By Hamza Hendawi
MARIA Christodoulou says she and some of her colleagues at a Nicosia law firm have discussed the Nato military campaign against Yugoslavia almost every day since the day the first bomb was dropped on March 24.
But the British-trained lawyer only learned of the reports alleging atrocities by Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo when she picked up the BBC’s World Service on her car radio while on her way to Limassol for a business meeting.
She brought the subject up the next day, but her colleagues rubbished the reports as nothing more than Nato propaganda.
She knew better than to pursue it further.
“Everyone seems to see a Turkish hand in the Kosovo events,” she told The Sunday Mail. “They think that Turkey wants to encircle Greece by plotting to create a pro-Turkish Muslim Albanian state made up of Kosovo, Albania and the Albanians in Macedonia.”
“To me, it seems simply to be a question of who is Orthodox Christian and who is not,” said Christodoulou, a 30-year-old mother of two, who did not want her real name to be published.
The apparent obsession with religion as the ultimate decider of who is a friend and who is a foe belies the image of a modern state at the threshold of membership of the European Union – arguably the world’s bastion of affluence, sophistication and tolerance.
But many Cypriots argue that, what appears to outsiders to be an antiquated view of the world, is in fact the by-product of centuries of suffering at the hands of foreign armies, which saw in Cyprus an island precariously located near the hinterland of Islam and a soft target for raids and colonisation.
Turkey’s 1974 invasion of the island and its continued occupation of its northern third has not helped such sentiments disappear and indeed has been the catalyst in what is widely perceived to be a latent and deep resentment of the United States for its failure to apply in Cyprus the kind of political resolve it is employing against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.
“Cypriots behave like prisoners of history,” theorised a Western analyst who has been based in Cyprus for several years. “But I think they can get out of that prison, because the key is on the inside and all they have to do is to turn it and get out,” he told The Sunday Mail.
“But then again, the Cypriots are not alone in this, history is imprisoning the entire region, it is true of the Greeks as well as the Turks.”
Nothing like the coverage by the local media of the events in Yugoslavia or the fiery rhetoric used by the Cyprus Orthodox Church better illustrates the notion of a country shackled by a psyche whose roots lie as far back as the early Muslim conquests 1,300 years ago and the military expansion of the Ottoman Turks in the later Middle Ages.
That coverage has labelled the United States and its partners in the Nato campaign as brutal aggressors, drawing parallels with the actions of Nazi Germany. Indeed, US President Bill Clinton, the very man that the Cyprus government is reportedly looking for to produce a peace plan for a Cyprus settlement, has been dubbed “Adolph Clinton” by one newspaper.
Images appearing on local television stations and newspapers of the humanitarian suffering caused by Nato’s action have so far been virtually restricted to Serbs, ignoring altogether the terrible predicament of ethnic Albanians forced by Serbian forces to flee their homes to neighbouring Macedonia, Albania or Montenegro.
The media is not alone in the wave of pro-Serbian sentiment that has gripped the island since Nato began its aerial bombardment. The head of the Cyprus Orthodox Church, Archbishop Chrysostomos, fed the frenzy with a bizarre speech last week in which he spoke of a “Jewish conspiracy” and the “Muslim element” in the crisis over Kosovo. The church-owned TV station, Logos, on Friday launched an all-day campaign to raise money for the Serbs, while reigning first division soccer champions Anorthosis declared that its call for volunteers to join Serbian forces had received a good response.
But a decision last week by a small and relatively obscure Nicosia-based college to expel all its British and American students in retaliation for the Nato campaign was in a class of its own in the pro-Serbian fever.
“No one seems to have a clear idea of what is right and what is wrong in a conflict like that in Yugoslavia,” said the Western analyst, who did not want to be named.
But some Cypriots with moderate views on the conflict in Yugoslavia maintain that their stand is drowned out by the radicals and insist that the popular pro-Serbian reaction in Cyprus has been lukewarm.
“Those who speak loudest are often not the moderates, and they tend to be uncompromisingly pro-Serb without really telling us why,” said a senior Nicosia-based economist who did not want to be named.
“We cannot support the Serbs and the Kurds at the same time,” he said, alluding to the Kurdish violent campaign for autonomy in southeast Turkey and Serbia’s opposition to granting autonomy to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Others see the wave of pro-Serbian sentiments on the island as a means of venting frustration over the continuing occupation of Cyprus and also as an expression of admiration for the Serbs’ steadfastness in the face of vastly superior forces.
“There exists that extraordinary logic of a ‘glorious defeat’ or a ‘heroic withdrawal’ which Milosevic shares with the Greeks and may use to get out of his present troubles,” Peter Felstead, editor of Jane’s Intelligence Review, told The Sunday Mail in a telephone interview.
Significantly, the very same logic was used in the Serbian epic tradition that followed the 1389 defeat of the Serbs by the Ottoman Turks led by Sultan Murad I. The loss then of Kosovo, the heartland of Serbia, was branded a noble moral victory and the inspiration for subsequent resistance against the Turks.
