THE HOUSE Institutions Committee was scheduled to meet today to discuss the role and the activities in Cyprus of UN Special Representative Alexander Downer and his team. The meeting would provide deputies with an opportunity to attack one of their favourite targets, for his alleged bias and other sins he had supposedly committed, and in so doing advertise their unrivalled patriotism on the television news shows which would cover the proceedings. It is an excuse for individual deputies to score cheap political points.
European Party deputy, Rikkos Erotokritou, one of the two deputies who submitted the subject for discussion claimed that his primary concern was to “protect the institutional stature of the presidency and other officials of the Republic from the hostile remarks made against them by Downer.”
Deputies had an obligation to express their opinions when “individuals and institutions are insulted in a totally unacceptable way, by people with a colonialist mentality,” he said. This gives a pretty good idea of what form the debate would take.
AKEL leader, Andros Kyprianou was pretty accurate in describing the proposed meeting as a public tribunal. Deputies would be competing over who would be the most scathing in his or her criticism of Downer, with the sole purpose of getting a few seconds exposure on television and a few lines in the newspapers.
It is very difficult to see what useful purpose the meeting would serve other than as an opportunity for patriotic grandstanding. It would not create conditions for a fairer settlement, it would not change the way the Downer team has been working and it would certainly not lead to the Secretary-General replacing the Australian.
Even the stand on principle that Erotkritou was claiming is not very convincing. If deputies were so concerned about ethical behaviour and principles they would not be discussing the content of private communications that were stolen from the UN and made public.
Lawmakers, who respected the laws, would be showing a little more respect for the right to privacy, instead of treating, stolen, internal UN e-mails as public property that merited a House debate. How would Erotocritou and the other proposer of the discussion, DIKO’s Andreas Angelides have reacted if their private e-mails were stolen and became the subject of a book that was subsequently discussed at a House Committee meeting?
Erotocritou repeated yesterday that the purpose of the meeting was to safeguard our institutions from the “hostile descriptions and hostile actions of Downer and his team that were directed against the President of the Republic, state officials, politicians, journalists and top priests.” But how would today’s meeting safeguard these institutions from Downer’s “neo-colonialist mentalities”?
