GREEK CYPRIOT WOMEN PREPARE TO MARCH INTO TURKISH TERRITORY

March 19, 1989 - (Reuters’ article in The Toronto Star) Hundreds of Greek Cypriot women planned to evade mine fields and U.N. peacekeepers today in a bid to cross the Green Line dividing their island.

More than 100 women from abroad came to join the march, the third such attempt in three years by a committee called Women Walk Home.

Turkish Cypriot women on the other side of the barricaded buffer strip said they would confront the Greek Cypriots with a march of their own.

Many of the Greek Cypriot marchers are refugees asserting their right to return to homes in the northern third of Cyprus, which they fled when the Turkish army invaded in 1974. The invasion followed a brief coup in Nicosia engineered by the military junta then ruling Greece.

The Greek Cypriot women will leave central Nicosia by bus. They hope to cross an unguarded point along the buffer strip before the eight-country U.N. force catches up.

Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash has warned the marchers that they will be arrested if they manage to cross.

Government sympathetic

The Cypriot government, which controls two-thirds of the island, is sympathetic with the marchers' aims but is under pressure from the United Nations to stop the demonstration.

"With the resources available we will try to prevent anyone from entering the buffer zone," U.N. spokesman Charles Gaulkin said.

"But we are spread out across 180 miles (300 kilometres) with a force of 2,100 and the location of the march is secret.

"Our position is that the government should take all necessary actions to ensure that demonstrators do not enter the buffer zone."

A Greek Cypriot political source said: "The government is not in a position to say, 'We don't want the women to demonstrate.'