By This post is also available in: ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ (GREEK) TÜRKÇE (TURKISH)
A worn-out, overused, threadbare and now feeble slogan returns—the call for a Pan-National Conference on Cyprus. Easy, inexpensive, and convenient, this rallying cry has been employed by many in the past during periods of national fervor. Some used it to harvest votes, others to enhance their status, knowing that nationalist sentiment excites the population and raises patriotic fervor. Still others, lacking the ability and courage to deliver results, simply sold seaweed as silk ribbons [Editor’s note: Greek idiomatic expression for making empty promises].
In fact, the slogan returns with the same naivety—perhaps even the same dose of mockery—that we first encountered it. As the saying goes: your mother did it, your aunt did it, so you do it too, little one, lest your generation be lost. Meaning: we fear nothing, we rest briefly and march toward glory again, as has been monumentally said about Mother Greece. However, while I cannot judge where the mother is heading, in the case of the daughter, allow me to say (though I avoid improprieties) that I maintain the strong view that we are simply… heading.
Archbishop George recently spoke about the need for a pan-national conference on Cyprus during the presentation of MP Costis Efstathiou’s book, urging: “The Cypriot government and representative figures of the people should without further delay travel to Athens to chart, together with the Greek government, after studying all the data, a line for Cyprus’s salvation.”
Indeed! I’ll overlook the paradox that we here, just five administrative districts in total, cannot manage to distribute hay between two donkeys. And that to achieve the unholy alliances we see forming in elections, we need to erase words and sweep phrases under the carpet, pretending they don’t exist—”for the good of the country and homeland,” always. Yet we persist in reformulating groundless appeals and expressing naive expectations for supposed “national consensus” that would allegedly emerge from a pan-national conference.
This conference would include the Cypriot government, “representative figures of the Cypriot people,” the Greek government and, presumably, representative figures of the Greek people. What can I say—let it be convened! And if those of the same faith, same customs, same language, and same blood manage to agree on something more than clearing the weeds from the cemetery of the informal Geneva conference—where the leaders of the two communities attended accompanied by five dozen figures (legal, political, advisors, collaborators, secretaries, and pharisees), the three Guarantor Powers, UN custody led by the Secretary-General, plus the European Union’s arranger—then I pledge to dress as Mary Magdalene next Easter and crawl on the steps that Zaha Hadid built with toil and sweat in Freedom Square, ready to be stoned by the mob.
For the sake of discussion, let’s overlook this paradox. What strikes me more is that George, an archbishop, makes such an appeal while ignoring the Gospel warning: “And the last deception will be worse than the first.” If we couldn’t agree then, in the pan-national conferences of November and December 1974, when everything was still fresh, if we had no common understanding of what “the current situation” was, let alone the handling required, how exactly will there be consensus, unanimity, and mutual support now, half a century later—not on specific issues, where we’ve seen success, but on direction and main handling, so we can conclude, as His Beatitude hopes and prays, with “a line for Cyprus’s salvation”?
Such moves for “re-nationalisation” of the Cyprus issue (which would greatly suit mediocre Cypriot leaders, accustomed to alibis and shifting their responsibilities elsewhere) are typically accompanied by warnings from the daughter to the mother that if the daughter is lost, the mother will be lost too. I don’t know if the archbishop articulated such warnings in his speech, which, however, closely followed the announcement by EOKA guerillas last October—an announcement filled with clichés like “stop the policy of appeasement,” “convening a pan-national conference to decide the method of salvation and vindication of Cypriot Hellenism,” “the Greek Nation to unanimously decide the liberation of the occupied territory,” and “loss of Cyprus would mean loss of other parts of Greece and the security of all Hellenism.”
[Photo insert: A cartoon that satirises the rejection Glafcos Clerides received from the Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou regarding the convening of a Pan-National Conference in Athens]
*PICTURE: The cartoon by the unforgettable Giorgos Mavrogenis, from April 1983 is indicative of the subject.
This article was originally published on 11.05.2025
