By Loucas Charalambous
MANY MYTHS have collapsed under the weight of the unexpected events of the last few months in our joke state. The myth that crashed most spectacularly, however, is the one relating to AKEL.
The party of the ‘working people’ may have had many weaknesses, but not even Stalin would have believed that it would have been proved a party of theft as well.
In some perverse way it had managed to safeguard a pretence that it was a party that had steered clear of financial corruption.
Even its critics accepted this myth.
If you had asked them what they thought a few years ago, they would tell you that they opposed AKEL for a hundred reasons, but they almost never questioned the honesty of its leaders.
This myth has now been debunked in the most emphatic way.
Everyone now knows that one of the main hang-outs of our political mafia is at AKEL.
Facts speak for themselves. No matter how hard party chief Andros Kyprianou has been trying to muddy the waters, he has failed to convince anyone.
I hope that the first to see this will be the thousands of poor but honest people who make up the mass of AKEL’s supporters.
One wonders how Kyprianou finds the nerve to stand in front of the cameras and talk about a stitch-up and fabricated statements aimed, supposedly, “at the weakening and denigration of AKEL in public opinion.” If AKEL has been denigrated this is exclusively down to him and his comrades.
His rivals do not need any stitch-up to weaken AKEL.
This task has been performed very successfully by Messrs Christofias, Kyprianou, Katsourides and the other political stars of the party’s leadership. Five years in power were enough for them to lead the country to bankruptcy and the party to self-ridicule and into disrepute.
The apogee of Kyprianou’s audacity is an incredible statement that he has repeated daily on radio and television. “None of those dealing with the Dromolaxia case has dealt with the substance of the issue, whether the investment by the CyTA provident fund was a good investment.
This is the main issue that should occupy them.”
I cannot recall ever hearing such an audaciously stupid statement by any of our politicians before. It is truly astonishing to hear the leader of a big party utter such a thoughtless view, which to me, open encourages corruption.
It is like telling people handling public money, ‘steal as much as you like and do not be afraid as long as your investment is sound; if the investment is successful, taking a cut is permitted.’
By Kyprianou’s logic, there is nothing wrong with generating backhanders if the investment is good. Thes are the political and moral values embraced by the AKEL general secretary.
As if this were not bad enough, he is trying to turn the party into ‘Chrysi Avgi’ (Golden Dawn) attacking state institutions, organising mob gatherings outside police cells and warning those involved in the investigation of the scandal that “in five years there will be another government” which, he was implying, would punish them.
Those who jokingly claim that Stalin had not died but was living in AKEL headquarters have a point.
The question that all honest AKEL voters should ask is the following: With such a party leadership, do AKEL’s rivals need stitch-ups and fabricated statements to weaken it and disparage it in people’s eyes? Does AKEL need enemies when it has leaders like Kyprianou, Katsourides, Zanettou and Christofias?
