What happens after ethnic cleansing ends?
Bruce Sterling reports from the postnationalist future – Cyprus, haven of undeclared peace. At the death of the 20th century, it’s open season on Muslim ethnics. The Milosevic regime and its war-criminal militias are throwing a pogrom. They shoot and shell Muslims, “disappear” their leaders, rape the women, set fire to the crops, bulldoze the villages, and chase the locals over the borders, wholesale. Those who resist and refuse get thrown into mass graves. These recent dire events in Kosovo mirror what happened in Cyprus – 25 long years ago. There, the bitter, endless rivalry of two quarreling parent states, Greece and Turkey, gave rise to vengeful ethnic militias who burned villages and uprooted thousands of civilians. Air strikes followed, UN ground troops tried to restore peace, barbed wire flew up, land mines speckled the landscape, and journalists collected ghastly atrocity photos. Then, finally, the undeclared war stopped. When undeclared peace broke out, the island found itself
