In 1974, the Turkish army invaded Cyprus, fearing that the Greek junta would attempt to annex the island. However, any excuse for Turkish forces to remain in Cyprus quickly evaporated when the Greek junta collapsed and Greece returned to democracy. However, Turkish forces stayed on the island as part of a long campaign of ethnic and sectarian cleansing. Today, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the proxy state created by Turkey, controls a third of the island.
Although the international community recognizes Greek Cypriots as victims of Turkish aggression – no country other than Turkey recognizes the sovereignty of Northern Cyprus – the island’s ethnic Greeks are not Turkey’s only victims. On the contrary, Turkey now appears to be waging a campaign of cultural genocide against the island’s traditional Turkish community.
Shortly after the Turkish invasion, Turkish settlers began arriving in northern Cyprus. The Turkish government, eager to increase the number of Turks and Muslims on the island, encouraged migration. Many were poor agricultural workers who moved into the houses abandoned by the Greek Cypriots.
Although there was no legitimate censusmany estimates indicate that Turkish settlers and their offspring constitute the half of the population of the area occupied by Turkey. However, speculation has grown in recent years that the settlers could outnumbered real Turkish Cypriots. Such an assumption is correct. Although the subject is very sensitive, sources say that the actual number of Turkish Cypriots today is around 90,000, while settlers now number between 160,000 and 200,000.
The reason for the acceleration of settlement, Article 49 Notwithstanding the Fourth Geneva Conventions, this is a deliberate decision by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to drown out Turkish Cypriots. Its methods differ and the scale is smaller, but what Turkey is currently doing in northern Cyprus is not much different in outcome from what the Han Chinese are doing in Xinjiang.
Erdoğan’s motivation is religious intolerance. While many diplomats and activists describe the fight for religious freedom as a struggle between religions, the main victims of religious bigotry are often those who are deemed insufficiently pious or orthodox within a religion. This is why, for example, Pakistani authorities are increasingly targeting their country’s Ahmadis, while Saudi authorities are harassing the kingdom’s Shia community in the Eastern Province and the Sufi community of Hejaz. Erdoğan is an acolyte of the Muslim Brotherhood. It has long targeted Turkish Alevis and other heterodox sects. His anger has also extended to his fellow Sunni Muslims if he judges them to be insufficiently conservative. Soldiers and diplomats recalled after the 2016 attacksReichstag Fire CoupFor example, they faced imprisonment until they found extremist Sunni mullahs to vouch for them.
This is where the problem lies for Turkish Cypriots. Historically, Turkish Cypriots are very moderate and tolerant. Although there were episodes of sectarian tensions after the island’s independence from British control in 1960, intermarriage between the country’s Muslim and Christian communities was not uncommon in the years and centuries before and even, to a lesser extent, afterwards. They drank alcohol and, at least until the 1974 invasion, socialized with their Greek neighbors. They were, in essence, Muslims in the manner of many Kemalists: they valued their cultural heritage and could marry in a mosque, ask the village imam to bless a new child, or fast the first days of Ramadan, but they were doing. do not let Islam dominate their lives. Many Turkish Cypriot women have also come out.
In essence, they are not much different from Greek Cypriots. The most recent settlers, however, care little about Cypriot culture. The settlers, both men and women, turn their backs on Cypriot traditions and treat native Turkish Cypriots no better than they would Christians. Rather than creating jobs and building schools for the Turkish-occupied zone, Erdoğan is not only building new mosques, but also funding radical preachers who would be more comfortable in Taliban Afghanistan than in bistros or the beaches of Cyprus.
The world should care. Even though Erdoğan has played the UN peacekeeping and monitoring mission like a fiddle, his actions make a political settlement less likely. Having few real ties to the country or culture, the settlers vote for the least tolerant and harshest politicians. Ersin Tatar, the current Turkish Cypriot president, is a good example. Although he claims democratic legitimacy, he has not succeeded in winning over the majority of true Turkish Cypriots. It is in fact an illegitimate puppet set up by settlers more loyal to Turkey than to Cyprus.
However, the lasting damage will not only be political and diplomatic, but also cultural. Erdoğan’s policies now subordinate and suffocate the population whose protection was the justification for the Turkish invasion in the first place. Simply put, Erdoğan poses a greater threat to Turkish Cypriots today than did the pre-1974 Greek irredentist junta.