On 15th October 2011 we decided to go to the Buffer Zone after responding to the international call to occupy, meeting in Plaza Eleftherias. We moved on to the Buffer Zone and shouted a bit and waved some banners. We decided to return every week to establish a place and a time where anybody that might want to break their silence and apathy over the division and system in which we live, could come and do so. We always had the idea of eventually being enough people to set up a permanent occupation in the space and use it to raise awareness of the Cyprus problem, it’s international and systemic nature, and therefore relate back to the wave of global unrest that started in Tunisia in December 2010. It was a wonderful idea: to expose the Cyprus problem under a new light, creating awareness of our relation to the absurd systemic norms which so many of us have accepted, or even deemed too normal to think about.
On November 19th, on our one month anniversary, we decided to stay the night, and we are still here.
Day after day I receive emails and personal visits to the Buffer Zone of a particular repetitive nature. Somebody sits me down or writes me an essay, and tells me what we should be doing, how things should be done, what should be happening, how things should be, and they share a thousand wonderful ideas. I agree with the vast majority of what I am hearing, but I am tired, exhausted in fact, of hearing it. I really am. Why? Because whilst the criticism is constructive, the inaction isn’t. Occupy Buffer Zone is not an institution or an establish organisation, it is the sum of the individuals that spend time in the Buffer Zone, with the unifying factors of a desire for reunification, and to raise awareness of how the Cyprus problem is but one of many symptoms of an unhealthy global system. For some reason many, even some that were involved from the beginning in this impromptu expression of frustration and indignation, expected that suddenly, with this new permanent occupation, that the movement be defined in its totality, somehow. To this day it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. The movement is emergent, open, decentralised and spontaneous.
We need people to come and make things happen in this space, we need you and your contacts for workshops, talks, theatre, screenings, panels etc in our new indoor Activity Centre, we need your presence at the camp. We need new people sleeping here to change the dynamics again and offer new energy, ideas and HANDS! We need participation. What we most certainly do not need is for the movement to be looked at as an established paradigm that people chose to participate in or not. The movement is emergent, extremely emergent at the moment, changing every week in new and fascinating ways, and I can only marvel at what this movement might be if all of those individuals out there who aren’t getting involved because they don’t like x, y or z came and changed x, y or z. We are inviting you, entreating you, to come and claim ownership over this movement that belongs to everybody. You are not reading the brochure of Home for Cooperation or CCMC and deciding whether you want to be a member or not. You are not surveying ideas and trying to establish whether you share them. We have the two principal axis as stated above in bold type, and the rest is as open as the sky. You are invited to come and make, here, now, whatever it is you want to see here and now. This is not a challenge to put your money where your mouth is, this is not a response to criticism with “well come and see if you can do better”. This is a plea to empathise and understand that this is something new, that we can’t be thinking about it in the same way that we have thought about anything else before, whether we are activists or not. We don’t need any more people only attending general assemblies to engage in endless debate about what should be, we need hands to make it be! We need you to realise that this is yours, it’s your neighbours’, it’s your childrens’ and it’s your mothers’. We need you to come and change what you dont like about the space and give what you feel is missing, we need you to help the movement MOVE. We need YOU. We do. We don’t need your disappointment, indifference, apathy or laziness. We need your passion, we need your conviction and we need your determination.
We need people outside of the living team to take shifts to give out leaflets and talk to passers by in the crossing (energies are understandably running low after 2 months of sleeping in tents in the cold), we need new people sleeping in the living quarters, we need people doing outreach activities in their cities, we need you to get up and activate and materialise these wonderful ideas you all have. Everybody is in charge. There is no central committee, there is no hierarchy, when you see a job – it’s yours.
We want to be together, we don’t want to live on a military base, we want to break the indoctrination, we want to free and be free – here is your chance, here is your moment, here is your space and here are your brothers and sisters.
What you see now in the Buffer Zone is the result of the spontaneity of those who have acted, and the omission of those who haven’t.
Michalis Eleftheriou
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