Authors: Ryszard Kapuscinski
Behind the dense mass of peasant men stand the crowd of women, dressed in black, with black scarves on their heads. They are all old.
At the edge of the field there are tents upon tents—the refugee camp. I have seen camps of this kind. The most terrible were outside Calcutta, filled by Hindi shadows that had fled East Pakistan. I say ‘shadows’ because that throng of skeletons, even while still moving, no longer belonged to the human world. There are Palestinian camps in Jordan, there are the camps of starved nomads in Africa, who having lost their pastures and their cattle—the basis of their existence—are now listless, desolate, waiting for death. Around the cities of Latin America the camps are human hills of poverty. These people have fled the hunger and animal drudgery of the villages, hoping that somewhere, anywhere, even in a refugee camp, it will be better, that they will salvage their lives and find their place.
Dear friends, I say, I have seen much misfortune in my life and here I see more. Our world does not smile on everyone and when it is good in one place, it is bad in another. The trouble is that we do not know how to get off the see-saw. There is no sense in going on about it. There are always dark clouds and we can never know where and when these clouds will produce a deluge. You are this time
victims of the deluge. The deluge on Cyprus has taken the form of an armed invasion; a foreign army has seized your villages. I understand your despair, because I come from a country that has known many invasions. The roads of my country have been trod upon by millions of refugees, and in every great war my country has lost everything. I myself have been a refugee, and I know what it means to have nothing, to wander into the unknown and wait for history to utter a kind word. I know that what you care about most right now can be reduced to the questions: when will we recover our homes? when will we return to our land? I want to tell you honestly that I do not know. It may be in a month; it may be never. Your fates are entangled in a great political game, and I cannot foresee how that game will turn out. That is why I am standing here, on this platform, uselessly. I did not come here to promise anything. I came here to get to know you and I hope you will tell me what happened. I propose that we end this rally, and perhaps one of you will invite me to your tent.
I express my thanks, but I have made for a commotion, because the programme calls for many more speakers. An activist of some kind calls on the people to stay and announces the remaining events. I go to those old women dressed all in black. One of them leads me to her tent, and several others follow. They sit me in a chair, although they remain standing. I ask the interpreter why they are standing and am told that they will sit down once a man tells them to. They give me coffee and water. They are Greek peasants from the northern province of Cyprus. Hard-working, worn down by housekeeping and bearing children. Tactlessly, I begin asking about their ages. They are forty or fifty years old, but they look like elderly women. People live long here but spend half of their lives being old. Youth, prolonged endlessly in western Europe, seems not to exist here. First
there is a little girl in school, and then immediately a dignified mother surrounded by a pack of children with big, beautiful eyes and their thumbs in their mouths, and a moment later there is this kind of old lady, dressed in black.
I ask these women what hurt them most. They say nothing and cover their faces in their black scarves.
Later they tell me about their sorrow. They tell how suddenly the Turkish army came: it was as if foreign troops had sprung up out of the ground. Airplanes dropped bombs and napalm; tanks rolled along the roads; there were soldiers shooting in all directions. Panic broke out in the villages and people hid in the woods or the hills, wherever they could. Because the Turkish army came from the north, the Greeks began fleeing south. They left everything behind and thought only about saving their lives. Along the road they met Turkish Cypriots heading north. The two streams of people passed each other in silence, both driven by fear, uncertain of what would come next. Houses and vineyards burned all around and they became lost. Nobody knew where they should go, where their people were and how they could reach them.
One of these women is named Maria Salatas. The soldiers killed her husband because he would not tell where he had hidden their two daughters. The soldiers violated any girls who fell into their hands. The local policeman—a Turkish Cypriot—had helped her daughters to hide in the fields. The woman calls these Turkish Cypriots jikimas, which means ‘ours’ in Greek. Later, Maria was held in a Turkish camp for three months. There was no water and nothing to eat. Turkish Cypriots sneaked food to the Greeks from the village. That village is called Kaputi and the daughters are alive; they are sitting here with us.
Maria and the other women in the tent think that everything was good before the invasion. Of course, you could find hatred in the villages, but the Greeks and the Turks were used to it. They accepted it. It was a part of their lives; it was an internal, communal affair. An equilibrium of hatred existed in the villages and people knew when to back off to avoid a catastrophe. The Greeks of the village never set out to finish off the Turks and the Turks would never set out after the Greeks. Sometimes the boys would go after each other, and then somebody would be hurt, sometimes killed. But it is the same all over the world. Anyone who knows peasant life knows how starved for events a village is, even if it has to pay for them with its own blood. Is that any reason for the Turkish army to come in with tanks and send the Greeks into exile? They want the army to leave so that things can be as they were. Nobody picks the oranges, the grapes have rotted on the vines, the cattle have surely been butchered and the meat eaten.
They ask me if I know anything about the missing.
I know nothing.
They ask everyone. Several thousand young Greeks disappeared during the invasion. Whether they are alive, where they are—nobody has an answer. There is no proof that they died, but there is no proof that they are alive. The Turks say they know nothing about them. So where are they? Cyprus is a small island; you could hide ten people here, but not several thousand. They cannot bring themselves to think that those boys are buried somewhere. After all, nobody has seen their graves. Someone said that they were taken out to sea and sunk, but the mind cannot accept such things.
They then showed me their tents. They apologized for the poverty. If I had come earlier, they could have showed me
their houses. They had everything in their houses: light and running water and furniture. There was always a garden, and they never ran out of fruit. They talked about these houses, about their villages, as if they were talking about a lost paradise. Their lives had been broken and they did not know to whom to turn. They asked the men, but the men said nothing, shrugging their shoulders. Men can go out into the world and live anywhere, but a woman cannot live without a home. Such a thing was unheard of.
Evening, night and dawn in Nicosia. Nicosia: charming and sunny and bright. A splendid architecture; just looking at the buildings is a pleasure. Goods from all over the world fill the shops; the Cypriot industry is small, and everything has to be imported. Here and there, traces of the invasion: a wall full of bullet holes, an empty window frame, a burnt-out car. But the city’s losses are not great. People went to work during the days of the invasion, and shops stayed open.
‘During the whole war,’ a Polish woman tells me, thinking of the invasion of July and August 1974, ‘I saw people lined up only once. For a porno film.’
All day, beginning in the morning, the Greeks sit in chairs in front of the little cafés. Until noon they sit facing the sun; at noon they pull the chairs into the shade; in the afternoon they move back into the sun. These are the men—no women. They sit in silence, without a word, not moving, often with their backs turned to each other, but some sort of unseen community exists among them, because when a Greek comes up to one of them from the street and starts to argue, they all begin to argue.
At dusk the beautiful girls come out for their walk. The girls cannot walk alone; their mothers or grandmothers accompany them. They cannot look around, because that is
in bad taste; it creates the impression that they are hunting for boys. The eyes of their mothers or grandmothers are proud, but also wary. From the café terraces, the girls are watched by United Nations soldiers: Swedes, Danes, Finns, big blond boys pink from the sun—good matches, but who can tell if their intentions are honourable? None of these blond boys gets up from the tables, though. They sit drinking their beer, bored, sloppy. Their fair, dull eyes follow the girls until they disappear around a bend in the street.
In the evening the city empties out and falls dead. It gets chilly. Nobody on the streets, empty pavements, locked gates. Darkness and silence on the border between the Greek and Turkish sectors. One spotlight illuminates the rolls of barbed wire. A second illuminates the Turkish flag. A third—the Greek flag. Beneath the Turkish flag, a soldier. Beneath the Greek flag, a soldier. Silent, hunched up against the cold, machine-guns in their numb hands.
In the morning, we are on the Turkish side. In Nicosia there is one crossing between the Greek and Turkish parts of the city, where the street is piled with sandbags and the nearby houses are empty, their windows broken. The Turkish district is poor, with many clay huts and less traffic. The Turkish argument is that the Greeks were unfair, that they were marginalized by them.
A Greek is a skilful merchant; he is a quick, agile intelligence.
A Turk: he needs time to think; he is closed, slow, patient like an Asian.
The Greek will outsmart the Turk in commerce.
The Turk will defeat the Greek on the front.
From Nicosia we drive north into the land occupied by the Turkish army. A countryside of fairy-tale beauty, with a road that first climbs into the hills, then falls between
hanging rocks into a forest and then, suddenly, around a turn, the sapphire sea. Below stands miracles of Mediterranean architecture: the old port of Cyrenia, the white houses, the red roofs, the orange groves. There are no half tones; all the colours are violent, colliding, glaring and shocking.
The little streets of Cyrenia are empty and many of the houses destroyed with their doors hanging, blown in. A
gendarme
stands straight as a pillar on every street corner. White helmet, white gloves, blue leggings. He is directing traffic that does not exist. On the Port, it is quiet; the hotels are closed; splendid yachts are taking water. In a shop, you can buy a postcard that shows Cyprus as a part of Turkey.
Everywhere on the road are troops and more troops. This is an enormous army on manoeuvres. Tanks in motion, self-propelled guns in firing position, fighters at tree-top level. Platoons on the march, companies at double time, battalions attacking. Here is a brigade digging in on open ground, and there is a division storming a rock face.
This is a threatening army, in a state of constant readiness. There is nothing like it on the Greek side; it is hard to find a Greek soldier.
Nicosia, night, ten minutes after midnight.
A shot rings out on the Greek side.
The silence lasts for a second.
Then come three shots from the Turkish side.
Next, from the Greeks: ten.
And a hundred from the Turks.
And five hundred from the Greeks.
And a thousand from the Turks.
And a cannon from the Greeks.
And a heavier cannon from the Turks.
So 125’s from the Greeks.
But 164’s from the Turks.
Thus incendiaries from the Greeks.
To which, from the Turks, fragmentation.
One side opens fire with everything it has, and so does the other at the same time, as if on command, suddenly, who knows why, for no reason, senselessly, without logic a sleepy sentry might have dozed with his finger on the trigger or it might have been some lunatic, some provocateur, or somebody just felt like it, on a whim, and that was enough, that one shot at ten minutes past midnight, to plunge the whole of Nicosia into a hell made of cross-fire in the course of one minute, into an exploding elemental fury that falls on the drowsy city like a fiery apocalyptic rain.
I jump out of bed in my room on the sixth floor of the Nicosia Palace Hotel and look out the window. Two waves of tracers are breaking against each other over the roofs of the city. The walls tremble and the windows sing. People are running up the stairs, dashing through the streets, ducking into doorways. Nobody knows what is going on or what it is about.
It isn’t about anything.
It is a matter of that one shot.
Everybody is on his feet at UN headquarters. The alarm is sounding in the UN barracks. UN liaison officers get the Greeks and Turks to agree on a ceasefire as of 0:45. At 0:45 the fire-fight goes quiet. But the order has not reached all the outposts; some Turk is still firing, and so the Greeks resume fire, and then the Turks open up with everything they have, and there is such a noise that you can’t hear anything, and that hellish cacophony goes on into its second hour with people taking cover in cellars, lying on the floors, in shelters, under cars, and those who live closest
to the front are scrambling towards the far ends of the city, while the UN gets the Greeks and the Turks to agree to a ceasefire as of 2:05, and again the fire-fight pauses, but this time some Greek has not received the order and keeps banging away with his machine-gun so that for a moment only his lonely series is trickling across the sky, but that’s enough for the Turks to go on, and so one more time they open up, tirelessly, letting the Greeks have it, and now the Greeks come back with the full force of their fire, with all the steel they can throw, and for the third time the UN arranges a ceasefire, for 2:45, and this time the order gets all the way down the line, the shooting stops, and silence envelops the city.
The morning after that night, the Greeks are sitting motionless outside the little cafés, saying nothing, as if nothing had happened. At noon, they move into the shade. At dusk, the beautiful girls come out for their walk, accompanied by their mothers and grandmothers. The big blonds from the UN watch them, but they do not move and keep drinking their beer. In the evening the city empties and there is nobody on the streets. Two soldiers, a Greek and a Turk, stand at the border between the sectors. They stand in silence, hunched up against the cold, with machine-guns in their numb hands.