Bananiot wrote:Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Armenian Cypriots and Latin Cypriots are indigenous Cypriots! If GR and Epiktitos think that only Greek Cypriots are indigenous, they are making a huge mistake which is driven by their wishful thinking. GR, especially, is one sorry bugger. He asks:
Ottoman remnants are indigenous to Cyprus? Whatever next…
I can hear some of you asking:
Greek remnants are indigenous to Cyprus? What a confused individual.
I am translating the word "indigenous" as "γηγενής" in Greek. I do not know of another meaning to this word, but if it is the Greek word quoted, only ignorant people can doubt that people who have lived in this place for some 400 hundred or more years are not indigenous.
Of course, for all sick nationalists it is quite convenient to consider them strangers, foreigners etc, for we can do whatever we like to them if the need arose.
Bloody hell!
I think you are missing the point about using a word such as "indigenous".
Here, as in Biology, it is a
relative term. If specimens exist with historically longer ties to a place, then they are termed 'indigenous' whilst the others are termed foreign (or introduced). It's not uncommon to refer to trees or squirrels etc as non-native/foreign even if they were introduced into an area
centuries ago.
In terms of Man's business, politics, the label
indigenous for people, or followers, of a cultural type which has been recorded for
thousands of years, is wholly appropriate relative to applying it to 'newcomers' which do not follow this cultural norm (of thousands of years).
Of course, being Human, they had the
choice to integrate/assimilate and become
indistinguishable from the longer serving cultural norms (GCs). However, they
chose not to do this, preferring to forcefully make the long-term indigenous peoples extinct from one long-term held area.
