Students in Greece say they have been abandoned

 

CYPRIOT university students in Greece said yesterday they could not secure the necessary paperwork to complete their government grants, scholarships or student loan applications because of the ongoing strikes in Athens and accused the education ministry of ignoring them.

The national Kapodistrian university of Athens and Athens’ national technical university have been on strike for months, with academia and staff opposing government plans for redundancies as part of the austerity measures and efforts to restructure the education system. Greek education minister Constantinos Arvanitopoulos said this week that staff were acting against the law and were out to turn the universities into “a battle field”.

Cypriot students based in Athens issued an announcement yesterday saying that eleven weeks into the strikes, the Cypriot state had done “nothing” for them. The students asked the education minister Kyriacos Kenevezos in an open letter last month to mediate on their behalf so they could receive payments for scholarships or student loans.

No one has been working at the universities in order to provide them with the documentation they need to support their applications for payment, the students said, adding that this was causing financial troubles for some of them who were looking forward to some source of income that was no longer forthcoming.

Speaking to state broadcaster CyBC, student representative Panayiotis Sofroniou, appealed to the Cyprus state-funded universities to admit any Cypriot students based in Greece who wanted to transfer back home. He was referring to the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus University of Technology (TEPAK).

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.