Magdalena Dembinska Université de Montréal, Canada
Fluctuating Images of Enemies and Friends: Abkhazia, With Turkish Cyprus’ Lens1
Since1the 2008 Russian-Georgian war over breakaway regions, journalists talk about the undergoing colonization of Abkhazia by Russia through a number of processes: financial and military aid, missiles installation in the region, infrastructure and telecommunications control, Russian business and migration. Although, for various security reasons, welcomed by the Abkhaz elites while building their political entity against Georgians, one cannot but think of parallels with the Northern Cyprus developments over the last 30 years. In a similar process, Turkey sponsored the construction of the Turkish Cyprus de facto state. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, considerable resources were used to ‘prove’ the affinity with Turkey and Turks, to construct the enemy image of Greek Cypriots and, in so doing, to legitimate the separatist cause and friendship with the sponsor-State. However, anthropological studies in the North of the island show how living side by side with settlers from Turkey modified Turkish Cypriots’ self-identification as distinct from their new neighbours. Turkish Cypriots of all political convictions are uncomfortable and count critical stories about “people from Turkey.” They distinguish “us” Cypriots from “them” the settlers and simultaneously the image of former ‘enemy’, the Greek Cypriots, is vested with less hostile shapes. A civic identification develops as collective perceptions change. This, in turn, has implications for political cleavages as new options for (de)constructing the de facto state and new party programs emerge. How this identity transformation occurs? What triggers changing policies towards our enemies and friends? The article’s objective is to map and compare the ‘colonization’ process that took place in Northern Cyprus and the one observed in Abkhazia and to detect changes that occur in the image of ‘friends and enemies of the nation’ during this process and in the ethnic 1
Previous version of this article was presented at the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), Columbia University, New York, April 2011, and at the Warsaw East European Conference (WEEC), Warsaw University, July 2011.
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