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 protege 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 own 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 cafes 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.
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.
As it turns out, Ayshen is originally from the city of Limassol, in what is now the Republic of Cyprus. Her family was solidly upper-middle-class—her grandfather a large landowner, her father a physician—until they lost almost everything in the “enclave era” of the 1960s. After the 1974 partition they moved north as refugees, and Ayshen eventually went off to attend university in London; she returned to the TRNC only a few years ago, a decision she clearly regrets. “Always it is the same here,” she says after one particularly long and tedious day of interviews. “The same politics, the same arguments. Sometimes I feel like I am caught in a nightmare and cannot wake up.”
Until last year Ayshen had been active in the “bicommunal” talks initiative. Sponsored by the United Nations and international conflict resolution groups, the talks were designed to bring together small groups of Turkish and Greek Cypriots—businessmen, intellectuals, educators—in hopes that the dialogues might lead to a political opening. Ridiculed by the governments and conservative media of both sides, the effort has largely been abandoned. “It is too bad,” Ayshen says, “because I felt it was important that we try anything that might change the situation.” Now she carries the label of “peacenik,” which causes her some problems around the office.
Between interviews, Ayshen tries to steer me to the more pleasant places to be found in the TRNC, one being the St. Barnabas Monastery outside Famagusta. In the deserted inner courtyard, she sits on a stone bench beneath a bitter lemon tree. “This is one of my favorite places in the whole country,” she remarks, “this and the Karpas Peninsula. Up there, it is so quiet—miles of empty beaches, small villages. It’s the best place to go to get away from everything.”
I know her well enough by now to know what she means by “everything”: politics, the speeches, the Problem.
At St. Barnabas Monastery, we are just three or four miles from the Martyred Villages. In late July 1974, a few days after the first phase of the Turkish Peace Operation, EOKA gunmen seized three Turkish villages, led over eighty residents out into the fields to be shot, then threw their bodies in mass graves. Today the road connecting the villages is called Martyr’s Way, and beside it are a couple of nearly identical memorial parks, both centered on a stone wall on which the names of the murdered have been carved, both containing freestanding posterboards displaying the same awful photographs of the mass grave exhumations. Along Martyr’s Way, large yellow signs, helpfully printed in both English and Turkish, point toward the actual mass graves.
When I mention our proximity to the Martyred Villages, Ayshen’s mood falls.
“Do you want to go to them?” she asks.
When I say no, that I’ve already seen them, she seems tremendously relieved.
On my last day in the TRNC, I convince Ayshen to take me to the village of Tashkent, in the hills just north of Lefkosa. I am curious to see Tashkent, both because of the massive Turkish Cypriot flag that has been painted on the mountainside just outside it and because it is known as the village of widows. The original Tashkent was in the south, and amid the fighting in 1974 nearly all the adult males were rounded up and murdered by Greek Cypriot gunmen. In the population transfer of 1975, the Tashkent widows were brought north and given the formerly Greek village of Vouno as their new home.
Wandering around the village, I spot an old woman in black sitting on her porch on this sunlit day. Her name is Emine Mutallip, and sitting in the sun with her is her ninety-two-year-old father, Mustafa Sadik. Emine graciously brings out chairs for us to sit on and, at my instigation, begins to tell the story of those long-ago killings, the
