Cyprus-Forum.com

[Saint Jimmy]

As a child I can remember going through the airport and being discriminated against, the baggage of TCs were always searched where as GCs passengers were asked for identification and ushered on

Was this a systematic phenomenon? Do you know many TCs who were treated this way, or could it have been an isolated incident that happened occasionally (not that its importance is diminished by the degree of regularity...)?

[garbitsch]

Not only was it in the Nicosia airport that there was a discrimination against T.Cs. My uncle, although he was holding a British passport, was beaten by the Greek police in Limassol port and he was put into prison - just because he was a T.C, but later the British authorities helped him to go out and travel to London. I cannot remember the year, but it was before 1970.

p.s: My uncle had nothing to do with TMT or any other organisation. Please do not come up with this excuse!

[brother]

In those days a tc was regarded as a dog and we were called it openly by the gc, even though that is in the past a lot of the older generation remember it with disgust.

[Saint Jimmy]

The more I find out about the '60s mess, the more devastated (or horrified, I'm not even sure which word describes it best) I get.
This feeling started coming over me when I watched 'Hotel Rwanda', a couple of weeks back, and made the inevitable comparisons in my head...

As a GC, I feel the need to apologise. For what it's worth (not much now, I know), I feel ashamed.

[brother]

Dude the best apologies we could do would be to find the solution to unify our island and live in peace that way the memories of our past dead relatives would not be in vain and our childrens future would be assured.

[Saint Jimmy]

to find the solution to unify our island

Not enough, brother...
Our political disputes and disagreements are one thing, and such blatant, unthinkable disrespect for human life and human dignity is quite another...

I had never translated all those distant phrases in our History textbooks ('intercommunal fighting', for instance) in real terms. It's truly horrifying.

[Bananiot]

Many Turkish Cypriot women were complaining during the period of 1963-1974 that policemen who stopped them in road checks had their arms all over them, touching them up with the excuse that they were looking for weapons or messages.

[Viewpoint]

Saint Jimmy

Was this a systematic phenomenon? Do you know many TCs who were treated this way, or could it have been an isolated incident that happened occasionally (not that its importance is diminished by the degree of regularity...)?

When you consider that there were only a few TCs on an Olympic airways flight and those people were targeted for a search then you can arrive at a decision to whether it was systematic or not, they also had another way of belittling us they would throw our underwear all over the place and laugh making jokes in greek, you can imagine how degrading this is to a Turkish Cypriot woman in the 1960/1970. Once in their own community TCs would all complain to each other about similar treatment but felt they had to endure discrimination and degrading treament to visit their loved ones.


Saint Jimmy you are the first GC I have heard actually apologise, thankyou Im sure we were no angels but the past has taught us nothing we are still as bad as our fathers were, there are a few very good examples on this forum.

[erolz]

The more I find out about the '60s mess, the more devastated (or horrified, I'm not even sure which word describes it best) I get.
This feeling started coming over me when I watched 'Hotel Rwanda', a couple of weeks back, and made the inevitable comparisons in my head...

As a GC, I feel the need to apologise. For what it's worth (not much now, I know), I feel ashamed.

Thank you Jimmy.

For me such apologies are worth much - even today. The ability to make them provides me with much hope for the future just as the inability to do so does the opposite. Thanks.

[cannedmoose]

I had never translated all those distant phrases in our History textbooks ('intercommunal fighting', for instance) in real terms. It's truly horrifying.

Makes you think eh Jimmy. I read a book that was basically short personal accounts of individual Cypriots on their experiences during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It really brings it home to you how savage things became when you read personal testimonies from those on the ground, rather than the stock history texts that just talk about, as you said, 'intercommunal fighting' and 'persecution'.

It's something that the Shoah Visual History Project about the Jewish Holocaust www.vhf.org/ also brings across. It's so easy to simply read that '6 million Jews were murdered' and 'millions were transported to concentration camps', but when you can actually see the testimony of individual people, it is far more shocking and real. I've said it on here before, but I think Cyprus needs something like the Shoah VHF, I think it would make people appreciate the suffering each side has imposed on the other through the years and would be a rather cathartic process for both communities. It would also be a major and important history resource.