What have we learned?
“Like the Serbs today, the Turkish Cypriots would rather boil
septic water, and eat roots in their blacked out ruins than give up their
self-defining, blood-drenched national myths.
Since only the Greeks are willing to actively march out and shoot them,
and since the Turkish Cypriots are well armed by Turkey, they cannot be
obliterated, nor assimilated, but they still won’t obey the rules, and they
have to be ignored. And they are
ignored, but when you are invisible and unmentionable, as well as zealous and
heavily armed, it tends to fertilize your eccentricities.”[i]
I think this quote tells us so much about ourselves, and humans in general. Ethnocentrism is learned, no child is born hating another child because it was born on that side of a line, hate is not primordial, it is taught. It is taught through history, passed from adult to child, for generation after generation until finally nobody remembers how it started and suddenly it is not a story any more, it is reality. And the reality is that in places like Cyprus, and Kosovo, where a peoples entire way of life, from religion to work is constantly being challenged by the modern world, it is very easy to start to blame the ones who are different, and then to tell your children, and eventually the hate becomes a way of life. This is exactly what happened over the last twenty-five years in Cyprus.
Remember the picture I showed you of the city of Maras? Nothing was bombed or destroyed in that city, but yet it is the only thing on the island that truly doesn’t exist, and a rather foreboding image of a possible future. Is this what we want? Do we really want little spots of implacable ethnic conflict like Kosovo and East Timor to end up like this, an empty overgrown corner of the world? But what can we do, will people be stubborn enough to go on fighting forever despite the death they see around them?
It seems that way, after all how can we force two opposing sides, both of who have been taught for generations to hate the enemy, to give up there national pride, and talk to each other? Maybe we will never know the answer to those questions, but after reading and researching about Cyprus, I think I know what the answer isn’t. When it comes time for the U.N., or whoever, to decide the fate of Kosovo, I hope that they don’t decide to deny it diplomatic recognition. I hope that instead they recognize the existence of both sides; we can’t just push problems out of the way as everyone seems to have done with Cyprus, because it creates a breeding ground for corruption.
I hope that through compassion, understanding, and recognition, we can bring these struggling people in Eastern Europe into the prosperity that Western powers have enjoyed for so long. I think that by bringing all countries under the fold of civilization we can grow and prosper in the future as a race of humans, instead of becoming a lost race, whose cities are destined to be overgrown, much like the ghost town of Maras in the Non-existent Northern Turkish Republic of Cyprus.