Which interests are served by the pogroms in Chloraka and Limassol?

Pogroms are not “senseless” violence or apolitical hooliganism. It is programmatic violence that aspires to a particular order. It is based on a particular interpretation of the world, it has an ideology and a vision, it has political demands. These demands need not be explicit and publicly articulated at all levels-they can exist implicitly, even at the level of subconscious desires. But pogroms are not only related to future plans and political visions, but also serve certain existing power relations and centres of power.

An x-ray of pogroms should not portray them as isolated, self contained entities or events, but should extend the portrayal to the economy of relations, so that we can understand how these specific pogroms emerged and were constituted, and what kind of instruments they are. Relatedly, we need to see which interests they serve and who profits from them. In this note, I describe two such interests of different character and importance.

The first interest operates on a psychological-ideological level, and concerns the mechanisms of the state with respect to its relations with Turkey and Turkish Cypriots. To illustrate this, I start a little backwards. A friend was asking the other day: “what if tomorrow these far-right groups attack Turkish Cypriots in the same way?” But the bottom line is precisely that they will not attack Turkish Cypriots in the same way, because they know what disastrous consequences it will have. It is the attack they desire to make, but cannot. At this point, their desire reaches a dead end, becomes repressed and becomes bigger with time. The way out is provided by imagination: it constructs a conspiracy theory that wants Turkey to pull all the strings of the migration issue through the idea of a "hybrid war". This triggers a process of psychological displacement, where the target objects of the original desires (the Turks) are replaced by other objects (the migrants), who are easier targets. (I do not dispute that Turkey at some point in time instrumentalized the refugees and carried out a "hybrid war" with the migrants. What I dispute is the extent of this conspiracy theory).

The migrants are now seen as "extensions" of the Turks. So the far-right attacks the migrants, who are an easier target since one need not risk one's life in order to target them, and by targeting them they achieve an (indirect) "victory" over the Turks. This "victory" renews their irredentism and sustains their nationalist ideology, which, after so many years of inertia, is under unbearable pressure from reality. Through this mechanism, attacks on immigrants serve ideological interests related to Turkey, but also to the need for armaments, etc.

The second interest served by the pogroms is more clearly and directly economic, and explains why the economic elite will not clash with the groups carrying out the pogroms (unless the pogroms otherwise harm their economic interests). The pogroms spread terror among the migrants. They impose a stricter discipline on them that will keep them subjugated and confined to their existing working conditions. The migrants will hardly think twice about going on strike to demand better working conditions, as the Wolt workers did six months ago. Therefore, the pogroms intercept any aspirations they may have had to fight in order to be included in the National Minimum Wage as well as to demand other improvements in their working conditions beyond wages. Fear of future pogroms give the government and the economic elites a good excuse to maintain working conditions as they are. Conditions that have created a working class economically inferior to the Greek Cypriot working class. The businessmen see the pogroms and rub their hands.

[This opinion article was originally published in the Cypriot newspaper Dialogos, on Monday 4th September 2023].