By Mihalis Eleftheriou

SO HERE we are again, faced or taunted with the possible reunification of our tattered island. It feels different this time though. But then so did all the times before. So maybe you find yourself, like me, tempted not to even pay attention because you don’t want to feel duped – once again – into going along with this unexciting parade.

If you think like me – that the premise of our reunification should be based on an understanding of ourselves as a people whose cultures and indeed existences are symbiotic, where none ‘is’ or exists without the other – then you already know this reunification is not the one for you either.

The draft joint ‘communique’ has been released and from the outset it formalises, fossilises and legitimises the fictive stories that led to our division in the first place, just as our unimaginative constitution did. The communique pre-establishes a ‘bi-communal, bi-zonal federation’ built of ‘constituent states’ with one international personality. Both further ingrain the false idea on an internal level (where it most counts) that the pluralist island of Cyprus is a bi-communal one of warring Greek and Turkish factions rather than a collection of peoples much more victim of colonial policy making than of one another. It is the same false idea that led to our division and is now an unquestionable piece of trivia for most of the island and indeed the world. Did you know that all other minorities of the island – like the 64 villages of Maronite Cypriots for example, who settled here over a millennia ago – were forced by our constitution to make the choice between becoming ‘Greek’ or ‘Turkish’ Cypriots? This led to the almost complete loss of Cypriot Maronite Arabic, the most deviant dialect of the Arabic speaking world.

The concept of Cypriot bi-communality, a remnant of the ‘divide and rule’ tactic exhausted by the British in Cyprus and across their vast empire, was enshrined in the 1960s constitution and managed to commit genocide without killing (hardly) anyone.

The joint statement outlines a proposal based on the total adoption of the very ideas that landed us in this calamity to begin with. The path drawn out not only normalises and solidifies the idea of bi-communalism, but pretty much doesn’t provide for anything else but the physical removal of that wall. It might between the lines read ‘take the wall down and buy stuff from each other’.

Each community is afforded such independence as a ‘constituent state’ of the ‘United Cyprus Federation’ (at least they had the foresight to avoid ‘The Federation of United Cyprus’ or ‘FUC’) that there doesn’t seem to be much unity at discussion at all, just economic logistics. There will still be ‘their bit’ and ‘our bit’ and we will be oppressively conscious of where we are. This clumsy pre-agreement might not yet prove to be a recipe for disaster, but it certainly has all the ingredients to be. I’m still voting ‘yes’ though.

If I had more faith in our politicians, or in politics, to come up with something better, I would already be sure of my ‘no’ vote, but of course I don’t. The world as we know it is changing everywhere, norms are being challenged, values are being reconsidered, even questions are being questioned, minds are opening, cultures are evolving and here we are stagnant in our division.

Most of us do not know what we are without this wall, so how indeed might we be expected to make the right decisions about living without it? This is going to have to come afterwards, there’s no way around that as uncomfortable as it feels. Aware of the abysmal results it could bring to our peaceful sleepy island, I vote ‘yes’ to whatever crap they come up with.

There is of course great risk in impatience for change, but I too have lost my patience. I am aware of how perilous it is to do the right thing for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way, that if it doesn’t work out, then it will be considered ultimate proof that we are incapable of living with one another and the next step would be permanent division. But this is just a phrase. That wall has been here for 40, and in Nicosia for 50, years. For most of us that’s been ‘permanent’.

We need the space to grow that this wall has denied us and if we don’t want to see total collapse, we will have to. We must experience the peace of understanding that this is our world and possession is not unilateral – we also belong to it. We must use our creativity to bring ourselves together in a plethora of ways, and not least because a peaceful reunification is also not without its hazards. The doors to mass-development will spring open and we will have to protect the island from its clutches. We must work together and not only to save trees, lakes and beaches, but for the very act of participating in and reclaiming the world we live in, with all of the satisfaction that this brings which the Mercedes, expensive clothes or foreign flags failed to.

All of this happening on our little island whilst the world begins disquietly to shake off a system which after having provided many fruits, has also exhausted our capacity for environmental and social damage. It would in fact be a wondrous stroke of luck to be thrown off our bearings by reunification at a time when we need to open our minds as a global family and envisage an alternative future to that with which we are currently flirting.

This is definitely not the reunification I want, but this isn’t the world I want either, and neither is going to come all by itself.





