Cyprus: 50 years of partition

 Andrew Stone looks back on the military coup that divided Cyprus in 1974 and reflects on developments over the subsequent fifty years and the prospects for peace and reunification.

On 15th July 1974 the Greek junta instigated a military coup against the democratically elected Cypriot government of President Archbishop Makarios, installing a ‘Government of National Salvation’.

With telephones and telegraph lines cut, Holgar Jensen, a Reuters correspondent, sent this report via the British Embassy:

‘Cypriot troops led by Greek officers fought running gun battles with police in this island capital Monday. Radio broadcast announced that President Archbishop Makarios had been killed in a coup. The broadcast named a new president, Nicos Sampson… Thick palls of black smoke hung over Nicosia Airport, the Presidential Palace and Police Headquarters. Machine-gun fire rattled sporadically in the streets, interspersed with the whistle of mortars and the roar of tank cannon.’

In fact Makarios had survived, being driven to Paphos, flown by helicopter to Akrotiri and then by RAF plane to Malta. The Greek-led National Guard that undertook the coup insisted that, in the style of authoritarians immemorial, ‘the main purpose of the National Guard is to maintain order. The matter is internal between the Greeks alone… anybody interfering will be immediately executed.’ 

If this was meant to reassure the Turkish Cypriot minority, who composed around one fifth of the population, then the installation of Sampson as a puppet leader was a puzzling choice (though not, by any means, the junta’s first choice). Nicknamed ‘the Butcher of Omorphita’ for his attacks on Turkish Cypriot civilians during the events of ‘Bloody Christmas’ in 1963 and 1964, he had been elected to the extreme right fringe of the Cyprus House of Representatives in 1969 on the slogan ‘death to Turks’. 

So although the junta were initially true to their word, and focused their violence on pro-Makarios Greek Cypriot forces rather than the Turkish minority, the coup provided a perfect pretext for a Turkish government that had been itching to stake its claim to the island. Within five days it launched a military invasion – supposedly to protect the Turkish minority community, though in fact the assault precipitated subsequent attacks on them. Completely outgunned and condemned at home, the Greek junta collapsed and its Cypriot placeman Sampson quit, replaced as acting President by Glafcos Clerides, the conservative head of the House of Representatives. But the end of the coup was not the end of the conflict.

Perry Anderson takes up the story:

‘After a few weeks’ ceasefire, during which Turkey made clear it had no interest in the treaty [The Treaty of Guarantee that established a formally independent Cyprus in 1960] whose violation had been the technical grounds for its invasion, but wanted partition forthwith, its generals unleashed an all-out blitz – tanks, jets, artillery and warships – on the now restored legal government of Cyprus. In less than 72 hours, Turkey seized two-fifths of the island, including its most fertile region, up to a predetermined Attila Line running from Morphou Bay to Famagusta. With occupation came ethnic cleansing. Some 180,000 [Greek] Cypriots – a third of the Greek community – were expelled from their homes, driven across the Attila line to the south. [Overall some 40% of the island’s population were displaced.] About 4,000 lost their lives, another 12,000 were wounded: equivalent to over 300,000 dead and a million wounded in Britain. Proportionally as many Turkish Cypriots died too, in reprisals. In due course, some 50,000 made their way in the opposite direction, partly in fear, but principally under pressure from the Turkish regime installed in the north, which needed demographic reinforcements and wanted complete separation of the two communities. Nicosia became a Mediterranean Berlin, divided by barbed wire and barricades, for the duration.’

Conflicts such as this, whether in the Middle East or in Northern Ireland, are often presented as the result of inherent and intractable irrationalism of two tribalistic peoples. But as in those cases, the role of British imperialism has been central to the creation and propagation of these divisions.

The Cyprus Convention 

Located at the crossroads of Asia, Europe and North Africa, the small Mediterranean island of Cyprus has played host to the competing interests of a range of occupiers, including Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, French and Venetians. From 1570 the Ottoman Empire took control, ensuring the growth of a Turkish minority to supplement the overwhelmingly Greek-derived population. By 1878 the now-declining Ottomans signed a secret deal – The Cyprus Convention – with Britain promising to pass on a ‘tribute’ of £92,800 per year squeezed from the mostly impoverished population in exchange for administering and occupying the island on their behalf. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli boasted to Queen Victoria that this new naval platform provided ‘the key to Western Asia.’ Victoria surmised that ‘the whole country [i.e. Britain] was delighted’ with the acquisition. 

The tribute, which produced numerous protests against British rule, and even arch-imperialist Winston Churchill had recognised as ‘an iniquitous and immoral arrangement’, was only abolished in 1927, long after the territory was formally annexed by the British in November 1914 and made a Crown Colony in 1925. 

Despite the fact that many Cypriot villages were mixed, and violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots at the time was rare, the constitution bequeathed by the British was designed along communal lines. The first legislative council of 1878, at which an ordinance on the sale of land to foreigners was determined, included four English, one Italian, one Greek Cypriot and one Turkish Cypriot. The reformed version of 1883 included the British High Commissioner, 6 British officials, 8 Greek and 3 Turkish Cypriots. This was deliberately weighted to ensure that an Anglo-Turkish majority could always win the day, providing the basis for ‘divide and rule’. Should this tactic fail the High Commissioner and later the Governor retained the power of veto and ordinance.

The British had promised to raise the standard of living of its subjects, but the 1927-8 Survey of Rural Life revealed living conditions to be equivalent to Tudor England. Three quarters of the population lived at or below the level of subsistence, and 70% of peasants were chronically indebted. Forced labour was only outlawed in 1931.  By the start of the Second World War only 8% of children attended secondary schools, and illiteracy was still rife. But the British state was profiting nicely from the relationship. As its Prime Minister Anthony Eden would later explain, ‘No Cyprus, no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil, unemployment and hunger in Britain.’ 

It’s therefore unsurprising that the 1930s saw the growth of both trade unions, as the country slowly industrialised, and organised political opposition of both the left and right. In October 1931 an island-wide revolt resulted from an attempt to raise taxes that had been resisted by the legislative council but imposed by the governor. Government House was left in flames as protestors raised the Greek flag and called for Enosis (union with Greece). Shared opposition to the British briefly united the island, with a Turkish Cypriot manifesto lauding the activities of ‘our Greek compatriots’.

Repression

The British responded with repression. A Defence of the Realm Act began the enactment of 27 ‘illiberal laws’ between 1931 and 1937. Harsh censorship was imposed on the press, the Communist Party of Cyprus (the forerunner of AKEL) was proscribed along with eight of its front organisations, trade unions were banned and its members victimised, and even meetings of over five people were made illegal.

Despite this, social and cultural expressions of anti-colonial nationalism increased, as did trade union membership, with 2544 members in 1939 increasing to 13,394 by 1945. Despite employers and the right denouncing wartime strikes, a range of disputes rocked the authorities, including a 1940 strike that led to 40 arrests outside the district commissioners’ office and a labourers’ strike of 1944 that brought military and government work to a standstill. 

The Allied Atlantic Charter of 1941 made rhetorical promises of respecting self-determination, which were bolstered by further statements by British Prime Minister Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that encouraged the notion of ‘pan-Hellenism’. Even the Communist AKEL could get behind this demand during the war, while the Communists in Greece led the resistance to the Nazis. But in one of the opening gambits of the Cold War, Britain and the USA sponsored reactionary monarchist forces in the ensuing civil war. George Grivas, who would become the leading right winger of the EOKA (The National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) independence insurgency, spent his war in Greece hunting Communists. The subsequent monarchist regime supported his activities in Cyprus as a counter to AKEL’s cross-communal appeals.

Grivas’s more liberal rival for the resistance came from Archbishop Makarios III, the primate of the Cypriot Orthodox Church. In 1950 he helped to organise a church plebiscite that demonstrated 96% support for Enosis. Clement Attlee’s much mythologised Labour government dismissed this expression of the popular will as ‘meaningless’. The Church under Makarios thus played a leading role in bringing together peasant, trade union and youth groups as a foundation for an independence movement. Meanwhile the British ambassador in Ankara advised the Labour government that ‘the Turkish card is a tricky one, but useful in the pass to which we have come.’

Insurgency

After much strategic negotiation, by 1955 Grivas gained Makarios’s assent to launch a series of bomb explosions against government, military and police targets. The character of the insurgency was assured by Grivas’s policy of purging the left, with EOKA shooting down AKEL militants even as Britain proscribed them and put their activists in detention camps. Britain also ‘internationalised’ the issue by inviting Greece and Turkey for talks, encouraging the latter to harbour ambitions for a future stake in the island.

Britain – which in 1954 had made Cyprus the base for its Middle East Military Headquarters – resorted again to repression. A state of emergency was declared: demonstrations were banned, schools closed, trade unions outlawed and Makarios deported. With EOKA initially aiming its fire at collaborationist Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots were drafted in by Britain to take their place. They thus became EOKA targets, and among the Turkish minority a mirror image of EOKA chauvinism emerged in TMT (The Turkish Resistance Organisation) under Rauf Denktash, who would be a reactionary barrier to Cypriot unity for decades to come. When, in June 1958, intelligence agents from Turkey set off an explosion in the Turkish Information Office in Nicosia it stimulated a wave of mob violence against Greek Cypriots and their eviction from predominantly Turkish urban areas. Turkish Cypriot members of AKEL or inclusive trade unions were forced to leave in favour of ethnocentric organisations. And Britain was now leaning strongly towards Turkey, with its colonial secretary referring to Cyprus as ‘an offshore Turkish island’.

Makarios, desperate to escape either partition, Turkish occupation or the straitjacket of a right wing Enosis, now declared for Cypriot independence. It was a demand that an embattled Britain ultimately acceded to, but in a profoundly distorted form hammered out between them, Turkey and Greece and overseen by the USA.

The constitution of 1960 established a foreign head of the Supreme Court, a Turkish Cypriot vice-president with veto powers, separate voting blocs and civil service and army quotas institutionalising communal division, as well as a secret agreement that Cyprus would join NATO and ban AKEL (which Makarios would later refuse to implement). It also agreed to station Greek, Turkish and British troops on the island, and give each the right to future intervention. Britain also received Sovereign Base Areas as a jumping off point for Middle East adventures such as the later wars on Iraq. More pages of the treaties were devoted to these SBAs than all other provisions combined.

Peace with honour?

In his 1998 book ‘Fifty Years On: A Prejudiced History of Britain Since the War’, former deputy Labour leader Roy Hattersley lived up to his subtitle when he assessed that with the ‘complicated constitution that had been invented by the ingenuity of the British Civil Service… [PM Harold] MacMillan had brought to an end the problem which Disraeli had created when the island became British, to confirm that “peace with honour” had come to the Middle East.’

In reality the 1960 Constitution paved the way for further conflict, emerging from grievances over representation and the potential for political deadlock. Makarios, elected as President with two-thirds of the vote, made proposals for reforms. These were resisted by the ‘Guarantor Powers’ and in December 1963 violence erupted, stoked by chauvinists on both sides, that forced many Turkish Cypriots to abandon their homes for ethnically exclusive enclaves. A demarcation line was drawn between Greek and Turkish Cypriot areas by Major General Young, British head of the Joint Intervention Force. It became known as the Green Line, after the colour of the talc that he traced over a map, and was effectively the first draft of the partition that was institutionalised by the 1974 conflict and which has scarred the island ever since.

Makarios, who had attempted to appease the right wing within EOKA while avoiding outright alienation of the left, and who had flirted with non-alignment on the international stage, found this balancing act increasingly unviable when a right wing junta took power in Greece in 1967. In March 1970 he survived the first of several assassination attempts – his presidential helicopter was riddled with bullets and the pilot shot mid-air. In 1971 Grivas returned to Cyprus to mobilise against him, and by 1973 he had established a new organisation – EOKA-B – to terrorise Makarios and his administration. 

Grivas was to die in hiding in January 1974, but his junta sponsors continued to try to unseat Makarios. When the Archbishop eventually tired of turning the other cheek and sent a public letter denouncing their interference and demanding the withdrawal of their officers from the Cypriot National Guard, their response was to send in the tanks.

Cock up or Conspiracy?

There has long been debate about the role of the British – and especially the US – in the 1974 coup and the subsequent partition. As discussed above, Britain had a significant military interest in Cyprus, and would have feared losing its bases in a genuinely independent Cyprus. The US had also made significant use of these resources for many years, and to this day has spy listening posts in RAF Troodos, Akrotiri, Cape Gata and Ayios Nikolaos, which are believed to have supplied Israel with intelligence for its murderous assault on Gaza. 

As early as 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s administration proposed a secret settlement that would have combined partial Enosis with a large Turkish military base in the northeast. This deal was viewed favourably in Athens and Ankara but resisted by Makarios.

There is also the evidence that Sampson – along with many members of ‘the Colonel’s Junta’ – was a CIA asset. The Greek military had taken power in 1967 to prevent the election of a centre-left government. The US was deeply involved in the Greek ‘deep state’ that brought this about, seeing it as a reliable ally within NATO to offset potential Communist influence in central and southern Europe. The US was also determined to block the USSR’s turn towards the Middle East occasioned by the 1973 Yom Kippur war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. ‘Protecting’ the supply of oil remained a major concern, and Cyprus a key pawn in that game.

Furthermore, there is the deserved notoriety of Henry Kissinger to consider. The US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State that handled the crisis (Richard Nixon was reaching the endgame of Watergate as it broke, and the inept Gerald Ford did little to get involved after Nixon’s resignation.) Kissinger certainly had no love for Makarios, who he saw as soft on Communism, and actively resisted attempts to reinstall him (despite his overwhelming re-election as recently as 1973). 

Imperial calculations were no doubt decisive for Kissinger, and for British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan, but the confidential documents released in recent years do not support the notion that they deliberately engineered the coup and invasion. It would later serve the interests of a variety of actors to claim this – including the Greek colonels, who could claim US ‘betrayal’ had scuppered their plans, and AKEL, who could use it to justify uncritical popular frontist support for Makarios.

The US and the UK certainly both declined to intervene actively when it was viable to do so, for example, when an official at the US state department received an explicit warning about plans for the coup two months in advance. But they were apparently more driven by the desire to protect NATO’s southeastern flank by avoiding direct conflict between two of its members, Greece and Turkey. It can be seen as an example of imperial blowback that the internationalisation of the ‘Cyprus Problem’ that the US and UK had engineered potentially made this crisis so dangerous. Kissinger was also adamant that the Soviet Union would not be involved in any diplomatic efforts, and that his protege Bulent Ecevit, the Turkish Prime Minister that he had taught at Harvard, would receive sufficient spoils from his invasion to placate his hardline supporters.

And spoils they did receive – with 37.5% of the island, and assets under their control including 70% of gross output, 65% of tourist accommodation, 56% of mining and quarrying output and 48% of agricultural exports. 

Diplomacy

The half century since has seen interminable rounds of failed negotiations between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish state declared – but internationally unrecognised – in the North. In the period until the millennium, Cyprus accounted for approximately one tenth of all UN resolutions – mostly in condemnation of Turkey and its statelet’s illegitimacy. But the US security council veto helped to ensure that these resolutions remained paper tigers. 

It was only as the EU – egged on by the US – attempted to expand eastwards in the 1990s that there was a renewed incentive for a solution to the Cyprus Problem. The Annan Plan of 2004 was, like the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, seen by many as preferable to continued conflict, whatever its flaws. But while both institutionalised communal division, the Annan Plan went further and endorsed the ethnic cleansing of 1974, denying reparations and return for the displaced and removing their right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and Court of Justice.

The rights of the Guarantor Powers would have been assured though, with 6,000 Turkish troops and British military bases kept intact. Harking back to the days of Queen Victoria, foreigners were imposed in the Supreme Court, Central Bank and Property Board.

While two thirds of Turkish Cypriots voted in favour in the approval referendum, 76% of Greek Cypriots voted against. This included AKEL, which, though an increasingly discredited social democratic party that even held the presidency between 2008-13, was not primarily driven by ethnic chauvinism. Annan would not have delivered independence or justice, but would have put the seal on centuries of vassalage. 

Despite all its tribulations, Cyprus today is a relatively wealthy country. But away from the tourist beaches its geography, society and culture remains scarred by a long history of British interference. The anniversary of the coup and invasion should be a cause for reflection on how progressive forces there can chart a course that unites Greek and Turkish Cypriots from below, based on common struggles rather than imperial chess. 

Encouragingly, a movement called Unite Cyprus Now is now attempting to do this. It describes itself as a ‘multicommunal grassroots non-party initiative of Cypriots founded in May 2017 promoting actions in support of peace and the reunification of the island through a negotiated settlement.’ Denouncing the corruption, nationalism and militarism of both Cypriot leaderships, as well the interference of the ‘bigger powers’, it meets symbolically in the buffer zone, and advocates a mixture of lobbying and direct action. It provides a hopeful potential forum in which socialists in Cyprus can organise and attempt to mobilise for change.