Property, Lawfare, and the Cyprus Impasse
BY REBECCA BRYANT
By the time this article appears, the presidential election campaigns now in full swing in Cyprus should have resulted in a new president for the Republic. It is quite likely, according to many polls, that the new president will also be the old one. Tassos Papadopoulos, president since 2003, presided over an eventful five years, as the buffer zone that had long divided the island opened and a United Nations reunification plan was defeated in local referenda. The former event was one of joy and hope, as Cypriots on both sides of the island returned to visit villages and homes left unwillingly behind and rediscovered former friends and neighbors. But it was also a period of disappointments, as many Cypriots realized for the first time that the past thirty years had resulted in lasting changes and that the island would never return to the way that it once was. Those disappointments led many people to rethink the idea of reuniting with their former neighbors and gave impetus to a movement in the Greek Cypriot south, led by President Papadopoulos, that opposed the reunification plan.
The result has been a political stalemate characterized by a new form of social action: disheartened Cypriots have increasingly turned to mechanisms of transnational justice, attempting to resolve their own problems even as a solution to the Cyprus Problem remains elusive. This is what some commentators have dubbed “lawfare,” or the pursuit of conflict by judicial means. Cypriots have opened suits over lost property, both against each other and against governments, in the European Court of Human Rights and, since the opening of the checkpoints, in local courts whose judgments may also be enforced in other parts of the European Union. This turn to transnational legal mechanisms is certainly a way for many people to solve their problems in lieu of a political solution. But what has become increasingly apparent is that recourse to the courts is also changing the political terrain. Partition is now being seriously discussed on both sides of the island as a political option, while local nationalisms have begun to emerge that express a newfound loyalty to the island’s two states.
THE POLITICS OF PROPERTY
Cyprus has become a textbook example of an intransigent conflict, one that has been in a stalemate since the division of the island in 1974. That division began in the 1950’s when Greek Cypriots rebelled against British colonial rule with the intention of uniting the island with Greece. Turkish Cypriots objected and called for division of the island, ultimately leading to what neither community had wanted: the island’s independence based in an unwieldy power-sharing arrangement. The new republic soon collapsed into intercommunal violence, and more than sixty percent of the Turkish population retreated to enclaves, where they remained for the next ten years. In 1974, a coup sponsored by the junta government in Greece led to Turkey’s military intervention and ultimately to the division of the island and ethnic homogenization of its two parts. Within a few years, the breakaway state in the north declared itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus—a state that today remains unrecognized by any country besides Turkey. The militarized zone that divides the island was, until 2003, closed to Cypriots, who had to obtain special permissions to cross to the “other side.”
The role of property in this story is one that for decades was obscured by attention to the international dimensions of the problem. Over the past few years, I have conducted research on Lapithos, a formerly mixed town in northern Cyprus that in many ways represents a microcosm of the conflict. There it became clear that the problem of property that arose so clearly after the opening of the checkpoints had long been central to the conflict itself.
Since the 1950’s, property has been clearly mapped onto territory and treated as a “national” issue. Turkish Cypriots originally from the town aver that their Greek Cypriot neighbors had long tried to acquire their property as an incentive for them to leave the island. When Turkish Cypriots fled Lapithos in early 1964, their homes were looted and plundered, presumably by neighbors they had known their whole lives. One older woman told me, “When we returned, we didn’t find anything—they took the roof, the windows, the doors.” And when Turkish Cypriots returned to their villages in 1974, they settled in the homes from which Greek Cypriots had fled, their own houses unlivable. Greek Cypriot property was distributed to these returning Turks, Turkish Cypriots moving from the south of the island, and Turks who came from Turkey. In turn, some of the 150,000 Greek Cypriots who fled or were exchanged to the south have settled in former Turkish Cypriot homes. The problem of property, then, is the intimate side of the Cyprus conflict, the part of its history that describes friendships betrayed, social ties broken, and communities uprooted.
But it is also a problem that shapes the political and economic landscape today. For thirty years, the property problem had been kept alive in the Greek Cypriot south through the political promise of return and the refusal of the government to issue title deeds to refugees either for the Turkish land where they had settled or the prefabricated housing that they were given in the late 1970’s and where many still live today. The problem was kept alive in the north because of the knowledge, especially in certain border towns, that the property where Turks now live might eventually be returned to the Greek owners in the event of a political settlement. Property was the primary subject of discussion after the opening of the checkpoints when Cypriots returned to their villages to find that the homes to which they had dreamt of returning were now occupied by others who had no intention of leaving. The sense of uncertainty about property has, of course, intensified average Cypriots’ anxieties about the shape of a political solution.
Only a few months after the failed referendum, a Greek Cypriot from Lapithos decided to open a lawsuit in the Republic’s courts against the English couple who had built a villa on property to which he still holds the title deed. Prior to this, cases had been brought against Turkey in the EU Court of Human Rights, since the north is not recognized as a legal, political entity. In particular, a Greek Cypriot refugee, Titina Loizidou, had already won a monumental case against Turkey in the EU court, and other Greek Cypriots had signed on for more such cases. Around the time of the checkpoints’ opening, the number of suits queued in the European court had swelled to fourteen hundred.
But the opening of the checkpoints changed the legal frameworks. The Greek Cypriot claimant decided to sue in the court of his own country, which claims sovereignty over the north. The Republic had entered the EU in May 2004, only a week after Greek Cypriots rejected the reunification plan, thus making the judgments of courts in the Republic enforceable in the EU. Not surprisingly, when the case came to court in the south, the Greek Cypriot won, and the judgment demanded that the villa be demolished and compensation paid. The case has now been remanded to the EU’s highest court, as the claimant hopes to seize the couple’s properties in Britain.
Since that time, suits have been brought by Greek Cypriots against both foreigners and Turkish Cypriots who occupy their homes; by Greek Cypriots against Turkey; by Turkish Cypriots against the Republic for expropriation of their land; and by Turkish Cypriots wishing to have their homes in the south returned to them by the Republic. And it has now become quite common on both sides of the island to hear people express the hope or fear that if only the property issue would be resolved, the Cyprus Problem would be “finished.” Some Greek Cypriots have rebelled against their own leadership by taking their cases to a recently established reparations commission in the north of the island. When their names were leaked, the Greek Cypriot media declared them traitors, and commentators claimed that solving the cases in this way only lays the groundwork for permanent division by reinforcing the status quo. But what it also reinforced was a growing sense that reunification or federation were not possibilities worthy of investment. Rather, lawsuits have played an important role in changing Cypriots’ perceptions of political possibilities, making it possible for one of the less likely candidates for president, renegade EU representative Marios Matsakis, to declare that recognition of the north and partition of the island is a possibility that Greek Cypriots should seriously consider. Although Matsakis had broken a taboo in raising the possibility of partition, he also echoed the belief of many people that peace could not be purchased at any cost.
LAWFARE AND CYPRUS’ STATE OF EXCE PTION
“Lawfare” is a phenomenon that has intensified in the past decade, as a new regime of global governance has emerged that appears capable of taking national governments to task. The term originated during the “war on terror” to refer to the ways in which “terrorists,” such as those imprisoned at Guantanamo, may resort to international human rights law as a continuation of their alleged attempts to undermine American democracy. Amongst some political scientists, a concern has emerged that international human rights may take precedence over democratically implemented local law. “These changes amount to a serious political and intellectual challenge to democratic sovereignty vested in the liberal democratic nationstate,” one commentator warned.
The case of Cyprus, though, points to another possibility, one in which the continuation of conflict by legal means aims not at the undermining of sovereignty but at the resolution of a contest over sovereignty. For more than four decades, sovereignty in Cyprus has been plagued by what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a “state of exception,” or “the legal form of that which can have no legal form.” In Cyprus, this has appeared as the difference between legal form and political fact. The Turkish Republic of North Cyprus declared itself a separate, sovereign state in 1983, but the Republic of Cyprus in the south is internationally recognized as the only legitimate government of the island. This means, on paper, that the Republic has sovereignty over the north, as well, despite the fact that it has no control or jurisdiction over anything north of the ceasefire line. The Republic labels the north an “occupied area” governed by a “pirate state,” and in return, the Turkish Cypriot administration claims that the Republic died with the demise of constitutional order in the 1960’s.
All of the property suits engage in what I’ll provisionally call a “politics of legitimation,” one that asks for rulings on claims of historical right. Lawsuits effectively attempt to legitimate a territorial claim through reducing it to a legal dispute over a property regime. Although property is presumably an alienable possession, in these suits it is invariably treated as an inalienable possession, what the Greek Cypriot Minister of the Interior recently called a “sacred and inviolable right.” Of course, the only way to turn property into an inalienable possession, or legally to make a claim of absolute right, is also to make a claim about history and politics. Indeed, respondents in the civil suits have remarked that those suits were treated like criminal cases and that they were really trials of history. Putting history on trial is in some sense every wronged person’s dream, especially when the legal cards are stacked in one’s favor. But the effect here is that one asks transnational courts not only to recognize the legality of one’s existence, but to recognize that only oneself has a legal existence.
In this sense, then, the question of sovereignty reemerges and is decided in the legal space where territory maps onto property. A federal solution appears increasingly unlikely in a political environment in which the return to a unitary state or permanent partition now lead most polls as Cypriots’ favored modes of political solution. The first would legitimate Greek Cypriot claims to be the legitimate government of the island, while the second is an expression of rising local nationalisms that were part and parcel of the checkpoints’ opening. Indeed, just as the demise of the nation-state is being loudly declared, Cyprus presents a case in which nation-state politics are reinscribed, even as Cypriots bring that politics to the level of individual action. And so, paradoxically, the opening of the ceasefire line in Cyprus has led to the development of new borders that may be longer-lasting and more impenetrable than anyone had dreamed.
Rebecca Bryant (rbryant2@gmu.edu) is assistant professor in the department of Sociology & Anthropology (http://anthropology.gmu.edu). This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
