Fire

by Sebastian Junger

  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 succeed, Turkey would invade Cyprus, Greece would intervene, and suddenly there would be—at the height of the Cold War—a full-blown conflict between two NATO members.

  To prevent such a disaster, the British arranged for a meeting in Zurich between the antagonists. They finally agreed to a fabulously awkward constitution that provided for a Greek Cypriot president, a Turkish Cypriot vice-president, and disproportionately large Turkish representation in the parliament. England was to retain two military bases on the island, and both Greece and Turkey were allowed to contribute small contingents of troops for common defense. As signatories to the agreement, England, Greece, and Turkey all could intervene militarily if they deemed the Cypriot constitution to be in danger. On August 16, 1960, the Republic of Cyprus was born, with a former EOKA leader, Archbishop Makarios III, as president. Almost from the beginning the arrangement was a nightmare.

  It was the contention of the Greek Cypriots that the Turkish Cypriot minority had no reason to fear for their safety and that hatred between the two groups was the result of Turkish propaganda and British manipulation. (“As late as 1955 Greeks and Turks had always lived peacefully together, like brothers,” reads a placard at Nicosia’s Museum of National Struggle. “Their relations had always been completely harmonious, and the Turks had never put forward any claim on the island.”) In reality, things had never been so rosy. Although they had tolerated each other for centuries, Greek and Turkish Cypriots had largely lived in separate communities, and calls for enosis drove the two groups even farther apart. By the early 1960s death squads of Greek nationalists were regularly killing Turkish Cypriots, who, instead of turning to the government for protection, started to gather into easily defended enclaves and arm themselves. In retaliation, the Greek Cypriots tried to strangle the Turkish communities with economic blockades, and the situation quickly escalated into gun battles in the streets. By late 1963 the Green Line had been established across Nicosia, but even that didn’t stop the fighting, and Archbishop Makarios finally appealed to the UN for help. Several thousand peacekeepers were sent in with a renewable ninety-day mandate, but by then the Turkish Cypriots had completely severed relations with the Cyprus government, and fighting was breaking out regularly between the two militias.

  Like a bad marriage, the split was only a matter of time. In the late 1960s Archbishop Makarios officially stopped calling for enosis as a political goal, and in July 1974 he accused the Greek military of trying to undermine his power. A cadre of right-wing officers, outraged by what they perceived to be a betrayal of Hellenism, sacked the presidential palace and chased Makarios into hiding. They also killed hundreds of moderate Greek Cypriots suspected of being Communist sympathizers or simply soft on Turks. Within days they had replaced Makarios with an EOKA fighter named Nikos Sampson, who had already proved his patriotism by taking seven hundred Turkish Cypriot civilians hostage during the Green Line clashes ten years earlier. Within forty-eight hours the Nixon administration had dispatched a high-level diplomat named Joseph Sisco to try to keep Turkey out of the war, but it was already too late. “We will not repeat the mistake we made ten years ago,” the Turkish prime minister told Sisco on July 19. The next morning a flotilla of Turkish troop carriers scraped ashore near the north Cyprus town of Kyrenia and disgorged six thousand Turkish troops.

  Scott Anderson

  THE TURKISH REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN CYPRUS

  I will tell you a story about Cyprus. Once there was a snake, and one day this snake came into the house of a man who had a son. The snake bit the man’s son and that son died, so in his grief the man took up a knife and cut off the snake’s tail. The next day the snake came back and said to the man, “Okay, now let’s be friends.” The man said, “We can never be friends, because you killed my son, and that is a pain I will carry in my heart forever, and I cut off your tail, and that is a pain you will carry in your heart forever.” So that is why there can never be peace in Cyprus.

  —ELDERLY TURKISH CYPRIOT WOMAN

  An old man and a scruffy white dog stand at the edge of an empty swimming pool, both seemingly lost in thought as they stare into its depth. The pool is exceptionally deep—maybe fifteen feet—and lined with cracks, its bottom covered with a thick layer of dead leaves. The man spots me on the opposite side of the gate and beckons me through.

  “Very bad design,” the man mutters when I come alongside. “Big pr
oblems.”

  I ask if he’s thinking of repairing it.

  “No, no.” He chuckles. “It has been like this for twenty-five years. It is a museum.” He looks to the three-story house beyond; it is an angular structure, concrete balconies and windows perched above the sea. “All this is a museum. In 1974 it was the home of [President] Makarios’s doctor; now it is for the Peace Operation martyrs.”

  In the early-morning hours of July 20, 1974, advance units of the Turkish amphibious force started coming ashore in a small cove about three miles west of this house on the north coast of Cyprus. It marked the beginning of what Turkish Cypriots still call the Peace Operation. A matter of definition, perhaps, because the most immediate results of that operation were the deaths of as many as four thousand soldiers and civilians, the dislocation of over two hundred thousand more, and an international crisis that very nearly led to regional war. I’m not here to quibble, though; the old man starts toward the house, and I follow.

  It was a cold overcast day, and I had headed west out of the coastal resort town of Kyrenia to explore the nearby beaches where the Turkish soldiers had first come ashore in 1974. I had stopped at a memorial park on a bluff overlooking the sea, an austere mausoleum with the graves of some seventy Turkish soldiers arrayed before an abstract sculpture of bent black metal. To one side lay another kind of graveyard, some two dozen old tanks and armored personnel carriers parked in neat rows and surrounded by flower beds and trees. Most of the weaponry appeared to be of 1950s vintage, the feeble armor the Greek Cypriots had mustered to oppose the Turkish Army, and the joint ravages of combat and pilferage had transformed them into empty husks. It was while walking amid the tanks that I had glanced over the fence to see the man and his dog by the swimming pool.

  At the entranceway to the house, the old man stops and draws my attention to the scars in the flagstone wall. “This is where they killed Karaoglanoglu,” he says, referring to the Turkish ground forces’ commander killed early in the invasion. He points to a nearby clump of trees. “The Greeks were hiding in there, and when Karaoglanoglu peacefully approached this door—tok!—a mortar.” He shakes his head sadly, then pushes open the door and motions me inside.

  The far side of the house is a wall of windows, and just beyond is the Mediterranean, all whitecaps and thrashing waves on this stormy day. The bottom floor is taken up with display cases of captured Greek weapons, fragments of shells and grenades. Upstairs are four rooms, each lined with row upon row of black-and-white photographs of young men in formal pose, Turkish soldiers killed in the Peace Operation. Some of the photos appear to be from high school graduations, the teenagers in civilian dress and smiling, whereas others look to be enlargements of military identification cards, the subjects more somber and with shaved heads. Here and there are glass display cases containing the dress uniforms of dead officers and their personal effects: wallet-size photographs of wives or children or girlfriends, letters home written on thin paper, medals.

  If not much of a Peace Operation, the first phase of the Turks’ 1974 invasion was also not much of a military triumph. In fact, it was pretty much a fiasco, a detail glossed over by the Turkish government but given unintended confirmation by the neat juxtaposition of the rows of “martyr” photographs in the oceanfront museum with the display of antique enemy weaponry in the adjacent field.

  On that first day, all had gone rather smoothly for the Turkish soldiers. Coming ashore at the western end of Five-Mile Beach, the six-thousand-man vanguard had met little resistance and by evening had fanned out along the coastline; in the morning, commanders planned to cross over the Kyrenia Mountains and link up with the paratroop unit that had landed just outside Nicosia—or Lefkosa, as it is known to the Turks. It was with nightfall that things began to go awry.

  Incredibly, the naval armada that had delivered the vanguard to the Cyprus coast headed back to Turkey at dusk, and so did the jet fighters that had provided air cover throughout the day. Even more incredibly, there was virtually no communication link between the landing force on the island and military planners on the mainland. Greek Cypriot fighters, complemented by Greek soldiers, seized the moment to attack all along the Turkish line, surrounding the paratroop unit outside Lefkosa and streaming down from caves in the mountains above Five-Mile Beach to fall upon the landing units strung out along the coast. Throughout the night, ferocious battles raged as positions were overrun, retaken, and lost again in a chaos of close combat made worse by raging brushfires.

  At dawn the Turkish Air Force finally returned to the skies, and what had been a seesaw battle now turned into a slaughter. Turkish planes bombed military positions across the island, decimated Greek Cypriot armored convoys caught in the open, and cleared their entrenched mountain positions with napalm. By the time a cease-fire was declared the next day, the Turkish Army had carved out a narrow enclave that extended all the way to the Turkish Cypriot neighborhoods of Lefkosa.

  But the Peace Operation wasn’t done just yet. Over the next three weeks, as diplomats frantically sought a solution to the crisis, Turkey quietly built up its force on Cyprus to some thirty thousand troops, and they were ready to roll when the peace talks collapsed. In just three days the Turks poured out of their bridgehead to seize more than a third of the island and create the frontier they still hold today.

  It’s all a little hard to picture at ground level, however. Up close, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus resembles nothing so much as a quiet, slightly raffish tourist destination. The once-pretty villages along the northern coast have been transformed into sprawls of cheap hotels and fish restaurants, weird concoctions in faux-Tudor or-Bavarian style to lure the British and German vacationers who predominate. Those who tire of lolling on the beach can take hikes in the hills, visit the ruins of castles, or play the slots at one of the grim roadside casinos. Along with tourism, the TRNC has become an international tax haven—“an ideal place for foreign businessmen,” government brochures exhort—with an array of dubious-looking offshore banks tucked away in the back streets of Lefkosa.

  Lurking at the edges of the landscape, however, is a parallel universe: the martyrs. Over the past twenty-five years the Turkish Cypriots and their mainland Turkey protectors have studded the countryside with monuments and cemeteries and museums dedicated to those who have fallen, and the message these buildings and fields carry is directed equally at the villagers in the hills and the tourists on the beach: This is a land created by blood and defended by blood; there can be no return to the old days.

  In the story of their existence, the Turkish Cypriots weave an epic tale of victimization and dominance. From their vantage point, history has been a four-hundred-year-long siege in which the majority Greek Cypriots have never ceased trying, through both force of arms and guile, to force them into an intolerable union with Greece—or to push them off the island altogether. Nowhere does this mythology more radically diverge from that of the Greeks than in the interwar period of 1964 to 1974, between the collapse of the republic and the arrival of Turkish troops.

  In the Greeks’ telling, this was the island’s golden age, an idyllic time when the two communities coexisted in harmony. In the Turks’ rendition, it was the time when the noose was steadily tightening around their necks, when they were forced to seek safety in tiny vulnerable enclaves, and any trip outside the “ghettos” meant constant harassment by Greek Cypriot authorities or worse. With the bloody EOKA coup against Makarios in July 1974, Turkish Cypriots figured that they were the next targets for annihilation, once the Greek moderates were dealt with, making the Turkish Peace Operation a justified act of defense.

  That sentiment is firmly on display in the monument built above the little cove on Five-Mile Beach where the Turkish soldiers came ashore. Just down from a great pillar of concrete jutting out of the ground at such an angle as to be nicknamed the Turkish erection are seven concrete stele that purport to tell, in brief words and bad etchings, the history of modern Cyprus.

  The
first two stele borrow heavily from Picasso’s Guernica: lots of unhappy people and animals afloat in flames. By the third panel, help is on the way: Lantern-jawed Turkish soldiers stride into the fiery wasteland with drawn swords, their progress heralded by flittering doves of peace. For the rest of the monument, the warriors for peace continue apace, the flames gradually tamped out, the doves joined by blooming flowers and pretty—if slightly lantern-jawed—girls.

  Other honorifics to the Turkish Cypriots’ version of a martyr-filled history are scattered throughout the TRNC. The former Greek fishing village of Ayios Yeoryios, where Colonel Karaoglanoglu was killed, has been renamed in his honor, and Five-Mile Beach is now officially the Beach of the Resolute Outbreak. Beside the old Venetian wall of Famagusta is a little graveyard with a sign in Turkish, English, and German that reads: ARMED GREEK CYPRIOTS AND GREEK THUGS TRIED TO ELIMINATE EVERYTHING TURKISH TO ACHIEVE ENOSIS; IN THIS CEMETERY LIE TURKS WHO, UNARMED AND DEFENCELESS, WERE MARTYRED BY GREEK CYPRIOTS AND GREEKS. In Lefkosa the government has built a Museum of National Struggle, perhaps to maintain parity with the Museum of National Struggle on the Greek side of the city.