By Serdar Atai
“AISHA can go on holiday!”. This was the crypto message; the green light for starting the military operation by Turkey in 1974.
No doubt, it was a rescue operation for Turkish Cypriots at the time. The years went by and it became very apparent that the operation was not so innocent. It had a wider coverage as a tailor-made occupation project, in which almost all possessions of Turkish Cypriots (including people’s hearts and minds) were held hostage.
In the first couple of years, the forcible population transfers took place. The pretext given by the Turkish government was to meet requirements in the lack of a farming workforce, although there wasn’t really such a necessity.
Following their arrival, the land captured from displaced Greek Cypriots was distributed to settlers free of charge. Village names in north Cyprus were immediately replaced with new ones in parallel with the incoming population’s original settlement names in Turkey. The gates of north were wide opened to everybody from “the Mainland”.
In 1980s, unemployed guys from Turkey just showed up. They were ready to work at half the wage with no awareness of any social rights. A small economy with scarce job alternatives had a limited capacity to offer employment. Then the medium and large investors greedily opted for recruiting the substitutes to maximise profit. Turkish Cypriot employees were automatically excluded from the job market. Youngsters who were reluctant to get a university degree had to flee the country for foreign destinations.
The same influx of workers from Turkey went on in 1990s, too. During that period and afterwards, in addition to outgoing Turkish Cypriot high school graduates, the university graduates chose to settle in the modernised cities of Turkey, following their graduation from Turkish universities.
In parallel, the real estate business and construction sector expanded and boomed in the second half of 1990s and early 2000s. It reached its peak level with the introduction of Annan Plan in autumn 2002, causing a sharp rise in demand for skilled and unskilled labour. Those migrating from southeast Anatolia to more developed cities in Turkey, now turned their face on to north Cyprus. This was a safe haven for them with good job opportunities and meant many freedoms they were not able to enjoy at home.
The new arrivals cost the Turkish Cypriot construction sector workers the loss of their jobs. Thanks to the timely opening of checkpoints, they took advantage of the freedom of movement and got jobs in the south. In the absence of competent domestic manpower, inhabitants in the north have to buy services from the settler population now at lower quality and more expensive prices than they used to.
There is an untruthful complaint by some settlers that they are treated like second-class citizens and downgraded by Turkish Cypriots. Contrary to their claims, Turkish Embassy and the military always have the priority for supporting their nationals with direct subsidies and incentives. That’s why the majority were enriched in a way they could only dream of.
Of course, financial aid from Turkey generally coincided with election periods. And Turkey’s interventions with settlers’ votes regularly shaped composition of the political scene.
If we are going to open a debate on second class citizenship, it’s actually us Turkish Cypriots who are subject to discriminations on various fronts:
– We were dramatically outnumbered in our own homeland
– Our political will is obviously overriden
– Our civil rights are roughly overshadowed
– Our cultural heritage is systematically abused
– We are highly discomforted with a routine clash of mentalities in daily life and
– We are alive only by chance with sky high level of crimes imported from Turkey.
Regarding north Cyprus, a survey thoroughly analysing the repercussions of population transfers from Turkey has never been carried out.
Few speculative reports produced by amateurs or charlatans cannot provide scientific evidence for healthy evaluation of this deep-rooted problem. Don’t listen to biased and arrogant foreign emissaries telling us “not to exaggerate the problem” and advising how to integrate the “migrants” with the “locals”.
I wonder whether their majesties could behave in such a “humanitarian” manner if they experienced a settler population three times bigger than the indigenous population in their own countries.
In February 2007, the official results of 2006 population census in north Cyprus were announced by Ferdi Sabit Soyer. In his address to the public, he gave de facto population figure as 265,100. Two years later in 2008, Mehmet Ali Talat made a statement in one of his speeches with indirectly saying that our de facto population is around 500,000. Whose is correct?
The streets have a voice and what we feel there justifies the figure given by Mr Talat. But again the census in this geographical location is a delicate job that must be undertaken by world famous experts.
Therefore, I call upon the CoE’s European Population Committee and OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to urgently send in a taskforce in order to investigate, document and publish reliable data about the change in demographic structure and its impacts on north.
While granting the right to vote for Annan Plan referendum, the negotiating parties adopted a quick but mistakenly arbitrary approach in violation of international conventions.
In the context of universal covenants, we would like to discover who is who and to identify the individuals eligible for citizenship and voting rights.
As the landladies and landlords of the country, we were unfortunately defeated by the holidaymakers. But when I consider the last 60 years’ miraculous evolution in the field of human rights and protection of fundamental freedoms, I have sufficient enthusiasm to fight for our right to exist.
“Nonviolence or nonexistence,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. four decades ago. As a member of an indigenous population under the imminent threat of extinction, I’m hereby exerting a little nonviolent pressure through freedom of thought for our right to exist, if there is any international player sensitive enough to hear the message I’m conveying.
Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2009
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Very interesting article.
A punch on the face of those fanatics who believe that Tr is pretecting them and their rights ...a punch on the face to those who believe that settlers can become Cypriots overnight.
