WHEN I wrote last Sunday in this column that President Christofias and his government were totally irresponsible and therefore dangerous, I was not expecting that my view would have been proved correct in such a tragic way.
I was referring to the president’s irresponsibility on issues relating to the economy. Often I cite his handling of the Cyprus problem to illustrate his irresponsibility, to which I have also attributed the regular revelation of scandals, involving his close associates.
His irresponsibility is illustrated everywhere and all the time. It is a personal gift – it is in his genes and therefore permanently his very own. It cannot be bought, it cannot be sold and it cannot be leased out. An irresponsible man will always be irresponsible. There is no such thing as an occasional sense of irresponsibility. If a man is irresponsible by nature, he will be irresponsible in everything. He cannot show a sense of responsibility on one issue and irresponsibility on another.
Christofias is probably the most striking example of this type of man. His political irresponsibility is applied to everything he takes on and it is no coincidence that nothing is going right – the Cyprus problem, the economy, domestic administration, institutions.
His political irresponsibility which, after three years of negotiations has taken the Cyprus problem to the worst point it has ever been, is the reason the economy is on the verge of bankruptcy; it is also the reason our institutions are in crisis, the reason for the Papasavvas and Moleskis scandals.
It is this gross irresponsibility which led to the decision to store the 98 containers full of gunpowder in Cyprus and caused the unprecedented tragedy with 13 dead, 61 injured and incalculable damage to the economy. All these are the direct result of the irresponsibility of one and the same man.
With regard to the tragic event of last Monday, there is no doubt that the president’s astonishingly irresponsible behaviour was exclusively determined by his sick anti-American fixation which pushes him to satisfy the whims of all the anti-US dictators of the world. Whoever is in the bad books of the US, automatically becomes a friend of Christofias.
It is obvious what happened. In order to keep happy his friend, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the US-hating president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he kept the deadly containers here and rejected all offers to have them taken elsewhere. He kept them here for safe keeping, presumably hoping to be able to deliver them to Syria at some stage. We all saw the horrendous results of this policy.
Someone could well ask: The president was mistaken to keep the containers here, but was it his fault that some brainless officials decided to store them inside the naval base that was next to the Vassiliko power station?
I am not suggesting that the president made the arrangements for the storage of the containers, but usually disaster strikes after a series of errors. He committed the first and biggest by keeping the containers in Cyprus.
Of course others should take a share of the responsibility for the disaster. Defence minister Costas Papacostas was forced to tender his resignation. But who appointed him? Was it not Christofias? Are we to accept that in a democratic country like ours, the president should not take any political responsibility for the actions of the people he appoints in key positions?
If he appoints inadequates to key positions, he is to blame for their blunders. It doesn’t make any sense for Papacostas to take political responsibility and for Christofias to wash his hands of the whole affair.
The man has messed up big time. He has wrecked everything and he should take the responsibility. In these tragic conditions that he created, the only real service he can offer to the country is to step down immediately.
