Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
I go from one funeral to the other, all funerals of "missing persons", "missing" Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots…
"Missing" from 1963-64 and 1974…
It is quite significant and interesting that no one is noticing the fact that we are still trying to clean up the mess that has been left over to us and that we carry the burden of half a century on our shoulders…
We carry this burden on our conscience, in our hearts, in our souls…
We carry it and we live in the past and we continue to live in the past since the past has not been cleaned up yet…
And there are "forces" both internal and external on this island who want to keep us where we are – that is, in the past… They don't want us to move together for a future… We live lives for people long gone, we live with memories, we cry for our pain, we think we are the only victims on this land and we are frozen in the deep freeze of history, paralysed and can't even conceptualize a future for all the inhabitants of this land…
Our efforts are not sufficient to compete with the "big politics" of the "mainstream" who are ignoring reconciliation, who are ignoring building an infrastructure for mutual understanding, who are ignoring the fact that we need cooperation on this land, not confrontation…
Most of the time, I feel sad and upset since it's like a race we are losing as Cypriots because we refuse to see the evident: We need clear minded, clean, fresh ideas and crystal clear thinking minds to be able to be visible on this land and to show the real picture instead of those figures resorting to the safe propaganda mechanism that would bring in "votes" or "interests"… Not interests as a whole for this island but interests for themselves, personal interests, interests for their families or their villagers or their neighbours…
A Christmas tree is decorated by the Nicosia Municipality and some relatives of "missing persons" are invited to hang the photos of their "missing" on the tree…
It is a "Greek Cypriot event" and no one bothers to think of all the Turkish Cypriot "missing persons" and even put a symbolic photo of a single Turkish Cypriot "missing" person on that tree…
Perhaps they are afraid of the "backlash" or they don't want to upset the "balances"? Or perhaps it does not even cross their mind to do such a thing which I suspect is the main reason… We are not used to thinking together but only of our "own" community – we do not introduce the "bicommunality" or "multi-culturalism" of our communities and just stick with the same old thing… Which is more safe and more easy… Which does not endanger us… It does not make us lose anything… It's a "perfect sanctuary" and it is what is called the "status quo" on this land. The "status quo" continues but it does not only continue but gets more and more complicated since nothing stays as it is – internal and external conditions affect the "status quo" as it gets more and more consolidated as decades long propaganda, stereotypes, myths, lies, mountains of lies build on top of each other and efforts at dismantling these illusions created by "forces" that want to keep things "as they are" is an endless struggle between "evil" and "goodness"…
At the funerals or in activities about "missing persons" people come and speak to me… They ask me why their "missing" loved one is not found yet and complain about the decades' long wait – some have been waiting for 44 years, some have been waiting for 55 years… All because of this pretence of doing stuff but not actually doing anything. Keeping the status quo… Feeling "safe" in their own little sanctuaries while throwing away the prospect of a whole future of a whole island…
People don't speak, they keep silent. Some people speak… Their words are muffled… Some words we catch and we try to put up so everyone can see but generally such words fall on deaf ears…
We can only ask a few questions and try to think of the answers….
"Who wants us to get stuck in the past?"
"Who wants the status quo to continue?"
"Who has an interest in keeping things as they are?"
One of the most dramatic social media groups I am part of is a group of people from Famagusta (Varosha)…
There, I can see how some people want to keep things as they are while others struggle to put some sense into them and urge them on for something better for Famagusta…
Sometimes I feel like shouting in the group:
"Vreeeeee friends! They want to keep you in the past! They want you to cry forever for your lost Varosha! They don't want you to take action or move anywhere – they want to keep you where you are, as refugees so that they can play with your hopes of getting back Varosha, blaming this or that for not getting it back but keeping you as a pawn in the game to use you! Vreeeee friends! Look around and see for yourselves that they want to keep you locked up in a freezer forever with your dreams of your Ghost Town Varosha!"
You think there is any difference in the Turkish Cypriot community landscape? Of course not… Una Fatsa una rasta as they say – same old story in different forms…
In the social media, the words of the son of a "missing" Turkish Cypriot Mehmet Raif who had "disappeared" on the 21st of December 1963 from his workplace CYTA – he was in the night shift that night – is like an endless cry:
"Why, in such a small, tiny island, you cannot find our missing persons? It has been exactly 55 years since my father Mehmet Raif went to CYTA where he worked. While working there, all of a sudden he "disappeared"… Today the 21st of December is the beginning of those days, 21st of December 1963…
There hasn't been any place where we haven't asked, we haven't investigated… Who took care of what we said? Why can't you find our missing persons in such a tiny island? Perhaps it's because you want to make politics and use those missing persons in your politics?
First of all, I want to say that no one should emigrate outside our island… Something must be done so no one would leave…
If I speak about our family in 1969 my elder brother, in 1971 myself, in 1973 my mother and my younger brother had to emigrate to Australia from our island.
The reason? My father became a martyr in 1963 – to tell you the truth, he went to work one day at CYTA and he never came back… They were giving us his wage and we had rented a house in the area called Marmara in Nicosia and then for a reason we do not know, they cut half the wages they were giving to my mother. As a result of this, we had to move from the house we were renting. We found a garage next to a mandra and we turned it into a house since this was cheaper. We didn't mind. We created three rooms out of a garage – in the bedroom four person, the kitchen and toilet… Due to the necessities I had to become a Turkish Cypriot soldier at the age of 16 in order to get 8 Cypriot Pounds a month. Then I left school since I was going to go to Australia so that I would make 15 Cypriot Pounds a month… We emigrated all the way to the other end of the world… Due to the greediness of these administrations…
I had two sons while I was abroad. Since I love our CYPRUS so much, I came back with my family. My kids went to school, they went to university, they did their military service, they sat in exams and passed and applied for jobs. Both of them were not given jobs. They are both very fluent in English and Turkish but since we did not go and beg some people for jobs, they were not given a job. For the past 20 years, they both work at bet offices. I am not against any kind of job but others who did not deserve were given jobs in the administration but not my sons…"
In the end it is us, the ordinary people who suffer from this partition and this "being locked in the freezer of the past"…
It is people like Raif who suffered all his life because his father was "missing", they lost their house, they lost their country, he had to quit school and he had to quit Cyprus so that his family would survive…
It is people like the refugees from Varosha or from Lyssi or from Paphos who suffered… Or from Limassol…
People losing homes, loved ones, in endless pain and suffering…
It is not the pain of "Turkish Cypriots" or "Greek Cypriots" – it is our common pain all that has happened in the last half century – we all lost. We lost our sons, our fathers, our mothers, our sisters and brothers… We lost our land, our homes, our photographs… We lost everything, having to flee from our homes and live in tents or makeshift garages turned into houses over one night… We lost hopes for a better country… And this is where they want to keep us…
Unless we use our mind and think and question, "Who are making benefits out of all this?"
Definitely not the ordinary Turkish Cypriots or ordinary Greek Cypriots…
So what keeps us from trying to understand that we all lost and that the only way to gain our future is if we come together and think together and act together, refusing to stay in the past and victimise only ourselves and cry for only our own pain…
I go from one funeral to the next… I help bury Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot "missing persons" whom my readers helped to find…
Believe me, their graves are exactly the same: One and a half meters depth, maybe 90 centimetres most the width…
That's the only land we are allocated as we leave this earth and we cannot take anything with us…
I look into these graves and I see the stupidity and absurdity of all these and also see how fragile life is on this land – at any moment, with the click of the fingers of some "forces" anything can blow up out of proportions – they can "create" and "provoke" anything they like on this land, unless we start thinking and using our brains and questioning everything that has happened in the past half century on this island.
Let us become wiser and think more instead of crying only for ourselves…
25.12.2018
Photo: Mehmet Raif at work at CYTA from where he disappeared in December 1963...
(*) Article published in Greek in the POLITIS newspaper on the 13th of January 2019, Sunday. Two similar articles were published in Turkish in the YENİDÜZEN newspaper on my pages entitled "Cyprus: The Untold Stories" on the 25th of December 2018 and on the 2nd of January 2019 and here are the links:
http://www.yeniduzen.com/bu-minnacik-adada-bu-kayiplarimizi-niye-bulmazsiniz-13405yy.htm
http://www.yeniduzen.com/bir-kayip-cenazesinden-oteki-kayip-cenazesine-giderken-13435yy.htm
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