Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Mansoura in nationalist history education

I don't know where to put this for the moment, but Mansoura's mentioned in "a study of clashes in Dillirga and how they were reflected in official annals", by Ulus Irkad, which reviews both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot school textbooks and, unsurprisingly, finds that they're nationalist texts.

It's from a book about history education, human rights and understanding produced by the New Cyprus Party (Κόμμα Νέα Κύπρος or Υeni Kıbrıs Partisi). Irkad's article is worth reading in full, but the key to his evaluation is this:
Both sides in this conflict try to induce the impression of their innocence stressing the pressure on them. As always the guilty side is the other one.... Both communities endeavour to conceal the facts from their communities showing the other side as culprits in this affair....

If the events and developments that took place in Dillirga are rightly reflected and recorded in textbooks indicating mishaps I tried to stress above, the forthcoming generations will have a better chance to understand all that happened . They can thus try to avoid the recurrence of similar incidence in the future.

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