Speech by the General Secretary of AKEL Stefanos Stefanos at the event in honour of comrade Hambis Genethliou

 

8 May 2023, PEO Limassol

Tonight’s event fills us with emotion and awe, because we are honoring a comrade who gave a lifetime of service to the Party, the People’s Movement, and the Left and to the struggles for our Cyprus and people.

It is an honour for us to honour comrades whose contribution and struggles marked the course of our People’s Movement and who were present at every difficult and important moment in Cyprus’ modern history. Hundreds of anonymous militants of our movement have emerged in the course of the almost one hundred years of the Party’s existence. Comrade Hambis occupies a special place among them.

Hambi’s childhood was similar to the life of the overwhelming majority of the children born in the first decades of the last century in our country. Poverty, misery, brutal exploitation, a living wage barely sufficient to a piece of stale bread. A society enmeshed in poverty, inequality, ethnic and class oppression, with many people condemned to work all day long, permanently in debt to loan sharks, without any rights, without any prospects, without a future. Hambis experienced these conditions to his very bone.

The picture he describes in his book is characteristic. He was almost five years old when he saw “all those miners who were coming out of the depths of the earth at that time, blackened, as if someone had smeared them with coal dust. Tired, they were sitting, as I remember, or lying down, under a long porch to rest from the heat of the day. To rest and gain strength for tomorrow’s struggle for their bread and butter in the bowels of the earth.”

This was the picture that Hambis saw then as a child. And children never forget. This image, and life itself as he lived it as a child, marked his consciousness. The “terrible 1940’s”, as comrade Hambis described the decade, was the decade when the damned of the earth had no choice. Their path seemed to have no other option. Many did not believe in anything else. They could not imagine that this was not their root. Many were resigned to their fate…

However, that picture began to change. The black-tanned workers came out of their shells. They began to organize and assert for themselves. Through their struggle they began to break their chains that kept them on the margins of society and to assert for their own class and for society as a whole.

When Hambis finished primary school there was no option for him to go to high school, as the tuition fees were unaffordable. He was still a kid, he would go somewhere to work, run errands, learning the business, and join the next shift of the condemned. He would learn no more letters, his education would stop at the little education he received in elementary school.

And yet it was at that very precise moment that Hambis discovered that there is another alternative. He discovered it in the Left club of his village, Kissonerga. There he found education, socialised, and engaged in sports and cultural activity. He formed a political orientation and took part in social intervention. Hambis crossing the threshold of the Local Club of the Left did not know that his life would change forever.

In those “frightening decades” the Left opened up a new way for people with the establishment and growth of the movement of local cultural, educational and sports clubs. This would open the door to a world that until then colonialism and the domestic establishment had kept its door tightly closed to the poor. On the libraries of book collections to this day one can find the time-worn covers, on which the titles of the world’s leading works of literature are inscribed in elementary school crayons. So many people learned to read and write in these clubs, in the humble libraries of our local clubs. So many people encountered in these clubs the cradle of world thought and literature, the richness of theatre and music, the value and joy of sport.

It was there that Hambis received his ideological and political baptism of fire. Inside the club was a new world, but outside it an old, rotten world existed. Hambis was first a barber’s assistant, then a professional barber, later a worker in the Fassouri estates and finally a worker in a button factory in Limassol. Work from morning till night, a fatigue such as to convince him that there is no other way…

And yet. In the button factory the workers were more organized than those on the estates in Fasouri. They were more determined. The great strike was for Hambis an event that shook him. The only trade union in the factory was the right-wing trade union confederation of SEK. When PEO sent a letter of solidarity to the workers, SEK rejected it. And along with it, it expelled some of the striking workers. One of them was Hambis. The strike ended, but Hambis was never called back to work in the factory.

From the factories he found himself working on construction and building sites and it was there that the picture inside him was completed. There was another way: the way of organization, solidarity and joint action. The road of struggle that united the voice of workers, working people, peasants, the common people and made it a force to win what they were entitled to: rights to work, the right to life, the right to dignity.

His activity in the trade union movement made him stand out. When the proposal was made for him to become a member of AKEL he immediately accepted. “For me, the title of an AKEL member was a great honor, because I would be one of those whose life goal and action would be to offer one’s services for the vindication of workers and working people, for a better life for all people,” he wrote.

Hambis Genethliou became a member of AKEL at a time when this automatically implied persecution, exclusion, struggle in underground work and dangers. The Party in December 1955 was banned, its militants operating in underground conditions taking a myriad of precautions. The Party leadership and cadres were arrested and detained in concentration camps and prisons.

The British colonial regime had launched a witch-hunt and imposed a regime of terror. However, AKEL’s cadres and members continued to struggle with courage and self-denial to abolish oppressive measures, to liberate Cyprus, for the Cypriot people to fight united for their visions.

In the years after the 1960’s, and despite AKEL’s disagreement with the Zurich-London agreements, the completion of Cyprus independence was the political goal that motivated the People’s Movement to work for the foundation of democracy in the country, political action for the fraternity and unity of the Cypriot people, for social and economic development. Hambis is now the District Secretary of the EDON Youth organisation. Under his leadership, the Organization developed and expanded its multifaceted activity in the city and in the countryside to an enormous extent. By creating local organizations, cultural groups in the city and local communities. With pioneering actions that mobilized young people.

But the stronger the voice of the independence of Cyprus, of peace, of the unity and friendship of the people grew, the more imperialism and its mouthpieces in the two communities exerted pressure to foment the conflict. AKEL, the main political force that was a real obstacle to the plans of those forces and circles who wanted to undermine Cyprus independence, was bound to be targeted. Hambis, like all the comrades who were in leadership positions at that time, had to withstand all kinds of provocations and attacks. From the special policemen and Interior Minster’s people in the Central Intelligence Service (KYP) who monitored their every move, up to and including interrogations and sabotage.

Anti-communism reached its peak after Grivas’ descent into Cyprus. Bombing attacks against left-wing militants, members and houses, threats and harassment. The underground armed ultra-right nationalist EOKA B organisation was spreading its tentacles and the crime against Cyprus and our people was being prepared at all levels.

AKEL was vigilant, but in the end this did not prove to be enough. At dawn on 15 July 1974 the Republic of Cyprus and Democracy was set up before the execution squad. The betrayal of Cyprus was completed with the subsequent Turkish invasion of 20 July 1974. Bigotry and chauvinism prepared the ground for the Turkish army’s invasion. The people of the Left, imprisoned, wounded, hunted, ran to save Cyprus. Many of them were sent to fight in the front line, while the henchmen of EOKA B were running to hide in the rear.

AKEL immediately after Turkey’s invasion mobilised all its forces to assist and support our people. Hambis, as the District Organisational Secretary of AKEL Limassol and now also as a member of the Central Committee of AKEL, along with hundreds of other comrades, ran from morning till night to help the thousands of Cypriots who found themselves refugees in their own country from one day to the next.

From that black year, 1974, until today, almost five decades, AKEL and the People’s Movement of the Left have been fighting unceasingly for the liberation of the country, the reunification of our homeland and people. Almost five decades later, we insist on fighting together with our Turkish Cypriot compatriots for our common future in our common homeland.

Since that horrific summer when Cyprus was divided by the force of arms, AKEL has been and remains the leading force fighting for the many. It is the voice of the weak, the political force that expresses that large section of society that aspires to another Cyprus, an open, progressive and modern Cyprus.

Comrade Hambis Genethliou was a protagonist in this struggle during all the years he has served AKEL. From the political and cultural development of EDON’s activity, to AKEL’s daily political work that changed the lives of workers, farmers, women and young people. From the small and big actions and initiatives for the people, the workers, Cyprus and Limassol.

Special mention should be made here of Hambi’s decisive contribution to the rescue of the Rialto Theatre.  Hambis Genethliou was the person who managed to realise in practice the idea of the Limassol Cooperative Bank taking over the Cultural Rialto Centre with its reactivation. An idea that changed the map of the region and made Rialto once again one of the most important cultural organisations in our country.

Comrades and friends,

Tonight we honour a comrade who gave wings to the vision of a more humane society. Through hard work. With dedication, but also with vitality. With initiative, but also through collective action. Strict, but not dogmatic and above all humane. Humble and always there for people in need. A reliable companion and always ready which is precisely why the Movement always entrusted him with numerous tasks. His solid presence in the District was a guarantee that Party work would get done, the organisational and political objectives would be fulfilled. By leading by his own example, comrade Hambis inspired and motivated comrades.

Hambis Genethliou is one of those AKEL militants who with their work, contribution and example have lifted AKEL. Our Party has been targeted for decades. But the militants and members of AKEL have not closed themselves in their shells, defeated by a misguided instinct of self-preservation. Instead, they developed increasingly outward-looking actions that reached out to the people, to the workers, to Cypriot society itself. From the establishment of workers’ municipal housing estates, to the creation of local cultural associations, to the waging of struggles for a living wage, to creative political and social action in every region, in every neighbourhood.

Hambis Genethliou lived this world of struggle and can confirm that this is how the trust of society is gained. And as a result political and electoral support by extension is gained naturally.

It is the struggles of such cadres like comrade Hambis that represent a valuable lesson and example for our younger comrades. The valuable experience of AKEL’s long historical journey is a key asset for the development of our struggle.

Today, when political engagement is being denigrated and depreciated, we have a duty to reaffirm what AKEL has proven over time to be: a force for tomorrow, a force for progress and prosperity. A political and social force that pioneers, creates and opens up new paths.

Comrade Hambi, thank you for everything you have offered to the Party, the Movement and the country. We thank you for the work you have done, but above all for the example you have set.

May you always be well and enjoy your family.