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.”
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 cafes. 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 cafe on one side, a Turkish cafe 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 Ataturk 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 cafe, 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
