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DIARY OFFERS GLIMPSE OF 1974 CYPRUS WAR THROUGH TEENAGE EYES
Reuters
July 17 2014
By Michele Kambas
(Reuters) - On a balmy July morning in 1974, Victoria Harwood
Butler-Sloss was awoken by the sound of gunfire outside her childhood
home in Cyprus's capital Nicosia.
Aged 13, she started to document a defining moment in one of the
world's most intractable conflicts - a coup against a democratically
elected government, engineered by Greece's military junta, triggering
a Turkish invasion five days later.
"Machinegun fire, bombs, mortars, guns ... fighting all round house.
Only me, mam and Robert," she wrote in neat script.
Her mother tried to go outside, a bullet whizzed past, and then she,
her mother and her brother spent the next few hours huddled in the
kitchen. The telephone went dead.
Butler-Sloss started her diary the day Greek Cypriot army tanks rolled
into the streets of Nicosia.
Forty years on, and defying the best efforts of many mediators, this
east Mediterranean island remains partitioned among its Greek and
Turkish Cypriot populations, with Nicosia remaining the last divided
capital in Europe.
"I'm still mystified as to why I started writing it," Butler-Sloss,
born on the island of Armenian and British parents, told Reuters.
"I think it was my way of keeping calm," said Butler-Sloss, who lives
in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons, but frequently returns
to Cyprus to visit her mother.
After years at the bottom of a drawer, the 45 pages of exercise book
are now on display in Nicosia. Fittingly, the exhibit is just a few
meters (yards) away from a de facto border hewn during those days
of turmoil.
FACTS AND FIGURES
For all the emotional upheaval of those events in the summer of 1974,
Butler-Sloss's narrative remains purely factual.
Covering just over a month of conflict, it starts at 8:30 a.m. on
Monday, July 15 when she was awoken by the sound of bullets from
the presidential palace - just a few hundred meters up the road -
and ends on Aug. 19, the day Rodger Davies, the American ambassador
to Cyprus, was killed during riots.
Writing under curfew on the evening of July 20, the day Turkey
launched its invasion, Butler-Sloss's handwriting slopes across the
page as she writes in darkness, "Very heavy bombs and fights around
the house .. ack ack guns quite near us."
She documents the heaviest fighting from 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 14, 1974.
"There are hundreds of Turkish planes in the sky," she writes. "A
rocket from a plane almost burst my eardrums. It was so loud that
little bits of plaster fell from the house."
With hindsight, she acknowledges her diary could have been a defensive
mechanism to buffer herself from fear.
"Reading the diary now, I feel the emotions that I didn't at the time.
At the time it felt very disembodied: 'this is happening out there,
it's not going to hurt us'," she said.
AIRLIFTED
Less than an hour after she started her Aug. 14 entry, British forces
radio relayed a message for British citizens to evacuate to its bases -
military compounds Britain has retained on Cyprus since granting it
independence in 1960.
Her family was split up; not all of them had British passports. She,
her brother and a cousin were airlifted to Britain, where she spent
about a year before returning when her school reopened.
Tens of thousands of people were displaced in the conflict. War dead
are still being buried after a decades-old stalemate allowed the sides
to eventually locate and open unmarked mass graves for identification
in an effort which started in 2007.
Today, the gentle hum of cicadas under a carob tree in her mother's
back garden is interrupted by the buzz of a massive construction site
a block away. It's the new headquarters of a Russian online gaming
firm, an indication of how much at least some parts of Cyprus have
changed over the past four decades.
But for one 13-year-old, life was never the same again.
Some of her peers carried the trauma, turning to drink and drugs and
dying prematurely.
"People sometimes don't make the link, but it did have an effect.
There was an innocence and freedom that we lost," she says.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/17/us-cyprus-conflict-diary-idUSKBN0FM1U620140717
Reuters
July 17 2014
By Michele Kambas
(Reuters) - On a balmy July morning in 1974, Victoria Harwood
Butler-Sloss was awoken by the sound of gunfire outside her childhood
home in Cyprus's capital Nicosia.
Aged 13, she started to document a defining moment in one of the
world's most intractable conflicts - a coup against a democratically
elected government, engineered by Greece's military junta, triggering
a Turkish invasion five days later.
"Machinegun fire, bombs, mortars, guns ... fighting all round house.
Only me, mam and Robert," she wrote in neat script.
Her mother tried to go outside, a bullet whizzed past, and then she,
her mother and her brother spent the next few hours huddled in the
kitchen. The telephone went dead.
Butler-Sloss started her diary the day Greek Cypriot army tanks rolled
into the streets of Nicosia.
Forty years on, and defying the best efforts of many mediators, this
east Mediterranean island remains partitioned among its Greek and
Turkish Cypriot populations, with Nicosia remaining the last divided
capital in Europe.
"I'm still mystified as to why I started writing it," Butler-Sloss,
born on the island of Armenian and British parents, told Reuters.
"I think it was my way of keeping calm," said Butler-Sloss, who lives
in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons, but frequently returns
to Cyprus to visit her mother.
After years at the bottom of a drawer, the 45 pages of exercise book
are now on display in Nicosia. Fittingly, the exhibit is just a few
meters (yards) away from a de facto border hewn during those days
of turmoil.
FACTS AND FIGURES
For all the emotional upheaval of those events in the summer of 1974,
Butler-Sloss's narrative remains purely factual.
Covering just over a month of conflict, it starts at 8:30 a.m. on
Monday, July 15 when she was awoken by the sound of bullets from
the presidential palace - just a few hundred meters up the road -
and ends on Aug. 19, the day Rodger Davies, the American ambassador
to Cyprus, was killed during riots.
Writing under curfew on the evening of July 20, the day Turkey
launched its invasion, Butler-Sloss's handwriting slopes across the
page as she writes in darkness, "Very heavy bombs and fights around
the house .. ack ack guns quite near us."
She documents the heaviest fighting from 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 14, 1974.
"There are hundreds of Turkish planes in the sky," she writes. "A
rocket from a plane almost burst my eardrums. It was so loud that
little bits of plaster fell from the house."
With hindsight, she acknowledges her diary could have been a defensive
mechanism to buffer herself from fear.
"Reading the diary now, I feel the emotions that I didn't at the time.
At the time it felt very disembodied: 'this is happening out there,
it's not going to hurt us'," she said.
AIRLIFTED
Less than an hour after she started her Aug. 14 entry, British forces
radio relayed a message for British citizens to evacuate to its bases -
military compounds Britain has retained on Cyprus since granting it
independence in 1960.
Her family was split up; not all of them had British passports. She,
her brother and a cousin were airlifted to Britain, where she spent
about a year before returning when her school reopened.
Tens of thousands of people were displaced in the conflict. War dead
are still being buried after a decades-old stalemate allowed the sides
to eventually locate and open unmarked mass graves for identification
in an effort which started in 2007.
Today, the gentle hum of cicadas under a carob tree in her mother's
back garden is interrupted by the buzz of a massive construction site
a block away. It's the new headquarters of a Russian online gaming
firm, an indication of how much at least some parts of Cyprus have
changed over the past four decades.
But for one 13-year-old, life was never the same again.
Some of her peers carried the trauma, turning to drink and drugs and
dying prematurely.
"People sometimes don't make the link, but it did have an effect.
There was an innocence and freedom that we lost," she says.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/17/us-cyprus-conflict-diary-idUSKBN0FM1U620140717