Do we really honor our resistance?
In fact, during the Clerides decade, EOKA Fighters Associations spent millions of pounds from the state budget on silly ceremonies and tasteless monuments, under the pretext of historical memory of the 1955-59 struggle. In fact, they used EOKA as a vehicle to wash away the guilt of 1974.
The Historical Memory Council of EOKA struggle, as an organic section of the Ministry of Education and Culture, entered the schools and gave guidance to the instructors on the national education of the youth. This kind of guided learning offered the young superficial knowledge and, often enough, misleading information, resulting in inefficient education or in complete ignorance of the true facts composing the modern history of
One would expect that a government professing change would try to uproot these mentalities and teach the children to think and not to memorize standardized knowledge, adapted in such a way as to serve political expediencies. This year, thirty years after 1974, the government decided to establish a day of memory for the resistance against the military coup. The new government adopted the methods invented by the Associations of EOKA Fighters to awaken people’s conscience regarding the “resistance fighters”, at the expense of “EOKA fighters.”
The industry producing a positive image of the resistant fighters has already started reaping fruit. President Papadopoulos was the first to be awarded last summer with a medal for his resistance action. I have gone through all the newspapers of the seven-year-period 1967-1974. I didn’t even find a statement of his, which could be regarded as a criticism of the seven-year dictatorship in Greece. On the contrary, his interventions towards stopping the debates against the Greek regime are registered in the minutes of the Parliamentary proceedings. On July 15, Mr. Papadopoulos was arrested in Ammohostos, but Kikis Konstantinou intervened in 48 hours and set him free. At the time of the Turkish invasion, prisons were full of thousands of prisoners. In the Castle of Kyrenia, prison wardens were shooting at the locks to set the detainees free, so as not to fall in the hands of Turks, since the organizers of the coup had taken the keys and disappeared. Mr. Papadopoulos would be entitled to obtain the title of resistance leader, only if he refused to be set free, until the last citizen would be set free.
There are undoubtedly people who gave their life for democracy. Whole families were broken up and lived in misery, either as direct or as indirect victims, without anyone seeing them. The state is undoubtedly obliged to support these families even now, but not to use them as raw material for petty politics. First of all, the state bears the responsibility to record the history of resistance and to offer it to the generations to come as a moral lesson. This recording of history should be the result of an unbiased research, which will undoubtedly bring up the unbearable responsibilities of EOKA B and the apathy with which the powers that were supposed to resist accepted the developments and compromised.
An important chapter of our modern history is also that of non-resistance to the coup. EDEK formed nuclei of resistance, but Lyssarides fled to the embassy of
The factors of society hurried to congratulate Samson, not because they were thrilled with the new regime, but to pay their respects to the new authority. As Makarios said after the coup, if he could hold on for a few more weeks, even his sister Maria would have renounced him.
So, our children should have access to information about everything that happened in
Makarios Drousiotis - Politis
15/12/2003