century by Venetian military engineers bracing for the arrival of the Ottomans. The invasion finally came in 1570. As any Greek Cypriot can recount, fifty thousand Turks came ashore in the withering heat of midsummer, led by a sadist named Lala Mustafa. After sacking Nicosia and killing twenty thousand of its inhabitants, Mustafa led his forces against Famagusta, which was defended by a garrison of Venetian soldiers.
The Turks hammered the thick stone walls with an estimated hundred thousand cannonballs until the Venetian commander, Marcantonio Bragadino, finally ran out of supplies. Bragadino arranged for peaceful terms of surrender, but the Turks, enraged by the losses they had suffered while taking the city, started torturing and killing Bragadino’s soldiers. When Bragadino objected, Mustafa ordered that his ears and nose be cut off and that he be skinned alive. The skin was stuffed with straw and mounted on a wagon, and legend has it that Bragadino lived long enough to behold his own gruesome double paraded through the streets of Famagusta with a parasol stuck in its arms.
Four hundred years later the Turkish Army walked back into the city. It was August 1974, “phase two” of the Turkish invasion, and Famagusta’s Greek Cypriot inhabitants had grabbed whatever they could and fled south to the small farming town of Dherinia. From a gently sloping hill they could look down on the beautiful beaches and now- empty hotels that had been their home just hours before. It almost certainly didn’t occur to them that the situation was permanent; it almost certainly didn’t occur to them—late in the twentieth century—that upper-middle-class Europeans could be driven out of their beach homes by a modern army without the rest of the world intervening. They were wrong.
Now the closest they can get to Famagusta is a hillside several miles away where they can look out at the city. Two “viewpoint” cafes have sprung up, each boasting Turkish-atrocity photos and a rooftop viewing platform. I stop at the one called Annita’s because it also overlooks a spot where two Greek Cypriots were killed by TRNC forces in 1996. Annita’s is a three-story apartment building on the edge of a desolate swath of Dherinia suburb that abuts the buffer zone. Across the street are a roll of razor wire and then several hundred yards of untended fields and then more razor wire. A flagpole flying the TRNC flag—a red sickle moon and star against a white background —marks the beginning of “the pseudo-state.”
I climb three flights of stairs to the cafe, sit down at a table, and order a coffee. It arrives with a pair of binoculars. On the wall of the cafe is a stop-action sequence of a young Greek Cypriot named Tassos Isaak getting beaten to death in a field; the field is the one I can see out the window. Next to the photos is a placard: “On the 11th of August, 1996, the barbarian Turkish settlers brutally murdered in cold blood and in full view of the UNFICYP, Austrian contingent, a peace-loving 24-year-old Cypriot. They used truncheons and metal bars to crush the spirit of freedom.”
The events that led to Isaak’s death were set in motion when the European Federation of Motorcyclists organized a ride to protest the Turkish occupation of Cyprus. One hundred and twenty riders left the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on August 2, 1996, and proceeded on a one-week tour of Europe. They wound up in Cyprus on August 10, and, after joining forces with some seven thousand bikers from the Cyprus Motorcycle Federation, promptly declared their intention to crash the cease-fire line. After pressure from the UN, Cypriot President Glafcos Clerides finally forced the bikers to change their plans, but thousands of protesters gathered in the Dherinia area anyway. The Cyprus police were deployed along the cease-fire line near what is now Annita’s but had left the checkpoint unmanned, and by midafternoon the protesters had pushed their way into the buffer zone and started screaming at the Turkish troops. They were quickly confronted by a rough crowd of a thousand Turkish Cypriots who had been bused in by the Turkish military. The Turkish counterdemonstrators were predominantly civilians but carried bats and iron bars, and some were members of a vicious nationalistic group called the Grey Wolves, who had come from Turkey to deliver—in their words—“a special surprise package” to the motorcyclists.
Watching all this was Rauf Denktash, president of the TRNC, recording the events with a camera and telephoto lens. A melee broke out in the buffer zone, and as Turkish troops started firing into the crowd, four Greek Cypriots—including Isaak—got hopelessly tangled up in razor wire. UNFICYP policemen managed to pull three of them free, but Isaak fell to the ground and was quickly surrounded by an ugly knot of Grey Wolves. Photographs taken from the Greek Cypriot side show him desperately trying to ward off the blows while Grey Wolves and Turkish police officers in riot gear take turns beating him on the head with truncheons and iron bars. By the time UNFICYP peacekeepers managed to get to him, Isaak was dead.
A wall-mounted television at Annita’s cafe plays, in a continuous loop, news footage of Isaak’s death, as well as footage of the next death three days later. On the afternoon of August 14, immediately after Isaak’s funeral, a few hundred motorcyclists returned to the same spot outside Annita’s and again managed to get past the Greek Cypriot police into the buffer zone. Among them was Isaak’s cousin, twenty-six-year-old Solomos Solomou. Footage of the second protest shows Solomou dodging past two UNFICYP soldiers and slipping through a gap in the fence that separates the buffer zone from Turkish territory. Waiting for him were a line of Turkish troops, machine guns at the ready, and a cluster of state security officers on the balcony of a nearby building. Solomou managed to cross the Turkish cease-fire line and make it to a large white pole that was flying the TRNC flag. While security officers leveled their weapons at him and UNFICYP soldiers looked on in amazement, Solomou started shinnying up the pole.
He made it about a quarter of the way up before a red splotch blossomed on his neck and he slid back down to the ground. A total of five bullets hit him in the stomach, neck, and face. News photographs clearly show two security officers—later identified by the Greek Cypriot police as Kenan Akin, now a TRNC member of parliament, and Erdal Emanet, chief of the TRNC special forces—firing pistols from the building, quickly followed by Turkish troops kneeling and firing into the crowd of protesters. Two UNFICYP soldiers and seven Greek Cypriots were wounded, including a fifty-nine-year-old woman who had shown up to try to convince her son to come home.
I scan the buffer zone with the binoculars that came with my coffee, but it just looks like every other weeded-over field I’ve ever seen. The windows of the two-story building that the Turkish security forces fired from have been bricked in, with slits left for machine-gun barrels, and the TRNC flag still flies on the pole that Solomou tried to climb. I watch the video loop of the killings several times and then get back in my car and drive around until I find the cemetery where Isaak and Solomou are buried. It’s a small plot of stone crypts surrounded by a concrete wall, tucked behind the town’s soccer stadium. Isaak’s grave is crowded with flowers, and several plastic-coated photographs of his own murder are propped against the gravestone. Solomou’s gravestone is fancier. It depicts, in poured concrete, Solomou on the flagpole as Turkish soldiers level their guns to kill him. In a war with few casualties, along a front line with almost no gunfire, his tomb serves to remind people that there’s still an enemy out there.
“The tragedy of Cyprus is that there is no tragedy,” goes a sarcastic bit of local wisdom. The idea that there hasn’t been enough suffering to merit world intervention is blasphemy, of course, but there are still a few Greek Cypriots who believe this. They just have to be quiet about it. Later, after returning to Nicosia, I ask a longtime European diplomat what he thinks of the idea.
“Both sides revel in this sort of victimology,” the diplomat says, asking not to be identified. “It’s what we call a double-minority problem, where both sides feel like they’re the oppressed minority. The Turkish Cypriots say that their security is threatened because they are a minority on the island. The Greek Cypriots argue that they’re a minority if you take Turkey and Cyprus together…. And neither sidewill stand up to its obligations as an equal player in this dispute, so both sides wait for the other to take the first step.”
The diplomat works in an ultra-high-security office near the Ledra Palace checkpoint. Out his window I can see a huge Turkish Cypriot flag marked out in stones on a distant hillside. Turkish troops supposedly went up there day after day and painted the design on the undersides of the stones. When they were done, they waited until nightfall and then turned all the rocks over. The next morning, the Greek Cypriots awoke to find a huge Turkish Cypriot flag emblazoned across the flanks of the Kyrenia Range.
“Is there a solution?”
“The problem could be solved if you had cooperation between Greece and Turkey,” says the diplomat. “Which is not on the horizon. If you look at Northern Ireland—I don’t like drawing parallels, but this is quite a good one, actually—up until 1984 Britain and Ireland were at loggerheads, and the communities in Northern Ireland exploited this difference to ensure that the conflict just raged on. Then the British and Irish governments agreed to a joint policy on Northern Ireland and stuck to it, firmly. The two communities could not see any light between the policies of the two governments, and in the end they just had to come to terms with each other. If you had that kind of cooperation between the motherlands, the Cyprus problem could be solved pretty easily.”
At the end of the interview the diplomat takes me up to the roof for a look at Nicosia. The sun is setting
