__ What happens after ethnic cleansing ends? Bruce Sterling reports from the postnationalist future - Cyprus, haven of undeclared peace. __
At the death of the 20th century, it's open season on Muslim ethnics. The Milosevic regime and its war-criminal militias are throwing a pogrom. They shoot and shell Muslims, "disappear" their leaders, rape the women, set fire to the crops, bulldoze the villages, and chase the locals over the borders, wholesale. Those who resist and refuse get thrown into mass graves.
These recent dire events in Kosovo mirror what happened in Cyprus - 25 long years ago. There, the bitter, endless rivalry of two quarreling parent states, Greece and Turkey, gave rise to vengeful ethnic militias who burned villages and uprooted thousands of civilians. Air strikes followed, UN ground troops tried to restore peace, barbed wire flew up, land mines speckled the landscape, and journalists collected ghastly atrocity photos.
Then, finally, the undeclared war stopped.
When undeclared peace broke out, the island found itself cruelly divided into the official, recognized, Greek Orthodox "Republic of Cyprus" and an illegitimate region later proclaimed the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus." The latter, a weird little armed protectorate, today contains 190,000 people, 99 percent of them Muslims. Their unreal, propaganda-drenched situation on the ground - along with today's very similar chain of events in Kosovo - suggests that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is a kind of military/political lab experiment. It's a living, breathing futurist scenario for a new sort of planetary area: the 21st century's Muslim ethnic netherworld.
These people live outside the New World Order's game plan. As do plenty of others: A brief roll includes Kosovo, Bosnia, the Bekaa Valley, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, East Timor, northern Iraq, southern Iraq, every bit of Afghanistan, the Sudan, Algeria, Kashmir, South Lebanon, the Western Sahara, and the Gaza Strip.
The distinguishing mark of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is that, unlike those other highly disturbed places, it is at peace. Nobody bombs it or shells it. Its people live quietly at the crumbly edge of Europe, and they survive, and they even make a little money. They're not refugees. They have become a New World Order counterculture.
Turkish Cyprus may be diplomatically suspect, but like other outlaw zones in history, it has become a busy locus of illegality in finance, espionage, and military affairs. Its situation is outside the pale of decency, as that's haltingly defined by the UN General Assembly, but it's still a workable way of life. It could have a very big future.
Mind you, there was never any real resolution of the basic conflict. Genuine peace never arrived in Cyprus, but there's been no slaughter since 1974. There are Turkish military bases all over the place to keep the Greeks from flooding in; the UN runs back and forth, harmlessly blowing whistles and taking pictures, and somehow the cease-fire holds.
So Turkish Cyprus has peace and borders; it just doesn't officially exist. Which makes it of inherent political interest - even though it's small, weak, backward, poor, mostly offline, and almost totally forgotten by the world's great powers.
Kosovo will look like Turkish Cyprus someday, if it's lucky. "Kosovo," or whatever people call it in 2024, will be small, balkanized, and politically, legally, and economically screwed up. It will be semi-sort-of independent, scarred with bullet holes, land mines, and old hate. Maybe it will also be picturesque, an off-the-beaten-track tourist draw, an overgrown rather than an active graveyard.
Now that Berlin is full of new skyscrapers and German media yuppies, the broken Cypriot city of Lefkosa/Nicosia is the last divided capital in Europe. The Green Line, which runs right through the heart of town, is the legendary cease-fire zone of armed apartheid that cuts the island of Cyprus across its midsection. It's a hostile, mostly uninhabited wilderness, 110 miles long and up to 5 miles wide. It's patrolled by chuttering UN helicopters and overseen by guard towers. This no-man's-land is a full 3 percent of the island, and it contains thousands of land mines.
Like every other place in the Mideast and the Balkans, Cyprus boasts many ancient, bloodstained stone fortifications. The Green Line is the 1960s version of a Cypriot medieval wall. But this barrier is built, quite properly and aptly, out of cheap consumer goods. In downtown Lefkosa, the Green Line is made mostly of big, rusting oil barrels shoveled full of dirt; as you walk along, these yield to bulldozered bunkers with thick green overgrowth. Then to tall sheets of bullet-pierced tin, followed by cracked concrete, and then big, rusty, tetanus-gleaming coils of filthy barbed wire. Then you find nail-studded wood, and woven wire and tar paper, and even dry bamboo, and on and on. The fortifications are largely homemade, almost humble, and lavishly heaped with trash. Some parts of the Green Line sport entire dead cars.
After a while it dawns on you that something very strange yet deliberate is going on here. Strident signs everywhere firmly forbid you to take any photographs. But why? The UN photographs all of the Green Line routinely, and anyway, there seem to be no possible military secrets there.
It's not simply a military security issue; rather, it's about a bizarre enforced blindness. It's about stubborn, bitter, total denial. About a willing refusal to look. The Turkish Cypriots have symbolically turned their backs on the enemy with a profundity that defies foreign belief. Heaping garbage along the Green Line somehow makes the Greeks beyond it even more invisible. The enemy is farther away than Antarctica. The Turkish Cypriots don't see him. They don't touch him. They don't hear him. They don't know him.
There's an eerie majesty in this blanket rejection of other people's notions about reality. It's astounding to physically confront so much of it, going on so incredibly long. I spent so much time staring balefully at the wire and junk along the Green Line that a local family noticed me, invited me into their home, and gave me tea and cigarettes.
Parked in a modest working-class apartment abutting their bullet-pocked fortress of ethnic death, these Turkish Cypriots couldn't have been more warm, open, human, and hospitable, even though dragging a foreigner into their home wasn't exactly a win-win notion. An eccentric, elderly uncle, who had once been a barber on a local British army base, translated for us. Mom poured tea and handled the TV remote. Despite their dodgy locale on the UN-patrolled rim of a nonexistent country, my impromptu hosts possessed a handsome color television, their own satellite dish, and a European PAL-style VCR. The whole family sat beneath a gold-framed portrait of the Republic's president, Rauf Denktash, a wily, portly fellow, attentively watching Turkish TV.
We traded broken small talk until the news came on. The family was extremely eager to see this news, because this was a red-letter day for Turkey - and, by extension, Turkish Cypriots. A Kurdish separatist (not quite as bad as a Greek, but close) named Abdullah Ocallan had just been snatched out of Africa by three Turkish spies in sport shirts and black ski masks.
The sight of their nation's terrorist enemy, blindfolded, handcuffed, duct-taped, and trussed up like a Christmas turkey, filled my hosts with unfeigned glee. A successful Turkish moon shot couldn't have made them any prouder or happier. At that moment, three anonymous men wearing black ski masks were Turkey's foremost national heroes.
Lefkosa, chopped violently in half and pockmarked with the scars of house-to-house sniping, has the appropriate look-and-feel of a tough place. My real home base in Turkish Cyprus, however, was the charming seaside town of Girne/Kyrenia. If you've ever seen a Mexican ocean resort, nothing about Girne would surprise you. The streets are cracked and run-down, the electricity's spotty, the water supply is increasingly constrained. But Girne is civilization: There are computer stores, cell phones, glossy fashion mags, all lolling in the gentle sun under huge, ancient castles built by 12th-century French crusaders.
Girne has no detectable unruliness of any kind. If you leave an empty plastic bag on a cafe table, the locals will run after you to courteously return it. Compared to Girne, Peoria is a maelstrom.
My home away from home, the Jasmine Court Hotel, is one of Girne's largest and most ambitious resorts. It's a major tourist draw, and a linchpin of the local economy. It has its own private beachfront, a swimming pool, restaurants, many tall whitewashed walls, much exotic foliage.
The Jasmine Court Hotel - by no coincidence - also boasts one of the largest casinos in Europe. This fabled gambling den is a single enormous barn, with several thousand blinking, yakking, American-made slot machines, plus some unused roulette wheels and a few desultory card players. The largest wall features, of all things, a giant mural painting of rootin'-tootin' Turkish cowboys, in hats, mustaches, and spurs, playing poker in some imaginary Nevada. The casino has metal detectors at the entrance, cold-eyed, bow-tied security men, and a large, circular bar suitable for encouraging recklessness in the clientele.
The Jasmine Court was built by Turkish Cyprus' richest and most famous businessman, Asil Nadir. Mr. Nadir is an international mogul who started a Cypriot/British multinational called Polly Peck. In the go-go 1980s, Polly Peck was a booming conglomerate moving everything from fruit to electronics. Its British connection was perfectly natural, since "Cyprus" as a whole is still officially considered a Commonwealth country. For 25 years, the British Foreign Office has tried to ignore the entire concept of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, attempting to treat the locals as if they were all loyal patriots of a single state. Over the years, huge numbers of the original Turkish Cypriot population, clutching their Commonwealth visas, have pulled up stakes to live in Britain.
So Mr. Nadir had the wherewithal to become an entrepreneurial star in both Cyprus and the UK. He was moving from commercial strength to strength and had many devoted friends in the upper reaches of the Tory Party. Then he fell afoul of Britain's Serious Fraud Office when his enterprise crumbled under a debt that reportedly exceeded £500 million.
Where did the missing money go? Who knows? But things looked pretty dark for Mr. Nadir; he was assessed a tremendous bail in preparation for a dramatic fraud trial in the UK. Then he skipped the country in his private jet. Turkish Cyprus, since it isn't recognized by Britain, has no extradition treaties. Mr. Nadir came down to earth in one of his local mansions and simply defied the British cops and lawyers to dig him out. They couldn't. There was just no way to get a grip on him, and there hasn't been since.
After Mr. Nadir's financial embarrassment, the Jasmine Court eventually came into the possession of the rapidly expanding, multinational Emperyal casino chain. The mogul of the Emperyal chain was one Omer Lutfu Topal, a silver-haired heroin entrepreneur. Mr. Topal had close ties to Turkish intelligence, such close ties that in 1996 several agents of Turkish intelligence reportedly had Mr. Topal murdered in order to grab his business holdings for themselves.
Which means I'm a guest, in Room 130, of a gambling establishment built by a multinational swindling suspect and operated for years by a smack dealer who, when assassinated, had allegedly just sent a $17 million bribe to Turkish spooks.
Alas, I don't have space to get into the many other operatic complications, but here's the crux of the matter: When you don't exist, corruption is the true killer app.
The local corruption can be documented easily enough (a random issue of the local English weekly newspaper details a £3 million bank swindle and an international car theft ring), but what's more relevant is the fact that Turkish Cypriots have nothing much to gain by honesty. They're not allowed to play the New World Order game, so they have no stake in its persnickety rules and procedures. You can't cut diplomatic relations with Turkish Cyprus - it doesn't have any. Economic embargo? It's got one already, thanks.
Not existing brings inherent operational difficulties. These burning local grievances were presented to me with great clarity by Ozdil Nami, a Turkish Cypriot political analyst who works for the president's office in Lefkosa. Young Mr. Nami is a Berkeley-educated Fulbright scholar, and he's as bright and polite a spin doctor as you are ever likely to meet.
First, Mr. Nami told me earnestly, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus has no airline certification, so there are few direct flights to the Republic: Only Turkish airlines can fly there, and only from Turkish airports. Still, getting in is relatively easy. Getting out is much harder. Turkish Cypriot passports aren't recognized by most global travel authorities, which makes obtaining visas a permanent crisis.
The Republic is not part of the world postal network; there is no official zip code. Most mail naively addressed to "Turkish Cyprus" is swiftly routed to enemy Greek Cyprus, where the Greeks get up to all kinds of mischief with it. If you want mail to get through to Turkish Cyprus, it should be fake-addressed to "Mersin 10, Turkey."
Ownership of land in Turkish Cyprus is a big legal problem. One Greek Cypriot has taken the matter to the European Court of Justice and successfully claimed their land in the Turkish part of the island to be stolen property. Sheep and oranges originating in Turkish Cyprus are also viewed as the proceeds of a 25-year-old theft, and the European Community won't buy them.
International authorities give big development loans to Greek Cyprus, but the money never reaches Turkish Cyprus. Culture and arts exchanges with the rest of the world are pretty much out of the question. Perhaps the most galling insult is that Turkish Cypriots, soccer fanatics of the deepest dye, cannot compete in sports under their own flag.
The Republic would love to be a real country, at least as real as, say, Andorra or Monaco. "Federation," "confederation" - endless Cyprus peace proposals have been offered over the years. But the negotiations are going nowhere, and Mr. Nami was by no means optimistic about their future. Meanwhile, he firmly insists that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is already a real, legitimate state. His nation is waiting for the rest of the world to stop senselessly persecuting it and do it justice.
But of course, the status quo isn't all bad. I asked Mr. Nami what would happen if the UN monitors left the Green Line. He said there would be many more cross-border incidents, but the Turkish Army would surely hold firm.
And what if the Turkish Army left?
"Then the Greeks will attack," he said with perfect confidence.
One may naturally wonder how this fertile and fragrant island, the legendary birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite, got so utterly messed up. Well, Cyprus is a very, very old place. It's no use beginning at the beginning, because then you have to point out that Cyprus once had its own race of dwarf elephants. Modern Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are no help at all because, although they claim they have a national history and they loudly chew over it all the time, what they really have are two intricate, dual theologies of vicious ethnic grudges. Outsiders who dare to describe Cypriot history will be sternly reminded that they know nothing - that they have abjectly failed to mention, for instance, the vile enosis doctrine of Archbishop Makarios, or the ghastly cruelties of the Grey Wolf commandos.
But here, for the busy inhabitant of 1999, is the executive summary of the Cypriot's 20th century. Cyprus, with a population dominated by ethnic Greeks and Turks, was controlled since 1878 by Britain, which built naval bases there. A small but nasty terror/liberation struggle broke out in the late 1950s. The British left in 1960, keeping their naval bases and leaving behind a hopelessly elaborate, democratic constitution. There was a war in 1963, with many grisly atrocities, but the UN cooled it down.
Then, in the mid-1970s, the Greek military junta grew desperate. It was a sorry Cold War junta, tolerated by NATO because it rarely failed to blackjack Communists, but it was losing all popular support in Greece. So, in a daring gamble, its leaders decided to launch a glamorous military adventure inside Cyprus.
This Cyprus imbroglio was very popular in Greece - anything that alarms Turks is always popular in Greece. But, like the Argentinean junta in the Falklands, this crew didn't have the firepower to back up their ambitions. They went so far as to destabilize the weak Cypriot government, and provoked a heroic shoot-'em-up among the local militias. The much greater numbers of Greek Cypriots got the upper hand on the ground. The angry Turks "intervened" from the very, very nearby Turkish mainland and split up the island at bayonet point. The Greek Cypriots immediately claimed that they were innocent civilian victims of illegal, bullying, military oppression. They demanded that this unspeakable barbarity cease at once, that all of Cyprus be placed in their hands. They've been demanding this for 25 years, but the stalemate is perpetual. Neither side in Cyprus will come out of the hard, paranoid shell of its ethnic mythology. The situation is double victimology at its best.
Like the Serbs today, the Turkish Cypriots would rather boil septic water and eat roots in their blacked-out ruins than give up their self-defining, blood-drenched national myths. Since only the Greeks are willing to actively march out and shoot them, and since the Turkish Cypriots are very well armed by the Turks, they cannot be obliterated, or assimilated. But they still won't obey the rules. So they have to be ignored. And they are ignored, but when you are invisible and unmentionable, as well as zealous and heavily armed, it tends to fertilize your eccentricities.
On the face of it, recent events in Turkey and Turkish Cyprus have been utterly fantastic. Turkey has endured an espionage and corruption scandal of titanic proportions. It has been publicly revealed that this NATO power of 65 million people was influenced for years by a covert clique of government-supported, heroin-smuggling assassins. (The Republic of Turkey reportedly has 2,700 unsolved political murders.) This horrific spy scandal makes Iran-contra look like a Boy Scout jamboree. It was known as the Susurluk Affair. Quite a lot of the Susurluk skullduggery was financed and run not within Turkey proper but in Turkish Cyprus, where it was offshore and unrecognized and, therefore, plausibly deniable.
The 1998 book Cetele mafya iliskilerinde (Gang and mafia relations) shows the incredible scope of the Susurluk Affair. It's a stark, alphabetical list of the major figures in the investigation: offshore bankers, intelligence chiefs, cops, arms smugglers, croupiers, casino owners, members of Parliament, gangsters' molls, rural warlords, government ministers, party fund-raisers, lots of dead Kurdish terrorists, and so forth. Most of the players get only one or two paragraphs, and the book is 400 pages long!
The main activity of the Susurluk "state mafia gang" was liquidating enemies of the Turkish state. To facilitate this, they smuggled heroin and they laundered money, much of it inside the casinos of Turkish Cyprus. Some say they used the black money to kill ethnic Kurds in Turkey.
In the rhetoric of the Kosovo crisis, as we know, Kurds are never hard to find. The Kurds have been catching it almost as badly as the Kosovars, only in slow motion. Iranians shoot them, Iraqis gas them - and Turks dispossess them, fight them in the hills, and deny them their heritage.
There are 25 million Kurds - they are the world's largest submerged nationality. As the costs and casualties from grinding away at the Kurds have risen in Turkey, more and more money is required for the dirty war. And since one result of the Susurluk scandal was that Turkish casinos were banned - inside Turkey, that is - Turkish Cyprus now contains all of the Turkish casinos. Thus, the invisible economy is booming, visible across the island in an unexplainable rash of luxury cars and flashy hillside mansions.
The northern Republic is richly gifted with Turkish military bases. Some 30,000 Turkish soldiers, every man jack of them neatly kitted out in top-of-the-line NATO gear, rumble constantly about on mysterious errands, in big dun-colored jeeps and army trucks, toting highly efficient automatic rifles. One frequently hears the distant gutsy yells of massed Turkish commandos, and the rifle crack of their target practice.
There are soldiers galore in Lefkosa, in the core of the island. Girne also has a military presence. There are soldiers and barbed wire near the third city of the little Republic as well, Gazimagusa/Famagusta, on the island's east coast, a hop from the seething ports of Lebanon.
Once upon a time, Gazimagusa was the richest city in Cyprus. That was back when the island was ruled by the Lusignans, French adventurers who supposed themselves to be Christian kings of Jerusalem during the Crusades. These bold knights actually grabbed Jerusalem for a little while. Then the enraged Muslims rose up, beat them like drums, and threw them into permanent exile. The Lusignans retreated to nearby Cyprus, prospered mightily, made great wines and brandies, got into the Mideastern spice and drugs trade, and built lavish cathedrals and monasteries.
Their noblest cathedral there has become the local mosque. To hear a muezzin wailing out of a Notre Dame-style Gothic tower is a strangely liberating and refreshing experience. One day I wandered through the medieval inner city and clambered up onto the well-preserved fortress parapets. I noticed that the ancient stone arches over Gazimagusa's crooked entryways had been nicely retrofitted with 1970s machine-gun nests.
Except for offshore enthusiasts of medieval military engineering, very few people clamber around those city walls now. When I slid and jumped my way down from one, I had to take a shortcut across a local soccer field. Unfortunately, this field was near a garrison of the Turkish Cypriot Army, which is how I ended up in army custody.
I was ratted out by a local 9-year-old. This alert little fink saw me traipsing past the goalposts and took off like a shot to tell his good buddies, the soldiers. I was hailed by a fast-moving squad of four crisp, clean-shaven men half my age. They surrounded me at once, and marched me over to meet their sergeant. My juvenile captor accompanied us, capering in joy and grinning triumphantly at my discomfiture. The Turkish sergeant, the only one among the five adults who spoke any English, examined my Yankee passport. He sternly told me that I had trespassed on forbidden property. I expressed my deep, NATO-style regret for the mishap. He then asked what was in my suspicious-looking shoulder bag. I showed the entire squad pictures of my children (this stunt almost always works). We began discussing kids. The soldiers cordially explained to me that my 9-year-old betrayer was their "commando."
I was escorted off the base by a private. As soon as we were out of military jurisdiction, my escort swiftly talked me into buying him a pack of cigarettes. Locked inside the war machine, the poor guy didn't have the proper scrip to make his own purchases in the town. So I bought him two packs of Benson & Hedges. It was clear that this small act of graft would make him quite a popular guy back at the barracks.
These Turkish soldiers couldn't have been more gentlemanly about this incident; they treated me far better than some suspicious-looking Mideastern Turk would have fared on an American army base. I don't believe I was even ever formally under arrest. It's just that, you see, the Turks really do care a lot about their security. They are very, very serious about it, and large, wandering creatures with a camera can't go unspanked.
Turkey is a NATO alliance member. There are excellent reasons for this, because Turkey occupies a central arena of the New World Order's scariest endemic disorders. Turkey's pretty much dealing with it all: the Balkans, the Mideast, the decaying ex-Soviet Union, big oil, very valuable water, fundamentalism, ethnic separatism, the arms trade, the drug trade, and a huge diaspora of guest-worker Turks all over the planet. The country's got TV ads, jeans, designer clothes, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, beauty contests, and F-16s, but it's also got every modern crisis but nukes.
These are very troubled times for Muslims, and the Republic of Turkey is the closest thing the Muslim world has to an advanced industrial nation. Its internal politics - weird, violent, bloody, thoroughly corrupt though they are - are at least as good as and usually much better than any other country's in the region. Turkey is the one Muslim nation-state on earth that can truly kick ass and take names. Better yet, of all NATO powers, Turkey has the strongest and most promising position inside the remnants of the Soviet Union. There are Turkish-speaking peoples in a huge Asian belt through Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, all the way to China.
Then there's Turkey's archrival, Greece. Of all other NATO members, Greece has by far the coziest, chummiest relationship with the vile Milosevic regime. Milosevic's son Marko was sent to the family villa in Greece to sit out the NATO bombing campaign. Milosevic, who is a dictator and therefore a multimillionaire, has major offshore holdings in both Greek Cyprus and Greece.
Turkey didn't invent Cyprus or its troubles, and neither did Greece, but Turkey has zero intention of backing off over "Turkish Cyprus." The US certainly isn't going to pressure the Turks, because the Americans owe Turkey big-time over the endless Saddam debacle, and nobody else is in any position to make the Turks do a thing. The Turks are masters in their own house in Anatolia, and they have half the house next door. If the UN doesn't like it, tough.
Little Turkish Cyprus could even get a new diplomatic deal, thanks mostly to Serbia. For years, the Turkish Cypriots' paranoid fantasies about Christian genocide have been dismissed as, well, paranoid fantasies about Christian genocide. After Kosovo, those fantasies don't dismiss so easily. As for the illegal Turkish "intervention" in Cyprus in 1974, NATO's "interventions" in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999 are on equally shaky legal ground - if not shakier. So the doubting world may yet somehow admit that the Republic exists!
While they wait, there might be compelling reasons for the two sides in Cyprus to find a new modus vivendi. The whole island, which has limited aquifers and many demands, is running out of water. The closest fresh water is in Turkey, but the greatest need is in the Greek south. Already there have been Rube Goldberg efforts to move Turkish water to Cyprus using tugboats and gigantic plastic bags. Vague plans for a huge undersea pipeline float around.
Boysan Borya, a Turkish Cypriot lawyer, environmentalist, and peace activist who told me about the water shortage, thinks that liquid diplomacy makes a lot of sense in Cyprus. Why can't people agree about water? Water is a very simple, central matter. By Cypriot standards, Mr. Borya is a decided optimist. In his Lefkosa office, he told me that he felt that "peace could come quickly - as quickly as a war."
But it was also Mr. Borya who directed me to the strangest part of the Lusignans' old haunt, Maras/Varosha. "You have to see the Ghost City," he assured me, and he was right. It is a place dense with memories.
Once upon a time, Maras, just south of Gazimagusa, had a large and thriving population of ethnic Greeks. After the 1974 battle, the Greek Cypriots decided that they didn't want to leave the Turkish Cypriots with any ready-made hostage population, so they pulled their fellow Greeks out of the region and back across the Green Line. But the Turks did not go into that part of the city. And so, the region became the Ghost City, abandoned entirely. The Greeks wouldn't stay there, and the Turks wouldn't go there. The place was politicized out of existence with the efficiency of a neutron bomb.
I imagined that the Ghost City would be a matter of a couple of neighborhoods, but it is scarily huge. I walked much of its perimeter for hours and couldn't complete my round. In 1974, the Ghost City was a thriving suburb in a charming resort town. Now, you could not ask for a more perfect metaphor for abandoned, blighted hopes.
In 25 years, the Ghost City has become an urban jungle the likes of which I have never seen. It's gone wild, but it's nothing at all like a natural wilderness. The city has been eaten by its houseplants.
The homes of the richest people, with the best landscaping efforts, now have decorative cactus bursting through porches, while former shrubs greedily eat the roofs and lintels. The place is loud with flocks of birds, which live off feral lemons and oranges. Every street and sidewalk is thick with knee-high grass. By the seaside, pigeons dwell in huge rookeries that were once pastel beach resorts.
Unlike in Lefkosa/Nicosia, nothing caught fire in the Ghost City, nothing was bombed or shot; they just turned the lights out on the future and fled. It's as if some tremendous, focused gout of hate and fear had caused the people there to vaporize.
The Ghost City is the one place on the island of Cyprus that really and truly Does Not Exist. It has become a great world capital of emptiness. If this is the future of a crowded world seething with implacable ethnic conflict, then believe me, you don't want to know about it. Because it's like a promise of doom.
