Migration Into the Cyprus Conflict and the Cypriot Citizenship Regime
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Migration into the Cyprus conflict and the Cypriot citizenship regime Olga Demetriou PCC REPORT /201 Olga Demetriou is Associate Professor in Post Conflict Reconstruction and State-Building at the Durham Global Security Institute, School of Government and International Affairs, University of Durham. She is a social anthropologist and holds a PhD (2002) from the London School of Economics. She was Senior Research Consultant at the PRIO Cyprus Centre between 2006 and 2018. She has carried out fieldwork in western Thrace and Cyprus and has been working on issues of human rights, minority-state relations, refugeehood, gender, and migration. She is particularly interested in processes of subjectivisation in conditions of conflict and inequality. Her work has appeared in several anthropological and inter-disciplinary journals, and in two monographs. The first was published in 2013 by Berghahn under the title Capricious Borders: Minority, Population and Counter-Conduct between Greece and Turkey and the second in 2018 with the State University of New York Press, entitled Refugeehood and the Postconflict Subject: Reconsidering Minor Losses. She has been involved in a number of social justice initiatives in Cyprus, including the Gender Advisory Team (since 2009) which seeks to mainstream gender equality concerns in the peace building agenda. T MIGRATION INTO THE CYPRUS CONFLICT AND THE CYPRIOT CITIZENSHIP REGIME Olga Demetriou Report 2/2019 Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Hausmanns gate 7 PO Box 9229 Oslo NO-0134 OSLO, Norway Tel. +47 22 54 77 00 Fax +47 22 54 77 01 Email: [email protected] Web: www.prio.no PRIO encourages its researchers and research affiliates to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals and book series, as well as in PRIO’s own Report, Paper and Policy Brief series. In editing these series, we undertake a basic quality control, but PRIO does not as such have any view on political issues. We encourage our researchers actively to take part in public debates and give them full freedom of opinion. The responsibility and honour for the hypotheses, theories, findings and views expressed in our publications thus rests with the authors themselves. © Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). ISBN 978-82-7288-964-6 (online) Production and Cover design: Crystal Graphics CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................. 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................................ 4 THE MIGRATION LANDSCAPE .................................................................................................................... 7 LEGAL FRAMEWORKS AND IMPLEMENTATION .................................................................................. 14 THE CITIZENSHIP REGIME ......................................................................................................................... 18 MIGRATION INFLECTED BY THE CYPRUS CONFLICT: TWO CASE-STUDIES ................................. 22 DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE OF MIGRATION CONTROL ................................................................... 25 RECEPTION AND RECOGNITION POLICIES ........................................................................................... 29 INTEGRATION POLICIES ............................................................................................................................. 31 MIGRATION SINCE 2015 ............................................................................................................................ 33 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................ 36 RECOMMENDATIONS ................................................................................................................................. 38 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................................. 39 2 INTRODUCTION n 8 March 2017, news reports stated that a boat carrying 24 Syrians had reached the coast of Akamas, which lies at the northwestern tip of Cyprus. 1 The group was Omade up of eight men, five women, and eleven children. They were taken to a first reception facility for health checks by police and emergency service, under the immigration control scheme ‘Nafkratis’, until their status was clarified. On 5 December of the same year, another boat carrying 38 Syrians landed nearby, on the coast of a village just beyond the Green Line that separates the island’s north from south, two areas controlled by different administrations. 2 They were taken to the reception centre in Kokkinotrimithia village in the mainland, before their statuses were ascertained. The bodies of nine people were found on 13 and 14 May by Turkish-Cypriot police in the northern part of Cyprus. 3 On 23 May 2018, there were news reports that Syrian refugees living in the areas controlled by the Republic of Cyprus (henceforth RoC) had identified the bodies in the region of Karpaz as their relatives. 4 On 13 June 2018 another boat arrived on the western coast carrying 61 people. 5 In recent years, i.e., since 2015, patterns relating to irregular migration in the region of the Eastern Mediterranean have changed dramatically. Even though Greece was the main site of the most spectacular of those changes (see Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris, 2016; Papataxiarchis, 2016; Panourgia, 2014; Rozakou, 2016; Cabot, 2014), with an estimated one million people arriving on its shores in 2015 en route to other European countries, 6 by the time of writing in summer 2018, other Mediterranean countries are also witnessing mass arrivals. Cyprus is one of the countries where such changes have been slower and less impactful. Numbers of arrivals have been lower, humanitarian response less strained, and deaths infrequent. One 1 http://www.sigmalive.com/simerini/news/411432/syroi-metanastes-prosaraksan-ston-akama (all web references last accessed 23 July 2018) 2 http://cyprustimes.com/2017/12/05/metaferonte-stin-kokkinotrimithia-38-syri-pou-eftasan-pliario-ston-pyrgo/ 3 http://www.kibrispostasi.com/c89-KARPAZ/n251305-karpaz-sahilinde-can-pazari!-karaya-vuran-ceset-sayisi-8-old 4 http://www.kathimerini.com.cy/gr/kypros/eixan-syggeneis-edw-oi-syroi-poy-pnigikan-anoikta-toy-rizokarpaso 5 https://pafospress.com/ υπό -8 ημερη -κράτηση -ένα -άτομο -σε -σχέση -με / 6 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/country-resource/greece Introduction 3 significant change, however, is the fact that boats have been landing on parts of the coastline that are policed by the authorities of the RoC, compared to earlier patterns where irregular migrants arrived from Turkey to the north of the island, and then crossed the Green Line. This is only one way in which the political problem in Cyprus, ongoing since the 1960s, inflects migration dynamics. In this case it spells the difference between the two routes. But in other cases, it may also determine the difference between greater and lesser chances of regu - larization. 7 As the conflict and migration dynamics in the region continue to remain in flux, the relation between local conflict dynamics and refugee reception will remain uncertain and problems already appearing could be exacerbated. This report provides an overview of these dynamics and relations, with a view to providing recommendations on how current challenges could be taken up more efficiently. 7 This is explored in detail in Demetriou (2018). 4 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND yprus has a long history of migration and forced displacement. The island is often presented in local discourse, including history books, as having diachronically sat ‘at C the crossroads of civilizations’, and cultural influences are celebrated for their blending of eastern and western elements. Significantly, all of Cyprus’s local population groups identify their origins elsewhere. Greek-Cypriots often trace their cultural lineage all the way back to the Achaean Greeks who colonized the island from the 12th century BC. Maronites find their roots in communities that emigrated from present-day Syria and Lebanon from the 9th century AD and through the Middle Ages. Latins claim heritage from Levantine groups that settled on the island during the Crusades and particularly the Lusignan and Venetian rulers (1192-1489 and 1489-1521). In the absence of a formalised history of the Roma population, it is speculated that the Roma settlement on the island took place in the 14th century and was related to population movements during the time of the Crusades. Turkish-Cypriots trace their roots to the Ottomans who conquered the island in 1521, and Armenians often have family histories of descendants settling in Cyprus after the genocide of 1915. Thus, the population of the island is a population identified by migration as well as by conflict. 8 And if migration and conflict are important diachronic elements in the history of Cyprus, they mark the island’s modern history even more starkly. The violence between the two main ethnic communities on the island, Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, drove many to emigrate—beginning