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Greek Cypriot is Turkish delight

Asian Age
A.T Jayanti, New Delhi   Ýndia
5 August 2006

Half an hour in Cyprus is all you need to understand the history of hate that divides Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots. So it comes as a total surprise to meet a stocky Greek, Tony Angastiniotis, in the midst of a very Turkish Cypriot celebration in North Cyprus.

At ease with Turkish Cypriots yet uneasy about his situation is Tony, who wears his hair long unlike most Turkish Cypriots. Tony, a freelance photojournalist and social worker, works in North Cyprus – he teaches media studies at the Eastern Mediterranean University – not entirely by choice. He was driven out of South Cyprus or Greek Cyprus or Greek Cyprus for allegedly “betraying his country”. His is an unusual story of love: the word courage “has its limitations, love knows no bounds”, according to him. His love for truth led Tony to make powerful documentaries and write books like Voice of Blood I and II. These are unvarnished, stark accounts of the massacre of Turkish Cypriot women and children by the Greek junta in the voices of the men who survived.

On April 23, 2003, when the barricades were lifted between North and South for the first time in three decades one of the first Greeks to drive down to the home he was forced to abandon as an 8-year-old was Tony. He instinctively drove down to the house he had to flee in Famagusta when the Turkish Army landed in the North.

His home now occupied by a Turkish family seemed to be caught in a time warp with even the plum tree in the garden waiting to greet him. On the walls of his ex-home still hung the framed photograph of his father and his doctor’s certificate. The lady who occupied his house had carefully dusted the frames and handed them over to Tony with the comment that she had kept them as she knew that he would one day collect what he as forced to leave behind.

Tony broke down at her gesture and wept like he had never before, “Her kindness and humanity just broke all my resistance.

All my life I was raised on the notion that the Turks were our enemies and complete barbarians. Where was the barbarian I was willing to hate? Until then a nationalist (another word for Turkhater) himself Tony began to question the propaganda he had been fed all these years. In 2004 when the Annan Plan to bring together the two feuding sides was rejected overwhelmingly by the Greeks, Tony once again drove down to North Cyprus, this time armed with his camera to capture tales that tell his Greek compatriots that they were perpetrators of crimes of unforgivable proportions in 1974. The documentary was a terrible blow to Greek Cypriot nationalistic pride as one of their own had made it. Overnight  they had turned from victims to villains and Tony had to pay the price for his projection of the Turk side of the story.

Tony who fled his home in North Cyprus in 1974 lost his job and home in South Cyprus in 2004. Shunned by his friends and countrymen he today lives trapped in the Green Line governed by the UN. He smiles wryly as he says he is looking forward to his future home, clearly alluding to his to his ex-home in Famagusta.