By George Koumoulli
Twice in my life I was laughed at with the sentence imposed on (alleged) misconduct or illegalities. The first time happened when our teacher in elementary school described to us the passage of the Hellespont from Xerxes, king of the Persians, during his campaign against the Greeks. The waters went up very high and destroyed the bridges that Xerxes’ engineers had been building for days, and then the king imposed a harsh punishment on the “diverted” sea: he ordered the chains to be thrown in to tie it, whip it and mark it with a hot iron because he did not obey his orders!
The second time I burst into laughter it concerns another “sentence” imposed 2,500 years after Xerxes punished the sea. The board of the Cyprus Bar Association, which supposedly functions as a Supervisory Authority in the implementation of the law on the prevention and combating of money laundering, has thoroughly examined (;) the case of five law firms that issued dozens of “golden” passports illegally. The revenues from the notorious Cyprus Investment Programme that created the gold-bearing passport industry amount to around €11 billion. And that a large proportion of this pie has been devoured by the five law firms in question. Official statistics on the amounts collected do not exist – of course! – but it is considered certain that the receipts for each office would be tens, if not hundreds, of millions of euros. In the end, for this illegality the council imposed financial penalties ranging from 8,000 to 79,000 euros. Such ridiculous penalties actually encourage illegalities of this nature, especially when the names of the illegal offices are not published because, allegedly, the law on the protection of personal data is being violated. But in this case we are dealing with law firms and not individuals. Indeed, how does this decision of the Bar Association, inspired by the mandarins of the Bar Association, differ from that of Xerxes? The king of Persia had never seen a sea before. But they?
It is also another ridiculousness that the DIPA’s proposal to form a government of national unity with a common presidential candidate for President in the 2023 presidential elections to guarantee the implementation of a common governance programme is another ridiculous. Such a formation would be grotesque if the visions of the parties are taken into account. ELAM dreams of union, EDEK the unitary state, DIKO supports the IDF but with the… correct content, the Ecologists have made science the eiches-touches, the DIPA is colorless, the DISY is wavering between the DDO and two states and the AKEL in favor of the IDF. A national government is appropriate in a national crisis when there is universal acceptance of a goal, e.g. in 1940 in the UK a government of national unity was formed under Churchill to prevent the threatened invasion of the UK by Germany and with a long-term goal of winning the war. But then there was 100% unanimity in England that does not exist at the moment in Cyprus.
Another political foul that poisons the concept of democracy is the statement of the president of the DIKO, Nikolas Papadopoulos, that his party will be co-government in 2023. He adds: “‘With whom’ will clarify the time it should, without pre-excluding any party.” In other words, for the DIKO, power is an end in itself since it is willing to cooperate with any party that comes to power. It entrenches the pervasive impression that the DIKO is not a party of principles but a party of ruffle, of volition, of hypocrisy, of self-righteousness, the leaders of which are the pioneers of political amoralism. As long as the people mature democratically, parties such as the DIKO will inevitably fade away.
Finally, I would like to comment on another ridiculousness, the failed attempt of the leaders of DIKO and AKEL concerning the cooperation for the presidential elections of 2023. Rationally, these parties should first draw up an electoral manifesto so that ordinary people can see what the common vision is, if so, on the basis of which to look for a candidate who would embrace it. Instead of doing so, the two parties were looking to find a candidate in the false hope that he would be able to reconcile their differences. If they followed the rational course, they would find from the first moment that their difference in the main issue that rightly concerns us, namely the Cyprus issue, is unbridgeable: AKEL supports the IDF while the DIKO rejects it in an artful way. This would avoid wasting time and grey matter in search of a Messiah.
In fact, AKEL is closer to DISY than to DIKO since AKEL and DISY support the DDO. In fact, if we exclude the fact that the right wing of DISY honors Grivas and that AKEL is clearly against privatization, I do not think there are any other radical differences that frustrate a cooperation for the good of Cyprus. But, unfortunately, now it is too late. Our leaders thwarted the dreams of our young people who demanded their Tomorrow, their Tomorrow, not to be gloomy without dawn, fear without hope…
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of CypriumNews.
