An uphill battle to change mentalities.

TWO DAYS ago we spoke of the deafening silence from the authorities regarding the shameful racist attack on a 15-year-old African Cypriot girl. Better late than never, politicians have finally come out to condemn the assault in no uncertain terms.

The Education Minister visited young Margarita Duku in hospital, and on Tuesday, the chairman of the House Education Committee, Nicos Tornaritis of opposition DISY, broke the holidays to call an emergency meeting to debate the issue.

At that meeting, politicians across the spectrum united to condemn an incident that had "powerful elements of racism and aggression" in the words of Education Minister Andreas Demetriou. And the minister went further, issuing a scathing assessment of the root causes of racism in society. "As a society, our mentality is very wrong," he said, adding that schools were part of the problem. "If you cultivate in children that we are the superior race, it affects their acceptance of multiculturalism."

That is the crux of the problem, and it is not just a phenomenon in schools but ingrained at every level of society. Cultivated as a defence mechanism of national survival through centuries of foreign rule, political Hellenism has been kept alive by the festering division of the island. And while many may underline its importance in maintaining a fragile identity in a small island half occupied by Turkey and buffeted by globalisation, the effect has been to breed a blanket chauvinism and intolerance, initially directed across the Green Line and now at the tens of thousands of foreigners living on the island, especially those of another race.

Influenced by its ideological and historical background, governing AKEL has tried to temper the more aggressive discourse of nationalism and the racism it brings in its tracks. But the problem runs very deep, as illustrated by the reaction of the teachers' union OELMEK at this week's committee meeting, where a representative cast doubt on the racist nature of the attack on Margarita, and insisted that there was no racism in schools in Cyprus.

This is the same union that has furiously opposed the minster's plans to change the way in which history is taught in our schools to tone down the blatantly one-sided nationalist content of the curriculum. And for all the government's efforts to promote tolerance in schools and to ensure that the curriculum is directed at turning us not into good Greeks, but good citizens, when this is the attitude among the teachers supposed to implement the changes, one begins to realise the mountain we still have to climb.

But we have to start somewhere, and the more politicians -- from both right and left as they did this week -- come out and make very public statements condemning chauvinism and racism of all kind, the more likely the message is likely to start filtering through to society, and especially to key intermediaries like teachers and police.

Copyright Cyprus Mail 2008

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