BRICKS LAID ON THE WALL OF DIVISION
The Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias posted the following underneath the photos he shared of the Berlin Wall, which came down in 1989, and of the capital Nicosia:
“The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall reminds us that the struggles for freedom are not in vain. Our commitment to the need to bring down the Wall of Nicosia, the last wall in the capital of a European state, is firm.”
Dendias says that they will be bringing down the wall in Nicosia just like the one in Berlin and he dreams of establishing control over the whole of the North, including North Nicosia. He repeats that they “remain committed to achieving this goal.”
I don’t know whether it is the fate of Cyprus or the irony of history but as Dendias was announcing his “holy” dream, just a short while ago, the South Cyprus Parliament’s Finance Committee approved with a majority vote to release funds for establishing a Grivas Museum at the village of Chloraka in Paphos.
In other words, the Greek Cypriot-controlled state has officially decided to allocate funds for a museum where Georgios Grivas Digenis will be remembered.
When I read the news story I said to myself, “here is another brick skillfully laid on the wall.”
In spite of Dendias’s dream, the wall of division keeps growing bigger by the day.
It is becoming higher and the Turkish Cypriots are being pushed away a little more.
Meanwhile, let’s not go without mentioning that we found AKEL’s stance, which voted against the decision to “create a museum for the murderer Grivas”, extremely valuable.
***
Meanwhile, “our lot” were busy too.
They announced that they were withdrawing from the Imagine Project launched by the United Nations in 2017 under the auspices of the Bilateral Technical Committee on Education and carried out by the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research and the Home for Cooperation with the aim of providing “peace education and seeking ways of building communication between school-aged children from both communities.”
The Presidency and the Education Ministry were directly involved in this programme.
Its incompatibility with the Turkish Cypriot side’s two-state policy was provided as the excuse [to withdraw from the programme].
There you go, another brick on the wall of division.
If the programme is scrapped, then the new generations will also lose the chance of getting to know one another through dialogue and debate.
***
This is the latest from around here.
Our wall keeps on getting higher, brick by brick.
The rest is meaningless chatter.