Fire (15 page)

It worked. The soldier studied our papers and then waved us through. As far as I could tell, the only reason the Serb military allowed journalists into Prekaz—a damning place, easily sealed off—was to spread word of what would happen to those who resisted.

Harald drove slowly down the town's wide dirt street, which ended at a pasture. A dead cow lay rotting by the side of the road. Every house had its roof blown off, its windows shot out, or its walls caved in. Rooms spilled their contents to the world, as if disemboweled by some huge claw. Walls were pocked with mortar shell explosions; tongues of soot licked roofward out of windows. Bullet shells lay in gleaming little piles wherever someone had really put up a fight.

Harald and I walked through a wooden gate, splintered by artillery, and into the courtyard of a house. Two abandoned dogs, one with a wound on its back, growled at us from what used to be the doorstep of their home. Harald gave the dogs some sausage and a tin of sardines, and we stepped around them and into their family's home. Schoolwork sat on tables, and jackets hung on pegs alongside things that had been blown to bits. It was odd what had been touched and what hadn't.

After the attack this particular house had served as an outpost for the special police, who had gone through it room by room, laying their hands on everything that could be tipped over or broken open. Books, clothes, photo albums, and lamps all lay tangled on the floor. On top of one pile was a Serb porn magazine, discarded by the latest occupants.

We paid our respects to the fifty-five rectangles of freshly dug-up earth in the pasture above town, and then we drove back out to the world of the living. As we passed, the men at the bunker were posing for a group portrait—the destroyed town in the background, their machine guns wedged upright in the crooks of their arms. The men grinned broadly at us.

One of them wasn't holding a gun in his hands. He was holding a huge double-bladed ax.

1999

T
he 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

A
n 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.”