On the occasion of the RoC’s censorship of (to the stones) we lent you our breath, and you whispered it back to the earth.

The Greek Cypriot nationalist establishment, ever since it gained the monopoly of power, has always tried to control and discipline public discourse. Citing an undefined “national interest” and the “state of necessity”, it tries to define what can and can’t be said or done.

As proven many times, “the national interest” is any politician’s career, built on the corpse of the Cyprus problem, it’s the business with golden passports and developers which go unhindered due to the lack of checks and balances in the status quo, it’s the exploitation of the pain of the victims of war, the neglection of Turkish Cypriots, who are supposed to be partners in the Republic of Cyprus, which the Greek Cypriot nationalist elite treats as its backyard.

Arts and words have the capability to unmask the hypocrisy and power mechanisms. They offer the people tools of resistance against the dominant narrative.

However, this is not done automatically. Individuals are behind every act and word, consciously using them to highlight marginalised and oppressed truths. It takes courage and political consciousness to take on the establishment, as every time a truth is being told, it goes after the ones who voice it. Arts can be the voice of power or they can be the voice of resistance. We stand with the latter.

Examples of censorship against any expression that goes beyond the Hellenic Christian nationalist narrative vary. Here’s a few:

• In 1992, anarchist sociologist Andreas Panayiotou said in a TV show on the state broadcaster that he identifies as a Cypriot, not as a Greek. The establishement thought this crossed a red line and cut the funding to the show, subsequently leading to the termination of production.
• In 2015, the state theatre hosted a play in the ancient Salamis theatre. It was the first time this happened after the war in ‘74. Even though the nationalist establishment was looking for reasons to block the play, including by mobilising the Audit Office, the play was a huge success in front of a packed crowd.
• In 2020, painter and teacher George Gavriel was disciplinary prosecuted by the Education ministry, because his paintings -critical of the nationalist and religious establishment- supposedly violate the ethics of the Greek Cypriot education system.
• In 2021, the government attacked the “Os Dame” movement for using the Greek Cypriot linguistic variety. The Education minister at the time even tried to offer advice on Greek Cypriot spelling, while at the same time dismissing the inclusion of the language in the public schools’ curriculum. “Os Dame” was also in the spotlight when it described Anastasiades’ administration as “the government in the south”. 

There’s also a list of examples that highlights the hypocrisy of these same groups: 

• They veil the events before 20 July 1975 and claim that the Cyprus problem is simply one of invasion and occupation, but they say nothing when Cyprus is used by the Israeli forces as a training ground to attack other countries. And they are ok with the RoC president becoming a puppet of war criminal Netanyahu.
• Greek Cypriots who were forcibly displaced from their homes are refugees and even their descendents are entitled to state aid, but when people leave their countries on rotten boats to escape war and try to come here, they are “illegal immigrants” and the RoC is right to push them back. It goes without saying that in these narratives there are no Turkish Cypriot refugees or missing persons, as that would deprive the GCs of their exclusivity to being the victims. 
• They think it’s a problem to use Cypriot linguistic varieties instead of the official ones, but they have no problem with the absence of Turkish signs or with the fact that TCs often can’t be offered the required services in state agencies.
• Those who are involved in sales of properties in the north are thieves and usurpers, but when we invite them in Larnaca and Limassol, there is no issue. And we won’t even address the exploitation of TC-owned properties in the south.

Partition is before our eyes and is about to bite our necks, while the nationalist elite still plays with words and calls for books to be censored. Even if partition becomes formally established, the people of Cyprus will continue enjoying this island together, away from anachronistic moral panics. History has shown that censorship efforts always fail.