IT’S been a week of mounting hysteria on the domestic front, culminating yesterday in the outrageous statements by DIKO deputy Nicos Pittokopitis that anyone who had received money to support the Annan plan should publicly commit suicide to serve as an example to others!
Perhaps we should be grateful that the appeal for public blood-letting should come in the form of suicide, rather than Taliban-style executions on Eleftheria Square. But to what depths have we sunk when this is the level of political dialogue, that a deputy should say such things in public and not be forced into immediate resignation from public life?
What began as a spat between Politis newspaper and AKEL has now turned into a full-scale witch-hunt, whose ultimate aim appears to be to crush all criticism of the government by painting political opponents as paid-up traitors who deserve to die. It gets worse: not only have the presidential cohorts turned on political opponents, they have sought to tarnish anyone remotely involved in bi-communal bridge-building, in the very civil society initiatives that are the essential building blocks for any future solution to take root.
The argument is simple: America and the UN funded bi-communal initiatives; bi-communal initiatives tended to support the Annan plan (hardly surprising); therefore all bi-communal funding was in fact a bankrolling of the ‘yes’ campaign, and anyone involved was a traitor. Hey presto, bi-communalism is the new treachery.
But if the Americans were involved in such evil schemes, why did the government not nip them in the bud during the referendum campaign? God knows the innuendo was there, the accusations of foreign interference were there. Yet if Tassos Papadopoulos had in his possession a letter from Alvaro de Soto admitting that the UN was bankrolling the ‘yes’, as the president claims, then why did he not make it public at the time?
Why now, six months after the referendum, when the President has secured his resounding ‘no’ and effectively buried the Annan plan? These are dangerous games. The government is fanning the flames of intolerance. It speaks of the need for unity, but fuels bitter social division. It is smashing civil society, which is not only the foundation of any future solution, but the foundation of our own clearly immature democracy.
Ironically, the hysterical mobilisation of patriotism and paranoia has a parallel across the Atlantic, in the disturbing America of George W Bush post-9/11. There too, the public is encouraged to feel under constant threat; there too, one man – the President – is presented as the only one capable of protecting them.
And guess what, when the survival of the nation is at stake, who cares about health care or education, jobs or the economy?
