Breaking with convention

Cypriot MEP Marios Matsakis on how his views have led to his split from the Cypriot Democratic party

Marios Matsakis is in a sort of political no man’s land. Although technically a member of the Cypriot Democratic party (DIKO), he is not functioning as their MEP, and has yet to be officially expelled from the party. He remains part of the ALDE group in parliament (“I am affiliated to the Liberals, I am happy to be where I am”) but doesn’t consider himself a politician. So where does the self-confessed radical stand? “I carry on my job for the benefit of my country. I believe in freedom, I believe in democracy, I believe in common sense. I don’t consider myself to be a politician, I consider myself to be a doctor and a scientist.”

The reasoned approach is something that comes naturally to Matsakis. A career founded on science (he worked as a microbiologist in the UK, going on to train in medicine at Cambridge) developed for Matsakis an interest in law and justice, and, for him, forensic pathology seemed to offer a marriage of the two. “I’ve always been interested both in medicine and the law and I thought forensic medicine combined the two.” But his return to Cyprus in 1993-94 as the country’s state pathologist brought him into serious conflict with the powers that be. According to Matsakis, he was dismissed from the post after a year and a half because his outspoken views on the Cypriot health system led him into a final conflict with the then health minister in 1996. “I was on the news every day. I criticised the hospitals, I criticised the lack of safety measures in industry. I found myself at odds with the medical profession, I found myself fighting the ministry of health and the government in general because I criticised the way they were handling health issues in Cyprus. I thought the conditions in some of the hospitals were atrocious. I thought there was inadequate inspection or control of private clinics. I had to deal with some awful cases of workers having been mutilated by prehistoric machinery that nobody tried to make safe.”

Cleaning up the health service inevitably made him politicised – and not only because he became embroiled with the establishment. It was when he returned to Cyprus after 23 years abroad that he came to see the political situation in his country as “unacceptable”. “If in medicine you come across a wound that is filthy and infected, you have to clean it up, you have to remove the rotten bits. It’s the same in society. When we come across a situation where something is wrong, we have to clean it up.” What was wrong in Cyprus, he says, and still wrong today, is that the country is subject to a complicated system of partition and foreign occupation. “The main problem arises from the fact that two communities – the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots – are in varying degrees attached, influenced and manipulated by the so-called motherlands, that is, by other forces outside Cyprus. And these forces are Greece, Turkey and Britain. And these three countries are the so-called guardians of the independence of Cyprus. This, for me, is totally unacceptable. I can’t see why an EU member state should have guardians, two of which are member states themselves and one of which is not a member state.”

He was elected a DIKO member of the Cypriot parliament in 1996, and then began a series of very public protests to change the status quo. He waged a campaign against the British army in Cyprus by breaking into firing ranges where they were carrying out live ammunition exercises, “causing fires and destroying the environment”. In 2005 he lowered the Turkish flag from a sentry post on the border crossing at Ledra Street in Nicosia (which was just reopened at the beginning of April) – and got himself arrested in the process. He climbed an antenna in Akrotiri, one of the two sovereign bases the UK retains on the island, to draw attention to what he calls the “ridiculous” situation of Britain excluding its two bases from membership of the EU. As a trained soldier (he was in the British territorial army’s parachute regiment and served in the Cypriot national guard), he says he was the first to use such novel tactics. “I wouldn’t just send a letter of complaint because when I did, it would have no effect. I try to use the media. And I try to play their game to get to where I want to get. I could have been killed on the day that I lowered the Turkish flag. I could have been killed the day that I climbed the gigantic antenna in the British bases. But all these attracted attention and they had results, and they had better results than the government information services have ever achieved.”

What Matsakis wants to achieve is recognition of the reality of the situation in Cyprus, and a workable solution, which is, ideally, reunification – but not without withdrawal of all troops first. “To have a true reunification it is important to have withdrawal of all foreign troops from Cyprus, and that includes Greek troops, Turkish troops and any other troops.” But this isn’t to say that Cyprus should break relations with any of what he terms the de facto “guardians” of the island. Matsakis’s plan is in fact founded on very inclusive relations with Turkey. “The only way that I can help my country is for Turkey to become a democratic state. And for Turkey to become democratic it must have some democratic reforms. And the only way that can be achieved in today’s terms is for them to be on an accession path to the EU.”