Occupation takes decades and starts with the mind

On 7 June  and 12 June, 1958 shots were heard in the villages of Kioneli, Cyprus. The ended the lives of 12 young men but started the politics of illegal occupation 16 years before idyllic holiday island of Cyprus became Europe's only apartheid state.

No one imagines it's possible. It feels like something no one, not a domestic politician nor international justice, could allow. But we've seen it happen time and time again.

Palestinians are live-streaming their holocaust so the history books could not allow for any ambiguity or misrepresentation. Since 7 October 2023, the use of disproportional force, false imprisonment and brutal sieges on an already over-populated and under-resourced open concentration camp has shone a light on the politics of occupation.

It did not start on 7 October, it started when Zionist pioneers started their plant ideas of a Jewish nation for Jewish people. It was accelerated after World War II when Hitler's race laws and Nazi objectives to exterminate European Jews added fuel to the argument. Israel was born in 1948 but not out of the ashes of Auschwitz or Dachau but in a country that had nothing to do with the Shoah, Palestine.

Similarly, in 1950, Professor Nihat Erim, member of the National Assembly of Türkiye representing Kemalist party, Republican People's Party (RPP) at the time, conjured a plan to split Cyprus along the 35th parallel, ethnically cleansing Greek-speaking Cypriots from Turkish-speaking Cypriots to live on apartheid island in two separate feudal states. 

This plan developed as the Turkish-speaking immigrants (or Cypriots Turkified by the Ottomans during their rule of the island from 1571 to 1878) minority, who were 18% of the population, 

Erim ironically was allowed at negotiations on Cyprus in London in 1956. The same year, he became the Turkish member of the European Commission on Human Rights. 

A cardholding Turkish nationalist was allowed to lead the Turkish committee on the new Cypriot constitution in 1959, following Zurich and London Agreements. And he continued legally advising the Turkish committees at further negotiations on Cyprus at the United Nations.

To add fuel to fire of division, the British administering the island used Turkish-speaking Cypriots as auxiliary police during the Cyprus Emergency, as unrest grew among the Greek-speaking majority demanding independence.

The British felt the Greeks could not be trusted to work with them so use their tried and tested methods to separate people with religious differences, turning neighbours into enemies. As they did in India, Ireland and Palestine.

They were either unaware or uncaring about the fact terrorist militants groups wanting partition and operating in civilian populations since the 1940s, were growing in numbers and arms. They had already forced Turkish speaking Cypriots from their homes in Paphos at gunpoint into ghettos, starting division, aggression and mistrust between the communities. 

It is unknown if they were aware of the existence of the small terrorist factions within Turkish-speaking communities who wanted their own state from 1940s.

By the time of the Cyprus Emergency and the fight for sovereignty, these terror calls embedded within civilian populations numbers 20,000 men, far outnumbering the freedom fighting faction of EOKA, who were battling the British, turning Ledra Street into Murder Mile.

Turkish propaganda will lament that EOKA's objective was to wipe out all Turks. As with Israel's similar rhetoric about Hamas, there is no evidence of this and was never part of the manifesto. Not even in the over-politicised Akritas Plan which simply stated that Turkish Cypriots would be dealt with SHOULD they object to enosis (unification) with Greece.

All this micro-actions, seemingly meaningless in their importance, became grenades for the occupation.

Actions that each country undertakes to squash talk of insurgency and treason weaponised as acts of uncivilised barbarians.