A Turkish Cypriotâs Tale
I grew up in an ambiguous and discordant country. Most of the households had multiple vehicle ownership and even multiple house ownership, yet most households did not have clean drinkable water until recently. Similarly, most individuals received regular income from at least two sources, but they didnât necessarily pay their taxes regularly. Citizens rarely worried about the poisonous exhaust coming out of their cars, parking their car literally anywhere they liked (including the middle of the road), or adding extensions to their house without any approval from the state, because there was no monitoring by the state. The state provided free healthcare, but state hospitals lacked the necessary personnel and equipment. There was free primary and secondary education provided by the state, but most families also sent their children to private tutoring after school hours to be taught by the very same school teachers who had taught them a couple of hours earlier even though those same teachers were prohibited from holding a second job. We claimed to be living in a democratic country where the same person had served as the âleaderâ of the people for more than 25 years and some of the MPs who were in parliament when I was in elementary school are still in office. Democracy in the eyes of my compatriot involved the right to vote but does not really require civic engagement or transparency and accountability of governments. Although as a country we complained about the performance of governments, we rarely acted collectively to change things.
In our daily lives, we didnât have major economic difficulties. Or at least our parents never expressed that to us. I grew up in a traditional family where my mother was a housewife who took care of the house and my father provided income. My father worked in the civil services until his retirement in his early 40s. After retirement, he continued working for a private company where he worked long hours but with generous work benefits. When that company went bankrupt, he formed his own business and entered the private sector. We had a house and a car and a comfortable living. Well, that is apart from the power outages and the lack of clean and adequate water at our home in the city. It was later, in secondary school years, that we perfected our night vision and specialized in working in the dark because power outages had become a very common occurrence. But since the teachers went on strike regularly, there was not much homework to do anyway. In accordance with teenage spirit, we used to make fun of the accents of small number of students in school who were immigrants from Turkey. We supported Turkish football teams fanatically but rarely went to a local football match. Although being an islander, we ate fish only on special occasions, but red meat was abundant. Since we had extended family in a village, we visited them every weekend and brought all the fruits and vegetables from there. In terms of our education, we started âpreparingâ for some kind of an exam from as early as ten years old, continuing all the way until university. As a teenager, I never thought about economics or politics of my country, and our parents always reminded us that what we had was an economic heaven compared to their childhoods.
My high school years were a little bit different. My generation of Cypriots grew up on a divided island with a demilitarized buffer zone patrolled by UN forces, with communities on both sides of the border having been stripped off some of their basic rights. In an era of no internet and no social media, complemented with an authoritarian government regime, I grew up only hearing one-sided stories of pre-division events. The brain washing started from the early years. While in elementary school, aged seven, we were taken on a field trip to a museum that showed the grotesque pictures of a murdered family in a bathtub. As we grew older, we heard exploding bombs and of the execution of journalists, but didnât really understand their political implications. During the last two years of high school, I had the opportunity to have a closer look at âthe otherâ side of Cyprus. The first occasion was when we had special permission to attend a fair organized by universities from the UK on the other side of the buffer zone, and the second was when several people from the other side tried to cross the border which resulted in the deaths of two people. When we first crossed the âborderâ under UN escort to get to the conference venue, we all realized how much ânicerâ the roads and the environment were. My first thought was that it looked like London, which Iâd visited a year earlier. But a year later, some people on motorbikes tried to cross the border to our side and two of them were killed. Although the local media portrayed those events in the most nationalistic way possible, I began to have some questions in my mind. Having seen the better economic development of the other side and inhumane execution of individuals, I began to ask more questions about the history of northern Cyprus.
Things changed after high school. Although I wasnât able to obtain a scholarship to go to the USA for my higher education, and despite my objections, my family decided to send me anyway. In travelling to the USA, we intended to transfer in Germany, and unfortunately I found out for the first time that the passport of my âcountryâ was not valid in Germany; thus I applied for a temporary Turkish passport so that I could obtain a transit visa from Germany. I had trouble explaining myself at the US customs with two different passports. After one hour of interrogation and âchecking with the managersâ, I was able to go through. During the four years of undergraduate studies in the USA, I obtained student visas eight times because the visas were given for âsingle entryâ, and I used to come back to Cyprus for both Christmas and summer holidays. Many years later in another visa interview (this time with Republic of Cyprus passport), a counsellor told me that, looking at my history of visas, she had never seen so many visas for one applicant. But the interesting point of going to the USA was the opportunity it gave me to meet people from the âotherâ side of Cyprus whom I have never met before in my life. Once I started hearing conflicting stories, I became puzzled and began to read other sources and learn about the story of the other side.
I began to accumulate research skills after I began graduate studies in economics. Many people think that economics is solely about the study of money. Any first-year economics textbook defines the discipline more or less as the study of efficient allocation of scarce resources among unlimited wants. However, when we were growing up, the policymakers in northern Cyprus thought that the resources were not scarce, and they did not allocate those resources in an efficient way. During my graduate studies, I began to apply my training to my country and began asking the following questions to myself: âWhy is my country economically wealthy but not developed?â âWhy is there a large pool of young retirees?â âCan social security be sustained with these large number of retirees?â âWhy are the public services so poor?â âWhy donât we produce more value added products?â âWhy canât we export more goods and services?â âWhy do people complain all the time and yet still vote for the same politicians over and over again?â âWhy did the state-owned airlines company go bankrupt after more than 30 years?â âWhy was there so much Turkish influence on our budget?â âWhy does the âother sideâ perform so much better than us in economic matters?â The answer given to most of these questions by the government officials in northern Cyprus has been âbecause of the Cyprus Problemâ. I was persuaded by that response for a while, but no more.
After completing doctoral research in the USA, as a native Cypriot, I returned to Cyprus and started working as a lecturer in economics at a university in northern Cyprus, and wanted to conduct research on northern Cyprus, but I encountered two main problems. The first was the lack of data for an empirical social scientist. The existing data (whose quality was questionable) was simply not shared with or by the public. After a while, as is typical in social science research, I started meeting, networking and collaborating with more senior researchers who also had contacts in the public sector which made my access to data easier, but still inadequate and arbitrary. The second problem arose when I submitted my work, for international academic journal publication, and as one reason for receiving rejections was the use of TRNC data.1 Thanks to my co-authorsâ persistence, we managed to publish some of our work in international journals. However, this also made me realize that international scholars were unaware of the history of northern Cyprus, by no fault of their own since there are very few works in English (or any other language) about northern Cyprus. It is out of this personal experience that this book is an attempt to correct those errors and omissions albeit with a focus on the economic history of northern Cyprus, and to draw together the extent of economic data and major analysis of northern Cyprus into one place.
Although per capita gross national income in northern Cyprus had been increasing over recent years in local currency (the Turkish lira (TL)), its dollar value has decreased due to depreciation of Turkish lira against foreign currencies. Regardless, per capita income in 2016 was $13,902 according to official statistics which placed the northern Cyprus among âhigh-income countriesâ classification by World Bank. However, in terms of business competitiveness, northern Cyprus is still classified as âefficiency drivenâ stage of economic development instead of a transition to an âinnovation drivenâ stage of development, if judged only by income levels.2 Furthermore, according to a corruption perception index in 2017âwhich was calculated for the first time for northern Cyprusâit ranked 81st among 180 countries in this list.3 Looking at health indicators, in 2015, there were 536 persons per doctor, 434 persons per nurse and 4.5 beds for 1000 people which is worse than the statistics of other developed nations. But the statistics show 92.8% enrolment ratio in tertiary education and favourable teacher-student ratios in public schools. According to the 2008 Household Budget Survey (HBS), 64.8% of the households own their dwelling and 79.3% of households have at least one car. The reliability of these official statistics notwithstanding, they show that there is economic wealth but not a developed economy in northern Cyprus.
Since the de facto division of the island in 1974, the demilitarizing of the UN-administered buffer zone and demarcation of the Green Line under annually renewed UN Security Council resolutions and the growing international isolation of northern Cyprus, there has been a corresponding bifurcation in the development of the two zones of Cyprus. Whilst the original 1960 broken constitution of the Republic of Cyprus continued uncorrected and the Republic of Cyprus continued to enjoy full international recognition, full international relations and eventually full membership in 2004 of the European Union, the northern polity endured a discordant, oblique, neglected and outcast development. The provisional post-1974 polity became permanent in the November 1983 unilateral declaration of independence as the Kuzey Kıbrıs TĂŒrk Cumhuriyeti (KKTC), hereafter anglicized to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC ). No matter the permanent UN-mediated missions dedicated to the peaceful settlement of the âCyprus problemâ, including the singular opportunity offered by the Annan Plan and 2004 Referendum (voted against by 76% of the Greek Cypriot electorate on an 89% turnout; voted for by 65% of the Turkish Cypriot electorate on an 89% turnout) but squandered, and notwithstanding the significant economic, environmental, social and cultural benefits which many have argued would arise from any settlement, today the island remains as firmly divided as ever.
The readjustment to life in Cyprus was not easy. Although I was able to obtain a good job and have decent earnings, I was still puzzled with so much of the everyday life. Northern Cyprus had changed since the last time I had spent significant time here. Notwithstanding that people were living in luxury (large houses, big cars, expensive clothing), there were now more congestion, more environmental problems, more social problems (murder, rape, stealing, divorce) and more structural problems compared to the time at which I left for the USA. What is more puzzling for me was why people didnât seem to be bothered by these discordant developments. So I joined a civil society association who were interested in a âclean society, clean politicsâ and attempted to act as a watchdog monitoring domestic government in northern Cyprus. This is when I started to learn more about legal and institutional framework of northern Cyprus development and find out how poorly politicians have governed the north. At the same time, I became frustrated and was angered when I learned what the highest level of government discussed during their weekly meetings. Thatâs when I decided to dig further and go back to the roots of the political and economic status quo in northern Cyprus.
A Tale of a Discordant Polity
Thus, the primary ambition and novel purpose of this book became the attempt to identify, trace and explain the discordant economic development of northern Cyprus. Southern Cyprusâthe internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus (RoC)âhas experienced a relatively comfortable economic development with full benefits of a sovereign state. Where the Republic of Cyprus, in enjoyment of its international legal status, has contributed to and receives the support ...