TODAY is the biggest day in the history of Greek sport. Greece is in the final of Euro 2004, playing the hosts and hot favourites Portugal. Even we atheists will be on our knees tonight praying to the Almighty for victory. Never before in the history of international football tournaments, have such conclusively emphatic underdogs (no tradition, no experience, no galacticos and no chance) reached the final.
Foreign commentators have not been too flattering about Greece’s fairy-tale advance, criticising the ultra-defensive tactics and the smothering of the opposition, but who cares. They have been describing the team as “effective”, a polite way of saying they are boring, but who cares? We are in the final.
As one England fan wrote on the BBC web-site: “Greece play boring negative football but as an England fan I would sell my left bollock to get to an international final, playing boringly or not.”
I think that just about sums it up. I will not say anything else in case it brings bad luck, as we Greeks are very superstitious people.
OUR ETHNARCH, may have taken politics back to the dark ages of the 1960s but the man he appointed Attorney-general, Solon Nikitas, has taken the legal system back to the 19th century. The single-mindedness with which the most trivial of cases are pursued and the relish with which prison sentences are sought for petty offenders is unprecedented.
This modern-day Javert knows not the meaning of words such as compassion and mercy, pursuing minor cases involving teenagers – as if giving them a criminal record is something to be proud of. If an AG’s competence and wisdom were measured by the number of people he put in prison, Solon would be the most successful in the history of the plantation.
Never has the Nicosia Central Prison been so overcrowded. There were 508 prisoners at the last count, a hundred more than a year ago, when the authorities were publicly complaining about overcrowding which threatened security. Despite critical reports by the Ombudswoman and EU officials about living conditions in the overcrowded prisons, Javert keeps packing them in.
Not a single case has been discontinued since he took over, and staff can no longer hide their frustration with their boss’s ‘no mercy’ policy, as they are forced to waste valuable time prosecuting the most pointless cases. Another year of Solon as AG, we will have to build another prison or re-introduce the death penalty to ease the overcrowding in the existing one. I can guess what Javert would prefer.
SOME 200 of those serving time are impoverished foreign workers who had entered the plantation illegally. Despite a government decision authorising the automatic deportation of these unfortunates, Javert insists on prosecuting them and securing custodial sentences. And people are still being imprisoned for debts, despite the change in law.
Ten days ago, George Lanitis reported a case of a Filipina who was arrested at the airport as she was about the leave the plantation for good, having completed the maximum four years of working here. She was remanded in custody for allegedly stealing 10 tweezers and two broken watches from the family who employed her. Javert kept her on the plantation and prosecuted.
To his great disappointment he was unable to secure a sentence, as the husband of the woman who had accused the maid of stealing, told the court that the tweezers and broken watches had, actually, been given to her by his wife.
There was also the case of a teenager who had stolen a bike and then left it in a field. The police picked up the teenager, whose father subsequently bought a new bike for the owner who was happy and withdrew the complaint she had filed with the police.
But Javert insisted that the kid must be prosecuted and the case has gone to court.
And what can you say about his insistence that a man who had suffered a stroke and is in a wheelchair should go to prison. Admittedly, the man had been sentenced for a serious crime, but a medical committee had recommended that he should not be imprisoned because of his condition and the fact that he was unable to look after himself. Javert completely ignored the council.
It is mind-boggling how such a zealous prosecutor, hell-bent on bringing every petty criminal to justice could have deemed the police allegations against Dr Madsakis not even worthy of investigation and only changed his mind, two months later, because of pressure from newspapers and politicians. Had Madsakis stolen a couple of tweezers, I am sure he would have applied for a lifting of his parliamentary immunity.
WE WERE all pretty surprised when, in the June Euro elections, social democratic party EDEK managed to double its strength, taking 11 per cent of the vote. This was a party in disarray, led by man who has been striving to be Dr Lyssarides the Second but fails lamentably to produce anywhere near as much hot air as his hero.
So why was EDEK so successful in the elections? According to it allies AKEL, it is because EDEK’s two ministers in the Papa-Dop government are frenziedly engaged in rusfetological activity. Minister of Justice Doros Theodorou is in control of the police and Defence Minister Koullis Mavronicolas is in charge of the National Guard, two sectors in which the scope for seriously rampant rusfeti is limitless.
By using the promotions, transfers and appointments in the police and army, the two EDEK ministers have secured their party big numbers of new voters. Doros, as we have reported, sees rusfeti applicants, personally, at EDEK’s offices on Saturday, whereas the cunning Koullis has Mrs Mavronicola handling the rusfeti requests.
With DIKO, the party which owns all the rusfeti rights on the plantation, favouring its own people as well, AKEL’s members have been left out in the cold, even though Papa-Dop owed his election to them. The comrades, according to a report in last Sunday’s Politis, are so enraged about this gross injustice that they went to Papa-Dop to complain, accusing Mavronicolas of turning the National Guard into an EDEK bastion.
Tassos’ response to the comrades, according to Politis was, “bring me evidence and I will sack him”. Surely, Mavronicolas has to be proved guilty of engaging in rusfeti by a court before he is sacked.
ITS CONFIDENCE boosted by the election result, EDEK has now decided to push home the advantage by re-packaging and re-selling the old Clerides myth about the Unified Defence Dogma with Greece (according to this dogma, if Turkey attacked Cyprus, Greece’s army would run to our defence). In fact, for a government that dabbles so much in modern mythology and dogmatism, I am surprised that we have heard so little about the dogma.
The real stumbling block has been the new government of Greece, whose priority is the normalisation of relations with Turkey rather than peddling imaginary defence pacts to us Bananiots. Mavronicolas has tried to revive the myth whenever he visits Greece, but his Greek counterpart, Spilios Spiliotopoulos, refuses to play.
Back in May, Spiliotopoulos had tried, in a sensitive way to lay the dogma to rest by telling Greek TV: “If you want to implement a dogma you must have the military means. The question is did we have or do we now have the means?”
Everyone knows the answer, but Mavronicolas insists on keeping the myth alive.
On Thursday Koullis was in Athens for his first meeting with Spiliotopoulos since the referendum, and issued a press release saying that he would be discussing the Unified Defence Dogma with him. Koullis, obviously did not read the interview given by Spilios to the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, the previous weekend.
His interviewer asked: “Are you still worried that war will break out?” His reply was a cold shower for Koullis and the Dogmatics. “A war? Between Turkey and Greece? No. Never. Never….. Now we have left behind the period of tension.” Even though Greece has no intention of ever going to war with Turkey, it does not mean that the Unified Defence Myth cannot be implemented.
THE FIRST time the dogma was tested was during the Greece-Turkey stand-off over Imia in 1996. Despite the existence of the dogma, our presidente was unable to communicate with Greek government to find out what we should do. After that experience a hot-line was set up at the palazzo for direct contact with the Greek PM.
Asked during a National Council meeting, a few years later, whether the hot-line was ever used, the old sea-wolf joked that the phone had rang a few times and when he answered it had always been someone wanting to order a pizza. More recently, Papa-Dop also admitted receiving pizza orders on the hot-line, which says it all about the Unified thin-crust Dogma with extra pepperoni.
The only real Unified Defence Dogma consists of four Greek warriors – Dellas, Kapsis, Seitarides and Fysas – under the command of German King Otto. And you can see it in action on the telly tonight. Call the palazzo early, if you want your pizza delivered before the start of the match.
SPEAKING of modern mythology, nobody weaves fairy tales better that out Ethnarch. “I want a solution yesterday”, he said a couple of weeks ago. He also insists that he is committed to bizonal, bicommunal federation, but when it was offered to us yesterday he told us to reject it, because a better solution could be secured once we had joined the EU.
This is proving another big myth. We have received a taste of the just and fair ‘European solution’ all the no-voters had claimed was round the corner, and nobody likes it, least of all Tassos, who plans to take the EU to court if it goes ahead with plans to establish direct trade links with the Turkish Bananiots and recognise the pseudo-ports in the north.
Even bash-patriotic Simerini, which served the myth of the ‘European solution’, has lost its faith in the EU as last Tuesday’s editorial showed. “Because we said ‘no’ to the Annan abortion, to the dissolution of the Cyprus Republic and its transformation into a Turkish protectorate, Europe, of which we are a full member, has decided to punish us…. Why did we sign the Treaty of Accession last year? So they can humiliate us today? This is not Europe, our Europe.”
The Ethnarch, is also furious about the developments, but has found a new myth to peddle. The Cyprus solution would be based on the new European constitution, he declared, while this week he called on the EU to undertake an initiative for a settlement of our problem. The Europeans will come running, as they have no reason to doubt our Ethnarch’s sincerity and commitment to a solution.
DURING the referendum campaign, Sigma TV had brought some bash-patriots from Greece – lawyer Lykourezos and hackette Kyra Adam – to urge us to reject the satanic plan. It did not matter if EU Enlargement Commissioner Gunter Verheugen felt that we had cheated and misled him, they both insisted. By June he would have stepped down and returned to Bavaria to spend his time with his grandchildren.
They have been proved spectacularly wrong. Verheugen is not only staying in Brussels, he is set to become Vice-President of Economic Affairs, a super-commissioner. We’d better start reducing our fiscal deficit pretty soon, because Verheugen would love to turn the screw on the Ethnarch.
WHAT IS it that Larnaca Airport does to our Ethnarch that brings out all his aggression and arrogance? Every time he is at the VIP lounge, departing or arriving, he seems to turn into venomous viper. The poison flows as freely and abundantly as cheap booze at an English stag party and he doesn’t care who is bitten.
His VIP lounge victims have included the DISY Fuhrer, Gunter Verheugen, Colin Powell, Alvaro de Soto, Kofi Annan, Giorgos Papandreou, the journalistic community and the governments of the axis of evil. Is it the airport that has this effect on him, or is he always tetchy and irritable before and after a flight?
It could be a coincidence. After all, the VIP lounge has become the only place at which he speaks to hacks, who have a knack for rubbing him up the wrong way even when they are asking friendly and deferential questions. This is why he often directs his vitriol at the poor old scribes themselves, accusing them of imagining things, creating issues out of nothing and implying that they are morons.
Amazingly, despite being publicly insulted, hacks’ adulation of the Ethnarch remains undiminished and they continue to file gushing report about his greatness. You begin to wonder whether one of his flunkeys hypnotises them when they enter the VIP lounge and they all end up with the critical faculties of CyBC’s Yiannis Nicolaou, who considers Tassos a modern-day deity.
THERE was one occasion that the hacks were responsible for setting off our Ethnarch’s foul temper with unforeseeable consequences for our diplomatic relations with perfidious Albion.
Ten days ago, on his return from his triumphant tour of Iberian peninsula, during which he was entertained by King Juan Carlos and managed to keep the PM of Portugal and future European Commission chief, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso in the dark about his Cyprob intentions, he was in a good mood when he entered the VIP lounge. It did not last long.
Waiting hacks, rather than ask him about his meetings with Spanish and Portuguese PMs, meetings which proved that he was not pariah but a respected statesman, decided to field a question about Mehmet Ali Talat’s meeting in London with the Foreign Secretary.
That was when he flipped his lid and reverted to his sour, aggressive self, suggesting that Britain’s interests in Cyprus could be endangered by the duplicitous Foreign Office’s effort to “upgrade the illegal authorities” of the north. The following day the British High Commissioner was summoned to the foreign ministry so representations could be made to him.
Despite our representations and our muddled, half-baked threats, Jack Straw saw Talat on Thursday. Just when his country most needed him, to spearhead our retaliatory offensive on the bases, Super-Mario has gone into hiding. What a great shame.
APART from airports, churches also seem to have an unsettling effect on our Ethnarch. From what we hear, he has fainted three times in his life and every time this happened he was in church. I know that churches could be very hot and stuffy in the summer, especially for men in a suit and tie, but I would worry if I were Tassos. It just could be the Lord’s way of showing His disapproval for the Ethnarch’s handling of the Cyprob.
RESIDENTS of a Strovolos neighbourhood called the municipality to ask it when it would send workmen to clean up the park in their area. The municipality official who took the call informed the caller that the park would not be cleaned up because it attracted drug users, which as far as excuses go is pretty imaginative. As if junkies would stop using the park if it was left unclean.
