Our View: The Church needs to stay out of politics

It took Archbishop Georgios III a year to show his true colours. Almost 12 months after his enthronement, he issued fire and brimstone message for Christmas, indicating he would continue the catastrophic, hardline tradition of the Church on the Cyprus issue, a tradition imposed by Makarios in the early 1950s and never deviated from since then, despite the devastating consequences for the country, which are still evident today.

The Church’s simplistic, dogmatic approach to politics pursued by Makarios in the lead up to independence and during his presidency, with disastrous results for the Greek Cypriots, taught nothing to his successors, who persist with same, narrow-minded approach. Its strident opposition to a settlement has meant that tens of thousands of refugees have been deprived of re-taking possession of their properties in the occupied north that would have been returned in 2004.

At the time, while still the bishop of Paphos, the late Archbishop Chrysostomos II urged refugees to vote against the Annan plan, telling them the Church would give them land to build their home, a promise he failed to keep. Twenty years on, huge expanses of Greek Cypriot-owned land in the north, which would have been returned under the plan, are being developed and apartments being sold to foreigners. The fenced area of Famagusta, that would also have been returned, has been opened by the occupation regime and it is only a matter of time before it is developed.

Yet Archbishop Georgios has the audacity, in his Christmas message, to castigate people for “selling their property to the occupying power, facilitating it in achieving it ultimate goal,” by resort to irrational arguments. This, he claimed, led to “the permanent de-Christianisation of our occupied land and the acceleration of the occupation and the de-Christianisation of the whole of Cyprus.”

It is staggering how an educated man like Georgios does not understand that the best way for the occupying power to achieve its ultimate goal, which it seems very close to doing, is by the Greek Cypriots opposing a settlement that would reunify the country and make all its territory part of the EU. Supporting maintenance of the status quo is the surefire method of Turkey achieving its ultimate goal of turning the north into its province, irrespective of whether Greek Cypriots sell their property to the occupying power or give it for free as the archbishop seemed to be urging them to do.

What Turkey is doing in the north is unlawful, a blatant violation of property rights, but it will not be stopped by maintaining the status quo, or Greek Cypriots by avoiding going to the north as the archbishop naively advised in his message. The truth is that Georgios’ message, through which he supposedly wanted to shake Greek Cypriots out of their “national lethargy” was nothing of the sort. It was a plea for the continuation of the “national lethargy” that has led to the surrender of all occupied territory to Turkey.