating the political attacks on the president, everyone assumed he was referring to the wily Kats, who made no secret of how thoroughly pissed off he was with Tof.
Have the two kissed and made up, and if so, what has Kats been given to stop pissing in the presidential tent from outside?
ON THURSDAY comrade Tof spoke for the first time about the need for everyone to make sacrifices so that we could deal with the recession. We may have been in a recession for more than a year, but our wise leader only this week recognised there was a need for belt-tightening.
I suppose he was waiting to take delivery of the brand-new presidential limo he ordered for himself before giving his sermon about the need for belt-tightening. Leading by example is very important to the comrade. He will now be chauffeured around in the Merc S450, which in a way was a sacrifice, because he could have bought an S600, the limo preferred by all Africa’s tyrants.
According to Phil, the government order also included a brand new Merc for Garoyian, which he will be given even if he fails to persuade his party to stay in the government.
SPEAKING of recession, the EU has really turned the screw on Greece, where things can only get worse. The big problem is the Greek public sector, the workers of which enjoy even more privileges than our own public parasites. While wages are lower than in Cyprus, Greek civil servants are entitled to a range of ridiculous allowances that boost their pay. For instance there is a ‘punctuality allowance’ for arriving at work on time and ‘taking work home allowance’ for teachers who mark schoolwork at home. There is also an allowance especially for those who have not earned any of the allowances on offer, because the Greek state could not discriminate against the lazy.
THE RECESSION has been very bad for the press and we hear that the company that prints the late Nicos Sampson’s organ, Machi was getting a bit nervous about the newspaper’s growing debt. About 10 days ago it threatened not to print the paper unless it received some payment against the debt. Instead of payment, the director of the printing press received a telephone call from Archbishop Chrysostomos asking him to carry on producing the paper. He did not offer to settle the debt, but the director withdrew his ultimatum and carried on printing Machi, as a favour to Chrys, the new defender of press freedom.
We now know who to call when the libel lawyers come around demanding payment.
