RELIGIOUS nut-cases will take centre stage next weekend when Pope Benedict XVI arrives on the island of religious and cultural tolerance for a three-day visit.
The Pope was branded a heretic by the pious Bishop of Limassol Athanasios, who shows his humility by always gazing at the floor, incurring the righteous rage of his boss Archbishop Chrys II. Chrys spent the week issuing threats to fundamentalist, senior clerics, like Athanasios, who intended to boycott the events held for the Pope.
Any bishop who boycotted the official welcoming ceremony would be kicked out of the Holy Synod for a year, warned an indignant Chrys. He might also spank their bottom. In theory, this would be a small price to pay for one’s faith and we wait to see how many of the fundamentalist bishops would defy Chrys and snub the heretic, in defence of Greek Orthodox dogma.
Apart from the priests, other Orthodox nut-cases are also planning dynamic action during the visit. Commerce minister Antonis Paschalides warned that some organised groups of loonies would arrive from Greece, but his claims were rubbished the following day by the police spokesman who said there was no such information.
Paschalides obviously took his info from Phil, which has carried many scare stories in the last few weeks about the angry protests planned by assorted nut-cases, for the apostolic visit.
ONE QUESTION that nobody has an answer for is ‘why is the Pope visiting Cyprus?’ Why is he going to all this trouble – a papal visit is a complex affair both in terms of security and logistics – to visit a country with a tiny Catholic community?
It is said that the visit was arranged by our ambassador to the Vatican, George Poullides who is extremely well-connected in the Holy See. He is credited with arranging visits to the Pope for both the Ethnarch and the comrade; the latter visited twice, once as House president and once as president of the People’s Republic.
Our political elite just love being seen with the Pope and I suspect the comrade had asked Poullides, who apparently knows all the Vatican’s movers and shakers, to arrange the visit. Comrade Tof must be wetting his pants just thinking that pictures of him playing host to the Pope would be broadcast to every corner of the world.
Entertaining the Pope is the only sure-fire method, apart from being assassinated, for the head of a tiny and inconsequential country to get world exposure.
OUR MAN in the Holy See was interviewed ahead of the Pope’s visit by journalist Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register. Poullides was hopeful that the Pope’s visit would send the right messages to Turkey.
“His mere presence on this wounded island constitutes a vigorous protest against the injustice and violence that the Cypriot people have undergone, namely the Turkish occupation.” Poullides also played the Christian versus Muslim card, telling Pentin that “the Maronite community suffers because of the Turkish occupation as much as other Christians.”
The Maronites “face oppression and threats every day so that they will leave their homes just as they (the Turks) forced hundreds of thousands of Christians and Greek Cypriots before them,” Poullides dutifully pointed out.
Any hopes that the Pope would do anything about the Muslim occupation and persecution of Christians were dashed by Pentin who wrote: “Benedict XVI will be especially keen not to upset Turkey as he sees the country as crucial to his outreach to the Islamic world.”
What did we expect from a heretic?
THE RECESSION, we are pleased to note, has had no effect on the world travels of globe-trotting foreign minister and compulsive air miles collector Marcos Kyprianou.
His ministerial colleague and our good friend Charilaos may have cut the foreign trips’ budgets of all government departments but he appears to have left Marcos’ travel budget untouched. Being a caring sort of chap, he did not want to wreck a colleague’s plans to travel, in first-class luxury, to every corner of the world, even if it was at the taxpayer’s expense.
But we have to give him some credit for his ability to come up with justification for his travel plans. A couple of weeks ago he was in Venice to oversee the twinning ceremony between Venice and Larnaca, an event of colossal inconsequence to everyone apart from the Larnaca mayor and councillors.
On Thursday he packed his samba gear and flew off to Rio de Janeiro, where he represented Cyprus at the UN’s grandiosely-titled talking shop Alliance of Civilisations Forum. According to the Alliance’s website, the two-day forum would be attended “by 2,000 political and corporate leaders, civil society activists, youth, journalists, foundations and religious leaders.”
All these do-gooders “will agree on joint actions to improve relations across cultures and build the conditions for world peace.” I am certain Marcos will make a critical contribution towards achieving this aim which is why his presence in Rio was essential.
WHILE Marcos was packing his bags for the Rio trip, the second in command at the foreign ministry, perm sec Nicos Emiliou was at the centre of a row between the government and its allies, the principled opportunists of DIKO.
The dispute was over what Emiliou, a hawkish disciple of the Ethnarch, would be doing in the comrade’s negotiating team, which he recently joined at the insistence of DIKO chief and personality of last year, Marios Garoyian. The comrade agreed to this humiliating gimmick in order to keep DIKO’s vultures happy.
But how would the gimmick work? Would Emiliou, a civil servant, monitor the president’s negotiating tactics and report him to DIKO when he stepped out of line or would he veto any proposals made to the Turks that he did deemed treacherous?
This vagueness about his role prompted DIKO deputy leader Giorgos Colocassides to demand government make clear Emiliou’s terms of reference as a member of the negotiating team, and a row ensued. Lawyers will be lawyers. If Colocassides had a sense of humour his demand would have been a clever send-up of this ridiculous arrangement, but he does not. The man was being serious, which is why his party pooh-poohed his idea.
OUR SOCIETY, I am afraid, has completely lost its bearings and direction. Our traditional values and pride have disappeared, replaced by a victim culture that is turning us into a bunch on moaning girls’ blouses. OK, we are victims of Turkish aggression and expansionism but can’t we draw a line there.
All this came to mind when I read reports about the two 17-year-old boys who had allegedly been seduced by their young, female lyceum teacher. The case had been reported to the authorities and the puritanical newspapers made a big fuss because the education ministry did not investigate the matter promptly. Since the revelations, the investigations were completed and a report sent to the Attorney General to decide whether to take further action.
What kind of youths are we producing today? Back in my days, every testosterone-crazed, sex-hungry adolescent had daily visions of being seduced by his teacher, irrespective of her looks. He’d spend a whole lessons watching in the hope she would uncross her legs and he could get a glimpse of her knickers for a nano-second.
Nowadays, youths get on a plate what hundreds of thousands of boys of previous generations dreamt of and the ungrateful boys run to their parents and the Commissioner for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, complaining that they suffered sexual harassment. They apparently showed the authorities the text messages as well as Facebook messages sent by the alleged seductress – a very discreet way to behave.
You really cannot sink any lower than this is as a male – taking the role of traumatised victim after being offered the delights of sex by an older woman, with an A-grade thrown into the deal. There is no hope for our society.
ONE MAN who would disagree with this gloomy forecast is the ultra-optimistic, happy-clappy minister of communications Antonis Paschalides who sees hope in everything and loves to share it with the rest of us. He was the one who was to sell the unsold holiday homes to Iranians, among other things.
This week he announced that three wealthy individuals – one from Cyprus, one from Russia and one from an Arab country – were to make very big investment in the People’s Republic. Two of them would spend a billion euro each while the third would invest 700 million. The investments would be in development, tourist projects and infrastructure, and the sites would be in Larnaca, Paphos and Nicosia he revealed, giving an idea of a game where participants would have to guess who is doing what, where – a bit like Cluedo.
I guess the man from the Arab country would invest one billion on an infrastructure project in Paphos. I also guess that a man from Cyprus, who regularly gets things wrong, will end up with egg on his face in Larnaca.
I CAN’T say we were surprised to hear that the government was not being serious about its proposal to cut the student grant and child benefit, as the finance ministry announced some 11 days ago. All that was needed for the indecisive comrade to get cold feet was a bit of public moaning by the village idiots in charge of the unions and demonstration of a few dozen hairy students outside the palazzo de popolo.
A delegation of the demonstrators, who went to the palazzo to hand in a memo, was told by the under-secretary to the President that no decision had been taken on the matter. A few days earlier, the government spokesman was publicly defending the decision that had not been taken, creating the impression that the dithering comrade had for once taken a decision about state cost-cutting that he would stick to, at least for a week.
MEANWHILE the public parasites’ union PASYDY has pulled off some very smart misinformation about the causes of the growing public deficit. This was not caused by the constantly rising wages and pensions paid to its members but because of tax evasion, the union has declared.
Now, with the help of the other unions, they have started a campaign demanding that the ‘rich’ were made to pay for the recession and not the poor workers. The rich should pay so that the poor, lazy, unemployable labour aristocrats of the public sector could carry on getting 50 and 60 grand annual salaries for being rude and unhelpful to the public.
We are moving closer to the ideal of a fair and just society every day.
A WEALTHY capitalist from Greece is apparently negotiating the purchase of the entire Zeus group. Mr Laurentiades owns a group of drug companies in Greece and apparently has plenty of cash to spare. The middle-man is reportedly the Cypriot wheeler-dealer Lambros Christofi, who could sell sand to the Bedouins. Negotiations are still at an early stage, according to a report in Politis.
THE PHIL media group, we hear, has lost sales since it incorporated a 60-page sports paper, named Goal, in its pages and charged readers an extra 50 cents for it. Some readers resented having to pay the extra money for something they did not want and stopped buying Phil. This has prompted the Phil management to change policy and from tomorrow the purchase of Goal would be optional. Of course, readers may still feel they are getting a bad deal because the core paper will not feature any sports news.
AFTER a lull that lasted longer than a month, the Cyprob was back in news this week, thanks to the Tuesday night dinner between the comrade and Dervis Eroglu, followed on Wednesday by the resumption of talks.
The only snag was that Eroglu has not lived up to his billing as a bullying, bloodthirsty, baby-eating, partition-supporting, Greek-hater. On the contrary, he said nothing before, during or after his meetings with Tof that could have been construed as offensive or remotely provocative by our touchy politicians and hacks. In short, he let us all down.
Proof of this was the fact than none of the bash-patriotic, freedom fighting moaners could find anything bad to say against him. With Eroglu out of the picture, the bash-patriotic chorus had to direct their fire at Big Al, for misleading the Big Boss in New York about the progress. They also pilloried the Big Boss for setting an asphyxiating time-frame in his message to the two leaders, which could only mean one thing – arbitration and the return of Annan Plan.
Life feels so empty when the Cyprob is out of the news.
