-The Cyprus problem used to be about people. Today, it's about power.
The film was black and white. Refugee camps. Buses packed with prisoners. Bodies in the rubble of a hotel. Images of horror, concepts that had never existed before, now forcing their way violently into the minds of an entire generation. I was ten years old, then.
That vast black cloud — the one that settled on our souls like a boulder — could only be shifted one way. Things had to go back to how they were! The foreigners had to leave. People had to return to their homes. And the missing — they must be somewhere, hidden away — had to be found. A child's mind can only solve simple equations. And since nobody thought to explain that this particular equation would never be simple — that it was, in fact, loaded with layers of complexity we couldn't begin to imagine — we carried that same childlike certainty into adolescence, and beyond.
Then, slowly, the film began to acquire colour. Washed out at first, the light falling only on one half of the homeland. The other half stayed dark. The lens couldn't reach it. The island felt like something otherworldly — day on one side, night on the other. That was when we began to understand: things were not going back to how they were. But at least — at the very least — as many people as possible could return to their homes, as many soldiers as possible could board the ships and leave, and as few settlers as possible could embed themselves in what we'd come to call the new reality.
The colours turned vivid for one brief moment. When the checkpoints opened. And alongside the rush of human longing to finally put an end to this strange, imposed existence, something important was revealed. The other half of the island really had been living in the dark. It was as though time had stopped in that summer of '74. And oddly, strangely, that made things a little easier. People could return to their homes in areas that would be handed back. They could even return to areas that would remain under Turkish Cypriot administration — because the vast majority of properties had been left largely untouched. The settlers could be absorbed as a small minority into the new arrangement. The soldiers could be consolidated into one single base.
Some people didn't like those vivid colours. So they painted over them. Black again. They dragged us back to the child's equation — “things must go back to how they were” — and somehow managed to convince us that, in that moment, it was entirely within reach.
For many years, the Cyprus problem film — black and white or colour — contained real images. It had people, emotions, beloved places, memories and stories. Those black-and-white images of the camps could have become colour footage of us coming home to our villages. Those buses of prisoners could have become images of return. But “the ship has sailed”...
Now, well into my sixties, the film of the Cyprus problem barely matters anymore. Either way, wherever you point the camera, what you'll capture is skyscrapers, sprawling tourist complexes and residential developments, and well-dressed men and women fighting tooth and nail to hold onto whatever slice of power they've carved out for themselves. When was the last time you heard about refugees — and it wasn't about benefit entitlements? When was the last time properties came up in conversation — and it wasn't in the context of a mortgage loan? When was the last time anyone mentioned occupied villages and towns — and it wasn't about some new Israeli-Russian businessmen’s tourist development?
The Cyprus problem used to be about people. Today, it's about power.
This article was first published on 22.02.2025
