Disappearances and Political Memory

1 HEIRS OF ANTIGONE: DISAPPEARANCES AND POLITICAL MEMORY Introduction On 17 August 1998 two middle-aged Greek Cypriot women, Androulla Palma of Peristerona village and Maroulla Shamishi from Nicosia, Cyprus, went secretly at dawn to a military cemetery at the outskirts of Nicosia. They had with them two heavy pickaxes. They started attacking a collective grave, murmuring miroloyia (mourning songs). After an hours’ hard work they had broken through the mar- ble slabs. Alarmed neighbours called the police, but not before the forewarned women had called the private television channels on their mobile phones. When confronted by the police and the army, the women said that they wanted their husbands. They said that they did not know whether their husbands were dead or alive since the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus and its subsequent occupation, and they wanted to know whether their husbands were dead (as they had been told by some witnesses), or whether they were still missing, as claimed by the government. The authorities told them that they had committed an offence, took them into police custody, where they were then questioned, but released. The incident made national headlines. Some said that the women were crazy, and craving publicity; others that their pain had driven them to such extremes. After 24 years their husbands were clearly unidentifiable. They were frightened, proud, and defiant about what they did. What had driven them to such extreme measures? This book attempts to answer this question. 1 Bodies of Evidence This book is about how representations of the past continue to influence con- temporary realities in Cyprus. It deals with the case of some 2000 disappeared people and the resulting traumas that have affected the lives of the relatives. Its main aim is to demonstrate how memory can be seen as both a political plan used by state authorities and political leaders, and as a political act on the personal and local level against the very authorities that have employed it. Its main theme is the political economy of memory: its production, consumption, distribution and exchange – for memories too are produced socially, traded, countered, and used to obtain or purchase other ‘goods’. It deals with interrupted mourning, trauma, attitudes to loss of memory, the ineffectiveness of traditional religious symbols in dealing with massive social dislocation and personal traumas, and how a whole category of people – the disappeared – have come to represent the political fan- tasies, fears, and aspirations of social groups, and their representatives. Between 1963 and 1974 over 2000 persons, both Greek and Turkish Cypriot, went ‘missing’ in Cyprus, an island with a population distribution of 80 per cent Greeks and 18 per cent Turks. This represents a significant number for a population of 600,000. This was not a ‘simple’ case of individuals being made to ‘disappear’ as in dirty-war Argentina and elsewhere in South America where agents of fascist regimes executed political opponents, or ordinary citizens believed to be ‘enemies’ of the regime. Rather, these individuals disappeared in the course of hostilities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots between 1963–74, and during a mainland-Greek backed coup in 1974, and the subsequent Turkish invasion. Responsibility for their disappearances appears straightforward in some cases, more murky in others. It would be a relatively ‘simple’ matter if these individuals had been made to disappear by members of the opposing ethnic group in the course of hostilities. Indeed in some cases both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots may wish that to be the case. But the picture is much more complex. Some individuals may well have been killed by members of their own ethnic group and made to look as if they had been ‘disappeared’ by the opposing ethnic group. Few bodies have been recovered; most will probably not be. Some individuals, who it was claimed had disappeared, have now been shown to be alive. Others have recently been discovered to have been openly buried in cemeteries under normal tombstones with their names clearly visible, yet these same names still figure on the lists of the missing, whilst others on these lists are assumed to be alive, or at least missing and certainly not necessarily dead. For others there is strong evidence that they are dead, yet their relatives maintain their names on lists of the missing, and refuse to recognise, often with official connivance, the possi- bility of their death. The issue is far from closed and continues to poison relations between the two groups. The issue of burial and recovery of people who are dead and yet kept metaphorically and literally unburied is an old and important theme in western and other literatures and cultures, and continues to exert a strong hold on our collective imaginations. The lack of proper dispatch and of narrative and mourning 2 Heirs of Antigone closure also runs through much recent history. It still continues to trouble many, including relatives of US servicemen Missing In Action in Vietnam, and the relatives of the ‘disappeared’ throughout many parts of the globe. It has also pro- vided a plot for some basic social dramas, and philosophical explorations. One of the most potent was the story of Antigone: Antigone, a daughter of Oedipus king of Thebes by his mother Jocasta. She buried by night her brother Polynices, who had been killed in battle fighting against his native city, against the positive orders of Creon who, when he heard of it, ordered her to be buried alive. She, however, killed herself before the sentence was executed; and Haemon the King’s son, who was passionately fond of her, and had not been able to obtain her pardon, killed himself on her grave. (Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, orig. pub. 1788; repr. 1984: 51) As George Steiner (1984) reminds us in his magisterial survey, the theme of Antigone has dominated modern western imagination. It can also provide a good entry for approaching some important issues in Anthropology. As the entry to the Oxford Classical Dictionary notes, ‘Antigone’s role in the play has been the sub- ject of endless dispute, with some critics claiming that she is wholly in the right, others that she and Creon are equally right and equally wrong. Most would now agree that she is no saint (she is harsh and unfair to Ismene)’ (1996: 104). Sophocles, like Plato, was concerned with the tensions that arise from the transition from a tribally based society, where ritual obligations are paramount, to a norm-based city state marked by obedience to transcendent rules. One could see Antigone as anticipating, in crude form, the tensions between Durkheim and Weber in their treatment of rationality, order, compulsion and restraint. Whereas Antigone represents justice (dike), Creon is concerned with the law (nomos). Antigone belongs to a Durkheimian world of mechanical solidarity. Ritual is crit- ical for social harmony. Her dike is ‘the justice due the dead and the gods below. It is private, exclusive, jealously guarded’ (Segal 1981: 169). She is compelled to her actions. Creon, by contrast, attempts to anticipate salvation through restraint: compliance with transcendent city-based rules. He fails. Although he dares to anticipate Weber’s world, he poses it not in terms of the interiorization of norms but in terms of differential access to knowledge and virtue. He believes that some individuals, especially in positions of authority, should be ‘more rational’ (or guided by different principles) than others. Because he belongs to a tribal world, of house and genos, he can only visualise this in terms of the elevation of patriarchy to a principle of government and obedience. He lacks the knowledge avail- able to Plato’s philosopher king, or the humility of ordinary men and women when facing the gods. Like most ancient Greek rulers, Sophocles’ Creon is an aspiring Platonist but a recidivist patriarch. He has power without wisdom or insight. He starts by evoking abstract justice and principles but becomes increasingly personal and arbitrary: ‘Creon’s dike, like his ‘laws’ of earth, though it seems 3 Bodies of Evidence at first to be the impartial ‘justice’ that holds the city together, becomes increasingly personal and emotional, increasingly distant from the ‘oath-bound justice of the gods’ praised in the Ode on Man. He can even go so far as to require obedience to the city ‘in what is just and the opposite’ (ibid: 169). This is patriarchy without sentiment; Platonism without wisdom. As Segal notes ‘both his private and his public life become the very opposite of his ideals’ (1995: 132). Antigone can be seen as the ancient Greek answer to the Hobbesian question of the rationalisation and concentration of power, except that tragedy follows rather than anticipates absolute secularising power. Rather than a rationalisation of power, Antigone can be seen as a critique of power. As Beard and Henderson remind us, drama was the ancient Athenian version of engaged sociology: ‘Drama was special to Athens as an intrinsic and key institution of the democratic city … In drama the democratic city was on display’ (1995: 88–9 emphasis in original). Creon learns by his misfortune. All humans suffer. The play ends with retributive justice, and asks for piety, and moderation. Prideful words teach wisdom in old age. Sophocles can- not resolve the dilemma of social and logical coherence. The two are fatally opposed. This theme continued to trouble western thought. Hegel famously thought the two could eventually come together. Weber was not so buoyant. Rather than the Sophoclean disenchantment of the Gods, Weber’s disenchantment of the world entails the separation of fact and value.

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