War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [28]
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