Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict

3. Disclosure and Censorship in Divided Cyprus: Toward an Anthropology of Ethnic Autism

66 I Yiannis Papadakis three Disclosure and Censorship in Divided Cyprus towArd AN ANthropologY of ethNiC AutisM Yiannis Papadakis All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity of not even hearing about them. . . . in nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. —orwell (2000, 307–308) A Dead Zone In Between: Divided Views propaganda, defined as that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without deceiving your enemies. —Cornford (1922/1993, xv) for years on end, on weekdays at 8:00 p.m., faithful to his rendezvous with his (possibly nonexistent) audience, a serious, middle-aged turkish Cypriot man appeared on Brt 2, an official turkish Cypriot television channel. he addressed greek Cypriots either in greek or in english, reading from a text which he often abandoned as he got carried away, overwhelmed with enthusiasm for his own argument. he then began to improvise on the day’s topic, chosen with care among the (apparently plentiful) evils of greek Cypriot society. topics varied daily from rampant corruption and nepotism on the greek Cypriot side to the inhuman disclosure and Censorship in divided Cyprus I 67 treatment of foreign migrants to wasted arms expenditures paid by the duped greek Cypriot taxpayers. despite the seriousness of his intentions and those who commissioned the program, if greek Cypriots watched it at all—extremely few did, in fact—they only did so to laugh. The greek Cypriot official television channel, in turn, produced its own programs in turkish addressed to turkish Cypriots. These often showed a previously mixed village in the south where turkish and greek Cypriots lived “happily together” before 1974. The camera never failed to focus on the (newly restored) mosque in pristine condition as a local woman emotively called to a past turkish Cypriot neighbor using her first name, saying that she missed her and expected her to return in order to live in warm neighborly communion as in the past. This program was treated with as much mirth and skepticism by turkish Cypriots as its turkish Cypriot counterpart was by greek Cypriots. even if such programs would strike many outsiders—as well turkish Cypriots when faced with official greek Cypriot official publications or programs, and vice versa—as stark propaganda, they were produced for years on end as potentially strong persuasive arguments. it could be argued that, caught in the webs of their own limited political horizons, the creators of such programs were unable to perceive how unpersuasive they may have appeared to others or how they may have had the opposite of their intended effects. But what is of real interest here is not so much the effects of such programs on others but what they revealed about their creators. despite the laughter they provoked among those seeing them from the other side, they were no laughing matter but had serious and, i would argue, insidious implications. what they starkly revealed was the chasm separating the two sides, one so deep that even when they were trying to persuade the others, the creators of such material remained so deeply enmeshed in their own perspectives and so utterly convinced of their own self-evident truths that they appeared unable to question its efficacy. for eventually, and herein lies their insidiousness, they did have real effects by causing laughter, often mixed with a sense of incredulity and indignation, to those watching them on the other side. what appeared amazing and laughable, what caused indignation, was how unreasonable the others were, how they seemed to buy into their own propaganda, how blindfolded, how brainwashed they were—how so different, in other words, from us. The well-known verdict shared by both sides was verified and reinforced: “our” truth, “their” propaganda. This all too easily led to a tendency of rejecting in toto any argument or evidence presented by the other side as yet another instance of propaganda. in his discussion of nationalism, gellner (1983, 2) makes a brief allusion to what the italians under Mussolini called the sacro egoismo of nationalism . This formulation aptly captures two key elements of nationalism: 68 I Yiannis Papadakis first, the self-centered, or ethnocentric, perspective upon which it is based; and second, how in demanding...