SUSPICIONS of collusion between the police and owners of big high street stores were being voiced in our establishment all this week after last weekend’s raids on four Larnaca shops in connection with illegal gambling.
There is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that the raids had been conducted in order to help sluggish business in the struggling retail sector. Every December, police carry out raids on suspected gambling joints, which have become as much a part of the Christmas season as street decorations, Christmas trees, artificial snow and manic shopping.
We know Christmas is nigh when we start reading newspaper reports about police raids on gambling joints and hear about the confiscation of 3,000 playing cards, 5,000 chips and dice. This year however, the raids started before the Christmas decorations had been put up on the main shopping streets.
Why had the cops decided to break with a long and much-loved festive tradition, launching their customary crackdown on illegal gambling in November? As several Coffeeshop customers suggested, the cops were trying to help high street retailers get punters into their shops.
The raids on gambling joints sent the subliminal message that the Christmas season had arrived and that people needed to go downtown and start shopping for presents.
THE RAIDS might not have had the desired retail effect, but they put the outspoken Larnaca businessman and folk hero Antonis Fanieros in the public spotlight after claims that the gambling joints belonged to him.
Fanieros who speaks like someone out of The Godfather movie – his vocal chords were damaged after an attempt on his life – took centre stage as he defended himself, railing against the cops who were persecuting him. There were 3,000 gambling clubs in Cyprus, he said, and the cops only raided his. “Who did 50 armed cops come to catch (at my club), Bin Laden?” he asked on a radio show.
HIS ANGRY rants of the radio contained great wisdom and many truths. Here are some of his views. “They want you to be born poor and die poor and to owe money even for your gravestone. And they want the rich who stole from all the poor to get even richer.”
There was also an anti-authority message. “Deputies and ministers should all go to hell; useless people harassing the poor. They are all immersed in dishonesty and instead of chasing them the police go after the poor. There are people who stole off others to become rich and Fanieros is to blame because he emerged honestly…. (politicians) are all actors, liars and hypocrites.”
He started out poor. “I ask you: is a poor man – we were born in a poor family, we worked, we are struggling to improve ourselves –prohibited from getting rich?” He opened his gambling club when the “the government took the land of my pig farm, the biggest pig farm in Aradippou, to build a road.”
ON WEDNESDAY Fanieros announced that he would stand as an independent candidate in Larnaca in next May’s parliamentary elections, so he could have immunity as a deputy and say whatever he wanted. Many Coffeeshop customers said they would register as voters in Larnaca so they could vote for him.
The only problem was that he required a ‘good conduct certificate’, which the authorities refused to grant him. As he told one radio station, he applied to open a ‘pezina’ (petrol station in Livadkia and the authorities were demanding a ‘good conduct certificate’ in order to give him a licence.
“They won’t give me a licence for a pezina, they won’t give me a licence for the other. What should I do? Die?”
Fanieros does not share the official line on the Cyprob, not demanding the return of all refugees to their homes. In another dig at our politicians, he said: “For 35 year they can’t find a solution to the Cyprus problem. And instead of sitting down and solving the problem so that the refugees can be compensated, they are dealing with Fanieros.”
Fanieros, who buys and sells real estate, should be standing for president not for a seat among the actors and liars. It is a post that a poor man can win (the comrade did it) and he won’t need a ‘good conduct certificate’ to be a presidential candidate.
ON THE occasion of the anniversary of the student uprising against the Greek Junta, Alithia’s veteran columnist Glafcos Xenos wrote an article that was mildly sympathetic to the Junta’s leader Colonel Papadopoulos.
He made the point that after the uprising of the students, Papadopoulos was toppled by the ultra-nationalist Brigadier Ioannides, who subsequently ordered the coup against Makarios. The situation had gone from bad to worse, he correctly pointed out. He concluded that Papadopoulos “died penniless in prison while the ‘democratic’ wheeler-dealers led Greece to the current state.”
Alithia’s new supreme boss Giorgos Tsalakos was outraged, announcing that he could not work for a media group that expressed sympathy for the Junta. The great democrat, Tsalakos, undemocratically cut Xenos’ daily column from the paper’s back page immediately and replaced it with a display ad for the group’s radio station.
Tsalakos’ anti-junta sensitivities must be a recent development, because for the previous 15 years he was news boss at Antenna TV, happily taking orders from the man whom the Greek Junta appointed Cyprus’ Permanent Representative to the UN during the coup.
SPEAKING of the Junta, the comrade brought up the Facebook fascist grandpa in the speech he made to Greece’s Parliament earlier this week, on the occasion of the Republic’s 50th anniversary. What was the relevance of a moron, telling his four-year-old grandson to shoot communists and Turks to the anniversary of the Republic? And why did the comrade think Greek MPs should be told about this triviality?
You can take the mukhtar out of the village but not the village out of the mukhtar, as they say in my village. It does not matter whether the comrade is speaking to the Brookings Institution, the European Policy Centre or Greek Parliament, for him it is a village audience.
DURING the Athens trip, the comrade also saw Greek PM George Papandreou. Both over-stressed the point that relations between them were very good, after the comrade’s refusal to attend the climate conference in Athens last month and press reports of a falling out. Our establishment has learnt that after the comrade declined Papandreou’s invitation to attend the conference, the PM asked a Cypriot acquaintance whether Athienou was a big town. As an excuse for not attending the conference, the comrade had said he had to be in Kyproulla because he was opening a primary school in Athienou, which might be a big village, but a town it ain’t.
SLAMMING asylum seekers and political refugees must be a huge vote winner. The matter was taken up by our Olympic demagogue Lefteris Christoforou, who had once apologized to a minister he unjustifiably attacked on the grounds that he had four kids, no other job and needed to get re-elected.
Accused by interior minister Neoclis Sylikiotis of promoting xenophobia, Lefteris said that “there is no bigger racism than obliging the Cypriot refugee to pay out of his limited savings for political refugees.” The government was racist said the populist Paralimnite for not recognizing the refugee rights of the children of female refugees. This is the acceptable face of racism as it would save the taxpayer a few dozen millions.
ULTRA-NATIONALIST EUROKO have also embraced the vote-winning anti-immigrant cause. The party has even appointed a ‘Co-ordinator of the Committee of Immigration Policy, Labour and Social Issues. The Co-ordinator, a certain Andreas Morphitis, had an article published in Simerini in which he asked “is it correct to draw parallels between Cypriot immigrants of the 1950s and ‘60s with the illegal immigrants in Cyprus in 2010?
Cypriots did not “enter countries illegally through unprotected borders or destroy their travel documents or sought welfare payments from the host country. On the contrary, with their daily toil, their sweat and respect for their host countries struggled for survival and self-improvement.”
Maybe this was the case in the sixties, but in the ‘80s in the UK, half the London Cypriots I knew worked cash-in-hand and also collected unemployment benefit, out of respect for the host country. Not all we Cypriots are saints, as Morphitis seems to think.
ON MONDAY at 1pm, at the top of Makarios Avenue (Capital Centre traffic lights) there was a small service vehicle with a crane on it. In the basket of the crane was a man putting up Christmas decorations, fiddling with cables and moving the ornaments around.
It was the lunch-time rush-hour, and there were no police to be seen anywhere. Another worker was standing in the middle of the road, a few yards ahead of the vehicle, waving to motorists to use one lane. The same hazardous ritual was taking place at the next set of Mak Ave traffic lights. The guys on the cranes should have been awarded medals for death-defying courage.
And the supervisors from Nicosia Municipality who sent the workers to do this job during the busiest time of day deserve a medal in stupidity. They did not even have the excuse that the workers putting their lives at risk on the cranes, during rush-hour, were foreigners.
ANY CUSTOMER who thought he would be spared the ordeal of reading about the latest efforts not to solve the Cyprob after getting this far, was wrong. We simply cannot ignore the scandalous report by the UN Secretary-General, which set a suffocating time-frame for an agreement between the two sides and threatened a UN disengagement from the Cyprob after 47 years of unproductive work.
The parties and newspapers were furious with Ban Ki-Moon’s reference to the “steady stream of untruthful and highly negative remarks about the United Nations reflected in the media. The criticism and misinformation about the UN is most unfortunate.” They were livid that he spoke about the negative climate and opposition to a settlement cultivated by the political parties and media.
Diko spokesman Fotis Fotiou, after listing the negative points, said “we expected more seriousness from the UNSG”. It was not only a flippant report, but according to EDEK chief Omirou, Ban had veered outside the spirit and letter of the UN Charter. Omirou also accused Ban of ignoring the freedom of the press and the democratic rights of political parties. He had not the right to give advice to the media and parties.
According to Phil, the report was not just an unacceptable case of interference in the internal affairs of the Cyprus Republic, “it was an official doubting of the Cyprus Republic and its institutions.”
It just makes you wonder why we insist on solving the Cyprob within the framework of an organization that is so hostile towards us. Isn’t there another, more favourable framework anywhere in the world within which not to solve the Cyprob? Maybe we should try the Islamic Conference or the Organisation of African Unity.
RIKKOS of EUROKO blamed Big Bad Al for the report, claiming that the Aussie treated Kyproulla as a protectorate, and behaved like a colonial governor who did as he pleased. If he could not behave himself, he should board the first plane back to his country. He said that Al did not leave the UNSG any choice but to intervene and “relieve Mr Downer of his duties and us of his presence.”
And once Mr Downer is sacked we could then write to the Security Council demanding that Ban was relieved of his duties, as well because he was as bad as Al.
UNDER the heading of Ban’s report about Kyproulla, it said “As approved by EOSG”. We did not know what EOSG stood for so we did a Google search of the acronym which came up with the following suggestions – Electro-Optical Systems Group, Engineering Occupational Standards Group. The third suggestion was the best and could have been interpreted as a subliminal message – End of Story, Goodbye.
