CYPRUS: The Cypriot capital, Nicosia, is split by a rough track between opposing buildings, Michael Jansen writes
We cross through the UN-operated gate at the eastern-most edge of the buffer zone which bisects Nicosia, the last divided capital in the world. The large black and white dog standing beside the British peacekeeper outside the pillbox takes no notice as we file off the bus. Dog and soldier slope off to the next post a short stroll away.
Capt Louise Burt, two months into a half-year tour of duty on the line, leads us into the passage between two very different sectors of the city. On the right, to the north is the Turkish-Cypriot sector, a sleepy provincial back- water, on the left, to the south the Greek-Cypriot sector, a rapidly growing modern sprawl, thrusting and prosperous.
The core consists of the densely-built old town enclosed within 16th century Venetian walls. This is bisected by the narrowest section of the Green Line, a rutted, earthen track between crumbling buildings and edged by tall grass, clover, tangles of nettle and barbed wire and mines. While time has stood still along most of the line since the troubles began just before Christmas in 1963, the ravages of both years and war have destroyed the physical fabric of the jumble of houses, shops and workshops in the working-class area of Ayios Kassianos.
Our first landmark is the primary school, a still handsome, windowless, roofless, neo-classical structure behind a rust-encrusted iron fence. The windows of the crumbling buildings opposite are boarded up. A Turkish Cypriot house is shielded by sheets of corrugated iron - a brothel serving mainland Turkish soldiers since 1974. The madame did not want her customers observed by soldiers of the Greek-Cypriot National Guard across the way.
Nicosia is split by this rough track between opposing ranks of ramshackle mudbrick buildings reinforced by patches of cement, stacks of car tyres, sandbags and breeze blocks. One short stretch of wall consists of empty wooden tea chests; another, called the "10 brick wall", has been illegally raised by the Turkish army by 10 bricks above a white line painted by the UN. The status quo is meant to be sacrocanct, but soldiers on both sides play games with each other and the UN by altering a feature, moving a position forward a few centimetres, or, even, a metre or two.
Three mainland Turkish soldiers standing on a rooftop beneath an umbrella watch us pass. According to the agreement on troop reductions, three is one too many. Before this accord was implemented in 1989, tension was high in this area. Soldiers threw stones and attempted to spear one another with long poles. They still shout insults across the line on warm summer evenings.
We pause before a Greek Orthodox chapel completely surrounded by barbed wire. Our guide points out the back wall of a house inhabited between 1880-1883 by Kitchener, who mapped the island. A tortoiseshell cat slips from one side of the line to the other, an infiltrator. Cats are no respecters of the rules of men.
All but two of the shop signs are in Greek, indicating that the Green Line area was populated by members of the the Greek-Cypriot majority community. The exceptions are for Armenian-owned premises: Diran and Bohdgalian.
At Maple House, the barracks of the 26 British soldiers, we climb down a steep ladder into the basement. A dealer from Famagusta stored 50 Japanese cars here between the coup against President Makarios mounted by the Athens junta on July 15th, 1974 and the Turkish invasion on July 20th. The cars, dusty and deteriorated, are frozen in the physical status quo of the buffer zone.
While the zone remains in a time warp, the political status quo imposed by the Turkish occupation is cracking. The cracks began to appear in December when President Glafkos Clerides of Cyprus and the Turkish Cypriot leader, Mr Rauf Denktash, agreed to negotiate until they reach a political settlement. An outline settlement is expected by June. One day, the dead zone between the two sectors of the divided capital will be given a new life.