NICOSIA, Cyprus — It was the first time that Canadian UN peacekeeper Michelle Angela Hamelin said she came up against the raw emotion of a people so exasperated with their country’s predicament.
On an eight-month tour of duty on ethnically divided Cyprus in 1986, the fury of Greek Cypriot protesters demonstrating against the first-ever visit by a Turkish head of government to the island’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot north was seared in her memory.
“I think that that was something that really stuck to my mind because of that anger and the people,” Hamelin told The Associated Press.
She was one of among 100 other Canadian veterans who travelled to Cyprus as part of commemorations that culminated Monday to mark the 60th anniversary of the U.N. peacekeeping force (UNFICYP), the longest such Canadian mission.
“And this was the first time I was confronted with people that were really, really upset with their situation that they were in.”
At the time, it had been a dozen years after a Turkish invasion — triggered by a coup aiming at union with Greece — sliced the island along ethnic lines and tensions were still high.
UNFICYP had been in place since 1964, a decade prior to the invasion, deployed to tamp down hostilities between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots to prevent an all-out civil war. Canadians were among the first to join the force and more than 28,000 would eventually serve with UNFICYP. Canada withdrew almost all its peacekeepers from UNFICYP in 1993, but a Canadian presence still remains. Some 28 lost their lives in the line of duty.
Through most of 1986, it was Hamelin’s job was to patrol the U.N.-controlled buffer zone that separated troops on either side of the divide in the medieval center of the capital, Nicosia, staying in the once luxurious Ledra Palace hotel that had been converted into a UN barracks.
The hotel’s bullet-pockmarked sandstone walls were a constant reminder that a flare-up in hostilities could never be ruled out.
“And…
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