ALL OF A SUDDEN, the country is full of self-taught historians. Politicians, journalists, trade unionists and priests have all been expounding their views about Cyprus’ modern history, with all of them insisting that their own version s the only true account of events. Anything that deviated from the self-styled historian’s evaluations of events was a distortion of historical truth which served political expediency.
This futile exchange about history has been dragging on for months. It started when the government announced plans to change the state school history text books, to make the account of modern Cyprus history more balanced. The plan was slammed by most right-wing nationalists as an attempt to rewrite our history in a way that would serve the government’s political objective of reunification. A single word had not been written but they were convinced the new books would be a distortion of history.
The implication was that the tidy, official version of events leading to the Turkish invasion, as written in existing text-books, constituted the absolute truth and therefore could not be challenged or questioned. In order to appease the politicians, journalists and teaching unions, the Education Ministry announced that when the new text-book was completed, it would be given to the interested parties for their comments. We would thus have the writing of history not by historians, but by committee of non-historians.
After the brief lull, the row was rekindled last week by Education Minister Andreas Demetriou, who sent out a circular – to mark the name-day of the late Archbishop Makarios – in which he said that extremist organisations from both communities had tried to destroy the Cyprus Republic in its early days and were the cause of the subsequent troubles. This outraged the nationalist pseudo-historians, who slammed Demetriou for having the audacity to put some blame on the Greek Cypriot side for the ‘Turkish Cypriot revolt’ and the division of the island.
The Archbishop said his views were provocative, while the teachers’ union said it would never allow the teaching of history to be used as a tool for political expediency. The union, obviously, did not notice that this was exactly how history has been used for the last 30 years. While the minister stuck to his guns, his case was not very strong, considering his circular was a hagiography of Makarios, whom he presented as infallible. In the case of Makarios, he was also promoting the sanitised, state-approved history, which he supposedly wanted to end.
The debate is incredibly superficial and the minister is making a big mistake in playing the blame-game. The teaching of history is not about the distribution of blame for specific events but about providing people with an understanding of past events. And this understanding is more balanced when we read a variety of sources and we recognise that nothing is a case of black and white, as the nationalist camp maintains.
This is the line the Education Ministry should take rather than engaging in futile exchanges with narrow-minded nationalists, whose dogmatic approach to history has no place in a liberal and democratic society.
