Cyprus

A TIME TO REMEMBER

Experience cautions us that irreparable damage could be done by those who somehow seem to regard Cyprus as a dazzling intellectual challenge and fail to put human faces behind the issues. Of one thing we can be sure: They will not be around when their ill-conceived paper glory is blown away in the storm that is bound to follow.

It has been 35 years since the stationing on the island of a UN peace-keeping force that could prevent neither a secret invasion by Greece nor the continuation of the entire range of faits accomplis created by force over the next 11 years.

KORKMAZ HAKTANIR

Founding Member of the Cyprus Foundation

It was September, still warm in daytime, but a welcome cool descended on the central plain by nightfall. The window panes had cracks in them and there were bullet holes on the walls. The house was on what used to be the northern edge of the Turkish quarter. No one had lived on the second floor since it had come under gunfire from a tall and ugly building down the street occupied by Greek Cypriots. I was the first tenant after many years.

When I began, in this way, to live in Northern Cyprus more than twenty years ago, my neighbor was an elderly lady who had not seen the sea for eight years after 1963. In the afternoon, she sat on the porch in the shade of the lemon tree in her garden and watched over her grandchildren. Nalan hanÐ"Ð...m and her family had survived those traumatic years in caves, in tents and in enclaves into which Turkish Cypriots had been squeezed, leaving behind loved ones, homes and property, and a peaceful life. She always felt living on an island without a glimpse of the Mediterranean around her had been the worst punishment of all. This experience alone seemed to symbolize in her mind the unforgotten fears, abuse, desperation and isolation of those years. She recalled how she had ventured to the northern shore and stared at the sea for the first time after so many years, feeling the cool breeze on her face. The policy of doing away with Turkish Cypriots was by that time being pursued through severe economic sanctions, this time to squeeze them out of the island. She was then, like the rest of her people, still a hostage in her own homeland. She did not stay there long, but returned to the safety of the Turkish quarter in LefkoÐ"Ñ*a.

Despite all the dark memories of those years, she could still be considered lucky. Lucky to have survived and to have tasted the new freedom. But there were many others who could not make it, like the mother and her three children lying dead in a bathtub. One can't make out the face of the mother, certainly a young woman, but the faces of the children, a seven-year-old and a three-year old and their six-month baby brother, are clearly visible. So are the bloodstains on the bathtub where they had taken refuge on Christmas Eve, 1963. Sixty-four bullets were found in the bathroom, more than 15 for each of them. The father, a medical doctor, was on duty at the hospital that night. The house, a simple structure in a garden on the comer of the street, was, like other Turkish homes, unprotected.

Now there are orange trees in the garden where the children must have played, and tall palm trees cast their shadow on the house as the evening approaches. I don't suppose they were there 36 year ago.

There are also children of all ages, and their mothers, lying in MurataÐ"oa and Sandallar. The entire population of two villages on the way to the eastern coast. The strong sunlight reflects from the white marble. The negetation has overgrown to cover some of the names, but you can still read them, with the age marked beside each name. Their surroundings are open, peaceful countryside, green until May, turning to golden yellow thereafter. A stark contrast to the blind hatred that has created this massacre. The guide points out the mound where the bodies were discovered 25 years ago.

Cemeteries of victims and martyrs mark the land, as they mark the long and lonely struggle of Turkish Cypriots against tyranny of the worst kind. The Turks of Cyprus have won that struggle by resisting and refusing to be suppressed for over a decade when the world simply watched. They have survived, they have endured, but at great cost. Lives and families have been shattered, never to be restored. For many others lost throughout the years, there is actually no place you can visit. They have all gone, as have over a hundred Turkish villages. It is not difficult, not difficult at all, to understand what the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the State of Turkish Cypriots, represents for them; their existence and future as a free people, a people who do not want to be subjected to the abuses of the past under the indifferent gaze of an uncaring world.*

This is a good time to remember, because one can sense, once again, a temptation to approach Cyprus along familiarly irrational lines, like making a secret wish while blowing out the candles on an anniversary cake. I know it is not the innocence of a child, but rather a streak of shared sins that have fed this impulsive attitude throughout the years. Sins of feigned deafness and structured ignorance.

Some say now that the Cyprus problem has gone on for too long. This is certainly no new discovery. But one wonders, while stating the obvious, could they also be implying that peace on the island - the only peace Turkish Cypriots have known - has gone on for too long as well ? A peace to which they have not, in all fairness, contributed much, so perhaps it has subconsciously become part of the problem they perceive ?

Sometimes unhappiness is expressed more bluntly with what is called the "status quo'- the existing state of affairs -which has saved the Turkish Cypriots from being daily objects of premeditated and unhindered ethnic cleansing, long before the term became fashionable through the agonies of Bosnia and Kosova. Unhappiness, perhaps, with a status quo that is not based on Greek hegemony in Cyprus?

One fears that all this persistence in having another go to reinstate as far as possible a fallen past might indicate an incurable difficulty in coming to terms with the basic elements of a situation that has evolved dramatically over the past four decades. Such zeal may end up in actually failing to resolve any of the real issues. But where would it leave the two peoples of the island and their respective states? Where would it leave their motherlands and stability in The Eastern Mediterranean? Experience cautions us that irreparable damage could be done by those who somehow seem to regard Cyprus as a dazzling intellectual challenge and fail to put human faces behind the issues. Of one thing we can be sure: They would not