YOU HAD to laugh seeing the film footage of the glum-looking mukhtars of the two communities standing either side of Ban Ki-moon, staring into the void, as he read his statement straight after the meeting at UN headquarters.
They looked like two naughty schoolboys being told off in front of the classroom by the benevolent headmaster whose patience was at breaking point, but was giving them one last chance to mend their ways.
He put them on probation until the end of January, but if their behaviour does not improve drastically by then he will expel both them and their problem from the UN for good. They will no longer be allowed to take the piss out of everyone as they have been given more than enough time to cut out the monkey business and get serious.
Will they heed this final warning and take some responsibility as their long-suffering headmaster urged them to do, or will they carry on misbehaving and insisting that the other boy is to blame for messing about in the classroom?
Both looked pretty miserable and dispirited while listening to the public reprimand, but I am certain that they will get over it once they are back in the sun and dust of their separate playgrounds in Kyproulla, where they can be as naughty as they like.
DESPITE the public bollocking, which must have been preceded by a much worse one at the private meeting, the comrade was in defiant mood. He called newsmen and showed off his talent for Stalinist propaganda, by informing them that he was “very satisfied with the outcome of the meeting”.
None of the scare stories circulating in Cyprus ahead of the meeting proved correct, he triumphantly announced, implying that our great leader had saved us. “There are no time-frames, there are no threats from anywhere and the Secretary-General has no intention whatsoever of applying pressure.”
Apart from forcing the two sides to stop the delaying tactics, stop the blame-game and intensify their contacts, there was indeed no pressure. And there was certainly no time-frame, apart from the end of January deadline for progress. And there were certainly no threats apart from Ban threatening to end his good offices mission if significant progress was not reported by the end of January – which was not a time-frame – when he arranged to meet the two leaders again.
Under the circumstances, we should congratulate the comrade for achieving all his objectives at the meeting and adding one he forgot to mention – no change to the procedure, apart from intensifying the meetings and Big Bad Al submitting convergence proposals.
IT WAS re-assuring to see that even the bash-patriotic, armchair warriors of EDEK also declared the comrade’s handling of the Big Apple meeting a resounding success.
So much so, that the party spokesman with the appalling hair-style, Panicos Papadakis, was bragging on TV that the negativity surrounding the meeting, to which his party had made a big contribution, had helped the illustrious comrade secure the satisfactory outcome.
Had our parties not taken ‘pre-emptive action’, setting all those negative conditions, which were conveyed to Ban in a letter from the comrade, the outcome of the meeting would not have been so positive. The UN would have adopted a much tougher stance towards our side explained Papadakis, who also defined what constituted an ‘asphyxiating time-frame’.
Two months and a bit, for Ban’s progress review, did not constitute an asphyxiating time-frame he said. Had it been less than two months we would all have needed oxygen masks.
NOBODY praised Archbishop Chrys the Second for his personal contribution to the positive outcome of the meeting. Chrys sent a letter to Ban Ki-moon urging him to uphold and defend the principles of the UN at the meeting and to restore the human rights of the Cypriot people that were violated by the invasion.
He also called on the UN to allow war to be declared against Turkey as a way of freeing us from the occupation. “If in other cases, such as Iraq, the Organisation which you lead, allowed a war against a country that invaded another country, is it too much for us to ask for the restoration of our violated rights in the same way?” he wrote in his letter.
Sources at the UN inform us that Ban has contacted several countries to enquire whether they would invade Turkey in order to restore Greek Cypriot rights, but has yet to receive a reply.
IN EARLY October, Athanasios Ellis, a columnist in Greece’s Kathimerini newspaper wondered why no official from the US administration had met the comrade president when he was in the Big Apple for the UN General Assembly, the previous month. Not even Vice-President Joe Biden who has very close links with the Greek lobby saw him.
One possible explanation, Ellis wrote, was that the Yanks were pissed off with comrade Tof over a speech he had made at a memorial service for a certain Giorgos Tsikouris, who was killed in the summer of 1970 when the bomb he and an Italian woman wanted to place at the US embassy in Athens exploded before they got to the building. Ellis said the transcript of the comrade’s speech had been sent to the White House by US ambassador in Nicosia Frank Urbancic, the only ambassador who drives around in a diplokambino.
While in New York, Tof tried to see all representatives of the five permanent Security Council members, but he failed to see the US ambassador as she was reportedly out of town.
THE INCOMPETENT terrorist, Tsikouris, came from an Akelite family and was therefore declared an AKEL hero of the resistance against the junta. The commies also have erected a monument somewhere in the capital to honour his dubious heroism.
At a memorial service held on August 29, the comrade said of Tsikouris’ botched attempt at terrorism: “The mission aimed, through a bloodless bomb attack on the building of the US embassy in Athens, to show up the inspirer and moral instigator of the (1967 junta) April coup…. Unfortunately, in the course of implementing the plan, the detonator was activated early and the two young people lost their lives.”
Our president considered it “unfortunate” that a commie terrorist blew himself up instead of the US embassy building, in his “bloodless bomb attack”.
THE FLAME of anti-US sentiment will never be allowed to go out, by our commie rulers. On Wednesday the brainless Akelite youth, in order to mark the 37th anniversary of the Greek junta’s suppression of the uprising by Polytechnic students, was sent to demonstrate outside the US embassy. As our president said, the Yanks were “the inspirers and moral instigators of the coup”.
The demonstrators were not born when the Polytechnic events took place, but they had no problem chanting the moronic Akel slogans of the period ‘Nato-Sia-Prodosia’ (Nato, CIA, treachery). An Akelite student leader, speaking to the mob, revealed that “there was a common conspiracy, a joint plan that was prepared in the dark corridors of the CIA and Nato.”
The government’s introduction of critical thinking in state schools is producing impressive results.
THE CHAMPIONS of political correctness were collectively beating their breasts this week after seeing the footage of a four-year-old boy holding a toy gun and being encouraged by his fascist grandfather to say he would kill Turks and communists. His bash-patriotic grandfather, who had taken the video and posted it on his Facebook profile, also instructed the kid to chant ‘long live the junta’.
Everyone was outraged, and the Commissioner for Children’s Rights Leda Koursoumba called on the state and welfare services to take action because the grandfather was instilling racism and fascism in the child. The police, meanwhile, had sent the case to the Attorney General who could press charges.
There was even more outrage when it transpired that the brainless grandpa was a public servant, as if public servants cannot be Turk-hating, commie-hating, junta-loving fascists. I think we are guilty of double standards here, because under the current regime if a public servant is a US-hating, capitalist-hating, Stalinism-loving commie, nobody protests and it greatly enhances his promotion prospects.
Nor does Koursoumba demand the intervention of the welfare services when Akelites brainwash their kids with anti-Western propaganda and teach them to chant ‘Natio-Sia prodosia’.
THE THREAT is not from a fascist pappous, but from the black-clad, ultra-nationalist youths who belong to organisations with fascist names name like National Popular Front and Greek Resistance Movement and go around beating anyone non-Greek.
Some seven people were beaten up last weekend including two Cypriot taxi drivers and female Cypriot doctor – the rest were non-Greek. A few days later young thugs attacked an Asian man walking in downtown Nicosia. Nobody seems too bothered about these incidents, nor about the racist organisations which pretend they are concerned about the growth of illegal immigrants.
One of the teenagers arrested in connection with last weekend’s attacks allegedly told the police that he and his friends attacked the female doctor because they thought she was Chinese. That is a pretty good excuse.
NOBODY could believe that after all that fuss made by rating agency Standard and Poor’s about the need for the government to reduce its spending to avoid a downgrading, it eventually based Tuesday’s decision to downgrade our economy on the huge size of our banking sector and its big exposure in Greece.
Bank insiders are blaming this surprise on our former friend Charilaos, claiming he persuaded the S&P analysts to focus their attention on the banking sector so as to take some pressure off the government’s continuing efforts to bankrupt the country. Cyprus’ banks may be over-exposed, but if we are going to go under it will be because of the state’s insolvency and not the banking sector’s.
Then again, it is very difficult to feel any sympathy for our bloody banks, whose interest rates make them the loan sharks of the EU. The good news for borrowers is that one of the big banks will announce an interest rate cut in the next few days. Rates, customers were told, would go down from the current 7.40 per cent to 7.35. I bet there are underworld loan sharks who offered more competitive rates.
DEPUTIES made a big fuss at a committee meeting on Wednesday about the operation of illegal private courts run by crime syndicates, which administer justice by threatening the use of violence. Although more costly than normal courts (the judge takes a cut of the debt being collected) they are a lot more effective because no defendant would dare to ignore a decision.
Our lawyer deputies expressed some very strong opinions against the clandestine courts, as we would have expected. And they had an additional reason to be angry. Apparently civil cases are down by 33 per cent, which represent a big reduction in earnings for lawyers, even though money is the least of our deputies’ concerns. As long as libel suits are not tried in the illegal courts we are happy.
TWO WEEKS ago this paper published a hostile letter from the do-gooder NGO known as the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies, which was directed at our establishment’s libertarian views about prostitution. There is no room to give an adequate response (we will do this next week) but below is what Professor Christie Davies wrote in the web-page of the Social Affairs Unit, regarding UK plans to prosecute men who paid for sex:
“The idea seems to have come from Sweden, the land of the “New Totalitarians” – the country where they have to go to Germany to watch boxing and to Denmark to get drunk, the country where the secret services eliminate unPC internet sites the government does not like and where African mothers go to jail for smacking their children.”
I wonder what they would have done to the fascist pappous if he were living in Sweden.
