Tales from the coffeshop (Cyprus Mail)
By Patroclos
THE ELECTION circus moved to the Hilton Park on Friday morning for the submission of the candidacies and the CyBC broadcast this thrilling extravaganza live, in order to entertain all our countrymen, who were unable to get a life during their last visit to the supermarket.
Commissar Christofias stole the show by walking into the hotel holding the hand of his hapless, black-clad, 86-year-old mother, who is clearly not in very good shape and had difficulty walking. But a beaming Commissar held her hand, like a kid being taken to school for the first time, smiling at the film crews as they slowly made their way into the hotel.
Mrs Annou proposed him as a candidate and informed journalists that he was the most pampered of her children, because her husband wanted a boy. As for the Commissar, whose campaign has been turned into monumental kitsch-fest peddling nauseating sentimentality, he almost cried when referring to his mummy.
Well, his eyes welled up and he seemed to have lost his voice for a minute, but no tears were seen trickling down his cheeks. Had he managed to suppress his urge to shed some tears or perhaps his thespian skills are not so advanced to allow him to produce tears on demand? Whatever the case, it was a passable performance, which must have won him a few extra female votes.
After holding back the tears, he said: “I want to thank from the depths of my soul my mother – the person who gave birth to me and brought me up.” I loved the explanation he felt obliged to give, in case anyone did not realise that his mother gave birth to him.
THE KITSCH-FEST had a folkloric dimension, with an elderly priest, straight out of a Kypriotiko sketch, also at the side of mummy’s boy when he was submitting his candidacy. Papalazaros, with white straggly hair and white beard, backed the candidacy of the Commissar, presumably to show voters that the commie leader, unlike true communists, believed in God and went to Church.
The general idea was to present Christofias as a traditional Cypriot, who loves his mum, respects the village priest, is proud of being a horkatis, is overweight, over-emotional over-ambitious and embarrassingly uncool. Why he did not wear a vraka as well I do not know?
WE MAY think all this is a big joke but mummy’s boy appeared to have set the agenda on Friday. The parental card appeared to have been playing on all the main candidates’ minds. Ioannis Kassoulides spoke of Glafcos Clerides, who had turned up to back his candidacy, as his spiritual father.
Kass’ father (the man who helped his conception as the Commissar would say) was also mentioned because he was a hard-line, right-wing nationalist and it could help Ioannis to remind nationalist voters about this.
In the end, the only one of the three candidates who did not mention his mum or dad was the Ethnarch, who was also proposed by an octogenarian former politician, Dr Faustus Lyssarides. He could have asked Faustus to adopt him, at least for the elections, as the good doctor has no children of his own and could prove quite an understanding daddy, but Tassos does not go in for such nonsense.
And he was certainly not going to say that a socialist windbag like Faustus was his spiritual father. Great leaders are spiritual fathers by definition and do not need anyone to play this role for them.
NO-HOPER candidate Costas Themistocleous introduced a sense of fun, by being proposed by the crazy psychiatrist and columnist Yiangos Mikellides. Themistocleous said that he was being proposed for the presidency by “my psychiatrist”. There can be no better recommendation for a candidate than this.
The question is would any of the other candidates find a psychiatrist willing to put his reputation on the line and back them for the presidency? Dr Madsakis presumably could not find a psychiatrist, which was why he chose a glamorous blonde to back his candidacy. We can always rely on the crazy doctor to go for the unconventional solution – no priests, no mothers, no spiritual fathers no ex-presidentes and no windbags in sight.
A HAPLESS man who thought that Friday morning was a good time to get his hair cut was in for a big surprise when he arrived outside Hilton Park in his car. Cops, standing guard, informed him that he was not allowed to go in the car park.
“You can’t stop me from going to the hotel,” he told the cops, who insisted that only candidates were allowed to go in. “Well, I am a presidential candidate,” the man announced “and I demand you let me in to submit my candidacy.” Unconvinced, the cops tried to reason with him, asking him why he had to go to the hotel and he insisted that he was a candidate.
In the end, the cops let him through and one asked him again why he needed to go to the hotel. “Look, I am a candidate but I am also going to have a hair-cut,” he finally admitted.
CUSTOMERS may have been pleased not to have read anything about the possible return of Karpasia, which became the central theme of the election campaign at the start of the week and was then dropped completely.
The row centred on claims that the Turks had been willing to return the Karpass peninsula at Burgenstock in 2004 and our Ethnarch was not willing to explore this possibility, presumably because it would have made the settlement plan a bit less of an abomination than he had painstakingly created thanks to his supreme negotiating skills.
The campaign team of the mummy’s boy cited the testimony of the two Georges, Vass and Iacovou, to prove the Ethnarch’s unwillingness to discuss the return of Karpass to the Greek Cypriots. Having failed to convince anyone that there was no such issue, the Ethnarch recruited the help of one of his poodles in our negotiating team – our baby-faced permanent representative at the UN Andreas Mavroyiannis.
Mavroyiannis, purely by coincidence was interviewed in New York by the correspondent of the semi-official mouthpiece Phil. He said that he had spoken to the associates of Gunther Verheugen and they had told him that talk of the return of Famagusta was a joke. This conversation was put on a conference call and all the members of the National Council listened to it, Mavroyiannis told Phil.
Of course it was a joke, one day before the final Annan plan was scheduled to be submitted. What the Ethnarch’s favourite diplomat did not tell the Ethnarch’s favourite newspaper, was that the Turks had submitted a map, with a proposal for the return of a large chunk of the Karpass, to our negotiating team several days earlier.
That was also a joke, which Mavroyiannis forgot about.
WHAT IS peculiar is that mummy’s boy knew all about the map, but his campaign staff, like Mavroyiannis, avoided mentioning it in the last week, even though it would have caused additional embarrassment for Tassos. Why? Because back in April 2004, the Commissar got his poodle and Foreign Minister George Iacovou to make a statement, saying the return of the Karpass was never an option at Burgenstock.
Someone would have mentioned this if the AKEL camp continued to accuse the Ethnarch of doing his best to persuade the Turks not to return the Karpass, so the comrades dropped the matter after a couple of days.
As for our Ethnarch, he was right to not to discuss the return of the Karpass, even though nobody would say such a thing. He had already made up his mind not to accept the return of Famagusta and Morphou, and it would have been a joke if he had to reject the return of the Karpass as well.
THE JOKE about the Ethnarch trying to solve the Cyprob in 2004 is the theme of a documentary prepared by journalist Makarios Droushiotis. Its first showing will be at the Pantheon Cinema in Nicosia this Friday at 8pm. The documentary, titled ‘Dilitirio’ (Poison), looks at the period between the Ethnarch’s election and the A-plan referendum.
The documentary does not deal with the A-plan, but the way our enlightened Ethnarch poisoned the climate in Cyprus, by cultivating fear and insecurity among the Greek Cypriots in the period leading up to the referendum. The documentary is not sponsored by the Ministry of Education or the PIO.
MORE THAN three years after its establishment, the Cyprus Institute last month held the opening ceremony for its first research centre which was attended by the Ethnarch and a posse of our society’s big-wigs. The Institute will eventually be the home of seven research centres, which would be run in collaboration with respected foreign universities, as well as offer postgraduate courses.
The first project of the Energy, Environment and Water Resources Centre which was opened in early December, according to the Institute’s president, Professor Kostas Papanicolas would be a study of the “forthcoming climate changes and the very serious consequences these will have on our region as well as the creation of a programme for dealing with them”.
I do not want to sound too unenthusiastic, but this hardly comes across as a pioneering or very imaginative research project. It is a bit like the other ground-breaking research project carried out by Yiorkos Lillikas’ cousin at his Harvard School of Public Health, which found that a lot of Cypriot youngsters smoked and that tobacco was bad for their health.
These are not the kind of projects that will turn Cyprus into the renowned regional research centre our government would like. At least the Energy, Environment and Water Resources Centre could have undertaken a more useful research project like “the forthcoming drought and the very serious consequences of not having water for a daily shower in July”.
HOW IRONIC that a government which has proved totally inept at carrying out the most basic management of our water resources has been pouring money into the establishment of an Energy Environment and Water Resources Centre.
Do we need scientific research to tell us that in a country which regularly suffers droughts, the construction of desalination plants should be a higher priority than the creation of golf courses? Perhaps we do, because in the five years of Ethnarchic rule, the government put all its energy in establishing golf courses while shelving plans for a desperately-needed third desalination plant.
The government is obliged to spend money on scientific research by the EU which sets specific spending targets (a percentage of GDP should go on scientific research). Unfortunately, it does not set any targets relating to water, because it assumes that governments of member states would ensure, as a matter of the highest priority, that their citizens would have an uninterrupted water supply.
It is a mistaken assumption in the case of the soon-to-be regional scientific research centre and drought-stricken golfing paradise.
PRESSURE to spend money on scientific research makes our governments vulnerable to grandiose proposals from academics who can give a good sales pitch about their ideas and capabilities. Lillikas’ cousin became director of the Harvard Public Health School and Professor Papanicolas is president of the Cyprus Institute.
An article by Papanicolas, published in Simerini last December, showed remarkable PR skills and an uncanny ability to say all the things we natives love to hear about the alleged importance – geographical, strategic etc- of our country. He wrote:
“The impressive successes of the Cyprus Institute are owed, mainly, in its convincing development as an institution of regional interest and excellence, which exploits the important strategic advantages of Cyprus: its geopolitical position, its good relations with its neighbours which make it a gate to the EU in the region, the excellent infrastructure of the island and the high educational level of its people. These objective advantages, combined with the progress-geared policy of the government...”
Are these the words of a scientist or of a smart salesman/politician pandering to our delusions of grandeur? When anyone starts talking about our strategic advantages and geopolitical position you suspect he is taking you for a ride. To his credit, the professor avoided mentioning that we are at the crossroads of three continents.
And why mention Cyprus as a “gate to the EU in the region”, when the only people using this gate are impoverished Third World workers and asylum seekers. Are they going to help the Cyprus Institute achieve its ambitions?
