Cyprus-Forum.com

[Kikapu]

"THE PROBLEM OF PIGEONS: ORIENTALISM, XENOPHOBIA AND A RHETORIC OF THE ‘LOCAL’ IN NORTH CYPRUS"

By Mete Hatay


A very interesting read indeed of the differences between the Turkish Cypriots and the Turkish settlers in the "trnc"!

http://www.prio.no/upload/6_M_HATAY.pdf

[Kikapu]

Following what can be described as an initial honeymoon period, some negative reactions surfaced among the Turkish Cypriots toward the influx of this large number of mainlanders. The rural background and lack of education of these immigrants provided Turkish Cypriots with grounds for prejudice and discrimination. The immigrants’ dress and appearance appeared to contradict the Kemalist ideals to which Turkish Cypriots had been accustomed for the previous four decades. Turkish Cypriots used the mainlanders’ religiosity, appearance, language – including spoken Turkish or other languages – and other cultural differences as “strong boundary-maintaining mechanisms”. Anthropologist, Sarah Ladbury, who carried out fieldwork in north Cyprus in 1976 and 1977, claims that:

“The mainlander is respected for his fighting ability, but not for his cultural ingenuity (‘they saw the legs off tables’), commonsense (‘after two years they still ride their bicycles on the right’), or Western ways (‘they wear shalvar’)23 ... Even the religiosity of the mainlander is used in the process of ethnic delineation (‘they build mosques before schools’)”.24

[Kikapu]

Moreover, certain isolated criminal incidents involving Turkish immigrants, such as fights between neighbours, or in one case someone trying to marry a Turkish- Cypriot girl before divorcing his first wife, also caused anger among the secular Turkish Cypriots. The late Turkish-Cypriot leader Dr. Faz›l Küçük wrote a series of articles in 1978 criticising the “immoral behaviour” of the settlers. He said that they should all be sent back (the ones from the East) because they were not “civilised” enough to stay in Cyprus:

“Thus an ‘Eastern sultanate’ has been established in many villages. ... The earlier [mainland Turks,] those who have such bad manners and little civilisation that they would even spit in the face of the policeman on duty are sent back to their villages, the earlier they could reach the freedom they desire, and Cypriot Turks and the people who settled on the island could live in peace. Those coming from the western provinces [of Turkey] are as unhappy as we are”.

[Kikapu]

In addition to their embracement of Cypriotness, another possible reason for the left-wing parties’ reluctance to accept the settlers is a presumed lack of information concerning their numbers, especially those who are citizens. In particular, a former leader of CTP, the late Özker Özgür, was very outspoken in his views on this issue. He made numerous statements heavily criticising the on-going immigration at the time. For example, in an interview recorded in 1986, he claimed:

“In the place of our people who flee abroad to earn their living, people come from Turkey under the name of ‘labour force’. This labour force is turned into a vote force for conservative, chauvinistically oriented politicians ... We are faced with the danger of becoming a minority in northern Cyprus ... foreigners in our own homeland”.

[Hermes]

Indeed. The colonization and domination by Ankara of the north has now become an existential problem for the T/C community. This suggests that it might be mistaken to present the recent protests as an internal matter rather than as a reaction against Ankara's colonial policies in the occupied areas. Even though it started as a protest against Turkey's economic cuts it now looks like the demonstrations have developed into a political protest and has uncovered deep resentments and rivalries between Turkey, the settlers and Turkish Cypriots. Is the next conflict in Cyprus to be between settlers and T/Cs? Interesting times ahead...

[Kikapu]

In daily life, as well as in the mainstream press, critical reactions toward the settler or immigrant population are often voiced by people coming from the right or from the Kemalist tradition. Orientalising commentary such as that of Dr. Kücük that saw the arrival of “other Turks” on the island as the establishment of an “Eastern sultanate”, became even more common in public discourse at the start of the 1990s, largely because of the liberalising consequences of the economy in that decade. Killoran claims that in the early 1990s:

“Very rarely Nationalist and very often the oppositional Turkish Cypriots would suggest that they were much more ‘European’ and educated than these ... ‘workers’. For example, a government official once told me that ‘they sent the wrong kind of Turks’ ...”.

[Kikapu]

Many local entrepreneurs found the wages demanded by Cypriots to be more than they were willing to pay, and as a result, construction companies brought their workers from Turkey, especially from the poorer areas in Turkey’s south and southeast. In addition, large numbers of these workers were of Kurdish or Arab origin, and many hailed from the area of south eastern Turkey where they had experienced economic devastation and social turmoil as a result of long-term, low-level conflict. Many construction workers were originally offered accommodation on construction sites, but they gradually began to find housing in the empty properties of Nicosia’s walled city:

“When the need for construction workers created by the growing construction sector came together with the Turkish Cypriots lack of willingness to work ‘for nothing’, an unskilled labour force began to flow from Turkey’s undeveloped areas in the east and southeast to Cyprus. The accommodation needs of these ‘guests’ were first met in the half-finished construction sites, but as their numbers multiplied, the old houses that Cypriots had begun to abandon in Nicosia’s side streets began to be turned into workers’ boarding houses. These new residents of Nicosia’s side streets began to produce anxiety in its old residents and to accelerate their move into the suburbs”.

[Kikapu]

The absence of Turkish Cypriots within the walled city, and the preponderance of Turkish immigrants, is often lamented in the Turkish-Cypriot press. One of the most popular columnists in the north recently toured the walled city and wrote of what he found there:

“I don’t remember the last time I strolled through old Nicosia’s streets. It must have been two, maybe five months since I had walked there. The number of Turkish Cypriots that I saw between Kyrenia Gate and Saray Önü Square had decreased incredibly. A woman in a shop that sells coffee and nuts asked, ‘Hasan Bey, did you notice how much the number of Cypriots has decreased?’ ‘I’m aware of it’, I said.”

[Kikapu]

This change in the social fabric of the walled city is often referred to in the Turkish-Cypriot press as a form of “Anatolianisation”. In the widely read columns of fiener Levent in the newspaper Afrika, the “colonisation” or “Anatolianisation” of the walled city is a common theme. The day after the April 2008 opening of the checkpoint that divides Ledra Street, one of the city’s main arteries, Levent wrote: “The reporter for a television channel from Turkey who was filming at Lokmaci was saying with great excitement,‘The Greek side stopped the crossings to Turkey. It closed the gate’.

Oh, man! I said. Finally someone’s come out and told the truth. I’m sick of hearing lies. Let’s speak the truth for once. It’s not a gate opening onto peace. It’s not about Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots uniting ... This gate certainly isn’t one that opens from one part of Nicosia to another. It opens from Nicosia to Turkey! From Europe to Anatolia!”47 In such portrayals, there is an inevitable elision of immigrants with Anatolia, of immigration with colonisation. Levent continues, “This isn’t Cyprus, it’s Turkey. A little Turkey. It’s a remote Anatolian town, with its pensions, coffee houses, simit sellers, and lahmacun salons”. The implication of such remarks is that the ghettoisation of the walled city is part of a plan to “integrate” Cyprus into Turkey, to “assimilate” Turkish Cypriots to Anatolian culture.

[Kikapu]

Turkish Cypriots have a preference for jobs in the civil service, and the public sector has expanded in past decades to meet demand. Much of the funding for civil service jobs comes from pecuniary aid provided by Turkey – which also demands a say in certain areas, because of its financial support and leads to accusations of colonisation. Moreover, many immigrant workers are aware of this drain on the Turkish state and accuse Turkish Cypriots of ingratitude, exacerbating existing tensions. As one interviewed Kurdish worker reported, “If Turkey would invest this much in my region, I’d be there now rather than here”. As a consequence, the preference of Turkish Cypriots for civil service posts has meant that as sectors requiring cheap, manual labour grew, they had to be filled by an immigrant population. One research team that has conducted research with migrants inside Nicosia’s walled city remarked:

“In north Cyprus, the foreign (Turkish national) work force in both the formal and informal sectors is around 50,000, with the greatest number employed in construction. In contrast to this, according to the 2006 north Cyprus census, the number of residents is 178,000, the number of households is 72,000, and the number of persons drawing a government paycheque is 55,000. These figures clearly show that ‘TRNC’ citizens, as a work force, have clustered in the public sector, and that there is a structural labour deficit in north Cyprus’ developing sectors. It is this deficit that non-citizen workers, in both the formal and informal sectors, fill”.