Next door for our weekly purchase of the Cyprus Mail, with all its deficiencies. And catch the very tail end of the Larnaca Marathon coming along Makarios. Over 11,000 entrants from 85 countries and a good day for running as the unseasonably hot weather seems to be over and back to highs of 23 or 24.
Meanwhile President Christodoulides has announced piously that he is « steadfastly increasing efforts to resume negotiations on the Cyprus [reunification] issue. The difficulty being that he was speaking at a memorial service for EOKA fighter Kyriakos Matsis, who died in 1958 while resisting arrest by security forces. To quote from my blog entry of March 2, also concerning then newly elected President Christodoulides:
EOKA was a terrorist organisation active from the fifties to the seventies whose aim was political union with Greece, pitting it against the British, Turkish Cypriots, and many fellow Greek Cypriots. While many independence movements have involved violence, EOKA was not an independence movement and did mean death for Turkish Cypriots. Independence was granted by the British in 1960, and the government of the Republic later outlawed the organisation, which had been responsible for civilian deaths and involved with the assassination of the American ambassador.
Difficult to reconcile glorification of EOKA with sincere attempts to reunite Cyprus.
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