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CYPRUS MAIL, Sunday 16th November 2008.

BEYOND THE BUFFER ZONE

By Simon Bahceli

One woman’s vision for bringing new life to no-man’s land

FOR NEARLY 35 years a 180 kilometre-long swathe of land across the middle of Cyprus
has remained in a time capsule.

Left wild, silent, untended in the countryside and fenced in by barbed wire and sand-
filled oil drums in the towns, this jagged tract of land is visited only by patrolling soldiers
and the occasional wandering shepherd. It takes in fields, forests, mountains, and
seemingly endless flat plains, while in the towns it swallows up roads, homes, factories,
schools and shops.

This swathe, also known as the UN-controlled Green Line, occupies approximately three
per cent of Cyprus’ landmass. Add to this the military zones that flank it, and it becomes
apparent how much of this tiny island is off limits to nearly all of its people.

Yet it is feasible that this situation could change in the not-too-distant future. If the
current round of peace talks succeed, the Green Line will disappear, delivering for the
people of Cyprus, among other benefits, a peace dividend of several thousand square
kilometres.

And this would not be ‘any old land’. This would be land that has been largely untouched
over the past three and-a-half decades. A land where historical buildings have not been
demolished to make way for utilitarian concrete eyesores, where meadows have not been
poisoned with pesticides and artificial fertilisers, and where hillside forests have not been
razed to make space for villas to sell to foreigners looking for a place in the sun.

“The Green Line could be transformed from being a military fault line into an ecological
seam,” says Dr Anna Grichting, a Harvard University researcher who has devised a
blueprint for the reintegration of the Green Line into Cyprus proper – as and when a
reunification formula is found.

The crux of Grichting’s blueprint is its aim to prevent the Green Line simply being
swallowed up and forgotten about once its dividing role comes to an end. Rather it should
become a focus for a host of environmental, reconciliation-building, historical and artistic
projects. As Grichting says, “It could become the backbone for environmental
cooperation between the two communities”.

In devising the blueprint, Grichting has studied ‘borderlines’, both past and current,
throughout the world, including the Berlin Wall, the Demilitarised Zone in Korea, and the
Great Wall of China. It also draws on inspirational projects such as the Green Belt
Movement in Kenya, which saw women taking it upon themselves to reforest the areas in
which they lived, and the Trans-boundary Peace Park in Europe, which has seen parts of
the old Iron Curtain frontier transformed into protected green areas where people can
now enjoy themselves and appreciate nature.

Gichting’s project is wide-ranging to say the least, providing different ideas and
approaches appropriate to the variety of terrains the Green Line transects.

In the capital Nicosia, for example, it focuses on the preservation of existing buildings of
interest, and on the creation of public spaces that will have meaning and use for the
people of the town. Grichting believes it is important too to preserve some elements of
the city’s recent history of partition.

“Nicosia is currently being marketed as the ‘last divided capital in Europe’ and people are
fascinated by seeing these boundaries and borders, so I believe that some elements should
be preserved and that we shouldn’t erase all of the past,” she says.

An example of how this might work is Grichting’s highly-ambitious idea of linking the
Greek and Turkish Cypriot National Struggle Museums across the Green Line. The two
museums are surprisingly close to each other, making it possible to connect them
physically. And although both currently focus on the wrongs done to them by the ‘other’
community, the researcher feels they should continue to function after a reunification, in
a less jingoistic manner than now.

“I don’t think we should get rid of them but link them in some kind of reinterpretation
across the buffer zone,” she says, adding: “There has to be a balance between memory
and forgetting. If you remember too much you can’t move on, but at the same time if you
forget the past you are in danger of losing your heritage”.

There is also a proposal in Grichting’s project of what could be done with Nicosia’s old
airport, which currently functions as the United Nations Protected Area (UNPA). “It
could be used to house government buildings, research centres, museums, public spaces
and archives,” she believes. The landscape for this transformed area, she says, could be
based on a model used at China’s Taichung Municipal Airport where water catchment is
the leading principal.

“As everyone in Cyprus knows, water is a major issue,” she says.

The water theme is in fact a recurring one throughout Grichting’s project. In rural and
urban area alike, rivers transecting the Green Line have been often treated by each
community as if they exist only in their part of the island. What is needed, she says, is
recognition of the fact that rivers are a continuum and that what you do at one end of
them greatly affects what happens at the other end.

“Catchment areas need to be landscaped and treated as very fragile areas. Good water
management is only possible through co-operation,” she says.

Grichting also has an intriguing idea to link the ancient ruins of Salamis with the
mediaeval city of Famagusta and the modern town of Varosha in a kind of “tale of three
cities”. There is also a plan for organic farming in the Morphou area on land currently in
the Green Line and therefore uncontaminated by fertilisers and pesticides, along with an
idea for the preservation of monk seals in Kokkina (Erenkoy). As Grichting says, “The
Green Line also runs under the sea”.

Grichting has countless more ideas, all of which cannot fit into this article, but one thing
these ideas all have in common is that they depend on the participation of Cypriots.

“It is important to incorporate what people are already trying to do, rather than say ‘this is
my design’,” she insists, adding that many of the concepts she proposes have been tried
and tested elsewhere. “These ideas are adapted from procedures and projects I’ve seen in
the past, like Berlin, or contemporary projects like the one in the demilitarised zone in
Korea”.

Some of the ideas were also inspired by Cypriots, in particular former Nicosia mayors
Lellos Demetriades and Mustafa Akinci, who, in the 1980s devised the Nicosia Master
Plan. Grichting has met with both of these men to ask for their advice and support.

Time will of course tell if there will be a need for Grichting’s blueprint, but in the
meantime it is a pleasure to dwell on what it would be like to climb onto what used to be
a military observation post with binoculars to watch migrating flamingos at dusk. Such
things have happened elsewhere; they may one day happen here.

Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2008