It was not simply a catamaran that sank in the waters off Kyrenia. Nor was it simply that around thirty people lost their lives. Hope, the prospect of a future and humanity itself went down with that ship. The last of these, in particular, appears to have abandoned this society for good, judging by the vicious, spite-filled posts that surfaced on a scale that was, quite literally, sickening.
That rotten catamaran dragged the most essential ingredient of peace down with it to the seabed. Something that must first take root in the individual before it can spread through society and into the institutions of power. Here, after more than half a century, we have still failed to come to terms with our own feelings and emotions. That is why, after all, we do not even know exactly what we want. On either side of the barbed wire.
Politically, too, things are darker than ever. Once again, one side is refusing the help offered by the other. This time it is the Turkish Cypriot side, but it certainly does not have a monopoly on refusal. Our own side has also rejected help offered to it in similar circumstances. And so we barricade ourselves within what each side calls its own state, while supposedly striving for reunification. Our leaders do not even want the simple symbolism of cooperation, something that could also help change the mood among ordinary people. And then we wonder at the bile and venom so many pour out on social media. Then we wonder why the international community has grown tired of us, exasperated by the immaturity we display every time an attempt is made to move something forward.
It is now clear that everyone in Cyprus is going their own way. The frenzied campaign to cancel certain events in the occupied north in the period before the tragic shipwreck does not put Turkish Cypriots under pressure, as some seem to believe. Quite the opposite. It is fuelling a surge in Turkish Cypriot nationalism that is now reaching even people who fought for a solution to the Cyprus problem. It is creating a suffocating climate within a community that will now, as a community, look for other ways to survive. And its only way out is not to crawl on its knees before the Greek Cypriot establishment, as some seem to fantasise, but either to leave Cyprus or surrender itself completely into Turkey’s hands.
I genuinely wonder what the two leaders will go and tell the UN Secretary-General at the end of the month. Will Mr Christodoulides go there to announce that he succeeded in getting a music festival and a football camp in the occupied north cancelled? And will Mr Erhürman go there to announce that he rejected the help offered by the Greek Cypriot side? And, really, will they both expect a man entering the final months of his term to launch new initiatives and take an interest in a problem that those most directly affected quite clearly could not care less about?
No one can tear down a wall when others are working day and night to keep it standing. What is strange is that those very same people then pretend to be surprised when they discover that this wall has by now taken deep root in people’s minds as well.
It was not simply a ship that sank in the waters off Kyrenia, nor was it simply that a number of people drowned. It was Cyprus itself that foundered in those waters. And the sea is not to blame, just as it was not to blame back then, when “our beloved sea of Kyrenia brought them to us”…
Source: OUR COLLECTIVE SHIPWRECK
