Tales from the Coffeeshop: UN envoy correctly identifies Cypriot pig-headedness

THE NEXT personal envoy the UN Secretary General sends to find common ground will have to be a shrink, now that Maria Angela Holguin has established that the reasons there has been no solution to the Cyprob are psychological.

In her heartfelt farewell letter to Kyproulla, Holguin said that she had to resort to neuroscience insights to make sense of some of the behaviours she saw on the island. These insights, she wrote, “suggest that the brain perceives reality by merging past beliefs with new experiences. These beliefs, formed, inherited and reinforced during childhood, are deeply ingrained in the brain, which loses the ability to assimilate new information.”

We have a word for this in the Cypriot dialect that pre-existed neuroscience. We Cypriots are renowned kkelledjides (xerokefali in proper Greek; in English you would call us pig-headed), who will never change our mind? It is in our DNA and you have to credit Holguin for realising this after just a few visits.

Whether it will be a neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychologist or psychiatrist, who can also prescribe drugs, the UNSG will make his next personal envoy remains to be seen. There is a cure for Cypriot kkelledjiness – money. Regrettably nobody will pay us to solve the Cyprob so the next personal envoy should bring a couple of shipments of psychotropic drugs.

THE GOVERNMENT of the people-pleaser, meanwhile, has been at pains to persuade us that Holguin’s departure is not the end of the process. As long as there is some kind of theoretical process Prezniktwo is happy.

In the last week we learned that the Prez exchanged messages with Holguin, that UNSG Antonio Guterres would make every effort to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table and that Holguin’s report contained some ideas.

On Friday, the Prez said he was optimistic that before the end of the year there would be positive news about the resumption of talks. His optimism was based on information he had received. This reminds me of a telephone call he received in his car about the appointment of an EU envoy to the Cyprob, which also filled him with optimism.

DEPUTY spokesman Yiannis Antoniou, speaking on CyBC radio earlier the same day, also offered some false hope about the future of the process but was more restrained than his boss, although he was also convinced that Guterres was “encouraged to move to the next step.”

This is how he explained the next step. “The UNSG remains optimistic that the givens exist which allow him to attempt the next step to see if the requirements exist for more. We are far away from the start of dialogue, but from the moment the Secretary-General’s effort continues we are obliged to exhaust every possibility to see if the ground exists to attempt the next step.”

What the next step would be he did not say but as long as there is possibility of a next step it means the process is not completely dead. The information about the positive news must have been received by the Prez after Antoniou’s radio comments.

MANY politicians, when they retire, write their memoirs. Glafcos Clerides’ My Deposition, for example, is a valuable reference book as it records the political history of modern Cyprus by someone who was directly involved in events.

Now, I hear that Preznikone has decided to write his own book but, according to reports, it is a hatchet job rather than a memoir. A memoir would have been rather problematic for him as he would have had to write about the golden passport industry he personally set up and earned his family tens of millions of euro.   

Titled O Sykofantis (in Greek it means ‘slanderer,’ the exact opposite of what sycophant means in English), Nik’s tome is an attack on journalist Makarios Drousiotis, who wrote three books about his corrupt presidency. Perhaps he fears the investigation into the allegations by the authority against corruption, which he had asked for in the first place, would not exonerate him.

I was mildly surprised to read that the person who took the job of editing Nik’s book is former Politis columnist and radio show host Kostas Constantinou, who systematically accused Nik of corruption, dishonesty and shaming the country in his column. Weird that he is now helping Nik’s futile effort to salvage a reputation, to the wrecking of which he made a commendable contribution.

WILL ANYONE believe a word Nik says in his book, even if he has hired an excellent wordsmith to edit and polish it? At least the book will focus on ‘the sycophant’ and he will not contain his lie about never having suggested the two-state solution to the Turkish side.

Last week former Akel chief Andros Kyprianou was added by Nik to the growing list of scoundrels who lied about his support for a two-state solution. Andros said that even Nik’s ministers had told him he voiced support for two states. Does the former prez still think there is anyone who believes his denials or is he just another kkelledjis?

People are more likely to believe him if he said he was a teetotaller than he never championed a two-state solution.

THE PUBLIC exchange of nastiness between Nik and Averof was instigated by the former describing the latter as “bitter” in an interview on Antenna. There was a public exchange with Averof responding with a poem, which was quite cute, while Disy legal advisor Chris Triantafyllides fired some salvos at Nik.

According to reliable information, Nik is pissed off with Averof because he gave testimony to the anti-corruption authority’s investigator looking into the allegations made in Drousiotis’ books. Nobody knows what Averof said, but we very much doubt he would have lied to protect Nik.  

CONFIRMATION that UN Special Representative Colin Stewart has entered the UN Hall of Infamy, as our establishment reported last week, was provided by the Hall’s gatekeeper Michalis Ignatiou the Phil columnist and Turkophile diplomat-hunter.

In last Sunday’s moral sermon, Ignatiou declared: “Stewart is an enemy of Cyprus and must leave the island. He clearly expresses the Turkish positions. He is a diplomat of mediocre level who enjoys his life, mainly in the occupied area, without diplomatic esteem.”

The final straw for the moralising hack was that Stewart “drafted with a British style of writing, with, of course, British guidance, the reports on the good offices mission of the Secretary-General of the UN and situation of Unficyp in Cyprus, in order to completely exonerate occupying Turkey.”

I have lost track of the number of UN Special Representatives the Turkophile diplomat-hunter has demanded should be kicked out of Kyproulla over the years, but sadly his commands are never obeyed. In his sermon he even offered Prezniktwo advice on how this should be done.

The president “must invite the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and announce to them that he cannot work with him any longer.” And if his replacement is as bad, Ignatiou will sort him out as well.

DISY chief Annita Demetriou angered the government by making public a letter she had written to Prezniktwo criticising his handling of the Cyprob and his failure to be proactive during Holguin’s mission to find common ground.

Prezniktwo reacted like a cry-baby, moaning that the letter had been made public before he had received it. He was on a trip to Athens and learnt about it through social media, he said. So what? If it was going to be made public anyway, did it matter who read it first?

Deputy spokesman Antoniou resorted to some pathetic arguments to criticise Annita’s decision to make the letter public while the prez was abroad. It went against political ethics, he said, and the timing was unfortunate, because it was released on the eve of the submission of Holguin’s report to the UNSG, as if they give a damn in New York what is happening in Kyproulla. Also, Annita had not made these points at the national council meeting a few days earlier.

These are schoolboy arguments, confirming the lack of grown-ups in this government.

THE SPOKESMAN and his chums in the media accused Annita of making the letter public to divert attention from the Averof-Nik row which reflected badly on her party. If this was her intention, good for her. She obviously did not attend the school of political ethics that Antoniou’s boss graduated from with top marks.