manual on how peace might be sustained in places like Kosovo. In February Harper’s Magazine sent Scott Anderson and Sebastian Junger to report on this intractable zone of conflict. To decide who would go to which side, they flipped an old Greek coin with a man’s head on one side and a war chariot on the other. The coin landed chariot side up, which meant that Anderson traveled to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and Junger to the Greek side, the Republic of Cyprus.
REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS
A fool throws a stone into the sea and a hundred wise men cannot pull it out.
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
