BY ETYEN MAHCUPYAN
ZAMAN- Columnist Etyen Mahcupyan writes on Turkey’s way of dealing with the Cyprus issue. A summary of his column is as follows:
No doubt the Cyprus issue constitutes the most intense case of a Turkey trapped between the East and the West, its own past and future, and most of all between fantasy and reality, for this long-standing problem threatens an identity dilemma for the republican regime.
Today the Turkish state stands face-to-face with four most agonizing conundrums, each of which has its own historical adventures. Of these four, the non-Muslim and Kurdish issues could, in the final analysis, be defused through an overwhelmingly vigorous Turkish nationalism and thus be left out a possible identity crisis. Apparently, these people are not ‘Turks,’ and thus pose no grave threat to the perceived integrity of Turkish identity. Tensions between the state and Islamic sectors are ‘settled’ by the former appealing to secularism. The presence of a pious swathe of society doesn’t bother the state, as this group is itself left out of the secular republic’s ‘citizen imagination,’ and thus does not endanger the state in terms of identity. However, the case of Northern Cyprus is quite different and far more challenging, as half of its population is composed of Turks who emigrated to the island from Turkey after 1974. Therefore, they are expected to be secularists and Turkish nationalists, and to side with the state on the Cyprus problem. A contrary stance, especially when it’s openly demonstrated by taking to the streets and is backed by a firm opposition, which turns Turkey’s stomach.
Neither the rhetoric nor the administrative tools of the state are up to facing this problem in a democratic fashion. That’s why, in spite of the government’s recent compromising attitude on the issue, the state is trying to use a nationalist mentality to paper over the already tattered relations between itself and the Turkish Cypriots. In so doing, the state is trying to stave off an identity dissolution it finds itself unable to cope with for the sake of a more ‘sublime and sacred’ nationalist cause. The recipe is simple: Identification and homogenization of the interests of Northern Cyprus and those of Turkey. Thus the state kills two birds with one stone. The first is that a transition from the interests of the state to those of the people becomes possible, thus unifying the interests of the Turks of both Turkey and Northern Cyprus. And secondly, in this unification, because it has ‘unquestionable’ reference to nationalism, ‘Turkish’ identity becomes prior to the concrete demands of the Turkish citizens. The more the mainland asserts its nationalism, the harsher becomes the conflict between the Turkish Cypriots and the imagined Turkish identity of Turkey itself.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION