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INTERNATIONAL
In Cyprus, a new generation inherits a conflict
PYLA, Cyprus: Tell a Greek Cypriot
that your next destination is the
Turkish city of Istanbul, once the seat
of empires, and there’s a chance you
will be gently chided. “You mean
‘Constantinople,’” the conversation
partner might say, referring to the former
Byzantine capital, which fell to
Ottoman armies in 1453. This allegiance
to the past is tinged with defiance,
a stubborn refusal to call a place
by the name chosen by the inhabitants
of a hostile country. But it is
more recent civil strife and war, nearly
half a century ago, that infuse the psyche
of Cyprus, a Mediterranean island
favored by vacationers for its sun and
beaches.
In a strange twist, divided Cyprus
has taken on a role meant to unify, this
month assuming the rotating presidency
of the European Union, a sixmonth
stint that gives it a self-promotional
platform even as it scrambles for
a multi-billion dollar bailout to support
its troubled banks. In another
quirk of split-screen Cyprus, it is seeking
money from oil-rich Russia, an
increasingly important friend, in addition
to the EU, as it tries to avoid the
austerity measures that would likely
come with any European aid.
At the heart of these dueling directions
lies the “Cyprus problem”, as it is
blandly known. Talk of a peace settlement
between the island’s majority
Greek Cypriot community and Turkish
Cypriots that would end decades of
political uncertainty is giving way to a
sense that the problem is, unofficially,
the default solution. “People are simply
not interested in any form of power-sharing,”
said Yiannis Papadakis, a
social anthropologist at the University
of Cyprus. “There is a strong denial of
this reality.” Papadakis said the problem
is so consuming that it has sapped
will on both sides to debate migration,
the environment, women’s rights and
other important social issues. He questioned
whether they can compromise
and trust each other if they ever reach
a political settlement.
Cyprus, which joined the EU in
2004, split into an internationally recognized,
Greek-speaking south and a
Turkish-speaking north after a 1974
invasion by Turkey, a reaction to a
coup attempt by supporters of union
with Greece. Travel restrictions
between the two sides have relaxed,
but negotiations on security and territory
foundered. Only Turkey, whose EU
candidacy has stalled partly because
of the impasse, recognizes the government
in the north.
The result is an island that is not
quite a nation, with an identity that is
the sum of its shards. When George
Andreou became the first Cypriot to
climb Mount Everest and held up his
nation’s flag at the summit in May, it
was a reminder of division as well as a
symbol of unity. The flag, designed by
a Turkish Cypriot and adopted in 1960
after independence from British rule,
shows a map of the whole island and
two olive branches, a symbol of peace
between communities. But Turkish
Cypriots use a flag that is a variation of
the star and crescent emblem of
Turkey, their patron.
In his rucksack, Andreou, 39, also
carried the old flag of his hometown
Famagusta, which he and his ethnic
Greek family fled ahead of Turkish
MBABANE, Swaziland: A picture taken on July 24, 2012 shows a group of pupils
playing in an empty geography class at St Mark’s High School. — AFP
Swazi strike battling
to gain more traction
MBABANE: In the geography class at St
Mark’s High School, boys play chess on a
board scratched onto a workbench in
one corner, while in another a girl knits a
scarf while her friends gossip. Swazi
teachers have been on strike for more
than a month, but so far their abandoned
classrooms are the only tangible
result of a movement that wants not just
salary increases but democratic reforms
in Africa’s last absolute monarchy. “Our
ultimate goal is democracy,” said
Sibongile Mazibuko, president of the
Swaziland National Association of
Teachers, who see King Mswati III as the
country’s biggest problem. “He creates
the poverty himself.”
Teachers went on strike on June 22
demanding a 4.5 percent salary increase.
Other public servants joined briefly, but
the movement is stuttering after nurses
returned to work on Tuesday following a
court interdict.
Sporadic protests have drawn hundreds
into the streets, where police
greet them with rubber bullets, water
cannons and batons. Now most teachers
go to school only to sign attendance
registers, but still don’t teach. Police
have arrested 41 teachers, and the union
has spent almost 150,000 emalangeni
($18,000) on legal fees, Mazibuko said.
“The protests have become unsustainable.
We are looking at stayaways, picketing
on the premises,” she said.
Their financial demands are modest -
they want a 4.5 percent raise, while inflation
is around nine percent. It’s their
political demands that roil the palace,
which like to paint a picture of traditional
mountain kingdom where the
monarch is revered by his subjects. That
image has faded as pro-democracy
protests mushroomed over the past
year, sparked by a crippling financial crisis.
The International Monetary Fund has
urged the government to slash its public
wage bill as the economy stagnates, but
has pulled its team from the country
after the kingdom made no progress on
reforms.
Striking teachers have had their
salaries slashed as authorities retaliate
against the strikes, receiving as little as
30 emalangeni for their last paycheck.
Some were handed dismissal letters and
threatened with jail for contempt of
court if they didn’t report to work, said
government spokesman Percy Simelane.
“Even if money could come now it
would be very difficult to increase
salaries,” he told AFP. “We need to adhere
to this advice or sink.”
Teachers point to a 30 percent
increase lawmakers awarded themselves
in 2010. “If you’ve paid yourself so much,
why can’t you pay them?” asked
Mazibuko. “The politicians’ kids are outside
the country. The king’s children are
outside the country.
They will not invest in educating kids
for the poor,” she said.
Public servants also blame the lavish
lifestyle of Mswati and his 13 wives.
Forbes magazine rates him as among
the world’s 15 richest royals, keeping
each wife in her own palace. This week
opposition groups claimed three of the
queens and an entourage of 66 would
travel to Las Vegas for a holiday. The lawmakers’
big paychecks “could be contributing
towards the hefty salary bill
that we have,” Simelane said. “If it is not
(withdrawn) amid the outcry... discontent
will be very rife.”
But he insisted democratic reforms
were not necessary. “We are one of the
most democratic societies in the region,”
he said. “The king loves his people. I
don’t think he can create conditions
where people go hungry,” he said. About
60 percent of the tiny country’s 1.1 million
people live on less than $2 a day.
The UN World Food Programme says
one-fifth of the country experienced
food shortages this year.
Simelane also justified police violence
against protesters. “In most cases provocation
of some kind came out,” he said.
“We have one of the most disciplined
police forces in the region. They normally
don’t shoot to kill.”
Life in Swaziland continues despite
the school groundings, the tiny country’s
troubles far from the international
spotlight. Other government workers
are also demanding raises, but generally
are not downing tools. But
Mazibuko is adamant that growing
awareness will see her movement succeed.
“Little by little people are seeing
the light,” she said.
forces, less than one year after he was
born. The climber has never returned
to his house in Famagusta, where
Turkish Cypriots now live, because he
thinks it would help to legitimize
Turkish forces based in the northern
part of the island.
“It is like I never lived my childhood
or I refused to remember,” Andreou
wrote in an email. “I know from my
parents that they had been very difficult
years since we left everything
behind, hoping we would go back
soon. It never happened. Instead, we
lived in houses without doors and
windows, in tents, in the fields, anywhere
just to stay safe and away from
war.” Days after Andreou, a banker,
returned from the Himalayas, his wife
gave birth to their first child, who may
grow up to discover the same sour
politics. The same goes for the 3-yearold
daughter of Ahmet Sozen, a
Turkish Cypriot research director at
Cyprus 2015, a group that seeks to
In this May 19, 2012 photo, Cypriot George Andreou, 39, holds up his
nation’s flag on Mount Everest. — AP
BUCHAREST: Romanians voted yesterday on
whether to impeach their unpopular president,
Traian Basescu, after a government campaign
to remove him that has drawn international
criticism of its methods and raised
doubts about the country’s IMF aid deal.
Prime Minister Victor Ponta’s leftist Social
Liberal Union (USL) has suspended Basescu
and its drive to unseat him has brought a
stern dressing-down from Brussels, which
accused him of undermining the rule of law
and intimidating judges.
Ponta’s government took office in May and
is holding the referendum to seek popular
backing for the impeachment of Basescu for
overstepping his powers. He is unpopular for
backing austerity and for perceptions of
cronyism. Opinion polls show that some 65
percent of Romanians want to remove the former
sea captain from office, but the opposition
has called for a boycott of the vote and
the USL is struggling to get the turnout of
over 50 percent needed for a valid vote. “I am
not a fan of Basescu but I will not vote
because I do not approve of the way the government
stepped on laws to have their way,”
said Dan Popescu, a 52-year-old Bucharest
pensioner.
Many people are on holiday and the temperature
is expected to hit 39 Celcius, prompting
the government to set up extra polling
stations, many of them at seaside restaurants
and hotels, to make it easier to vote. After
three hours of voting, the election bureau said
turnout was 9.1 percent by 10 a.m. (0700
GMT), suggesting it could be very close to 50
percent by the time polls close at 11 pm.
Basescu and his allies, the opposition
Democrat Liberal Party (PDL), asked their supporters
to boycott the referendum. The suspended
president initially urged Romanians
to vote against what he called a coup d’etat,
but his stance shifted this week when he and
his PDL allies said they were concerned about
the possibility of electoral fraud.
promote joint understanding. Sozen
said the uncertainty goes back to the
1950s, when his father, now 80 years
old, was a police officer in a British
administration fighting a Greek
Cypriot guerrilla group that sought
union with Greece.
While today’s stalemate is violencefree,
Sozen maintains the ethnic
Greek-Turkish divide has a corrosive
impact on Cypriot psychology. “I don’t
want my little daughter to go through
the same thing in her life,” said Sozen,
The government had tried to make it easier
to impeach Basescu by removing the minimum
turnout rule but was forced to back
down by harsh EU criticism and a
Constitutional Court ruling that a 50 percent
turnout was obligatory. “I hope the voting
presence will be decisive and ... that by the
end of this day we will know and enforce the
will of a majority of citizens,” interim president
and USL co-leader Crin Antonescu said after
voting. The row over Basescu has delayed
policymaking, raised doubts about Romania’s
5 billion euro International Monetary Fundled
aid deal, sent the leu currency plunging to
record lows, and pushed up borrowing costs.
The IMF has said it will begin a two-week
review of Romania’s aid deal on July 31, a
who was inspired to become a professor
of politics in order to help find a
solution, even though his selfdescribed
“life mission” sometimes
exhausts and frustrates him. Polls by
his group indicate that Turkish
Cypriots, who have leaned toward living
apart because of fears of being
dominated, and Greek Cypriots, who
have tended to prefer a one-state
island dominated by their majority, are
moving further from the compromise
of a power-sharing federation.
Greek Cypriots fear encroachment
from Turkey, a rising power that
objects to Greek Cypriot plans for offshore
oil and gas exploration. They
highlight past suffering, but gloss over
the question of 1960s attacks on
Turkish Cypriots. Turkish Cypriots
resent the Greek Cypriot rejection of
unification in a 2004 referendum. “As
more time passes, it’s not good for the
result, meaning that people are not
moving toward the solution spirit. On
the contrary,” said Sozen, noting that
the problem is exacerbated by a gap
between Cypriots and their leaders.
“People are alienated in the sense that
the common people are shut away
from the official process. The general
public is not really informed by what is
happening.”
In February, Turkish Cypriot leader
Dervis Eroglu said negotiations with
the Greek Cypriot leader left “a zucchini
taste in the mouth,” a Turkish
way of saying they have grown bland.
His Greek Cypriot counterpart,
President Demetris Christofias said in
May that talking to Eroglu was like
trying to knock down a wall by throwing
eggs at it. — AP
MONDAY, JULY 30, 2012
Romanians vote on
impeaching president
Basescu unpopular for backing austerity
KOMAGGAS, South Africa: The
man slips the plastic pouch of
gems into his mouth, an illicit haul
from the sandy deposits scattered
among the mountains of South
Africa’s diamond coast. “It’s my
safe,” he explains, sliding the stash
week later than planned because of the
impeachment referendum. Romania has
made progress since the 1989 overthrow of
communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and
joined the EU in 2007, but the economy
slipped back into recession in the first quarter
of this year and pockets of severe poverty
remain. Brussels has a wide range of levers
with which to put pressure on Romania,
whose justice system is under EU monitoring.
Romania gets European cash to help it catch
up with other members and the bloc contributes
to its IMF-led aid deal. Ponta felt the
full weight of EU wrath after his government
took on the Constitutional Court, threatening
to replace judges and reduce its powers, and
ignoring one of its decisions. — Reuters
MAMAIA, Romania: A Romanian tourist casts her ballot at one of the additional polling
stations which have been set up along the Black Sea coast to facilitate voting for holidaymakers
and rural populations in this Black Sea resort city yesterday. — AFP
Death no deterrent for S African gem diggers
back along the inside of his cheek.
The group of diggers are waiting
for the cover of darkness to make
another raid on a disused mine,
opposite their make-shift camp,
where 10 miners died in an avalanche
three months ago. Illegal
KOMAGGAS, South Africa: A picture taken on July 6, 2012 shows an
illegal miner sifting sand and stones as he looks for diamonds. — AFP
miners in South Africa are ready
to risk death to chase a share of
the mineral riches that shaped the
continent’s biggest economy.
In sparsely populated
Namaqualand, where the famed
gem deposits run along the icy
Atlantic Ocean to the Namibian
border, diamond giant De Beers
was once the top employer, providing
3,000 jobs and building
two towns with recreation halls, a
golf course and schools, to house
its staff. But its mines were halted
in 2008 and the company’s
Namaqualand operations are in
the final stages of a 225 million
rand ($27 million, 22 million euro)
sell-off after years of retrenchments.
The slowdown has emptied
out the private mining towns,
but has lured growing numbers of
diggers from the area’s other
small settlements into the abandoned
fields.
“I can say that more than 60
percent of the active workforce
are involved in the informal diamond
trade,” said Andy Pienaar, of
the social outreach office in
Komaggas, one of the few small
villages in the mining area. “There
was sort of a blessing from the
community that ‘people, you may
go’” dig, he added. “It was about
survival. It was about sustaining
and we’re not talking about high
life standards, we’re talking about
just basically survival.”
Komaggas has little sign of
gem wealth along dirt roads that
wind past humble homes where
many residents survive on government
welfare payments. But
one local buyer, who also digs
with a team who share the profits,
estimates that he has made about
400,000 rand since he started digging
three years ago. “It changed
my life completely. I don’t even
mind about looking for a job now
because I was running around
Cape Town, Johannesburg, looking
for a job - there’s no need
now, I’ve got a job now,” he told
AFP. “I’m not a rich man but I can
support my family each and every
month.” — AFP