Women Walk Home

Cyprus, 19/3/89

In brief, uncertain light and early morning cool the women converged, stepping out of the alleys and shadows cast by stone buildings, huddling in small groups at the meeting-place. The disused mosque, which caught the first full light, was pocked with shrapnel scars.

The only man in the bus was the driver. The women hugged their fears and their excitement to themselves, but some of it escaped into the air inside the bus, so that we breathed a blend of longing, trepidation, promise.

Sea at times, and arid fields, light traffic on the early road. All over Cyprus, women were converging on the pick-up points, busloads of them drawn towards the capital, until the square at the heart of Lefkosia (Nikosia) was thronged with more than eighty buses, crammed with women of all ages, from schoolgirls to grandmothers.

Ice-cream vendors sold stale, poisonously bright ice cream in tiny cones from glass containers like rectangular fishtanks, balanced precariously on the handlebars of bicycles. Women walked restlessly up and down the narrow footpath opposite a section of the wall bisecting the city, greeting each other, exchanging snippets of information about their lives since 1974. Men stood around in separate groups, fingering their beads, waiting.

At some point, in response to a signal imperceptible to me, there was a ripple of purposeful movement as passengers began to return to their buses, but the vehicles were so numerous that it was no simple matter to find the right one. A young woman bounded aboard our bus and proceeded to issue instructions. Prominent among them was the phrase, "Kleiste to stoma!" (Say nothing. Remain silent.) She handed a small olive branch and a white flag to Koulla, an elderly woman sitting in one of the front seats, and exited.

After the briefings, the clumsy cavalcade swung out of the dusty square. Every vehicle was crammed to capacity, with women sitting or standing in the aisles and occupying spaces near the drivers.

Men lined the city streets, applauding. they were unaccustomed to seeing women off to the front; they felt inadequate. All they could do was acknowledge the women"s courage. Men were not permitted to take part in this journey. Three-and-a-half thousand unarmed women believed they could accomplish more, without casting a word or a stone, than any number of men, armed or otherwise. They wanted to draw the world"s attention to the fact that Cyprus and its fate continued to be virtually ignored. They wanted the Turkish government, whose troops had occupied northern Cyprus for fifteen years, to account for the disappearance of more than sixteen hundred Greek Cypriots, including many civilians, who had last been seen alive in Turkish custody. They wanted to make their point without violence or bloodshed. The only males involved in the operation were the drivers.

The convoy wound in and out of alleys in labyrinthine fashion. Only one person on each bus, apart from the driver, knew the destination. Although the newspapers had abuzz with speculation about the planned event for days, and women had converged not only from different parts of Cyprus, but also from Athens, New York, London, the Antipodes; although the Greek and Cypriot press had predicted violent clashes, the point where the women intended to cross the Green Line that partitioned Cyprus was still secret. The organisers were maintaining tight security, so as to give the army of occupation as little prior notice as possible of their precise movements and intentions. So the convoy took a tortuous, circuitous route to confront the minotaur. A poor analogy in fact, since there was no Theseus, but several thousand Ariadnes, and the minotaur in question was not one creature, but an army of more than thirty-five thousand.

Children ran out of alleys, passing plastic bottles filled with water up to the bus windows; families cheered from balconies; an old woman in black, her long white braids falling beside her face, stood in her open gateway with both arms outstretched, waving, while tears streamed down her cheeks. A schoolgirl on our bus called out to her: "We"re going for you!" and some teenage girls began to sing.

Koulla offered me a bread-ring flecked with sesame seed, and leaned forward to stroke my hair. (I was sitting on the floor of the bus at her feet.) We had become acquainted that morning on the bus to Lefkosia. I guessed she had been touched in some way by the war: she had bullet or shrapnel scars on her bare calves; she walked with a limp. She had never married.

Once clear of the city, the sense of disorientation persisted. I would not have known where we were anyway, but everyone else on the bus seemed unclear about this too. For over an hour the convoy twisted and turned in the hot sun, writhing its way between fields and through villages, until a whisper rippled through the bus, becoming audible. "Limbia?" "Limbia."

Abruptly the convoy stopped, women scrambled out and surged towards a steep hill crested by a white Greek church, a white flag with a red crescent flying from it like a gibe.

A few soldiers ran out of the church and stood silhouetted on the crest of the hill. Women surged towards them, closing the distance rapidly, then suddenly the wave backed up and toppled over on itself.

A line of police, Greek Cypriot, was pushing back the women, but although the dark blue uniforms resisted and closed ranks, some women broke through and scrambled up towards the group of soldiers on the hilltop.

A very large Turkish military helicopter commenced harassment, flying provocatively low above our heads. Another line of soldiers appeared between the police and the hilltop garrison, this time United Nations troops. They formed a cordon and tried to push the women back, but scores of them had already crossed the Green Line, and a handful of them had reached the hill"s parapet, where the small knot of soldiers was trying to dislodge them.

Those of us part of the way up the hill could see people streaming across the fields with banners. They were Turkish Cypriots and more recent settlers from the Turkish village across the line from Limbia. They must have prepared the banners for this contingency. They also carried sticks and scythes and stones. Many of the villagers were women, and the slogans were hostile.

The villagers cut around behind the hill on Turkish-occupied land. The women from the convoy still outnumbered all the males present, and skirmishes were breaking out all over the hill as Greek Cypriot police, United Nations troops and Turkish soldiers tried to force them back.

I could feel my entrails twisting in a knot of fear. How would this day end? I was in a line of women who had been pushed back by police, while the helicopter continued to swoop over our heads. I did not try again to scale the hill, but waited with others on a strip of no-man"s land on the lower slopes.

The villagers with banners appeared on the crest and unfurled their slogans, red on a white ground. They started to shout: "Down with Greeks! Long live Denktash!" brandishing their sticks and scythes. They wanted blood. A line of Turkish riot police appeared on the hilltop and stood between the villagers and the women who were still struggling to ascend to it. The villagers began to skirmish with their own riot police. They wanted to settle the matter themselves.

Turkish press representatives also appeared all over the hill.  A soldier from the UN peacekeeping force was recording the proceedings with a video camera, when he was set upon by Turkish villagers and pressmen. Pieces of his camera flew out in all directions. He was rescued before the same could happen to him.

Some Greek Cypriot women near me were approached by Turkish Cypriot men, who had come across the fields to the foot of the hill. I overheard a Turkish Cypriot man say to a Greek Cypriot woman wearing the black uniform of mourning: "We don"t want conflict. We don"t support this division. I am a Cypriot. I want my children to live in peace with your children."

"I had five children," the woman said. "I buried all of them." Other women called to her, "Don"t speak to him! Don"t speak to him!"

For hours under a parching postmeridian sun, a bloodless battle raged across the hill. Women continued to assail three lines of men, but made no further headway, and those who had reached the top within minutes of our arrival were compelled by physical force to retreat.

As the shadows lengthened across the wheatfields, the women slowly returned to the buses. A line of defiant Turkish villagers occupied the hillcrest, screaming their slogans and striking the ground with their sticks and scythes.

Only in the bus driving back through the dusk to Lefkosia did I learn that similar scenes had been enacted at the village of Akhna, where half the convoy had been directed. There, women had occupied the desecrated church of Aghia Marina and held a requiem. The difference was that at Limbia all the women had been evacuated, whereas at Akhna fifty-nine women had been captured by Turkish troops, and their whereabouts was unknown. This cast a pall on everyone"s spirits. There was no singing on the return journey. Back at the square in the capital, some left the bus, while others continued on, across Cyprus to Old Paphos, the town we had set out from that morning. Koulla invited me to visit her the following day.

Arriving back at my room in Pension Phidias, I found the note I had left on my bed for my landlady in case I should fail to return, asking her to contact consular officials on my behalf. So much had happened in the course of that day, it almost seemed as if another person had written it.

The Green Line still partitions Cyprus. Women continue to wait on both sides of the line to return to the homes they were forced to abandon. The women I walked with on that day in March 1989 - from Famagusta and Kyrenia, and many villages in the north - still wait south of the line, living for the day when they will be free to walk home. 



Footnote: Although history has, happily, almost overtaken the events described here, they remain as testimony to a courageous instance of affirmative action by women.

           К Международному Женскому Дню 8 Марта 2003