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I found an interesting article in the New York Times today:
Beware These Greeks? No, They're Bearing Cash
By MARLISE SIMONS
KYRENIA, Cyprus, May 1 — The people of Kyrenia, with its perfect horseshoe harbor, know something about invaders. The list reads like a Who's Who of Eastern Mediterranean history. Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Byzantines, Crusaders, Venetians and Ottomans have all held this strategic and pretty spot. The last was the army of Turkey, which landed 29 years ago and never left.
But no one here had expected the latest fleet, composed not of galleons or helicopters, but motorbikes and cars zooming down from the mountains behind the town.
In the past week, since Turkish Cypriots eased travel across the buffer zone that has divided the island since 1974, some 160,000 people have rushed to visit the other side. The majority have been Greek Cypriots, who outnumber the Turkish population by almost four to one. Many have come to celebrate in this little port, a place of medieval walls and a magical reputation.
( Read about an unexpected reunion. )
All this reminds me of the vast migrations between East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. 14 years ago, however, the influx was overwhelmingly from east to west; there was a sizable West German population of East German refugee origin, but by the late 1980s all these refugees save the most recent had been assimilated into their new communities. There wasn't a large number of West Germans going east to see their hometowns; or, if there were, they were disproportionately old. In the case of Cyprus, however, the separation was barely a generation ago, while it is the Greek Cypriots--three or four times as numerous as their Turkish counterparts--who seem to have suffered the relatively greater displacement.
It seems not too probable, I think, that Cyprus will be reunified in time for European Union membership. The Republic of Cyprus is simply far too prosperous a society not to draw the Turkish north into its orbit; it doesn't seem too improbable that if Denktash and the other hard-liners try to close the border, the TRNC will be depopulated almost as surely as the GDR would have been if the East German communists had remained in ineffectual power. After having managed to alienate both western Europe and the United States in the recent Iraq crisis, neither the Turkish civilian government nor the Turkish generals will really be in a position to keep the mass of the poulation in the TRNC (including, incidentally, a very large number of Turkish immigrants) from achieving reunification if they truly want it. And now that the Greek Republic of Cyprus seems to have achieved, without any violence, economic hegemony in the north, there's no reason to think that there might not be a fairly rapid knitting-together of the two halves.
The general outlines of a Cypriot settlement have been fairly clear for a while--there will be Greek and Turkish semi-sovereign entities, there will be the transfer of some lands (mainly in northwestern Cyprus) from the Turkish to the Greek entity, and there will be international guarantees of the entire situation (administered through the UN, or perhaps now administered through the EU). The main stumbling block has been the refusal of the Denktash government to accept any agreement that did not give the TRNC some kind of internationally-recognized quasi-independence. I'm not sure if that will really be a usable point, not if the reports I've read of TRNC citizens trying to get passports and health cards (and succeeding!) from the Republic of Cyprus government are true. In the end, Denktash might have to accept Cypriot reunification on more or less Greek terms if he doesn't want Cypriot reunification to be achieved by having all of his statelet's citizens move south.
The sense, incidentally, that I get from this and other articles about a pan-Cypriot identity that transcends Greek and Turkish ethnies--a sort of nationalist sprachbund, if you would, an identity shared by distinct and separate peoples--is equally interesting. It is important to note that many Turkish Cypriots complained about the immigration of their fellow ethnic Turks from Anatolia because they were foreigners, in a way that the Greeks presumably weren't. The pre-invasion history of Cyprus was rather bloody, marked by ethnic massacres and hatred generally, but it seems as if something has persisted. And that's heart-warming.
Beware These Greeks? No, They're Bearing Cash
By MARLISE SIMONS
KYRENIA, Cyprus, May 1 — The people of Kyrenia, with its perfect horseshoe harbor, know something about invaders. The list reads like a Who's Who of Eastern Mediterranean history. Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Byzantines, Crusaders, Venetians and Ottomans have all held this strategic and pretty spot. The last was the army of Turkey, which landed 29 years ago and never left.
But no one here had expected the latest fleet, composed not of galleons or helicopters, but motorbikes and cars zooming down from the mountains behind the town.
In the past week, since Turkish Cypriots eased travel across the buffer zone that has divided the island since 1974, some 160,000 people have rushed to visit the other side. The majority have been Greek Cypriots, who outnumber the Turkish population by almost four to one. Many have come to celebrate in this little port, a place of medieval walls and a magical reputation.
( Read about an unexpected reunion. )
All this reminds me of the vast migrations between East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. 14 years ago, however, the influx was overwhelmingly from east to west; there was a sizable West German population of East German refugee origin, but by the late 1980s all these refugees save the most recent had been assimilated into their new communities. There wasn't a large number of West Germans going east to see their hometowns; or, if there were, they were disproportionately old. In the case of Cyprus, however, the separation was barely a generation ago, while it is the Greek Cypriots--three or four times as numerous as their Turkish counterparts--who seem to have suffered the relatively greater displacement.
It seems not too probable, I think, that Cyprus will be reunified in time for European Union membership. The Republic of Cyprus is simply far too prosperous a society not to draw the Turkish north into its orbit; it doesn't seem too improbable that if Denktash and the other hard-liners try to close the border, the TRNC will be depopulated almost as surely as the GDR would have been if the East German communists had remained in ineffectual power. After having managed to alienate both western Europe and the United States in the recent Iraq crisis, neither the Turkish civilian government nor the Turkish generals will really be in a position to keep the mass of the poulation in the TRNC (including, incidentally, a very large number of Turkish immigrants) from achieving reunification if they truly want it. And now that the Greek Republic of Cyprus seems to have achieved, without any violence, economic hegemony in the north, there's no reason to think that there might not be a fairly rapid knitting-together of the two halves.
The general outlines of a Cypriot settlement have been fairly clear for a while--there will be Greek and Turkish semi-sovereign entities, there will be the transfer of some lands (mainly in northwestern Cyprus) from the Turkish to the Greek entity, and there will be international guarantees of the entire situation (administered through the UN, or perhaps now administered through the EU). The main stumbling block has been the refusal of the Denktash government to accept any agreement that did not give the TRNC some kind of internationally-recognized quasi-independence. I'm not sure if that will really be a usable point, not if the reports I've read of TRNC citizens trying to get passports and health cards (and succeeding!) from the Republic of Cyprus government are true. In the end, Denktash might have to accept Cypriot reunification on more or less Greek terms if he doesn't want Cypriot reunification to be achieved by having all of his statelet's citizens move south.
The sense, incidentally, that I get from this and other articles about a pan-Cypriot identity that transcends Greek and Turkish ethnies--a sort of nationalist sprachbund, if you would, an identity shared by distinct and separate peoples--is equally interesting. It is important to note that many Turkish Cypriots complained about the immigration of their fellow ethnic Turks from Anatolia because they were foreigners, in a way that the Greeks presumably weren't. The pre-invasion history of Cyprus was rather bloody, marked by ethnic massacres and hatred generally, but it seems as if something has persisted. And that's heart-warming.
