Cyprus, Everyday Life

Cyprus, Everyday Life

Amid the current controversy, set against a backdrop of tense negotiations between Turkey and the European Union, one ends up forgetting that the settlement of the Cyprus conflict concerns, first and foremost, those who live there and who remain very little known. It is in an attempt to restore something of this issue’s everyday reality that Turquie Européenne has chosen to publish this impassioned exchange between Jean-Marc Cavalier-Lachgar, who knows the island well and has many friends there, and other members of the association.

Anne: The French often believe that the Turks are the “only villains” in this story. What do you think?

As I often like to say, paraphrasing one of UNFICYP’s senior officers, the conflict in Cyprus is one of the most complex in the world. Reducing responsibility to a single camp is a serious analytical error, because it fails to take into account the particular nature of Cypriot identity, which historically cut across both Greeks and Turks.

I do not like speaking of “Turkish Cypriots” and “Greek Cypriots”. It would be more accurate not to define people by an identity and national reference, which is, in fact, at the heart of the problem, but rather by the terms Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking. Even that terminology is reductive, since the Turkish-speaking Cypriots spoke Greek fluently, or at least the local dialect, Kypriaki. Indeed, this is the simplest way of distinguishing Turks from the mainland from Turkish Cypriots: the latter are the only ones who speak Greek perfectly.

Personally, I found it very difficult to go to the North before the crossing points opened. I did so only twice, in 2002, on the day when 80,000 Turkish Cypriots were demonstrating for the opening of the Green Line. I crossed to the other side, although I had refused to do so for years. In the “Greek” part, I had friends, both Greek and Turkish, since the village where I live in Cyprus was mixed before the events of 1974.

In the end, I crossed to the other side on two separate occasions, each time for a single day: once in Nicosia and once in Kyrenia. I realised that, insidiously, I had been taking sides unconditionally, and solely, with the Greeks.

As a member of the European Community, I was authorised to cross for a day. I therefore went to the other side of the wall, among other things to visit the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, which had been converted into a mosque four hundred years ago. I stopped to drink tea at the foot of the cathedral. There was a man selling baskets. I explained to him that I could not buy anything because I came from the South and the embargo completely prohibited the importation of goods from the North. We struck up a friendship and exchanged cigarettes that were not available in the North. He asked me where I came from, and whether there were still Turks in the South. I told him that I had a friend in the South who came from Androlikou. He was close to tears, saying to me: “Before ’74, I was a shepherd in Chrysochous (five kilometres from here).” Then he added: “Why are we under embargo? You are going back to the South, tell them that I love them.”

I reflected for a long time on the words of that old man. He had spoken to me in Greek, to show not only that he mastered the language, but also that he bore no hatred. I took photographs in the North, and Greek Cypriots who had not set foot in that part of the island since 1974 asked me to bring back pictures of their homes on my next trip.

There are no “good” and “bad” people in Cyprus, but a profound tear.

Engin: Is it true that politics in Southern Cyprus is made in the churches, and that the Orthodox clergy exerts enormous influence there?

This question is entirely pertinent, both as regards Cyprus in particular and the Orthodox world in general. As a secular republican, I cannot help being shocked by the positions taken by the ethnarchs on the Cyprus issue and, more broadly, on relations with Turkey.

The Church owns tourist hotels and a television channel; it distils and distributes alcohol; it also owns a bank, Hellenic Bank. I even opened an account with that bank without knowing it belonged to the Church. I chose the institution simply because it is so present in Cyprus.

As for the Church’s position in Cyprus, it must be qualified. The autocephalous Church of Cyprus adopts hard-line positions and insinuates a thoroughly pernicious discourse among the population. That discourse is as follows: Cyprus is Greek, or at least belongs, in their view, to the Greek sphere. The Church does not hesitate to make incessant references, on the one hand, to Christianity and, on the other, to antiquity, a position that is, to say the least, surprising when one knows the struggle Christianity waged against paganism, symbolised in Cyprus by the allegorical figure of Saint George slaying the dragon. This stance effectively induces the idea that Turkish Cypriots would be, at best, “tolerated”, if not regarded as guests of the Greeks.

It is a rewriting of history. The clergy discreetly passes over the fact that the Ottoman Empire did not forbid the practice of Christianity, and also that the powers of the Church and the Orthodox clergy were greater under the Ottoman Empire than they had been under the Byzantine Empire.

We are therefore witnessing a radicalisation of clerical positions, centred on a form of religious identitarianism. In this regard, I once heard a metropolitan in an Orthodox church in Paris say that Greeks recognised one another by using Herodotus’s very terms: “Same blood, same language, same religion.”

The Orthodox Church deliberately maintains a confusion between language, culture and religion.

This viewpoint must be vigorously challenged. One may, in religious terms, consider oneself Orthodox and of Greek descent without necessarily practising the language. That is indeed the case for many Greeks in the diaspora. One may also practise the Greek language without being Orthodox or even Christian, as was the case throughout antiquity, since Greek was a language of communication. Even today it continues to be used by minorities, whether Turkish or otherwise. In Cyprus there are Armenian and Maronite minorities who speak Greek and hold Cypriot nationality.

The second problem is economic. The Orthodox clergy benefits from privileges, such as exemption from taxation. This raised no difficulty in the past; but when the Church controls a television channel, banks and tourist hotels, the issue is different, because it then becomes a state within the state, outside the reach of civil legislation.

Finally, Church and State are not separate, and the Church therefore constantly seeks to intrude into civic affairs. One of the reasons casinos are banned in the South is due to religious influence.

Nevertheless, we must also put the Church’s influence on local populations into perspective. There are many mixed marriages with Anglicans, Protestants and Catholics. Mass tourism in the South has contributed to a liberalisation of social mores. Greek society, broadly speaking, has become more secular and has abandoned many traditional behaviours. There is also a strong current, carried by the left, seeking to separate Church and State. From that point of view, it is worth recalling that most municipalities in the major cities are controlled by the Cypriot communist party, which is not inclined to sympathise with religious authorities.

To sum up, the mixing of temporal and spiritual spheres exists in Cyprus, and its influence is not conducive to easing tensions between Cypriots.

There is much more that could be said. One must also balance the clergy’s identitarian positions against the nationalist rhetoric voiced by certain political leaders of the TRNC (Northern Cyprus).

I believe we have an interest in seeking what binds the Greek and Turkish peoples. The points of commonality between the two Cypriot communities are, in reality, more numerous than what divides them. Glafkos Clerides and Rauf Denktash, Greek and Turkish respectively, in fact shared far more than their political declarations suggested.

Reynald: The EU holds Turkey responsible for all ills in Cyprus, yet it was the EU that did not keep its commitments even though Turkish Cypriots had accepted the Annan Plan. What do you think?

It should be noted at the outset that the Secretary-General of the United Nations is not particularly popular among Greek Cypriots. The Annan Plan was submitted to both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots; I did not read it in full. It is a substantial document of 182 pages. It can be consulted online or downloaded from the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

To simplify matters, the plan revolved around nine main ideas:

1. Creation of a united republic covering the entire territory (a confederation of two constituent states).

2. A common presidential council of six members chosen by parliament: four Greek members and two Turkish members; a President and a Vice-President drawn from the two communities.

3. The President and Vice-President chosen from among the members of this council; the presidency and vice-presidency alternating every twenty months over a five-year term.

4. The creation of two chambers: a senate and a legislative assembly.

5. A Supreme Court composed of an equal number of Greek and Turkish judges.

6. A constitution for each of the two states within the confederation.

7. The creation of a national flag and a national anthem.

8. The creation of a reconciliation commission tasked with addressing the problems of the past.

9. A limited return of refugees.

10. Greece and Turkey would retain military forces on the territory, with an intention to disarm progressively.

Those are the facts. What follows is not factual, but reflects the perceptions I gathered among certain Greek Cypriots.

The first criticism was that it was difficult for them to familiarise themselves with a plan of such length and complexity, a criticism comparable to that expressed by the French during the referendum on the European Constitution.

The second criticism concerned the plan’s origin. The plan had been discussed at the UN, by international institutions, and as such it did not appear to them to be the product of Cypriots’ own work. In other words, the plan was perceived as imposed from outside.

I am not taking a position by saying this; I am simply trying to convey Greek perceptions. Contrary to what one might expect, at least in the eyes of a French observer, the Cypriot right voted massively in favour of “Yes”, whereas the left threw itself into “No”. This was so true that Tassos Papadopoulos, a centre-right figure (DIKO), obtained the support of the communists (AKEL) and the social democrats (KISOS), inflicting on DISY, the party of Glafkos Clerides, a historic defeat at the presidential elections. Tassos campaigned forcefully for “No” in the referendum.

In reality, several factors must be considered in this failure: domestic political realities and foreign policy realities.

On the domestic side:
Glafkos Clerides, the incumbent President, was elderly. He was seeking a third consecutive term at the age of 81. In my view, this played a role in the electorate’s choice of Tassos, especially since ten years in power had worn Glafkos down, and it must be acknowledged that no solution had been found during his two five-year terms.

On the foreign policy side:
The traces of Operation Attila remain fresh. From the Turkish side, it is presented as a legitimate peace operation under the 1959 Zurich Agreements, since Turkey was a guarantor of the constitution of the new republic. The Republic of Cyprus had indeed been founded on a communitarian model: the President had to be Greek, the Vice-President Turkish, and certain ministerial posts were allocated to Greeks or Turks.

From the Greek side, although the coup by the Greek far right, which was the official cause of the Turkish intervention, definitively ended the unionist aspirations of the Cypriots, Operation Attila is far from being perceived as aiming to restore peace. For the Greeks, it was the prelude to ethnic cleansing on either side of a frontier that had no historical legitimacy. Rauf Denktash maintained that without that intervention there would no longer be any Turkish Cypriots on the island today. I fear, alas, that history would have proved him right.

Moreover, the Turkish intervention, for the first time in the history of Cyprus, provided territorial continuity to the Turkish minority, thereby aligning with the separatist aims of the movement known as TAKSIM. That separatist and nationalist movement was born in 1950 in reaction to the unofficial referendum organised by the Orthodox clergy on ENOSIS (union with Greece).

We must now scratch beyond the varnish and declared intentions. One must go, however harsh it may seem, beyond human tragedies and dispel certain untruths that the press too readily neglects to mention.

The population exchange that followed the defeat of Cyprus is painfully felt by the Greeks, even if some forget the treatment inflicted upon the Turks (for example, the blockade of Turkish villages). The situation of the Turks in Cyprus was far from rosy well before 1974; UNFICYP was created in 1964 precisely to put an end to the unrest between the two communities. Likewise, the partition of Nicosia predates Operation Attila, even though that does not legitimise it in my eyes.

Greek refusal is rooted in this long shared history between the two communities. For a Greek Cypriot, voting “Yes” in the referendum amounted, at bottom, to endorsing partition and reviving the old intercommunal conflict: ENOSIS versus TAKSIM.

Accession to the European Union disrupted the natural order of things. From the Greek point of view, EU membership meant, for many, improved external security; for the Turks, it meant hope of lifting the embargo on the TRNC. Presented in those terms, the interests of the two communities are diametrically opposed.

The referendum was experienced as the outcome of more than thirty years of dialectic over the effects of partition. A “Yes” for the Turks meant hope of ending thirty years of embargo; yet even if the Annan Plan did not say so explicitly, it could be understood as recognition of TAKSIM, which remains, for various reasons (both legitimate and illusory), inconceivable for the great majority of Greeks. Under these conditions, the referendum results on either side of the Green Line are understandable.

Personally, I believe the EU has a key role to play in easing tensions. On the one hand, catharsis has not taken place, at least on the Greek side. It is difficult for Greek politicians to acknowledge any implicit responsibility in the partition. Catharsis, or a common identity, cannot be decreed politically. It is difficult to legislate history.

I am not naïve enough to believe that Cyprus will return, save for a few individual exceptions, to the face it had in the 1950s: mixed villages on either side of the Green Line. In that respect, partition is a fact with which both communities will have to live in the future.

Southern Cyprus’s accession to the EU has brought very positive developments. It allowed the opening of the border and mutual visits by Greeks and Turks. The populations are no longer strangers to one another, as they were for thirty years. They will, one hopes, be less susceptible to propaganda conducted on either side of the frontier. Finally, it had the great merit of bringing this regional conflict onto the terrain of European diplomacy.

Two major problems remain, in respect of which the EU has a role to play: compensation for Greek refugees, in terms of land and property, and the lands of Turks in the South; and, finally, the extremely delicate issue of the presence of Anatolian immigrants in the North. The Greek position on this point is unequivocal: the “settlers” must leave the North without delay. This position is plainly unsustainable, particularly for the generation of Turkish Cypriots now in their thirties, who were born on the island and have known no other. They are in no way responsible for Turkey’s foreign policy.

Yet once again, to reduce the failure or slowing of negotiations to Ankara’s sole responsibility is to focus on a tree that hides the forest.

In reality, Tassos Papadopoulos uses the EU to put pressure on Ankara. The only difficulty is that, as I said earlier, a viable political project for the island can only be conceived on the basis of a bi-zonal state. So long as that solution is not accepted as the basis for negotiations, it will be difficult to escape the current deadlock. It is quite possible that if a different leader is elected at the next presidential elections in February 2008, it will be possible to work on different foundations.

Anne: In your view, what explains France’s uncompromising stance towards Turkey?

I am quite unable to answer that with any precision. France’s current electoral posture is probably not unrelated to its positions. Both left and right align themselves with public opinion more than with an objective analysis of the facts concerning Turkey. It is possible that a hard line is also a posture, sometimes necessary in negotiations. But I harbour few illusions. Resolving the conflict will take a long time. A daily newspaper once ran the headline: “Europe inherits the Cypriot quagmire.” That said a great deal.

François: I am reassured to see that I am not the only one to have reservations about the Annan Plan and to see the importance of a bi-zonal solution in Cyprus.

I did not arrive at the idea of partition through doctrine. In truth, I had refused for years to go to the North of the island. I had to become pragmatic, and I forged my conviction in the light of two events.

A Turkish friend who returned to his home town near Paphos told me: “I was born here; I shall die here. In Paphos I am where I belong. My brother lives in Karpas (in the North); he built a house and married an Anatolian woman.”

After the border opened, Greek friends from the same region decided to go to the North. The oldest made a point of speaking only Turkish once he arrived in Kyrenia. He had not spoken Turkish in thirty years, and even then had learnt it in the fields. He returned from the North stunned by the welcome he had received from the Turks. As soon as he began speaking the local Turkish, they in turn made a point of speaking to him in Greek. When he came back, he announced to anyone who would listen: “We are the same people!”

Around 15 August we celebrated the fortieth birthday of the “Turk from Paphos”, Greeks and Turks together. The Turk told us, incredibly, that he had chosen the name Aphrodite for his niece. For the length of an evening, in the euphoria of the moment, one could have believed that the Cyprus problem had never existed.

But the refugees from Karavas, who had gone to see their home now occupied by Anatolians, knew, as I did, that they would never return. The world they had known was gone; and the Turks of the North, if they came to see their lands, knew also that they would not return. Beyond politics and illusions, pragmatism eventually reasserts itself.

It is often easier to act at the level of individuals. Manoeuvring politicians and economic and military interests is another matter altogether. The tragedy of Cyprus is not that it is the land of a people composed of Greeks and Turks, but that it is a strategic position in the Near East. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that everyone has had their share of misfortune, rupture and humiliation.

Peace has become a necessity. I saw the mosque of Lefkara turned into a delicatessen in the South, and I also saw the lamentable condition of certain churches in the North. I saw Greek cemeteries in disarray, not to say desecrated, and I am unable to know where the Turkish cemetery is in the village where I live, which was nevertheless mixed before 1974. I believe everyone wants to say: enough. But it will take still more time to accept and recognise, in otherness, a richness rather than an inexhaustible source of conflict.

Thomas: Is there a division among Turkish Cypriots between those from before 1974 and those who arrived later from Anatolia?

It is difficult for me to answer this precisely. I am not Turkish-speaking, and I can therefore speak with Northern inhabitants only in English. Personally, I am always wary of generalisations.

Nevertheless, two broad attitudes can be observed in the North. For Cypriots who, since 1964, had been enclaved in villages in the South and fled to the North during the population exchange, the feeling that the 1974 intervention was a peace operation is mixed. They were uprooted and did not necessarily recover what they had left behind. I am thinking in particular of farmers. To tear a farmer from his land is always a rupture. Those who already lived in the North before 1974 did not move, and therefore do not have the same perception.

What is striking in the North, for anyone who knows mainland Turkey even slightly, is the great freedom of mores and the very limited, not to say total absence of, religious practice among Turkish Cypriots. By way of example, afelia, a typically Greek dish made of cubes of pork cooked in wine with crushed coriander seeds, was sometimes prepared and eaten by Turks before 1974.

This was so true that when the Green Line opened, contrary to expectations, Turks rushed into Greek supermarkets (such as Chris Cash & Carry, which, incidentally, belongs to the Carrefour group) to buy pork because it was difficult to find in the North. As for Greeks, they spent millions of Cypriot pounds in the casinos of the North.

One hardly ever sees, at least I have never seen, veiled women in the North. The beaches are full of Turkish families who are impossible to distinguish from European tourists. Cypriot society is thoroughly European, both in the North and in the South.

One cause of this westernisation among Turkish Cypriots was contact, during the colonial period, with the English, and later with tourists. One must not forget either that Turkish Cypriots have lived daily and continuously alongside Eastern Christians for more than four hundred years.

There were Christmas garlands and trees in shop windows long before the Green Line opened. The majority of the population is Muslim, with the notable exception of the Greek enclave of Rizokarpaso, but it is not at all obvious to an outside observer that one is in a country of Muslim culture. One finds Turkish pornographic magazines in the newspaper stands in Kyrenia. Alcohol is available everywhere without the slightest restriction.

It is nevertheless true that Anatolians often say to Turkish Cypriots: “We saved you.” I know that this remark is sometimes poorly received by Turkish Cypriots.

Northern society is fully westernised, so it is possible that rural populations from Anatolia were shocked by the Turkish Cypriots’ way of life.

Mixed marriages were not numerous, but they were not so rare either. The mukhtar (mayor) of the village of Androlikou in the South, who never left and has just become the first Turkish elected representative in the South, has been married to a Greek Cypriot for more than thirty years.

To give another example: I have a Turkish friend living in the South who brought his family back to the Paphos region. He speaks Turkish with his mother, but Greek with his brother, who nevertheless remained in the North for thirty years after being deported to Myrtou (North) at the age of three.

Another friend, who was born in Istanbul and cannot be suspected of being personally invested in the Cypriot controversy, since he descends from one of Turkey’s oldest Jewish families (and is, moreover, unable to say when his ancestors arrived in the Ottoman Empire), told me that before 1974 he did not understand the language spoken by Turkish Cypriots, so heavily was it laced with local expressions. He conceded that since 1974 the new linguistic policy of the TRNC had changed that.

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Have You Heard the Turkish Cypriots?

Quebec is respected worldwide for its distinctive culture. It is a remarkably rich culture, shaped by centuries of isolation from the Hexagon, the country of origin of a large number of the first Canadians. Quebec culture has been influenced by the British, the Scots, the Irish, Indigenous peoples, the Basques and many others. The present-day province of Quebec is no longer “New France” of the sixteenth century but an autonomous, distinct and multicultural region.

But imagine an exacerbation of Anglo-Francophone tensions in Quebec. Imagine foreign-backed nationalist militias launching a campaign to divide the province into two linguistic zones. In this chaos there would be no Prime Minister like Mr Pierre Trudeau, but rather a silent Outaouais, incapable of controlling the paramilitaries.

Imagine the majority of a people, manipulated by these militants, believing themselves to be victims of their ‘barbaric’ Anglophone neighbours, to the point of no longer being able to share the province. Imagine this Canadian province brutally divided one day by the French Republic. That division would then trigger a wave of thousands of refugees, disappearances and victims of violence. Imagine the same people, manipulated, believing that they had been saved by the Mother Country. Now imagine that no one recognises the “NRFCE” (New French Republic of Eastern Canada), created outside Quebec, along the maritime borders of Labrador, Newfoundland and much of Nova Scotia.

In this new homeland of French Canadians, residence would be refused to Anglophones. Imagine the ‘saviours’ from the Mother Country having relocated large numbers of their citizens from Lyon, Marseille and Paris, to the point where they would outnumber the native Quebec population by three to one.

Imagine the French army controlling a large part of this New Republic and demanding that the citizens of this new state never forget the repayment of their debt of gratitude towards France.

This debt would become a means of controlling this “new nation”. Québécois, the Parisian French of the seventeenth century, would be immediately banned and replaced by the French of France. The symbols of the French Republic would replace the fleur-de-lis. Every flag of the “New French Republic of Eastern Canada” would be required to fly alongside a French flag, and the names of the country’s towns and villages would be changed to invent a new France. Maple syrup and blueberries would be banned, and a new law would require that citizens of this province could not identify as “French Canadian” or Québécois, but only as “French of Canada”.

Naturally, in today’s Europe, the organised cultural extinction of a people would attract critical scrutiny from journalists, writers and politicians, who would emphasise the importance of recognising cultural differences. Reading this story, you may think you are dreaming. And yet here is the story of the Turkish Cypriots: my people, a people of the European Union of twenty-five. We love Turkey and we wish to see Turkey in Europe, but we are not an extension of Turkey. We are a people of diverse origins: Yörüks, Karamanlis and Alevi Turks from Ottoman Anatolia of the sixteenth century. Over four hundred years, we have developed our own culture and idiosyncrasies in the solitude of the island of Cyprus. Older than many European nations and those of the New World, the Turkish Cypriot people had already intermingled with Greeks, Syriac Maronites, Latins, Armenians, Africans from Sudan, the English and many others.

A people speaking an archaic and syncretic Turkish inherited from the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire. We have our own equivalents of Céline Dion, René Lévesque and Pierre Trudeau, and our own Monseigneur de Laval.

Canadians bear names such as “Tremblay”, “Gagnon” and “Prévost”; we have names such as “Mehmet Valentino” and older names like “Behiye Mevlit”. We do not have blueberries or maple syrup, but we have molokhia, gologasse, zivania and bumbar. Canadians say, “My country is winter”; for us, “Our country is the spring of the orange groves.” Assimilation, the displacement of voters, the presence of Anatolian Turkish settlers and the economic problems created by the absence of a solution to the Cyprus issue threaten the existence of our people.

The emigration of our young people abroad continues. Only a political solution to the Cyprus question, which has endured for far too long, can resolve our problems and prevent the extinction of the Turkish Cypriots: the French Canadians of the Eastern Mediterranean.