The Puppeteer is the one who defines the Rhetoric

As we tumble around passing by a series of important events defining Cyprus' history, the political rhetoric appears to have been defined by "someone else". Couple of years ago, none of us were talking about "minority rights offered by Greek Cypriots" or "I will recognize Republic of Cyprus but it will not be a political recognition"? Suddenly, these begun sounding like part of a decades of existential battle that Turkish Cypriots fought in the streets of Cyprus.

Our great saviors (!) -- Talat and co -- are busy telling us how they are against the status-quo and that they are very different from Denktash and co. Apparently, I should be grateful that they did not let us live with minority rights under Greek Cypriot domination and I owe this partially to their insistence that Turkey does not recognize RoC. Their friends and their opponents too are parotting the same rhetoric. Minority rights, minority righs that, ad infinitum.

It was already nauseating listening to Denktash tell us such stories. Except, in his rhetoric it was about ENOSIS, becoming refugees and being eaten alive by Greeks.I guess Talat and co are right, they are indeed anti-status quo, they want to use a different rhetoric. If only rhetoric brought prosperity and peace to us.

I always repeat this; Cypriot communities are very similar to each other. I do not mean to talk about the usual we eat the same food, we dance the same music, we breathe the same air stories. I am talking about sharing the same type of hysteria and the chavunistic, outdated worldview. Walk accross the Green-line, around similar times, everyone was arguing about whether Papadopoulos should veto openning of membership negotiations with Turkey or not and it was all about recognizing RoC. Decades old tradition of repeating "remove the troops, remove the settlers, let all refugees return to their homes" motto was pushed to the background. Talk about being "gardash" (brothers).

This is not a Cypriot-only matter. The political arena elsewhere suffers from similar games too. Look at the recent presidential elections in the US. The Republicans made a big fuss about "moral values" by which they meant banning same-sex marriages, and other similar outdated religious favorites. The Democrats let them define the rhetoric of the elections and followed their lead, dancing around the same idea, trying to proove their superiority in the same moral values. At the end, Bush won the election and polls have shown that moral values played a key-role in his victory. Puppeteer was the one who defined the rhetoric, i.e. the Republicans. It became irrelevant to morality whether Bush's policies led to massive unemployment, deaths and disability of hundreds of thousands of people in US, Afganistan and Iraq, torture becoming a common tool used by US military etc. The puppeteer was able to steer his puppets away from moral values in general and led them to a tiny portion of it where discrimination against a large section of the society became a moral value that needed defending.

Do you follow the pattern here? Republic of Cyprus did not force Turkey to improve its human rights conditions, play a positive role in solving the Cyprus problem but instead it forced her to dance around the mainly financial issue of the Customs Union. Cypriot people and our organizations were the puppets here. Similarly, Talat and co. did not use the year after the rejection of the Annan plan to build an alternative solution and change the status quo, but they used it to gain a few brownie points here and there and create a new set of things to blame the Greek Cypriots with. They did it using the power of the Turkish Cypriot masses who flocked to rallies in tens of thousands and cried out their demand for peace. In the mean time, the puppeteers, namely, Turkey on one side and nationalist Greek Cypriot circles (Papadopoulos and co) on the other side defined the rhetoric and survived these important times with relatively small amount of damage to their traditional policies.

A new version of this game has just been released, let's play it out; it is that time of the year again in north Cyprus; It is the ELECTION TIME!

I am certainly enjoying the squabbles between different parties calling themselves "the opposition" while they are trying to establish which one is the best choice to lead us in this game of chavunistic pissing competition. All I have to tell them is "The Puppeteer is the one who defines the Rhetoric"!

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