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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Prisoners of history
By Hamza HendawiPalace College, a Cypriot private school, last week expelled all its American and British students in protest at the NATO air and missile strikes against Yugoslavia. "Those who are completely British or American" were immediately suspended, according to director Michalis Papachrysostomou, who added that students who had one Cypriot parent had not been thrown out. Some 50 students were thus expelled from the Nicosia school. When asked if the students' tuition fees would be refunded, Papachrysostomou replied, "Of course not." He explained that the money would be sent to support Yugoslavia's war effort, along with a matching amount donated by the school administration.
The school's reaction effectively encapsulates the Cypriot reaction to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Nicosia lawyer Maria Christodoulou says she and her colleagues have discussed the NATO military campaign against Yugoslavia almost every day since the first bomb was dropped on 24 March. But she adds that she 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 the matter further.
"Everyone seems to see a Turkish hand in the events in Kosovo," said the British-trained lawyer. "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 to be simply a question of who is an Orthodox Christian and who is not," she concluded.
The account given by Maria Christodoulou, who did not want her real name to be used, may be taken as typifying the reactions of a people who are themselves obsessed by centuries-old animosities and who remain loyal to religious and ethnic lines drawn as far back as the Middle Ages, just like the peoples of the Balkans. The apparent obsession with religion as the ultimate decider of who is friend, and who foe, effectively belies the image of a modern state standing on the threshold of membership of the European Union -- arguably the world's principal bastion of affluence, sophistication and tolerance. Instead, it places Cyprus on a par with those radical Islamist zealots throughout the world who are apt to detect the hand of "neo-crusaders" in every conflict in which Muslims are involved.
Yet many Cypriots argue that what may appear to outsiders to be an antiquated world view, is in fact still relevant, being the direct by-product of centuries of suffering at the hands of foreign armies for whom the island of Cyprus, precariously located near the hinterland of Islam, has always represented a soft target for raids and colonisation.
Turkey's 1974 invasion of the island and its continuing occupation of the northern third have not helped erode such sentiments. Indeed, they have rather served as catalyst in reviving a latent and deep-seated resentment of the United States, which when confronted with the Turkish fait accompli signally failed to show the kind of political resolve it has since demonstrated against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic.
"Cypriots behave like prisoners of history," theorises one 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," he added. "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 better illustrates the inner psyche of a country whose culture is still in thrall to events dating back as far as the early Muslim conquests 1,300 years ago and the military expansion of the Ottoman Turks in the later Middle Ages, than the reporting of the events in Yugoslavia by the local media and the fiery rhetoric used by the Cypriot Orthodox Church.
Blatantly biased in favour of the Serbs, local media coverage of the Yugoslav crisis has labelled the United States and its NATO partners as brutal aggressors, drawing parallels with the actions of Nazi Germany. US President Bill Clinton, the very man whom the Cyprus government is reportedly hoping may yet produce a peace plan that would allow the island to settle its differences once and for all, has been dubbed "Adolph Clinton" by one newspaper. Images shown on television and printed in newspapers of the humanitarian suffering caused by the NATO strikes have so far been almost entirely restricted to the harm caused to the Serbs, and have ignored altogether the more serious predicament faced by those ethnic Albanians who have been forced to flee their homes to neighbouring Macedonia, Albania or Montenegro.
The government of President Glafcos Clerides has, it is true, condemned Serbian actions in Kosovo and called for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. This stand was taken in an official statement that echoed a similar declaration by NATO member Greece, the island's closest foreign ally. However, according to several press reports, both statements were made under pressure from Washington.
The media in Cyprus is not alone in having fallen victim to the pro-Serbian hysteria that has gripped the island since the air raids began. The head of the Cypriot Orthodox Church, Archbishop Chrysostomos, fed the frenzy with a bizarre speech last week in which he spoke of a "Jewish conspiracy" and referred explicitly to the "Muslim element" in the crisis over Kosovo. On Friday, the church-owned TV station, Logos, 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 the Serbian armed forces had met with a good response.
How did things get this way? Part of the problem can perhaps be put down to lack of information, or even misinformation. "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 asked not to be named. "For instance, there has been a lot of criticism here of the Western campaign against Saddam Hussein, but there has not been a real effort to study the situation in Iraq carefully."
Meanwhile, Cypriots who have more moderate views on the conflict in Yugoslavia complain that their stand is being drowned out by the radicals, and insist that the popular pro-Serbian reaction in Cyprus has been lukewarm compared to those elsewhere. "Those who speak loudest are often not moderates, and they tend to be uncompromisingly pro-Serb without really telling us why," said a senior Nicosia-based economist who requested anonymity. "We cannot support the Serbs and the Kurds at the same time," he added, comparing Turkey's attempts to repress the long-running Kurdish campaign for autonomy in the southeast of the country with Serbia's opposition to the struggle of the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo.
Others see the wave of pro-Serbian sentiment sweeping over the island as above all a means of venting frustration at the continuing occupation of Cyprus. They also point out that Cypriots are naturally drawn to admire the Serbs' steadfastness in the face of superior forces, a role traditionally revered in Greek culture.
"There exists that extraordinary logic of a 'glorious defeat' or a 'heroic withdrawal', which Milosevic shares with the Greeks and which he may yet use to get out of his present troubles," Peter Felstead, editor of Jane's Intelligence Review, said in a telephone interview from London.
This is the very same logic that can be found in the Serbian epic tradition that grew out of their 1389 defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks led by Sultan Murad I. The catastrophe which led directly to the loss of Kosovo, the heartland of Serbia, was thus branded a noble moral victory, and became the inspiration for the Serbs' subsequent resistance to the Turks -- a resonance which is evidently not lost on the population of contemporary Cyprus.
