Cyprus fieldwork: communities' conflicts, rights' conflicts

Here, I wish to set out some of the basic conflicts between Cypriot communities' human rights and human duties and so reveal some of the problems that archaeologists face when trying to work out how to resolve conflicts between their professional responsibilities and humanitarian duties.

Some of the key conflicts between human rights and duties are:

• a community's right to self-determination
  • and its duty to respect other communities' rights to self-determination;
• a community's right to freedom of movement
  • and its duty to respect other communities' rights to freedom of movement;
• a community's right to freedom of thought
  • and its duty to respect other communities' rights to freedom of thought;
• a community's right to property
  • and its duty to respect other communities' rights to property;
• a community's right to identity and culture
  • and its duty to respect other communities' rights to identity and culture.

It is important to remember that this is a vast simplification of the actual circumstances, made solely to identify the key rights and duties and their primary points of conflict.

Not only do many communities' human rights clash, but many of the human rights clash with many others, not just their equals; so, each community's human right to culture and identity does not just conflict with each other community's human right to culture and identity.

Each community's human right to culture and identity, then, may potentially conflict with each other's human right to freedom of expression (particularly pointedly in the protection of the human rights to freedom of thought and freedom from discrimination) or even (when, for example, some people argue that we ought to kill those who steal what they consider to be their own cultural property), the (individual's) human right to life.

As illustration, the UN's Annan Plan for the comprehensive settlement of the Cyprus Problem proposed a compromise whereby each community's members would have to accept some limits on, would have to waive certain points of, their human rights, including those to self-determination, freedom of movement and property, in order to protect, equally, the other communities' members' human rights.

Some of the key communities in the Cyprus conflict are:

• Greek Cypriots (GCs),
  • Cypriots who choose not to identify themselves as members of the Cypriot Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot communities;
• Turkish Cypriots (TCs),
  • Cypriots who choose not to identify themselves as members of the Cypriot Cypriot or Greek Cypriot communities;
• Cypriot Cypriots (CCs),
  • Cypriots who choose not to identify themselves as members of the Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot communities;
• Minority Cypriots (MCs),
  • Cypriots who cannot be categorised as members of the Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot communities, but whom the 1960 constitution forced to choose between being aligned with the Greek Cypriot and being aligned with the Turkish Cypriot communities, including,

    the Greek Cypriot allies,

    • the Armenians (Armenian Orthodox Christians),
    • Latins (European Catholic Christians) and
    • Maronites (Lebanese Catholic Christians) and

    the Turkish Cypriot allies,

    • the Linobambakes (syncretic Christian-Muslims, encompassing Greek and Turkish speakers and Christian converts to Islam and Muslim converts to Christianity, whose ideologies and practices marry the two);

• Cypriot Workers (WCs),
  • immigrants to Cyprus,

    popularly categorised as

    • "Sri Lankans",
    • "Arabs", or
    • "artistes" and

    overwhelmingly, exploited, as they are employed or enslaved as,

    • domestic workers,
    • manual workers, or
    • sex workers;

• Turkish Settlers (TSs),
  • Turkish immigrants to Cyprus during and after 1963, who may have settled, amongst other things,

    • as collaborators in the nationalist programme of ethnic cleansing and Turkification (as violators of other communities' human rights), but

    who may also have settled,

    • as part of accessing their human right to work or to freedom of movement, or

    who may have settled,

    • as vulnerable people trying to secure their human right to subsistence;

• Greek Settlers (GSs),
  • Greek immigrants to Cyprus during and after 1963, who may have settled, amongst other things,

    • as collaborators in the nationalist programme of ethnic cleansing and Hellenisation (as violators of other communities' human rights), but

    who may also have settled,

    • as part of accessing their human right to work or to freedom of movement, or

    who may have settled,

    • as vulnerable people trying to secure their human right to subsistence;

• International Settlers (ISs)
  • non-Greek, non-Turkish international immigrants to Cyprus since 1974,

    popularly characterised as

    • old Britons,
    • young Russians and
    • middle-aged Germans

    who may have settled, amongst other things,

    • as part of accessing their human right to work or to freedom of movement, but who may also have settled
    • as powerful people exploiting vulnerable people's insecurity or lack of access to their basic human rights; and

• International Visitors (IVs), including,

  • Contract Ex-pats,
  • Turkish Students,
  • Greek Students and
  • International Students.

I'll try to produce an incomprehensibly convoluted mind map to illustrate something of the mass of conflicts between human rights being negotiated by all Cypriots at all times in their daily lives.

As with the presentation of human rights and duties in conflict, the categorisation of communities is a simplification performed in order to reveal the Cypriot community's very complexities.

Individuals, groups and communities all have multiple identities, situationally chosen or ascribed and each might (rightly) contest their or others' categorisation(s). There may be individuals who are categorised by others as "pure Greek Cypriot" or "pure Turkish Cypriot", but who choose to identify themselves as "mixed" or "Cypriot Cypriot".

There may be other individuals who are categorised as "mixed" or "Cypriot Cypriot", but who choose to identify themselves as "pure Greek Cypriot" or "pure Turkish Cypriot".

There may be still other individuals who define themselves as "Cypriot Cypriot", "Linobambakis" or otherwise, who are denied that identity by others, categorised as "Greek Cypriot", "Turkish Cypriot" or such like.

As I currently understand it, [in terms of identifying community groups] one of the most troublesome aspects of the Cyprus Problem is the aggregation of different communities and the silencing and disempowering of the minority communities alternately assimilated and excluded.

So, these are some of the threads of conflicts between communities and conflicts between those communities' human rights that I have picked up and followed in my fieldwork in Cyprus so far; hopefully, I will begin to weave them together soon, or at least untangle them more.

[Updated on the 8th of June 2006.]