AGIOS GEORGIOS, Cyprus -- In a bucolic valley, the ghosts of Agios Georgios roam among the village's crumbling, war-ravaged houses. Red poppies and yellow crown daisies flower amid collapsed roofs, shattered windows and the mined cemetery.
Among the remnants of the people who once lived here are a child's composition book, a rusty bed frame, a broken clay pot perched in a window.
Here, the refugees of Kosovo might see their past and their future if they depend on peacemakers to restore them to their homes.
The families of Agios Georgios fled the village in an ethnic-nationalist conflict that split this island between Greek and Turk in July 1974.
Similarities
The Cypriots of Greek ancestry -- Orthodox Christians as the Serbs are -- were pushed south, while their Turkish neighbors -- mostly Muslims, like the Kosovar Albanians -- fled north.
The scene was repeated throughout Cyprus. Families who had lived in their homes for generations became refugees, many fleeing with little more than what they could carry. They often resettled in houses abandoned by the other.
About 200,000 Greek Cypriots and 80,000 Turkish Cypriots were displaced in the exodus in 1974. Most have never returned to their native villages and towns. The island's dividing line is patrolled by U.N. peacekeepers who have been here since an earlier conflict in 1963.
Would-be peacemakers have tried and failed to find a way to reunite the island -- including Richard C. Holbrooke, the senior American diplomat involved with Yugoslavia.
TV news reports of the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo remind the Cypriot people of their dark times. They take sides in the more recent conflict, depending on their history and religion.
The Greek Orthodox Christians, who live in the southern Republic of Cyprus, celebrated Easter this weekend as did the Serbs waging the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo.
Serb and Greek Cypriot share an enmity for the descendants of the Muslim Ottoman Empire which once ruled them both.
Greece, though a NATO member, opposes the alliance's air campaign against Yugoslavia and that sentiment has led to protests on the Greek side of Nicosia, the divided Cypriot capital.
There are other similarities. The war here started after Greek Cypriot nationalists, favoring annexation by Greece and encouraged by the military junta in Athens, toppled Archbishop Makarios III, the moderate Greek Orthodox prelate who was president of the island republic.
Turkey, infuriated by the idea of Greek annexation of the island less than 100 miles from its shores, invaded five days later to protect the Turkish Cypriot minority.
When the fighting ended, the Turks held a third of the island in the north and placed it under a Turkish Cypriot government.
Avyie Savvidou, a Greek Cypriot who was a toddler at the time, recalls the Turkish airplanes bombing the farmlands near her native village of Peristerona. She and her family fled in a neighbor's car to another village about 25 miles away.
"It's very similar to the picture of what you see now from Kosovo," said the 28-year-old, American-educated marketing specialist. "If only the people had the courage to say we're not going."
The histories of Greek and Turkish Cypriots also are eerily similar to the tragic tales told today by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian refugees: Knocks on doors, imminent flight, men herded into a stadium, mountain treks on foot or by mule.
But the Cypriot experience did not include the packed trains and missing children of Kosovo. And, unlike the Kosovars, the island-bound Cypriots could not flee to neighboring countries.
Unforgiving hatred
A roadside billboard in the Greek Cypriot sector of the country reminds its citizens of the 1974 invasion: "Remember the Turks are occupying our land."
After three months in a nearby village, Savvidou's family returned to Peristerona, about a half hour's drive from Nicosia. Of the 200 or so Turkish Cypriots who once lived there, only two returned. Both have since died.
The minaret of the village mosque towers above the steeple of the 11th-century Greek Orthodox church. The gate to the mosque is padlocked. The key is held at the Greek Cypriot police station.
Many of the Turkish Cypriots of Peristerona relocated to villages in the Turkish-controlled north along the 112-mile "Green Line" that separates the Greek south from the Turkish north.
"Most of the Peristerona people came to my village as refugees," said Husan Kasapoglu, a Turkish Cypriot who lives in the border village of Elia. "They left their villages and houses just to save their lives.
"The ethnic cleansing happening in Kosovo today reminds me most of the Turkish Cypriots who experienced these human disasters before. It reminds us a lot of the period from 1963 to 1974."
Likewise, the Turkish occupation of the north drove thousands of Greeks from their homes there.
Famagusta, once a bustling seaside resort in the north, still bears the scars.
Churches became mosques
Greek Orthodox churches have been converted to mosques in the manner of the Ottoman Turks who did the same to Famagusta's Cathedral of St. Nicholas in the 16th century.
Still vacant is a 1 1/2 mile stretch of apartment buildings and beach-front hotels that were devastated during the 1974 war. The area, known as Varosha, was a popular summer playground. Today, Varosha is fenced and patrolled by Turkish military. Signs warn: "Military Security Zone, Entrance Forbidden."
Rauf Denktash, the president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus -- a republic recognized only by Turkey -- has recently offered the Varosha strip as a possible home for Kosovar refugees, infuriating the Greeks.
Many Turkish Cypriots hope they never have to live again under the authority of the Greek Cypriot majority on the island.
"I feel better here because I'm safe," said Ecvet Guven, 65, a retired customs officer who relocated to Famagusta after the 1974 civil strife. "I realize our life before 1974 was all stress. We couldn't see our life forward."
No more fear
"For 24 years we are feeling what is freedom," says Suna Bayrtarolgu, 53, as she sits crocheting outside her dry goods store in the old, walled part of Famagusta. "We haven't any fear from the Greeks that they can come and kill us, kill our children, burn our houses. The Greeks don't want to live with us. They want us to leave here."
Dr. Yiannis Laouris, a Greek Cypriot from Nicosia, hopes for peaceful reconciliation. The 40-year-old physician is active in efforts to renew ties between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
"It's not the property they lost. It's not the money. It's the abrupt cutting of your past in a way that you don't have any history," he says, explaining the feelings of people who were displaced by the war.
His family was forced to leave their house in north Nicosia when Laouris was a teen-ager. Unlike most Greek Cypriots, Laouris' work in reconciliation gave him a rare opportunity to travel to the Turkish Cypriot side and visit his old house.
The Turkish Cypriot who lives there had previously been in touch with the Greek Cypriot family by sending the university diplomas belonging to Laouris' father.
When Laouris knocked on the door, the Turkish Cypriot man seemed to know him.
Laouris joked that he came to reclaim his house. The Turkish Cypriot responded that he would gladly give it back when he received his two houses in Larnaca on the Greek-Cypriot side.
The man invited Laouris in, and offered to show him the garden. Laouris accepted.
When he walked into the back yard and saw the rows of flowering trees, the physician said, "something moved inside of me."
Memories revived
"I didn't think I had any feelings for that house," said Laouris, who runs a computer education company. "It was like a videotape playing before my eyes. These were memories I didn't know I had."
Nearly a quarter-century after the war, people on both sides still refer to themselves as refugees. The Greek Cypriots want the island reunited under their banner, while the Turkish Cypriots want the island divided into two equal states.
"This is what nationalism is doing to both sides in Cyprus," said Husyn Gursan, a Turkish Cypriot sociologist who is working to bring the two communities together.
"When you're not tolerant to the other side's ethnicity, it causes troubles on both sides. We have to respect the other more. We have to do that in the world today, not just in Cyprus."
Pub Date: 4/12/99