Historic Service Held At Sumela

Patriarch Vartholomaios leads yesterday’s service at the Sumela Monastery in Trabzon, Turkey. The Turkish government has allowed religious worship to take place there once a year in slow easing of restrictions on religious expression. Until now, the monastery, a site of holy significance to Black Sea Greeks, has been operated as a museum.
The first service to take place in 88 years at the Sumela Monastery in northeast Turkey was described yesterday as a "historic and important" event by Premier George Papandreou, who watched Patriarch Vartholomaios preach to some 1,500 pilgrims, many from Greece and Russia.
"After 88 years, the tears of the Virgin Mary have stopped flowing," said Vartholomaios, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, at the 4th-century monastery, built into a sheer cliff in the Trabzon area of Turkey, where tens of thousands of Black Sea, or Pontian, Greeks once lived.

The last service held at the monastery was in 1922, before the last of the Greeks fled the region following the First World War and the conflict between Greece and Turkey. Greece estimates that 350,000 Pontians were killed when they were forced out by the Turks, in what Athens describes as a genocide.
For the first time since then, the Turkish government, which is trying to allow greater religious and ethnic freedom in the country as it attempts to gain entry to the European Union, gave official permission for Vartholomaios to hold a service at Sumela to mark the ascension of Jesus’s mother, Mary, to heaven.
The Patriarch said the event had great symbolism. "This monastery is the bequest of a civilization that had a culture of living together," he said. "Let us ensure this bequest survives so the pain does not reoccur."
The Greeks admitted to the service seemed greatly moved. "For us, the Virgin of Sumela is more important than our mother," said Charalambos Zigas, 51. "Being apart from this place feels like being Odysseus: always searching for your home," Evropi Papadopoulou, 45, told Reuters.
KATHIMERINI - AUGUST 16 2010

Futile Blame Game over Refugees Properties

LAST WEEK’S decision of the European Court of Human Rights continues to be the main issue of public debate, which is no bad thing. After all, this was a wake-up call for all Greek Cypriots who believed that their property rights would be unaffected by the passage of time and bought the politicians’ myth that a settlement was not a matter of urgency.
Unfortunately, the debate has avoided the main point of the ECHR decision, degenerating instead into a blame game. Some have blamed the decision on the lawyer/politicians who encouraged refugees to file over a thousand recourses to the European Court and thus prompting it to propose the setting up of the Immovable Property Commission (IPC) in the north. Others put the responsibility on the refugees (some 400) who applied to the IPC, thus giving it legitimacy. The hard-line politicians, who advocated that the Cyprus problem could be solved in the courts, blamed the judges of the ECHR for taking a politically expedient decision.
In a way everyone was correct. The ECHR wanted to find a way to dismiss the individual property claims of refugees after it was inundated with applications and it set up the IPC. It declared it an acceptable domestic remedy in order to block the submission of more applications. Refugees gave legitimacy to the Commission by applying for compensation, but they had no other choice under the Papadopoulos government which had no interest in pursuing a settlement; they saw the commission as their only hope of getting some compensation for their properties.
And the judges took a political decision, as many lawyer claimed, because they felt the ECHR was being abused by Greek Cypriots. They felt Greek Cypriot property claims could be settled by a political solution to the Cyprus problem, a view endorsed by President Christofias. In short, a combination of factors contributed to the decision released by the Court eight days ago.
The blame-game everyone has been engaging in for the last week is futile, but for the hard-line politicians and their patron the Church, it is preferable than having to deal with the hard choices presented to us by the decision. We either work for a settlement which would not guarantee the return of all the refugees to their homes but would ensure they would be compensated for their properties, or we surrender the occupied part of Cyprus to Turkey and hope that a maximum number of refugees would receive some compensation from the IPC. The ECHR has even placed a December 2011 deadline on applying for compensation. After this, refugees would have no legal claim to their properties in the north.
This is what our wise politicians should be discussing instead of looking for scapegoats to blame the consequences of their short-sighted policies.

Cyprus Mail - March 13, 2010

The Greek Connection

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou assured on Tuesday that the Greek government would continue to support the negotiating effort of the leaders of the two communities in Cyprus for a solution of the island`s political problem.``We will not be mere observers in this effort,`` he said in a speech before an extraordinary plenary session of the House of Representatives, attended by the state, political, religious and military leadership of the Republic of Cyprus, as well as representatives of organisations, foreign ambassadors, and media representatives from Greece and Cyprus. Papandreou said Greece would undertake initiatives, in the framework of the close cooperation and coordination between the two countries, adding that ``there is no alternative to the reunification of the island`` and ``we will not accept division.`` He said the Cyprus question was a problem of invasion and occupation, and that the aim was to terminate the military occupation, be rid of the threat it constitutes to Cypriot Hellenism, and end the drama of the relatives of missing persons.

Empire and the Law

The impassioned debate currently taking place in the United States as to whether to hold an inquiry into the revelations that captives in the “war on terror” were tortured, indicates that America is at a turning point that will determine the image and substance of its democracy.
The United States has not left any physical marks that will allow the people of the future to grasp the power and influence of the mightiest military and economic power the Earth has seen. It did not build pyramids nor Parthenons nor great roads and aqueducts, like so many empires before it. The great achievements of the Americans have been mostly intangible: the development of technology that empowered the individual, the spread of open markets and the globalization of trade and affluence. Above all, though, the United States was the driving force in the spread of democracy and human rights in countries whose citizens were suffering. Even though US governments cooperated with brutal, autocratic regimes and took part in regional wars, the image of justice that they radiated created a standard that every nation wanted to reach.
With the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989, it appeared that the model represented by the United States – that of democracy and capitalism – had triumphed. This illusion did not last long: The terrorist attacks of 2001, the ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003, the collapse of the global credit system, the widespread recession and the rapid climate changes shook the new order.
The United States found itself facing an unprecedented challenge: How could it protect its people and its interests without endangering the ideals on which the Americans’ global influence depended? It was a great misfortune for the United States – and the rest of the world – that George W. Bush was president at this critical time.
He did not waste time before deciding that what was good for America was good for the world. He adopted the dogma of “preemptive war,” along with extrajudicial killings, the kidnapping of suspects in foreign lands and harsh interrogation tactics (i. e. torture). Not only did these violate US and international laws but, in the eyes of the world, the American model lost the precious sense of its moral superiority. What once took place in the dungeons of dark regimes was now being carried out by Americans.
Beyond its moral decline, however, the Bush government’s greatest crime was its violation of the law. Scrapping punishment for those who break the law leads directly to arbitrary behavior, corruption and widespread cynicism. It destroys the fabric of society.
It’s irrelevant whether torture helped gain valuable information (as its supporters claim) or whether it lead simply to forced and useless confessions born of fear and despair (as others counter). Nor can we know whether the fear of torture dissuaded anyone from committing a terrorist act. What we do know is that undermining civil society is far more dangerous than the threat of terrorism – both for the United States and the countries whose governments might like to do the same.
In his desire for political consensus, President Barack Obama would like to avoid a confrontation with Bush administration officials and the CIA. But this is not a matter of personal choice. Just as the administration officials and CIA agents had no right to break the law, the president has no right not to order an investigation and the possible punishment of those responsible. (Let’s not forget that the revelation by US newspapers of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, painful though they were, saved the reputation of the American media and, to a great extent, cleansed their country’s name of the taint.)
Only the imposition of the law – however belatedly – can heal the wounds of its violation. And only by adhering to the law can a society show its true face.