‘Playing properly'

Since 1974, the island of Cyprus has been divided into two sectors. A population exchange in the aftermath of violent conflict effectively ended the traditional residence pattern which for centuries had seen Greek and Turkish Cypriots distributed throughout the island, both in separate villages and in contiguous neighbourhoods of mixed towns or villages. The vast majority of the Greek Cypriot population was now settled in the southern two-thirds of the island, which, as the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus (RoC), has de jure sovereignty over the whole island. The unilaterally declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), in the northern third of the island, became home to the Turkish Cypriot population. During the following decades, members of the Cypriot general public were not permitted to cross the internal boundary known officially as the Green Line, and ‘bicommunal spaces’ – in other words, shared spaces available for everyday encounters between Turkish and Greek Cypriots – were virtually nonexistent. Negotiations to reach an official peace settlement and a solution to the key issues of territorial sovereignty, security and private property repeatedly ended in stalemate. However, something happened in 2003, just one year before the RoC, in the absence of a political agreement which would have united the island, joined the European Union without its northern neighbour. Following a series of organised mass protests and a campaign of civil disobedience by Turkish Cypriot civil society, which according to some estimates was attracting nearly half of the Turkish Cypriot population by the end of 2002 (Demetriou 2007: 993), the Turkish Cypriot leadership was forced to relax its restrictions on Turkish Cypriots crossing the Green Line. In the euphoria of the moment, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots responded to the unprecedented opportunity for freedom of movement, and Cypriots streamed across the Green Line in both directions. This was something that the leadership on neither side had been prepared for. ¹ After decades of promoting a polarised and polarising political discourse framed predominantly around the rights and requirements of competing ethno-national states, both governments were put temporarily on the back foot by people’s readiness to cross over, and to behave well. People visited the homes and villages they had left behind decades previously and sought out former neighbours, work colleagues and friends (Dikomitis 2005). And Greek Cypriots poured into the casinos which had opened in the north over the previous 10 years.