THE National Guard should be turned into a semi-professional army and military service should be simultaneously reduced from 24 to 14 months, DISY leader Nikos Anastassiades said yesterday.
Citing studies commissioned by the party, Anastassiades said the lengthy duration of the service was the primary cause of draft dodging, and suggested that creating an army comprising partly professional soldiers and partly conscripts would kill two birds with one stone.
Criticising the AKEL administration for abandoning plans to cut the draft to 19 months, Anastassiades went on to wonder whether the government’s defence policy “is limited to sending emails from the Presidential Palace to the Defence Ministry asking that so-and-so gets preferential treatment”.
Speaking at an election news conference, Anastassiades also took the government to task on a raft of other defence and security policy issues.
Inevitably, he fired a salvo at President Christofias for the latter’s refusal to ratify a recent parliamentary resolution calling for Cyprus to join the Partnership for Peace (PfP).
He accused the AKEL government of being dogmatic and of sticking to “outdated obsessions”.
Cyprus’ absence from PfP meant that the country had no say in decisions made at NATO level affecting its security, Anastassiades charged.
Moreover, he said, the government’s argument that it does not want to join PfP, because it wants nothing to do with NATO, is inconsistent..
By contrast, he pointed out, the administration provided support to UNIFIL operations in Lebanon and, moreover, it entered into an agreement with Canada allowing the latter to station troops on the island as part of NATO operations in Afghanistan.
Anastassiades noted also that in 2003 Christofias was acting chairman of the Cabinet when the body gave the green light for NATO bombers to use Cyprus airspace in operations against Iraq.
Responding, government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou said AKEL was not in power in 2003, and that consequently the Iraq decision was not Christofias’.
Stefanou hit back with AKEL’s own ace up the sleeve: he brought up the DISY-led Clerides’ government’s purchase of the Russian S-300 long range surface-to-air missile systems back in 1998.
The missiles were paid for but were never deployed on the island after international pressure.
“Mr. Anastassiades forgot to mention the purchase of the S-300s, which cost Cypriot taxpayers half a billion euros and never got here,” said Stefanou.
“Of course, before the elections of that year the taxpayers had their fill of the missiles by watching them being launched on television thousands of times over,” he remarked.
