Battle Over Turkish Flag Leaves Cyprus Seething

DHERINIA, Cyprus - Hours after his cousin was buried, Greek Cypriot Solomos Solomou broke through a cordon of U.N. troops who help keep this island separated and tried to tear down a Turkish flag.

As he climbed the pole, shouting and waving to fellow demonstrators, a volley of Turkish gunfire brought him crashing to the ground.

The incident Wednesday shows just how deep feelings still run 22 years after Turkish troops invaded and captured the northern third of this Mediterranean island.

Cyprus has been an independent country since 1960, but it has never resolved the ethnic conflict between the 600,000 Greek Cypriots and the 150,000 Turkish Cypriots.

U.N. forces along the so-called Green Line that divides the island have generally managed to keep the peace since 1974, but there's no solution in sight, and the rising tempers on the island also reflect the larger conflict between longtime rivals Greece and Turkey.

Solomou's family fled the east-coast resort city of Famagusta during the 1974 Turkish invasion, which came on the heels of a short-lived Greek coup.

The trouble began Sunday when hundreds of Greek Cypriots stormed into the buffer zone and threw stones at Turkish troops and civilians.

When the Turks responded with gunfire and stones of their own, the Greeks retreated, but Tassos Isaac, 24, was caught by the Turks and beaten to death.

Solomou, Issac's cousin, was a pallbearer at his funeral Wednesday. After the burial, several hundred young men went directly to the buffer zone, where they planted a Cypriot flag and stoned the Turkish troops on the other side of a barbed-wire barricade.

Solomou led the charge. He managed to squeeze through the barbed wire and started to climb the Turkish flagpole when the shots rang out. Solomou was killed and 11 people were hurt in the shooting from the Turkish side, including two British U.N. peacekeepers.

Archbishop Chrysostomos, the head of the Cyprus Orthodox Church, praised Solomou as a hero for trying "to haul down the flag of the foreign occupier from the soil of Cyprus." Turkish Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller, for her part, made an impromptu visit to the island Thursday to pledge Turkey's backing for Turkish Cypriots' "just cause."

"We will never leave you alone, my Cypriot brothers, in your right cause," said Ciller, the former prime minister. "We break the hands that reach out in disrespect of the flag."