When we speak of the Cyprus Left, we must first clarify what we mean by this. Greek Cypriot writer Kyriacos Djambazis, in his book "Disclosure of a Myth", emphasizes that the nationalist leadership of the Greek Cypriot community does not include Turkish Cypriots in the definition of "Cypriot people" with an "expansionist" understanding. In this case, since the Cypriot people will consist only of the majority Greek community living on the island, the exclusion of the Turkish Cypriot community, which does not comply with their demands for union with Greece, becomes a necessity in terms of political integrity.
AKEL AND EXCLUSION OF MINORITIES
Djambazis writes that the Communist Party of Cyprus (KKP), which was
founded in 1926 and developed a policy against the nationalists' goal of
Enosis, has set the island's full independence as its main goal and argues that
this can only be achieved through the joint struggle of the two communities
(Lefkoşa 2013, p.55).
On the other hand, the leadership of AKEL, which replaced the KKP and
defined itself as the "Progressive Party of the Cypriot Workers",
adopted the definition of "Cypriot people = Greek Cypriot community",
like the nationalist Greek Cypriot leadership, and excluded from the common
political struggle foremost the Turkish Cypriot community, as well as other
religious groups like the Maronites, Armenians, Latins.
Djambazis, who also gives us information about the existence and views
of the members who criticize AKEL's policy of Enosis and its mistakes in its
approach to Turkish Cypriots, referred to an article titled "AKEL and the
Turkish Cypriots", written by Pavlakis Georgiou, a member of the AKEL
Politburo and responsible for the Turkish Cypriot community. In that article
titled "Minorities" (No: 12, 1954, pp. 294-297), Pavlakis Georgiou
stated:
“AKEL both did not educate the Greek people about the difficulties of
the struggle and underestimated the role of minorities. For this reason, it has
never addressed minorities, never enlightened them or called them to
struggle... Moreover, the ignoring or belittling of the Turkish minority by our
progressive party is nothing but an obvious expression of this chauvinism.”
(p.31)
In his footnote to this quote, Djambazis makes the following assessment:
“The contempt mentioned in the quote is limited to the non-use of the
Turkish language in workers' meetings and party documents. Of course, while
linguistic communication is a major factor, it is not the only factor. The
reaction of the Turkish Cypriot workers was related to the Enosis policy
supported by AKEL. AKEL management interpreted this as not being able to
explain their theses because of language and refused to examine the underlying
causes.” (p.31)
At the meetings held by the "Left and the Cyprus Problem"
group, I also discussed these issues in my papers titled "Language Problem
in the Common Class Struggle in Cyprus" (1924-1954) in 2018 and "The
Enosis Problem of the Greek Cypriots and Political Cooperation with the Turkish
Cypriots (1902)" in 2020.
FROM ENOSIS TO FEDERATION
At a press conference with Turkish Cypriot journalists in 1989, AKEL
Secretary General Dimitris Christofias answered a question directed to him
regarding the issue of enosis as follows:
“Our current program was approved in 1962 and still hasn't changed. At
that time the goal was complete independence. In the conditions of those days,
the Turks were scattered and there were no conditions for federation. After
1974, conditions were created for two separate regions and federation. In our
opinion, Turks should live in the North, Greeks should live in the South, and
Turks should be in the majority in the North. All these views are new and
naturally unpredictable in the conditions of 1962. Our program needs to be
changed. That program is not valid today. The valid ones are the party
decisions, taken after 1974. What is on the agenda now is federation, and
enosis and partition must be buried forever. We are divorced from Enosis,
enosis is now buried.” (Halkın Sesi, 19-23 April 1989)
Speaking at an event, organized by AKEL on the evening of October 13,
2000, Party Secretary General Dimitris Christofias said that Cyprus gained its
independence after many years and tough struggles, that the majority of the
people took part in this struggle, but there were some mistakes on the domestic
front and the Turkish Cypriot factor was not given the necessary attention.
(Kıbrıs newspaper, 16 October 2000).
This important statement of Christofias about the policy of AKEL, the
biggest party of the Greek Cypriot left, which excludes the Turkish Cypriot
community, reminded me of an article published in the newspaper
"Demokratis" in 1952 and I wrote under the pseudonym "Yusuf Aydın",
an article titled “AKEL and the Turkish Cypriot Factor”, in which I felt the
need to emphasize this important point once again:
“But unfortunately, AKEL itself, which prides itself on being the party
of the Cypriot working class, still does not pay due attention to the Turkish
Cypriot factor.” (Kıbrıs’ta Sosyalist Gerçek, No:58, November-December 2000)
This historical article, which puts its finger on this burning issue and
asks for due attention to the issue half a century ago, was taken from AKEL's
publication "Demokratis" and it was translated into Turkish and was
published in the newspaper Halkın Sesi, dated March 19, 1952 under the title
“The Liberation Struggle of the People of Cyprus. (Written by G.Ioannidi,
K.Koliyannis, P.Rusu, Translated by K. Muhtaroğlu) In this article titled
“=Turkish Minority=", among other things, it was said:
“AKEL should explain to the Turkish minority in concise and sensitive
words that the independent administration to be provided in case of the
annexation with Greece will provide the Turkish Cypriots with ample autonomy,
national, linguistic, political, religious and other development. AKEL will not
be the leader party of the struggle of the Cypriot people unless it succeeds in
influencing and winning over the Turkish minority workers in the political
arena and as an organization.”
The justification of these warnings, which appeared in Demokratis in
March 1952, was accepted at that time, as the PEO established a separate
Turkish Office for Turkish Cypriot members in November 1952. The news that AKEL
also established a separate Turkish Bureau appeared in the Turkish Cypriot
press in June 1954. The first statement signed by "AKEL Turkish Branch
Office", which was distributed to the public, was published in full text
in the newspaper Halkın Sesi, dated October 20, 1954. (A.An, Transition from
Class Unionism to Ethnic Unionism and Workers' Opposition among Turkish
Cypriots, Nicosia, 2005, pp.208-212)
In his book, Djambazis writes the following regarding the attitude of
Turkish members on the issue of Enosis defended by AKEL: "Unfortunately,
there is no written document showing how the AKEL administration informed the
Turkish party members, or even if they did, how these members reacted."
(p.25)
I also wanted to cover the important and sensitive issue of AKEL's
Enosis policy and Turkish Cypriots in my book titled “The First Pioneers of Our
Working Class - Turkish Cypriots in the Labour Movement Until 1958” (Khora
Publishing, Nicosia, January 2011), but only what I could obtain. I quoted two
anecdotes. (p.141)
FEDERAL STATE
The fascist Greek coup in the summer of 1974 and the subsequent
partition of the island by Turkey forced the Greek Cypriot leadership,
including AKEL, to accept the federation model. On what grounds was AKEL now
accepting this model, which contradicted the USSR's view that "a form of
federal state can also be considered" in 1965?
As the author of these lines, I had been wanting to ask the AKEL
leadership, whom I sympathize with, some questions that have plagued my mind
since I started to look at the world from the perspective of the working class.
As a matter of fact, in a letter I forwarded to AKEL on December 20, 1977, I
requested the explanation of the reasons for the adoption of the federal
solution, which was strongly opposed by the party before, and asked the
following questions:
“Wouldn't it be helpful to hold a conference on theoretical and
organizational issues regarding Turkish Cypriots before the 14th General
Assembly of AKEL? What will be the future of ethno-political integration in
Cyprus?”
Unfortunately, this proposal was not even responded to and the “approach
to Turkish Cypriots and the nationality problem” continued to prevent the two
communities' relations from improving as a bleeding wound.
JOINT FRONT OF TURKISH CYPRIOTS AND GREEKS
The following decision, taken at the AKEL Central Committee Plenum
Meeting on February 24, 1989, is still relevant today:
“Another prerequisite for the victory of our struggle and the liberation
of Cyprus is the joint front of the Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots.
According to AKEL, the idea of establishing a joint struggle front is maturing
today. The necessity of a common struggle on the Greek Cypriot side is accepted
by the wider public. (...) AKEL, which has a wide prestige in the Greek Cypriot
community and also in the Turkish community, will take the initiative to bring
the idea of rapprochement and establishing a common front into practice. This
task is not easy at all. There are many issues that need to be discussed and
clarified in order to reach the desired level of consensus with our Turkish
Cypriot citizens.”
In a series of articles titled “What AKEL's 80th Anniversary Theses
Reflect” that I wrote in May 2005, I stated the following:
“On April 23, 2003, after the Turkish Cypriot side allowed mutual free
crossings to both sides of the green line, albeit limited, we did not witness
new expansions in AKEL's rapprochement policy. Interestingly, the case filed by
Ahmet An, the Turkish Cypriot Coordinator of the Contact Group for an
Independent and Federal Cyprus, against Turkey, the sovereign power in the
north of Cyprus, was won in the European Court of Human Rights on February 20,
2003, after a waiting period of 12 years. The main theme of the case was the
inhibition of “freedom of association”.
In the first month after the attainment of this freedom, a negative
response was given to the question “When will the Turkish Bureau open, which
AKEL closed in 1974 on the grounds that contacts were no longer possible”, by
the Secretary General of AKEL Dimitris Christofias. His explanation was on the
grounds of “safety of comrades”. It was a sign of how difficult the struggle
that had to be fought was going to be. Moreover, it is known that nearly 30
letters I sent to the party between December 2, 1974 and November 4, 2003,
requesting opinions on theoretical and organizational problems related to
Turkish Cypriots, were left unanswered.
Another reason we were told during our meetings with other AKEL
supporters was as follows: “Turkish Cypriot progressive parties are against
AKEL establishing a separate Turkish branch. It is sufficient to support the
progressive parties that still exist in the north.”
However, as far as we know, this support has been maintained for years
in the form of purchasing tickets from the solidarity lottery of the CTP held
every year. Unfortunately, those who "own without any criticism" of
the party policy also achieve a zero-to-none result due to the struggles to
"not be a mug stuck in AKEL's tail"! In other words, the
"agents" of once have just turned into a "bad copy"!
Since the gates were opened, AKEL has yet to hold any political meeting
for Turkish Cypriots living in north of the division line. Another disadvantage
is that the joint commissions created together with the CTP do not work,
regardless of the reason. Especially during the voting of the Annan Plan,
AKEL's saying "no for a strong yes" led to the loss of sympathy for
AKEL in the Turkish Cypriot community. Despite the fact that the party has
adopted the federal solution, it has emerged that it has not sufficiently
enlightened both its members and the Greek Cypriot community in general on what
the federal state is and what it is not, and on the sharing of power. (…)
NO UNITY TO FIGHT CYPRUS TURKISH LEFTISTS
AKEL preferred to stay away from Turkish Cypriots, both after 1968, when
the youth of higher education was closely interested in leftist ideology, and
under the extraordinary conditions created by the coup and occupation in 1974,
just at a time when a guiding Turkish Office was needed.
Especially, AKEL made a big mistake by closing the Turkish Bureau, and
under the new conditions, it caused the Turkish Cypriot workers to be deprived
of a leadership that would enable them to equip themselves with an
internationalist policy against the separatist policies of the nationalist
Turkish Cypriot leadership. It is an important shortcoming that this vital
mistake made in organizing is not mentioned in the 80th year theses.” (These
critical articles were published in Afrika newspaper between 15-22 May 2005.)
IMPERIALISM DOES NOT WANT THE
UNITY OF THE CYPRUS LEFT
In the 1990 Edition "Yearbook
of International Communist Affairs", which is published every year in the
USA, there is the following assessment of the Turkish Cypriot left:
"If the north and south of
Cyprus were to reunite in a "Federal Republic" one day, it can be
predicted that the combined voting power of the left-wing parties in both
communities could secure a majority of the votes in a Presidential election.
This fear of American
imperialism, first expressed in the 1989 Yearbook and more clearly formulated a
year later, explains why the United States pursued a two-state confederal
solution based on partition of the island. It also reveals the reason for the
"hostility against the Greeks" and "not having contact between
the communities" policy of the Turkish Cypriot leadership, which has been
a collaborator of British and American imperialism. (A.An, The U.S. View of the
Turkish Cypriot Left, Sosyalist Gözlem, October 1993, Issue:5)
In the 1991 Yearbook, the
following evaluation is made:
“Although AKEL is not banned
within the Turkish Cypriot community, the party has chosen not to be active in
the north due to the difficulty of establishing contact via the “green line”.
There are three left-wing parties
among Turkish Cypriots: CTP, TKP and YKP. All three left-wing parties advocate
a federal solution to the Cyprus problem and believe that intercommunal
rapprochement is a tool in achieving this. According to the CTP leader, “all
three left-wing parties are unique in their own right, and none of them copy
any party in the south of Cyprus or anywhere else in the world.” (Learned from
personal communication between Özker Özgür and writer Thomas W. Adams on 6
November 1990.)”
LEFT PARTIES OF TURKISH CYPRIOTS
When the island was
partitioned after the events in July 1974, Turkish Cypriots gathered in the north
and formed various political parties, unions and associations. The struggles of
those who are mentioned on the left are known for their successes and mistakes.
The parties that represent today the Turkish Cypriot left politically are as
follows:
The Republican
Turkish Party (CTP), which was founded at the end of 1970 and defended a left
social democratic line for many years, has adopted a liberal policy today. The
old left line of the CTP has to some extent been taken over by the New Cyprus
Party -YKP. YKP was founded in 1989 by the left wing that broke away from the
Communal Liberation Party-TKP. Those who left the CTP together with Özker Özgür
formed the Patriotic Unity Movement (YBH) in 1998 by merging with the YKP, but
later left and founded the United Cyprus Party (BKP) in 2002. The Right Social
Democrat, Communal Democracy Party-TDP- is the continuation of the TKP, which
was founded in 1976, and it cannot develop because the party cannot reproduce
itself.
Some of the members
and supporters of these four political parties are the projections of those
views in the unions of workers, teachers and other civil servants. Other
elements of the Turkish Cypriot left, who are independent of these structures
and have a political view, can occasionally convey their thoughts in certain
publications or in their own magazines or newspapers, or they maintain their
existence in the form of certain narrow friend groups. The Cyprus Socialist
Party, which was founded by the "Socialist Reality in Cyprus" magazine
in 2002, and the Independence Path established in 2018 by the "Baraka
Cultural Association" can be given as examples.
It is noteworthy
that, with a few exceptions, all these organizations did not adopted the
accumulated experience of the Turkish Cypriot left, which were silenced by the
bloody terror and oppression applied by the TMT in 1958. These parties, which
do not base their current policies on the principles that the old left
tradition defended with the mistakes and merits, cannot clearly show the
Turkish Cypriot community the way out of the political, economic, social and
cultural impasse they are in, and in the final analysis, they leave the people
helpless and melt away.
Almost all of the
political parties in the Greek Cypriot part are against the partition of the
island and demand that the Cyprus problem be resolved with a bi-communal,
bi-zonal federal state structure and an end to the fait accompli that has been
imposed on the island for 49 years by military force. Let us remind you that
the candidate of AKEL, the largest organized party of the Greek Cypriot left,
won 48% of the votes in the last presidential elections.
OBSTACLES TODAY
The Turkish and Greek
Cypriot left, which should join forces to re-organize the Republic of Cyprus
under a federal roof and to re-establish friendship and cooperation between the
Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, the two main ethnic-national communities
living on our island, against the partitionist and separatist policies of the
Turkish Cypriot leadership, should immediately make a new assessment of the
situation. In order to overcome the difficulties on the way to an independent
and federal Republic of Cyprus, it has become an inevitable necessity to get
rid of fake leftists and reorganize the struggle.
Unfortunately, we are
far from the goal of a unified federal state, although advocates of a federal
solution make up 48% of voters on both sides. Akinci and Mavrogiannis, the
federalist presidential candidates on both sides, resigned from politics after
failing to win the elections. Already after the collapse of the inter-communal
negotiations in Crans Montana, the Turkish Cypriot side abandoned the UN parameters
based on a federal solution and began to advocate the policy of “two separate
states”.
But now is the time
to form an All-Cyprus Federalists Front to fight for a united Cyprus whose
federal constitution is at the signing stage. In this struggle, it is
inevitable that those who seem to be in favour of a federal solution but
support the confederal solution or the final partition will be exposed. What we
mean here is the so-called federalist policy of the CTP. CTP Chairman Tufan
Erhürman, who says he is a "Federalist", did not continue the
struggle for a solution in this direction and left the scene to the
separatists.
Same Erhürman spoke
at a meeting of the United Cyprus - Bi-communal Peace Initiative, held with the
leaders of CTP, TDP, DISI and AKEL on February 11, 2019 under the title "Bi-communal
Discussion Panel" in the buffer zone in Nicosia against the speech of KTOEÖS
President Selma Eylem, who stated that “The north of the country turned today into
the backyard of the Republic of Turkey”, Erhürman reacted by saying that “even
if I were not the Prime Minister of the TRNC, I would reject her statement completely”
and stating that he did not agree with what was said. This was the clearest
proof of the CTP's policy of not blaming the occupying country.
In addition, Erhürman
took the floor after the speech of POGO Women's Movement General Secretary
Skevi Koukouma, who attended the 10th Ordinary Congress of the CTP Women's
Organization on May 28, 2022 and repeated again: "I am under the obligation
and responsibility to openly state that we, as CTP, do not accept some of the
terms used in her speech here, and that we reject the terminology of the
occupied area."
The most important factor underlying the election
failure of the supporters of the federal solution, besides the interventions of
the occupying power, is the use of the "citizen-made" settler population
transferred here as a vote depot in the race for seats in the Parliament.
The day-to-day criticisms of the government by hiding
the occupier and the invader serve no purpose other than "we cooperate
better". The solution forces that are in favour of the federal Cyprus
should gather and come together and seek ways to meet with the federalists in
the Greek Cypriot side as soon as possible on a COMMON POLITICAL platform! It
is not enough to just publish joint statements, we must make our voices heard
in the international community!
(This is the English
translation of the original Turkish text of the paper, presented at the 5th
Annual Conference of the “Left and Cyprus Problem”, held on 14 October 2023 at
the “Home for Cooperation” in the buffer zone in Nicosia, where the subject was
the “Common Action by the Cypriot Left”. Because of time constraint, only the text
of the last two subtitles was read.)
