IF ANYONE was wondering why the European Commission has left our application for the registration of halloumi/hellim as a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) to gather dust in its offices for three-and-a-half years they should not look outside Kyproulla to find who is to blame.
The “delay and inaction” by the Commission, which Prez Nik complained about in a letter to his former drinking and smoking buddy, President of the Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, was not the result of a sinister plot by perfidious Albion to claim halloumi as a Yorkshire cheese; nor was it caused by Turkish intransigence.
In fact it was another triumph of Kyproulla’s diplomatic assertiveness, achieved by our resourceful foreign ministry officials that specialise in preventing anything that could be regarded as progress in relations with the other side from happening. The custodians of bad faith at the ministry were never going to allow an agreement on halloumi to ruin the negative climate that is their raison d’être.
That the foreign ministry demolition mob would wreck the “common understanding” on the PDO reached in July 2015 by Nik, Mustafa and Juncker during a visit to the island by the latter was no surprise. Foreign ministry officials slammed the deal soon after a beaming Juncker hailed it as “highly symbolic” and confirming “the willingness of the two parties to work together with the Commission to build confidence.”
One of the deal’s fiercest critics at the time was the foreign ministry official in charge of the halloumi diplomacy Mrs Philippa Christodoulides, the better half of our FM Nicos, who is now the acting director of the president’s diplomatic office. Perhaps her promotion to this position, which is much higher than her ministry rank justified, was reward for her principled stand on halloumi that ensured it remained ethnically Greek.
THE HALLOUMI application was put on hold by the Commission because of four new demands made by our foreign ministry after the common understanding was reached in Nicosia. The demands were the product of the charmingly, twisted negativity that reigns at the foreign ministry and were reproduced in Friday’s Phil.
First, if the hellim produced in the north, was not exported through the legal ports of the Republic and left the island, certified and approved from the pseudo-state, it would “put into practice direct trade, as desired by the Commission, leading to the Taiwanification of the pseudo-state.” The danger of Taiwanification – the pseudo-state having links with the outside world, without being recognised, like Taiwan – is the reason most foreign ministry officials never get a good night’s sleep.
Second, the PDO for hellim could lead to PDOs for a host of other products from the north, forcing our government into entering a “bicommunal decision framework.” We demanded that the agreement would be restricted only to hellim.
The third demand is just too tediously boring to repeat. My personal favourite is the fourth. We demanded that the six-monthly report by the foreign company that would certify the standards of hellim produced in the north should be submitted to the Cyprus government which would then send these to the Commission, because this was the sovereign right of the Republic.
“What particularly irked Nicosia was that Brussels was attempting to secure the six-monthly reports simultaneously with the Cyprus Republic and directly from the company,” wrote Phil. This would not lead to Taiwanification, or upgrading of the pseudo state, but receiving the halloumi report at the same time as the Commission, presumably, would lead to the downgrading of the Republic.
HOW COULD Prez Nik have reached such a halloumi deal with Juncker that would open the way to Taiwanification of the north, the halloumification of bicommunal relations and the downgrading of the Republic? It was 2015, a year-and-a-half before his rebirth as a rabid rejectionist, when he was still, superficially at least, embracing…
