Every year, as the UN General Assembly rolls round again, not a single speech by a Cypriot leader comes to mind. Sadly. None has ever managed to make the world’s pen-pushers sit up over the tragedy of our island. Every speech so far has led with a readiness to compromise with occupying Turkey, and offered no vision whatsoever of freeing our homeland. Speeches history will not remember, bland and off-key, delivered to a world that needs clarity and backbone, not “diplomacy” and good manners.
What we do remember is the speech Ernesto Guevara gave on December 11, 1964, in which he spoke about Cyprus and left behind that fearsome, undying cry: “Patria o muerte”, homeland or death. We remember Fidel Castro’s four-hour speech in 1960. And we remember November 13, 1974, when Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Fatah, gave a speech that could be given again today, and not only for Palestine, but for so many peoples living under oppression, occupation, slavery and conditions of genocide.
Arafat spoke about Cyprus that day too, just months after the Turkish invasion, calling for a just solution, peace and independence. He spoke about South Africa, Latin America and colonialism, and he called on the powerful to let his people win independent national sovereignty over their own land. He spoke of his dream: to come home from exile with his people and live in Palestine, in a democratic state where Christians, Jews and Muslims would live side by side in justice, equality and brotherhood.
That speech has lost none of its force. The Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are fighting simply to survive, to escape ethnic cleansing at the hands of a genocidal Israel that denies them the right to self-determination, and even the right to life. Twenty years after that speech, Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, which the Netanyahu government does not recognise.
Fifty-two years on, exactly as long as it has been since Turkey invaded Cyprus, the closing words of that electrifying speech echo through every corner of battered Palestine and the wider world. They could have been spoken for our own people. And they leave no room for a third way:
“Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. War flares up in Palestine, and yet it is in Palestine that peace will be born.”
