Cyprus Mail
Feb 21 2010
Tales from the Coffeeshop: Struggle for the soul of DIKO
By Patroclos
Published on February 21, 2010 +-Text size
I WOULD like to apologise that we have nothing about yesterday’s
meeting of the DIKO executive bureau but I was working to an early
deadline. I had to finish by 9am because I was going to drive up to
Stavrovouni monastery to pray that DIKO would decide to stay in the
government tent, for the good of the country.
Prayers do not always work, especially when the Archbishop is praying
for the other side in what has become a struggle for the soul of the
historic party founded by the great Spy Kyp. In one camp we have the
hard-line opportunists, represented by party leader and personality of
the year Marios Garoyian who has been valiantly upholding the party’s
proud traditions and values, bequeathed by his mentor Spy.
In the other camp are the narcissistic, hard-line lawyers who see
themselves as the keepers of the late Ethnarch’s proud legacy of
negativity and have been agitating for an acrimonious divorce from the
government ` they generously waived the legal fees – ever since the
rotating presidency scandal hit the news. This legal tendency is
represented by Junior, Colocassides, Angelides and Associates, and has
the full backing of two TV bosses ` the Archbishop and Loukis P.
It goes without saying that Spy’s son and heir, foreign minister
Marcos Kyprianou, is in the Garoyian camp and wants to maintain the
alliance because he is very fond of foreign travel. And he has a
bigger claim to the party than Junior who, like his father, never
embraced the traditional values and ideals of DIKO – horse-trading,
rusfeti and total focus on the spoils of power.
Has it not occurred to the smart, idealistic lawyers who put their
patriotic principles above everything else that they might be in the
wrong party? If they want to belong to a party that sacrifices power
for nebulous principles they should join EDEK instead of arrogantly
trying to impose an alien ideology on their hard-line opportunist
comrades.
THERE IS a class element to the DIKO struggle, as any Marxist scholar
would tell you. The Garoyian camp, with the exception of Marcos,
consists of men of humble origins who enjoy the status and importance
linked to being part of the government.
The lawyers on the other hand, with the exception of Zacharias Koulias
who is a bit of a loud-mouthed peasant, are from wealthy backgrounds,
have social status and earn loads of cash from their practices. They
can afford to take narcissistic stands on principle and demand a grand
patriotic exit from the government because they are spoilt rich dudes
with nothing to lose.
But they should spare a thought for their colleagues ` Paschalides,
Fotiou, Garoyian, Patsalides etc ` who are from poorer backgrounds
(one is from Paphos and would have to go back there if he leaves the
ministry) and are not prepared to sacrifice everything for reckless
stands on principle about the Cyprob, advocated by the lawyers.
It is just as well we have the Cyprob as it allows members of the
legal profession to show the public that they have some principles.
COMRADE president Tof had no problem accepting suffocatingly intensive
talks for two evenings in succession with Garoyian in his bid to
persuade DIKO to stay in his tent. He even set a suffocating time
frame, demanding that the party’s central committee met tomorrow to
decide whether it would accept his improved offer for staying in the
tent.
DIKO’s decision will depend on how many more ministries and other
public sinecures have been offered by the comrade. If he has offered
enough posts to buy the support of an adequate number of the hard-line
opportunists, the principled lawyers will suffer an honourable defeat.
Our establishment has heard of two DIKOites who have been approached
by Garoyian and offered ministries in the Tof government. A third,
deputy Fytos Constantinou, yesterday denied he had been offered any
ministry. A fourth, less influential member, was offered one week’s
free holiday for him and his family in a three-star hotel in Protaras
but was holding out for four-star accommodation.
The comrade has even agreed to propose amendments to the rotating
presidency that is a red rag to DIKO’s principled lawyers. He will not
withdraw the proposal but will suggest amending it so that it would
stipulate that one of the two presidential terms reserved for the
Greek Cypriot community, would go to an Armenian DIKO member.
That should persuade the lawyers to stay in the tent, assuming Talat
would agree to having an Armenian president.
IF ALL goes well and the majority of the DIKO central committee on
Tuesday votes to stay in the tent for now, the comrade will have to
start planning his next moves for keeping the alliance going.
His safest bet would be to help the dour Dervis Eroglu get elected
pseudo-president as he would ensure the talks ground to a halt. With
prospects of a settlement hitting zero, the comrade’s concessions
would be irrelevant and DIKO would stay in the alliance and help the
comrade get re-elected. EDEK might even return when the threat of a
settlement ceases to exist.
All that remains now is for the comrade’s poodles to find out how to
send money to the Eroglu election campaign fund. They should ask the
Archbishop, who is a big admirer of dull Dervis and may have already
contributed to his election kitty.
TALAT would have been certain to be pseudo-re-elected if the
international community were allowed a say in the pseudo-elections. I
do not know how he does it, but for the international community his
farts smell of Chanel No 5. He is the darling of all our EU partners,
the US and the UN, and it just doesn’t make any sense.
Last week he gave a lunch at his pseudo-palace for the ambassadors of
the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and they all
attended. Why had our government not written to them urging them not
to go as it had done in the case of the EU ambassadors a couple of
months ago?
Surely the ambassadors of our close allies – France, Russia, China `
would have respected our wishes, if our government had bothered to
intervene.
I LOVE the evening television news on Green Monday. This being a
public holiday, TV news bosses are hard-pressed to find enough
nonsense to fill their 60-minute shows, as they would on a normal
working day. They therefore broadcast news items that do not even
qualify as nonsense, but which enjoy a cult following.
Nobody does Green Monday news better than Antenna, which has camera
crews combing the villages around Nicosia to bring us pictures of
people sitting outdoors eating vegetables and grilled squid. Then
there are the interviews, in which the reporter asks people what they
had eaten, and he gets revealing answers such as: `Tomatoes,
cucumbers, olives…’
The interviewees from Tseri are more articulate. `We ate artichokes,
tashi, moungra and laganes..’ or `We put some squid and octopus on the
charcoal and they were very nice,’ or `fasoulia, greens, tomatoes,
moungra and of course halva.’
Now if the newshounds found people eating souvla, loukanika, pastourma
and halloumi on Green Monday that would be worthy of leading the TV
news. The hack could ask the Archbishop for his views on this
provocation and make an intriguing report.
I should also mention the other standard news story of this day ` the
long queues of cars on the highways, heading back to Nicosia. This
year Antenna did not interview the drivers, stuck on the highway, to
ask them how they felt – a big disappointment for viewers who cherish
the Green Monday TV news tradition.
THIS YEAR we also had what criminologists would refer to as Green
Monday crime. An artichoke farmer from Alamino reported that last
weekend thieves had stolen some 5,000 artichokes from his field. He
went to his field to cut the artichokes, two days before Green Monday,
and found nothing there.
You had to feel sorry for the farmer who said the value of the
artichokes stolen was ?¬7,000. But if he was charging the wholesaler
?¬1.2 per artichoke how much would the consumer have had to pay for
them in the shops? The thieves probably helped keep artichokes
competitively priced on Green Monday.
The second Green Monday crime took place in Paralimni where thieves
broke into a snail farm and, according to police, took huge quantities
of what we Cypriots call karaoli. The karaoli can also be eaten on
Green Monday, even though none of Antenna TV’s interviewees admitted
having eaten karaolous.
IT WAS nice to see AKEL’s intellectual heavyweight Nicos Katsourides
back in the limelight recently. Kats, although a deputy, appeared to
have gone into hiding since his narrow defeat by Andros Kyprianou in
the elections for the AKEL leadership 13 months ago. He was probably
ashamed and who could blame him? I would go into hiding for a year if
I lost a game of tavli to Andros Kyprianou.
Time is a big healer and Kats is now back in the spotlight defending
the party that betrayed him and the comrade president whom he
passionately detests for helping the lightweight Andros win the
leadership contest.
When a few weeks ago Andros conspiratorially announced that he knew
the identity of the man co-ordinating the political attacks on the
president, everyone assumed he was referring to the wily Kats, who
made no secret of how thoroughly pissed off he was with Tof.
Have the two kissed and made up, and if so, what has Kats been given
to stop pissing in the presidential tent from outside?
ON THURSDAY comrade Tof spoke for the first time about the need for
everyone to make sacrifices so that we could deal with the recession.
We may have been in a recession for more than a year, but our wise
leader only this week recognised there was a need for belt-tightening.
I suppose he was waiting to take delivery of the brand-new
presidential limo he ordered for himself before giving his sermon
about the need for belt-tightening. Leading by example is very
important to the comrade. He will now be chauffeured around in the
Merc S450, which in a way was a sacrifice, because he could have
bought an S600, the limo preferred by all Africa’s tyrants.
According to Phil, the government order also included a brand new Merc
for Garoyian, which he will be given even if he fails to persuade his
party to stay in the government.
SPEAKING of recession, the EU has really turned the screw on Greece,
where things can only get worse. The big problem is the Greek public
sector, the workers of which enjoy even more privileges than our own
public parasites. While wages are lower than in Cyprus, Greek civil
servants are entitled to a range of ridiculous allowances that boost
their pay. For instance there is a `punctuality allowance’ for
arriving at work on time and `taking work home allowance’ for teachers
who mark schoolwork at home. There is also an allowance especially for
those who have not earned any of the allowances on offer, because the
Greek state could not discriminate against the lazy.
THE RECESSION has been very bad for the press and we hear that the
company that prints the late Nicos Sampson’s organ, Machi was getting
a bit nervous about the newspaper’s growing debt. About 10 days ago it
threatened not to print the paper unless it received some payment
against the debt. Instead of payment, the director of the printing
press received a telephone call from Archbishop Chrysostomos asking
him to carry on producing the paper. He did not offer to settle the
debt, but the director withdrew his ultimatum and carried on printing
Machi, as a favour to Chrys, the new defender of press freedom.
We now know who to call when the libel lawyers come around demanding payment.