FROZEN IN TIME
By FRANK JACOBS
New York Times
Dec 20 2011
If you could fly into Nicosia International Airport, you’d arrive
in a different era. The architecture, furniture and advertising
all scream early Seventies. The Cyprus Airways jet plane out on the
tarmac is an ancient Hawker Siddeley Trident, a British model that
most carriers retired in the mid-1980s. But there are no other planes,
nor any passengers.
Because you can’t fly into Nicosia International anymore. The
airport has been frozen in time since a ceasefire between pro-Greek
and pro-Turkish forces was reached on Aug. 16, 1974, when it ended
up in the no man’s land that has divided Cyprus ever since. Well,
not exactly frozen. Weather and time are having their way with the
building, the insides of which are covered in a 37-year-old layer
of dust and bird droppings. The Trident, stripped of its engines,
doors and nosecone and exposed to the elements, is proving Neil Young
right: “rust never sleeps” [1]. The whole island is subject to the
same paradox. The ceasefire and the buffer zone, both monitored and
maintained by a United Nations mission, remain in place just as they
were on day one. But while Unficyp [2] does its best to maintain the
conflict in a cryogenic sleep, real time marches on. In the absence of
human intervention, no man’s lands turn into de facto nature reserves
[3]. Ramshackle border crossings get a more enduring makeover. And
temporary lines of control start to look and feel like actual borders
between two different countries.
Cyprus’ frozen border, which runs about 112 miles from east to west
across the island, is often called the Green Line [4]. That is a
misnomer. Its official name – the U.N. Buffer Zone in Cyprus – may
be less poetic, but it does it more justice: lines have no surface,
but zones do. And this one is no less than 134 square miles in size,
just over four times the size of Manhattan. Where it envelops the
village of Athienou, it is as wide as 4.6 miles. It’s only 11 feet
wide in central Nicosia, which has the distinction of being the only
city in the world that is the capital of two states – and possibly
the only one of the world’s capitals without an international airport
to call its own.
Being a zone rather than a line makes the Unbzic one of a few
territorial actors on the crowded scene that is tiny Cyprus [5]. The
main ones are the two states it separates, one de jure and the other
one de facto [6]. The former is the Republic of Cyprus, almost entirely
ethnically Greek. It is the internationally recognized government
for the entire island, but in fact only controls 59 percent of its
area. The latter is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC),
covering 36 percent of the island. It was established following the
invasion of the Turkish Army in 1974, and is recognized only by Turkey.
And then we have by Akrotiri and Dhekelia, two British military bases.
Britain’s initial interest in Cyprus had been for its strategic
location in the Eastern Mediterranean, close to the Suez Canal. The
island had been a crown colony since 1925, but growing unrest in the
1950s made tight control untenable. Realizing that instead of using
Cyprus as a base it could suffice with having bases on Cyprus, the
British government granted Cyprus independence in 1960 but retained
sovereignty over both areas.
Akrotiri, also known as the Western Sovereign Base Area (WSBA), is
actually in the south of the island, near Limassol. Dhekelia, the
Eastern Sovereign Base Area (ESBA), is close to Larnaca. Together,
they constitute a British Overseas Territory; at a combined 98 square
miles in size, they cover 3 percent of the total area of Cyprus [7].
Like the United States’s lease of Guantanamo Bay, British sovereignty
over Akrotiri and Dhekelia is open-ended. Unlike Gitmo, the British
bases are not cordoned off – they are home to about 7,000 Cypriots,
and 60 percent of the area is held in property by private citizens.
The WSBA is a pretty straightforward exclave, centered on the Akrotiri
Peninsula, which contains Cyprus’ southernmost point, and tapering
out westward to include most of the coast along Episkopi Bay. One
salient intruding on the WSBA allowed the agglomeration of Asomatos
to remain within Cyprus proper. (The larger town of Trachoni, just
to the north, is mainly within the WSBA.)
In contrast, the ESBA is a bewildering jumble of borderlines. For
starters, the Dhekelia base occupies an area between the TRNC and
the southern coast in such a way that it isolates the easternmost
part of the Republic of Cyprus around Cape Greco from the rest of its
territory. Second, the base consists of a main territory connected by
the narrowest of salients – no more than a road, actually – to the
near-exclave of Ayios Nikolaos, the site of a “listening station”
run by British military intelligence.
Finally, Dhekelia contains three Cypriot enclaves – or four, depending
on how you count: the villages of Xylotymbou and Ormidhia and the
Dhekelia Power Station, the territory of which is sliced in two by
a British military road [8].
The picture is complete only if we mention a peculiar exclave on
the northern shore of the island. But rather than a footnote to the
story of the Green Line on Cyprus, the story of Kokkina (Erenkoy in
Turkish) is an excellent summary of the absurdity of the island’s
frozen borders.
Post-independence troubles between ethnic Greeks and Turks had forced
local Turkish Cypriots to converge on this port city, safeguarding
its “Turkish” status even after the 1974 invasion by the Turkish
army stopped five miles to the north, at the Green Line. The town’s
citizens were transported to the northern Karpas peninsula in the
TRNC, settling in the abandoned Greek village of Yiallousa that was
renamed Yenierenkoy (New Erenkoy).
All that remains of the town’s strategic importance is its
obstacularity (if that’s a word): the area is occupied by a Turkish
garrison, which is surrounded by an unattached bit of the Green
Line, patrolled by the U.N., which is again guarded by Greek Cypriot
soldiers. This standoff has never-ending explosive potential, which
has … traffic consequences. Travelers are forced off the coastal
road, which used to pass through the town, and onto a laboriously
winding mountain path, just to avoid all this unpleasantness.
But what if the enclave’s border is what you’re here for? As so often,
no love for the harmless border tourist. Fortunately for that tourist,
Cyprus is an easily reachable holiday destination, and crossing the
border via seven points along the rest of the Green Line is mostly
unrestricted [9]. Plenty of barbed wire and angrily graffitied slogans
to photograph. If you get Unficyp’s permission, you can even go and
shoot a few picturesque snaps at Nicosia International Airport.
All of that will be a lot more difficult in and around
Nagorno-Karabhakh [10], and not just because it’s so obscure even
travel agents have never heard of it. It is also very inaccessible,
high up in the southern Caucasus; and, compared to the relatively
relaxed intra-communal contacts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots,
quite grim. Maybe because the violence that froze the frontlines into
de facto borders was more recent, and more lethal.
That violence, also known as the Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994),
spanned the end of the Soviet Union, and was a symptom of its demise.
The Soviet Union was a bizarre quilt of ethnicity-based sub-republics.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the Communist Party’s main
concern was not the autonomy, cultural or otherwise, of the country’s
over 100 nationalities. Rather, Stalin’s Nationalities Policy can be
seen as an attempt to divide and rule, by playing out the age-old
feuds and mutual fears between the Union’s peoples to strengthen
their dependence on Moscow.
That theory can certainly be applied to the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous
Oblast [11] (NKAO), created in 1923 to be an Armenian-majority
enclave within Azerbaijan, without a territorial link to the Armenian
Soviet Socialist Republic. So when fighting over the enclave that
broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan – then still co-republics
within the USSR – it was a sign that the Soviet Union was in serious
trouble. Not only did it reveal the moral bankruptcy of a system
based on state-sponsored mutual ethnic distrust, it also highlighted
Moscow’s embarrassing inability to stop the fighting.
In 1991, Azerbaijan tried to legislate the conflict out of existence
by administratively dissolving the NKAO. On official Azeri maps, the
oblast has in fact disappeared, divided among the five surrounding
oblasts. It has also vanished off Armenian maps – replaced by a much
larger Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR). The territory of this de facto
republic corresponds with the ground gained against Azerbaijan in the
war: most of the NKAO, and a large swathe of the Azeri territory that
separated it from Armenia.
Whereas the TRNC can at least rely on the diplomatic recognition by
its patron state Turkey, the NKR has no such support from Armenia. Not
that the two aren’t close [12]. But the distant possibility of a
negotiated settlement is preventing Yerevan from recognizing its
client government in Stepanakert.
There is a tantalizing diplomatic link between both conflicts. The
only other entity recognizing the TRNC is the Azerbaijani exclave of
Nakhichevan (wedged between Armenia and Iran). This recognition is
not shared by the Azeri government. Considering the close cultural
and political links between the Azerbaijanis in Baku and the Turks
in Ankara, this may not be a coincidence.
And indeed, there is a sort of symmetry to the conflicts: one is an
unrecognized Turkish conquest of part of a Christian nation, the
other an unrecognized conquest by a Christian nation of part of a
Turkic country. Does this point the way to a possible, face-saving
solution to both conflicts: a simultaneous recognition of the TRNC
and the NKR by the international community?
Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about
cartography, but only the interesting bits.
——————————————————————————–
[1] The slow but constant decay of the airport is reminiscent of the
thought experiment in “The World Without Us,” Alan Weisman’s book
about the rate of decay of the built environment if humans disappeared.
[2] The United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus.
[3] As mentioned by a commenter in the previous post, the former Iron
Curtain is a green zone as well. Other “involuntary parks” include
the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the Demilitarized Zone separating
North and South Korea.
[4] “Green Line” is a popular denomination for ceasefire lines, see
also Israel-Palestine, Pakistan-India, and the demarcation between
Christians and Muslims in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. The
Cypriot Green Line is sometimes also called the Atilla Line, after
Operation Atilla, the Turkish Army’s name for its invasion.
[5] At 3,572 square miles, the island of Cyprus is a bit bigger than
Delaware (2,489 square miles, 49th in size out of 50 states) and
slightly smaller than Connecticut (5,543 square miles 48th in size).
[6] “Legally” and “factually,” respectively.
[7] Interestingly, Akrotiri and Dhekelia are the only territories
under British control where that hated continental currency, the euro,
is the legal tender.
[8] Although it borders the sea, the exclave has no territorial waters.
[9] Don’t let southern border guards catch you with proof of purchase
of property in the TRNC; as this may still be legally owned by the
Greek Cypriots who were forced to flee the north when Turkey invaded.
[10] “Nagorno” is a Russian adjective meaning “mountainous.” German
media call the area “Berg-Karabakh,” French media often mention it as
“Haut-Karabakh.” The Azerbaijani refer to it as “Dagliq Qarabag,”
while for the Armenians, the area is “Artsakh,” after an ancient
Armenian province.
[11] An “oblast” is a Russian (and Soviet) administrative subdivision
of territory, often translated as “province” or “region.”
[12] Very close. Armenia sent in conscripts to fight on the NKR
side against Azerbaijan, the NKR shares its currency (the dram)
with Armenia, and Robert Kocharian was president of the NKR before
he became president of Armenia.