War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (9 page)

I walked one morning a few years ago down the deserted asphalt tract that slices through the center of the world's last divided capital, Nicosia, on the island of Cyprus. At one spot on the asphalt dividing line was a small painted triangle. For fifteen minutes each hour, Turkish troops, who control the northern part of the island, were allowed to move from their border posts and stand inside the white triangular lines. The arrangement was part of a deal laboriously negotiated by the United
Nations to give Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots access to several disputed areas along the 110-mile border that separates the north from the south. The triangle was a potent reminder that once the folly of war is over, folly itself is often all that remains.

“It's really a game of hopscotch,” said Major Richard Nixon-Eckersall, a British peacekeeper who was escorting me. “You see, the Greek sentries, over there, can't see the lines. Are the Turks inside the lines or not? A lot of rock-throwing and insults are generated over this triangle. Last year the Greeks fired off five rounds at the Turks. This is considered one of the most volatile areas along the Green Line.”

A buffer zone along the Green Line, set up after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and patrolled by United Nations soldiers, has prevented the resumption of a civil war that began in 1963. The zone—four miles wide in spots, narrowing to just a few yards in others—cuts through farmland, mountain passes, and Nicosia itself. Many of the houses and shops in the no-man's-land have dusty and decaying furniture and goods still stacked inside. Some doors have signs warning of booby traps. The deserted Nicosia International Airport with its gutted terminals, the seaside resort of Varosha swallowed up in thick vegetation, and the whitewashed Olympus Hotel were crumbling from neglect and inhabited by stray dogs and cats.

The buffer zone was lined with earthworks, barbed wire, trenches, bunkers, and watchtowers manned by troops with automatic weapons. There were about 43,000 Turkish and Greek Cypriot troops, including 30,000 Turkish soldiers sent by Ankara to the island, stationed along it.

On one side is Northern Cyprus, with one-fifth of the island's 650,000 people and a government recognized only by
Turkey. It is a dreary collection of towns and villages that look like working-class districts in Ankara or Istanbul. It suffers from constant shortages and high rates of unemployment. It is propped up by the Ankara government with an estimated $200 million a year.

The south, by contrast, has a per capita income of $12,000 a year, equal to those of Ireland or Spain. Luxury hotels and shops selling designer clothes, bone china, and computer software nestle along tree-lined avenues.

As if the war had ended only a few days ago, the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots denounce each other in repetitive weekly editorials and political rallies. The Ayios Demetrios Church in Nicosia, in one of the stream of Greek exhibitions portraying Turkish perfidy, had just mounted a photo display of the desecration of more than 200 Greek churches in the northern part of the island. The island is hostage to its own hatred.

“For over twenty years our young men have been trained in the art of war,” the Greek Cypriot president, Glafkos Clerides, told me as we chatted in his hilltop palace. “They are trained not to fight an external foe, but an internal enemy. This has had a devastating effect on the younger generation.”

The war between the Orthodox Serbs and the Muslims in the Balkans was viewed by many on the island as an extension of the global religious clash that grips Cyprus. The mayor in northern Nicosia, whose father disappeared in the violence in 1963, had a poster denouncing the siege of Sarajevo on his office door.

United Nations officials, along with Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders, warned it would take little to trigger the conflict again.

“The two peoples cannot be put back together,” said Rauf Denktash, the leader of the Turkish Cypriots, when I crossed the Green Line to see him. “One single incident, one crime involving a Turk and a Greek, would ignite the whole thing. We can't play with the fears of the people.”

The white glare of the Mediterranean sun beat down on the Ledra Palace Hotel checkpoint. Only foreign visitors who do not have Turkish or Greek names can cross. At the checkpoint the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots had set up competing billboards. Each side displayed gruesome photos of the atrocities they had allegedly endured. It was, once again, the struggle by opposing sides to wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood. For once a group or a nation establishes that it alone suffers, then all other competing claims to injustice are canceled out. The nation or the group falls into a collective “autism,” to use a phrase coined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and does not listen to those outside the inner circle. Communication is impossible.

“Enjoy yourself in this land of racial purity and true apartheid,” read a billboard directed at those headed to the north. “Enjoy the sight of our desecrated churches. Enjoy what remains of our looted heritage and homes.”

The red and white star-and-crescent flags flapped over the Turkish Cypriot guard posts, about 400 yards away, and a sign welcomed me to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

An enlarged photo showed the bloody bodies of a Turkish Cypriot mother and her three children in a bathtub. Another showed a priest firing a rifle with the awkward English caption “A Greek Cypriot priest who forgot his religious duties and joined to the hunting of Turks.”

Like the Cypriots, the Palestinians have been nurtured on bitter
accounts of abuse, despair, and injustice. Families tell and retell stories of being thrown off their land and of relatives killed or exiled. All can tick off the names of martyrs within their own clan who died for the elusive Palestinian state. The only framed paper in many Palestinians' homes is a sepia land deed from the time of the British mandate. Some elderly men still keep the keys to houses that have long since vanished. From infancy, Palestinians are inculcated with myopic nationalism and the burden of revenge. As in Bosnia, such resentment seeps into the roots of society. Private histories of despair overwhelm the present. Each generation is raised to exact revenge for the injustices visited on the last, real or imagined.

“Tell the man what you want to be,” said Hyam Temraz to her two-year-old son, Abed, as she peeped out of the slit of a black veil one afternoon in Gaza.

“A martyr,” the child told me.

“We were in Jordan when my son Baraa was four,” she said. “He saw a Jordanian soldier and ran and hugged him. He asked him if it was he who would liberate Palestine. He has always told me that he would be a martyr and that one day I would dig his grave.”

Nezar Rayyan, her husband, was a theology professor at Islamic University in Gaza. He was a large man with a thick black beard and the quiet, soft-spoken manner of someone who has spent much of his life reading. On the walls of his office, black and white photographs illustrated the history of Palestinians over the last five decades. They showed lines of trucks carrying refugees from their villages in 1948, after the United Nations created Israel and its Arab neighbors attacked the new state. They showed the hovels of new refugee camps built after the 1967 war. And they showed the gutted remains of Palestinian villages in what is now Israel.

Rayyan's grandfather and great-uncle were killed in the 1948 war. His grandmother died shortly after she and her son, Rayyan's father, were forced from their village. His father was passed among relatives and grew up with the bitterness of the dispossessed—a bitterness the father passed on to the son and the son has passed on to the grandchildren.

“There was not a single night that we did not think and talk about Palestine,” Rayyan said, his eyes growing moist. “We were taught that our lives must be devoted to reclaiming our land.”

Rayyan spent twelve years in an Israeli jail. His brother-in-law blew himself up in a suicide-bomb attack on an Israeli bus in 1998. One of his brothers had been shot dead by Israelis in street protests five years earlier. Another brother was expelled to Lebanon and several more were wounded in clashes.

He gave two of his sons—ages fifteen and sixteen—money to join the youths who throw rocks at Israeli checkpoints. His youngest, Mohammed, twelve, was crippled by an Israeli bullet. All three, according to their father, strive to be one thing: martyrs for Palestine.

“I pray only that God will choose them,” he said.

The rewriting and distortion of history—as in all wartime regimes—is crucial. Many of those who went on to prosecute the war in the Balkans, such as the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who fancied himself a poet, and Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, who after a lifetime in the Yugoslav army began writing nationalist tracts about Croatia, looked at themselves as academics or intellectuals. They believed they were unearthing or championing a true version of history, but what they were doing was tearing down one national identity and replacing it with another. For Tudjman and his Serbian counterparts, the new identity glorified Croatian or Serbian cultural heritage and denigrated the heritage of others. And, for all my
sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, most Palestinians have done the same thing.

Tudjman was part of a long line of mediocre writers and artists who found their voice and a route to power in national chauvinism. In 1963, after a career as an army general, he managed to be appointed professor of history at Zagreb University, even though he lacked a doctoral degree and his dissertation was rejected. He was part of the nationalist campaign for the linguistic separation of the Serbo-Croatian language, which had also been championed by the Nazi puppet state in Croatia run by the Ustashe. His turgid nationalist historical tracts were in the service of one idea—Croatian nationalism. In his book
Impasses of Historical Reality
, he challenged the numbers of victims of World War II genocide by the Germans and the Ustashe. He reduced the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust to one million instead of six million—as well as the number killed in Croatia's main death camp, at Jasenovac, from more than 500,000 to 59,639.

“A Jew is still a Jew,” he wrote, “even in the camps they retained their bad characteristics: selfishness, perfidy, meanness, slyness and treachery.”

During the 1990 election campaign that saw him ascend to the presidency and lead Croatia's bloody secession from Yugoslavia, he said, “Thank God, my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew.”

In 1992, he said his comments in his books had been “misinterpreted” and in 1994 he offered “an apology” in a letter to B'nai B'rith, saying that he intended to delete “controversial portions” from later editions, which he did. But by then the Croatian state, which carried out the forced expulsion of nearly all the ethnic Serbs—there were 600,000 of them, 12 percent of
the population—was complete. Croatia had become the most ethnically cleansed state in the former Yugoslavia.

Tudjman declared Croatia “the national state of the Croatian nation” when he assumed power. And when his government began wholesale dismissals of Serbs from civil service jobs, Serbian communities began arming themselves. The civil society broke down. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in
The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
, it is this fear of the other, perhaps more than anything else, that triggers war.

It is fear that turns minor difference into major, that makes the gulf between ethnicities into a distinction between species, between human and inhuman. And not just fear, but guilt as well. For if you have shared a common life with another group and then suddenly begin to fear them, because they suddenly have power over you, you have to overcome the weight of happy memory; you have to project onto
them
the blame for destroying a common life.
¹

The fervent drive for “authenticity” leads nationalist leaders to use a variety of disciplines to promote and legitimize the cause. In Israel the mania for archeology, for excavating ancient Jewish ruins, is a way of legitimizing the presence of Jews in what was once Palestine. These sites are given a prominence out of proportion to the multitude of other ruins that are not Jewish in character. Sociologists, historians, and writers all seek to find that within the culture that champions the myth and the state, ignoring that which challenges their own supremacy.

No nation is free from this distortion. After the September attacks in the United States a document entitled “Defending Civilization” was compiled by a conservative organization called
the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It set out to show that the American universities did not respond to the September attacks with a proper degree of “anger, patriotism, and support of military intervention.” The report offered a list of 115 subversive remarks taken from college newspapers or made on college campuses.

What is at work in this report is the reduction of language to code. Clichés, coined by the state, become the only acceptable vocabulary. Everyone knows what to say and how to respond. It is scripted. Vocabulary shrinks so that the tyranny of nationalist rhetoric leaves people sputtering state-sanctioned slogans. There is a scene in
Othello
when Othello is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he has lost the eloquence and poetry that won him Desdemona. He turns to the audience in Act IV and mutters, “Goats and monkeys!”
²
Nationalist cant, to me, always ends up sounding just as absurd.

The destruction of culture in wartime is also physical. There is an effort to eradicate the monuments and buildings that challenge the myth of the nation. There are thousands of Armenian villages in Turkey, Kurdish villages in Iraq, and Palestinian villages in Israel that have been razed in this process of state-sponsored forgetting. Along with their destruction has been a ferocious campaign to deny the displaced the right to remember where they once belonged.