Why the lack of civil society in Cyprus?
My grey, short-legged cat Trixie is back from a 10-day visit to the vet. She was shot with an airgun by somebody in the neighbourhood and needed an operation to remove a pellet from her stomach. She is not very well but at least she is back in her usual place on the table and that makes Boom Boom very happy. Because Boom Boom missed Trixie terribly. After all, Trixie is her mom and the only other surviving member of the cat family I adopted from the garden of my first dwelling in Nicosia, in Palloutriotissa. I have just made a genealogical tree for Trixie and Boom Boom and established that they are the fourth and fifth generation of this family, respectively. Which doesn’t really prove the saying that cats have nine lives. The cats I know have only one life and when it is gone it is gone for ever.
Actually, there is a possibility that Trixie and Boom Boom have one more living relative in the buffer zone. Charlotte is Trixie’s mother and she moved out of my house into the buffer zone when I came to live in Ayios Kassianos. Last time I saw her alive was about two years ago, hiding under a pile of rubbish next to the soldiers’ post. She meowed me ‘hi’ but refused to return. Oh well, she was still a bit wild as the third generation. And so were my other two cats, Tarby and Edmund, that also disappeared into no man’s land at the same time as Charlotte.
After Trixie had been shot I went around the neighbourhood and made some inquiries into who had airguns and who didn’t. Of course, I knew that nobody would admit to the crime but at least I wanted to make a point that it didn’t pass unnoticed. Now I am lying low and waiting to see whether shooting Trixie was accidental or somebody really enjoys doing it. Because if the latter is true, I am going to go after the culprit and shoot him.
More or less at the same time as I was going around and asking questions about airguns I received a letter from a reader about the garden next to Ayios Kassianos Church so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and start researching the matter. The answer was simple and I am sure you have already read about it in this paper. Some guys (we will call them “the progressive forces”) don’t like several trees in this garden, including the pride of the neighbourhood, the beautiful red bougainvillea that acts as a baldachin over the church’s entry, and some other guys (let’s call them “conservatives”) want the plants to stay. The problem is that a) the progressive forces are stronger and more outspoken; and b) the conservatives are not very good at organising themselves and opposing “progress”.
“It is not your problem,” was the first reaction I received from the conservatives. “You are a foreigner anyway. And we think it is better to say nothing. Why should we say anything right now? Maybe they won’t get permission to do it. And we don’t want to make any problems for ourselves, do we?”
I have no idea what will happen to the bougainvillea yet because apparently the decision belongs to the Forestry Department, to which the progressive forces applied for permission to annihilate it. I was thinking about the above words a few days later during the Civil Society Fair that the UNDP organised in the moat next to the Ledra Palace Hotel. There, in the blazing sun, a group of hard core idealists, both local and foreign, was trying very hard to explain to an almost non-existent audience the importance of civil society.
I went around the booths, collected about a hundred leaflets on various initiatives and finally collapsed in the shade of the only kiosk at the whole fair that had any.
“Why didn’t they put some more umbrellas up in this place?” I asked a friendly passer-by whom I recognised from other similar events. “Nobody will come down and have a walk around this place in such conditions.”
“Yes, I know,” he answered. “If I was a normal person I wouldn’t bother to come here and fry either. I would take my kids somewhere much more pleasant.”
I drank some cold water, read through various dignitaries’ speeches lamenting the fact that there was no real civil society in Cyprus, and finally started entertaining myself by creating a theory about how such a phenomenon couldn’t exist on the island due to human networking based predominantly on the strength of ties within a family and tribe.
And then I saw the Ayios Kassianos bougainvillea in front of me. As beautiful as ever – another potential local victim of a lack of social engagement.
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