Our Civil Society, strangled with too many layers of barbarity in the past centuries, managed to resume a bearably intact shape up to the mid 20th century, despite the ravages of two World Wars that inflicted unprecedented and ineffable pain to the nations of Europe. As if drawn by an irresistible impulse of self-punishment, the island lapsed into a selfish and unbending mode of conflict between the two major communities.
Though we are not as insular as we might like to think and most often we are affected by the decisions and interests around us, when the resolution of the conflict approaches, the bearers of rights and obligations are not any extraterrestrial or alien creatures. Everyone and each one of us is a bearer of civil rights as a concrete, individual person.
We are the associates who form together an ailing civil society, ensnared with enormous derogations from civil norms. The primary mission of civil law is the safeguarding of civil rights. As set out in the Institutions, (Gai, I, 8) “all the Law that we apply is pertinent either to persons, or to things, or to actions.” This three-part division had been elaborated on the basis of the ancient Greek Rhetoric.
The first part comprises rules regulating the capacity of persons as well as rules that govern inter-personal relationships emanating from the family.
The second part comprises rules governing things and their transfer among living persons or by inheritance after death.
Finally, the third part provides for the procedures for the protection of such rights before the court. Under this part the existence of a right is based on the existence of an action.
The initiators of the conflict started from an improvised notion of freedom and insisted in its pursuit, until one day as from July 1974 the actual civil rights and liberties became null and void leaving their bearers dispossessed, in an era in which slavery had been thought repealed.
This inadvertence coupled with the relinquishing of Abraham’s bonds in the form of institutions emanating there from, left us in a derelict society, without past and without future.
Once the civil society path is severely undermined and the temporal path had already been unconditionally superseded and abandoned, the outcome is a persisting conflict.
The former path emerged from a divinity protecting friends, partners, litigants, civilians, and all the institutions that prop a viable and lasting state.
Such institutions comprise good laws, the administration of justice and peace being not only indivisible and interdependent, but also a sine qua non essential for the preservation of law and order and for good government.
The latter path, on the other hand, had been deemed anachronistic and grossly overlooked as a means that sustained the peaceful co-existence of the two communities – for four centuries – between 1570 and 1974.
Their common fatherhood fell into disregard and oblivion.