Tragedy

Very belated piece of writing, but I was working on it for a while... 
Hope some think it's still relevant.

I spent my final year in Cambridge working on the so-called 'Tragedy' paper that included the study of tragedy from Ancient Greece to contemporary versions of the genre, but little did I know that I would return to a tragedy of our own as I arrived in Cyprus on the 11th July. Academics might criticize the way I use the word to describe a non-literary event, but the magnitude and effect of an event that has moved the entire island (hitherto deep in slumber) to tears and onto the streets has pushed me to reconsider the aptness of the word 'tragedy' in our daily, and very real, lives.

At university, we  spent time juxtaposing the use of the word 'tragedy' in the media as opposed to its use in literary and academic environments, wherein some scholars (I'm thinking particularly of Ronan McDonald) reach the conclusion that in real life, as opposed to art, one labels as 'tragedy' certain unfortunate, devastating events (mostly of accidental nature) in order to imbue them with transcendence, to give them a certain sense of permanence; a grandeur that ensures their place in a culture's, a community's, a family's long-term memory. In short, to ensure permanence in posterity of an event that is part of a nature so fickle and transient that it constitutes an almost absurd effort against nihilism.  

Yet one thing that non-literary and literary tragedies seem to have in common - despite many academics' attempts to polarize the two - is that they raise a storm of questions, an explosion (an apt term bearing in mind our situation) of question marks that remain bitterly unanswered. Why did Cyprus keep the containers? Was the President actually so keen to please Syria and Iran, that he neglected his fundamental duty of protecting the country he is supposed to rule? Why did officials decide to put the containers next to the largest power plant of the island?

What's more, the explosion at the naval base in Zygi on the 11th July has something else in common with our Greek ancestors' favorite cultural and educational pastime: maddened individuals who, possessed by some sort of illusion or delusion - the Greeks called it ate - overreach human boundaries and make choices that provoke divine judgment and insult the gods. To use a term closer to our modern sensibilities: they play with fire.

That's exactly what a shamefully large number of army and state officials did in Cyprus. Not once, or for a while. But for two whole years. Leaving 98 containers of explosives and other materials used to make bombs stacked up in an Aztec-like pyramid in an area right between the Evangelos Florakis naval base and the Vasilikos power plant, the island's main source of energy and biggest investment that, by the way, cost approximately 3 billion euro to build, and was only finished some months before the explosion with the addition of new equipment.

So in effect these high-minded low-lifes would convene meeting after meeting brushing aside the warnings of the naval base's director with an ease comparable to Oedipus' complacency - the man who solved the Sphynx's riddle, at least we had some proof of his capacity - when faced with warnings about his criminal fate.

This is typical Cyprus, some may say. Others will say that this was an accident - Oedipus, after all, was completely oblivious to the fact that he had killed his father, or, that it was his father that he had killed. He was also oblivious to the fact that he was sleeping with his mother, or, that it was his mother he had married and was sleeping with. Tiresias insists that this is no excuse. And so the man who thinks he knows it all plucks his own eyes out as an indication of his belated clairvoyance.

I cannot call an accident what happened in Cyprus on the 11th July. Nor can I accept the excuse that our dear president, the man who thinks he knows it all, did not know and was oblivious to the imminent danger that the 98 bulging containers posed not only to the naval base and sailors that were serving there, but to the entire Limassol community and the residents of the surrounding area. It was in fact his own deliberate political whim that insisted the containers remained in Cyprus - a country lacking the infrastructure of handling such a titanic amount of explosives - despite several pleas from EU countries such as France and Germany, as well as the United States, which explicitly offered to help remove the containers from Cypriot territory.

At a decision-making crossroads between favoring our EU allies or satiating the narcissism of Iran and Syria's megalomaniac regimes - to whom the containers originally belonged -  our dear president chose the latter path. He also decided to appoint the aging and incompetent Mr. Papacostas as Minister of Defense, who notoriously made a reassuring statement back in 2009 when Cyprus first confiscated the containers that these were 'absolutely safe and could be stored in a residential area if they had to'. It was his decision as well to extend the contract of the Deputy Chief of the National Guard - Mr. Savvas Argyrou - indefinitely, despite the fact that the aforementioned never graduated, or even attended, the Hellenic Army Academy.

Even so, says the devil's advocate, what matters now is the way the president handles the situation that has been created. Let's look forwards, not back into the past.

Yet there is no plucking of eyes  in the case of our communist leader. There is no remorse, there is no clairvoyance whatsoever. There seems to be, instead, an ever-fattening sheath of darkness, a result of the filth this man is steeped into, which isolates him from a substantial portion of the Cypriot community but perversely brings him closer to his sheepish loyalists.

After all, our man who thinks he knows it all appointed his own Tiresias, the esteemed Mr. Polys Polyviou, to ascertain whose fault it was, in a move that 'would guarantee transparency and would bring the causes of the event to light'. That was the spiel we became accustomed to hearing, up until the report was actually ready. Faithful to his ancient past, the president rejected the report which his own appointee delivered. Personal and political responsibility are not in the President's vocabulary, so surely, they mustn't be in anyone else's.

And now for the cherry, the icing, the frosting of the Banana Republic cake. Five months on, we've seem to forgotten it all. Perhaps it's because the Christofias administration is constantly surprising us with various other tragic developments, namely the economy and the lack of any substantial measures to save it. Or his pathetic image hopping out of a helicopter and onto Noble Energy's natural gas platform - another way to haze. Perhaps I shouldn't be this scathing. There is a less malignant explanation to all this. Mr. Christofias and his minions are deliberately failing to resuscitate our collapsing economy because they want to be the best in something, so they've decided to mishandle  everything they get their hands on in order to get into the Worst Government Administration International Hall of Fame, and thus secure fame in posterity as the only so-called communist government that made a mess out of their country (!) Or are they doing it in order to secure those last votes standing from the unions, to the detriment of everyone else? Is this their way of punishing private sector employees, who are all, as we know, naturally right-wing, fascist, supporters of the 1974 coup d'etat?

All I have to say is don't worry misters, you've already made it. Please stop trying.