A New Release of "Taksim! Chypre divisée"

COPEAUX, Étienne ; MAUSS-COPEAUX, Claire. Taksim ! Chypre divisée, 1964-2005. Nouvelle édition. Paris : Presses de l’Inalco, 2023 (généré le 05 avril 2023).

Online : <http://books.openedition.org/pressesinalco/46238>. ISBN : 9782858314225. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pressesinalco.46238.

Preface to the 2023 edition

This book, first published in 2005, results from an investigation carried out from 1995 to 2004 in Cyprus, mainly in the northern part of the island, known as the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" (TRNC). We were then experienced as historians but also as geographers, and, in addition, we previously had long and slowly traveled, as close as possible to the terrain and the people, across France, Corsica, Sardinia, the Maghreb, and West Africa. For the last fifteen years, we crisscrossed Anatolia and, over time, gained practical knowledge of the Turkish language. The signs, natural or human, offered to us, did not escape us anymore.

At the time when we approached Cyprus, we were rich in another experience, that of research, which had brought us, for either one of us, a precise knowledge of Turkish nationalism, its words and modes of expression, and for the other, skills in oral history, thanks to an extensive investigation on the memory of the Franco-Algerian conflict. Familiar with landscape reading and, of course, with the critical analysis of written documents, we had skills to analyze the various expressions of dented life stories: three sources for a lengthy investigation.

As we will see in the first chapter, the history of the "Cyprus problem" is very intricate. As far as we know, the Turkish-speaking population of the North had never been a matter for an in-depth study. This population was gathered in 1974 in a puppet republic doomed to widespread opprobrium. However, this territory was not inaccessible: nothing was easier for us, living then in Istanbul, than to multiply our visits there. But, since this "republic" is unrecognized, we could not count, at first, on any support from French institutions. From 2000 to 2004 however, the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean-Pouilloux (Lyon) provided efficient backing.

During our first visit in 1995, we did not understand much of what we were told, and it was not an issue of language. Our interlocutors referred to place names we could not find, evoked unknown events, and their lives had been moved several times from one village to another, from one end of the island to the other. Few of the stories were clear, and, during the investigation, we had to carry on documentation work from the available written sources, mainly in Turkish, until we precisely knew what had happened, between 1955 and 1974, in each village we approached. As we went along, our photos, brought back from the "other side" were efficient triggers for dialogue at a time when the Internet was in its infancy. For we had to do with people who, for many (about a third of the population), were forced migrants. They had been separated from their homes, their belongings, and their past, by an impassable buffer zone and had never seen their village, even when it was close, for twenty-nine years.

We traveled across villages and lives, listening to stories, observing the country and the land, and deciphering the elements of propaganda embedded in their minds, without getting discouraged or disturbed by the multiple changes of opinion or point of view within the stories this disoriented population told us.

The investigation could have never ended because, over the years, it became a story in itself that affected us deeply. The island was changing, its history was moving forward, and we had to update continuously, but until when? We decided to conclude our research in 2004 when Cyprus entered European Union.

Many of the people we met, sometimes at length, often on several occasions, who had witnessed events mostly unknown to the French public, have now passed away. This book is part of their memory. Although written more than fifteen years ago, it remains relevant today. Cyprus has been and remains the scene of a national and communal conflict that has opposed people who had been living together, more or less well, for centuries, against each other, before separating them from each other. The same story dramatically unfolded in the post-Ottoman area, from Yugoslavia to Lebanon. The societies of the twentieth century could not maintain the living-together, albeit shaky and often punctuated by problems and violence, of the Ottoman era. Identity-based, often religion-based nationalism has sown war, destruction, and misfortune everywhere, and well beyond the post-Ottoman world, in Ireland, in the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere. On its own scale, Cyprus is a paradigm of what nationalism, this regression of intelligence, has produced.

Tackling with the problems of such a small country could sound derisory as in the meantime and nearby, the war has spread, on different scales, from Libya to Azerbaijan… But listening to the Cypriots has aroused remembrances of many other conflicts, and these stories have clashed, in many ways, with our own history.

At the time of its entry into the European Union (2004), Cyprus could seem close to reunification, if not reconciliation. But the situation has frozen. Turkey has managed to make the partition irreversible. The autochthon Cypriot population is about to be overwhelmed by a population coming from the continent.

© E.C.

Often, authors writing about Cyprus are fascinated by the most visible of the problem: the ghost town of Varosha, near Famagusta, and the "Green Line" separating north and south since 1974, and cuts Nicosia into two separate entities. As for us, we have chosen to turn our backs on the Line and the classic political/geopolitical approaches, preferably focusing on the invisible or the discrete traces.

For there is another impassable border, a temporal one, the summer of 1974. For the Greek Cypriots, this is the time of the Turkish invasion, of the expulsion and exile imposed on 200,000 people, that is to say, almost the entire Orthodox population of the northern part, which remains until now militarily occupied: according to this vision, this dramatic event is supposed to be the beginning of the "Cyprus problem". In the Turkish vision, on the contrary, the summer of 1974 witnessed the liberation of the Turkish Cypriots, the birth of a new country, of a republic created for them, opening up the possibility of living in peace, safe from threats: for the Turkish doxa, 1974 would be the end of the problem. Depending on which way one looks at this date, one endorses one of two irreconcilable visions of the recent history of Cyprus.

By dint of traveling the Cypriot land and thanks to the people who gave us a few minutes or whole days, we crossed this temporal border as well as the Green Line. For to understand the island, one has to cross over both.

But there were serious impediments: we could discuss in Turkish, but not in Greek. In addition, at that time and until 2003, one had to go through Istanbul and Athens, or London, to get from one part of Cyprus to the other. Hence, our visits to the South were less frequent than to the North. But a knowledge of the South was necessary to prompt the word of the people of the North. A particular knowledge: not the one that politicians, academics, researchers, or "actors" of the Cypriot question can deliver, but the one that is taught by the field itself, the landscapes, the villages, the humble places of memory, of which our photographs were, in the North, the sesame that opened the memories - and the hearts - of the people we met.

The opening of the Green Line on April 23, 2003, was a tipping moment for the island and its inhabitants. And in 2003-2004, with the admission of the entire island into the European Union, one could hope that reunification was near. But twenty years later, what has changed? The northern territory has remained a Turkish protectorate so that since 2004, Turkey militarily occupies part of the European Union.

Taking advantage of the existence and "independence" of this TRNC, Turkey wants to exploit the seabed of the eastern Mediterranean. The Turkish army is still there. Twice, succeeding the unmovable Rauf Denktas, democrat figures in favor of reunification have accessed the presidency of the territory: Mehmet Ali Talat (2005-2010) and Mustafa Akıncı (2015-2020), only to always come up against the will of the "motherland." Many northern Cypriots have resigned themselves; they can indeed live quietly, they have become more comfortable through tourism and large-scale real estate operations, and they have finally entered the globalized world after living, for a generation, in an "open-air jail." Just as Israel has done, Turkey has succeeded in creating an irreversible situation.

As our book dates from 2005, some observations reflect the period of our investigation, at the turn of the century. However, after a careful re-reading, we thought it best to make only minimal changes.

Instead, we asked Katerina Attalidou, a Cypriot intellectual and artist, to write an afterword. We entered into a relationship thanks to this book and, as you shall see, she has a viewpoint of her country and her Turkish compatriots of the North that is, at once, similar, complementary, and opposite to ours. Her text is a mirror of our own work, it tells of a vision, a discovery by a person who has never known her unified island. It is also the story of the Cypriots' pain and hope.

Étienne Copeaux, Claire Mauss-Copeaux

Nyons, October 2022