Our View: Akel determined to keep alive Nato hostility

Soviet communism and the Eastern Bloc under its control may have collapsed more than 30 years ago, but Akel still refuses to abandon the Kremlin-dictated, anti-West propaganda it relentlessly mouthed during the Cold War. The EU admittedly has ceased being the force of evil it was in the 70s and 80s according to Akel’s dogmatism, but Nato has not, frequently disparaged by the defenders of Soviet totalitarianism.

On Monday, Akel’s press spokesman, Giorgos Koukoumas, decided he had to speak out after a Disy deputy and a press spokesman committed the cardinal sin of proposing that Cyprus should join Nato. Just when Cyprus was marking the black anniversaries of July, “Disy returns to its ideological prejudices, which clash not only with history and the feelings of the Cypriot people, but also with the interest of our country,” he said in a written statement.

Disy “wants to erase from the memory of Cyprus the truth about the moral instigators of the (1974) treachery and tragedy,” he added reminding that “the problem was not just Nato’s past, but also its present.” Akel’s Soviet-directed propaganda imposed as ‘fact’ – without any real documentation – maintains that Nato was the moral instigator of the coup and invasion, a claim that is repeated to this day by Akel and its fellow-travellers. As for the present, he claimed that Nato regularly catered to Turkey’s wishes and was the reason for the latter’s aggressiveness towards Greece.

Akel wants to keep alive the hostility towards Nato that it cultivated over decades, even if there is not the slightest possibility the Republic could become a member without a settlement of the Cyprus problem – Turkey would veto this. As for Disy’s support of membership, it is academic, even though it serves the purpose of debunking the Akel myth of Nato as an evil force, responsible for all Cyprus’ woes, past and present.

Perhaps the West-bashers of Akel could one day explain why all the former members of the Warsaw Pact – Soviet satellite states – joined Nato after the collapse of Soviet communism, which ended their subjugation to the Kremlin? All the Baltic Republics, all the states of central Europe, plus Albania, Bulgaria and Romania as well as the former states of Yugoslavia, apart from Serbia and Kosovo, are now Nato members? Ukraine also wants to join but has yet to be given the go-ahead.

Apart from security, Nato offers these countries a guarantee of independence, a safeguard that they would not again come under the control of Moscow. They have chosen to belong to the democratic West, the security of which has been provided by Nato ever since its establishment in 1949.

The Alliance’s membership has doubled since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is the perfect answer to Akel’s propagandists, who try to conceal their lack of any political argument against Nato by citing “the feelings of the Cypriot people”.