Fire (19 page)

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

D
uring 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.