By Sadaf Bayani
I can’t stop thinking about what happened to a person I knew. I’m an Iranian who lives in Cyprus for 11 years and I never felt like here is not home. Cyprus was a country that I grew up in and fell in love with and made friends in. I always watch Eurovision or football and my heart is beating for Cyprus or Greece to win. Cyprus is like a home to me and my Cypriot friends are closer to me than my Iranian ones. I love this people like people of my homeland and their problems make me cry and their happiness makes me smile.
I don’t know what other foreigners think about Cyprus but if they have the same feeling it is quite unfair to be threatened with racism and discrimination. A few days ago I heard that they killed an Iranian man in Limassol and to be honest I didn’t get that sad and I thought maybe it was a fight between criminals and yeah this happens everywhere and as long as our Cyprus is not as safe as before we can’t cry over these matters anymore. After a few hours I got a call and was informed that the man who was killed was a gentleman I knew. I saw Mr. Reza while he was working at my shop and I still remember his smile. He was a great man that I still remember even though I met him a few times. Polite, gentle shy person who was always smiling. Probably Mr. Reza left Iran because of the social or other problems he had and he brought his family to Cyprus to live in a safer environment.
Mr. Reza got shot on the 6th of July of 2012 at 17:30 pm in front of his young son. The reason? His teenage son was throwing something from the balcony and in order to bring it back he jumped on the neighbour’s air-condition compressor. So the neighbour had an argument with him and asked him to leave immediately. The son fell and hurt himself. The son said the story to his father and the father went down to ask his neighbour why he did that to his son but before he opens his mouth the neighbour shot him in his face. Yeah, a human died. A father and husband. How is his family going to face this loss and how is it possible for them to survive?
What makes this event more sad and unfair to me is that I was reading many comments in Cyprus Mail and people were saying that the old gentleman has the right to do that because Mr. Raze was Muslim and he got scared. Another lady was saying that we have to open his grave and ask him to apologize from Cypriot for causing them problem. Another gentleman wrote that these people are coming here and taking money from our government.
First of all, for the information, he wasn’t taking any money from the Government. Nothing! He was working like any other man to support his family. My question is: aren’t we living in 21st century? Don’t you think we are civilized enough not to be brainstormed and think all Muslims are bad? Another question is how do you know all Iranians are Muslims… Maybe many of them don’t believe in any religion.
Another fact is that many Cypriots, after the unfair invasion of the Turkish, they moved to other countries and what behaviour were they expecting from others? Does any minority deserve to be threatened with racism? We are all humans and living in a modern world. We are moving to other countries due to our economy, political or social problems or to study or work or any other reasons, and what we are looking for is peace and a better future for our next generation. I’m not writing this in order to take anyone’s side but is this fair? To be killed because some people think Muslims are wild or terrorists?
I understood that many Cypriots don’t like Muslims and maybe they have the right because they had a bad experience from the invasion of their country, but it is time to bring the peace back to the world. I mean Black or White or Asian or Muslims or Christian is just a title. At the end of the day we are all the same. This world doesn’t need racism and war anymore and we can’t just judge others by their race. It is so unfair for a child to lose his father over the fact that someone got scared from him because he is not from the same country as him or he has another religion.
Why does Mr. Reza have to be a victim of the mentality of some people? Why don’t some of us respect human lives, and write comments without knowing a person? I’m just writing this because I couldn’t sleep well for a few nights and what happened made me want to tell you all that there are good foreigners and 100% there are bad ones too, but let’s teach our next generation to respect all races, all nationalities and all religions in order to have a better tomorrow in our world .
