VIDEO: Satirical game on Cyprus negotiations ‘irk Greek Cypriots’

NICOSIA

A Turkish Cypriot man has turned the U.N.-led Cyprus negotiations into a satirical video game, saying it irked Greek Cypriots for showing Greek Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades “running from the table.”

The online game, “Cyprus Players,” was created by Nazmi Pınar, a journalist who was “bored of reporting about the lagging negotiations for the decades-old problem,” according to an Anadolu Agency report on April 14.

In the game, which takes place at the Ledra palace in the U.N.-controlled buffer zone in Nicosia, the player’s goal is to make Anastasiades, who runs around a table, sit down by pushing a seat ten times at the right time. 



The player’s character is represented by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Adviser on Cyprus Espen Barth Eide, while Turkish Cypriot President Derviş Eroğlu is seen sitting at the table throughout the game. If the player ultimately succeeds, the three leaders are seen saluting the crowd as the song “We are the World” plays.


“I received criticism from Greeks who suggested that the game is biased. Greeks were irked that Anastasiades was shown running around the table,” Pınar was quoted by the agency as saying. He said he wanted to create the game to raise awareness about the “isolation and embargoes that were put on Northern Cyprus.”

The Turkish military intervention in Cyprus in 1974, following a coup that brought a hardline Greek administration to power on the island, resulted in the division of Cyprus and led to decades of scarce contact. Greek Cypriots rejected a peace plan in 2004 shortly after they joined the EU as a member, even as the Turkish community agreed to establish a new partnership with the Greek Cypriots. The EU had initially promised to relieve sanctions on Cypriot Turks if they approved the U.N. plan, but have so far failed to do so as a new round of negotiations began.