A YOUNG, attractive and impressively energetic Turkish Cypriot woman bursts into a boardroom in a dauntingly prestigious advertising agency in London’s Soho Square. Out of breath, she informs the lawyers, academics and myself that the seminar is about to begin.
Filing into a larger and plusher boardroom, we meet the BBC’s James Robbins. He will chair the seminar aimed at telling journalists and British political figures the problems currently faced by the Turkish Cypriot community in Cyprus. Dark-suited men and women from the Foreign Office look on and take notes as Robbins, in clipped and eloquent BBC English, introduces the guest speakers.
For decades, groups on both sides of the Cyprus divide have found it in their interests to lobby foreign politicians on the numerous injustices being perpetrated against them by the “other side”. With formidable effect, the Greek Cypriots have used the tactic to expose to the world the horrors and losses of the 1974 Turkish invasion. Likewise, Turkish Cypriots have, albeit seemingly to lesser effect, sought friends in Westminster, Washington, and more recently Brussels, to lend support to their feelings of injustice over what happened to their community prior to 1974. Both sides’ arguments are convincing. Both sides’ grievances are without doubt valid.
However, since 2004, when the Turkish Cypriot community did a political about turn and began seeking the reunification of the island, a new grievance has come to the fore – not so much about the past, but about the present.
“Just about every aspect of life is blocked by Greek Cypriot action,” Ipek Ozerim, the energetic co-ordinator of London-based pressure group ‘Embargoed!’, tells the audience. Her list of grievances is long, ranging from the community’s 48-year banishment from international sports competitions – “not even friendly matches” – to its inability to export products from its ports or fly planefuls of tourists directly into airports in the north.
But today’s seminar is by no means one of those no-holds-barred Greek-bashing sessions so common in the past. Here British-trained lawyer Emine Erk and US-educated international relations expert Erol Kaymak, articulately and without resort to recrimination, explain the dilemma facing the Turkish Cypriot community when faced with the realities of living in an unrecognised and illegal state. They even go as far as outlining, albeit briefly, Greek Cypriot grievances regarding issues such as property and traveling to the northern part of the island.
“I accept the anger created by the property boom on Greek Cypriot land,” Erk concludes, while also rationalising the Turkish Cypriot point of view that “they felt they had done enough by backing the Annan [UN peace] plan, which, had it been implemented, would have prevented the boom”.
Kaymak too focuses, not on what the Greeks Cypriots have done to the Turkish Cypriots in the past, but on how different perspectives prevalent in the two communities have led to the exacerbation and prolongation of the conflict. More importantly still, Kaymak and Erk seek solutions, not approbation or the moral high ground.
This seminar took place last Tuesday, but it was not the first time Embargoed! had sought to put what it terms the decades-long plight of the Turkish Cypriot minority into the minds of the masses. Earlier this year, the “independent, non profit-making organisation” shocked the somewhat conservative folks back home in Cyprus with a protest depicting naked Turkish Cypriot footballers with their genitals obscured only by a banner reading “Balls to Embargoes!” Another protest in the spring chose the occasion of an EU summit to highlight the fact that the community has no voice in the European bloc. Here, members of the organisation turned up in Brussels to picket the entrance of the summit with their mouths covered with pieces of masking tape with the word “Gagged!” printed across them.
Ozerim says Embargoed!’s approach – unorthodox by Cypriot standards – stems from a wish to “reach out to a broader range of people”, and to focus on human rights issues, rather than politics.
“We want it to appeal to non-Turkish Cypriots,” she says, insisting that Embargoed! “is not about recognition of the TRNC”. But nor, she adds, is it campaigning for reunification.
“If you sit down with a bunch of members, you’ll get people who will say both. But we see ourselves as apolitical,” she says.
The non-partisan nature of Embargoed! is a factor that attracted the renowned London-based Turkish Cypriot fashion designer Huseyin Caglayan MBE to lend his support to the organisation. He says it is also the “non-nationalist” approach that he feels comfortable working with.
Being an artist, Caglayan is keen to see the organisation launching cultural events that highlight the difficulties the Turkish Cypriot community finds itself in. In particular, he feels the Greek Cypriot community need to be made aware of what it is like to be a Turkish Cypriot in north Cyprus today.
“A lot of Greek Cypriots don’t know about our predicament, either in terms of history or the present. Many of them think we are a breakaway state happy with things the way they are,” he says.
In order to get the message across, Caglayan believes organisations like Embargoed! need to get around what he describes as the “heavy-handed approach” of the Cyprus government when dealing with anything involving Turkish Cypriot participation. He points to its pulling the plug on the Manifesta project that was to see artists from both sides of the dividing line working together throughout the second half of 2006.
“I am not happy to condemn the government for its action, but this is typical of its attitude. This is not ethnicity, this is art,” he says, adding that the Cypriot government has effectively sent the message that intercommunal co-operation was undesirable and left people wondering how, if co-operation could not be achieved in relatively innocuous the field of art, could it be found on other, more complex, levels.
Caglayan’s presence in and contributions to Embargoed! clearly exert influence, but another predominant factor in the formulation of its style and methodology is Ozerim’s experience working in London with what she describes as “the top ten agencies”.
“It’s a lot about synergy,” she explains, using a term that would probably leave many Cypriot politicians both sides of the Green Line searching for a dictionary, and adds: “It’s also nice to have access to such resources and knowledge of the techniques used by big organisations like Oxfam and Greenpeace.”
Talk of resources leads one naturally to wonder where the money is coming from to fund these imaginative but also relatively expensive campaigns.
Embargoed! has around 250 members, and each one pays a fee of £25 annually, Ozerim says. She adds, however, that “many give more”.
Unfortunately though, it is the question of where funding and other forms of material and moral support come from that could create a potential pitfall for Embargoed!. One cannot help but be aware there are those among its ranks who feel the organisation should be used to counter what they see as the overly pro-solution sentiments of the current Turkish Cypriot administration. And more worrying is the tangible danger that the greatest contributions could come from companies profiting from the lucrative sale of Greek Cypriot properties in the north. But while saying she is not in the practice of disclosing the identity of donators Ozerim gives assurances that Embargoed! will not be diverted from its chosen course by the interests of individual donators.
“People give us a cheque and we say ‘thank you very much, see you later’, and so far no one has tried to influence us in this way.
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