| Featured Article - June 2008
In The Shadow of Equus Donkey-Style
Peacekeeping |
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| Not
often does the plight of some wild-roaming donkeys bring two fractious
societies together. At the end of March, ten donkeys were discovered
shot to death on the ruggedly beautiful Karpas Peninsula in northern
Cyprus. Putting the long-standing, bitter differences of their
societies aside, Greek and Turkish Cypriots grouped together in an
initiative launched on the social network website ‘Facebook’ to stop
any further massacre and save the Karpas donkey population. They were,
after all, special. These were donkeys descended from those that had
been abandoned during a flashpoint in Cyprus’s history and they
represented more than just an ecological issue. The distinctive, brown
Karpas donkeys are “the symbol of Cyprus and it is our responsibility
to protect them,” the youthful, passionate group stated on the website. Since antiquity, donkeys have been part of the lifestyle and culture of Cyprus, the third largest island in the Mediterranean. For millennia, they were the only means of transportation. They were used to draw water from wells, work the farms, carry goods to and from market, and provide services to villagers. They were valued for their strength and endurance and were used in breeding programs with horses to produce equally durable mules. During British colonial times, the surefooted donkeys served in both World Wars. Cyprus was first settled around 9000 BC and in 1200 BC it was colonized by immigrants from Peloponnisos in southern Greece. The Greek Cypriots wasted no time recognizing the island’s enormous wealth in copper. The panhandle island quickly became a stopover on the ancient trading routes when copper was bartered for silver, gold, perfumes, ivory, wool, chariots, and horses. Even back then, donkeys were high on the appreciation index. Fossil remains of a donkey have been found in one of the tombs in the ancient coastal copper-smelting settlement of Enkomi. Cyprus was a must-see island for the Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, and Egyptians. It was annexed to Rome in 58 BC, became part of the Byzantine Empire in AD 330, then saw the comings and goings of crusaders and kings and squabbling faiths until, in 1571, the Ottoman army conquered the island. Descendants of those soldiers along with immigrants from Anatolia became Turkish Cypriots who, by and large, got |
along well with their Greek
neighbours. But in the 20th century the
Greek Cypriots wanted closer ties with Greece. ‘Enosis,’ they called
it, referring to the movement of the
Greek Cypriot
population to incorporate the island of Cyprus into Greece. This enosis
stuff didn’t sit well with the Turks who, no surprise here, wanted
Cyprus to have closer ties with Turkey. Thus began the mother of all
turf wars as each sought control of the island under its own ideologue.
The Greek government under President Makarios was overthrown by a
military junta in 1967 and Turkey, in an effort to cement its place in
the sun, invaded in 1974. Thousands were killed, thousands more fled
and the political profile of Cyprus became defined by the Green Line,
the cease-fire buffer zone originally drawn with a green pencil across
a map of Cyprus dividing the country into the Turkish north and the
Greek south. To this day, that buffer zone is patrolled by UN
Peacekeeping forces. Through peace, invasion, and conflict, donkeys remained a core staple of life around the island, but during the 1974 invasion, Greek Cypriot farmers fled the northern region and abandoned their livestock. The donkeys thrived in a feral state, reverting to the ancient laws of equine ways as they formed small bands with a jack, a jenny, and her offspring. The peninsula’s maquis vegetation, hard-leaved shrubs not unlike California’s chaparral, provided both food and shelter; a 2003 study found that there were 800 donkeys thriving in the dunes, beaches, and uplands of the peninsula. But in recent years donkeys have not only been feeding on natural foliage but taking advantage of olive orchards and wheat fields. Crop damage will anger farmers anywhere and the donkey’s unfortunate fatalistic habit, people theorize, is the reason behind ten donkeys being shot earlier this spring. The incident became a cultural flashpoint. For many who gathered in a symbolic rally on a sandy beach near the village of Rizokarpaso in April, saving the donkey was akin to preserving their culture. Questions, though, remain. Who killed them? Are others threatened? How should they be protected? One thing is for sure, however: one island nation knows how to set aside decades of political differences to unite for an equine cause. |
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