The Colonization Period between 750 BC- 1960

In the Mediterranean, Cyprus is the third largest island after Sicily and Sardinia, located 40 miles to the south of Turkey and 600 miles to the south-east of Greece (Sözen 1998:6).

Due to its geographical location, the island has always been the focus of power struggles since ancient times: it attracted many colonizers and was ruled successively by the Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, Ptolemies, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians, Ottoman Turks and British (Joseph 1997:16). As a result, throughout history the identity of the residents of Cyprus has been rearticulated, reconstructed and represented within changing social, political and cultural circumstances.

Although many colonial powers have come and gone in Cyprus, the island is still a field of power relations, especially between Turkey and Greece. These two countries have had crucial influences on the island because of their political interests and historical and cultural connections with the natives of the island, the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Because of their connections, Turkey and Greece are accepted as motherland countries by the Turkish and Greek Cypriots respectively. In addition, the United States, European Union countries, and Russia are external powers that are closely interested in Cyprus for a variety of global, political and geographical reasons (Samani 1999). These conflicting interests over the island make Cyprus one of the most problematic areas of the world and create, reinforce and reproduce the Cyprus problem.

As these varieties of complex interests are intertwined with each other, it is not easy to explain the main reasons behind the Cyprus problem. According to Kızılyürek (2001:10), its causes can be classified on the basis of internal and external factors. The external factors are the interventions of colonial powers on the island, while the internal

factors are the historical and political changes that have occurred on the island since its invasion by the Ottomans in 1571. The historical and political changes that make up the internal factors, Kızılyürek argues, create the necessary conditions for the interventions of colonial powers which are the external factors; the internal and external factors influence each other.

When the Ottomans invaded Cyprus, they settled a limited number of Moslem Turks from different parts of Anatolia on the island. Until the arrival of the Ottomans, the population of the island had been predominantly Greek-speaking and Christian Orthodox;

Moslem Turks and Orthodox Greeks made up the traditional Ottoman society after this point. The Ottomans administered the island under the ‘millet’ system, whereby the communities were institutionalized, had specific rights and privileges and elected their own judicial and administrative officials (Necatigil 1993:1). According to Samani (1999:13), these two communities mostly lived together and established friendly relationships under the Ottoman administration approximately for three centuries.

However, due to the Ottoman millet system of communal separation in areas such as culture, education and religion, the Christian and Muslim communities of Cyprus conducted their separate lives in parallel neighbourhoods of the towns and villages. As Joseph (1999:17) points out, the Ottoman millet administrative system distinguished the two communities on the basis of religion and ethnicity, and hence encouraged separate, private, social and political lives under different religious leaders. This was further encouraged during the period of British rule, when communal voting for separate councils was introduced in municipal elections; the British retained and developed the Ottoman system of separation (Tocci 2004:43). For this reason it is possible to talk about the transformation of the millet system into a system of ethnic differentiation that began with the influence of the politics of British colonization and with the entrance of Greek and Turkish nationalisms to the island.

One factor in the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots was the influence of Turkish and Greek nationalisms.⁹ The projection of Greek nationalism in Cyprus was ‘Enosis’ − that is, the discourse of the unification of the island with the

‘motherland’, Greece. Through this discourse, the elites that believed they had been politically second-class citizens during the Ottoman period began to feel they were part of

9 In many ways, Greek and Turkish nationalist projects are ‘parallel monologues’. Greece and Turkey have been historically posited as the ‘other’ in their respective nationalist imaginaries, each being seen, from the outset, as being at the antipodes of the survival of the other (Özkırımlı and Sofos 2008:2).

a privileged, ideal and powerful Greek nation (Samani 1999: 15). On the other hand, starting from the first years of British colonization, the local Ottoman intellectuals who were against the increasing desire of the Orthodox Greeks for Enosis, and were beginning to feel their social status was decreasing, were carrying the hope that the island would one day be given back to the previous owner, the Ottomans (ibid:22). Turkish nationalism in this sense mainly developed among Turkish intellectuals as a preventive measure against the collapse of the Ottoman Empire when the empire started to lose its power and authority (ibid: 19). The politics of British colonization was another contributing factor in the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. It had a substantial influence on the formation of the ethnic differentiation between the two communities. British politics focused primarily on the maintenance of British sovereignty in colonial countries;

protection of Britain’s control and authority over colonized societies was based on its classic ‘divide and rule strategies’ (Young 1994:225-231). During the British period in 1878, influenced by social, political and cultural contexts that were mostly formed as a result of these strategies, Greek and Turkish Cypriots¹⁰ began to fight with each other in order to gain dominance over the island.

In the beginning, the basis of their conflict was their focus on different religions; and later, differences in race, language, and cultural and historical backgrounds.

Although the different religions of the two communities empowered the antagonistic relations between them, this situation was useful for the British as it facilitated the British administration’s rule on the island. The Turkish Cypriots, who identified themselves as a Moslem community, lived in peace with the British administration until the 1930s. At the beginning of the 1930s, with the influence of the currents of nationalism in the world and the empowerment of the Republic of Turkey¹¹, Turkish Cypriots strove to establish a national identity (Erhürman 2007:14). This time the focus of the Turkish Cypriot community was diverted towards the putative racial, historical and cultural differences that distinguished them from Greek Cypriots. The language, religion and historical background of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, constructed differently from each other, make up the main stones in the formation of their national identities.

10 Greek Cypriots speak Greek and identify themselves with the Greek nation and Greek culture. Almost all of them are members of the Orthodox Church. On the other hand, Turkish Cypriots, all of whom are Moslems, speak Turkish and identified themselves first with the Ottomans and later with the Turkish nation and Turkish culture (Joseph 1997).

11 The Ottoman Empire was succeeded by the Republic of Turkey, which was officially proclaimed in 1923.

The end of the Ottoman culture came with the secularization of Turkey after World War II along European models of government (Shaw and Shaw: 1987:373).