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rfmcdonaldI found an interesting article in the New York Times today:
Beware These Greeks? No, They're Bearing Cash
By MARLISE SIMONS
KYRENIA, Cyprus, May 1 — The people of Kyrenia, with its perfect horseshoe harbor, know something about invaders. The list reads like a Who's Who of Eastern Mediterranean history. Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Byzantines, Crusaders, Venetians and Ottomans have all held this strategic and pretty spot. The last was the army of Turkey, which landed 29 years ago and never left.
But no one here had expected the latest fleet, composed not of galleons or helicopters, but motorbikes and cars zooming down from the mountains behind the town.
In the past week, since Turkish Cypriots eased travel across the buffer zone that has divided the island since 1974, some 160,000 people have rushed to visit the other side. The majority have been Greek Cypriots, who outnumber the Turkish population by almost four to one. Many have come to celebrate in this little port, a place of medieval walls and a magical reputation.
Kyrenia has not kept count, but every day the cafes along the harbor have been full of Greeks, eating, drinking, laughing. Turks have joined them as though there never was a war that tore them apart. Overnight, the "Jewel of the Levant," as it was known in ancient times, has been jolted from its languid ways.
Hamit Topal, the harbor master, was among the Kyrenians who looked overwhelmed.
"I've not seen so many people in my life," said Mr. Topal, whose normal duties involve registering the few British or German yachts that might float into town. Now he was on the quay, handing out advice, directions and tourist maps to crowds.
Behind him, empty fishing boats bobbed in the sun. Mr. Topal pointed to the cafes and restaurants lining the harbor. The fishermen, he said, had all been drafted as waiters to cope with invading Greeks.
The flood of people has overtaken the long-term projects of politicians and diplomats who have agonized about reuniting the island with orderly plans, only to see them fail time after time. Among the unresolved questions is the issue of how to deal with the huge economic gap between the poor Turkish north and the richer Greek south.
This first exhilarating week, though, has produced some impromptu answers of the kind that beat a well-planned government program. Free-spending Greek Cypriots have already poured close to $2 million into the tiny northern economy, according to unofficial estimates. Eager to see their land, their birthplaces, or merely the long-forbidden, they have spent almost $200,000 just on obligatory car insurance at the border. They have shopped in the maze of back streets, paid for gasoline, and bought souvenirs and designer knockoffs, a hallmark of the region. The waiters confide that diners have celebrated with great quantities of freshly caught snappers and squid, accompanied by many rounds of beer and whiskey.
"We are doing more than 20 times our normal business," said Hussayin Mustafa, a restaurant owner here. Taxi drivers have found new prosperity, making large sums with inflated prices. Business was up 1,500 percent in the past week, according to the taxi drivers union.
Kyrenians agree that this bonanza may fade as the excitement wears off. But for now they are thriving on "the big bang," as some locals have christened the sudden event.
It is hard to tell who is more excited, the Turks or the Greeks. Some Greek families said they had spent the night in their car at the checkpoint in the buffer zone, afraid to lose their place in line. Now they were telling their life stories to perfect strangers in the harbor cafes.
Kyrenians seemed eager to listen. "We are all in a dream, in a state of shock," said Ayla Djemal, whose Turkish family had just made friends with Greeks arriving from the southern port of Limassol. "It's marvelous," she said. "Our lives were far apart, but we all shared the same dividing wall."
Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader, has warned that "the honeymoon season" between the two sides "may not last forever" because such difficult issues as the return of refugees and of property still have not been settled.
On the Greek Cypriot side, officials have made it clear they resented Mr. Denktash's "spectacular" but "unruly" move to lift a travel ban he had imposed in the first place. They have urged him to open additional checkpoints to relieve the long wait at the Turkish posts where every visitor must obtain a stamped visa before crossing.
In an attempt to regain the initiative, they announced some long-awaited steps today, including reopening telephone lines and clearing minefields between the two sides as well as removing trade barriers on Turkish goods and granting work permits and health benefits to Turkish Cypriots.
Beneath the good will and new found fraternity, though, other, less visible, emotions linger. For instance, Soulla and Irini Mathiti, two Greek sisters, came back to Kyrenia after visiting a small village in the mountains. When their family fled south in the war, their father, an Orthodox priest, had insisted on staying, refusing to abandon his church and his flock. He was never seen again.
This week, for the first time, his daughters returned to his little church, now a mosque. Inside, the imam heard them sobbing. He apologized and embraced them, then he led them to a small room in the mosque.
"He gave us my father's books, he gave us his Bible," Soulla said. Now, the sisters said, they can mourn their father at last.
All this reminds me of the vast migrations between East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. 14 years ago, however, the influx was overwhelmingly from east to west; there was a sizable West German population of East German refugee origin, but by the late 1980s all these refugees save the most recent had been assimilated into their new communities. There wasn't a large number of West Germans going east to see their hometowns; or, if there were, they were disproportionately old. In the case of Cyprus, however, the separation was barely a generation ago, while it is the Greek Cypriots--three or four times as numerous as their Turkish counterparts--who seem to have suffered the relatively greater displacement.
It seems not too probable, I think, that Cyprus will be reunified in time for European Union membership. The Republic of Cyprus is simply far too prosperous a society not to draw the Turkish north into its orbit; it doesn't seem too improbable that if Denktash and the other hard-liners try to close the border, the TRNC will be depopulated almost as surely as the GDR would have been if the East German communists had remained in ineffectual power. After having managed to alienate both western Europe and the United States in the recent Iraq crisis, neither the Turkish civilian government nor the Turkish generals will really be in a position to keep the mass of the poulation in the TRNC (including, incidentally, a very large number of Turkish immigrants) from achieving reunification if they truly want it. And now that the Greek Republic of Cyprus seems to have achieved, without any violence, economic hegemony in the north, there's no reason to think that there might not be a fairly rapid knitting-together of the two halves.
The general outlines of a Cypriot settlement have been fairly clear for a while--there will be Greek and Turkish semi-sovereign entities, there will be the transfer of some lands (mainly in northwestern Cyprus) from the Turkish to the Greek entity, and there will be international guarantees of the entire situation (administered through the UN, or perhaps now administered through the EU). The main stumbling block has been the refusal of the Denktash government to accept any agreement that did not give the TRNC some kind of internationally-recognized quasi-independence. I'm not sure if that will really be a usable point, not if the reports I've read of TRNC citizens trying to get passports and health cards (and succeeding!) from the Republic of Cyprus government are true. In the end, Denktash might have to accept Cypriot reunification on more or less Greek terms if he doesn't want Cypriot reunification to be achieved by having all of his statelet's citizens move south.
The sense, incidentally, that I get from this and other articles about a pan-Cypriot identity that transcends Greek and Turkish ethnies--a sort of nationalist sprachbund, if you would, an identity shared by distinct and separate peoples--is equally interesting. It is important to note that many Turkish Cypriots complained about the immigration of their fellow ethnic Turks from Anatolia because they were foreigners, in a way that the Greeks presumably weren't. The pre-invasion history of Cyprus was rather bloody, marked by ethnic massacres and hatred generally, but it seems as if something has persisted. And that's heart-warming.
Beware These Greeks? No, They're Bearing Cash
By MARLISE SIMONS
KYRENIA, Cyprus, May 1 — The people of Kyrenia, with its perfect horseshoe harbor, know something about invaders. The list reads like a Who's Who of Eastern Mediterranean history. Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Byzantines, Crusaders, Venetians and Ottomans have all held this strategic and pretty spot. The last was the army of Turkey, which landed 29 years ago and never left.
But no one here had expected the latest fleet, composed not of galleons or helicopters, but motorbikes and cars zooming down from the mountains behind the town.
In the past week, since Turkish Cypriots eased travel across the buffer zone that has divided the island since 1974, some 160,000 people have rushed to visit the other side. The majority have been Greek Cypriots, who outnumber the Turkish population by almost four to one. Many have come to celebrate in this little port, a place of medieval walls and a magical reputation.
Kyrenia has not kept count, but every day the cafes along the harbor have been full of Greeks, eating, drinking, laughing. Turks have joined them as though there never was a war that tore them apart. Overnight, the "Jewel of the Levant," as it was known in ancient times, has been jolted from its languid ways.
Hamit Topal, the harbor master, was among the Kyrenians who looked overwhelmed.
"I've not seen so many people in my life," said Mr. Topal, whose normal duties involve registering the few British or German yachts that might float into town. Now he was on the quay, handing out advice, directions and tourist maps to crowds.
Behind him, empty fishing boats bobbed in the sun. Mr. Topal pointed to the cafes and restaurants lining the harbor. The fishermen, he said, had all been drafted as waiters to cope with invading Greeks.
The flood of people has overtaken the long-term projects of politicians and diplomats who have agonized about reuniting the island with orderly plans, only to see them fail time after time. Among the unresolved questions is the issue of how to deal with the huge economic gap between the poor Turkish north and the richer Greek south.
This first exhilarating week, though, has produced some impromptu answers of the kind that beat a well-planned government program. Free-spending Greek Cypriots have already poured close to $2 million into the tiny northern economy, according to unofficial estimates. Eager to see their land, their birthplaces, or merely the long-forbidden, they have spent almost $200,000 just on obligatory car insurance at the border. They have shopped in the maze of back streets, paid for gasoline, and bought souvenirs and designer knockoffs, a hallmark of the region. The waiters confide that diners have celebrated with great quantities of freshly caught snappers and squid, accompanied by many rounds of beer and whiskey.
"We are doing more than 20 times our normal business," said Hussayin Mustafa, a restaurant owner here. Taxi drivers have found new prosperity, making large sums with inflated prices. Business was up 1,500 percent in the past week, according to the taxi drivers union.
Kyrenians agree that this bonanza may fade as the excitement wears off. But for now they are thriving on "the big bang," as some locals have christened the sudden event.
It is hard to tell who is more excited, the Turks or the Greeks. Some Greek families said they had spent the night in their car at the checkpoint in the buffer zone, afraid to lose their place in line. Now they were telling their life stories to perfect strangers in the harbor cafes.
Kyrenians seemed eager to listen. "We are all in a dream, in a state of shock," said Ayla Djemal, whose Turkish family had just made friends with Greeks arriving from the southern port of Limassol. "It's marvelous," she said. "Our lives were far apart, but we all shared the same dividing wall."
Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader, has warned that "the honeymoon season" between the two sides "may not last forever" because such difficult issues as the return of refugees and of property still have not been settled.
On the Greek Cypriot side, officials have made it clear they resented Mr. Denktash's "spectacular" but "unruly" move to lift a travel ban he had imposed in the first place. They have urged him to open additional checkpoints to relieve the long wait at the Turkish posts where every visitor must obtain a stamped visa before crossing.
In an attempt to regain the initiative, they announced some long-awaited steps today, including reopening telephone lines and clearing minefields between the two sides as well as removing trade barriers on Turkish goods and granting work permits and health benefits to Turkish Cypriots.
Beneath the good will and new found fraternity, though, other, less visible, emotions linger. For instance, Soulla and Irini Mathiti, two Greek sisters, came back to Kyrenia after visiting a small village in the mountains. When their family fled south in the war, their father, an Orthodox priest, had insisted on staying, refusing to abandon his church and his flock. He was never seen again.
This week, for the first time, his daughters returned to his little church, now a mosque. Inside, the imam heard them sobbing. He apologized and embraced them, then he led them to a small room in the mosque.
"He gave us my father's books, he gave us his Bible," Soulla said. Now, the sisters said, they can mourn their father at last.
All this reminds me of the vast migrations between East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. 14 years ago, however, the influx was overwhelmingly from east to west; there was a sizable West German population of East German refugee origin, but by the late 1980s all these refugees save the most recent had been assimilated into their new communities. There wasn't a large number of West Germans going east to see their hometowns; or, if there were, they were disproportionately old. In the case of Cyprus, however, the separation was barely a generation ago, while it is the Greek Cypriots--three or four times as numerous as their Turkish counterparts--who seem to have suffered the relatively greater displacement.
It seems not too probable, I think, that Cyprus will be reunified in time for European Union membership. The Republic of Cyprus is simply far too prosperous a society not to draw the Turkish north into its orbit; it doesn't seem too improbable that if Denktash and the other hard-liners try to close the border, the TRNC will be depopulated almost as surely as the GDR would have been if the East German communists had remained in ineffectual power. After having managed to alienate both western Europe and the United States in the recent Iraq crisis, neither the Turkish civilian government nor the Turkish generals will really be in a position to keep the mass of the poulation in the TRNC (including, incidentally, a very large number of Turkish immigrants) from achieving reunification if they truly want it. And now that the Greek Republic of Cyprus seems to have achieved, without any violence, economic hegemony in the north, there's no reason to think that there might not be a fairly rapid knitting-together of the two halves.
The general outlines of a Cypriot settlement have been fairly clear for a while--there will be Greek and Turkish semi-sovereign entities, there will be the transfer of some lands (mainly in northwestern Cyprus) from the Turkish to the Greek entity, and there will be international guarantees of the entire situation (administered through the UN, or perhaps now administered through the EU). The main stumbling block has been the refusal of the Denktash government to accept any agreement that did not give the TRNC some kind of internationally-recognized quasi-independence. I'm not sure if that will really be a usable point, not if the reports I've read of TRNC citizens trying to get passports and health cards (and succeeding!) from the Republic of Cyprus government are true. In the end, Denktash might have to accept Cypriot reunification on more or less Greek terms if he doesn't want Cypriot reunification to be achieved by having all of his statelet's citizens move south.
The sense, incidentally, that I get from this and other articles about a pan-Cypriot identity that transcends Greek and Turkish ethnies--a sort of nationalist sprachbund, if you would, an identity shared by distinct and separate peoples--is equally interesting. It is important to note that many Turkish Cypriots complained about the immigration of their fellow ethnic Turks from Anatolia because they were foreigners, in a way that the Greeks presumably weren't. The pre-invasion history of Cyprus was rather bloody, marked by ethnic massacres and hatred generally, but it seems as if something has persisted. And that's heart-warming.
