LAST MONDAY morning a Chinese worker climbed up a 50-metre CyTA antenna in the centre of Paphos to protest against his employer’s refusal to pay him wages he was owed over the last three years. A fellow countryman, employed by the same man also had the same complaint but was prevented from climbing up the antenna.
He stayed up there for hours, threatening to jump off if anyone tried to get close to him. By the afternoon, suffering from dehydration and exhaustion, he lay down on a small platform in a semi-conscious state and was brought down by firemen. Dozens of people gathered to watch the desperate man’s attempt to bring public attention to his plight.
He was eventually taken to hospital, where he was treated for dehydration and hypothermia and later released. The Chinese workers were protesting that they had no money, no food and no place to stay, while the man on the antenna held a placard with his employer’s telephone number on it.
They had reportedly been without a job since August when they decided it was pointless waiting for their enlightened employer to pay them and walked out, something they should have done a couple of years earlier if their version of events was accurate. Was it possible that they were owed three years’ wages? Possible, if they were not being paid their wages in full every month.
Even though the protestor was Chinese he did manage to win some sympathy from Paphians, who are not renowned for their sensitivity towards the plight of immigrant workers. Some even spoke on air against the employer and called on him to pay up.
What happened next, could only have happened on a plantation on which people always think of themselves as victims who are never to blame for anything. The employer of the two Chinese men appeared on a television station on Friday night, in order to, “defend my reputation” and “restore my name”.
He indignantly explained that he did not owe the Chinese men three years’ wages and it was outrageous that these allegations were circulating. He did admit that he owed each one ‘only’ $1,500, as if that was perfectly acceptable. The amount was far too small for these uppity Chinese to expose him publicly and ruin his name.
They had left their job four months earlier and he still hadn’t paid what he owed them, but he was in the right, of course because he was local and they were Chinese. And then he had to play the victim’s card – he had been receiving threatening calls and was afraid for his life in the last couple of months! He made it look as if the Paphos mafia was after him. Despite the alleged threats, the Paphian restaurateur, still, heroically, refused to pay his two employees!
For this stand on principle – refusing to give in to threats and pay his workers – he demanded our respect. As he told the TV reporter: “I will fight to restore my name and the names of all those who employ foreigners.” Once this fine, upstanding citizen has restored his good reputation, he might even pay the 1,500 bucks he owes his ungrateful, blackmailing, former employees, if they have not died of starvation or been deported.
THE PAPHOS district may have the biggest concentration of foreigners in the plantation, but Paphians remain as xenophobic and tribal as they have always been, unless of course they are selling something to a foreigner, in which case their famed warmth and hospitality shines through.
The English schoolgirls, who were sexually harassed at Emba gymnasium by their schoolmates, were not buying anything so they did not get the famed, Paphos hospitality treatment. On the contrary, neither their schoolmates nor their headmaster showed an inkling of sympathy after the incident, which made the national news.
Both the headmaster and a couple of schoolgirls interviewed by reporters insisted that the English girl who was being touched up by a gang of boys had asked for it. She had been provoking the boys with a friend of hers and got what she deserved, said a schoolgirl.
Would they have been so disparaging and unsympathetic if the girl was Cypriot? One Cypriot schoolgirl showing the type of contempt usually reserved for serial killers, told reporters: “They (English girls) hardly ever attend classes, loiter all day long in the playground, smoking talking on their mobile, flirting…”
One of the girl’s parents, on hearing what had happened turned up at the school, swearing and shouting and gave one boy a good hiding. The poor kid, according to all accounts, had not been in the gang that was harassing their daughter, but they probably felt better for doing it anyway. Whatever happened to English reserve and aloofness?
If the target of the boys was a Cypriot girl, the Paphian father would probably have turned up at the school with a shotgun. But then again a Cypriot girl would never provoke the boys.
AFTER TWO weeks of wrangling and posturing, our government, realising that it was losing the publicity battle, finally decided to take a more constructive stance about the Ledra Street crossing. Perhaps ‘deconstructive’ is a more appropriate word as it has demanded that the Turks demolish the bridge under construction for some agreement to be reached.
I will not bore you with details about our government’s counter-proposal or the Turkish military advance into the buffer zone. I would like to focus on the scoop carried by Simerini and Sigma TV regarding the Turks’ plans for the Ledra Street crossing. Both boasted uncovering “Turkish plans for Ledra (street)”.
They had obtained a map for the area which showed that the crossing would be turned into a “frontier station” which would have police, military police, customs, warehouses, a coffeeshop, toilets and two banks – not one but two banks. The Simerini and Sigma newshounds did not know that in Turkish, the word ‘bank’ meant ‘bench’. Yes there would be two benches at the ‘frontier station’.
Interestingly, the government, which had given the map to the Dias group, used the revelations to accuse the Turks of wanting to turn the crossing into a ‘frontier station’. The Ethnarch himself repeated the accusation, a couple of days later. So when our government set up a police station, a customs office and toilets at the Ayios Dometios crossing was it setting up a ‘frontier station’? Perhaps it does not qualify for this title because there are no banks there.
THE STORY about the National Guard officer (he is a colonel) who was caught taking kickbacks from a Chinese arms supplier has been covered up and you will not hear anything else about it. The man is very well-connected and therefore entitled to steal the taxpayer’s money.
The government had intended to prosecute, but decided against it after the colonel, who has been involved in the National Guard’s arms purchases for some time, threatened to make public everything he knew about kickback from arms sales. He has dirt on politicians and political parties all of whom implored the Ethnarch not to pursue the matter.
Tassos dropped the case and everyone was happy, everyone except the Chinese arms manufacturer, who paid the commission into the bank account of the colonel’s brother before receiving payment. The government has in the meantime decided to cancel the order for the guns.
I hear that a representative of the Chinese firm is planning on coming to the plantation and climbing on to a CyTA antenna in order demand that the colonel gives back the money he received as commission for the deal that never went through.
EIGHT DAYS ago, the government decided to hold a ceremony to honour all those who fell fighting during the Turkish invasion. Yes, 31 years after the event the state decided to honour the dead, and only a year after it had honoured hundreds who had allegedly fought against the coup and were still alive.
Some 600 cops were promoted for their br
ave resistance to the coup, which lasted a couple of hours. But one of the brave coup resistance fighters, Petros Papacharalambous, who was awarded a medal has written to the Ethnarch to protest because all he got for his bravery was crummy medal. He told the Ethnarch: “You have an obligation to reward all the resistance fighters, employees and other citizens in the same way as the policemen for the heroic resistance they put up and for their great bravery and self-sacrifice in defending democracy. Democracy and justice means equal treatment of all the resistance fighters and not promotions for some (policemen) and just medals and diplomas for the rest. With such diplomas and medals for the rest you insult, not only their dignity, but their very resistance…
“People cannot survive just with medals and diplomas. Medals and diplomas without the necessary means for life are useless.”
Papacharalmbous, a secondary school teacher, does not mince his words. But is it not incredible how he talks about an insult to his dignity and then shamelessly asks for money for his brave resistance to the coup? Well he did not ask for money but for a promotion he probably does not deserve that will earn him a bigger salary.
So how much money is the “great bravery and self-sacrifice” shown by the so-called resistance fighters worth? Papacharalambous did not say.
DID YOU KNOW that in Cyprus a law was passed to make it obligatory for anyone working as a hairdresser to have a hairdresser’s licence? The law was passed some months ago and some hairdressers association is going around demanding £40 from hairdressers to have a licence issued.
There are no tests involved to establish whether someone is qualified to cut hair and use a hairdryer. As long as you pay the association 40 quid you are given a licence, so even if someone brandishes a hairdresser’s licence it does not mean you will get a decent haircut. It is a legalised protection racket, approved by our deputies who cannot possibly read the laws they pass.
My barber has refused to pay for a licence, which means my hair-cut is unlicensed, but I have still to be stopped by the police.
A WEEKLY gossip rag, Mathe (Learn), recently carried a story about a hairdresser (did not say if she had a licence) from a Larnaca district village who had been videotaped giving a male friend something that sounds like blow-dry. Apparently the video was being circulated on the internet and on mobile phones and members of her family saw it.
Her son gave his mother a good beating the paper said, approvingly, while her relatives had stopped talking to her. However, her husband has forgiven her.
The paper reported: “According to residents of Larnaca district villages the hairdresser is an ‘old tart’, as she has seduced many men from the district and her escapades are constantly gossiped about.” The report concluded thus: “It is worth mentioning that many of her fellow villagers are wondering why her husband is still with her and does not throw her out into street where she deserves to be.”
WHY HAS the CyBC all of a sudden fallen in love with John Lennon, treating like some deity? Every day this week, both on radio and TV, there was some item to mark the 25th anniversary of his death, telling what a truly wonderful human being he was and how much he cared about world peace, the poor etc. Not once did they mention that he spent the last years of his life locked up in his super-luxury Manhattan flat, high on smack, watching television and ignoring the poor and destitute of the world.
He wrote some pretty good songs, but he was not Mother Teresa, as the CyBC would have us believe, because he wrote ‘Imagine’, a bad tune with lyrics that appeal to teenagers. And let’s not forget he was multi-millionaire superstar, enjoying all the luxuries that capitalism – which he so strongly opposed in his songs – had to offer.
