zan wrote:Tim
Although I understand what you are saying here you could actually be writting about any country in the world. Have you been out of the UK for long. Those bloody eastern Europeans taking our homes jobs and women. What a bloody liberty eh!!!
Yesterday on the news: Very few of these "imigrants" are the ones at the lowere end of the scale of wage earners. Those that did not have skills have got them and are contributing to the economy rather than the parasites they are portrayed to be. This does not stop the moaning and the racist remarks from the people I work with and the peoples houses I work in.
The point I am trying to make is that people always feel threatened by "stangers" on their shores. T_C went and hated what he saw. Iceman seems het up about something but will not say it outright. Halil is quantifying the blame as I do. We all have our ideas and predudices. I met a guy that came back from a long holiday the other day, a TC, and he was having a go at the TCs saying that they were sitting around while the Turks were working hard and opening shops and restaurants. We all see what we want to see.
Of course there is the problem that we are being outnumbered but that is the game we had to play given the conditions we were put under by GCs. I really would like to see the numbers of forieners in the "RoC" and how many people are disgruntled with them there. I would include those that the "RoC" have seen fit to give citisenship to regardless of what Greek land they came from, Pontians being one of them.
This stance that some are holding on this forum about being Cypriot first is just a load of claptrap. All over the world, countries are tryin g to atract large numbers of people to help the economy and in the case of the EU, give them extra leverage. Why is it that the GCs want to expell people instead??? Why is it tthat they only want to expell the Turks????This is much more than just racism. The political agendas are behind this and getting the TC numbers down to managible levels. Sure we would all like our cake and eat it but Cyprus is Cyprus and at the moment it is in two pieces. We have our problems with Turkey and people like Iceman have every right to be angry. With recognition we can put this right. We have no other choice otherwise. We would rather be Turkish that Greek....Not through predudice but because that is what we are. If and when the "RoC" decide that they can build a proper CYprus for Cypriots to live in then we can all be Cypriots. That does not exist and in my oppinion will never exist. I will be happy to be proved wronng....Long live that man who can give that gift to Cyprus.
I have lived in the UK all my life and love it here (although that is becoming hard to justify at the moment) and have had workmates accept me as "not a bad wog". I will not allow that in my own country of Cyprus. It cannot happen in the TRNC/KKTC.
"One Turk leaves and one Turk returns".......You betcha.....Turks from all over the world.....Don't try and make me feel ashamed about being Turkish. What I am constantly ashamed of though is being Cypriot because we cannot even sort out our own shit and keep blaming others. I can't count the number of times I have been asked if I am Greek because I am from Cyprus. When I say I am Turkish Cypriot then they say...."OH! You don't like each other do you".....I don't know which one pisses me off most.
Zan,
Thanks for your polite and well-argued reply.
I have been away from my computer for a while, but I would just like to take this opportunity to reply.
You should realise that I only entered this thread because it annoyed me to see an ignorant blockhead like Eric Dayi being given the credit for coming up with an original idea, when he was only parrotting a famous quote by Denktash that has now become a cliche. I only wanted to point this out. However, being addressed directly by this rude oaf was like a red rag to a bull, and I could not resist the temptatation to enter a longer post refuting his basic claim that there are Turkish Cypriots who welcome mass immigration from Anatolia. I assert that you cannot find a Turkish Cypriot LIVING IN CYPRUS who supports mass, indiscriminate immigration to Cyprus from Turkey. I stand by that claim, and will continue to do so until such time as I am contradicted.
By the way, I will be very happy to retract the remarks I made about Eric Dayi if he starts to show that he is capable of raising his level of argument to that befitting a civilised human being, and one of the qualities I admire about Cypriots is their ability to engage in civilised debate and respect the views of others. So raise your game to Cypriot standards, Eric uncle, please!
You raise much wider points which go beyond those I was trying to make in my post. Yes, you are right that there are many sides to this coin. Of course, hostility shown to immigrants by the host community is a universal phenomenon. Believe me, my stomach turns to hear you say that certain people in Britian can even nowadays refer to you as "not a bad wog". I find this totally disgusting. In my student days I was involved in the fight against the racist National Front in Britain and still would be involved in the same kind of fight if I was there. As you rightly surmise I have been away from my own country for a long time. I tried to resettle in London in 1999-2002 but for various reasons it didn't work out. Britain no longer feels to me like the country I once knew and I feel like a total starnger when I go there. I am sure this is a feeling that all long-term emigrants from Cyprus experience when they come here. I hear Turkish Cypriots from Limassol describe their heartbreak at seeing what has happened to Limassol now that, years later, they have the opportunity of visiting. Yet, I love Limassol as it is now. Still, I digress.
Yes, there is a very different side to the coin if you look at things through the eyes of the settlers from Turkey. If I can return to the book Büyükelçiler Anlatıyor (Ambassadors tell their stories) which I quoted from before - and I strongy recommend it to anybody who reads Turkish and is interested in Cyprus - several of the ambassadors interviewed complain about the system of institutionalised racism which exists in the de facto state north of the green line. I cannot find the page now, but one of them refers to an article of the penal code which envisages a higher penalty for a certain offence for settlers than it does for Cypriots. If this is not institutionalised racism, what is it? Did even the laws in South Africa under apartheid have higher penalties for blacks than for whites for the same offence? I doubt it. I have sat in coffee houses frequented by settlers in the north and have also hear their stories. How is it that mainlaind Turks have been occupying the same geographic space as Cypriots for over thirty years now, but there has been so little integration, to the extent that you can identify every coffee shop as either being Cypriot or settler. Does that not tell you something? Stories of teenagers from remote villages in Turkey who arrive on tourist visas, do the dirty jobs no Cypriots want to do, like working on building sites even though they have never seen a building site in their life and know nothing about work safety rules and protective equipment, and if they suffer an accident and are left incapacitated (not a rare event apparently) since they are working illegally and have no insurance they have no recourse against their employeers, they have to be taken back to their villages in Turkey as best they can to be forgotten and looked after by their families there for the rest of their lives. Don't worry, there is a ready stream of fresh immigrants ready to replace them. I am sorry Zan, you say it cannot happen in Cyprus. I say that racism and discrimination is the reality faced by people who come to Cyprus from Turkey, whether or not you want to accept this. Interestingly, this comment also applies to tourists who just come for a holiday to Cyprus from Turkey - I could give large numbers of anecdotal examples that I have heard from people in Turkey about their visits to Cyprus.
Incidentally, I see a story in this week's Cyprus Weekly (page 14) about yet another Syrian illegal immigrant who died in an accident on a building site in the south of Cyprus, so the same thing goes on evrywhere.
However, the question of immigration from Turkey is a very complex question. Let us leave aside the point that under international law it is illegal for a country to settle its own population in territory that it has conquered militarily. The mass immigration that we have witnessed from Turkey to Cyprus is not a purely economic question of migrants seeking a better life. To an extent it was also a conscious policy aimed at changing the cultural make-up of Cyprus and anchoring this newly captured territory more firmly to the mainland. Then if we look at the background to Denktash's famous statement, made at a time when large numbers of native Cypriots seemed to be voting with their feet and departing from his "ethnically-cleansed Turkish paradise" such that one of the reasons large numbers of settlers had to be brought in was to prevent a serious fall in the population, it takes on very different meaning. For him to dismiss this with a shug of the shoulder and the claim that "those who leave are Turks, those who arrive are Turks" may perhaps go down in history as the biggest gaffe made by this man, who in general is a skilled propagandist. The point remains that if one of the aims of this policy was to rob Turkish Cypriots of their unique cultural identity, it appears to have had the opposite effect and served to reinforce the huge gulf that separates mainland Turkish culture from Cypriot Turkish culture. Otherwise why are you still sitting in separate coffee houses after thirty-three years of co-existence?
So, you consider yourself Turkish first and Cypriot second. Of course, this is your right and I respect your opinion. All I can say as an outsider who knows mainland Turkey very well, Turkish Cypriots quite well and has had the opportunity to get to know Greek Cypriots over the past couple of years, a vast gulf separates mainland Turkish culture from Turkish Cypriot culture, wheras from what I have seen, very little indeed separates Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots in cultural terms. I personally think you are Cypriot first and foremost. If we examine the historical context, it is not suprising. A large number of Turks were settled here following the Ottoman conquest, and the ranks of their community were swelled by linobambakis, and this community then for centuries lived cheek by jowl with Greek Cypriots at a time when there was no mass media and people rarely travelled further than the nearest town. Over these centuries a unique culture emerged in which both sides retained their distinct identity but at the same time gradually moved closer to each other in a whole host of ways. The linguistic evidence is there for all to see. I have a recently published Etymological Dictionary of Cypriot Turkish published by the professional linguist Orhan Kabataş, which I think is much better than any of the amateur works that have previously been produced. Can anyone deny the existence of large numbers of words of Greek/Cypriot Greek origin used in the daily speech of Turkish Cypriots? With reference to the word that has been discussed in this thread, there is an entry on page 234 for the word "fica" (as it is spelled in this book) which is described as meaning "dried seaweed or tree cuttings" and is said to derive from the Greek word Φι΄τζια (if I have got that right). There is an interesting annex to this book showing the words of Turkish origin used in Cypriot Greek, and this runs to about 45 pages. I was amazed the first time I heard a Greek Cypriot market worker address another jokingly with a word beginning with 'P' which is used as a swear word in Turkish. I thought at the time I had imagined this, but have come to realise that this Turkish word is regularly used here. Does this linguistic evidence not bear testimony to the many centuries in which Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots lived as brothers? To a model of multicultural harmony which embraced diversity to the extent that, in mixed villages, Greek Cypriots did the Turkish Cypriots' daily chores during the latters' religious festivals, and the Turkish Cypriots reciprocated when their time came round. To days when both communities joined together in rebellions against the central authority. OK, then came modernity, the age of nationalism and with it a whole new sense of identity developed. These ethnic differences assumed a whole new significance and nothing could ever be as it had before. I just wonder, now, in a post modern era when the age of nationalism has passed, is it possible for the people of Cyprus to return to this golden age of brotherly coexistence? Certain developments suggest that it could eventually happen. Several hundred Turkish Cypriots now live pemanently south of the green line and I have not heard of a single incident suffered by any of them. I don't know. It is for Cypriots themselves to decide where they want to go and what they want to do about it. No outsiders will ever bring lasting peace to this island, so thanks Zan for giving me an opportunity to get a few things off my chest, and apart from adding a few factual comments I hope to remain a passive observer of the debates on these threads in the future.
