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.”
&
nbsp; 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 ow
n 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.