Greek and Turkish Cypriots Seek to Bridge Big Divide

Chris Sofroniou joined an encounter group for young Greek and Turkish Cypriots last year with a lofty goal: to help reunite this most rigidly partitioned of states. He had a personal mission as well.

Seeing a path to reclaim the home he had fled as a child in wartime, the 27-year-old Greek Cypriot student persuaded a Turkish Cypriot in the group to help him sneak into the Turkish-held town of Morphou.

With a map drawn by his grandmother, Sofroniou located the house. He pressed his face against a window; the Turks who live there weren’t home. Then he found the place where his Greek Orthodox parents had worshiped; it’s a museum now. He made a video recording and brought it home.

“It was like a dream,” he told a meeting of the U.S.-sponsored group. “I felt the Greekness of the place. It made me angry but determined to fight, in a peaceful way, to get justice done and help our people return to their homes.”

Twenty-four years after war split their Mediterranean island into two “ethnically cleansed” camps, ordinary Cypriots are now talking through the barbed wire. But so far, the exchange shows how stubborn and deeply rooted the conflict remains.

Even young Cypriots who rebel against the barrier tend to echo the irreconcilable views of the generation that built it: Greek-speaking Christians governing 600,000 people in the south want a re-integrated society; Turkish-speaking Muslim leaders claim a separate ministate for 200,000 inhabitants in the north.

Outside mediators are stepping up efforts to revive peace talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan failed in one attempt last weekend, and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke shuttled between the two sides Saturday with no success.

But while the high-level talks have gone nowhere since last summer, the debates among ordinary citizens are intense, provocative and straight to the point.

“Our mentality is close to the European mentality,” Sofroniou insisted to the student group. “Look how the French and the Germans slaughtered each other in World War II. They are reconciled and can live in each other’s countries. . . . So can we.”

Erdem Erginel, a 25-year-old Turkish Cypriot, disagreed. “Conflict resolution . . . may work in Europe, where reconciliation is a valid concept, but not here. The political culture and mentality in this part of the world is not suitable for minorities. Without our own state, the Greeks will crush us.”

Greek Cypriots just do not get it, he said. “The biggest enemy is not the physical barriers but the mental barriers. For them, it is inconceivable that the northern half of the island is under Turkish Cypriot rule.”

Cyprus has been divided since a 1974 war that was ignited by a Greek-sponsored coup and a Turkish military invasion; an armed stalemate has defied the world’s mediators since then. Now, an estimated 2,000 students, entrepreneurs, trade unionists, artists, scientists and lawyers--a tiny but influential fraction of the population--have joined a growing “bicommunal movement,” driven by a pent-up urge for human contact between the two sides.

The initiative, which brings together peers from the two sides to exchange views on the conflict, sprang from Cypriot pacifists but is backed by the United Nations and Western governments. The United States spends $10 million a year here in the hope that the grass-roots peace campaign can work.

In some ways, the movement does make a difference. It has expanded from the leftist fringe to the mainstream of each community, broadening debate over the island’s future.

Activists from both camps say their emotionally charged encounters have helped them air and shed some prejudices. They feel part of a newly sensitized elite that could help make a peace accord work--if the politicians would only reach one.

But the movement has failed to push the rival governments toward compromise or to produce its own vision of a settlement. It is, followers admit, less a protagonist than a hostage to the hawkish politics that make Cyprus one of the most militarized spots on Earth.

As the stalemate endures, the Greek Cypriot government is threatening to install Russian-made ground-to-air missiles to neutralize Turkey’s air force. Turkey, which has 35,000 troops defending the Turkish Cypriot side, says it would knock out the missiles with preemptive airstrikes.

In this climate, the citizen peacemakers meet lukewarm tolerance from Greek Cypriot officials and suspicion and hostility from the Turkish Cypriot side. In December, as they have a dozen times before, Turkish Cypriot leaders suspended all permits for contact between the two sides. Previous shutdowns have lasted up to four months.

Among the latest casualties is the Cyprus Bicommunal Choir, which at its debut last fall delighted thousands of Greek and Turkish Cypriots with one of the few things they share: folk music. A second outdoor concert in the U.N.-patrolled buffer zone that divides the island was set for New Year’s Day but had to be canceled because of the Turkish clampdown.

“Whenever we’re getting somewhere, it all stops,” said Ekaterini Economidou, a Greek Cypriot opera singer who spent a year forming the 44-member choir. “I’m not sure this process can be sustained. The obstacles are tremendous.”

Still, the movement is a persistent force, if only because the idea of a physical barrier dividing any place, especially such a tiny one, strikes many Cypriots--at a time when there is no more Berlin Wall, no more Green Line in Beirut--as an anachronism.

“At a popular level, people feel uncomfortable being cut off from each other,” said Shelhan Zeki, a 23-year-old Turkish Cypriot active in the gatherings. “They want to know what the other side is like.”

To reach their neutral meeting point in the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia, the capital, Cypriots must pass the main checkpoint into the buffer zone--a jagged alley of vacant, booby-trapped shops, rusting barbed wire and oil drum barricades--and confront the raw emotions of the 1974 war.

At the checkpoint’s north gate, guarded by Turkish Cypriot police, is an exhibit of black-and-white photographs showing atrocities committed by Greek Cypriot militias on ethnic Turks from 1963 to 1974.

At the south gate, 500 yards away, is a travel advisory in Greek: “Beyond this checkpoint is an area of Cyprus still occupied by Turkish troops since their invasion in 1974. The invaders expelled 180,000 Cypriots of Greek origin. . . . Enjoy what is left of our looted heritage and homes.”

The U.N.-mediated peace talks since the war, which also forced at least 45,000 ethnic Turks to move north of the divide and left about 6,700 people dead or missing on both sides, have repeatedly stumbled over one overriding question: whether Greeks and Turks can mix better than oil and water.

Turkish Cypriot leaders, backed by Turkey’s troops, insist on a “confederation” of two sovereign states--confirmation of the de facto Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus that only Turkey now recognizes. Anything less, they contend, will overwhelm their minority population.

The Greek-ruled Republic of Cyprus, with an economic advantage and the rest of the world’s recognition, demands a jointly ruled “bicommunal federation.” It feels no pressure to sign away the 37% of the island that the Turks gained by force.

The 23 university students who gathered at the Ledra Palace one Sunday evening in December grew up in postwar ethnic ghettos but want to break out. Their conflict-resolution group had met almost monthly for a year.

To come to the once-stately hotel, now a dormitory for U.N. peacekeeping troops in the buffer zone, Turkish Cypriots must get permission from their reluctant leaders, and Greek Cypriots must dodge hecklers on their side. The hecklers, who stand outside the checkpoint, also vandalize the students’ cars.

“You are the hope of this country,” Philip Snyder told the students after they had greeted each other with hugs and sat in a circle. Snyder, an American who moderates the meetings for the U.S.-financed Cyprus Fulbright Commission, added: “In 20, 30 years from now, you’ll be in charge.”

“God help Cyprus!” quipped Sofroniou, the Greek Cypriot student, drawing laughter.

He was only half-joking. The group’s encounters--conducted in English, the common language of this former British colony--are not easy. As frustrated as they are with hawks in their own communities, Greek and Turkish Cypriot doves find each other surprisingly unyielding.

Greek Cypriots in the group said they were appalled when their counterparts, on a weekend retreat to Budapest, Hungary, identified their country as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus on hotel registration cards.

And Turkish Cypriots recalled, with some amusement, a Greek Cypriot pacifist who visited their northern beaches for a day last summer but refused to buy anything to drink and collapsed from dehydration. After being revived, they said, the young woman explained herself with a maxim of Greek propaganda: “Every [Greek Cypriot] pound spent on the Turkish side will come back in the form of a Turkish bullet.”

Nese Yasin, a Turkish Cypriot poet whose pacifist recitals have brought her ostracism in the north, said even the most open-minded on each side can go only so far.

“This is because we don’t have a strong civil society,” she said. “In each community there is a cause, and everyone is expected to advocate it. The state [on each side] controls almost everything. It takes real courage to dissent.”

Some Turkish Cypriots view the conflict-resolution encounters as biased toward the Greek Cypriot goal of one state. “Sometimes I feel like a guinea pig in an experiment,” said Kutlay Erk, one of the participants.

Gustave Feissel, an American who heads the U.N. mission here, denies any favoritism. “It’s a generally accepted view--not just a Greek Cypriot view--that getting people together is helpful.” He noted that both sides have been officially committed since the late 1970s to building “one house with two rooms” on Cyprus.

Ergun Olgun embraced that goal in the summer of 1993 as one of 20 prominent Cypriots--10 from each side--who traveled to Oxford University in England for a pioneering 10-day session and came home to launch the bicommunal movement.

But since joining the Turkish Cypriot government a year later, he has retreated with his superiors from the “one house” ideal. Olgun, a senior advisor to Turkish Cypriot President Rauf R. Denktash, now enforces the periodic bans on bicommunal contact.

The latest ban, in December, came after the European Union infuriated Denktash by inviting the Greek Cypriot government to start membership talks while keeping Turkey’s membership bid on hold.

In an interview, Olgun claimed that the citizen meetings are “a Greek Cypriot ploy to undermine the unity of our country.” He promised new rules to favor contact between official delegations.

Few observers believe that the private contacts can be cut off entirely. Individuals from both sides are staying in touch via the Internet or the telephone, and the U.N. will soon add 17 inter-communal phone lines to the existing three. Despite their deep differences, these people say they hope foreign pressure will induce Denktash to reopen the checkpoint.

“The Cyprus problem is our problem; it’s no longer a problem for just the politicians,” said Fatma Azgin, a Turkish Cypriot pharmacist who took part in the Oxford encounter. “We’re trying to build a community of people on both sides who can solve problems. It’s a long-term process, and someday it will pay off. No matter what the Cyprus solution is, we’ll need these people to make it work.”