Cyprus — a wall in the Aegean?

Continually raising the stakes in the ongoing clash over the island will benefit neither side

The Cypriot Minister of Defense Kyriakos (Koulis) Mavronikolas (center), the commander of the island’s National Guard Athanassios Nikolodimou (left) and Greek President Karolos Papoulias review the National Guard (right) during a visit by Papoulias to Nicosia yesterday.

By Burak Bekdil - Kathimerini English Edition

Long before the European Commission formally gave Turkey a date for membership talks last December, this column had argued that Cyprus would stand in Turkey’s way westward. A year-and-a-half later and after endless diplomatic battles, little has changed. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an influential think tank in Washington, the Cyprus dispute is the largest single obstacle to the smooth progress of talks in the short term.

In Ottoman Turkey, there were over 50 Greek-language newspapers. In republican Turkey; there are only two — Apogevmatini and Icho Apogevmatini. Many months ago, Michail Vassiliadis, the editor in chief for the four-man newspaper, said, “I think the nationalists on both sides of the Aegean should find more convincing enemies for themselves.” There is truth in his words.

In 1849, the year that saw some Ottoman modernization, Stavrakis Aristarchis and Spyridon Mavroyiannis (the famous Marko Pasha) joined Sultan Abdulhamid II’s constitution commission. In those years, scores of Ottoman Greeks were appointed as the Empire’s ambassadors. After the exchange of populations in 1923, which exempted the Greeks in Istanbul and the island of Imvros as well as the Turks in western Thrace, things took a different direction.

In 1936, Turkey banned non-Muslim foundations from taking donations. In 1942-44 new laws imposed a “wealth tax” on non-Muslims — Christians and Jews. The events of September 6-7, 1955, left 5,538 shops and homes belonging to mostly the “Greeks of the East” damaged or looted. When Cyprus went astray in 1963, 110,000 Greeks were living in Istanbul, with about 12,000 of them holding Greek passports. On September 16, 1964, the Ankara government ordered them to leave Istanbul “in 24 hours” — 30,000 left Istanbul then, and most others did so after 1974. Now there are about 1,200 Greeks in Istanbul.

Sotiris Antoniou Hatzisotiriou, or “O Kir Sotiris,” as this columnist has enjoyed calling him, is a 60-year-old Cypriot from a town in the north. He helps a relative run Costas’s Grill, a Greek-Cypriot restaurant in London “since 1957.” Hatzisotiriou, whose father and uncle have been missing since 1974, is more than the “usual restaurant chap” with whom one exchanges a few words over drinks. He is a laikos poitis, or a popular poet. His verses may sound naive to many but there is some truth in what the man has written.

“The Return” reads: “Returning after many years / to my beloved home / I saw the swallows building still / in their nests of loam... even the sweet earth is sighing / to fold us in her embrace / soon, you’ll hear the people singing / from the Greek and Turkish race...”

Many Greek Cypriots may disagree with O Kir Sotiris. But they should sit down and think twice before the “Great Game” of the region ends irreversibly in a lose-lose situation.

What good, for example, will the Cypriot National Guard’s annual Nikiforos war games — which have been canceled every previous year since 2001 — bring when it’s up and running this week? How Defense Minister Koulis Mavronikolas justifies resuming the show only proves that Cyprus feels less safe about Turkey after October 3: “There are no developments in the Cyprus problem to justify canceling (the exercise) this time.”

Nikiforos may find reciprocity in the island’s north — Toros war games by the Turkish-Cypriot security forces. Do we really need any of these? O Kir Sotiris, with a father and an uncle missing (and probably dead), would probably say, “No!” But Cyprus, the “troubled island,” is “the Great Wall in the Aegean.”

If the EU’s half-hearted talks with Turkey for eventual membership collapse or are suspended in the near future, it will be the “troubled island” again. Greek Cypriots might think that a Turkey at the negotiating table could be easier to squeeze. In theory, that may be true. In practice, it may not.

One thing is certain, though, that raising the stakes in this never-ending game of trouble will not benefit any player. Ask O Kir Sotiris, and he will recite for you one of his poems for the “troubled island,” either “The Return,” or “Togetherness.” Or just recall what Pavlos Paleologos wrote for To Vima in 1972: “Nations that do not want to go astray do not just illuminate the good moments. They focus and carry out memorial services when the calendar asks them to remember their darkest hours... Not just memory for memory’s sake but memory as a lesson that will help us to avoid relapses.”