Global Policy Forum

By Douglas Frantz

Capt. Louise Burt stood in the muddy no man's land between enemy lines and pointed toward two flag poles that held aloft the star and crescent of Turkey and the similar banner of the Turkish Cypriots.

"Look closely," said Captain Burt, a British Army officer with the United Nations peacekeeping force that patrols the buffer zone separating Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. "See the barbed wire wrapped round the poles?" Sure enough, a strand of rusted wire snaked menacingly up each pole, protection against a sometimes lethal game of Capture the Flag carried on from time to time between the soldiers who have stared at each other across the narrow divide day and night for 27 years.

The Berlin Wall is history. So is the Iron Curtain. Peace prevails much of the time in Northern Ireland.

Nicosia is the world's last officially divided capital, stubbornly split by an ugly scar that symbolizes the deep differences between two ethnic groups that cannot seem to share this island of mountains and beaches in peace.

The island's formal division dates to August 1974, when troops from Turkey landed in northern Cyprus. They came in response to a short-lived coup by Greek Cypriots that threatened to make Cyprus part of Greece and seemed to endanger Turkish Cypriots.

Since then, Cyprus, half the size of New Jersey, has been divided by a neutral zone about 116 miles east to west and up to 3 miles wide.

But in the historic district of Nicosia, the capital, the distance shrinks to as little as 10 feet, at a place called Spear Alley. The name comes from the days when soldiers from the opposing sides strapped bayonets to broom sticks and jousted across the alley from balconies.

Those narrow points are where the danger is greatest, and where the games soldiers play to relieve the tedium or demonstrate their manhood carry the spark of violence.

Deaths have dropped sharply in recent years largely because the two sides voluntarily reduced the number of troops along the line. Still, the buffer zone remains, no longer only a line on a map but a state of mind and way of life.

"I've never been to the other side," said Takis Moriatis, 26, a carpenter who works in a shop next to the buffer on the Greek Cypriot side. "I've never even seen it, really, and I don't care to."

Though a new round of reunification talks opened this week with some optimism, no one is talking yet about erasing the fortified line that separates the island's 800,000 people, of whom about three-quarters are Greek and one-quarter Turkish. That line defines a forbidden zone that makes up 4 percent of the island and is open only to United Nations peacekeepers.

Outsiders who manage to wangle a tour find a place where time was ordered to stand still, though the buildings refused to obey. The damage of the years is particularly evident in Nicosia, where the division is known as the Green Line.

City streets dead end where the zone begins, blocked by ugly barricades. Neighborhoods are divided. and in one case so is a factory that used to make springs. What were once some of the city's most elegant buildings are scarred by bullets and ruined by enforced neglect, their walls of mud and brick crumbling.

A former Turkish Cypriot school that was the scene of fierce fighting in 1974 is riddled with shell holes and is on the verge of collapse. Nearby a small Greek Orthodox chapel, said to have been built in the fourth century, is falling down.

Time seems frozen in other places. Dust-covered tables wait for long-gone customers inside the Cafe Berlin, and a rusty sign hangs outside a beauty shop. Fifty-six Toyota cars sit marooned in a basement, each with 38.7 miles on their odometers to mark the drive from the port at Famagusta to Nicosia 27 years ago.

Soldiers watch each other through peepholes in fortified observation posts. During the day, the enemies slouch carelessly and mooch cigarettes from passers-by. At night, they often cut the boredom by firing stones from slingshots at each other. Sometimes they fire rifles.

Most of the posts are ramshackle. But the Greek Cypriots created a tourist attraction out of the post at the end of a popular pedestrian walkway on Ledra Street. People climb the metal stairs to the wood-paneled platform and peer across at the Turkish Cypriots on the other side. It is something like going to a weird and sad zoo.

Nearby, the Greek Cypriots set up an exhibit of photographs from 1974, carefully labeled "Turkish atrocities." Across the buffer zone, a similar display portrays what are called "Greek Cypriot war crimes."

The path winding between two halves of the city is rutted and overgrown with weeds. Coils of barbed wire line the sides, and signs in three languages warn of minefields.

The United Nations refuses to clear the mines because, Captain Burt said, that would constitute tampering with the status quo, which the peacekeepers are there to maintain, making sure neither side appears to build a higher wall or encroach into the buffer zone.

United Nations officials fear that the most trivial matter could turn ugly fast. They cite a particular brick wall on the Turkish Cypriot side. Not long ago, several rows of bricks were added to the wall, a violation. The United Nations painted the top row of bricks white so the wall could go no higher.

A few days later the wall appeared to be higher, although the white row was still at the top. A count revealed that the Turkish Cypriots had removed the painted bricks, added several rows and put the white ones back on top. So the line was painted 10 rows below the top, making the chore of moving it so burdensome that the Turkish Cypriots gave up.

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