Cyprus is Greek… but for how much longer?

On  RIK TV News last night there was a report on the visit to Cyprus by Greece’s new foreign minister, Stavros Lambrinides, one day after being appointed in place of Dimitris Droutsas. The  screenshot (l) is from the meeting that took place at Cyprus president Dimitris Christofias' private residence at Kellaki, outside Limassol. Lambrinides (l) and Christofias (r) are in the middle of the shot and above them – and this is what caught my attention – is a portrait of Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader, mass murderer and founder of the barbaric Soviet Union, but who is clearly, to the communist hack Christofias, a hero and icon of paramount importance.

Christofias is a clown, a village boy, whose communism amounts to knowing the slogans of the Third International, nostalgia for the Soviet Union and an undying belief in the virtues of the public sector. In Cyprus, communists have also developed a theory that blames Greek ‘nationalism’ for the island’s catastrophe, asserting that Cypriots – Greek and Turkish – are a distinct ethnicity. It’s a theory that has minimal support among the public, but this has not stopped Christofias and his communist party AKEL from pushing a concocted and phoney Cypriot national identity that seeks to strip Cypriots of their Greekness.

Below are extracts from an article I read on this site, originally written by the Hellenic Centre for European & International Analyses, on the explicit intention of Christofias and AKEL to dehellenise Cyprus:

Dehellenisation campaign in Cyprus

When he came to power [in February 2008] Christofias, responding to RIK TV’s Kostas Yennaris’ question on his dream for Cyprus, said: ‘Not, of course, in the way some others dream of Cyprus – as Greek… My dream is that Cyprus becomes a multicultural island. And I say this openly so that those who object to this can begin to digest it.’

A few months later, speaking at a Cypriot diaspora conference in Paphos, Christofias said: ‘We have to forget the heroes, the mothers and the nannies (τις μάνες και τις παραμάνες) if we want to solve the Cyprus problem.’

By mothers and nannies Christofias meant Greece.

In another speech, at the Brooking Institute in New York, in September 2010, Christofias expressed the view that both the so-called ‘mother countries’ invaded Cyprus in 1974; while speaking to Cyprus businessmen in Nicosia in November 2010, visiting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad revealed that President Christofias had reminded him that Cyprus is closer to Syria than it is to Greece.

Also, according to a report in the Cypriot daily Simerini (7 November 2010), the island’s interior minister announced a series of measures aimed at the integration of immigrants into Cyprus that included the teaching of… the Cypriot language.

What is, I ask myself, this Cypriot language?

In the Cypriot press, this dehellenisation trend has not gone unnoticed.

Andreas Vasiliou, writing in Simerini, said that ‘the Cyprus government is consciously working to transform the free areas of Cyprus into a patchwork (μιξοβάρβαρο) state without national, historical or cultural identity in the name, apparently, of multiculturalism  and the transformation of Cypriot Hellenism (a term which the communist party AKEL never uses) into a people without a national identity and conscience.’

Vasiliou goes on: ‘It’s as clear as day that those who took over the government of Cyprus in 2008 are trying to achieve that which was never achieved by those Frank, Latin, Turk and English conquerors and dynasties which ruled our country down the ages –  the dehellenisation of Cyprus.

'With unprecedented deceit they are working methodically in different ways to detach Cyprus from Greece and dismantle Cypriot Hellenism because, apparently, all our ills stem from “nationalism” and “chauvinism”…

‘But there are only two types of chauvinism in Cyprus: Turkish expansionist chauvinism and the anti-Greek chauvinism of the neo-Cypriots, who are systematically working to destroy all that has given us moral and spiritual strength in our resistance to foreign occupiers.’