Birkibrisli wrote:I have just read this whole tread in one sitting.I am in awe of all that energy that you guys are putting into arguing your points.Here is a quick response,and I will try not to be too utopian this time.Viewpoint is right when he says the key to reuniting Cyprus is building trust between the two communities.But Piratis and Kifeas is right too when they argue this should not be at the expense of GCs' human rights.The solution to the Cypro will have to involve acknowledging the wrongs that were done by both sides,trying to reverse what wrongs can be reversed,and compensate what wrongs cannot be corrected. If Kifeas want to return to his home in the North he should be able to,and if I want to return to my village in the South and salvage what I can I should be able to as well.
But should we expect Kifeas to live under the "TRNC" and hope that he will be happy he is back at home.I would think not.Can I realistically return to my village in the South if nobody else wants to come with me,and live like Don Qiote fighting with the gosts of the past.I would think not.Yet,no other solution will satisfy me.I don't want to live anywhere else in Cyprus.I want to go back home,but a home where I can sleep well at night,where I don't have to worry about some lunatic slitting my throat at night.We need a solution where kifeas will feel at home in the North and I in the South.And that can only happen in a united Cyprus where one government rules equally justly one nation called the Cypriot nation. Those who feel more Turkish or Greek than Cypriot can go and live in Turkey and Greece and let us get on with our lives.But how do we go from where we are to that Cyprus where we all feel secure and respected and trusted,where we are all proud members of one nation.Where we all speak at least three languages,and where we keep religion in its proper place ie in peoples hearts.Bugger if I know.But I feel we'll have a better chance of achieving such a homeland if we have more people thinking like Cypezokyli.We need to give peace a chance which means we need to be prepared to forget and forgive a lot of wrongs done to us by the other side,for the sake of trust and respect that Viewpoint is talking about.Without that I am afraid we will still be crying for our homeland in 30 years time, as I do often these days when I read some of the threads in this forum.
Hello Birkibrisli,
I agree 100% with the letter and the spirit of all you said. I do not argue that trust is not an issue, it is and a very important one. What I do not like though is to see the issue of trust being so savagely abused, just in order to justify unacceptable acquisitive claims. Trust is a very delegate but also a very subjective issue. One cannot for example assume the right to violate other people’s human rights simply because s/he says or even genuinely feels that s/he cannot trust the other. One cannot trust because of valid personal reasons but can also pretend that he doesn’t trust, either because he doesn’t want to trust or because of other purely subjective reasons. I cannot for example accept from an educated and intelligent person such as viewpoint to argue on the issue of trust like a child that all of suddenly was left away from its mother and in the middle of totally unknown crowed of people and thus was conquered by fear and mistrust of all those around it.
I believe that the GC side has taken some steps towards this building of trust, although I argue more thinks can be done. Unfortunately though, I see at the same time a TC leadership that instead of helping out their community to develop more trust, they do exactly the opposite. They try with their public declarations and speeches to enhance this mistrust towards the GC community. Part of the TC media is doing this as well. The way they distorted and present the GC positions and the way they talk about them proves exactly this. In the end it becomes a frustrating vicious circle because while the one side is trying to build something, the other is trying to demolish it. Consequently, it makes me wonder whether the leadership of the TC community genuinely wants the TC community to develop trust towards the GC community or they prefer instead that the mistrust continues, for their own reasons.
