For the last few days I could not concentrate on anything with the war going on in our neighbours’ countries. How can I write about culture if around us culture is being destroyed, literally destroyed, so lovingly looked after for many centuries: history, architecture, art and literature… and human values.

It will all have an effect on us worldwide; there is no question about it. Where are we heading?

The question I ask myself is what is the reason behind all these unrests and outbreaks of fires all around us? In my opinion people cannot be kept under the lid anymore with dictatorial rules, with words and promises; they know too much; the more people are informed and educated, the more they will ask questions and the more they will develop as individualists. Just to think that people watch television and see how other people live in freedom and develop their own ways, how they speak up when their government does something they don’t agree with, how they stand up and protest. That is the spark that may have set the fire alight.

I believe that governments in such countries have lost the contact to their people, they forget that – at least in democratic countries – they are the servants of the people and not vice versa.

There are other wars that break out with a religious or racist background for the fight about territory. The human being is greedy, that is his nature, and will always fight for territory, and only through humbleness and respect for each other we will be able to live next to each other.

We are far from thinking globally – the slogan ‘think globally act locally’ often repeated in political circles does not work.

I am not a political person but a woman and mother and as such I am used to think about the consequences, the dangers for our world, our families and future, mothers are used to weigh the facts of all sides; the politicians and diplomats often forget to do just that, so how will a fair solution become possible, I ask.

In this country of divided Cyprus people know about the problems better than many others.

I spoke to many of my poet friends and they are deeply depressed.

Orbay Delirceirmak, whose poems are short but full of deep meaning and biting wisdom, holds one poem by Nazim Hikmet close to his heart, for fourty years now, as he says,  and the message of it he had carried on to many international meetings. He had carried this message also to political parties but it was not understood.

To live like a tree

Independent and free

And in brotherhood as a forest

That is our yearning.