BLOODY foreigners were at it again in the last week, telling us when and how to solve the Cyprob, how to run our economy, to stop hiring unemployable Akelites in our civil service and what shape our cucumbers should be.
None of our enlightened hacks and politicians recognised the significance of the cucumber decision for our national survival, finding it beneath them to say anything about the shape of this noble vegetable that is part of our cultural heritage.
For those who do not follow the news, I am referring to the European Commission’s decision to lift its ban on excessively curvy cucumbers. Believe it or not, the Commission had rules stipulating the maximum curvature and minimum length a cucumber was permitted in order to be sold in EU markets.
Our establishment had made a big fuss about these monumentally idiotic rules even before we joined the EU, and demanded that the Cyprus cucumber, probably the best-tasting cucumber in the world despite its shape and small size (when it comes to cucumbers small is always better), be granted an exemption.
We had protested that it would be a travesty to ban our cucumbers because of appearance, while the EU treated those 15-inch abominations of pale-green watery mush, produced by the Dutch, as the model cucumber.
Our protests were ignored, but so were the EU’s idiotic cucumber rules by our authorities. The small curvy Cypriot cucumber has always been available in our shops so there was no point taking our justified complaint to the European Court of Cucumber Rights. Now, the EU’s pathetic rules have been repealed and we have been vindicated. Our angouri is safe from clueless Brussels bureaucrats.
THERE WAS no happy ending, however, to our heroic campaign against the suffocating time-frames that that the foreigners are trying to impose on us re: the solution of the Cyprob. The representatives of three countries (US, UK, Sweden) all tried to dictate that the two comrades should strike a peace deal by the end of the year.
Our foreign minister Marcos Kyprianou was particularly pissed off with all this pressure and said he found it “offensive” that foreign officials kept talking about the urgent need to reach a settlement. Nobody felt this urgency more than the Greek Cypriots, whose land and homes were under occupation, he pontificated on a morning radio show.
Well they could have fooled me, but I would not for a moment challenge the views of the son of Spy Kyp. If we are in such a rush for a settlement why are the custodians of patriotic purity always accusing foreigners of trying to “close” the Cyprob or of wanting to “rush through a solution”? Should we not applaud this urgency? Just asking.
In fairness, the waiting game sometimes works. In the case of the cucumbers, there were no suffocating time-frames and in the end justice prevailed.
SUFFOCATING time-frames no longer seem to be the main concern of our side. As Marcos and the AKEL leader Andros Kyprianou both pointed out in response to the comments of visiting State Department official Matt Bryza, ‘artificial time-frames’ needed to be avoided at all costs.
The danger is now posed by the ‘artificial’ and not the ‘suffocating’ time-frame. It was correct to change the adjective because if we started protesting that a six-month time-frame was ‘suffocating’ outsiders would think we were insane, which might not be too far from the truth, but there is no need to advertise it.
So we resourcefully came up with the ‘artificial’ time-frame, which was eloquently explained by the great political thinker Andros. If we set an ‘artificial’ time limit, the Turks would not negotiate, making arbitration necessary when we run out of time. It would be a bit like artificial insemination – while there is no sex, you still end up with Roesmary’s baby.
MATT BRYZA, to his credit, introduced a touch of rock ‘n’ roll to the mind-numbingly boring Cyprob talk, when he was quizzed by the hack mob. He understood that neither leader wanted to be put under pressure to “make concessions that their voters are not ready for,” but he added:
“It is a hope that everybody’s expressed, but as Mick Jagger said, ‘You can’t always get what you want’.” Someone should have told Bryza, that although we are great Stones’ fans on both sides of the dividing line, the song has no relevance to our thinking.
As dozens of foreign envoys and mediators have found over the years, the only Stones’ track our side likes to quote is ‘(I can’t get no) Satisfaction’. The Turks’ fave is ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
SWEDISH foreign minister Carl Bildt thankfully did not quote an Abba song when he was giving his ‘time-frame’ spiel and threatening to pull UNFICYP out, but I will: Mamma Mia.
A member of the Hall of Infamy since the Ethnarch’s days, Bildt was given the full baddy treatment by Antenna/Phil, EU conspiracy-theorist Pavlos Xanthoulis, who uncovers at least one heinous plot against Kyproulla in Brussels every week.
Xanthoullis, invited to Stockholm for the assumption of the EU presidency by Sweden, reported a “crescendo of threats” by Bildt who, according to his paper’s main headline, was cracking the “whip” against us, because he said that the current talks were the “last chance” for a settlement.
These Swedes seem determined to replace the Brits at the top of our hate-parade, but are six months enough to win our universal hatred? He should not forget that ‘The winner takes it all’.
THE BANKRUPTCY policies zealously pursued by our government were politely rubbished by the meddling foreigners of the IMF last Monday in a report about the state of our economy.
It warned that we were heading for big deficits if the government did not stop throwing away money aimlessly and did not drop its plans to build a mammoth public service. Nothing we did not know or had not written about, but when the IMF says the great and the good all react angrily.
The spokesmen of the economic mismanagement consensus, led by our friend the finance minister who, like his economically clueless boss, is interested in the welfare of people and not the welfare of numbers, all discredited the Fund’s neo-liberal suggestions for wage restraint and less government spending.
What sane person would take the lunatic ideas of union bosses and Akelites about the economy seriously? I hate to side with the foreigners here, but in my not so humble opinion, the economic views of IMF experts are slightly more reliable than those of clueless union bosses like Kyritsis and Hadjipetrou and a finance minister whose primary objective is to make the Soviet economic ideas of his boss seem less insane than they really are.
OUR FRIEND Charilaos, ultra-smart and highly-educated, may think that by publicly behaving as the loyal servant of the comrade presidente, deferring to his wisdom and defending his bankruptcy economics, he is advancing his own colossal, political ambitions.
As good friends of Charilaos, we urge him to think again about who is using who? The crafty comrade is, in fact, using Charilaos to give credibility and legitimacy to his reckless economic policies. When these policies are being promoted by a Cambridge and Harvard graduate, former banker of high intelligence, scion of old money and charismatic salesman, they become more acceptable to our unthinking business establishment.
These are no longer the Soviet policies of an unrepentant communist, but of a well-respected and highly-qualified economist. Once disaster has struck though, Charilaos will be the fall-guy.
I suspect it would give the comrade immense pleasure to blame our economic woes on a member of the much-detested Nicosia aristocracy.
THE LATEST conspiracy to make the news was not uncovered by Xanthoullis but by the mayors of Ayia Napa and Pa
ralimni. The former claimed that Paphos businessmen were using the high number of swine flu cases in the Famagusta district to persuade local tourists to go to Horkatosville instead of Napa.
The mayors did not have much evidence to back their theory. Their radio rants deflected attention away from what seems like a more plausible conspiracy, behind which could be the dastardly Brits. Is it a coincidence swine flu began to spread only after big numbers of British tourists started arriving on the island of love?
Would anyone be surprised that this is part of a British government conspiracy, to wear down our resistance to an unfair, pro-Turkish settlement? People suffering from swine flu would be too weak to resist, and I am surprised none of our politicians identified this alarming possibility.
SWINE FLU hysteria is gathering momentum. Before long, anyone who has driven through Ayia Napa will be stopping at the Nicosia General Hospital on the way back demanding he is tested for the flu.
This was more or less what happened on Wednesday night when some 30 school-leavers, who had been holidaying in Napa, arrived at Nicosia General with their parents demanding that they were tested. None of them had sneezed, let alone displayed symptoms, but they were in a panic after two fellow students who had been staying at the same holiday apartments had caught swine flu.
The health ministry is terrified of the prospect of every Costis and Yiannis with a runny nose turning up to the hospitals for flu test – a prospect that cannot be ruled out given our herd mentality tendencies – because each test costs €300 and takes several hours to carry out.
THREE CHEERS for the journalists’ union for backing author Makarios Droushiotis in his spat with the head of the State Archives Efrosyni Parparinou.
Parparinou had written to Droushiotis demanding that he handed over documents of the secret service KYP, which he had included in his recently published book, Two Attempts and a Murder: the Greek Junta and Cyprus 1967-1970. Failure to do so was in violation of the law and could lead to the guilty party’s imprisonment, she warned.
The documents had been given to Droushiotis by the son of the late Giorgos Toumbazos, who had been head of KYP in the late sixties. Toumbazos had done what all state officials, including former presidents, had done – taken archives with him when he left his post.
Parparinou has never written to former presidentes or their heirs threatening them with jail sentences if they did not return the state documents they took with them, so why did she remember the existence of the law in the case of Droushiotis?
According to her letter she was prompted into action by a report in Phil, which said the Yiorkadjis Foundation had expressed its strong disapproval about state documents being in the possession of a journalist. The book, incidentally, deals with the murder of former interior minister Polycarpos Yiorkadjis, after whom the foundation is named.
It was a bit rich of the foundation, which is run by Yiorkadjis’ son and his father-in-law – the illustrious Kokos Eliades – to take the moral high ground about state archives. When the late Yiorkadjis left the ministry of interior and defence, as it was known at the time, he had filing cabinets with state documents loaded on to a truck and took everything with him. The matter was even discussed at the House of Representatives.
Has Parparinou written to Yiorkadjis’ heirs to demand the return of these state documents? Or does the law allow state documents to be kept by individuals as long as the Yiorkadjis Foundation does not protest and Phil does not run a report about it?
WE HEAR that the Antenna news boss Giorgos Tsalakos has decided to retire after being in the job for 15 years. Anyone who lasts so long working under the autocratic rule of Antenna’s big-shot owner Loukis P and leaves on good terms deserves to have a statue erected in his honour. I would not be surprised if Loukis P, a generous chap, was willing to pay for it.
No decision has been made about Tsalakos’ successor. One ambitious hack is reportedly vying for job, but I will not mention his name because the last time I linked him to vacant media job he called me a garos.
I WOULD like to close this week’s shop by repeating our establishment’s boundless joy over the news that the future of the short and weird-shaped Cyprus cucumber has finally been secured. And if we are prepared to wait long enough and do nothing apart from resist artificial time-frames, the future of the Poor People’s Republic of Kyproulla would also be secured.
