Divided territories usually create their own ugly landmarks. In Nicosia, now holder of the unenviable distinction of being the world’s last divided capital, the scars of past conflict are brutally evident.
They come in the form of a UN-patrolled buffer zone, a wound that runs east to west across the city, and in the dereliction that surrounds it. Roads end at barrels and barbed wire; buildings stand bullet-pocked and empty, gun ports, sandbags and sentry posts slowly decay.
For 43 years these dismal sights have provided the motif to a conflict frozen in time, the most potent symbol of a 112-mile ceasefire line that has kept Cyprus’s estranged Christian Orthodox Greek and Muslim Turkish communities apart.
But in a dramatic week of international diplomacy, brinkmanship and talks, the starting gun has been fired on a process in which all could soon change. Across the ethnic divide there is conviction that the gaping wound could close. “This time people aren’t afraid to be optimistic,” said Andreas Mesarites, a Greek Cypriot brand strategist. “This time it feels different.”
What has long been Cyprus’s plight – the inability of its politicians to compromise and concede – changed last week in the elegant, high-ceilinged rooms of Geneva’s UN Palais de Nations. There, Nicos Anastasiades, who heads the island’s internationally recognised Greek-run south, and Mustafa Akinci, who leads its Turkish-run north, narrowed differences to the point where they pored over maps, discussed property rights and began tackling the thorny issues of territorial realignment and troop presence – small but bold steps to not only put Cyprus back together again, but ending a status quo that in many ways is both anomalous and surreal.
Even now, more than four decades after the 1974 Turkish invasion – an operation that cemented a division first created by inter-ethnic fighting in the early 1960s – the two sides are linked by very little. A common sewage system and electricity grid are in place, connecting entities that are only metres apart but, with the exception of trade in home-grown goods, practically all other official interaction is stymied.
Few know this better than Phidias Pilides and Fikri Toros. As presidents of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot chambers of commerce, the two men might, in different times, have much to bicker over. Instead, bonded by the desire for an end to their island’s division, they are good friends who regularly cross the ethnic divide.
“We are both working for the same cause,” says Pilides, seated behind a large glass table in his office with a view out towards the Kyrenia range of the breakaway republic beyond. “On the issue of Cyprus, I don’t hide any of my feelings … we have no secrets.”
Like Toros, Pilides believes that Cyprus is on the cusp of historic change. “I’d put money on a political solution being agreed in the coming months,” he says. “The talks didn’t end in deadlock, they didn’t collapse … there is optimism that the reaching of an agreement is still within grasp.”
Any deal will be put to a referendum – another high-risk move whose outcome, in an age of referendum surprises, is far from sure. The last time a peace plan was put to the popular vote in 2004 it was supported by the Turkish Cypriots and roundly rejected by the Greeks. “Back then,” quips Mesarites, “you wouldn’t put a bumper sticker on your car if you believed in a solution. You knew your windows would be smashed.”
But times have changed. Under the stewardship of Anastasiades and Akinci – who ironically both hail from the southern coastal town of Limassol – Cypriots on either side say they have arrived at a point of hope. “Finally we have two leaders who are truly committed to a solution,” says Toros. “Men who are willing to take the courageous steps to get there.”
In many ways, Anastasiades and Akinci already know that their people are ahead of them. Years of international isolation have seen growing numbers of Turkish Cypriots seek work in the south and, where possible, educate their children there too. With the passage of time passions have abated. In ways big and small, Cypriots from both sides are intermingling – collaborating on communal projects, working together, falling in love.
“For two years I was in a lovely relationship with a Greek Cypriot girl,” says a young Turkish Cypriot behind the till at Rustem’s, a bookshop in the north. “You can’t stop love. You can’t stop people getting on with their lives. A lot of us want a solution. Now it’s up to the politicians to get on and do it.”
About two miles south as the crow flies, Corina Constantinou and Elena Ellina, Greek Cypriot chemists in their 20s, couldn’t have agreed more. “Of course, Cyprus should be united,” said Constantinou, her trendy leather jacket pulled up around her neck as she sipped coffee at Starbucks on Friday. “If it wasn’t divided, we’d all be so much better off. Maybe on this side it would also stop us building so many concrete blocks which would be better for the environment.”
“And,” said Ellina interjecting, “it would be a good way to end the racism which is so ugly too.”
But, like so many Cypriots, both know that the future is fraught with risk. “It’s not going to be easy,” says Constantinou. “All our lives we’ve heard about this problem and all our lives nothing has changed. Still, I live in hope, I really do. At some point something has to give.”
What will give and how is anyone’s guess. Resolving what has long been regarded as the Rubik’s cube of diplomacy – the west’s longest-running diplomatic dispute – is a tortuous business, as arcane as it is complex. Conciliation cannot come without concession and concession cannot come without pain. To make matters worse, the long hoped for two-state federation not only requires compromise but approval from Nato rivals Greece and Turkey.
As former colonial master with military bases on the island, Britain also has a say as a guarantor power alongside Ankara and Athens.
That more progress wasn’t made in Geneva last week was blamed squarely on Greece’s truculent foreign minister digging in his heels on matters of security with Turkey.
“Sadly, in our case, it doesn’t just take two to tango,” one high-level Greek Cypriot diplomat confided. “It involves a folk dance which makes every step that much more complicated.”
In all the politics it is easy to forget the pain. One in three Greek Cypriots was displaced in 1974, when the Turkish army ordered a full-scale invasion in response to a rightwing coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece. Many were forced to flee their homes in hours, hastily burying jewellery, gold and other treasures in courtyards and back gardens. Refugees (though far less) also went the other way, with members of the Turkish Cypriot minority in the south being similarly forced north as the army moved in. For most, it never occurred to them that such a tumult would be anything other than temporary.
In 2003, when the then Turkish Cypriot regime eased travel restrictions – opening up access to the statelet for the first time since declaration of independence in 1983 – Greek Cypriots could see what they had lost. And often they were shocked. Not by anger or disbelief at seeing so much of the territory’s Greek past erased – street names had changed and churches converted into mosques – but at the kindness of apologetic Turkish Cypriots, who “wished a thousand Virgin Marys” (for many spoke Greek) it had not been this way.
That was the first sign that something had changed.
“For so many years we had painted the face of the devil on the other,” says Nikos Athanasiou, a teacher who led civil society efforts to reach out to the north. “That’s when that stopped.”
But fear and loathing still haunt Cyprus. Even today, as minefields are cleared and communal activities snowball and supporters of reconciliation take to the streets, there are those who prefer fracture as a state of mind. In the months ahead they will take to the streets, as they have in times past, to ensure the status quo.
Only now a new spirit has stirred; a spirit that sees hope in change and change in unity. For Anastasiades and Akinci, who belong to the last generation with common memories of coexistence, it is a spirit they have to harness before it is too late.