Tomorrow marks the end of a ten-day motorcycle ride across Greece by dozens of Cypriot riders, part of a mission by the Isaac and Solomos Memory Initiative, thirty years on from their murders during anti-occupation demonstrations in the dead zone between occupied Kato Deryneia and Deryneia. But the memory of that brutal day doesn’t end. I was there. I saw both Turkish crimes with my own eyes.
I’d gone to cover the two anti-occupation demonstrations of August 11 and 14, 1996, as a journalist. For me it was never just an assignment. It was a personal ordeal, above all the killing of Tassos Isaac, the young man from Paralimni who got tangled in the barbed wire, at the mercy of a mob of thugs who’d already decided to kill him. He took his last breath under blow after calculated blow, iron bars and stones, that carried on long after he’d already gone down, wounded. It was obvious what they wanted. To finish him off. And they did it cold, without hesitation, without a flicker of doubt, the way only wild animals operate.
Something broke in me that day, under the blazing August sun, in that hail of bullets and stones, in that parched wasteland of hatred. Those savages were “fighting” for and “defending” my house, calling it “theirs” – my house, standing just metres behind the crescent-moon flags in Kato Deryneia, where I was born and lived until 1974, when the invading army threw us out. Their mouths hung open, spitting hatred, screaming “sons of whores” at us in Greek, grabbing their own crotches and howling that they had us marked, “in there.”
I felt suddenly, completely alone, in that dust storm, the screams of wounded riders, the confusion, the pain. There, in the terrible isolation of that clash inside the Kato Deryneia dead zone, the ugly beast of Turkish nationalism slipped its leash and showed its true face.
Back in Nicosia to write it all up, I found my notebook soaked through with my own sweat. The words had half-washed away, the ones I’d scrawled down there: Yes to friendship between peoples. Yes to dialogue, in a society built on freedom and democracy. I kept that notebook. Those notes stayed half-erased for a long time. I think they still are. I lost it somewhere along the way. I’m still looking for it.
