MicAtCyp: GREAT question, through which it's pretty clear that those ethno-political categories don't match everyone's real-life histories and concerns.
I want to take Erol's question about who he 'is' (TC father and an English mother) as an opportunity to quote back what Alexandros offered in another thread as the "Greek Cypriot problems" with settlers in the north.
My contention is that most of his stated concerns about 'settlers' might well equally be raised about English ex-patriates living in the north. This is not to argue that the English should be shipped 'en masse' back to Kent, but to suggest that theoretical arguments based strictly on ethnicity run into problems when they meet 'facts on the ground'.
Alexandros wrote that 'Greek Cypriots' have the following concerns about 'settlers':
a. The fact that they were brought in deliberately by Turkey to alter the demographic balance of Cyprus and to "fill in the empty houses" left over from 1974. The 1974 events were traumatic in themselves, and the fact that settlers were then brought in was just rubbing salt into the wound.
....
b. The fact that they are living in Greek Cypriot homes. This is not an easy problem to resolve, even if you build new houses for them, because the new houses will most probably also be on Greek Cypriot land.
[With regard to points a. and b., have any of you visited 'Karmi' lately? It's a bastion of English culture, and the English have been welcomed for decades with open arms by the Denktas regime, both for their capital and for the warm bodies occupying 'empty' houses].
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c. The fear that the settlers will amount to a separate political force, through which Turkey will influence Cypriot politics. Many of the settlers are ex-army officers who were then granted citizenship, and not poor anatolian villagers ... many of these have an outlook on life that is strictly kemalist, with a view to maintaining ethnic purity and separation of Turks from Greeks in Cyprus. Would they be helpful after a solution?
[Arguably more English ex-military in the north of the island than Turkish, not strictly 'Kemalist' but many with their nest-eggs in the Denktas basket and their hands in his pockets, and savvy about the benefits of international political lobbies]
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d. The fear that, after a solution, the settlers (or at least a proportion of them) will not be sufficiently socially integrated.
[Imperial nostalgia dies hard, and the English military class is notoriously hard to integrate]
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Personally, I have visited the north quite a few times, and met quite a lot of settlers. Some of them I found perfectly agreeable, simple, hard-working people who have integrated succesfully into society. There were others, however, who I found scary: People who had nothing to do with Cypriot culture, with radical islamist tendencies, hard and withdrawn from what was going on around them ...
[Well, maybe 'radical Church of England tendencies', but the 'hardness' and 'withdrawal' are certainly visible in some quarters]
This is what happens when you just put people in ships and tell them, go to Cyprus, you will all get free houses there. Ghettos tend to develop. And ghettos are a source of all sorts of problems.
[yes indeed]
