NO MATTER how many election chat shows there are on TV and radio, no matter how many pages are devoted to the elections by the newspapers, no matter how many public meetings are addressed by the candidates every day, the more intelligent voters — those who do not follow party directives — are still in a quandary over who to vote for on February 16.
Nothing is what it seems any longer, and we do not know who or what to believe. The election campaign has entered a twilight zone of myths, fairy tales, magic disguises, hidden meanings, double-speak, surrealism and stupidity from which there is no escape.
There is an escape if you do not have to write a bloody column every week about topical matters — you can just switch off the telly and radio, stop buying a newspaper, and avoid public places and crowds.
But even if you choose the existence of a recluse, in order to safeguard your sanity, come ballot day, you will still have to vote for someone (unless you can afford the full cop-out option and take a 10-day holiday abroad, thus avoiding both election Sundays). It would cost more in fines if you stayed on the plantation and did not turn up to vote because voting is compulsory.
As we’re on the subject of going abroad, there is a question that the authorities need to answer: if you are taken to court for not voting in the elections, how could you prove that you were abroad now that immigration officers no longer stamp your passport with the date of entering and leaving the plantation? You could show your hotel bill, but what if you were staying with friends? Do you fly them over as witnesses?
I suppose you could show your air-ticket in court, but would the judge accept it as evidence? After all, you can get a friendly travel agent to issue a ticket which he can cancel a day later. And what if you go abroad in a friend’s sailing boat or private jet? There would be no ticket to show the court in such case. And what would be the court’s decision if you went sailing on Saturday night and returned on Sunday evening after voting had officially ended?
What are the chances of a judge believing such a story and acquitting you? I suppose if you had been sailing within the plantation’s territorial waters, technically speaking, you had never left and therefore had an obligation to vote. But how would the judge know if you had left the plantation’s territorial waters? Does visiting the British bases or the occupied north count as being abroad?
Regular customers needn’t worry. My shrink has assured me that brain damage and obsessive behaviour caused by excessive exposure to the presidential election campaign is temporary, as long as you eat plenty of fruit and veg every day.
IT IS FAST becoming obvious that what this election campaign really needs is not a TV debate among all the candidates, as the Papa-Dop camp has been demanding. El presidente, who has refused to take part in a live TV debate with the other candidates scheduled for the night of Valentine’s Day, is being accused by Akelites of running scared because his old age and inability to cope would allegedly be shown up.
The truth, and we have seen much too little of this in the campaign, is that el presidente has a very good excuse for not taking part in a TV debate. Valentine’s Day is sacrosanct for him, as every year on February 14 he takes his wife Erini out for a romantic dinner, followed by a visit to a nightclub for some dancing to the latest techno beats. He should be praised, not criticised, for putting his marriage above the electioneering.
And let’s face it: a TV debate among the candidates would simply give them a platform to tell us more lies, as if we will have not heard enough by then. In the past few weeks our candidates have come up with more fairy tales than Hans Christian Andersen managed during his entire career. So why do we need another TV debate?
What would really help voters make up their minds would be to make each candidate sit a televised lie-detector test, so we can know for sure which one is the biggest liar. I, for one, do not want to vote for someone, thinking that he tells the best porkies, and then find out that he doesn’t. I would feel deceived and cheated. If we had the readings of the lie-detector test we could make the right decision and with a clear conscience.
THE ONLY problem with the lie-detector test is that it does not make any evaluation on the quality of the lie. Who should we regard as the biggest liar? The one who tells the most fibs, the biggest fib or the cleverest fib? And if the lies have already been told in a previous campaign, would the candidate still qualify for the title? These are legitimate points that we have tried to illustrate with examples below.
The favourites for the title of biggest liar of this campaign are el presidente and Papa-Dop Tassos (the commissar and the Führer would give them a run for their money if they were standing too), which may also explain why they are the clear front-runners in all the opinion polls. And if we needed proof that we Bananiots love a liar, it has been provided by the third candidate, Alecus Brutus. Unlike his colleague Tassos, he has a lawyer’s obsession with detail and accuracy, and is therefore lagging way behind in the polls.
But I digress. Of the front-runners, el presidente is much more accomplished and sophisticated in the fine art of fibbing than Tassos, whose lies are much cruder and blatant, almost of schoolkid standard. For instance, if Tassos had broken a school window and the teacher asked him if he had done it, he would say “No, I did not.” If el pres was asked the same question he would respond thus: “I expected rapid developments in the Cyprus problem.”
PERHAPS this should be made a bit clearer. El prez said he would be seeking only one term in office, back in 1993, but come 1998 he sought a second one. What he said in ’93 was, technically and philosophically, a lie but the pretence was that it was not a calculated one, as circumstances (then as now, he expected rapid developments in the Cyprob) demanded that he go back on his word and stand for re-election.
Ditto the Estragosha fiasco of 1998. He fought and won the last election on the promise of deploying the S-300missiles on the plantation (it was difficult to disbelieve him considering we had paid for them, even though our establishment had been warning for months that these strategic babies would never arrive). When they did not arrive, again he could claim it was not his fault and he had not lied — Turkey had been threatening a pre-emptive strike and Greece had intervened to stop their deployment on the plantation.
And he has decided to stand again for 16 months only because he expects big developments in the Cybrob. What if these do not materialise, or what if they do so during the 16th month of his third term and he has to stay in office for another two years? Whatever the case, el prez can claim that he did not knowingly mislead anyone, but that he was the victim of events that were out of his control, thus ameliorating the lie.
PAPA-DOP’S lies have no such sophistication or ambiguity, probably because the guy has such colossal arrogance that he believes he can get away with anything. Last week we had a classic illustration of this. During a TV appearance, Tassos categorically denied ever buying or selling any shares. The following day, the Small Investors’ Association (Pasecha) issued an announcement saying that back in 1999, he had pocketed £249,000 from a single share transaction. Another blatant Tassos lie bit the dust.
Faced with this revelation, he issued a statement saying that he had sold Laiki Bank shares which he had bought a very long time ago and sold them when he needed the cash. Even though he was the legal adviser of the bank, as well as of the Stock Exchange, he did not deem it necessary to declare the transaction, as the rules stipulated, but that’s another matter. The investors’ group also
accused him of putting pressure on the CSE authorities to give listing approval to companies of which he was a director or legal adviser; it also alleged that as “legal adviser or director of companies he validated misleading or false information given by these companies”.
This allegation was denied by his spokesman Marios Karoyian, who seems to have learned a lot from his illustrious boss. He told Politis on Monday: “Directors and legal advisers have no involvement in the administration and management of companies. They have absolutely no participation or responsibility in the drafting of the prospectus of the company which is listed on the stock exchange (nor do they sign it).”
Can he be so ignorant that he thinks companies appoint directors and legal advisers for exclusively decorative purposes, and that a company prospectus is drafted by company’s cleaning lady? Did his boss tell him all this?
Anyway, after this slight reversal, Tassos announced that apart from the Laiki shares, he had conducted no other shares transaction, and we believe him.
I ALSO liked his response to accusations that he was a hardliner on the Cyprob. He challenged his critics to tell him of a UN peace plan he had rejected and President Clerides had not, the implication being that they wouldn’t find one. Loucas Charalambous, writing in this paper last week, mentioned the de Cuellar peace plan of 1985, which Tassos stridently campaigned against for three years. Clerides fully supported its acceptance.
This is the guy who claimed that he had always sympathised with the Left, but had been a virulent anti-communist (to his credit, I hasten to add) during the Cold War years; who was never responsible for nepotism, but admitted in the past writing letters supporting the appointment/promotion of a specific candidate if he was as good as the others. This is the guy who had no part in the channelling of the Milosevic millions out of Yugoslavia during UN sanctions, apart from — according to his own admission — registering a couple of Yugoslav companies in Cyprus and helping a friendly state avoid sanctions.
So when he says that he is not a hardliner and wants to be elected president so “that I can negotiate a solution of the Cyprus problem based on the Kofi Annan plan”, there is not the slightest bit of doubt that he is telling the absolute and indisputable truth. We can safely say that we have no reason to doubt him.
MORALE has hit rock bottom at the Alecos Markides camp as the candidate is failing to attract the support that would give him some momentum. The camp decided not to publicise an opinion poll it had commissioned 10 days ago as it showed his share of the vote falling from 14 to about 11 per cent.
Recriminations and the shifting of blame has already begun, which is not a good sign. Apparently, the DISY deputies who defected to Markides are unhappy with the way the campaign has been conducted, as many of the organisers are totally inexperienced and are infuriatingly slow in making decisions, issuing announcements and exploiting opportunities for point-scoring.
As one DISY deputy said, the campaign is being run like the civil service. His candidacy appears to be fading fast, and not even the support of Pasecha has stopped the trend. On a happier note, though, Markides does have the support of the Association of Owners of Racehorses, who organised a gathering in his honour. The odds are still the same, though.
WHEN Markides announced his decision to stand, a skettos drinker who had known him for years remarked that Alecos always had poor judgment. We don’t know if this was correct in the case of his candidacy, but it sure was correct about the way he handled the Akis Papasavvas affair. Papasavvas was the senior counsel who wrote a weekly newspaper column abusing Markides, el presidente, the foreign minister etc. According to Attorney-general Markides’ report, he also was insubordinate and constantly ignored orders from his superiors.
Rather than order a disciplinary inquiry and have Papasavvas sacked, which would have been the least he deserved, Markides tried to be compassionate and caring, recommending to the Public Service Commission that the errant counsel be forced into premature retirement. In this way he would not lose his pension and 100 grand pay-off that all civil servants receive on retirement.
Papasavvas was not going to show gratitude for the AG’s generous gesture. He took the case to court, claiming that disciplinary procedure should have been followed, and arguing that the forced retirement was unconstitutional. He won the case, has now been reinstated, and has made Markides look a complete fool. This would not have happened if Markides had shown better judgment and instigated procedures to have him sacked.
CANDIDATES go to all sorts of places in the manic search for votes. We reported last week how el presidente was awarded the ‘Golden Cow’ medal by the Pancyprian Livestock Farmers Association. According to the Disy Führer, all the farmers adore el pres, as in his 10 years in office he has given them £550 million in subsidies. If he had given coffeeshop owners such help we would have a ceremony for him and award him the ‘Diamond Estragosha’.
Meanwhile, New Horizons candidate Nikos Koutsou on Wednesday morning took his campaign to the Macedonia taxi office. Note that a principled man like Koutsou could only go to a politically correct cab office, one with a nationalistic name, for votes. He would not be seen dead at nationally suspect firms such as Taxi Finlandia, VIPs Taxi or Columbia Cabs.
IF ANYONE is looking for free envelopes, I hear that the Papa-Dop campaign office has got about 200,000 to give away, if you don’t mind them having slogans promoting Tassos’ candidacy. His campaign manager had 200,000 normal-size envelopes, with window, printed in full colour, so that they could mail promotional material to voters. The plan was abandoned when the campaign managers worked out the postage costs of sending 200,000 envelopes.
I doubt this mindless waste of wood pulp will force sanctimonious tree-hugger George Perdikis to take his Greens out of the AKEL electoral alliance in protest. He has already betrayed his beloved trees once by staying with the alliance even after the “modernising sheftalia” had sanctioned the cutting of the trees that stood, for decades, outside the legislature building.
THIS establishment has always had a soft spot for the DISY Führer, a man who loves kicking against the pricks and has no illusions about himself. Even when he lies, intimidates, contradicts himself or is economical with the truth, he does it with such style and panache that you end up cheering him on. The reason is that unlike all the other party leaders, he has a sense of humour and doesn’t take himself too seriously.
These are fine qualities for a politician to have. So when the leader of the Stalinist Propaganda Bureau, Nicos Katsourides, likened Clerides and Markides to the Twin Towers, Nice Nik said in response: “Who is Bin Laden, Papadopoulos or Christofias?”
He also came up with arguably the most brilliantly disingenuous and twisted argument of the campaign so far. He insisted, during some discussion, that even if we were served with a UN peace plan that had to be rejected, Clerides was in a much better position to do this than Tassos, because he was not carrying any hardliner’s baggage with him and foreigners would accept his rejection more readily. So we will vote for el prez because he can solve the Cyprob, but if the need arises to reject the plan he can do that as well. Respect to the man.
NO ROOM to write about the rally held on Friday night in Nicosia to support the candidacy of Papa-Dop Tassos, but any freedom-loving person who saw it on television will have had the fear of God put into them. Such rabble-rousing has not been seen since Nuremberg. Christofias spoke like a man possessed, shouting at the top of his voice a
nd manically stirring the hatred of the mob. I did not see Papa-Dop’s speech because I had to turn the telly off when I heard his phoney adulation and idolisation of the “great Spyros Kyprianou”. When Spyros was presidente, Tassos used to say that he was biggest calamity that had ever befallen Cyprus and that he was a laughing stock and an object of ridicule.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I’m mad.
Salvador Dali
BUSH OF THE WEEK
The French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
