IT IS not often that Cyprus makes the first item on TV news in Turkey, but on Monday evening it did.
That night, viewers from Istanbul to Iskenderun watched as thousands of Turkish Cypriot demonstrators clashed violently with police outside the ‘parliament’ in north Nicosia. The demonstrators, newscasters said, were intent on stopping Turkish Cypriot ‘deputies’ from ratifying a ‘bill’ that would significantly cut public sector salaries, and to do this, protesters would enter ‘parliament’ and physically disrupt proceedings. Equally intent, the police fired teargas at the crowd and beat it back with batons. In the wake of the charge, TVs showed protesters screaming as they were dragged off and bundled into police vans. By the end of the clashes, 16 protesters were in jail, and numerous demonstrators and police had been injured.
Such scenes are not usual in Cyprus, and this is partly why mainland Turkish television channels gave so much airtime to the protests. But there was another reason for the interest.
In Turkey, Turkish Cypriots are often seen as a privileged and underworked. As far as the stereotype goes, these islanders pick up their monthly cheques from Ankara and drive off to lavish lunches in expensive cars jangling their tacky jewellery. Turkish Cypriots have had it good for decades at the expense of the toiling Turkish taxpayer. There is, however, one thing worse than the indolent greed of the Turkish Cypriots, and that is their ingratitude.
And this so-called ingratitude was clearly demonstrated on Monday as protesters chanted “Down with Ankara and its austerity measures!” Turkish Cypriots, the protesters were heard to insist, would rule themselves and would not tolerate the interference of the Turkish government in its affairs – sentiments hardly likely to inspire the Turkish public to pressurise its government to spend more than the annual half a billion US dollars on Cyprus.
Despite their rarity, such scenes are not unprecedented. In 2001, when the Turkish lira lost half of its value in a single day leading to the collapse of several Turkish and Turkish Cypriot banks, demonstrators actually succeeded in storming ‘parliament’. Many had lost thousands in the collapse, and were justifiably aggrieved, and again anger was directed primarily towards the mainland. Out of these demonstrations emerged a movement headed by trades unions and civil society organisations calling itself This Nation is Ours. Ours, and not Ankara’s. The movement grew in stature, and the demonstrations grew larger in protest of what many Turkish Cypriots saw as Turkey’s denial of the Turkish Cypriots’ right to decide their own destiny. It became a political movement that desired not only a higher standard of living and financial security, but also the political freedom to reunite with the south of the island and join the EU.
Monday’s riots outside ‘parliament’ were reminiscent of the unrest in the early 2000s that led to the emergence of a powerful reunification movement, but are they indicative that something similar is happening again?
To answer this question, one has to look at what is being offered to the public sector workers. According to north-based economist Mustafa Besim, the package does nothing to harm the interests of workers currently employed by the ‘state’.
“It only affects those who will be employed in the future. Those already employed will continue on the old scales,” Besim explained. This means that those battling police on Monday were doing so, not for themselves, but for those who might seek ‘state’ employment in the future. These riots were therefore either an act of selfless altruism on the part of ‘state’ employees, or (and this is much more likely) political manipulation.
Giving strength to this view, economists like Besim in the north, in Turkey, the EU and even the World Bank believe that from an economic point of view, the austerity measures are both necessary and timely.
“I do not believe these measures will cause people to leave the island as the unions are saying. In fact I believe the opposite to be the case, Besim says”.
The basis of his conviction is that the public sector remains the north’s main and most popular employer. Wages in the private sector lag woefully behind.
“Everybody wants to work for the state. The wages are higher with job security and pensions. This needs to change, and reducing the demand for jobs in the public sector is a way of doing this,” Besim says. He adds however that as well as cutting demand for public sector jobs, the authorities should be doing more to boost the private sector.
Asked whether he believes, as the demonstrators say, Ankara is looking to crush the unions and further impose its rule on the north Besim says, “Ankara is looking to add conditionality to the funds it provides. It is saying, ‘if you don’t do this or do that with the money, you won’t get it’.”
Such an approach stems, Besim says, not from Turkey’s desire to colonise and rule the north, but from the fact that Turkey is itself under a strict austerity programme and does not see why the Turkish Cypriots cannot “rationalise” their consumption in a similar way.
But some are intent on reviving the political atmosphere of the early 2000s. On Monday, as the crowds gathered outside ‘parliament’, leader of the now-opposition Republican Turkish Party (CTP) Ferdi Sabit Soyer left his seat in the House and walked out to join the demonstrators. Arm in arm with the unionists, he walked towards the police barricades. Just seven months ago Soyer was ‘prime minister’, and one of the primary reasons why he no longer is so is because he sought to implement the self-same austerity package on the unions. In fact, the package was drawn up by Soyer and his fellow ‘ministers’.
But putting opportunism to one side, there could actually be a deeper political meaning behind Monday’s demonstration, even if most agree that as yet there do not exist the conditions that united the majority of Turkish Cypriots against the authorities in north Nicosia and Ankara in the early 2000s.
Before the general election in April, the then-opposition, now-ruling National Unity Party (UBP), promised the unions that if it got into power it would not seek to implement the kind of austerity measures the then-ruling Republican Turkish Party (CTP) was seeking to hand down from Ankara. The UBP won the election very comfortably. Then on Monday the party broke its promise by submitting the package and ratifying it. The party that designed the package, the CTP, abstained.
What is interesting is that following his election victory UBP leader Dervish Eroglu flew to Ankara to ask for more money, knowing full well that if Ankara didn’t deliver he would be finished. Ankara knew this too, and while it gave him the money he needed, it also insisted on the “conditionality” Besim speaks of.
“We know that the AKP government in Turkey does not support Eroglu, and maybe they thought, let’s put him in a corner and let the people turn against him,” Besim posits. He does not say this is for sure Turkey’s motive, but it could be a way in which economic and political interests combine.
Next April, Eroglu will take on the current Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat for the ‘presidency’ of the north. If he wins, and sticks to his long-standing belief that partition is the only solution for Cyprus, he will find himself directly at odds with the AKP government in Turkey, which, like Talat, supports the UN framework of a federal solution to the Cyprus problem. It is therefore in the AKP’s interest that Eroglu loses the election.
Meanwhile, the unions and left-wing parties, including the CTP architects of the austerity plan, say they will continue to hold demonstrations against austerity, thereby keeping emotions running high as the north heads towards an election and a possible referendum on reunification.
