EVERYTHING in this country degenerates into farce and it was impossible for the visit of the UN Secretary-General to prove an exception to the rule.

Under the circumstances, one wondered why Ban Ki-moon decided to visit Cyprus. Surely, his representatives know what impetuous hypocrites we are and must have informed him about our political antics, when he decided to put the Cyprus problem on the UN agenda. He must also have been aware of how we had treated all his predecessors and their special representatives.

Not a single one was spared. One was mocked as ‘the black’, another was pronounced ‘homosexual’, others were ridiculed as ‘fools’ and others were abused for allegedly being Anglo-American agents. Since 1964, when the UN arrived in Cyprus to save us from the blood-soaked consequences of Archbishop Makarios’ brinkmanship, a long list of UN representatives became involved in the Cyprus problem. None of them was any good, for us.

In this context, we can only conclude that Ban visited the island to knowingly participate in the Cyprus theatre of the absurd. He must have thought to himself: “I will visit the place to get to see the lunacy for myself. I will tell them what they want to hear, I will assure them that the peace process is their ownership, promise them there would be no arbitration or suffocating time-frames and then leave. I have nothing to lose.”

The only thing Ban did not think about was that when visiting Talat, was that he may have ended up in the ‘wrong’ building and sparked another exhibition of political lunacy. His visit made our super-patriotic politicians and journalists go wild. EDEK deputy Marinos Sizopoulos gave an indication of the degree of frustration the visit to the wrong building caused, by describing it “the biggest defeat suffered by Cyprus Republic since 1974.” But it was not a defeat. It was a victory: another victory of our stupidity.

Our journalists were at a loss. One of them, appearing as a guest on a TV show, tried to explain why the visit was so damaging. He said: “The entire international community saw the UN Secretary-General walking on the red carpet and entering the pseudo-presidential office. This is the image that will stay in its (the international community’s) memory.”

As if the international community gave damn if Ban went into Talat’s office instead of his residence. The international community had nothing better to do than to turn its gaze on Cyprus, anxiously waiting to see which building Ban would enter during his visit. This idiotic reaction alone gives a good indication of the political schizophrenia that reigns.

We genuinely believe that humanity has no serious problems to deal with and has time to follow the antics by us hypocrites in Cyprus. Millions of people in world are suffering, tens of thousands die every day of hunger and disease, half the world’s population does not have a bed to sleep in at night and our intelligent hacks think that the world is watching what is happening here.

They really believe that the world has its gaze fixed on a tiny island that is little more than a dot on the world map and is populated by a few hundred thousand spoilt and overfed individuals; that the world cares about Cyprus, Talat and Christofias and that the collective memory of mankind has room for us half-mad Cypriots.

With the crazy minds we have, are we really justified to wonder why those few foreigners that deal with us always decide that the Turkish Cypriots are in the right?