“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 behind the Troodos Mountains, and we can hear the Muslim call to prayer drifting over from the north side of town. The buffer zone runs like an awkward scar through it all, and beyond it are the massive earthen berms of the Turkish defenses, dug in with tanks and artillery. The diplomat points out the slapdash Greek defenses on our side and then traces the course of the buffer zone as it extends west. “It’s filled with songbirds and wild animals,” he says. “Hunters have killed everything else on the island, and it’s the one place they can’t go.”
Scott Anderson
THE TURKISH REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN CYPRUS
Rauf Denktash, the president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, doesn’t much look the part. A short, portly man of seventy-five who bears a striking resemblance to Homer Simpson, he speaks English with just a trace of a British inflection—a result of his legal training in London in the 1940s—and is most often photographed in baggy sweat suits. On this day, sitting in his office in the heavily guarded Presidential Compound in downtown Lefkosa, he wears a business suit. The office is spacious and sunlit, and he shares it with a large aquarium of tropical fish and three very noisy parakeets, in a cage beside his massive desk.
For over four decades Denktash has been the dominant political figure in the Turkish community of Cyprus. One of the chief organizers of the outlawed Turkish Defense Organization back in the 1950s—and twice expelled from Cyprus for his violent militancy—he has been president of the TRNC since its founding. Obviously, such a man knows how to parry journalists, and the evening before our meeting I’d asked a local reporter the best way to handle him.
“Above all, don’t ask him anything historical,” the journalist urged. “As soon as you give him the chance to mention the constitution of 1960, you’re doomed; you’re going to get the Denktash history lesson for the next half hour.”
Well, forewarned is forearmed. Sitting across from the president at the couch and coffee table arrangement in one corner of his office, I ask my first, carefully designed question.
“I’m already quite familiar with the history of Cyprus and because I know you’re a very busy man, I’d like to concentrate on what is happening today, on what you feel is most important for Americans to know about the TRNC and the current situation in Cyprus.”
The president nods. “What I would like Americans to know is that Cyprus has two owners, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, and these two owners had agreed to form a partnership republic in 1960.”
As the journalist suggested the previous night, “doomed.” With never a pause, Denktash begins his discourse on the island’s modern history from the Turkish viewpoint: the rise of the EOKA terrorists in the 1950s; the 1960 London Agreement, which the Greeks immediately sabotaged; the terror that existed in the Turkish enclaves throughout the 1960s; how the 1974 Turkish Peace Operation undoubtedly saved them all from EOKA annihilation; the political stasis that has existed ever since.
“And what do you see as the ultimate solution to the Cyprus problem?” I finally manage, because even the most energetic seventy-five-year-old has to pause sometime.
“A bicommunal confederation,” Denktash says. “That’s it. The Greek Cypriots must recognize our legitimacy and our right to govern ourselves. We’ve never made any claim on them—we’ve never called Cyprus a Turkish island, we have always recognized that we share this small island with them—and they must view and treat us the same way. I have said this to the Greek Cypriots many times, and they have always refused to hear it.”
Underlying Denktash’s comments is a deep resentment of the Republic of Cyprus’s ability to keep his domain isolated from the rest of the world. Since Turkey is the only country in the world that officially recognizes the TRNC, it means that international flights do not land there, all diplomatic missions are kept at the “interests section” level, and all incoming mail is routed through a drop box on the Turkish mainland. On the flip side, the isolation gives offshore companies in the TRNC an enormous advantage over companies that have to adhere to international standards and helps fortify Denktash’s state of siege message to his people.
In the Greek Cypriot worldview, Rauf Denktash is either the consummate political opportunist, his power dependent on his ability to keep the island divided, or a puppet of mainland Turkey and its “occupation” forces. In reality, Denktash appears to be enormously popular across the political and social strata of the TRNC. With a repetition that is at first quaint, then becomes tedious, his countrymen have the habit of calling him “the father of our nation” and make frequent comparisons to Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. At times it seems that almost everyone in the country, whether expatriates along the north coast or farmers in the most remote and impoverished mountain village, has had some surprise personal encounter with the president. Usually these involve Denktash, a serious photography hobbyist, tramping through the countryside in his baggy sweat suit with a camera around his neck, his small security detail following at a discreet distance. And although there certainly are those who feel that he is getting too old for the post, his political power hasn’t diminished; in each of the five presidential elections he has stood for, Denktash has emerged triumphant.