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lkinoos Ioannidis, a well-known Cypriot composer, lyricist, singer and orchestrator said his island’s economic crisis and ceding of its sovereignty to foreign lenders has cut deep into the soul of its residents and, on his site, wondered what had become of them.
He didn’t attack European and International Monetary Fund officials who insisted on a confiscation of up to 100 percent of the bank accounts of those with more than 100,000 euros, but about Cypriots, the tradition of solidarity and the values that he said were sacrificed on the altar of a now proved false prosperity.
“We were persuaded by television, advertisers and magazines to become something else of what we are. We changed. We forgot our history. We were divided into parties and we voted without thinking. In so little a place we became strangers. We took the worst characteristics of Greece and turned them into values,” he said.
“Where is our deep Character hidden that will enable us, now that everything is falling apart, to still say ‘We’?” he added.
Regarding the Parliament’s initial rejection of the confiscation plan, he said it “was more important than what the malevolent may suspect. No matter if the Parliament ends up in begging afterwards. No matter if we lose more. Because, at least for a moment, Democracy seemed to have a meaning again, a meaning forgotten for decades. Representatives, just for a moment, seemed to really represent. The “No” set a precedent and we have to be happy about it”.
It didn’t last long, as President Nicos Anastasiades, in a bill on bank resolution that allowed him to do an end-around the Parliament, relented to the lenders demands and gave it.
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