In times of trouble, turn to The Simpsons. Turn to The Simpsons to escape the trials and complexities of life; turn to The Simpsons to see the trials and complexities of life writ large across your television screen. My man Jonathan S. Foer says humor is not the only way to confront modern perils; in fact, humor “shrinks” problems. But the fact is, episode thirteen of the current Simpsons season stirred a lengthy debate at one precious hub of cultural exchange where people of several nationalities discuss the so-called “Cyprus problem” (the address is www.cyprus-forum.com.) Here, the English, Greeks, Turks, and Cypriots congregate from their respective time zones and vantage points. The only commonality seems to be this: Americans don’t know jack about Cyprus.
Fair enough. The average Wesleyan student has some sense of the static elements of the situation—that Cyprus is divided, that one half is Greek, the other Turkish. But we do not necessarily know how these events have unfolded and what is happening now. For instance, we do not all know that Cyprus was annexed by the British Empire by mistake (they were really after Crete, a smaller island out of Turkey’s reach.) In the fifties, the Cypriots (made up of Turkish and Greek communities) started a guerilla war against British rule, and under the guide of Archbishop Makarios III, who was elected president in 1959, achieved independence in 1960. Makarios encouraged changes in the 1960s that would tip the balance of power in favor of the Greek community on the island, and in 1963 a U.N. peacekeeping force was sent to the island. Greece, then led by a military junta that forced Makarios to flee to England, sent troops to “protect” the Greek community on the island, but when Turkey did the same in 1973, the latter was called an “invasion” by the Greeks and many others, and was followed by “illegal occupation” of the northern third of the island. The BBC nicely “shrinks” this story of Cyprus, saying on a handy little timeline on their website that Cyprus was “effectively partitioned” following the arrival, shall we say, of the Turks. Right.
So where are we now? Allow Homer Simpson to clarify the situation: “Bring back my children, you Cyprus-splitting jerks,” he said to a Turkish boat captain in the midst of a plot line that is not worth explaining. The point is that we can allow the collective American concept of, and response to, the “Cyprus problem” to be distilled in this one articulate phrase without losing much ground—it’s probably pretty accurate, and I am not going to blame us for that. Wherever I have been, from the sixth grade classroom of my ‘Cyprus Culture’ class taught at an American school in Nicosia by a Greek-Cypriot woman, to rare pieces about the country in the New York Times, to the commentary of my father’s well-traveled journalist colleague, now retired in Cyprus: bias in favor of the Greeks is hard to avoid.
This is not to say that the Greeks are wrong, but we need to be careful. Back in the sixties, now, and at every point along the way, each player in this dilemma has been hungry for power and anxious to protect its identity, and that anxiety inspires very simple, logical moves: get more land, or, at the very least, keep what we now have. “I will never surrender my country smaller than it is,” the former Greek-Cypriot President Clerides (1993-2003) has said. The squabbling between these two bodies of land has, then, mostly been over the push and pull of the borders and over the wording of formal agreements. And for so much of this long struggle, agreements have only happened because of outside influences, namely, the United Nations. It’s a familiar Middle Eastern scenario.
In the past few years, negotiations have been “sponsored” by the U.N. and the ever-patient Kofi Annan. Although the struggle has been ongoing, it has in a sense been reopened by the growing importance of the European Union. The European Union is the elite clique—it’s where all the cool kids are. On the website Europa (“Gateway to the European Union,” www.europa.eu.int,) there is a section called “What the European Union does,” and I was shocked to realize in how many categories the EU has influence: thirty-two. But the most important one is the very broad category of culture, for which most of the other categories are responsible for enriching, and which hopefully leads to less of the kind of Homerian ignorance we heard on The Simpsons. There is also a link on the website called “Europe is Fun!” which encourages people (okay, children) to play interactive games to test knowledge of their European neighbors.
Cyprus was recommended as a potential member of EU in 1998, and in 2004, the Republic of Cyprus, the Greek side, was finally inducted into the cool club. The Turkish sidea was not, though there were many Kofi-sponsored opportunities to do so. (Annan envisioned a federation with a rotating presidency, which sounds lovely, as most idealistic proposals do.) In 2003, it was importantly the Greeks who pulled out of a last-ditch attempt to sign a reunification plan that would allow the country to become a unified member of the EU. And it was Rauf Denktash, the former president of the Turkish territory, who amended some rules that same year to allow Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots to cross over the green line for the first time in 29 years.
This event was Cyprus’s own Berlin wall bashing: it was an occasion for the actual citizens of the island to exercise their freedom, interact with each other, and, in most cases, marvel alternately at the desolation of the North and the modernization of the South. Turkish-Cypriots, when interviewed, suggested a contrast between ‘existence’ in the North and ‘life’ in the South. What makes the Republic full of ‘life’? The very same thing that made it eligible for entrance to the EU: readiness to move into the future, to adopt, for better or for worse, some of the practices and customs of European countries and, by association, the United States.
One Greek member on the Cyprus forums living in the States said, “I would prefer a documentary on the Cyprus problem rather than a Simpsons episode, but I do find the show very funny.” So there is a respect and an interest in American culture, but also a recognition of our ignorance: “People in the U.S. know very little about other countries,” another member of the forums said. These comments give value to the lighthearted introduction of Cyprus into the Simpsons episode: the episode led to discussion around the world, and hopefully a few Americans said, “Well, I didn’t get the joke about Cyprus, maybe I should figure out what Mr. Simpson was talking about.” This is a first step, and the fact that our world-renowned, witty cartoon made it is something we can be proud of.
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