Turkish Cypriots ‘cannot be linobambaki’, Arikli says

Turkish Cypriots “cannot be linobambaki”, the north’s ‘transport minister’ Erhan Arikli said on Thursday.

Speaking on the 453rd anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571, he described August as “the month of the Turks”, and said, “the month of August is as if it were created for our nation”.

“I do not know whether almighty God makes a distinction between his months and days, but the month of August seems to have been created for our nation,” he said.

He began by referencing August 30, the date of the end of the Battle of Dumlupinar in 1922, the last battle in the Greco-Turkish war, which spelled the end of the Greek forces’ presence in Asia minor.

“If we had lost on August 30, we would have gone straight to the Asian steppes, from whence we came,” he said.

He then spoke of various Ottoman military defeats in the late 19th century and early 20th century, before appearing to misunderstand the counting of the dead during the first world war.

He said the Ottoman Empire had sent 2.85 million soldiers to fight in the first world war and that 2.2 million of them died, though the official figure of 2.2 million includes civilian deaths and, among those civilian deaths, includes an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

The Cypriot government, among others including Armenia, France, Germany, Greece, and the United States, recognise those Armenian deaths as a genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire and not as Ottoman casualties of the first world war.

Turkey, the north and Azerbaijan dispute the categorisation of those deaths as a genocide.

After this, Arikli turned his attention to Cyprus, saying, “our ancestors gained those lands for us by shedding blood.”

“If we hold a part of these lands in our hands and live on them today, it is our national duty to remember our ancestors with mercy and gratitude.”

“It is the same in Cyprus. We conquered Cyprus in this month, we established TMT in this month and started our struggle for existence. We also established our security forces this month [in 1976],” he said.

“We cannot be linobambaki like some people. We cannot live on these lands which our ancestors brought us and insult them.”

The linobambaki – linen-cottons – were a crypto-Christian community in Cyprus, predominantly of Venetian Catholic and Greek Orthodox descent, who presented outwardly as Muslim to curry favour with the Ottomans after the Ottoman conquest of the island, and to pay less tax.

They assimilated into the Turkish Cypriot community during British rule on the island, though their non-Muslim practices of consuming alcohol and pork and seldom attending religious services are commonplace among the modern Turkish Cypriot community.