By George Koumoulli
I believe most of my readers will say that I bring owl to Athens if I say that one of the main causes of war is religion.
For anyone with eyes to see, there is no doubt that religious faith remains a constant source of human conflict. As Richard Dawkins, the famous (notorious for some) British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author, and a fellow of New College at the University of Oxford, says, anyone who does not turn a blind eye to the divisive power of religion in most, if not all, of the violent hostilities in the world today can easily discern.
And unfortunately today there are religious leaders or fanatics who invoke sacred texts and who pose a very great threat to world peace.
That said, I am not claiming that religion is the only cause of wars. In fact, there are many causes of military conflicts, such as economic, nationalist, liberation, etc.
Religion, however, remains one of the main, if not the main.
I will not delve into the history of the Crusades or the disastrous Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) that began between Catholic and Protestant states in Europe and claimed the lives of 8 million or other wars, but I will focus on conflicts of the last 50 years and bicommunal conflicts in our homeland.
The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) was sparked by conflicts between Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims and Christian populations.
The breakup of Yugoslavia was the aftermath of wars fought between the Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim populations of the former Yugoslavia.
Hostilities in Northern Ireland were caused by differences between Catholics and Protestants.
The hostility between Israelis and Arabs is attributed, at least in part, to religion. “Remove God’s questions from Israel and Gaza, and you’ll be left with two groups that have more in common than they care to realize,” Dawkins says.
Unfortunately, I do not have the space to refer to all the conflicts caused by religion, such as the attack on the New York Twin Towers, the Iran-Iraq war, the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Sri Lanka, etc.
Let us examine the causes of our own intercommunal conflicts of 1963-64, which in reality was a civil war and led to the collapse of the RoC as we knew it in 1960-63.
Were they religious? In order to answer this question, a brief review of history is necessary.
In Cyprus, from the time of the Ottoman Empire until the death of Makarios in 1977, we did not have democracy but papadocracy.
The political leadership was the Church, the leader of the nation—hence “ethnarchy.” Regulator of political, social, educational, etc.
The Primate of the Church, who is not elected for a period of time but for life and therefore does not worry about losing his throne to the backlash of fickle voters, is proclaimed.
It was the Primate of the Church who decided to reject the 1948 Conference, Harding’s proposals. It was he who conceived the idea of the referendum of 1950, founded and financed EOKA.
It was he who again made the decision to accept the Zurich-London Agreements. Each Archbishop divides not only Greek Cypriots into “rejecting” or “compliant”, but into “genuine Greek-Orthodox” and “intruders” or “infidels”, as he considers the Turkish Cypriots. Therefore, the Turkish Cypriots are here uninvited and cannot integrate organically, harmoniously into a social space, and therefore they are annoying, foreign.
In an interview with the Athenian newspaper “TO VIMA” on 11/02/1967, Makarios made the following extremely important statement: “The concept of homeland is intertwined with the concept of religion, because in it (the homeland) there are the sacred and loyal things of our faith”.
What Makarios wanted to say, of course, is that Orthodoxy and Hellenism are identical. In view of these findings, how can we claim that Makarios, by submitting 13 amendments to the Constitution, which would transform Turkish Cypriots from a community into a minority and which ultimately caused the conflicts and the collapse of the RoC, had nothing to do with religion? We live in a country where in some town halls, military camps and elsewhere the Cypriot flags (representing Turkish Cypriots) are at half-mast on Good Friday, sending the message that Cyprus is Greek Orthodox.
To return to the international arena, it is disheartening that in the 21st century there is a sharp increase in violent sectarian or religious tensions.
These range from Islamic extremists waging global jihad and power struggles between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the Middle East to mass massacres and gang rapes against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and outbreaks of violence between Christians and Muslims across Africa.
According to the Washington-based Pew Research Center, in 2020 more than a quarter of the world’s countries experienced a high frequency of hostilities motivated by religious hatred, mob violence related to religion, terrorism, and harassment of women for violating religious codes.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of CypriumNews.
