AS EVERY year, we have spent the past week listening to the hackneyed messages about the “black anniversaries” of the “twin crimes” of July 1974. We’ve had the obligatory sirens at 5.30am, the memorial services, the messages from party leaders and organisations, as well as endless panel discussions and documentaries.
Memory is important and it is right to honour the dead. But we have to start asking ourselves why we keep commemorating and what purpose it serves. Does anybody learn anything new from the endless discussion of those terrible events of 1974? After all, it has been drummed into us all since primary school and it’s not as if any of the messages or programmes offer any remarkable new insight.
What it achieves, lest we were to forget, is to maintain a state of patriotic mobilisation. This may suit political interests, but it comes at a price. The tragedy of 1974 has been used across the political board as a smokescreen to avoid the real issues in Cyprus.
This has worked on several levels. It has been used to paper over the murderous internal divisions that saw virtual civil war within the Greek Cypriot community, culminating in the coup of July 1974 that sparked the Turkish invasion.
At the same time, the shock of that Turkish invasion and the trauma of ethnic cleansing that followed has set the benchmark of the Cyprus problem as one of invasion and occupation, sweeping under the carpet the ruthless inter-communal fighting that had already ripped Cyprus apart far more than a decade before 1974.
What’s more, this vision of history has set the Greek Cypriot community as a victim of aggression, rather than a party to a dispute. The depth of this feeling was exposed with the overwhelming rejection of the Annan plan last year, and the genuine shock that people were being asked to accept a solution that wasn’t punitive to Turkey and that didn’t merely roll back the situation to a status quo ante 1974.
The government insists it genuinely wants a solution. Yet the kind of slogans that are so regularly pumped only deepen the psychological and political divide between our two communities. It’s not that we must forget history – quite the contrary. But what we are being fed every July is not history, it’s politics.
Instead of bemoaning our suffering and the injustice we have suffered, we need to understand how we got there. If we come close to such understanding, not only might we avoid the mistakes of the past, but we might have gained an inkling of empathy for the ‘other’. Only with such knowledge can we begin to take the road towards reconciliation.
