NICOSIA: The sun falls behind the jagged, mountain-peaked horizon, and the sky dissolves from a scarlet stained backdrop to soft, empurpled nighttime. In my native Texas, the lengthy battle between night and day paints a polychromatic scene of carnage across the sky; in Cyprus, the transition is so gradual that one scarcely has time to greet twilight.

There is little time to appreciate the awe-inspiring Mediterranean glow. It is spoiled by an unsightly picture in the near distance: superimposed on the southward facing mountainside are two enormous Turkish flags, one of which begins to flash brightly, reminiscent of a cheap cabaret on a Las Vegas boulevard. Both speechless in the face of this tacky, nauseating display of jingoism, my traveling comrade, Creede, and I are standing on Makarios Street in southern Nicosia.

Despite often being overlooked in the international discourse, the tiny Mediterranean island of Cyprus is a victim to invasion, partition, ethnic cleansing, elements of apartheid, and military occupation.

We are standing in the southern region of Nicosia, the world’s only divided capital (excluding the complex on-the-ground reality of Jerusalem, effectively under complete Israeli control). Immediately in front of us is the Green Line, or UN Buffer Zone that separates the ‘Greek side’ from the ‘Turkish side’. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus encompasses the northern 37% of the island and is home to a military occupation enforced by 40,000 troops from mainland Turkey.

“That’s simply rude,” says my friend Creede, staring at the flashing crescent and star, “a really rude gesture.” He is right, and neither of us is able to construct a more articulate assessment.

Cyprus gained its independence in 1960, after a long guerrilla struggle forced British colonial forces to withdrawal completely. Sectarian strife between an ethnically Greek majority and a Turkish minority (17% at the time of independence) was immediately exploited by four NATO member states–the British, Greece, Turkey, and the United States–who each had their own plans for the island, each irrespective of the Cypriots’ right to self-determination. Much of the ethnic tension was in fact a colonial hangover: for years the British colonial authorities had exercised their trademark strategy of divide and rule.

The Greek government—it was, at the time, controlled by a military junta that enjoyed full diplomatic and considerable financial support of the United States—armed and financed various right-wing Greek Cypriot paramilitary organizations which sought for enosis, or the unification of Greece and Cyprus.

In 1974, after several years of sponsoring contentious right-wing guerillas against the democratically elected government of President Archbishop Makarios III, the Greek junta backed a coup d’état. Makarios, forced to flee, was replaced by Nikos Sampson, an active member of the EOKA-B (the terrorist organization that waged war on those who opposed enosis, with a racialist ideology and its sights particularly focused on Turkish Cypriots).

The EOKA-B’s long history of Greek chauvinism and terrorism against Turkish Cypriots provided Turkey with a pretext to launch its own invasion, bizarrely also with the full support of the United States, at that time under the presidency of Richard Nixon. Just days later the military junta in Athens collapsed, which also led to the failure of the Cyprus coup, and Turkey was able to capture the northern 37% of the island. The United States, having situated itself to become the victor no matter the end result, remained silent as American arms were used in the Turkish invasion and ethnic cleansing.

Although the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus made a unilateral claim to independence in 1983, till this day it is recognized by Turkey alone. Indeed, it effectively remains a Turkish puppet state, a hundred percent economically and politically dependent on the mainland government. Ethnic Greeks were gradually but almost completely expelled from northern Cyprus, and over a thousand souls remain unaccounted for.

The United Nations, having ruled consistently against the Turkish occupation, recognizes the southern-based Republic of Cyprus as the sole international representative of the entire island.

Greek history was erased from the land and the colonization of northern Cyprus immediately ensued: busts of Kemal Attaturk were erected in quantities more vast per square kilometer than in Istanbul, cities and villages were renamed, cathedrals were converted to mosques, and tens of thousands of settlers were shipped in from mainland Turkey.

Today in northern Cyprus, the only tangible trace of Greek history left takes the form of propaganda museums dedicated to depicting the alleged barbarism of the Greeks, all of whom are denounced as terrorists. Astoundingly, Anatolian settlers outnumber native Turkish Cypriots almost 2:1.

South of the partition line, though there is a great disdain for Turkey, not a person you will encounter sees the present partition as an acceptable status quo, and everyone will tell you that their former Turkish Cypriot neighbors are also victims of Turkey’s imperial project.

One is forced to ask, why there is an utter absence of noteworthy international campaigns to reunite the divided island; to oppose the Turkish military occupation, end the proto-Apartheid, and return the refugees who fell victim to the ‘population exchange’ (the most pervasive euphemism for ethnic cleansing in the English language).

Such an immense amount of Western activism focuses on the rights of the Palestinians, for instance. Cyprus is just a half hour flight from the Gaza Strip. The UN Human Rights Council estimates that today’s total of Cypriot refugees includes 200,000 Greeks and 65,000 Turks.

In no way is the analogy a perfect fit, but Turkey has enacted a policy of settler colonialism that shares the broad contours of Israeli designs in the occupied Palestinian territories. Unlike the messianic ideology that has driven nearly nine percent of the total population to participate in the ongoing colonization of the West Bank, the strategic reasons for the Turkish occupation do not display religious chauvinism so much as a poisonous display of nationalism. But all military occupations, it must be remembered, depend on historical denials and suffocating forms of segregation and exclusionism.

Standing in the Selimiye Mosque, once the Saint Sophia Cathedral, there are no adequate words to describe one’s discontent. ‘Outrage’ does not seem to do the job, and ‘disgust’ falls far short. “I want to throw up,” says Creede, who admits that, although he is an unapologetic atheist, he has a soft spot for cathedrals.

The whole interior of the mosque feels temporary: Turkish flags line the walls, a cheap carpet has been unrolled atop the floor, a single coat of paint has been hastily slathered on the walls. Behind the pale, translucent imitation of a paint job, I can still see the opaque scenes of the Christian imagery that once covered the walls and ceiling of the cathedral.

I wonder: can this be any less revolting than the erasure of Palestinian, Kurdish, or Native American histories? Certainly not.

A trip to Famagusta is in no way consoling. The city, also divided, is home to an actual ghost town. An entire beachfront Greek neighborhood was ethnically cleansed by Turkish soldiers and surrounded by fencing and razor wire. It is now a Turkish military zone, and no one can enter, no questions about it may be asked, no pictures are to be taken. Turkey would rather you did not see these things.

Why are there no boycott, divestment, and sanctions movements dedicated to ending the Turkish military occupation of 37 percent of an EU member state (or, in another vein, dedicated to the equality of the Kurdish minority in mainland Turkey)? Why don’t international activists demonstrate for Cypriot refugees? The conditions of Greek Cypriots pale in comparison to Palestinians or Kurds, but surely ethnic cleansing and heavy-handed segregation are crimes in any context.

One worries that there is an element of covert racism embedded in the failure to stand with Cypriots: there is little to eroticize in the ‘European’ (Greek) victim. Or perhaps Cypriots, who have adopted the diplomatic road to reunification, offer little to the contemporary radical narrowly, indeed naively, preoccupied with the concept of armed struggle. In any case, a visit to Cyprus serves as a sobering reminder of why principles must always precede causes.

BM

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