Fire

REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS

The rusting yellow car sits on four flat tires against an old wall in the buffer zone, directly in front of a cement bunker with a machine-gun slit. Painted a cartoonish camouflage, the bunker is manned by a lone Greek Cypriot soldier, who smokes a cigarette as he watches us.

I have been walking the length of the buffer zone in Nicosia with a British peacekeeping soldier named Murphy, who carries a silver-tipped walking stick instead of a gun. He uses it to point things out. We’ve started at a UN observation post at the east end of town and progressed between the two irregularly parallel cease-fire lines under a dreary rain that patters through the thick no-man’s-land foliage and fills puddles in the road. Murphy has shown me where, in 1989, a Greek Cypriot soldier supposedly dropped his pants and from 164 feet away mooned his Turkish counterpart, who promptly shot him dead. The spot, now a patrol landmark, is identified by a sign: MONUMENT TO THE MOON. Farther along is a place where the UN-patrolled zone, known in Nicosia as the Green Line, squeezes down to the width of a narrow street. The balconies of two buildings on either side extend to within ten feet of each other, and a few years ago Greek and Turkish soldiers took to strapping knives to the ends of long poles and jousting with each other. In other places they sling stones or shout insults.

“We can’t do anything about it unless we see it happen,” Murphy tells me. “It’s all right for the [Greeks] to say, ‘These Turkish soldiers are throwing stones at us.’…So we phone up the Turks and say, ‘We’ve had reports that some of your soldiers are throwing stones.’ The first thing they say is, ‘Well, did you see it?’ And we say, ‘No, we didn’t.’ So there’s not a lot we can do.”

Now we stand in the rain in front of the old yellow car, which also is identified by a sign, YELLOW CAR. A landmark for UN patrols, the car was once the focus of a bitter dispute between the Greeks and the Turks. In the original delineations of the buffer zone, Turkish territory was described as extending from the “front” of the yellow car to the corner of a building. By “front” the UN meant the end of the car where the headlights are located. The Turks, however, argued that the front was the end of the car nearest to one of their observation posts; the resulting difference in the angle of the cease-fire line would give them another fifty square feet of territory.

“They finally worked out a compromise,” Murphy tells me. “The line stayed where it was, but a Turkish soldier gets to stand in the triangle of disputed territory for five minutes each hour.”

The Green Line was established in 1963 by a British commander who was trying to quell street fighting that had erupted between Greek and Turkish militias. He supposedly took a green pencil and bisected a map of Nicosia from one side of the old Venetian fortifications to the other. Eleven years later, after the Turkish Army overran a third of Cyprus, the buffer zone was extended across the length of the island, a distance of 112 miles. A few months later the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in Cyprus [UNFICYP] oversaw a massive, but peaceful, population transfer of 40,000 Turkish Cypriots from the south to the north to replace the estimated 175,000 displaced Greek Cypriots, most of whom had fled south during the invasion. The exodus was proclaimed voluntary as well as temporary, but of course it was neither. When the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus finally declared itself to be an independent state in 1983, all but the most optimistic refugees realized that they were never going home.

Today the two countries mark their borders as the cease-fire lines that were established in 1974. Between the lines is the buffer zone that none of the 190,000 Turkish Cypriots to the north or the 655,000 Greek Cypriots to the south may enter without special permission. Per capita, Cyprus is the most militarized country in the world after North and South Korea—with 35,000 Turkish and Turkish Cypriot troops and 14,500 Greek Cypriot troops, monitored by 1,200 UN soldiers—yet it is one of the most peaceful: only 16 people have been killed along the divide since 1974. Greek Cypriots refer to the buffer as the dead zone. On Greek Cypriot maps, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is labeled “Area Occupied by Turkish Troops,” and in conversation, Greek Cypriots often refer to it as the so-called Turkish Republic or simply the pseudo-state. There are no embassies or consulates in the TRNC besides Turkey’s, and the UN does not maintain formal diplomatic relations with them. There is a checkpoint at Ledra Palace, in the middle of the buffer zone on the western edge of Nicosia, but only foreign passport holders may cross through it, and only from the south to the north and then back again. You cannot go in the other direction, and if you visit the TRNC, you must be out by 5:00 P.M.

Within Nicosia the Green Line doesn’t look like much, just a series of deserted streets that end at brick walls and cement barriers. Every so often appears a sandbag bunker with a Greek Cypriot soldier inside, invariably smoking a cigarette. The line has a strange pull to it, like the edge of a cliff or a third rail; it was the first place I went when I arrived in Nicosia. I dropped my bags at the hotel and walked past the fancy shops on Ledra Street to a cul-de-sac, where some staging had been set up against a concrete wall along the line. It’s the only place where tourists can look out over the rubble of no-man’s-land, and a flight of metal stairs has been installed to encourage viewing. While I was there, an English family arrived and trudged dutifully up to the platform, children licking at ice-cream cones and parents fiddling with camcorders. They looked over the railing at the ramshackle Turkish positions a hundred feet away, clucked their disapproval, and had their photo taken with a young soldier who was standing guard nearby. Then they wandered off to do more shopping.

The soldier had an M-16 slung around his neck and spoke fair English. I asked him if he and his buddies ever talked with the Turkish soldiers on the other side, but he told me that this was the one spot on the Green Line where the Turks don’t post guards. Apparently, tourists who step up to the platform occasionally get carried away and start yelling, and the Turks don’t want to deal with that. Elsewhere, though, the Turks will shout insults at the Greeks or throw rocks.

“Do you ever yell back?” I asked the Greek soldier.

“No,” he said, smiling. “We are careful not to provoke them, because we are the weaker side.”

It was a strange admission for a soldier to make, though in keeping with the general theme of the lookout point. Alongside were a photo exhibit of the wartime destruction and a map showing, day by day, the changing battle lines of the Turkish invasion. Few countries would offer up such evidence of their own worst defeat; it was practically a monument to Turkish military might. The point seemed to be that Cyprus was the object of unbridled aggression from a highly militarized government and that if the world didn’t act decisively, who knew what would happen next?

Thirty years ago it was the Turkish Cypriots who had to be careful not to provoke. The problems started in earnest in late 1954, when two Greek gun-running boats made the 250-mile crossing from the island of Rhodes to Cyprus and landed on a deserted stretch of the western coast. On board were hundreds of pounds of explosives and a former Nazi collaborator named General George Grivas, who had arrived to lead a guerrilla group called the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters. Known by its acronym, EOKA, the group was committed to kicking the British out of Cyprus—they’d been there since the Ottomans handed it to them in 1878—and eventually uniting Cyprus with mainland Greece. The prospect of union with Greece—“enosis”—presented a terrifying threat to the 18 percent Turkish minority in Cyprus, however, who in no way wanted to become Greek citizens. So it was with considerable alarm that they watched three hundred EOKA guerrillas, fighting with pipe bombs and homemade machine guns, elude twenty thousand British troops and forty-five hundred Cypriot police in the rugged Troodos Mountains. By 1959 the British still hadn’t been able to stamp out EOKA, so they gave the Cypriots their independence—and thus made Cyprus the rest of the world’s problem.

It was clear to the West that given the level of rhetoric, General Grivas wasn’t going to stop until he had achieved union with Greece, an outcome that Turkey would never permit. The south coast of Turkey lies only forty miles away, and a Greek military presence so close to its borders was unthinkable. If the enosis movement were to succeed, Turkey would invade Cyprus, Greece would intervene, and suddenly there would be—at the height of the Cold War—a full-blown conflict between two NATO members.

To prevent such a disaster, the British arranged for a meeting in Zurich between the antagonists. They finally agreed to a fabulously awkward constitution that provided for a Greek Cypriot president, a Turkish Cypriot vice-president, and disproportionately large Turkish representation in the parliament. England was to retain two military bases on the island, and both Greece and Turkey were allowed to contribute small contingents of troops for common defense. As signatories to the agreement, England, Greece, and Turkey all could intervene militarily if they deemed the Cypriot constitution to be in danger. On August 16, 1960, the Republic of Cyprus was born, with a former EOKA leader, Archbishop Makarios III, as president. Almost from the beginning the arrangement was a nightmare.

It was the contention of the Greek Cypriots that the Turkish Cypriot minority had no reason to fear for their safety and that hatred between the two groups was the result of Turkish propaganda and British manipulation. (“As late as 1955 Greeks and Turks had always lived peacefully together, like brothers,” reads a placard at Nicosia’s Museum of National Struggle. “Their relations had always been completely harmonious, and the Turks had never put forward any claim on the island.”) In reality, things had never been so rosy. Although they had tolerated each other for centuries, Greek and Turkish Cypriots had largely lived in separate communities, and calls for enosis drove the two groups even farther apart. By the early 1960s death squads of Greek nationalists were regularly killing Turkish Cypriots, who, instead of turning to the government for protection, started to gather into easily defended enclaves and arm themselves. In retaliation, the Greek Cypriots tried to strangle the Turkish communities with economic blockades, and the situation quickly escalated into gun battles in the streets. By late 1963 the Green Line had been established across Nicosia, but even that didn’t stop the fighting, and Archbishop Makarios finally appealed to the UN for help. Several thousand peacekeepers were sent in with a renewable ninety-day mandate, but by then the Turkish Cypriots had completely severed relations with the Cyprus government, and fighting was breaking out regularly between the two militias.

Like a bad marriage, the split was only a matter of time. In the late 1960s Archbishop Makarios officially stopped calling for enosis as a political goal, and in July 1974 he accused the Greek military of trying to undermine his power. A cadre of right-wing officers, outraged by what they perceived to be a betrayal of Hellenism, sacked the presidential palace and chased Makarios into hiding. They also killed hundreds of moderate Greek Cypriots suspected of being Communist sympathizers or simply soft on Turks. Within days they had replaced Makarios with an EOKA fighter named Nikos Sampson, who had already proved his patriotism by taking seven hundred Turkish Cypriot civilians hostage during the Green Line clashes ten years earlier. Within forty-eight hours the Nixon administration had dispatched a high-level diplomat named Joseph Sisco to try to keep Turkey out of the war, but it was already too late. “We will not repeat the mistake we made ten years ago,” the Turkish prime minister told Sisco on July 19. The next morning a flotilla of Turkish troop carriers scraped ashore near the north Cyprus town of Kyrenia and disgorged six thousand Turkish troops.

Scott Anderson

THE TURKISH REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN CYPRUS

An old man and a scruffy white dog stand at the edge of an empty swimming pool, both seemingly lost in thought as they stare into its depth. The pool is exceptionally deep—maybe fifteen feet—and lined with cracks, its bottom covered with a thick layer of dead leaves. The man spots me on the opposite side of the gate and beckons me through.

“Very bad design,” the man mutters when I come alongside. “Big problems.”

I ask if he’s thinking of repairing it.

“No, no.” He chuckles. “It has been like this for twenty-five years. It is a museum.” He looks to the three-story house beyond; it is an angular structure, concrete balconies and windows perched above the sea. “All this is a museum. In 1974 it was the home of [President] Makarios’s doctor; now it is for the Peace Operation martyrs.”

In the early-morning hours of July 20, 1974, advance units of the Turkish amphibious force started coming ashore in a small cove about three miles west of this house on the north coast of Cyprus. It marked the beginning of what Turkish Cypriots still call the Peace Operation. A matter of definition, perhaps, because the most immediate results of that operation were the deaths of as many as four thousand soldiers and civilians, the dislocation of over two hundred thousand more, and an international crisis that very nearly led to regional war. I’m not here to quibble, though; the old man starts toward the house, and I follow.

It was a cold overcast day, and I had headed west out of the coastal resort town of Kyrenia to explore the nearby beaches where the Turkish soldiers had first come ashore in 1974. I had stopped at a memorial park on a bluff overlooking the sea, an austere mausoleum with the graves of some seventy Turkish soldiers arrayed before an abstract sculpture of bent black metal. To one side lay another kind of graveyard, some two dozen old tanks and armored personnel carriers parked in neat rows and surrounded by flower beds and trees. Most of the weaponry appeared to be of 1950s vintage, the feeble armor the Greek Cypriots had mustered to oppose the Turkish Army, and the joint ravages of combat and pilferage had transformed them into empty husks. It was while walking amid the tanks that I had glanced over the fence to see the man and his dog by the swimming pool.

At the entranceway to the house, the old man stops and draws my attention to the scars in the flagstone wall. “This is where they killed Karaoglanoglu,” he says, referring to the Turkish ground forces’ commander killed early in the invasion. He points to a nearby clump of trees. “The Greeks were hiding in there, and when Karaoglanoglu peacefully approached this door—tok!—a mortar.” He shakes his head sadly, then pushes open the door and motions me inside.

The far side of the house is a wall of windows, and just beyond is the Mediterranean, all whitecaps and thrashing waves on this stormy day. The bottom floor is taken up with display cases of captured Greek weapons, fragments of shells and grenades. Upstairs are four rooms, each lined with row upon row of black-and-white photographs of young men in formal pose, Turkish soldiers killed in the Peace Operation. Some of the photos appear to be from high school graduations, the teenagers in civilian dress and smiling, whereas others look to be enlargements of military identification cards, the subjects more somber and with shaved heads. Here and there are glass display cases containing the dress uniforms of dead officers and their personal effects: wallet-size photographs of wives or children or girlfriends, letters home written on thin paper, medals.

If not much of a Peace Operation, the first phase of the Turks’ 1974 invasion was also not much of a military triumph. In fact, it was pretty much a fiasco, a detail glossed over by the Turkish government but given unintended confirmation by the neat juxtaposition of the rows of “martyr” photographs in the oceanfront museum with the display of antique enemy weaponry in the adjacent field.

On that first day, all had gone rather smoothly for the Turkish soldiers. Coming ashore at the western end of Five-Mile Beach, the six-thousand-man vanguard had met little resistance and by evening had fanned out along the coastline; in the morning, commanders planned to cross over the Kyrenia Mountains and link up with the paratroop unit that had landed just outside Nicosia—or Lefkosa, as it is known to the Turks. It was with nightfall that things began to go awry.

Incredibly, the naval armada that had delivered the vanguard to the Cyprus coast headed back to Turkey at dusk, and so did the jet fighters that had provided air cover throughout the day. Even more incredibly, there was virtually no communication link between the landing force on the island and military planners on the mainland. Greek Cypriot fighters, complemented by Greek soldiers, seized the moment to attack all along the Turkish line, surrounding the paratroop unit outside Lefkosa and streaming down from caves in the mountains above Five-Mile Beach to fall upon the landing units strung out along the coast. Throughout the night, ferocious battles raged as positions were overrun, retaken, and lost again in a chaos of close combat made worse by raging brushfires.

At dawn the Turkish Air Force finally returned to the skies, and what had been a seesaw battle now turned into a slaughter. Turkish planes bombed military positions across the island, decimated Greek Cypriot armored convoys caught in the open, and cleared their entrenched mountain positions with napalm. By the time a cease-fire was declared the next day, the Turkish Army had carved out a narrow enclave that extended all the way to the Turkish Cypriot neighborhoods of Lefkosa.

But the Peace Operation wasn’t done just yet. Over the next three weeks, as diplomats frantically sought a solution to the crisis, Turkey quietly built up its force on Cyprus to some thirty thousand troops, and they were ready to roll when the peace talks collapsed. In just three days the Turks poured out of their bridgehead to seize more than a third of the island and create the frontier they still hold today.

It’s all a little hard to picture at ground level, however. Up close, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus resembles nothing so much as a quiet, slightly raffish tourist destination. The once-pretty villages along the northern coast have been transformed into sprawls of cheap hotels and fish restaurants, weird concoctions in faux-Tudor or-Bavarian style to lure the British and German vacationers who predominate. Those who tire of lolling on the beach can take hikes in the hills, visit the ruins of castles, or play the slots at one of the grim roadside casinos. Along with tourism, the TRNC has become an international tax haven—“an ideal place for foreign businessmen,” government brochures exhort—with an array of dubious-looking offshore banks tucked away in the back streets of Lefkosa.

Lurking at the edges of the landscape, however, is a parallel universe: the martyrs. Over the past twenty-five years the Turkish Cypriots and their mainland Turkey protectors have studded the countryside with monuments and cemeteries and museums dedicated to those who have fallen, and the message these buildings and fields carry is directed equally at the villagers in the hills and the tourists on the beach: This is a land created by blood and defended by blood; there can be no return to the old days.

In the story of their existence, the Turkish Cypriots weave an epic tale of victimization and dominance. From their vantage point, history has been a four-hundred-year-long siege in which the majority Greek Cypriots have never ceased trying, through both force of arms and guile, to force them into an intolerable union with Greece—or to push them off the island altogether. Nowhere does this mythology more radically diverge from that of the Greeks than in the interwar period of 1964 to 1974, between the collapse of the republic and the arrival of Turkish troops.

In the Greeks’ telling, this was the island’s golden age, an idyllic time when the two communities coexisted in harmony. In the Turks’ rendition, it was the time when the noose was steadily tightening around their necks, when they were forced to seek safety in tiny vulnerable enclaves, and any trip outside the “ghettos” meant constant harassment by Greek Cypriot authorities or worse. With the bloody EOKA coup against Makarios in July 1974, Turkish Cypriots figured that they were the next targets for annihilation, once the Greek moderates were dealt with, making the Turkish Peace Operation a justified act of defense.

That sentiment is firmly on display in the monument built above the little cove on Five-Mile Beach where the Turkish soldiers came ashore. Just down from a great pillar of concrete jutting out of the ground at such an angle as to be nicknamed the Turkish erection are seven concrete stele that purport to tell, in brief words and bad etchings, the history of modern Cyprus.

The first two stele borrow heavily from Picasso’s Guernica: lots of unhappy people and animals afloat in flames. By the third panel, help is on the way: Lantern-jawed Turkish soldiers stride into the fiery wasteland with drawn swords, their progress heralded by flittering doves of peace. For the rest of the monument, the warriors for peace continue apace, the flames gradually tamped out, the doves joined by blooming flowers and pretty—if slightly lantern-jawed—girls.

Other honorifics to the Turkish Cypriots’ version of a martyr-filled history are scattered throughout the TRNC. The former Greek fishing village of Ayios Yeoryios, where Colonel Karaoglanoglu was killed, has been renamed in his honor, and Five-Mile Beach is now officially the Beach of the Resolute Outbreak. Beside the old Venetian wall of Famagusta is a little graveyard with a sign in Turkish, English, and German that reads: ARMED GREEK CYPRIOTS AND GREEK THUGS TRIED TO ELIMINATE EVERYTHING TURKISH TO ACHIEVE ENOSIS; IN THIS CEMETERY LIE TURKS WHO, UNARMED AND DEFENCELESS, WERE MARTYRED BY GREEK CYPRIOTS AND GREEKS. In Lefkosa the government has built a Museum of National Struggle, perhaps to maintain parity with the Museum of National Struggle on the Greek side of the city.

In at least one sphere of the museum competition, however, the Turkish Cypriots have achieved hegemony. Located on Mehmet Akif Boulevard, the Museum of Barbarism is a single-story whitewashed building set in an unruly yard of flowers and fruit trees and surrounded by much newer and taller structures: chrome and glass auto dealerships; five-story office buildings. The particular acts of Greek barbarism it is dedicated to are those of 1963, and the curators have clearly opted for the scared-straight approach. Lining the walls of the foyer are a dozen ghastly black-and-white photographs of Turkish Cypriots of all ages lying dead in fields, in morgues, being exhumed from burial pits, their bodies bullet-riddled, knife-slashed, decomposed.

The Museum of Barbarism stays on its theme. In each of its several small side rooms, each lit with a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling, is an unbroken line of similarly grotesque photographs mounted at eye level. Some of the captions identify the victims and detail the circumstances of death, but others are more general: “Another innocent victim of the brutal Greek campaign to exterminate the Turkish population.”

In the museum’s largest room, one comes to an ominous display, a glass sarcophagus filled with bath towels and baby shoes. Instead of murder photos, two walls of this room are lined with the personal snapshots of a young family. One shows a young boy at a table crowded with other young boys, staring at a large cake set before him. “Murat, pensive on his seventh birthday,” the caption reads. “With his left hand on his cheek, he tries to guess what the future has in store for him on this happy occasion, not knowing of course that he has few days left to live.”

As it turns out, in 1963 this little house on Mehmet Akif Boulevard was the home of an army doctor, Major Nihat Ilhan; his wife, Muruvet; and their three young sons, including seven-year-old Murat. The major happened to be away when EOKA gunmen attacked on the night of December 24, but they found his family huddled for safety in the bathtub; the next morning, a photographer dutifully recorded the grisly scene. That photograph—Muruvet Ilhan lying dead in the bathtub, her three dead boys clutched to her chest, the bathroom walls and floor sprayed with blood—is now such an iconic image in Turkish Cyprus that the museum curators have hung several large copies of it, along with two paintings that seek to replicate the scene faithfully, as if only repetition can convey its awfulness.

But it is more than just an image, for beyond the sarcophagus of bath towels is the bathroom itself, untouched for thirty-six years. Beneath a coat of dust, a white bottle of liquid soap still stands on the edge of the bathroom sink, and the tub and walls bear the same cracks and bullet holes as in the photograph. “The marks on the ceiling,” a small sign above the tub reads, “are brain pieces and blood spots belonging to the murdered.”

Sebastian Junger

REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS

Posted at the Ledra Street viewpoint—alongside photos of Greek refugees and buildings pancaked by Turkish bombs—is a list of what the Turks gained by invading Cyprus. According to the Cyprus government, the Turks gained 70 percent of the island’s gross output, 65 percent of the tourist accommodations, 83 percent of the general cargo capacity, and 48 percent of the agricultural exports. Those are just numbers, though; Greek Cypriots generally don’t grab you in bars and complain about their loss of cargo capacity. They grab you and complain about the city of Famagusta.

Famagusta lies near the center of a long scallop of bay on the eastern shore of the island, facing Syria. In the thirteenth century it was the wealthiest port in the Mediterranean, and before 1974 its Varosha district, now a Turkish military base, was the most fashionable beach resort on the islands, flooded every spring by English and Scandinavian tourists. Like Nicosia, it is surrounded by massive stone walls that were reinforced in the sixteenth century by Venetian military engineers bracing for the arrival of the Ottomans. The invasion finally came in 1570. As any Greek Cypriot can recount, fifty thousand Turks came ashore in the withering heat of midsummer, led by a sadist named Lala Mustafa. After sacking Nicosia and killing twenty thousand of its inhabitants, Mustafa led his forces against Famagusta, which was defended by a garrison of Venetian soldiers.

The Turks hammered the thick stone walls with an estimated hundred thousand cannonballs until the Venetian commander, Marcantonio Bragadino, finally ran out of supplies. Bragadino arranged for peaceful terms of surrender, but the Turks, enraged by the losses they had suffered while taking the city, started torturing and killing Bragadino’s soldiers. When Bragadino objected, Mustafa ordered that his ears and nose be cut off and that he be skinned alive. The skin was stuffed with straw and mounted on a wagon, and legend has it that Bragadino lived long enough to behold his own gruesome double paraded through the streets of Famagusta with a parasol stuck in its arms.

Four hundred years later the Turkish Army walked back into the city. It was August 1974, “phase two” of the Turkish invasion, and Famagusta’s Greek Cypriot inhabitants had grabbed whatever they could and fled south to the small farming town of Dherinia. From a gently sloping hill they could look down on the beautiful beaches and now-empty hotels that had been their home just hours before. It almost certainly didn’t occur to them that the situation was permanent; it almost certainly didn’t occur to them—late in the twentieth century—that upper-middle-class Europeans could be driven out of their beach homes by a modern army without the rest of the world intervening. They were wrong.

Now the closest they can get to Famagusta is a hillside several miles away where they can look out at the city. Two “viewpoint” cafés have sprung up, each boasting Turkish-atrocity photos and a rooftop viewing platform. I stop at the one called Annita’s because it also overlooks a spot where two Greek Cypriots were killed by TRNC forces in 1996. Annita’s is a three-story apartment building on the edge of a desolate swath of Dherinia suburb that abuts the buffer zone. Across the street are a roll of razor wire and then several hundred yards of untended fields and then more razor wire. A flagpole flying the TRNC flag—a red sickle moon and star against a white background—marks the beginning of “the pseudo-state.”

I climb three flights of stairs to the café, sit down at a table, and order a coffee. It arrives with a pair of binoculars. On the wall of the café is a stop-action sequence of a young Greek Cypriot named Tassos Isaak getting beaten to death in a field; the field is the one I can see out the window. Next to the photos is a placard: “On the 11th of August, 1996, the barbarian Turkish settlers brutally murdered in cold blood and in full view of the UNFICYP, Austrian contingent, a peace-loving 24-year-old Cypriot. They used truncheons and metal bars to crush the spirit of freedom.”

The events that led to Isaak’s death were set in motion when the European Federation of Motorcyclists organized a ride to protest the Turkish occupation of Cyprus. One hundred and twenty riders left the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on August 2, 1996, and proceeded on a one-week tour of Europe. They wound up in Cyprus on August 10, and, after joining forces with some seven thousand bikers from the Cyprus Motorcycle Federation, promptly declared their intention to crash the cease-fire line. After pressure from the UN, Cypriot President Glafcos Clerides finally forced the bikers to change their plans, but thousands of protesters gathered in the Dherinia area anyway. The Cyprus police were deployed along the cease-fire line near what is now Annita’s but had left the checkpoint unmanned, and by midafternoon the protesters had pushed their way into the buffer zone and started screaming at the Turkish troops. They were quickly confronted by a rough crowd of a thousand Turkish Cypriots who had been bused in by the Turkish military. The Turkish counterdemonstrators were predominantly civilians but carried bats and iron bars, and some were members of a vicious nationalistic group called the Grey Wolves, who had come from Turkey to deliver—in their words—“a special surprise package” to the motorcyclists.

Watching all this was Rauf Denktash, president of the TRNC, recording the events with a camera and telephoto lens. A melee broke out in the buffer zone, and as Turkish troops started firing into the crowd, four Greek Cypriots—including Isaak—got hopelessly tangled up in razor wire. UNFICYP policemen managed to pull three of them free, but Isaak fell to the ground and was quickly surrounded by an ugly knot of Grey Wolves. Photographs taken from the Greek Cypriot side show him desperately trying to ward off the blows while Grey Wolves and Turkish police officers in riot gear take turns beating him on the head with truncheons and iron bars. By the time UNFICYP peacekeepers managed to get to him, Isaak was dead.

A wall-mounted television at Annita’s café plays, in a continuous loop, news footage of Isaak’s death, as well as footage of the next death three days later. On the afternoon of August 14, immediately after Isaak’s funeral, a few hundred motorcyclists returned to the same spot outside Annita’s and again managed to get past the Greek Cypriot police into the buffer zone. Among them was Isaak’s cousin, twenty-six-year-old Solomos Solomou. Footage of the second protest shows Solomou dodging past two UNFICYP soldiers and slipping through a gap in the fence that separates the buffer zone from Turkish territory. Waiting for him were a line of Turkish troops, machine guns at the ready, and a cluster of state security officers on the balcony of a nearby building. Solomou managed to cross the Turkish cease-fire line and make it to a large white pole that was flying the TRNC flag. While security officers leveled their weapons at him and UNFICYP soldiers looked on in amazement, Solomou started shinnying up the pole.

He made it about a quarter of the way up before a red splotch blossomed on his neck and he slid back down to the ground. A total of five bullets hit him in the stomach, neck, and face. News photographs clearly show two security officers—later identified by the Greek Cypriot police as Kenan Akin, now a TRNC member of parliament, and Erdal Emanet, chief of the TRNC special forces—firing pistols from the building, quickly followed by Turkish troops kneeling and firing into the crowd of protesters. Two UNFICYP soldiers and seven Greek Cypriots were wounded, including a fifty-nine-year-old woman who had shown up to try to convince her son to come home.

I scan the buffer zone with the binoculars that came with my coffee, but it just looks like every other weeded-over field I’ve ever seen. The windows of the two-story building that the Turkish security forces fired from have been bricked in, with slits left for machine-gun barrels, and the TRNC flag still flies on the pole that Solomou tried to climb. I watch the video loop of the killings several times and then get back in my car and drive around until I find the cemetery where Isaak and Solomou are buried. It’s a small plot of stone crypts surrounded by a concrete wall, tucked behind the town’s soccer stadium. Isaak’s grave is crowded with flowers, and several plastic-coated photographs of his own murder are propped against the gravestone. Solomou’s gravestone is fancier. It depicts, in poured concrete, Solomou on the flagpole as Turkish soldiers level their guns to kill him. In a war with few casualties, along a front line with almost no gunfire, his tomb serves to remind people that there’s still an enemy out there.

“The tragedy of Cyprus is that there is no tragedy,” goes a sarcastic bit of local wisdom. The idea that there hasn’t been enough suffering to merit world intervention is blasphemy, of course, but there are still a few Greek Cypriots who believe this. They just have to be quiet about it. Later, after returning to Nicosia, I ask a longtime European diplomat what he thinks of the idea.

“Both sides revel in this sort of victimology,” the diplomat says, asking not to be identified. “It’s what we call a double-minority problem, where both sides feel like they’re the oppressed minority. The Turkish Cypriots say that their security is threatened because they are a minority on the island. The Greek Cypriots argue that they’re a minority if you take Turkey and Cyprus together…. And neither sidewill stand up to its obligations as an equal player in this dispute, so both sides wait for the other to take the first step.”

The diplomat works in an ultra-high-security office near the Ledra Palace checkpoint. Out his window I can see a huge Turkish Cypriot flag marked out in stones on a distant hillside. Turkish troops supposedly went up there day after day and painted the design on the undersides of the stones. When they were done, they waited until nightfall and then turned all the rocks over. The next morning, the Greek Cypriots awoke to find a huge Turkish Cypriot flag emblazoned across the flanks of the Kyrenia Range.

“Is there a solution?”

“The problem could be solved if you had cooperation between Greece and Turkey,” says the diplomat. “Which is not on the horizon. If you look at Northern Ireland—I don’t like drawing parallels, but this is quite a good one, actually—up until 1984 Britain and Ireland were at loggerheads, and the communities in Northern Ireland exploited this difference to ensure that the conflict just raged on. Then the British and Irish governments agreed to a joint policy on Northern Ireland and stuck to it, firmly. The two communities could not see any light between the policies of the two governments, and in the end they just had to come to terms with each other. If you had that kind of cooperation between the motherlands, the Cyprus problem could be solved pretty easily.”

At the end of the interview the diplomat takes me up to the roof for a look at Nicosia. The sun is setting behind the Troodos Mountains, and we can hear the Muslim call to prayer drifting over from the north side of town. The buffer zone runs like an awkward scar through it all, and beyond it are the massive earthen berms of the Turkish defenses, dug in with tanks and artillery. The diplomat points out the slapdash Greek defenses on our side and then traces the course of the buffer zone as it extends west. “It’s filled with songbirds and wild animals,” he says. “Hunters have killed everything else on the island, and it’s the one place they can’t go.”

Scott Anderson

THE TURKISH REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN CYPRUS

Rauf Denktash, the president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, doesn’t much look the part. A short, portly man of seventy-five who bears a striking resemblance to Homer Simpson, he speaks English with just a trace of a British inflection—a result of his legal training in London in the 1940s—and is most often photographed in baggy sweat suits. On this day, sitting in his office in the heavily guarded Presidential Compound in downtown Lefkosa, he wears a business suit. The office is spacious and sunlit, and he shares it with a large aquarium of tropical fish and three very noisy parakeets, in a cage beside his massive desk.

For over four decades Denktash has been the dominant political figure in the Turkish community of Cyprus. One of the chief organizers of the outlawed Turkish Defense Organization back in the 1950s—and twice expelled from Cyprus for his violent militancy—he has been president of the TRNC since its founding. Obviously, such a man knows how to parry journalists, and the evening before our meeting I’d asked a local reporter the best way to handle him.

“Above all, don’t ask him anything historical,” the journalist urged. “As soon as you give him the chance to mention the constitution of 1960, you’re doomed; you’re going to get the Denktash history lesson for the next half hour.”

Well, forewarned is forearmed. Sitting across from the president at the couch and coffee table arrangement in one corner of his office, I ask my first, carefully designed question.

“I’m already quite familiar with the history of Cyprus and because I know you’re a very busy man, I’d like to concentrate on what is happening today, on what you feel is most important for Americans to know about the TRNC and the current situation in Cyprus.”

The president nods. “What I would like Americans to know is that Cyprus has two owners, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, and these two owners had agreed to form a partnership republic in 1960.”

As the journalist suggested the previous night, “doomed.” With never a pause, Denktash begins his discourse on the island’s modern history from the Turkish viewpoint: the rise of the EOKA terrorists in the 1950s; the 1960 London Agreement, which the Greeks immediately sabotaged; the terror that existed in the Turkish enclaves throughout the 1960s; how the 1974 Turkish Peace Operation undoubtedly saved them all from EOKA annihilation; the political stasis that has existed ever since.

“And what do you see as the ultimate solution to the Cyprus problem?” I finally manage, because even the most energetic seventy-five-year-old has to pause sometime.

“A bicommunal confederation,” Denktash says. “That’s it. The Greek Cypriots must recognize our legitimacy and our right to govern ourselves. We’ve never made any claim on them—we’ve never called Cyprus a Turkish island, we have always recognized that we share this small island with them—and they must view and treat us the same way. I have said this to the Greek Cypriots many times, and they have always refused to hear it.”

Underlying Denktash’s comments is a deep resentment of the Republic of Cyprus’s ability to keep his domain isolated from the rest of the world. Since Turkey is the only country in the world that officially recognizes the TRNC, it means that international flights do not land there, all diplomatic missions are kept at the “interests section” level, and all incoming mail is routed through a drop box on the Turkish mainland. On the flip side, the isolation gives offshore companies in the TRNC an enormous advantage over companies that have to adhere to international standards and helps fortify Denktash’s state of siege message to his people.

In the Greek Cypriot worldview, Rauf Denktash is either the consummate political opportunist, his power dependent on his ability to keep the island divided, or a puppet of mainland Turkey and its “occupation” forces. In reality, Denktash appears to be enormously popular across the political and social strata of the TRNC. With a repetition that is at first quaint, then becomes tedious, his countrymen have the habit of calling him “the father of our nation” and make frequent comparisons to Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. At times it seems that almost everyone in the country, whether expatriates along the north coast or farmers in the most remote and impoverished mountain village, has had some surprise personal encounter with the president. Usually these involve Denktash, a serious photography hobbyist, tramping through the countryside in his baggy sweat suit with a camera around his neck, his small security detail following at a discreet distance. And although there certainly are those who feel that he is getting too old for the post, his political power hasn’t diminished; in each of the five presidential elections he has stood for, Denktash has emerged triumphant.

Even more remarkable is the degree to which his take on the “Cyprus problem” and how to resolve it is shared by his countrymen. If a visitor to the TRNC is not careful, he or she will be subjected to the “Denktash history lesson” by virtually anyone. Across the political spectrum—and with over a dozen political parties, that spectrum runs from hard socialist to neofascist—nearly all party leaders have adopted Denktash’s talk of a bicommunal confederation, even if they can’t quite articulate what that means. To a degree I’ve not encountered in any other ethnic conflict zone in the world—not in Bosnia or Sri Lanka, certainly not in Israel—the Turkish Cypriots appear to speak as one, and they have chosen Rauf Denktash to do the talking.

This is not to say, however, that the TRNC stands as some monoracial Volksland; rather, it is a place full of quirky little anomalies, reminders of the past that the government has never quite decided whether to tout or be defensive about. In the Karpas Peninsula, the long, thin finger of land that extends to the northeast, some six hundred Greek Cypriots have chosen to remain in their native villages rather than move south, as have a few hundred Maronite Catholics in the western town of Kormakiti; today these stalwarts continue to receive weekly deliveries of “emergency” supplies by United Nations troops. TRNC officials often cite the existence of these communities as proof of their live-and-let-live philosophy but become noticeably fretful at the prospect of a visitor’s actually going to them and hearing the residents’ litany of complaints against the government.

Throughout the countryside, Greek Orthodox churches have been either boarded up or retrofitted to serve as mosques, and with a frequency that defies coincidence, Orthodox shrines have the bad habit of occupying vitally strategic land, cordoned off behind barbed wire in militarily restricted zones and off limits to all outsiders. With those Greek monuments that the government simply cannot remove from view—like the beautiful little Monastery of Apostolas Varnavas (St. Barnabas) on the Mesaoria plains, one of the most important Orthodox sites on the entire island—they seem to rely on more subtle discouragement; although two major highways in the TRNC pass close by, neither posts signs to the monastery.

To fill up this landscape, with all its vestiges of Hellenistic culture, and to fill up all the formerly Greek villages that were abandoned after the invasion—after all, only 40,000 people moved north to replace the 175,000 who moved south—the TRNC has energetically tried to woo others to move in. Most controversial have been the “Turkish settlers,” thousands of peasants from Anatolia, one of the poorest regions in mainland Turkey, who have taken over entire villages on the Mesaoria and built new towns in the flatlands below Famagusta. Socially conservative and largely uneducated, the settlers are looked down upon by the far more liberal and cultured native Turkish Cypriots, and are a source of rage for Greek Cypriots, who see them as interlopers illegally occupying old “Greek land.”

At the other extreme are the expatriates, mostly British and Germans, who either have taken up permanent residence in the TRNC or maintain summer homes here, and nowhere is their privileged status more in evidence than in the picturesque village of Karmi. Nestled in the Kyrenia Mountains overlooking Five-Mile Beach, Karmi was a Greek Cypriot village until 1974; today it is “European only” by law, meaning that not just Greeks and mainland Turks are forbidden to own property there but Cypriots as well. Over a game of pool at the cozy Crow’s Nest pub, the owner, a good-natured Brit named Steve Clark, explains how that came about.

“Well, once the Turks came ashore in ’74, the fuzzies [Greeks] all took off across the mountains—can’t say I blame them—and this place just fell apart. A few foreigners were living up here, and they finally got together and went to Denktash and said, ‘The only way this village is going to come back is if you make it all European.’ Denktash agreed, and that’s the way it has been ever since.”

Given twenty-five-year leases in return for renovating the village’s dilapidated homes, the “Europeans” quickly transformed Karmi into a reasonable facsimile of a Cypriot hill town, if a bit abundant with flower boxes and cute house names. To judge by the minutes of their last town meeting—tacked up in an announcement box on the main square right next to the old Greek church—the residents’ most pressing concerns revolve around rising water bills, noisy dogs, and renters who play loud music. Oh, and the ongoing struggle to get their leases extended for another forty-nine years.

“President Denktash has done a lot for us—well, for the whole country,” says a slightly hammered Englishwoman at the Crow’s Nest, “but we’re having a very difficult time getting a clear answer on the leases.”

Although many of the other expatriates living along the north coast find the apartheid quality of Karmi distasteful, they share the sentiments of the town’s residents in at least one crucial aspect. Like determined expatriates everywhere, there is the tinge of the zealous convert about them. They tend to paint the Cyprus conflict in stark black and white: The Turks have done no wrong, are practically incapable of doing wrong; unification would be “a disaster, a holocaust”; the Greeks are lazy, scheming, vicious, never to be trusted. There is an anger, tinged with racism, to the “Europeans” that one rarely hears among the Turkish Cypriots, and many have directed that anger into lobbying politicians “back home” to grant full recognition to the TRNC, a point that will surely not be lost on President Denktash when the lease extension papers finally reach his desk.

Not surprisingly, the Greek Cypriots have seized on each one of these issues—the desecration of antiquities, the “flood” of Turkish settlers, the “illegal occupations” in Karmi—and added them to their Thousand Points of Plight campaign. For each one, though, Rauf Denktash has a quick and ready response.

As I listen to the president, I begin to wonder how many times he has answered these same questions, given the same lecture—to visiting diplomats, to journalists, to assemblies of his countrymen—and it finally dawns on me why he simply ignored my first question and led me back into history. Because there’s really nothing else to talk about. The current situation in Cyprus? Same as last year, same as twenty years ago. Albeit a Greek legend, there is something rather Sisyphean about Rauf Denktash. He has been saying essentially the same thing for twenty-five years, and no one but his choir has listened. The Greek Cypriots, the American and UN peace negotiators who periodically shuttle around the island have always looked for an angle, an opening, and there never has been one. Rauf Denktash is obdurate and unyielding and steeped in history because so are his people.

“Do you ever get tired of this?” I ask. “Hearing the same questions, giving the same answers? Do you ever think of just chucking it all and retiring to Switzerland?”

Denktash slips into a slight smile. “No. I feel it is part of my duty as president to get our message out to the rest of the world in any way I can. Of that I can never tire. And Switzerland is too cold.”

At the end of our long interview, as the president is walking me to the door, he suddenly veers over to a high bookcase. Standing on his tiptoes, he reaches up and pulls down an oversize paperback book and hands it to me. It is a collection of the photographs he has taken of his little domain over the years. I quickly leaf through it to show my appreciation—there are some nice portraits of villagers, others that look like standard postcards—and I think of the photograph I’ve seen of him, his camera strapped around his neck, watching the violent events of August 1996 unfold in the no-man’s-land outside Dherinia.

“If the situation in Cyprus was exactly the same fifty years from now,” I ask, “would that bother you?”

For the first time, Denktash seems caught slightly off guard. He glances over his bookshelf. “Well, I would like to think that at some point progress would be made, that other nations will recognize our legitimacy.”

“But you’ve found ways to work around that. You have security, you have a homeland. If nothing changed, would it bother you?”

He gives me a shrug. “Not really.”

Sebastian Junger

REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS

If you go to Cyprus, pretty soon you will hear about Pyla, a small town outside Larnaca where Turkish and Greek Cypriots live together in peace. The town falls entirely within the buffer zone, so neither side was able to claim it as its own. During the Turkish invasion both sides, at different times, sought protection from the UN, and today they still live together, under the shadow of an UNFICYP observation post. “Together” is a relative term, though. There are two mayors, two town halls, two post offices, two phone systems, and two cafés. There are, in effect, two towns, although Greek Cypriots invariably offer up Pyla as a shining example of bicommunal cooperation.

The other thing Pyla is famous for is fresh fish, a vestige of the black-market trade that once existed in the town. Since the TRNC isn’t a recognized country, it may ignore such niceties as import duties and copyright laws, allowing Turkish Cypriot merchants to sell Western knockoffs to Greek Cypriots at rock-bottom prices. Ten years ago Pyla boasted forty or fifty Turkish shops doing a booming business in leather jackets, designer jeans, cheap sunglasses, and basketball shoes, but Greek Cypriot authorities eventually cracked down on the cross-border trade, because any commerce with the TRNC, legitimate or otherwise, was seen as a de facto acceptance of an illegal government and therefore a violation of Greek Cypriot law. Besides, shop owners in Larnaca were losing business. Police started pulling cars over outside Pyla and confiscating illegal goods, and pretty soon the only thing left for sale was fish caught in the TRNC.

I drive to Pyla on a beautiful early-spring day with the tree buds suddenly opening up and the Mediterranean sparkling blue and flawless in the distance. Pyla looks like every other farming town in the area, a cluster of small stone houses and cheap apartment blocks set amid the stubbornly uninteresting fields of eastern Cyprus. There are no checkpoints on the road into town and no policemen to show my papers to, so I just drive in and park in the main square. There is a Greek café on one side, a Turkish café on the other, and a UNFICYP observation tower in the middle. On a nearby hill are a Turkish machine-gun position and a huge metal cutout of Atatürk in profile, striding down the slope into town.

Since there is open access on both sides, Scott has decided to meet me here for a drink, and as soon as I step out of the car, he comes walking up and shakes my hand. I’m worried that after a week of Turkish propaganda he’ll start gibbering about Greek atrocities, but he seems unchanged. He’s been here for an hour and has already arranged an interview with the Turkish mayor, or mukhtar, so we cross the square and step into a street-level office with a big plate-glass window. The mukhtar’s name is Mehmet Sakali. He wears an old blue suit, frayed at the cuffs, and a black wool sweater over a shirt and tie. His shoes need resoling, and he has the kind of leathery skin that you usually see on farmers or ranch hands. Scott asks how relations are between the two communities.

“Not so well,” he says. “No Turks go to Greek Cypriot coffee shops and no Greek Cypriots go to Turkish coffee shops. If a Greek comes and talks to a Turk, the spies in town will interrogate them. Day by day, they try to keep the people apart.”

“How were relations before?”

“They were fine until 1958,” the mayor says. “Then EOKA started killing people.”

Scott and I have been told that the UN awarded Pyla a one-million-dollar renovation grant several years ago, but the town lost the money because no one could agree on how to spend it. It was an important moment, because a successful collaboration would have served as a model for the rest of Cyprus. And bicommunal activities, as they’re called, would greatly help the Greek Cypriots’ case for being accepted into the European Union, something they have lobbied for energetically over the loud objections of the Turkish Cypriots. Scott asks him what happened.

“We built a coffee shop and a church with the money,” says Sakali, “but we can’t agree on anything else because the Greeks insisted on all Greek workers. I’ve worked with three other Greek mukhtars, but now the Cyprus government is getting into everything and it’s no good. We’ve set up meetings ten times, and each time this mukhtar has refused to come or has sent his town clerk. So how can I trust him?”

Scott gives me a baleful stare, which I ignore. After the interview we have a drink at the Greek Cypriot café, and then Scott leaves town and I go to talk to the Greek Cypriot mayor. He’s not in, but the town clerk is, a clean-shaven young man named Stavrous Stavron. He offers me a seat in his gleaming new office and asks me what I need to know. I repeat the same questions we asked the Turkish mayor, starting with relations between the two sides.

“It depends on what you’re looking at,” he says. “You can see neighbors living together peacefully and you can see a village coming into conflict. It’s intervention from the outside—by that I mean the politicians—that causes tension. The last year has been very difficult because the new [Turkish] mayor is a protégé of the extremists.”

I tell him that the “new mayor”—Sakali—says the deal fell through because the Greek Cypriot mayor kept refusing to meet with him. Stavron shakes his head. “We ended up employing three Greek Cypriots to repair the Orthodox church and twelve Turkish Cypriots to renovate the Turkish coffee shop. Both projects were finished successfully, but then there were elections on the Turkish side and the new mukhtar won without any opposition. The old mukhtar was forced to not be a candidate; that’s what I mean by ‘outside influence.’”

It seems that Sakali—presumably a puppet of the Denktash regime—sabotaged the project by insisting on complete Turkish control, which of course the Greek Cypriots couldn’t accept. After using only one hundred thousand dollars of the million-dollar grant, Pyla had to relinquish the rest because the two sides could not come to an agreement. That each side would pass up nearly a million dollars in order to make the other side look bad is a devastating comment on the political leadership in Cyprus. If they can’t cooperate here—in a fully integrated town that is crippled by unemployment—what chance do they have anywhere else?

“The old mukhtar was fair,” Stavron adds wistfully. “He was a Turk—we knew he was a Turk; we knew we could never turn him into a Greek—but we appreciated his cooperation.”

I thank Stavron for his time and walk back across the square. I have the impression that every person in town knows that Scott and I have been here and that half of them are still watching me through their window slats. I drive out to a Turkish restaurant for some of the fresh fish that Pyla is famous for. The meal is good but not good enough to make a town famous. I eat quickly and get back into the car. Dark clouds are rolling off the Troodos, and by the time I hit the highway a heavy cold rain is washing my windshield.

The Greek Cypriots can never win, I think, racing northwest toward Nicosia. The only thing that will bring stability to the island is a gradual meshing of the economies, and neither side will let that happen. The Greek Cypriots have stubbornly resisted doing any business with the TRNC because that would indirectly support the Denktash regime, and the TRNC has made it an unspoken policy to sabotage any budding relationship between the two countries. If peace came to Cyprus, the Greek Cypriots would become eligible for membership in the European Union, and that is something that Turkey—which has been rebuffed by the EU—could never accept. The only way out for the Greek Cypriots would be to recognize the TRNC diplomatically and declare the hostilities over, but that will never happen. Even acceptance into the EU isn’t worth that.

And so the conflict groans on, and the peacekeepers keep walking their patrols.

“All the politicians in the south have been around since before independence,” explains a prominent Greek Cypriot journalist (who, to my frustration, months later, requests that he not be identified, a reversal that testifies to the stifling paranoia of Cypriot politics). I seek him out the day after returning from Pyla. “They’ve made a career out of being defiant,” he goes on. “These are the same guys who lost the war in ’74…. They’re prisoners of their own rhetoric; they know fuck-all about anything apart from the Cyprus problem.”

The journalist is old enough to be part of the last generation to have any memory of the Turkish invasion. Anyone younger effectively grew up without contact with Turkish Cypriots and knows only what the government says about them. Clearly, he is tired of hearing it.

“No one will go on record and say it,” he says, “but now your average man on the street would say, ‘Why don’t we just build a wall?’”

“Literally build a wall?”

“Yeah, a big wall, them on that side, us on this side,” he says. “And we don’t want to see them ever again.”

Afterward I walk downtown for lunch. The weather has cleared, and English tourists are again out in force. They wander in and out of Gucci and Benetton shops and sit at cafés with their faces turned to the sun. A few blocks away, thousands of Turkish troops wait in bunkers for their orders to attack. It’ll never happen, I think. They already have what they want.

Scott Anderson

THE TURKISH REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN CYPRUS

During my last few days in the TRNC, I travel with an interpreter provided by the government’s Office of Public Information. It is an indication of how seriously the government takes its public relations initiative that the information office falls under the aegis of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Defense, but any concern that Ayshen, a pleasant, if slightly stiff woman in her mid-thirties, has been assigned to keep tabs on me is soon dispelled; through most of the interviews, her boredom is palpable.

As it turns out, Ayshen is originally from the city of Limassol, in what is now the Republic of Cyprus. Her family was solidly upper-middle-class—her grandfather a large landowner, her father a physician—until they lost almost everything in the “enclave era” of the 1960s. After the 1974 partition they moved north as refugees, and Ayshen eventually went off to attend university in London; she returned to the TRNC only a few years ago, a decision she clearly regrets. “Always it is the same here,” she says after one particularly long and tedious day of interviews. “The same politics, the same arguments. Sometimes I feel like I am caught in a nightmare and cannot wake up.”

Until last year Ayshen had been active in the “bicommunal” talks initiative. Sponsored by the United Nations and international conflict resolution groups, the talks were designed to bring together small groups of Turkish and Greek Cypriots—businessmen, intellectuals, educators—in hopes that the dialogues might lead to a political opening. Ridiculed by the governments and conservative media of both sides, the effort has largely been abandoned. “It is too bad,” Ayshen says, “because I felt it was important that we try anything that might change the situation.” Now she carries the label of “peacenik,” which causes her some problems around the office.

Between interviews, Ayshen tries to steer me to the more pleasant places to be found in the TRNC, one being the St. Barnabas Monastery outside Famagusta. In the deserted inner courtyard, she sits on a stone bench beneath a bitter lemon tree. “This is one of my favorite places in the whole country,” she remarks, “this and the Karpas Peninsula. Up there, it is so quiet—miles of empty beaches, small villages. It’s the best place to go to get away from everything.”

I know her well enough by now to know what she means by “everything”: politics, the speeches, the Problem.

At St. Barnabas Monastery, we are just three or four miles from the Martyred Villages. In late July 1974, a few days after the first phase of the Turkish Peace Operation, EOKA gunmen seized three Turkish villages, led over eighty residents out into the fields to be shot, then threw their bodies in mass graves. Today the road connecting the villages is called Martyr’s Way, and beside it are a couple of nearly identical memorial parks, both centered on a stone wall on which the names of the murdered have been carved, both containing freestanding posterboards displaying the same awful photographs of the mass grave exhumations. Along Martyr’s Way, large yellow signs, helpfully printed in both English and Turkish, point toward the actual mass graves.

When I mention our proximity to the Martyred Villages, Ayshen’s mood falls.

“Do you want to go to them?” she asks.

When I say no, that I’ve already seen them, she seems tremendously relieved.

On my last day in the TRNC, I convince Ayshen to take me to the village of Tashkent, in the hills just north of Lefkosa. I am curious to see Tashkent, both because of the massive Turkish Cypriot flag that has been painted on the mountainside just outside it and because it is known as the village of widows. The original Tashkent was in the south, and amid the fighting in 1974 nearly all the adult males were rounded up and murdered by Greek Cypriot gunmen. In the population transfer of 1975, the Tashkent widows were brought north and given the formerly Greek village of Vouno as their new home.

Wandering around the village, I spot an old woman in black sitting on her porch on this sunlit day. Her name is Emine Mutallip, and sitting in the sun with her is her ninety-two-year-old father, Mustafa Sadik. Emine graciously brings out chairs for us to sit on and, at my instigation, begins to tell the story of those long-ago killings, the tragedy that took her husband and two brothers. Suddenly both she and her father burst into tears, and then Ayshen does as well.

Afterward, as we wander along Tashkent’s main street, Ayshen apologizes for her outburst. “It brings back memories of my own family,” she says. “I was just a little girl when I was in the refugee camp, but I remember that we were very poor and I was always hungry. All my family, we had to flee to different places, and always my father was worried, trying to find the others, trying to learn if they were still alive. Three times in my childhood I was a refugee, but I have not thought about it for a long time.”

As we drive down the long hill toward Lefkosa, however, I discover that there’s another reason for Ayshen’s unhappiness. Some ten days earlier, on the very day I arrived in the TRNC, Turkish security agents in Nairobi grabbed Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the militant Kurdistan Worker’s Party, and whisked him back to Turkey. Ocalan, a man the Turkish government holds responsible for the deaths of some thirty thousand Turks and whom the United States government has classified as a terrorist, had been harbored in Kenya by the Greek embassy and had been traveling on a doctored Republic of Cyprus passport.

“For me, I think that is the end,” Ayshen says in the car. “Before, I think I didn’t want to believe how much the Greeks hated us, that maybe there was a way for us to live together again. But for them to support a man like Ocalan just because he kills Turks, now I see how much they hate us. Now I cannot see any way out of this.”

As I drive, I think of what a hopeless, bitter place this is. Cyprus is like some boat sunk under a great weight of stones, and while the rest of the world talks of finding some way to refloat it, none of the stones is ever removed. Instead, the Greeks and Turks busy themselves finding more stones to drop onto the wreck: the Dherinia killings, the struggle over European Union membership, the Ocalan affair. Tomorrow, no doubt, they’ll find another.

So how do you fix it? Both sides in this conflict wield history as a weapon and invoke it as the basis for their own plaintive cry for justice. But if the history of Cyprus—indeed, the history of most of the world—reveals anything, it is that there is no such thing as justice: You live in your house until the day someone comes along and throws you out, and then he lives there until someone else comes along to throw him out. Just where do you pinpoint the moment in this island’s history and say, “Here, we will right this wrong,” and let all the previous ones go by the wayside? Obviously, you cannot afford to go very far back, because in Cyprus, as everywhere else, there is always a prior victim.

More specifically, how do you fix it when both sides clearly have so little interest in doing so themselves? Start small, I suppose. Point out to them that wallpapering their countryside with grisly photos of those killed by the other side may not be the best way to foster fraternal thoughts. Suggest that it might be imprecise to describe a military offensive in which thousands were killed as a “peace operation,” or that there may be a better way to bring one’s rivals to the negotiation table than by referring to them as “the so-called ministers of the pseudo-state.” Even these baby steps the Cypriots will not take. By steadfastly clinging to the rhetoric of a quarter century ago, by stoutly refusing to make any concession, you finally have to conclude that it’s because they want it this way.

But there is, perhaps, another way to look at all this. In the fifteen years of ethnic violence before the 1974 partition, hundreds of Cypriots on both sides were killed. In the twenty-five years since, there have been a total of sixteen—or about the same number that die on the island’s highways in a bad month. At a cost of ninety million dollars a year, the United Nations has brought calm to an intractable conflict zone—about what the recent NATO military operations in Kosovo cost for just two days. Of course, people have suffered and lost a great deal in Cyprus—especially all those uprooted from their homes and forced to start over again—but at least now, kept apart by the buffer, they have been given the chance to start over. That’s far better than what usually happens in war zones.

So perhaps what has passed as “The Cyprus Problem” all these years has actually been “The Cyprus Solution,” and perhaps the diplomats who periodically wring their hands over the ongoing stalemate on this island should actually be taking notes and trying to export it elsewhere. That would require new thinking among the power brokers of the West, and perhaps especially among those in Washington, embroiled in the latest crisis in the Balkans. Maybe what most needs to end is all the chatter about exit strategies. Those in power must recognize that there is no exit from bad history and that at certain times and in certain places the best that can be done is to simply stand between the fighters indefinitely and hope that someday they’ll get over it and move on—not in a year, not in ten years, but maybe eventually. Until then the least costly solution, in terms of both blood and money, is to give the Bosnians and Serbs and Kosovars of the planet what the Cypriots already have, a “dead zone” across which they can hurl accusations and threats in safety. At least it will give them something to talk about, and all that the rest of the world will have to suffer is the hearing of it.

Back in Lefkosa I leave Ayshen at the entrance to the Office of Public Information and watch her walk slowly, head bowed in sadness, up the entranceway. It occurs to me that it is the people like her—the earnest, the “peaceniks,” the goodhearted and forgiving—who are the last, quiet victims of this place. They are to be found in Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo as well, of course, those who refuse to believe that a culture once torn apart can’t be put back together again, who forever wait for their day to come.