Cyprus after history

Abstract

An island constantly subject to foreign rule, Cyprus has a history of continual struggle and negotiation with larger powers. After a succession of various occupations and rulers, Cyprus became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1571 and remained a Turkish province until 1878 when Britain assumed administration of the island. On 1 April 1955, the Greek Cypriot anticolonial group EOKA started a campaign of violence against British rule and the result was a four-year revolutionary struggle organized and led by right-wing nationalists. Cypriot communists and Turkish Cypriots were forbidden from joining the EOKA ranks. Fought to a standstill, the British withdrew in 1959, and negotiations led to the creation of the independent Republic of Cyprus on 16 August 1960. Within three years of independence, however, violent inter-communal conflict began as a result of a Greek Cypriot determination to modify the constitutional safeguards that had been incorporated into the agreements of 1960 in order to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority. This resulted in the withdrawal of the Turkish Cypriot community from their constitutional role and position and the establishment of a ‘green line’ dividing the two communities in Nicosia, the island’s capital. These enclave borders and the neutral zone that divided the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot areas of the city were guarded by the British and subsequently by United Nations troops for the following ten years. Progress towards a solution was slow and was ultimately overtaken by the actions of the military junta in Greece who, in 1974, launched a suicidal coup to take control in Cyprus. Turkey used the Greek coup as an opportunity to justify an intervention on ‘humanitarian’ grounds in order to protect the Turkish Cypriots. As a consequence of their involvement in Cyprus, the over-extended Greek military government was humiliated and fell, and democracy returned to Greece. The consequences for Cyprus were catastrophic as the Turkish military occupied 37 per cent of the island. International opinion supported the initial Turkish action insofar as it served to protect the Turkish Cypriots, but condemned the brutality with which it was conducted and the invasion of half of the island in which it resulted. As a result, several thousand Greek Cypriots were killed, hundreds disappeared, and about 70 per cent of the island’s productive capacity fell into the hands of the Turkish army. The Turkish Cypriots, who had suffered from 1964, felt themselves to be liberated. Two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots found their land invaded and themselves homeless, living in tents for the whole of the summer of 1974. After 1974, the Greek Cypriot side immediately launched a policy of negotiation in order to have some of what was lost returned. The occupied north, the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, remains an unrecognized state and continues to struggle economically. It is currently recognized only by Turkey. In the politically turbulent years that followed 1974, the non-occupied south managed to rebuild itself materially and diplomatically and, more recently, to accede to the European Union on 1 May 2004 after a last-ditch UN-brokered reunification deal was rejected by an overwhelming majority of Greek Cypriots in a referendum they felt was unfair. The Turkish Cypriots and Turkey supported the UN plan, as a solution would give Turkey the green light to go ahead with its European Union accession aspirations and grant the Turkish Cypriots international access and substantial financial support. The following dialogue attempts to read and critique some contemporary Cypriot phenomena in light of this tragic legacy of strife, division and a history of ethnic trauma. Speaking to the current situation of Cyprus, this dialogue, written over the course of a month, took place between Spurgeon Thompson, Assistant Professor of English at Cyprus College, Nicosia, Stavros St. Karayanni, currently Visiting Scholar at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver, Canada, and Myria Vassiliadou, Director of the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Intercollege, Nicosia, Cyprus.