A memorial service for Savvas Menoikos
Next Tuesday, December 7, the government will celebrate resistance day. On that day, in 1974, President Makarios returned to Cyprus from his self-imposed exile. There is no objection to celebrating resistance to the 1974 coup, although the honors paid are disproportionately greater than the magnitude of resistance activities. There was in fact no organized resistance to the coup. Except for some isolated cases, the system of government at the time either fled or raised a white flag to the military regime.
Resistance day was established at AKEL’s request, as an antidote to any kinds of events commemorating the EOKA struggle. In fact, AKEL took this wrong step in an attempt to face the unfair and historically unfounded criticism, that it supposedly betrayed the EOKA struggle. If some kind of anniversary should ever be established to commemorate the party’s struggles, this should be the 21st of January, when EOKA began executing AKEL and PEO members, on the unfounded charge of treason. Those people were murdered for their ideas and AKEL has a historic duty to seek the rehabilitation of their memory.
There is a serious problem, though: as we have proved on the basis of irrefutable evidence published in last Sunday’s issue of Politis newspaper, the President of the Republic was the theoretician of the executions. It could be argued that he was also the main instigator, since he was the general head of PEKA, the organization which had been gathering information on the action of the left-wing party and handing it over to Grivas. This information was the incriminating evidence that led to the declaration of “traitors” and to their subsequent death sentence.
AKEL has been systematically avoiding any kind of cooperation with DISY, since it gave shelter, back in 1976, to the organizers of the coup. However, the current DISY party is totally different from that of 1976. Even though it still keeps some kind of client relations with what’s left from EOKA B, it has totally renounced that period. Moreover, the political positions expressed by DISY today are closer to those of AKEL than the positions of DIKO are. In addition, President Papadopoulos remains totally devoted to the ideology of the 1950s and 1960s, during which period AKEL suffered greatly from terrorism.
AKEL’s alliance with Giorkatzis’ elements is politically inexplicable. The leadership of the party claimed that Mr. Papadopoulos had changed. He had either been led astray or had been turning a blind eye. We had detected this ideological alchemy in time. But the party newspaper, Haravgi, rushed to call us “anti-AKELists”, which means enemies! At the same time, it has deified AKEL’s most fervent foe, not only in the 1950s but also in the 1990s. In 1999, four years before being nominated for the ticket of the “democratic progressive forces”, Mr. Papadopoulos proudly wrote the preface to the re-publication of one of the most bigoted publications ever. This volume, consisting of all the issues of the periodical “Egerterion Salpispa (Clarion Call)”, is currently part of all the school libraries of Cyprus. Our children are taught, among others, that Savvas Menoikos, who was stoned to death for his ideas, in Lefkoniko, was a traitor. And more is yet to come…
Makarios Drousiotis - Politis
30/11/2004