People’s pain must come before politics

Opinion accidentoccupied north People’s pain must come before politics Navagio Katechomena Relevant News Body found in Paphos state forest 3 September 2026 People’s pain must come before politics 3 September 2026 Van driver crashes into parked cars while fleeing police in Limassol (photos) 3 September 2026 Frixos Dalitis 3 September 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Face to face with human suffering, politics should get out of the way. Every dividing line we draw dissolves in the face of tragedy. What happened off Kyrenia was horrific. A father searching frantically for his children among the ambulances is about as close to a parent’s worst nightmare as it gets. At moments like this, everything else falls away. This is not the time for political point-scoring, history lessons or ideological trench warfare. It is, above everything, a question of basic humanity. Plenty has been said and written this week about the disaster, much of it triggered by comments from all sorts of people, some well-known, most not, on social media. Some even tried to deliver lectures on political history, as if every human tragedy has to be filtered through their own politics first. They clearly don’t get it. Or they don’t want to. There is no room for political calculation in the face of human pain. None. Human tragedies are not there to be weighed on political scales, or traded off so everyone can settle their own private score of right and wrong. And there is something genuinely chilling about the competition that builds up among the most rabid, fanatical voices on both sides of the wire. Feeling someone else’s pain doesn’t make you less of a patriot. It doesn’t mean forgetting history, wiping out the crimes committed against your own community, or handing anyone a free pass. It doesn’t erase the occupation. It doesn’t amount to recognising an illegal political entity. It simply means you’re still human. And that should go without saying. At the very least, anyone who can’t muster humanity or solidarity in the face of a tragedy should just keep quiet. Nobody needs to hear them dressing their own spitefulness up as logic in the face of other people’s suffering, whoever those people are and whichever side they come from. There is no excuse for gloating over pain. None. The same goes, of course, for those who, even now, choose to put political calculation above the human dimension of a tragedy. This is not the moment to go looking for who’s to blame. But that doesn’t mean we can quietly look past, or find excuses for, the occupation regime’s refusal to accept help from the Republic of Cyprus. In tragedies like this, as in natural disasters and emergencies of any kind, humanitarian need has to come before political difference. And it’s precisely in moments like these that trust gets tested in practice, and cooperation gets built, or doesn’t. We talk a lot about confidence-building measures. But trust isn’t built through declarations and political talking shops alone. It’s built, mainly, through action. And there is perhaps no more meaningful test of that than being able, in a moment of genuine human need, to offer help and to accept it, without political or any other obstacles getting in the way. Either way, we shouldn’t let the madness of social media puff itself up into something bigger than it really is. The extreme, poisonous views being aired in public are not the majority. Not on one side, not on the other. They shouldn’t be allowed to create the false impression that our societies have lost every last trace of humanity. They shouldn’t be allowed to poison how we see each other, or turn a human tragedy into just one more excuse for a fight. History doesn’t get a statute of limitations. The occupation doesn’t get wiped off the record. The crimes of the past don’t get forgotten. Memory and the pursuit of justice don’t get cancelled out because someone chooses to stand, humanly, alongside another person’s pain. Because there is something that has to sit above all of this. The human being. And if we ever want to break the vicious cycle of hatred, suspicion and score-settling, we need, at the very least, to be able to recognise someone else’s pain without feeling we’re betraying our own. Humanity doesn’t take sides. Pain doesn’t have a nationality. And in the face of human tragedy, staying quiet on political point-scoring isn’t weakness. It’s basic respect. People’s pain has to come before politics. 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