CYPRUS: A EUROPEAN ANOMALY

ISBN: 978-605-4233-45-8 CYPRUS: A EUROPEAN ANOMALY Michael Moran CYPRUS: A EUROPEAN ANOMALY İstanbul Kültür University Publications No: 137 ISBN: 978-605-4233-45-8 Prepared for Publication by: Susae Elanchenny Book Design and Cover: Myra Page Layout: Myra Printed by: Mega Basım İstanbul Kültür University Ataköy Campus Bakırköy 34156 / İstanbul Tel : +90 212 498 44 76 Fax : +90 212 498 44 05 www.gpotcenter.org Copyright© IKU, 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced electronically or mechanically without the prior consent of the Global Political Trends Center (GPoT). The views expressed in this book belong to the author, and they may not necessarily concur partially or wholly with either GPoT’s or IKU’s views. CYPRUS: A EUROPEAN ANOMALY How the island first came to be divided and why a negotiated recognition of its present division is the obvious way to solve the ‘Cyprus problem’ Michael Moran Contents GPoT’s FOREWORD 1 CYPRUS: A EUROPEAN ANOMALY 3 Introduction: A Perspective on the ‘Cyprus Problem’ the International Community Has Tended to Neglect How the Turkish Cypriots Were Deprived of Their Constitutional Rights in 1964-65 3 14 Part A: Manoeuvring at the UN in 1964 14 Part B: Cyprus and the International Community in 1965 49 BIBLIOGRAPHY 81 APPENDIX 85 Two Speeches at the UN Security Council 85 Speech Delivered by Spyros Kyprianou on 18 February 1964 85 Speech Delivered by Rauf Denktaş on 28 February 1964 97 Two Legal Documents 116 The Three Cyprus Treaties of 1960 116 UN Security Council Resolution 186 124 GPoT’s Foreword GPoT’s FOREWORD Global Political Trends Center (GPoT) is honored to publish another remarkable book by Michael Moran, an academician and expert on the Cyprus issue. This time we present with great pleasure a compilation of the author’s thought-provoking texts, which narrate the unique story of the first resolution on Cyprus adopted by the UN Security Council in 1964. While providing the readers with a solid amount of hard data, Michael Moran also takes them to the couloirs of the UN and unveils in detail the background discussions that led to the final approval of Resolution 186. As many readers interested in the Cyprus issue would know, the resolution consequently became one of the most controversial legal documents on Cyprus, and its wording has been disputed by the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sides for many years. Resolution 186 lies at the heart of many legal documents adopted by international entities after 1964. As a key source of both legal and political references it has significantly influenced key developments in the history of the Cyprus issue. Republication of Michael Moran’s books, which were first penned and printed a decade ago, comes at a time of intensive negotiations between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders. While these leaders are fully engaged in finding a comprehensive solution for the divided Mediterranean island, discrepancies in the understanding of the legal basis of the problem consistently emerge and prevent progress from being made at the negotiating table. The status quo on the island also directly influences Turkey’s accession process to the EU. GPoT Center believes that Michael Moran’s book will reveal important details about the past and present of the Cyprus conflict; shed light on the legal aspect of the problem; contribute to a better understanding of the positions of both Cypriot sides; explain the existing links between Cyprus and Turkey’s accession process to the EU; and serve as the source of vivid discussions. Even though the book is a publication of GPoT, it does not necessarily correspond with the views and opinions of both the staff and the advisors of the Center. GPoT has been actively supporting reconciliation between the two Cypriot sides ever since it was established in 2008 and believes that Michael 1 2 GPoT’s Foreword Moran’s outstanding manuscript will enrich the variety of the Center’s activities related to Cyprus. Besides the author himself, many other people were involved in making the publication of “Cyprus: A European Anomaly” happen. Meltem Abalı, Susae Elanchenny, Nigar Hacızade, Narod Maraşlıyan, Lenka Peťková and Can Yirik have contributed to the realization of the idea. We owe special thanks to Ayla Gürel for her time and the enormous amount of energy she invested in the endeavor. We wish to thank MYRA for the cover design and formatting of the book, and, last but not the least, we would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Bahar Akıngüç Günver, Chairman of the Board of the Trustees, Prof. Dr. Dursun Koçer, Rector, and Özkan Gül, Head of the Financial Office at Istanbul Kültür University, for their support in the realization of this project. Sylvia Tiryaki Deputy Director, Global Political Trends Center (GPoT) Cyprus: A European Anomaly CYPRUS: A EUROPEAN ANOMALY Introduction: A Perspective on the ‘Cyprus Problem’ the International Community Has Tended to Neglect I have published most of the items in this booklet before. Denktaş’s speech before the United Nations (UN) Security Council in 1964 was included in my edition of Rauf Denktash at the United Nations: Speeches on Cyprus (The Eothen Press, Huntingdon, 1997); and except for a few small changes, my opening essay here differs little from the first chapter of my book Sovereignty Divided: Essays on the International Dimensions of the Cyprus Problem (CYREP, Nicosia, 1998; third enlarged imprint, 1999). These earlier works are now out of print and will probably remain so. But given the current stage of the seemingly interminable negotiations for a settlement in Cyprus, I thought it might be useful to make certain items available once more for the benefit of those diplomats, government officials, European Union (EU) parliamentarians, academics, journalists and other persons interested in Cyprus, many of whom may have only recently become concerned with the extraordinary intractable problems of the ‘divided island.’ More especially, this booklet should help those who are tempted to accept a largely Greek account of what is at stake in Cyprus to realise that such a one-sided conception will never lead to the just, equitable and permanent reconciliation between the two Cypriot communities that the international community has been seeking for so long. Let me give just one recent example of the kind of misconceptions that still prevail, even in international organisations supposedly vitally concerned with Cyprus. In the British newspaper The Guardian, on 5 March 2010, an article by Robert Ellis appeared under the heading, ‘The Scandalous History of Cyprus’. A smaller heading read: ‘After decades of botched interferences, the EU should practise what it preaches and ensure that Turkey withdraws its troops.’ This last assertion was an echo of a resolution passed by the EU parliament three weeks earlier which called upon Turkey, inter alia, to immediately start withdrawing its troops from Cyprus. Now, such a request shows a remarkable misunderstanding of why the Turkish army came to Cyprus in the first place and of what would need to occur before it could sensibly be withdrawn. I sent a 3 4 Cyprus: A European Anomaly letter to The Guardian with the aim of reminding its readers about something the EU has consistently chosen to ignore: To the Letters’ Editor, The Guardian, 5th March 2010 Dear Sir, Robert Ellis’s and the EU parliament’s belief that the Turkish army should withdraw from Cyprus shows that he and they have still grasped only one half of the problem on the divided island. There are in fact two anomalies in Cyprus. One is the strong presence of the Turkish army in the north, protecting the Turkish Cypriots; the other is the existence in the south of a purely Greek Cypriot administration claiming to be the legitimate government of the whole island, even though that government is plainly unconstitutional under the 1960 Cyprus Accords. For the Cyprus problem to be solved, not just one but both of these anomalies need to be rectified. Yours, etc. As I rather expected, my letter wasn’t published – no doubt editors have an almost impossible task deciding which letters to print from the vast numbers they receive. Still, the point I am trying to make here is that Robert Ellis’s article and the EU’s recent request alone show that there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about Cyprus where it should least exist: misunderstandings about why that small country is divided; about why only part of it is effectively in the EU; about the role there (very different roles, as things actually turned out) of the 1960 guarantor powers, Britain, Greece, and Turkey; and about what sort of new arrangements, involving some agreement between all the interested parties, would be most likely to effect a long overdue reconciliation. Needless to say, a solution in Cyprus is not going to be found until the whole international community listens a little less to Greek Cypriot propaganda about Turkey’s ‘invasion and occupation’ of an innocent Greek island for no good reason, and a little more to the Turkish side’s real concerns. How in fact did Cyprus first become ‘divided’, to some extent even geographically? And why has it proved so very difficult – indeed so far impossible – to obtain a mutually agreed settlement between the two Cypriot sides? An essential part of the answer to both these questions is contained in this booklet, and I hope it will be found useful. Cyprus was first divided in 1964, as Rauf Denktaş explained, clearly enough, in a speech he delivered before the UN Security Council in February of that Cyprus: A European Anomaly year. Nevertheless, despite all Denktaş said at that time, by its interpretation of Security Council Resolution 186 (of 4 March 1964) the international community chose to place the government of Cyprus in the hands of just one of the two founder-partners of the 1960 Cyprus Republic, i.e., in the hands of the Greek Cypriots. From then onwards the all-Greek Makarios administration, and its successors, were treated as if they were the legitimate governments on the island. The Turkish Cypriots – including the Turkish vice-president, the three Turkish ministers, and the Turkish MPs, all required by the constitution – were quickly marginalised and soon entirely forgotten about by the world at large. This was of course very much in accordance with Greek wishes. What was more surprising, however, was that not only the Security Council as a whole but in particular Great Britain, the former colonial power and one of the two non-Greek guarantors of the 1960 Accords (which established Cyprus’s independence and sovereignty) eventually condoned this radical departure from both the letter and the spirit of the Accords, thus contributing substantially to the creation of a virtually intractable impasse between the two Cypriot communities. That same impasse still exists today, though in a more dramatic and debilitating form. Because, of course, now the Greek Cypriots, still masquerading as the legitimate government of the whole island, have managed to make ‘Cyprus’ an EU member state, the EU having very foolishly accepted them in this governmental guise not only before a settlement of the island’s political problems, but even after the Greek Cypriots had overwhelmingly rejected the best compromise plan (the so-called Annan Plan of 2002) the UN has so far been able to devise. This has shifted the Cyprus problem from being a longstanding difficulty that might be just about solvable if a genuine spirit of compromise could emerge on both sides, to one that even the closest observers have to admit may be truly intractable. When I first started seriously thinking about the current state of affairs in Cyprus, in the early 1990s, I thought it was important to try to understand what actually occurred at the UN early in 1964: what led up to Resolution 186 and why that resolution was interpreted in the way it was. The larger part of this booklet consists of my attempt to discern the motives of the various players in the Security Council at that time. This is what Part A of my essay is devoted to. Part B is a discussion about what happened at the UN and elsewhere in 1965, as the Greek Cypriots sought to consolidate their usurpation of the Cyprus government and present themselves to the international community – not least to the members of the Non- Aligned Movement (NAM) of that time – as 5 6 Cyprus: A European Anomaly the sole legitimate authority in Cyprus. I might just add here that in 1965 the roles of guarantor power Britain and UN Secretary-General U Thant became particularly important in ensuring that the Turkish Cypriots would not regain their partner status with their Greek compatriots.1 You might say: ‘But this is all history. What does it matter now?’ Well yes, it is certainly part of history, of the tragic, chequered past of Cyprus. Yet although much else has changed in international politics since that time, the essential nature of the conflict in Cyprus has hardly changed at all, and consequently a proper understanding of what happened there in the 1960s is an indispensable guide to our understanding of what is happening now. For the current issue is not – as the international community often seems to believe – how to reincorporate a dissident Turkish Cypriot minority into a perfectly legal and essentially Greek Republic; how to get the barbaric Turkish army out of Cyprus; and how to enable Greek Cypriots to regain the land they lost during the 1974 war. This is the perspective generated by the Greek propaganda. Like most effective propaganda, there are of course some elements of truth in it, one element being that any final deal in Cyprus will certainly have to include some settlement about property (for both sides). The real issue is, however, somewhat different; namely, whether and how the two politically equal, though long alienated, partners in Cyprus can be amicably reconciled: either by sharing power in a single state or, if that proves to be impossible (which I believe it already has), by agreeing to remain separate. Whether this amicable division would result in the existence of two separate sovereign states or in some other, perhaps confederal, arrangement, is something that will have to be negotiated. Of course, in the 1960s and 1970s none of the external powers – with the possible exceptions of Greece and the then Soviet Union – wished to lead Cyprus into the dreadful series of conflicts which have constituted its history since at least December 1963. Still, it is my contention that while neither the UN Secretariat, nor Britain, nor the United States intended creating in 196465 a virtually insoluble problem in Cyprus, together they did in fact do so. By recognising, and continuing to recognise, purely Greek governments on the 1 I have discussed the British role in the eventual international acceptance of purely Greek Cypriot governments in Cyprus as legitimate in my Britain and the 1960 Cyprus Accords: A Study in Pragmatism (Istanbul Kultur University Press, Istanbul, 2009). This can be downloaded from www. gpotcenter.org. Cyprus: A European Anomaly island as the legitimate governments of the whole Republic of Cyprus, thus blatantly ignoring the partner status of the Turkish Cypriots established by the 1960 Accords, they made the eventual Turkish intervention and division of Cyprus into two states inevitable. There is one thing that needs always to be remembered about Turkey’s intervention in Cyprus. This is that, apart from coming to the rescue of the Turkish Cypriots, the main reason Turkey intervened in Cyprus in 1974 was because the Greeks were about to declare enosis, i.e., to join Cyprus politically to mainland Greece. Guarantww or Britain refused to help prevent this reckless contravention of the 1960 Cyprus Accords, so Turkey had to take counter-measures on its own. Turkey’s actual division of the island came a little later. This was the result of its inability to come to a sensible settlement with the existing Greek Cypriot administration, a settlement which would have guaranteed the proper reinstatement of the Turkish Cypriots in all organs of the state and a firm commitment on the part of the Greek Cypriots themselves to relinquish, once and for all, their nationalist dream of making Cyprus Greek. Recently that dream, due to the thoughtlessness of the EU, has almost become a reality, and it is most unlikely that the Greek Cypriots will conduct negotiations with their Turkish compatriots with a view to abolishing it. So it is really important to understand what happened at the Security Council in 1964. For this was when the Turkish Cypriots were first eliminated from the Cyprus government and, for some years, forced to live in small enclaves scattered throughout the island, making up a mere three per cent of its land mass, this being the only way they could survive. Certainly between then and 1974 a ‘division’ existed in the island never envisaged when the Republic of Cyprus was formed in 1960. Since 1983 the Turkish Cypriots have fared much better in their own de facto state in the north. For reasons that are well-known, however, their present existence is still one of political marginality on the international stage, a predicament with grave consequences for them. In approaching the Cyprus problem today, the international community should realise that the issue is still essentially a contest about sovereignty. The Big Powers themselves – not just Greece, Turkey and the Cypriots – did much to create the problem that is still very much alive, by short-sightedly aiding and abetting the Greek quest for hegemony in Cyprus. Apart from the harm it is still doing to the Turkish Cypriots, it should be obvious to everyone by now that this was not the way towards a lasting peace in the Eastern Mediterranean; nor 7 8 Cyprus: A European Anomaly to a much-needed reconciliation between NATO’s two important members in that region. Somehow sovereignty must once again be shared in Cyprus. Personally I believe this would be most easily done by relinquishing the fruitless aspiration of seeking ‘unification’ or ‘reunification’. The latter would be nice if it were possible, but this unitary goal has surely proved by now to be unattainable for the present, largely because of the Greek Cypriot determination to keep all real power on the island in their own hands. What the international community needs to do, I think, is to find some way it can give official recognition to the plain fact that there are two states in Cyprus and not just one Greek one. I will not venture to suggest how this could be put into effect or what, given this recognition, the final status of the Republic of Cyprus might be conceived to be. There are various possibilities for people better qualified than I am to conjure with. I will, however, mention something else. Anyone who has thought seriously about the situation in Cyprus will know that the present negotiations between presidents, Demetris Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat, could hope only to make some very limited progress on relatively minor issues. With the newlyelected Derviş Eroğlu in Talat’s place, progress will be hardly more likely. After a very few months, I would have thought, these prolonged discussions will ignominiously fizzle out and prove to have achieved nothing of real significance – not because Eroğlu is ‘intransigent’ but for a simple reason I have mentioned: because the Greek Cypriots will, as always, seek to retain the power the international community has given them, by recognising them already as the government of Cyprus. Why would they want to negotiate about something that has been already granted to them? Given the incompatible positions of the two Cypriot sides on some major issues, this is only to be expected. Consequently the fact that so many of the external players in the Cyprus issue – including the UN and EU representatives and most of the ambassadors in the Greek sector of the island – have consistently projected an image of ‘optimism’ about the likelihood of a ‘breakthrough’ by Christofias and Talat surely needs an explanation. Perhaps it just goes to show how little the Big Powers are prepared to do themselves to remedy the most serious mistake they have made in their dealings with Cyprus: the mistake of continuing to allow the Greek Cypriots to represent the whole island in all international fora. Rather than do anything about that colossal Cyprus: A European Anomaly blunder – now admittedly hard to rectify – it would seem that they prefer to pretend that the Cyprus problem is a purely internal one that should and can be solved by the Cypriots alone. And the external powers often combine this transparent exercise in evasion with another seemingly easy option: given any suitable pretext, there is a recurrent tendency to blame Turkey for the whole Cyprus imbroglio. What is it about the Greek Cypriots, one wonders, a small community situated on the Eastern edge of Europe of still less than one million people, that prevents the international community from seeing the surely predominant role they – the Greek Cypriots themselves – have played in making Cyprus a tragic and tiresome trouble-spot for at least the last sixty years? No wonder the stalemate on the island continues. And no wonder, in this absurd process of predictably pointless negotiations solely between Cypriots – one ethnic group of whom has already been deemed to be the legitimate, even if unacknowledged, government of the other – the West constantly risks alienating one of its most needed allies. In the fraught Eastern Mediterranean region the West has many interests and concerns, many enemies, and only two real allies (very different though these two may be): Israel and Turkey. Pity to treat one of them – who as time goes by is likely to prove by far the most valuable – so thoughtlessly. Among the items that follow I have included one piece by a Greek Cypriot. This is the first of the speeches given by Spyros Kyprianou at the UN Security Council early in 1964. At that time Kyprianou was the young Greek Cypriot foreign minister, and it is instructive to see how he concentrates his efforts on trying to persuade the Council that the central issue in Cyprus is not that the Greeks were terrorizing the Turkish Cypriots with a view to eliminating them from the government of Cyprus (if not with a view to eliminating them altogether), but how to prevent an imminent invasion of a defenceless, uncontroversially Greek, island by an alien, belligerent regional superpower with ‘expansionist’ ambitions, namely Turkey. Of course Kyprianou doesn’t mention his administration’s real intentions in Cyprus: the illegal abrogation of the 1960 Accords and the reduction of their Turkish partner to the status of a political minority. Such was one of the seriously misleading perspectives Denktaş had to deal with in his own speech, given before the Council later. But throughout Kyprianou’s speech one notices something else: a great fear of Turkey, a large country with the second most powerful army in NATO, situated 9 10 Cyprus: A European Anomaly at its nearest point less than fifty miles away from Cyprus. Given what the Greeks were trying to do on the island, this fear of Turkey was, of course, entirely justified. Ten years later, when the Greeks attempted to put into effect their ultimate nationalistic folly of making Cyprus politically part of Greece, Turkey came and put an end to these unilateral aspirations. However justified Turkey may have been in so reacting to such provocations, only a small minority of those who at that time suffered most could be expected to see that justification. For the vast majority of ordinary Greek Cypriots one can only feel sympathy; though hardly for their leaders and teachers. In 1974, needless to say, the loss of lives, land and property of so many ordinary Greek Cypriots, indoctrinated since schooldays in Hellenic ideology, was hardly calculated to make them feel anything but hatred for the infidel ‘invader and occupier’. And, with the help of graphic media descriptions and television coverage of the inevitable destruction and chaos on the island, Greek propaganda was able to move to a new level of effectiveness. So today, on the Greek side, one can still hear views very similar to that expressed by Kyprianou in 1964 about Turkey’s allegedly invidious role in Cyprus, views which completely overlook the fact that Turkey was the only one of the three original guarantors who was prepared to act in accordance with the international agreements, embodied in the Cyprus Treaty of Guarantee, to prevent the whole of Cyprus becoming Greek. In his own speech Denktaş quotes something President Makarios said in 1963: As we kneel before the graves of our martyrs, we hear them shout: ‘Forward beyond the graves’… The armed struggle ended, but it is continuing in a different form so that the present may be appraised and the future conquered. Such affirmations still have the power to move many Greek Cypriots. And as far as I can see, in ever-renewed form, their ‘struggle’ continues much as Makarios understood it. No doubt the recurrent fear of, and enmity towards, Turkey is a symptom of the Greek side’s undiminished desire eventually to fulfil that traditional goal. In fact, given their hegemonic ambitions, the Greek Cypriots have done very well: first, by getting themselves recognised as the sole legitimate government of the Cyprus Republic; and then (despite the existing division of the island into Greek and Turkish sectors) by having that seriously flawed Republic accepted as an EU member state. These were major steppingstones towards making Cyprus Greek. And alas, it would seem at the moment Cyprus: A European Anomaly that the only member of the international community who still seriously stands in the way of the fulfilment of this ancestral dream is Turkey. Today European commentators often say that Turkey’s own full membership of the EU depends on there being a solution in Cyprus – as if, somehow, Turkey’s stance on the issue is what is preventing a solution. This is far from the case. The real obstacle to a resolution of the Cyprus problem is not Turkey but certain decisions (some formal and others informal) taken long ago by the international community. Above all, the trouble stems from the UN’s (surely rather paradoxical) determination, on the one hand, to seek a new federal government in Cyprus – while, at the same time, treating the present all-Greek government as if it were perfectly legitimate. In these circumstances, can one really blame Greek Cypriot leaders for resisting any new arrangement that would entail the loss of a status they have enjoyed since 1964? Perhaps the most revealing instance of this resistance was the reason the late president Papadopoulos gave for rejecting the Annan Plan in 2004. In a TV address on the 7th April of that year a tearful Papadopoulos spoke to the Greek Cypriot people as follows: Taking up my duties [as president of Cyprus] I was given a recognized state. I am not going to give back ‘a community’ without a say internationally and in search of a guardian… I urge you to defend the Republic of Cyprus, saying NO to its abolition. Needless to say, the Turkish side believes that the Republic of Cyprus was abolished in 1964. Given what happened then, and what has happened since then – especially in 1974, 1983, and 2004 – it will be hardly possible to persuade them otherwise. I began with a newspaper article illustrating some widespread misconceptions about what is needed in Cyprus, misconceptions often resulting from a – not always very conscious – immersion in prejudices that favour Greek Cypriot perceptions and interests. I will end with another example of this. In a piece published in the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review on 3 May 2010, Hugh Pope followed the rest of the international community in stressing the need for the resumption of talks between the two Cypriot leaders with a view to the speedy reunification of the island. If the talks fail to move forward in that direction, he predicted, this ‘would lead to ever-deeper entrenchment of the existing de facto partition’. And if that happens, then ‘everyone loses’. 11 12 Cyprus: A European Anomaly The Greek Cypriots will suffer Turkish troops on the island indefinitely, lose the hope of winning back territory and see compensation for property made much harder; the Turkish Cypriot zone will be absorbed further into Turkey and its original inhabitants will scatter even further; Turkey will see its EU process freeze up completely; Greece will suffer continued indefinite, expensive tensions in the Aegean; and Europe will lose any chance of normalizing EU-NATO relations. Yes, at least some of these undesirable things would surely occur if attempts to unify the island failed and no other solution could be envisaged. But there surely is one more possibility. Let us consider what would be likely to happen if the two sides could agree to an amicable separation instead of unification. We will not concern ourselves here with whether this agreement would lead to two quite separate states or to a confederation or to something else. The main thing would be for both Cypriot communities, and not just one, to be recognised parts of the international community. Then, I believe, a much more attractive scenario would quickly emerge. Probably, for a while, some Turkish troops would have to remain in the north, and some Greek mainland troops in the south, as in 1960. This wouldn’t be harmful to either side. As part of the deal, the Greek Cypriots would get some land back (perhaps as much as was proposed in the Annan Plan), and both sides would receive compensation for property they couldn’t, or didn’t wish to, return to. Far from being ‘absorbed further into Turkey’, the now internationally recognised ‘Turkish Cypriot zone’ (whatever its precise status and name) would be able to attract foreign investment, trade with Europe, increase its tourism and be less economically dependent on Turkey. This being so, many Turkish Cypriots now living abroad would be tempted to return to their more prosperous homeland. The Greek Cypriots would no longer pose a threat to Turkey’s full EU membership; and, with the Cyprus problem resolved, relations between Greece and Turkey, and hence the EU and NATO, could only improve. The crucial thing to note here is that, in his generally well-informed article, Pope arrives at his dire conclusion about the horrors of ‘partition’ because he doesn’t pause for a moment to consider what I am calling ‘an amicable separation’ as a viable option. Either we have reunification or we have a very bleak situation all round, in the whole Eastern Mediterranean region as well as in Cyprus. This is his view. Cyprus: A European Anomaly Why is the obvious option of separation so ignored, especially when, as everybody knows, since 1968 all UN-sponsored negotiations with a view to sharing power in a united Cyprus have spectacularly failed? It can hardly be simply that ‘partition’ is generally regarded as a nasty word and ‘unification’ a nice one. Nor that fashionable imperatives about the virtues of ‘multiculturalism’ make commentators shy about advocating, even on rare occasions and under special circumstances, the desirability of some peaceful disengagement between peoples of different languages, religions and cultures who may well be unable to live harmoniously together. No, although currently widespread, these preferences have only a minor effect on views about what would be best for Cyprus. The option of sanctioned separation I am suggesting is taboo largely because it is something the Greek side has always dreaded. And they dread it because, once implemented with the blessing of the international community, such an arrangement would mean that Cyprus could no longer be seen as all theirs, even in their dreams. But, of course, there have never been any good reasons why it should be so seen. And today, despite the markedly theatrical optimism issuing from all the external players in the Cyprus drama, there is still, surely, absolutely no reason to believe that a solution involving ‘reunification’ is going to be possible, especially given the way the Greek Cypriots will always insist on interpret that concept. If, however, the international community could just briefly rid itself of this idée fixe of unification and re-unification, I believe a much more promising solution to the island’s problems would become apparent, a solution from which everyone stands to gain, not least the Greek Cypriots themselves. All they would need to do is to substitute a little self-regarding pragmatism for their too often self-destructive Hellenism. True, they would no longer be regarded as the ‘government of (the whole of ) Cyprus’, but by relinquishing that unsustainable claim – which has caused most of the trouble since 1963 – they would have made a major contribution to good relations throughout the region. 13 14 Cyprus: A European Anomaly How the Turkish Cypriots Were Deprived of Their Constitutional Rights in 1964-65 Part A: Manoeuvring at the UN in 1964 1 1964 was one of the most eventful, indeed fateful, years in the history of modern Cyprus. It was a year of unprecedented and accelerating military strife between the two Cypriot communities and of intense diplomatic activity, at the UN Security Council and elsewhere, with a view to bringing that strife to an end. For the first time UN peace-keeping forces were stationed in Cyprus, and for the first time the two communities were, in effect, separated: the Turks being forced to seek refuge in barricaded enclaves, usually encircled by UN troops, in turn encircled by Greek Cypriot military or paramilitary units. Today, with its own protected state in the north of the island, the Turkish Cypriot community is incomparably better off than it was in 1964. Then the Turks in Cyprus were in the gravest danger of total extermination by their numerically much larger Greek compatriots, clandestinely reinforced by over 20,000 officers and men from the army in mainland Greece. Many of these socalled ‘government’ forces, together with smaller, uncontrolled private armies of fanatical gunmen, were thoroughly indoctrinated in Hellenic ideology, according to the more extreme versions of which the Turks in Cyprus were an inferior, infidel, even barbaric, element, latecomers and intruders in a Greek island, who must at no cost be allowed to stand in the way of Cyprus’s supposedly historic destiny of being united with Greece. These were the people, many of them trigger-happy thugs and hysterical zealots, the quite small groups of Turkish Cypriot defence fighters had to face. Because the Turks are now so well-established in their own part of the island, it is easy to forget these terrifying realities of the not very distant past. Turkish Cypriots no longer have to contend on an immediate, daily basis with these inhumane consequences of the self-aggrandising fantasies and fixations of the Greek ‘majority’. In the wider political arena, of course, the Turkish Cypriots are still effectively in a state of war with the Greeks. They suffer from the comprehensive economic embargo the Greeks have Cyprus: A European Anomaly succeeded in imposing upon them. More importantly, they are constantly subject to the undiminished flow of Greek propaganda, issuing from numerous sources – and most effectively from the three million or so Americans of Greek origin – the principal aim of which is to cajole the international community into believing that the ‘Cyprus problem’ began in 1974 when Turkey, apparently for no good reason, ‘invaded’ a small, defenceless, happy, and innocent Greek island forty miles from its southern shores – a political perspective created specifically to render the very existence, as well as the constitutional rights, of the Turkish Cypriots invisible. Above all, the Greek Cypriot political elite managed, as long ago as March 1964, to successfully present themselves to the world as the legitimate administration of the Cyprus Republic, a title they have had no difficulty in retaining ever since. So, although, to be sure, nothing can be quite the same as it was over four decades ago, I think it would be a mistake to think that Denktaş’s indictment of the way the Greek Cypriots were treating his community in 1964, and the underlying mythological rationale that was used at that time to justify those atrocities, are now simply matters of historical interest, irrelevant to the newly modernising, entrepreneurial, and pragmatic elites who are said to predominate in the busy life of Greek Cyprus today. This is what many wellmeaning Western diplomats who are involved in the current Cyprus negotiations would have us believe about contemporary Greek Cypriots. Unfortunately one cannot share this optimism. I will mention just one example of a phenomenon still characteristic of life in Greek Cyprus that must make one cautious about dismissing Denktaş’s speeches as passé curiosities, relics of a bygone age which has long given way, especially in the Greek south of the island, to a new and much more enlightened mentality. In October 1994, the Greek Cypriot authorities brought a famous icon from Mount. Athos in Greece to Cyprus where it was met by the Greek Cypriot Pesident, Glafcos Clerides, at Larnaca airport. I say ‘met’ because this human artefact was given a welcome very similar to that which would be afforded to a foreign dignitary on a state visit, and it was treated like this explicitly in the hope that the icon itself (or the Greeks’ show of reverence towards it; it is hard to know which) would help them to achieve the solution they desired to the Cyprus problem. Perhaps I am being unduly mundane in my assumptions about the nature of politics, but it seems to me that any sober observer of this 15 16 Cyprus: A European Anomaly event could only marvel at the undiminished power of otherworldly (indeed of magical) beliefs among the Greek Cypriot population.2 However that may be, the current political impasse in Cyprus is certainly the result of fundamentally the same seemingly irreconcilable forces that first came fully into play in 1964. The speech he addressed to the UN Security Council on the afternoon of 28th February of that year was the first one Denktaş had delivered in an international forum, and it is arguably the most important speech he has ever made. A passionate revelation of the quite horrific victimisation and other trials and tribulations the Turkish Cypriots had been exposed to since December 1963, together with a cogent defence of his community’s rights under the Cyprus constitution, Denktaş’s intervention was calculated to sway the Security Council away from any naive and one-sided acceptance of the official Greek Cypriot version of what was at stake in Cyprus. As the then second-in-command of the Turkish Cypriot community (the Cyprus Vice-President, Dr Fazıl Küçük, at that time the community’s leader), Denktaş was fully and painfully aware of the historic significance of his mission at the Security Council. When he arrived in New York a week before the Council’s debate on Cyprus (which took place intermittently between 18 February and 4 March), it was far from clear that he would be allowed to speak in the debate at all. Probably for this reason, on 24th February Denktaş wrote a letter in his hotel room addressed to the president of the Security Council which was designed to alert the Council to some of the more nefarious strategies that were already being adopted by the Greek Cypriots in the course of the debate. This letter, which was forwarded to the president of the Council by the representative of Turkey to ‘be brought to the attention of the members of the Security Council’, is worth quoting in full here since it touches briefly on some of the main points Denktaş was able to elaborate in the two-hour speech he was eventually allowed to make 2 See The Cyprus Weekly, October 21-27, 1994, p.1. It may be said that we should respect other people’s religious beliefs even if we cannot share them. I am not at all sure that this is always wise. By their very nature, religious beliefs are not susceptible to empirical tests. They are surely therefore, to say the least, always potentially dangerous as a guide to political action, in which the lives and well-being of many thousands of people may be at stake. An article in Time magazine (4th December, 1995) indicated this in its curt title, ‘Killing for God.’ This brings us to an important (though infrequently noted) difference between the two communities in Cyprus: whatever faults they may have, the Turkish Cypriot leaders have not mixed politics with religion since Atatürk created a secular state in Turkey in 1923. Cyprus: A European Anomaly before the Council. Like the speech itself, the letter also conveys something of the sense of urgency – almost of utter desperation – felt by the Turkish community in Cyprus at that time. To the President of the Security Council: Your Excellency, Greek Cypriot insistence on recognition of the integrity and sovereignty of Cyprus by the Security Council is a trick for finding the untenable excuse to argue that the Treaty of Guarantee is non-effective with the intention of getting a free license to continue the massacre of the Turks under the umbrella of the United Nations. The Treaty of Guarantee fully and effectively guarantees and secures the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Cyprus and the basic constitutional rights of its inhabitants. Why do the Greeks want to get rid of this Treaty? The answer is clear: they want to do away with this Treaty because it prevents them from doing to us what they have been doing since 21 December 1963, i.e. to take away our constitutional rights by brute force and violence; it prevents them from treating us as underdogs and obliges them to respect the rule of law, human dignity and equal treatment of their fellow men in equity and justice. This the Greeks have refused to do for the last three years; when they realized that they could not get their way by intrigue and subversive activities, they did not fail to use the mass killing of Turks as a means of getting their way, viz. political subjugation of the Turks by usurping their constitutional rights. With this object in view Turks have been attacked and killed since 21 December 1963, under the war cry of enosis. We have suffered in a matter of two months more than 800 Turkish dead or wounded (mostly women, children and old men) and Turkish property worth more than six million pounds sterling has been ruthlessly destroyed. One fourth of the Turkish population are on the move as refugees or out of work due to the conditions created by the Greeks. An illegal and unconstitutional Greek Cypriot army is being formed and arms of all types are being imported into Cyprus in order to arm this army of 20,000 to 30,000 Greeks. The pretext of doing so is the threat of Turkish invasion (!) but the real purpose is to annihilate the Turkish community after getting a free license so to do from the Security Council. Today in Cyprus all human rights have been trampled upon by the Greek authorities: genocide of Turks is in full swing; the principles of justice, 17 18 Cyprus: A European Anomaly of rule of law, humanity, equality have all been denied to the Turks, and the Constitution as well as the International Treaty which brought about Cyprus have been wilfully and wickedly ignored. It is the people who have done or condoned all these acts and have not hesitated to resort to genocide who are before the Security Council today claiming to be the victims of a situation, when they themselves have deliberately brought about this situation with a view to annihilating the Turks of Cyprus while the world is invited to look on and do nothing because, as they put it: ‘this is an internal affair of Cyprus and anyone who tries to intervene and stop the massacre albeit under a Treaty recognized by the United Nations is guilty of aggression.’ I am firmly convinced that neither you nor the Security Council will endorse such conduct by the Greek Cypriots or will give them the free license to massacre the Turks by acceding to their request. Any wording of your resolution which can in any way and by any stretch of the imagination be interpreted as a sidestepping or abrogation of the Treaty of Guarantee will be so used by the Greek Cypriots and they will thus be encouraged to attack the Turkish Community, which is outnumbered four to one, under the authority of the Security Council. The Greek Cypriot delegation pretends to agree to the necessity of an international peace-keeping force. The Treaty of Guarantee provides for such a force. Why do they object to the increase in number of the Greek and Turkish contingents in Cyprus who could effectively secure peace in the island jointly with the British? Why prolong the debate while innocent Turkish lives are being lost in Cyprus? (Signed) Rauf Denktaş President of the Turkish Communal Chamber of Cyprus3 As things turned out, the Greek side did not quite succeed in abrogating the Treaty of Guarantee at the Security Council (a large majority of members taking the correct view that this was not something within the Council’s competence); though they did succeed, to some extent, in side-stepping the Treaty by managing to relegate mention of the Cyprus 1960 Accords to the preamble of the 4 March resolution, rather than having them referred to substantially in the resolution’s operative part. We will look at how they managed to achieve this in a moment. 3 UN Document S/5561. The Cyprus Treaty of Guarantee is given in the Appendix. Cyprus: A European Anomaly By the fatal step of recognising the by then wholly Greek Cypriot administration in Cyprus as the legitimate government of the Republic, the Security Council contrived, through its rather casual reference to ‘the government of Cyprus’ in the 4th March resolution, to obscure a fact of considerable significance. This was that 1964 saw the final breakdown of the Cyprus Republic. 2 As is well-known, this was originally a partnership Republic, established less than four years earlier, after prolonged and meticulous negotiations between the former colonial power, Great Britain, together with the two Cypriot communities and their ‘mother’ countries, Greece and Turkey. And one of the things Denktaş’s speech was designed to do was to convince the international community that, for all the Greek cries about a threat to peace in the Eastern Mediterranean caused, they alleged, by bellicose threats and acts against Cyprus by Turkey, it was manifestly the Greek Cypriots themselves, aided and abetted by Greece, who were the real troublemakers. For it was the Greek Cypriots, in the person of their charismatic political leader and ‘Ethnarch’, Archbishop Makarios, who were doing their very best to destroy the Cyprus constitution and the other Accords they had solemnly put their signatures to in 1960, with the deliberate intention of turning the bi-communal Cyprus Republic into a Greek state. The intention was blatantly illegal and uncompromisingly overbearing: to create in Cyprus a solely Hellenic republic which would soon seek enosis with Greece; Athens being, of course, according to the Greek historical libretto (the celebrated megali idea) the ‘national centre’ of the greater Hellas that Greeks everywhere hoped (and indeed expected) one day to regain. A Greek Cypriot writer once had the courage to summarise the basic elements of this Pan-Hellenic ideology, with refreshing touches of irony, as follows: During the heyday of the Great Idea the Greeks developed a conception of their national identity which included the following features: (a) The Greek nation are a people who lived for millennia in their Mediterranean territory. Present-day Greeks are the descendants of the Hellenic heroes, Plato, Sophocles, Alexander and the Greek-speaking Christians of Byzantium. They are to be identified not by reference to 19 20 Cyprus: A European Anomaly citizenship of the existing Greek State, but by reference to a distinguished civilisation and language to which they are all the rightful heirs.4 (b) The Greek nation is much larger than the modern Greek State. The latter is that part of the Hellenic and Christian Orthodox world which has been liberated from (mostly Ottoman) domination by the sacrifice and heroism of Greek people. (c) It is the patriotic duty of all ‘true’ Greeks to work for the liberation of all historically Greek lands, now inhabited by Greeks under foreign rule. And it is a ‘prescription of history’ (a meaningless phrase which has enjoyed wide currency among history-conscious Greeks) that all foreign-dominated Greek territory will eventually become united with the free Greek State. Thus, to be a ‘true’ Greek, one would have to conceive of oneself as a member of a great nation only a part of which having, as yet, been redeemed and organized as a free national State; and further, to believe that this national State must grow steadily until it encompasses the whole of the ancient and Byzantine Hellenic world. Greek children at school were taught extensively their history (or an official version of it), ancient, medieval and modern; and modern history was taught as a record of the gradual fulfilment of national aspirations, mainly, by fighting against Ottoman Turkish conquerors. So, by a combination of various historical factors, state-controlled education, propaganda and political demagogy, Greek nationalism and patriotism came to mean by the 1860s: pride in being a member of a superior nation, belief in the necessity of extending the boundaries of the Greek State to include all historically Greek lands, and consequently the assertion of the duty to support a just struggle 4 A more accurate idea of the relation between the inhabitants of the modern state of Greece and the Greeks of classical antiquity is given by H.A.L. Fisher: ‘The Greeks who made the war of independence [between 1821-32] were neither in culture nor in blood ... connected with the countrymen of Plato and Aristotle. Descended for the most part from unlettered Slavs and Albanians, they were content that their minds should be in keeping of the monks and priests of the Byzantine Church. They spoke Romaic, a form of Greek fashioned by the lips of goatherds and seamen, drawing freely from the vocabulary of the Turk, the Latin, and the Slav, and racy with all the mariner’s slang of the Aegean. They used the Greek characters; but as an influence on the education of the liberators, the poems of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus might almost as well have been written in Chinese’. A History of Europe (London, 1936), p. 879. For the even more tenuous connection between the Greek Cypriots and the creators of classical Greek culture, see Sir G. Hill, A History of Cyprus (C.U.P., 1952), vol. 4, pp. 488f. Cyprus: A European Anomaly against the Turkish conquerors who have for long held by force sacred national territory.5 These elements of Greek nationalism and patriotism were fully assimilated by the Greeks of Cyprus. After 1878 the British administrators, not unlike the Ottomans before them, adopted the policy of leaving matters pertaining to Greek Cypriot religion and education entirely in the hands of the Greek community’s leaders. This must have seemed a sensible, even a humane, decision on the part of a colonial government that contained a number of philhellenes. But it meant, in effect, leaving the intellectual development of the Greek Cypriots largely in the hands of the Orthodox Church, and thus permitted Pan-nationalist sentiments, based directly on Greek mainland models, to grow unchecked.6 So, despite the gradual impact of modernisation at the economic and commercial levels, at the level of ideas and ratiocination these doctrines were allowed to flourish, indeed to luxuriate, in the insulated ethnic domain of church and school. Rather like certain comparable doctrines held by other emerging European nations – nations who also coped with a sense of inferiority or of powerlessness by inventing compensatory fictions of past grandeur and future glory, so as to be able to hold up their heads in a world now dominated by Western industrialised powers – the Greeks clung to their national mythology with increasing tenacity.7 What is more, in Cyprus these ideas were taught in the very same atmosphere of unquestioning certitude as were the doctrines of Orthodox Christianity itself, an atmosphere of simple-minded inculcation with little emphasis on discussion, or tolerance of dissension. It hardly needs saying that the mentality 5 Zenon Stavrinides, The Cyprus Conflict: National Identity and Statehood (Nicosia, 1976), pp. 19-20. I have added the italics in order to indicate that, to anyone other than a ‘true Greek’, the megali idea transparently involves a form of political expansionism. 6 The British did try to do something about this, in primary schools, in 1933. Among other things children were encouraged to sing ‘God save the King’ in a Greek translation. But this, like the British attempt to force changes in the Hellenic-oriented curriculum by withholding financial aid, had little effect. See Michael Attalides, Cyprus: Nationalism and International Politics (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 28-29. 7 Speaking of his experiences at the village school in Trikomo (near Famagusta) just before the First World War, one prominent Greek Cypriot wrote: ‘I enjoyed my studies, in which the glories of Greek history always took first place. I was particularly fascinated by the legends of Dighenis Akritas, the half-mythical guardian of the frontiers of Alexander’s empire. Not far from Trikomo was a huge rock, which the village elders assured me had been hurled there by Dighenis, and my mother often sang folk-songs recounting his acts of heroism. Mine was a happy childhood, and happiest of all when I marched behind the blue and white banners on some national day and felt the Hellenic passion for liberty burning.’ The Memoirs of General Grivas (London, 1964), ed. by Charles Foley, p. 3. 21 22 Cyprus: A European Anomaly of the Greek Orthodox Church had been little disturbed by such formative currents of modern European thought and feeling as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, or by the secular and humanitarian ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The decisive shifts in outlook caused by these cultural forces in Western Europe had had far less impact in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. To put a complex point all too briefly, this had the important consequence that the essentially political dogmas of Panhellenism remained untouched by rational criticism. Superficially the British influence in Cyprus had been considerable. This was obviously so, for example, in the areas of administration, trading practices, law, engineering, even dress, and it could be seen in some everyday habits that are still noticeable. Acquisition of the English language, and increasing access to British universities on the part of the educated elite, gave a small minority of Cypriots (Turks as well as Greeks) an opportunity to internalise Western secular values, if they so wished. But neither Cypriot community had actually evolved in the West, and such assimilation of Western values in any depth was hardly to be expected. Nor was it perceived as particularly desirable, given the relatively closed circle of family ties and the practice, until quite recently, of arranged marriages. By and large, the effect of the Western perspectives I alluded to in the last paragraph remained, at best, little more than a surface phenomenon in Cyprus. For the vast majority of Greeks, in particular, their decidedly non-secular and non-Western sense of identity, of what constituted a ‘true Greek’, remained firmly intact just beneath any Anglo-Saxon veneer they may have cultivated. It was a tribal identity all too ready to respond to a collective call, including a call to arms.8 8 Because of its curious failure to distinguish between West European and East Mediterranean cultural traditions, as well as its failure to note the differences between the two Cypriot communities themselves, one must surely read the following passage with some serious misgivings: ‘Cyprus’s geographical position, the deep-lying bonds which, for two thousand years, have located the island at the very fount of European culture and civilization, the intensity of the European influence apparent in the values shared by the people of Cyprus and in the conduct of the cultural, political, economic and social life of its citizens, the wealth of its contacts of every kind with the Community, all these confer on Cyprus, beyond all doubt, its European identity and character and confirm its vocation to belong to the Community.’ (Italics added) Bulletin of the European Communities, Supplement 5/93: ‘The Challenge of Enlargement. Commission Opinion on the Application of the Republic of Cyprus for Membership’. European Communities Commission, 1993, para. 44. As the rhetoric of this particular passage shows, this document was written with the close co-operation of Greece and the Greek Cypriots. Cyprus: A European Anomaly In this way, as late as the 1960s, belief in the wish-fulfilling fiction of the megali idea, of which the supposed inevitability of enosis was an essential part, had become a deeply-ingrained and emotionally-laden article of faith held by even most educated Greek Cypriots. In this scheme of things there was, of course, no viable place for the Turks in Cyprus. And I would venture to suggest that it is here we can find at least a partial explanation for the way the Greek Cypriots were able to sustain such a remarkable posture of self-righteousness during the debates at the Security Council from 1964 onwards, despite all the bloodshed they were causing in Cyprus. The Greek Cypriot community can hardly be supposed to be intrinsically worse or better than the rest of humanity. Yet, by the early 1960s, it was their ill-fortune to have been long subjected to a specific conditioning calculated to develop neither their capacity for open-mindedness nor their potential for fraternal feelings towards their Turkish compatriots. To Makarios and most of his associates the luminously self-evident veracity of the coming Hellenic ‘redemption’ provided a compelling rationale for action, a focal point for their deepest aspirations – something hardly distinguishable from an article of religious faith. So much of their own sense of significance was invested in this belief that it could all too easily permit them to be unconsciously less than scrupulous in considering the basic human rights of others. Such forms of self-deception are widespread and by no means a Greek invention. This was not the first or the last time in the twentieth-century that a leader had resolutely come to imagine himself as moving in step with history, on a ‘prescribed’ path which may, regrettably but inexorably, have to be strewn with the corpses of those presumptuous or foolhardy enough to attempt to hinder the fulfilment of a sacred ideal. It is a recurrent form of political insanity, to be sure. And unfortunately the Greeks had created and nurtured their own homespun version of it. Did Makarios really feel the need for any greater justification of his actions than this sense of certainty that his mission was divinely sanctioned? As far as I can tell, he did not. It was, then, I am suggesting, because they were under a kind of ideological spell, a collective mental condition similar to what Marxists used to call ‘falseconsciousness’, that the Greeks in Cyprus could embark on their particular course of action in December 1963, with all the zeal and confidence they did. Brainwashed through at least a hundred years of purblind school- 23 24 Cyprus: A European Anomaly teaching and sermonising into a set of beliefs pathologically at odds with any plausible account of historical and political realities; lacking contact with a counterbalancing tradition of rational criticism; for the most part incapable of ironic scepticism towards theological obfuscation, and oblivious to the dangers always lurking in self-serving metaphysical chicanery – the Greek Cypriot leaders were effectively de-sensitised to the equally important rights of the Turkish Cypriots. In this way they were able to treat their Turkish compatriots with such consistent and irrational abuse, hardly noticing that this was what they were in fact doing. I believe that today some of those same Greek leaders would admit there is at least something in this diagnosis. 3 But let us now return to the circumstances of the 1964 UN Security Council debate. Was the Security Council going to be taken in by Greek lies about Turkey threatening the sovereignty of Cyprus when what in fact was happening was that Turkey, as one of the guarantor powers who had signed the 1960 Accords, was merely indicating its intention to intervene, as was its right and duty under the Treaty of Guarantee, if Makarios continued to slaughter Turkish Cypriots and to flout the basic tenets of the Cyprus constitution? This was Denktaş’s rhetorical question. Yet clear, dramatic, and moving though it was, his speech, like his preliminary letter, seemed to fall very largely on deaf ears. On the face of it, at any rate, the resolution eventually adopted on 4 March 1964 was so favourable to the Greek Cypriots that one might feel that Denktaş need not have spoken at all. Things were not actually quite as bad as that, though Denktaş and the Turkish delegation may well have felt they were at the time. It is important to note at once that this particular resolution has played a crucial, and largely debilitating, role in all the subsequent UN negotiations on Cyprus. Its negative aspects were certainly clear enough. It gave international recognition to the wholly Greek Cypriot administration of Archbishop Makarios, in flagrant contradiction to the letter as well as the spirit of the 1960 Cyprus constitution; it gave that same Greek Cypriot administration the immediate responsibility of ‘restoring law and order’ in Cyprus, thus in effect permitting the Greeks in Cyprus to continue their ruthless policy of exterminating – and when not actually exterminating, at least marginalising Cyprus: A European Anomaly through a variety of inhumane means – their Turkish compatriots; and it was the wording of that resolution which attempted, at any rate, in accordance with Greek Cypriot wishes, to sideline the Treaty of Guarantee, and hence Turkey’s right to defend the Turks in Cyprus against these Greek atrocities. Despite all this, the resolution did not get the Greek Cypriots all that they had wanted, as they were soon to realise. Paragraph 7 of the resolution recommended that the UN Secretary-General should appoint a mediator ‘in agreement with the Governments of Cyprus, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom’ and that this mediator should ‘use his best endeavours with the representatives of the [two Cypriot] communities and also the aforesaid four Governments for the purpose of promoting a peaceful solution and an agreed settlement of the problem confronting Cyprus...’ (Italics added).9 What this meant was that there could be no solution to ‘the problem confronting Cyprus’ to which the Turkish Cypriot community and Turkey did not give their agreement. As Glafcos Clerides, the man Makarios had most relied on to guide the Greek Cypriot side through the UN debates in 1964, remarked with hindsight many years later: The idea, that through the UN, we could achieve the abrogation of the treaties, or at least set them aside, and unilaterally to proceed to give a solution to the problem, ignoring Turkey, received, without it being noticed, its death blow at the first Security Council resolution, and its burial, at all subsequent resolutions, which though they enunciated broad general principles for its solution, made the actual solution conditional on agreement between the parties concerned, i.e., the two communities and the guarantors.10 This is certainly true and it is doubtless one reason why the Cyprus problem has never been solved. For nothing could be clearer than that the positions of the two sides are incompatible in certain crucial respects. On the 4 March 1964, however, the Turkish Cypriots were in need of something more than a long-term glimmer of hope. At the time it seemed to them that the resolution had put the Greeks officially and ominously in charge in Cyprus and, for much of the international community, it seemed to have cast the Turkish 9 For the full text of Resolution 186, see the Appendix. 10 Clerides, Cyprus: My Deposition (Nicosia, 1989-92), vol. 3, p. 79. 25 26 Cyprus: A European Anomaly community in the preposterous role of a ‘rebellious minority’, an image that the Greek Cypriot delegates had repeatedly presented to the Security Council. This situation still prevails today, at least in the minds of those still susceptible to Greek propaganda. But there are some crucial differences. The ‘rebellious minority’ is no longer confined to numerous poverty-stricken ghettos throughout the island with little communication with each other, as they were, for the most part, from 1964 until at least 1968. And as we noted, they now have their own unified state in the north with the full protection of the Turkish army. True, the UN has still not recognised the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), and consequently the Cypriot Turks are strongly dependent on Turkey; while Cypriot Greek diplomats are accepted everywhere as the sole recognised representatives of ‘Cyprus’. With all the advantages that spring from this international recognition, the Greek Cypriot economy thrives, while the Turkish Cypriot economy suffers from the numerous embargoes imposed on it by the Greeks, and more recently by the European Union. Still, the Turkish Cypriots have survived and are now full citizens in their own country. In early 1964, however, Denktaş had no means of being sure that his people would survive. When Resolution 186 was finally framed, voted on, and accepted by the Security Council the Greek and Greek Cypriot delegations were jubilant. Spyros Kyprianou, the then Greek Cypriot Foreign Minister of Cyprus, thanked the Assembly warmly for what he called their understanding and desire to solve the Cyprus problem. Both Makarios in Nicosia, and the Greek Foreign Minister in Athens hastened to let their satisfaction be known. The Turkish delegation was, to say the least, downcast. Denktaş (as he told me with feeling in a conversation in 1994, over thirty years later) walked out of the Security Council chamber in tears. Why was Denktaş’s speech, as well as those of the delegates from Turkey, of so little avail? The answer is not difficult to find once we understand the wider context of that particular session of the Security Council devoted to Cyprus, and appreciate the considerable lengths to which the Greek Cypriots had gone to obtain the kind of resolution they wanted. The first thing to note is that already, early in 1964 and before the Security Council’s first meeting on 18th February, the Greek Cypriots had managed to take complete de facto control of the Cyprus government by declaring that the 1960 Constitution was no longer valid. The government no longer contained any Turkish Cypriot ministers or MPs. But the Turkish Cypriots did not bow Cyprus: A European Anomaly to Makarios’s writ and united around the vice-president in administering themselves. The vice-president used his title in sending letters and other more urgent communications to the president of the Security Council and to the UN Secretary-General, but Makarios totally ignored him in Cyprus itself. ‘Cyprus’, therefore, was represented at the Security Council by Makarios’s own delegate, Zenon Rossides, and for some sessions by Makarios’s Foreign Minister, Kyprianou. The delegate from Turkey, Turgut Menemencioğlu, was allowed to speak at the Security Council because his country was, like Greece, one of the interested parties in the Cyprus dispute. But since they were not members of the Security Council, neither Greece nor Turkey could vote on Security Council resolutions. All their representatives could do was to deliver speeches when called by the Council’s president, answer questions, and lobby among the actual members of the Council in the hope of finding political sympathisers. It is most important to realise, too, that the Turkish Cypriots were never officially represented in the debating sessions. Denktaş was allowed to speak – despite strong opposition from the Greek Cypriots, Greece, and the Soviet Union, who did not wish him to address the Council in any capacity – because the American delegation, headed by Adlai Stevenson, insisted that he should be. But Denktaş was admitted to the Assembly only under rule 39, that is, not as a representative of his community in Cyprus but as a private individual. Thus the quite extraordinary and calamitous exclusion by the international community of the Turkish Cypriots from their rightful place among the official representatives of the Cyprus Republic in international fora also originates at this time. Even just before the 4 March resolution gave official sanction to the ‘legitimacy’ of Makarios’s government (which was already lacking its Turkish vice-president and three ministers), the Turkish Cypriots were prevented from having their own voice heard, officially at least. As the opening sentences of Denktaş’s speech show, however, he himself regarded his intervention as far from that of a private individual. In his first sentence he thanked the president for letting him speak. And his second sentence read: ‘My community, which has suffered more than 800 dead or wounded in a matter of two months, will be most grateful.’ At the end of his speech he pointed out, quite explicitly, that Kyprianou could hardly ‘claim in justice and fairness and humanity that he can represent the Turkish [i.e., the Turkish Cypriot] voice... in this Council.’ Plainly that voice was Denktaş’s. It was not to the Council’s credit, however, that by admitting Denktaş only as a private individual it set a precedent that has severely hampered the Turkish Cypriot case being heard, let alone understood, to this day. 27 28 Cyprus: A European Anomaly 4 In trying to understand how the 4 March resolution came to be accepted we need to bear in mind two things in particular. The first was stated admirably by D.S. Bitsios, the Greek Ambassador to the UN at the time. An experienced diplomat (and later Greek Foreign Minister), Bitsios played a crucial role in assisting the relatively raw – though undoubtedly able11 – Greek Cypriot delegation to get something close to the resolution they wanted. And, as Bitsios quite accurately observes: In the United Nations, issues are not won through speeches in the Council room, but in the hard battling behind the scenes. It is there that resolutions’ texts are bargained, pressures are exerted, and the raw language of vested interests is heard, far from the stenographers, the translators, the tape recordings and the television cameras.12 In a book he published some ten years later, Bitsios gave a striking account of the ‘backstage’ processes of argument, bargaining and manoeuvring that occurred at the UN and elsewhere in February and March 1964, and which led to the resolution’s adoption, from which account it is clear that obtaining a resolution so favourable to the Greek Cypriots was by no means a foregone conclusion. The Greek side had to work hard to get it. As we shall see, not only the Turkish side, but more especially the British and the Americans had tried, at first, to put before the Council a very different resolution, one that would, among other things, have thrown considerable doubt upon the legitimacy of Makarios’ all-Greek-Cypriot government. The point is that all this was done, like most of the really intricate and important business of the Security Council, outside the debating chamber. In the end, it would seem, these delegates, the British, American, and Turkish ones – whom we can fairly see as forming a kind of NATO bloc – did not push hard enough. 11 Judging simply from the various memoranda he sent from New York to Makarios in Nicosia at the time, Clerides’s analytical powers were exceptional. Like Rauf Denktaş, Clerides was a Britishtrained barrister, as were a remarkable number of his Greek Cypriot associates in the Makarios administration. The list included the Minister of Labour, Tassos Papadopoulos, Spyros Kyprianou, Zenon Rossides, and the constitutional expert Kriton Tornarides. There were members of the Inns of Court on the Turkish side too, but inevitably their number was smaller. For a discussion of the significance of the fact that ‘The Cypriot legal system was inherited from eighty-two years of British colonial rule’, see Kyriacos Markides, The Rise and Fall of the Cyprus Republic (New Haven and London, 1977), pp. 99f. 12 Bitsios, Cyprus: The Vulnerable Republic, (2nd. ed., Salonica, 1975), p. 148. Cyprus: A European Anomaly Arguably they were in part out-manoeuvred by Makarios and in part simply prepared to settle for less than they had originally hoped for. Why permanent Security Council members, Britain and the United States of America, let things drift in this direction is not, however, immediately clear. Certainly they were strongly opposed by the Soviet Union, whose Ambassador consistently backed Makarios in the debate, and whose mission at the UN went so far as to distribute a translated editorial article from Pravda (21 February 1964) which roundly accused the Americans and British of trying to gain ‘NATO military control over Cyprus.’ Needless to say, the Greek Cypriots were also adamantly opposed to any Anglo-American and Turkish proposal that cast doubt on the legitimacy of their assumption of power in Cyprus. The most likely explanation for the Western powers’ lack of perseverance is that they came to realise they could, in any case, get most of what they themselves wanted by supporting the resolution that was eventually proposed. In a moment we will have to look in more detail at these ‘backstage’ activities. The second thing we must glance at is the more general role of the so-called Great Powers in the Cyprus issue, in the course of which we can note the sense in which what are sometimes called ‘the international dimensions of the Cyprus problem’ are not just an interesting feature of that problem but constitute, in fact, its very essence.13 It may be more illuminating to look at these matters first. In his intervention, Denktaş speaks very much as a leader eloquently defending his people from attempted genocide on the part of the other main group of inhabitants of the island, the Greek Cypriots. This was entirely appropriate. The 13 A good summary account of the ‘International Aspects of the Cyprus Problem’ was by Şakir Alemdar in C. H. Dodd (ed.), The Political, Social and Economic Development of Northern Cyprus (The Eothen Press, Huntingdon, 1993), pp. 75-101. For a Greek view with which Alemdar’s account may be interestingly compared see J.S. Joseph, ‘International Dimensions of the Cyprus Problem’, The Cyprus Review, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 1990). My own point is that any plausible answer to the question ‘What is the Cyprus Problem?’ cannot be confined to an account of the intercommunal conflict in Cyprus, with the external powers – the original ‘guarantors’, the UN, the EU, America, Russia – being seen merely as onlookers trying to help. This is important. For if the Cyprus Problem is ever to be solved through discussion and compromise, as the UN and every sensible party interested in the dispute assumes it must be, then there has to be an agreement about what the problem is. And since, so far, the Greeks and Turks in Cyprus have taken very different (indeed irreconcilable) views about what the problem is, and on the international stage perceptions about, and interest in, Cyprus are inevitably subject to fluctuation, it is hardly surprising that ‘the Problem’ has not been solved. Can one even say that it has been properly located? The Security Council was at any rate on the right track when it deemed in resolution 186 that the hoped-for agreement would have to be an international one, and not just one between the two communities. 29 30 Cyprus: A European Anomaly situation the Turkish Cypriots found themselves in at the time was desperate indeed. Yet it would, of course, be a mistake to imagine that the members of the Security Council were likely en masse to be moved by such a passionate outcry in the name of justice, however truthful. As individuals, some members may have been moved; but they were not attending the Security Council as individuals. They all had their ‘instructions’. Most of them knew what they had to do – what they, as their countries’ representatives, must say, how they should vote – before the debate began. And there is an even more sobering point to be made. The Turkish Cypriots’ cause would have received only a small fraction of the (still insufficient) international attention it did receive in 1964 had it not been for the considerable vested interests the Great Powers had in Cyprus, interests that could be served in a number of possible ways, and not solely by an adherence of the two communities, or the guarantor powers, to the 1960 Accords. I emphasise this point because it helps to explain the still remarkable fact that the UN has persistently chosen to ignore, as it did in 1964, the constitutional right of the Turkish Cypriots to be considered as part of the government of Cyprus; or, putting it the other way, the above italicised observation helps us to understand why, since 1964, the UN has been prepared to accept in lieu of a properly constituted Cyprus government a sequence of administrations made up solely of Greek Cypriots. One reason this was tolerated was that having Cyprus officially run by Greeks did not much disturb Western interests.14 The ability to pick and choose which parts of international law one will take very seriously, and which parts one can conveniently ignore, is undoubtedly one of the unwritten prerogatives of being a Great Power. Moreover, we only have to think of, say, the plight of the Chechens in the 1990s, to which for the most part the ‘international community’15 was inclined to turn a blind eye, on 14 Denktaş himself takes a profoundly sombre view of Western motives. As he put this to me in 1994: ‘No one was bothered by the fact that the Turkish Cypriots were enclaved in about thirty areas in the island because no one believed that the Turkish Cypriots would survive this ordeal.’ 15 The expression ‘the international community’ is now so much a part of common usage that it might seem pedantic to avoid it. But my inverted commas here are meant to serve as a reminder of how misleading the phrase can be if taken too literally. Marcel Merle was surely right when he wrote : ‘The absence of an international “society” is even more reason not to speak of an international “community”... since this form of solidarity implies, as well as material links, belief in a common code of values. It would be... at least a bold projection ahead, to treat international relations in terms of a society or community.’ The Sociology of International Relations (Leamington Spa and New York, 1987), p. 367. Cyprus: A European Anomaly the grounds that this was an ‘internal’ problem for Russia itself to deal with, to realise that, in 1964, no one outside Turkey would have been particularly anxious about the fate of a mere 120,000 Turkish Cypriots had Cyprus not been regarded as strategically pivotal in the Cold War conflict, and because a war between Greece and Turkey would drastically have weakened NATO’s eastern flank. Even then being, as diplomats say, fully seized of the situation, the UN managed to connive in the relegation of the Turks in Cyprus to a de facto status far below that of co-partners with their Greek compatriots. But this hardly seemed to matter. Mistakenly, it was believed that the 4th March resolution would bring the all-important ‘stability’. It is hardly disputable that throughout the modern – and probably the whole – history of Cyprus, the more devastating internal events have invariably been connected with external events, with the prevailing purposes and machinations of larger powers, regional or supranational. In 1964 the connection was of course with events in, and relations between, Greece and Turkey; with British – and increasingly American and hence NATO – interests; with Makarios’s newly-found role as a much respected figure in the NAM; and, not least, with Russian concerns that Cyprus should become truly independent of its NATO guarantors, one of whom already had military bases on the island and the capacity to spy, electronically, on the Soviet Union. Our later glance at the ‘backstage’ activities at the UN in early 1964 will serve to show the extent to which the ‘Cyprus problem,’ as it has regularly erupted since the Second World War at any rate, has always involved more than a powerstruggle between the two Cypriot communities. If the expression ‘The Cyprus problem’ had referred merely to an inter-communal conflict in Cyprus itself, would anyone, outside the Eastern Mediterranean region, have ever heard of it? Denktaş’s speech had little effect because, through no fault of his own, he was not addressing the issues which really concerned the major players in the Security Council. The truth is that Cyprus had become, and still is, not simply an independent state suffering from an extraordinarily intractable ‘ethnic’ discord; at best, it was a properly constituted sovereign state for only three years, between 1960 and 1963. There was never a ‘nation’ of Cypriots, only two communities living side by side, each clinging to its own language, religion and traditions; with almost no intermarriage, and each with strong ties with one of the two, traditionally hostile, ‘motherlands’. 31 32 Cyprus: A European Anomaly When Britain pulled out of Cyprus in 1960 a rather strange thing happened. ‘Independence’ was a formal reality but the shackles of the past, of the colonial and regional dependencies, were only superficially removed. In a way, they simply took on new and more insidious forms. The Cypriots – Turks and Greeks – were provided with the trappings and regalia of independence by other states from which they were never truly separated. Apart from the intimate association with Turkey, Greece, and Great Britain enshrined in the 1960 Accords, Cyprus was surely intended by the British and Americans to continue serving Western interests in certain quite specific ways. To that extent there was more than a grain of truth in the Soviet accusations at the Security Council. What the Soviets naturally chose to ignore, of course, was that not all of these Western interests were sinister, in the sense of being incompatible with the Greek and Turkish Cypriots’ own interests – if only those latter interests could have been properly understood and rationally pursued. Unfortunately neither of the two communities had much experience of governing themselves, let alone each other, and, as we saw, the Greeks suffered from the further disability of having substituted, in their own minds and hearts, a cultural mythology for a genuine understanding of the modern world and of their own decidedly modest place in it. In fact, this was an unwanted ‘independence’. The Greek Cypriots saw it as a death-bed for enosis and they decided to destroy it in the name of enosis. And, for the most part, the Turkish Cypriots would have preferred the British to stay. Failing that, Taksim, a division of the island into Turkish and Greek sections, seemed their only salvation. Thus the conflict, that seemed simply to erupt in December 1963, had in fact been very carefully planned by the Greek Cypriots.16 But the Western Alliance had assigned to Cyprus an important role which serious intercommunal strife was calculated to upset. It hardly needs saying that it was essentially this – the way the intercommunal conflict would endanger the effectiveness of NATO, if there was a war between Greece and Turkey – rather than the actual breakdown of the Cyprus constitution (which the UN hardly noticed) or the intercommunal atrocities themselves (which the United Nations Peacekeeping 16 In accordance with the notorious ‘Akritas Plan’, an account, and an English translation, of which can be found in Denktaş’s book The Cyprus Triangle (2nd ed., London, 1988), pp. 26-29 and 231-243. For a somewhat different account, and translation, of this Plan, see Clerides, My Deposition, Vol. 1, pp. 207ff. Cyprus: A European Anomaly Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) could, once it arrived, do little to allay) that led the Security Council to devote so much time to Cyprus in 1963-64. As Bitsios reminds us: ‘with the exception of problems directly menacing humanity with a major catastrophe, like the Suez or Cuba crises, no other issue stirred so much interest [at the UN] as that of Cyprus.’17 He could have added that this interest was not generated primarily because of an overwhelming international concern about the fate of the two Cypriot communities. As we know, when Cyprus became formally independent in 1960 its new status was the result of an elaborate series of arrangements between, not so much the two communities themselves, as the guarantor powers. The Cyprus constitution and the three Treaties of 1959-60 already had a, perhaps unique, international dimension to them. Quite undisguisedly, they embodied and sought to perpetuate a number of international compromises: not only between the two communities but, first and foremost, between Greece, Turkey and Great Britain. Britain retained its bases. Turkey obtained a constitution for Cyprus which gave the Turkish Cypriots partner status with the much larger Greek Cypriot community, and not simply the status of a protected minority. This was important for Turkey because Turkey did not relish the thought of a full-blown Hellenic Republic (whether politically joined with Greece or not) only forty miles from its southern coastline, and thus capable of causing trouble in an area containing some of Turkey’s most important ports, naval bases, and airfields. It is indeed arguable – and this was something the Greek delegates did not hesitate to complain about during the UN debate we are considering – that the Greeks and Greek Cypriots did less well out of the London and Zürich agreements than the British and the Turks. Like the other regional guarantor power, Greece retained a supervisory right to keep a small force on the island and to intervene (unilaterally if necessary) should the 1960 Accords be set aside by any of the other parties. Partition of Cyprus – something that had always had a certain appeal for the Turks (as, indeed, it came to have for the Americans) – was expressly forbidden. This pleased the Greeks. But then so was enosis forbidden, the eventual achievement of which had become a ‘sacred’ and almost inextinguishable desire on the part of many Greeks, on the mainland as 17 Bitsios, p. 147. 33 34 Cyprus: A European Anomaly well as in Cyprus itself, and hence something they – and Archbishop Makarios especially – could only pretend to set aside. In his excellent little book Cyprus, 1958-1967, published in the Oxford University Press series on ‘International Crises and the Role of Law’ (1974), Thomas Ehrlich juxtaposes two statements by Makarios expressing two very different attitudes to the 1960 Accords. The first statement, made at the closing ceremonies after the London Conference held at Lancaster House in 1959 celebrating the signing of the Accords, is conciliatory and optimistic: Yesterday I had certain reservations. In overcoming them I have done so in a spirit of trust and good-hearted good will towards the Turkish community and its leaders. It is my firm belief that with sincere understanding and mutual confidence we can work together in a way that will leave no room for dissension about any written provisions and guarantees. It is the spirit in the hearts of men that counts most. I am sure that all past differences will be completely forgotten. The second statement appears in a paper written by Makarios early in 1964 entitled ‘Proposals to Amend the Cyprus Constitution’ and published in a Greek learned journal: At the Conference at Lancaster House in February, 1959, which I was invited to attend as leader of Greek Cypriots, I raised a number of objections and expressed strong misgivings regarding certain provisions of the Agreement arrived at in Zürich between the Greek and the Turkish Governments and adopted by the British Government. I tried very hard to bring about the change of at least some provisions of that Agreement. I failed, however, in that effort and I was faced with the dilemma either of signing the Agreement as it stood or of rejecting it with all the grave consequences which would have ensued. In the circumstances I had no alternative but to sign the Agreement. This was the course dictated to me by necessity. Ehrlich comments on the marked discrepancy between the two positions as follows: It may be that the Archbishop’s former statement minimized his ‘reservations’ out of respect for his co-signatories; but it seems equally plausible that his latter statement overemphasized his ‘misgivings’ in an effort to justify his current views concerning the 1960 Accords.18 18 Ehrlich, p. 50. Cyprus: A European Anomaly This strikes me as unduly generous to the Archbishop. The evidence is now overwhelming that Makarios knew all along what he wanted. This was to turn Cyprus into an Hellenic island and, when the time was ripe, to join it to Greece. In a ‘top secret’ letter written on 1 March 1964, to the recently-elected Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Makarios was able to express his aims more openly than he allowed his team then at the UN in New York to express them. Makarios wrote: Our aim, Mr Premier, is the abolition of the Zürich and London Agreements, so that it may be possible for the Greek Cypriot people, in agreement with the Motherland, to determine in an unfettered way its future. I am signatory of these Agreements on behalf of the Greeks of Cyprus. In my personal opinion, in the conditions then prevailing, ‘naught else was to be done’. But not for a moment did I believe that the agreements would constitute a permanent settlement. It was a settlement of harsh necessity and, in my view, was the solution of the Cyprus drama which was the lesser evil at that time. Since then internationally and locally the conditions have changed and I think that the time has come for us to undertake to rid ourselves of the Agreements imposed on us. ... The unilateral abrogation of the Agreements without the process of law and without the agreement of all the signatories will possibly have serious repercussions. But we shall not proceed to any such action without prior agreement with the Government of Greece.19 But that is precisely the way Makarios did proceed. Nothing was to stand in the way of this ‘unfettered’ future, and he was quite unabashed to say to the British or the Americans or the Turks, as to the leaders of the USSR and the Third World, whatever the occasion demanded – so long as he created an impression that suited his ruling passion. This supreme and transcendent end justified practically any means. Makarios was very dissatisfied with the 1960 Accords, but at least he was now president of Cyprus (unencumbered by any Turkish Cypriot vice-president who could veto any proposal that seemed detrimental to Turkish interests), and he had every intention of abrogating any, or all, of these ‘binding’ international agreements in so far as they stood in the way of the realisation of his political fantasies. It was a great shortcoming on the part of especially Great Britain in 1959-60 that insufficient account was taken of the predictable power of these fantasies and the havoc they were quite likely to create. 19 Quoted in John Reddaway, Burdened With Cyprus: The British Connection (London, 1986), p. 224 (Italics added). 35 36 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Greece itself was a very different case. It is often forgotten that Greece had some excellent reasons for signing the Accords and was far from coerced into doing so. Greece had at first strongly resisted the earlier British plan – put forward by Harold Macmillan in August, 1958 – that there should be a partnership in the administration of Cyprus between Britain, Greece, and Turkey. This was because the Greeks (like the Greek Cypriots) had a longstanding aversion to the proposition that Turkey had a justified interest in the affairs of Cyprus. But in the September of that year Makarios made an unexpected proposal which seemed to offer all sides a way out of the deadlock – an impasse that had made Cyprus a debilitating issue between Greece and its NATO allies throughout most of the 1950s. Makarios said he would now accept a settlement in which Cyprus would become independent of Britain, and he gave a hint that enosis would be proscribed. This gesture – more a short-term tactic than a sincere relinquishing of a ‘sacred’ ideal on Makarios’s part, as events soon showed – made the 1960 Accords possible. Greece still disliked having to grant Turkey an equal status with itself as a guarantor power in Cyprus. But Britain’s giving Cyprus independence at long last brought a much-needed release of tension in Greece. Most importantly, it made possible a marked relaxation of pent-up feelings of hostility on the part of large segments of the Greek public towards Greece’s NATO allies, not least towards the United States. With all the arrangements made for Cyprus to be ‘freed’, however, President Eisenhower was greeted rapturously when he visited Athens in December 1959; while earlier in the same year Greece had seen its way to signing a nuclear weapons agreement with the United States. In 1960 negotiations began for Greece to secure an association agreement with the European Economic Community (EEC). Relations with Britain improved dramatically and those with the Soviet bloc declined. Thus while the 1960 Cyprus Accords were certainly a compromise for Greece, they were seen by the then Prime Minister, Constantine Karamanlis, as providing an otherwise unobtainable respite from a prolonged and wasteful ‘national’ preoccupation with Cyprus that was standing in the way of Greece’s desired move towards modernisation. As one historian of modern Greece put it, with the Cyprus settlement, ‘The interrupted progress of Greece towards a closer integration with the western world was thus resumed’.20 20 C.M. Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History (3rd ed., London, 1984), p. 280. Cyprus: A European Anomaly The 1960 Agreements should have helped to improve relations between Greece, Turkey, and Great Britain, all NATO members with, to that extent, common interests in protecting the Eastern Mediterranean against Soviet encroachment. Britain had relinquished its colonial hold in the area, retaining only its two ‘sovereign’ bases which not only gave some measure of protection for the Cypriots, but also provided a significant source of income before tourism had really taken off. Cyprus became a member state of the British Commonwealth. Turkey’s fears about the Hellenization of Cyprus seemed to have been taken care of. The Turkish Cypriots had acquired, on paper, a very good deal with a roughly 30 per cent representation in all public offices and a vice-president who could, if he felt it was necessary, veto any legislation or significant political decision that was contrary to Turkish Cypriot interests. Tragically, however, the Greek Cypriots had other plans. 5 How did the Greek side succeed in getting if not everything then at least a great deal of what they wanted in the 4th March Security Council resolution? We are fortunate in having quite detailed accounts of the ‘backstage’ activities of the Greek and Greek Cypriot delegations given by their two principal players at the UN at the time, Bitsios and Clerides. As far as I can determine, there is, on the other hand, very little published material – in the form of memoirs, letters, or systematic analyses – providing anything like a similar in-depth view of the behind-the-scenes activities of the Turkish mission;21 and we have to remember, of course, that the Turkish Cypriots themselves were not allowed to have a mission and consequently, with the one notable exception of Denktaş’s intervention, they could play only a limited part in the discussions at the United Nations. Almost all they could do was to act through the Turkish delegates. As regards the British and American players, it is possible to supplement what our two Greek sources tell us from bits of information given here and there, including some important documents released by the British Foreign and 21 A notable exception is volume one of Denktaş memoirs, Rauf Denktaş’ın Hatıraları, (İstanbul 1996) which contains extracts from a diary he kept throughout 1964, including the period he was at the UN in New York. Though Denktaş says less than one might have hoped about the manoeuvres at the UN. See also Clement Dodd, The Cyprus Imbroglio (Huntingdon, 1998), p.126. 37 38 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Commonwealth Office in 1994 and 1995.22 But, for the most part, the Greek sources – read with due caution, needless to say – provide the best general picture we can get. However, I was able to ask Denktaş himself about the ‘backstage’ activities at the UN in February/early March, 1964, and he made the following observations which contain at least one point of great interest: The Turkish mission and I objected to the wording of the draft agreement [which eventually became the accepted UN resolution of 4 March 1964] on the ground that Makarios would take full advantage of it. We stalled the passing of this draft for about a week. American and British diplomats assured us that the word ‘government’ in this draft meant the constitutional, bicommunal government. ‘It is the Security Council which will interpret this resolution’, they said. ‘Do not waste time... it is Turkish Cypriot blood which is flowing in Cyprus and we are trying to do something about it.’ We, the Turkish side, were not impressed. So the British and Americans worked through Ankara, complaining that we were wasting time unnecessarily. They assured Ankara that ‘government’ in the draft resolution meant, and would mean, the bicommunal government. On this assurance, Ankara caved in and the 4th March resolution was passed unanimously! Very unfortunately, as we know, these American and British assurances meant nothing. ‘Government’ was perceived by almost everyone to mean the already wholly Greek Cypriot administration of Archbishop Makarios, and because of this (to say the least) extraordinarily careless treatment of the Turkish Cypriots by the Western powers, to this very day the problem of sovereignty – how it should and can be shared once again between the two communities – is, in practice, the major problem the UN still has to solve in Cyprus. As regards the Greek Cypriots in February 1964, they needed to find political sympathisers among, preferably, the permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, the UK, the USA and the USSR); or, failing that, at least among the non-permanent members (at the time, Bolivia, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Norway). Suitable support having been thus canvassed, a draft resolution could be framed, favourable to Greek interests, ostensibly by 22 I am indebted to Professor S.R. Sonyel for alerting me to some of the more relevant documents released by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1993-1995. For Sonyel’s own summary and analysis of these papers see his Cyprus: The Destruction of a Republic (Huntingdon, 1997). Cyprus: A European Anomaly these sympathisers, and eventually voted on by the Council, the likely direction of voting having been carefully calculated, and various inducements to get the required result incorporated in the final resolution. On the face of it, things did not look too promising for the Greeks. Apart from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia – who could certainly be relied on to oppose any ‘NATO plot’ to ‘invade’ Cyprus, and both of whom already had clandestine arrangements to supply Makarios with arms in the event of such a contingency, or even without it23 – none of these countries were particularly strong supporters of Greek Cypriot policy in Cyprus. Nor were many of them particularly well informed about Cyprus in general. At first the Greeks thought Morocco might help, but Morocco decided it could not do much. The prospect of being visibly dependent on the Russians and their allies did not seem advisable to the Greek Cypriots. However Bitsios, the Greek Ambassador to the UN, had a bright idea. He went directly to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant, and explained the Greek position on Cyprus to him in some detail. Thant had been made Secretary-General in 1961, after Dag Hammarskjold’s tragic death in the Congo. A Burmese diplomat, educationalist, and historian of some distinction, he seems to have been immediately impressed by the Greeks’ case, partly one would imagine – and I shall try to provide some evidence for this in Part B – because of Makarios’s respected position in the NAM, towards which Thant was certainly highly sympathetic. He had been Chairman of the Asian-African Standing Committee on Algeria in 1957, and, perhaps more significantly for our present purposes, Chairman of the UN Conciliation Commission on the Congo in 1961.24 23 ‘By February 17 [1964], Soviet arms were reportedly shipped from Egypt to Archbishop Makarios to help him in his efforts both to deter and to defend against the threat of an invasion from Turkey or, quite independently, to liquidate the local Turkish minority in Cyprus itself.’ T.W. Adams and A.J. Cottrell, Cyprus: Between East And West (Baltimore, 1968), p. 35. 24 As The Economist pointed out on 14 March 1964, just before UNFICYP became operational, ‘There is little doubt that President Makarios had the Congo operation in mind when evolving his present tactics.’ The Congo became independent (of Belgian colonial rule) shortly before Cyprus’ independence, on 11 July 1960, with Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister. Shortly afterwards the copper-rich province of Katanga declared independence under the leadership of Moses Tshombe, who was supported by Belgian troops. Lumumba, asserting that racial segregation was a ruse used to continue ‘capitalist exploitation’, demanded that the UN see to it that the Belgian troops were withdrawn, and a Security Council resolution be passed condemning aggression and supporting Congolese territorial integrity. One might conjecture that, early in February, 1964, U Thant could have been persuaded to see an analogy here with the (in fact totally different) situation in Cyprus. 39 40 Cyprus: A European Anomaly In one of the most insightful accounts of the frequently authoritarian, corrupt, and ineffectual nature of the UN, and of the far from reassuring professional qualities of much of its secretariat, the UN is characterised, during Thant’s period of office (1961-71), as ‘an irresolute institution under an inept and timorous leader’.25 However that may be, Thant proved exceptionally efficient in helping Bitsios and his Greek Cypriot colleagues. To say the least, without Thant’s personal interest in their case, it is unlikely that the Greek side would have achieved as much as they did achieve in this crucial session at the Security Council. As was no more than his duty, the Secretary-General eventually consulted on the Cyprus issue with all the interested parties, and indeed with every member of the Security Council. But despite his statement to the Security Council on 25th February that it had not been his purpose ‘to offer solutions ... but to seek common ground’ among the various countries most concerned, Thant himself had in fact been decidedly helpful to the Greeks all along. I can find no detailed information about the extent of the Secretary-General’s consultation with the Turkish Mission, or with the British and the Americans, but the Greek side had three long meetings with him, on 17th, 20th, and 21st February. In fact originally the 17th had been chosen as the date the debate in the Council chamber would begin. But Thant had delayed the opening speeches until the 18th in order to continue his preliminary consultations. On the 17th he spent most of the day talking to the Greek Cypriots. According to Clerides’s account, the Secretary-General (already primed by Bitsios, we must remember) did not bat an eyelid when the Greek Cypriots explained to him their extraordinarily distorted view of ‘the situation in Cyprus’. What they presented to the Secretary-General was an unashamedly partisan picture of, to use Clerides’s words, ‘Turkish threats, the violations by Turkey of the sovereignty of Cyprus, the expansionist aims of Turkey, the use by Turkey of the Turkish Cypriot minority as a tool to occupy Cyprus’, and so on.26 There is no indication that Thant questioned the veracity or plausibility of any of this. Instead, he listened attentively and then explained to them his 25 Shirley Hazard, Countenance of Truth. The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (London, 1991), p. 74. Bitsios’ assessment of the Secretary-General in 1964 was, of course, entirely positive: ‘U Thant’s impartiality, his dedication to the principles of the [UN] Charter and his integrity were a guarantee that, as far as he was concerned, principles would not be sacrificed to political expediency.’ Bitsios, pp. 134-5. 26 Clerides, vol. 2, p. 47. Cyprus: A European Anomaly own views about ‘how the Cyprus problem should be approached’ and handed them a lucid one-page ‘Aide-Memoire on a New Approach to the Situation in Cyprus’, written by himself. This was a document that Bitsios had suggested the Secretary-General should produce, having approved of the latter’s general approach to the problem at their first meeting. And it was this document which, after many revisions, was eventually shaped into a draft resolution by certain of the Council’s non-permanent members whom the Secretary-General himself had put under the chairmanship of the Brazilian delegate, Carlos Bernardes, who happened also to be the Security Council’s president at the time. After their third meeting with the Secretary-General, the Greeks sent their usual impressively detailed and thoughtful memorandum to Makarios in which occurs the following remarkable passage: ‘We have been told by Mr Bitsios that the Brazilian Ambassador to Greece called on the Greek Foreign Minister [in Athens] and informed him that Brazil will support the Cyprus case fully.’27 No explanation for this piece of good fortune is given. Earlier Brazil had been listed by the Greeks as a country they could not rely on for support. A few speculative comments may not be inappropriate. Supporting ‘the Cyprus case fully’ meant, of course, supporting the Greek Cypriots and therefore not supporting the Turkish Cypriots. Why this sudden positive attitude towards the Greek position? No one had yet spoken in the Council chamber. Had the Brazilians really had time to consider all the various positions? Certainly they had had no opportunity to consider that of the Turkish Cypriots. Could it be that the Secretary-General had persuaded the current Council president, who was now the chairman of the group who were finalising the resolution, that justice lay a priori with the ‘anti-colonialists’? We may never know the answer. But if that is what had happened, then the plot may be thought to have begun to thicken. The British and the American delegates must have known about most if not all of these manoeuvres. Their lack of effectiveness in attempting to counteract them merits closer scrutiny than scholars have usually given it. 6 At first it must have seemed that the British and the Americans were likely to be particularly difficult to coax onto the Greek side. For one thing, they had plans of their own which Makarios’s appeal to the UN Security Council was calculated to frustrate. 27 Clerides, vol. 2, p. 58. 41 42 Cyprus: A European Anomaly When the intercommunal fighting in Cyprus had first broken out on 21 December 1963 the British had organised a peace-keeping force consisting of units of their own from the bases aided by Greek and Turkish soldiers forming part of the contingents the two regional guarantor powers were permitted to keep in Cyprus. This policing effort had not been very successful. The Greek Cypriot side objected to the manner of the British policing of the situation. They claimed that British soldiers should not prevent them from doing, in effect, whatever they liked to the Turkish Cypriots. Even less successful was a conference the British had arranged with Greece, Turkey, ‘the Government of Cyprus’, and the leaders of the Turkish community (by then effectively excluded from the government of Cyprus) in London on 15 January 1964. Makarios still sought radically to amend the constitution along the lines indicated by his ‘13 points’ (the publication of which in November 1963 had made the outbreak of violence in Cyprus virtually inevitable). This would have meant for the Turkish Cypriots the loss of their partner status, and the formation of a ‘unitary state’ in which they would have been reduced to a ‘protected minority’. In fact, as the Turks were only too well aware after all the horrors they had recently been subjected to, agreement to these (in any case illegal) Greek Cypriot demands would have entailed their being reduced to the status of an utterly unprotected minority. Denktaş, who was the Turkish Cypriot spokesman at the London conference, therefore countered by demanding a federal settlement on the basis of geographical separation from the Greek Cypriots. This was not a solution the Greek side could seriously contemplate. Britain suggested, as an interim measure, that the temporary peacekeeping force which had been created in Cyprus by the guarantor powers (in practice, 2,000 British soldiers from the bases had been doing most of the work) be replaced by a much larger NATO force. Realising that such an intervention by NATO might favour the Turks, Clerides, the Greek Cypriot spokesman, insisted that the Cyprus issue be taken to the UN Security Council, the UN being a forum where Makarios could expect to gain considerable support from both the Eastern bloc and a number of Third World countries whose sympathies he had been assiduously cultivating since Cyprus’s independence.28 28 For example, Makarios made official visits to Cairo in June 1961, to the Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned States held in Belgrade in September 1961, and to India in November 1962. Makarios even managed to visit Turkey in late November 1962, as a guest of President Gürsel. But he received a predictably cool reception from the media and a noisy one from students. Wisely, he omitted the standard trip for Heads of State to Istanbul. After all, as the Archbishop’s English biographer points Cyprus: A European Anomaly Returning the Cyprus issue to the UN was not calculated to please the British – or the Americans, and each power tried to do everything it could to prevent it. The Americans, in particular, had long been disturbed by the Archbishop’s fraternisation with AKEL, the Cyprus communist party, whose strength, on a percentage-of-population basis, was at that time second only to the Italian communist party in the non-communist world. They were well aware of Makarios’s direct, and disconcertingly independent, contact with the USSR and some of its satellites as well as with a miscellany of (on the Anglo-American view) ideologically unsavoury leaders, among whom Nasser and Tito were the most prominent. Neither the British nor the Americans wished Makarios to capitalise on these dubious associations by taking the Cyprus problem to the United Nations. Nevertheless there could be no agreement at the London conference which finally collapsed on 10th February. Meanwhile, in what may be considered one of the first episodes of the now very familiar American determination to operate a kind of parallel negotiating process on Cyprus – one going along side by side, that is, with British or UNsponsored negotiations – President Johnson had sent Under-Secretary of State George Ball to the capitals of the three guarantor powers, and to Makarios in Nicosia, in a final attempt to promote a revamped Anglo-American plan. Essentially, this would have entailed avoiding any recourse to the UN and having instead 10,000 NATO peace-keeping troops in Cyprus with additional combat and support troops from the US. As was to be expected, Britain and Turkey supported the plan, Greece was not wholly against it, and Makarios rejected it out of hand. The Archbishop was determined to get what support he needed not from NATO but from the United Nations. The collapse of the London Conference, quickly followed by the failure of Ball’s mission, was exactly what Bitsios, already at the UN in New York, had been waiting for. Having dutifully tried to solve their problem more locally, the Greek Cypriots could now take their case to the UN where they would present the plan Bitsios and the Secretary-General had already begun to formulate. out, such a visit to ‘Constantinople’ ‘might have... encouraged dangerous day-dreams in a Byzantine priest.’ It is interesting to note, too, as the same author tell us, that ‘The President’s refusal to take a Turkish Cypriot minister with him or to include any Turk in his entourage when he went abroad on official visits did nothing to remove the [Turkish Cypriot] community’s suspicions that Makarios regarded the conduct of foreign policy as entirely his own preserve.’ Stanley Mayes, Makarios (London, 1981), pp. 159 and 160. 43 44 Cyprus: A European Anomaly But on 15th February the Greek side experienced a mild shock. At 14.00 hours New York time the president of the Security Council received an urgent request from Sir Patrick Dean, the UK’s permanent representative at the UN, for an early meeting to be called to consider the ‘deterioration’ of the security situation in Cyprus. This letter arrived some hours before the Greek Cypriots could get in their own request for a meeting. Moreover, rather to their chagrin, Sir Patrick explicitly mentioned the Treaty of Guarantee and pointed out, inter alia, that ‘International concern with this problem’ – the Cyprus problem – ‘stems from the special Treaty relationships... which... impose particular responsibilities on the guarantor Powers.’29 Did this mean that the British were going to try to impose their own neo-colonialist framework of perceptions on the Security Council debate, the Greeks wondered? The answer turned out to be ‘No’. But Bitsios was disturbed. Early on the morning of 17th February, while the Greek Cypriots were getting ready to have their first long meeting that day with Thant, there was yet another, even greater shock laying in wait for them. An article in The New York Times asserted that in the forthcoming Security Council sessions the US would ‘seek to isolate’ Archbishop Makarios, frustrate his delegates’ attempts to get the kind of resolution they wanted, and push instead for a solution that would lead to partition of the island. This troubled Bitsios greatly because it echoed precisely what the Americans had told him earlier, i.e., before the London Conference and the Ball mission had failed. As Bitsios wrote: This piece of news would not have unduly disturbed me, considering that the N.Y. Times had a consistent pro-Turkish attitude, but for the advance notice we had received from our American colleagues some two weeks earlier. They had said that if Archbishop Makarios rejected London Conference proposals and appealed to the Security Council, their Delegation would challenge the legal basis of his appeal, by claiming that Cyprus was not threatened by a Turkish military invasion and that the problem was merely an intercommunal conflict. Furthermore, they would insist that the cause of the crisis was to be found in the proposals submitted by Makarios for the amendment of the Constitution. Finally, the American Delegation would propose that the Security Council should hear representatives of both communities, and would declare 29 UN Document S/5543. Cyprus: A European Anomaly that the United States would not finance a U.N. Peace Force should the Council decide to send one to Cyprus. They had added the Treaty of Guarantee was still valid. Therefore, should the peace effort of the Allies fail and Turkey intervene, the United States would consider the Turkish action legitimate.30 This is a revealing summary of the Anglo-American position, for it shows that, in fact, it was barely distinguishable from the position of the Turkish Cypriots. Not wishing to confront the Americans in open debate in the Council chamber itself, Bitsios went straight to Adlai Stevenson, the American UN Ambassador, to ask him about the newspaper article. Was this really what the Americans intended to do in the debate? Stevenson denied this. The article, he said, did not represent the American position. At Bitsios’ request, Stevenson even issued a press release later that morning which dissociated the American government from the views expressed in The New York Times. ‘The only interest of the United States’ in Cyprus, it was stated in the release, ‘is the establishment of law and order in the island to permit the conflict to be settled between the parties peacefully... We hope the Security Council will be able to exert a calming influence... and make possible concrete measures to restore law and order promptly. We have no other objectives in the Security Council and the United States has no position on the terms of any settlement.’31 This was clearly a major retreat from the well-known position the US had taken up to this time. At least the last half of the last sentence was plainly false.32 Bitsios was, of course, delighted with this news that the Americans were now 30 Bitsios, p. 141. 31 US-UN Press Release, No. 4363. 32 In an address to the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations on 18th September, 1964, George Ball listed, without inhibition, eight reasons for American concern about Cyprus: ‘First, as a result of ethnic ties and a complicated treaty structure, this local quarrel threatens to produce an armed conflict between Greece and Turkey. Second, it affects the relations of the Greek and Turkish governments with the government of Cyprus. Third, it concerns Great Britain as one of the guarantor powers with strategic bases on the Island. Fourth, it involves the relationship of the Government of Cyprus to the British Commonwealth, of which it is a member. Fifth, it threatens the stability of one flank of our NATO defenses and consequently concerns all NATO partners. Sixth, because the U.N Security Council has undertaken to keep peace on the Island, the Cyprus problem has become an active item in the (International) parliamentary diplomacy practiced in New York. Seventh, it has stimulated a new relationship between the Government of Cyprus and other non-aligned countries with which it has recently sought to associate itself. And, Eighth, because of Archbishop Makarios’ flirtations with Moscow (and the strength of the legal indigenous Communist Party (AKEL)) this local quarrel could bring about the intrusion of the Soviet Union into the strategic Eastern Mediterranean.’ Quoted in Adams and Cottrell, p. 48. 45 46 Cyprus: A European Anomaly seeking merely a ‘pacification’ of the intercommunal conflict, something which they were prepared to let a Security Council resolution provide. However, Bitsios’ busy day was not quite over and he was to receive a second shock. In the afternoon of the 17th he was visited by George Ball, recently back from his abortive talks with Makarios in Nicosia, accompanied by Stevenson and some other American officials. They asked Bitsios for his views on ‘U Thant’s pacification plan.’ Bitsios replied cautiously that he considered ‘the SecretaryGeneral’s proposals helpful, and continued: At that point, Stevenson drew from his pocket a piece of paper and gave it to me. ‘Read it’ said Ball, ‘it is draft resolution which I would request you to convince the Cypriots to accept’. As I went through that document, I realized that it was a text already shown to me by the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom. If approved by the Security Council, it would have made the independence of Cyprus dependent on the 1960 Treaties. The draft subordinated every issue to the existing Constitution. It mentioned expressly article 4, 2 of the Treaty of Guarantee which deals with the right to ‘separate action’ by the guarantor Powers. It undermined the legality of the Archbishop’s Government. Furthermore, since the draft provided only for ‘consultations’ between the Parties involved and the Secretary-General, the Peace Force and the Mediator would be answerable to the U.N. Secretary-General and the Security Council. Finally, in its part concerning the independence, territorial integrity and security of Cyprus, there was a provision blatantly reflecting the position of the Turkish Delegation. In fact, the draft Resolution ‘called upon all States and authorities [sic] concerned to respect the independence, territorial integrity and security of the Republic of Cyprus in accordance with the Treaty of Guarantee and as established and regulated by the basic articles of the Constitution’. In other words, the independence of Cyprus existed only as long as the Constitution and the Treaty of Guarantee were enforced. This in fact meant that its territorial integrity and its security would have to be respected by all, except by the signatories of the Treaty of Guarantee. There, then, lay the fundamental difference between the draft Resolution which Ball had asked me to sell to the Cypriots and Thant’s plan. Thant considered the independence of Cyprus, a member State of the United Nations, as a fact which could not be contested, while the American draft had adopted Ankara’s theory that the independence of Cyprus was born with the Treaties and survived only as long as they did. I put the paper on the table near me. I told Ball that I Cyprus: A European Anomaly was sorry to be unable to help them, but I could not possibly show such a text to the Cypriots. ‘But the Cypriots must understand’ said George Ball, ‘that they cannot obtain from the Security Council a Resolution to their entire liking. We shall not allow that’. ‘The Cypriots are aware of that,’ I answered, ‘but they also know that neither can you have your draft Resolution adopted by the Security Council’.33 Doubtless, in his last remark, Bitsios was referring to the fact that the Soviet Union would use its veto against any resolution of the kind the Americans had drafted. Evidently, however, Stevenson’s press release had been a little premature. The Americans – and we can be sure the British – were still, right up to 17th February, and just before anyone had spoken in the debate, trying to find their way to getting a resolution through the Security Council that would, if only by coincidence, have fully vindicated the position taken by Denktaş and his Turkish colleagues. If accepted, this Anglo-American resolution would have made it clear to the world that Makarios’s administration had no business posing as the Cyprus government, and quite probably have set in motion a solution based on a division of the island between the two communities – something which, as things turned out, the Turkish Cypriots had to wait for until 1974. Why the change of heart, or at least of tactics, on the part of these Western countries? The Soviet obstacle was certainly one consideration. Sensitivity to international public opinion about post-colonial manipulativeness and Great Power bullying must have been important. The Greek lobby, especially in the United States, was as hyperactive as ever. Both the British London conference and the American Ball mission had failed. Thant, into whose hands the Cyprus question had now been firmly placed, had – despite his public disclaimers – ideas of his own. As we shall see in Part B, these did not derive from a sense of commitment to the strategic imperatives of the Western Alliance. But perhaps, above all, the Americans and the British could passively allow Thant’s plan to go through because the 4th March resolution, unanimously accepted as it eventually was, did not look as if it would really affect whatever plans they themselves had particularly adversely. The servicing of the British bases in Cyprus depended more on the co-operation of the Greeks than the Turks. Makarios was proving himself a figure to be reckoned with in the region – perhaps (provided they were carefully watched) he and his administration 33 Bitsios, pp. 144-145. 47 48 Cyprus: A European Anomaly were better left in charge. There was some reason to believe that the UN force would prevent further massacring of the Turkish Cypriots. Although this force was not officially a NATO force it would include contingents from NATO countries, and none from the Soviet bloc. A fairly innocuous UN-sponsored mediator could be agreed on. And, most importantly, as we saw earlier, paragraph 7 of the resolution left the ultimate solution of the Cyprus problem in the hands of the guarantor powers and the two communities. There was not much for the Western Alliance to worry about. But Denktaş and his community had every reason to be very worried. They knew Makarios would try to finish the job he had started in December 1963, now with a bolder confidence in his power to do so. The first sure sign of what was to come was a primitive and vindictive decision made by the Greek Cypriot House of Representatives towards the end of March 1964, to ban Denktaş from returning to Cyprus. Makarios informed the British authorities and later the UN that if Denktaş landed in Cyprus he would be arrested for serious offences and for leading the Turkish Cypriot ‘rebellion’ against the Government of Cyprus. To their credit, both Thant and Clerides advised Makarios against this preposterous ban which, as Dr Küçük pointed out in a telegram to the Security Council’s president on 26th March, was manifestly illegal under the Cyprus constitution. But what was such an additional minor infringement of the constitution to Makarios? In 1994 I ratherly naievely asked Denktaş why he did not return to Cyprus and face the trial, as it would have provided excellent international publicity. ‘Certainly’, he replied, ‘I would have enjoyed the trial. But in those days once you were arrested in Cyprus there was no telling if you would ever be seen again. So I had to stay in Turkey, Prime Minister İnönü telling me that once the UN came to Cyprus he would see to it that I entered Cyprus safely, in the proper way’. On a number of occasions Denktaş succeeded in briefly getting back to Cyprus surreptitiously. However, it was over four years after the Turkish Cypriot leader’s participation in the momentous events in New York early in 1964, on 13 April 1968, that the Archbishop gave in to international pressure and allowed him to return officially to his homeland. Thus it may well be said that exile was the main consequence of Denktaş’s first performance before the UN Security Council. This was the price he paid for telling the truth: something that all the interested parties knew but, for a variety of self-interested or pragmatic reasons, no one was prepared to act on. Cyprus: A European Anomaly Part B: Cyprus and the International Community in 1965 1 The first UN Mediator in Cyprus, Sakari Tuomioja (formerly a Finnish Minister), took up his appointment on 25 March 1964, and UNFICYP was fully installed on the island by 27th March. Tuomioja suffered a stroke in August that year and died in September. The Secretary-General then gave the job of mediator to his Special Representative in Cyprus, Señor Galo Plaza Lasso, who eventually, after wide consultations with all the parties concerned, produced a comprehensive report on the differences of perspective of the two Cypriot communities, as he envisaged it, to which he added some suggestions of his own about how the political impasse could be best surmounted. This report was given to the Secretary-General on 26 March 1965, and I shall briefly return to it later on. During 1964 and 1965 the Security Council met and passed resolutions on Cyprus nine times, though the purpose of the majority of these meetings was simply to reaffirm the continuation of UNFICYP’s presence for further periods, at first of three-months duration and later of six months. At the time the general assumption was that a settlement would be achieved quite quickly, perhaps within a year at the most. No one could have guessed then that the UN force would remain in Cyprus for over forty years. As the UN Secretary-General pointed out in the reports he submitted to the Council at regular intervals, although UNFICYP did much to contain the fighting between the two communities, and to keep open a channel for communications between them, tension remained high. Not surprisingly, the mere presence of the UN did nothing to diminish the underlying causes of hostility. And it might be said that, however good the intentions of the Secretary-General may have been – and I do not doubt that his intentions were good – the way he had originally contrived to set up the agenda for dealing with the Cyprus problem immediately became a formidable obstacle to its solution. It has remained so ever since. For, having been effectively granted the title of the ‘government of Cyprus’ by the international community’s interpretation of the wording of the 4 March 1964 resolution, the wholly Greek Makarios administration proceeded to make 49 50 Cyprus: A European Anomaly the best of its position and to act against the Turkish Cypriots with all the power and ‘authority’ at its command. Any account of the actual events in Cyprus between early March 1964, and Denktaş’s next appearance before the Security Council 17 months later, on 5 August 1965, would be a sorry tale.1 The reader’s overall impression would be one of shock and disillusionment at the primitiveness and, for the most part, futility of all the strife and bloodshed, often entered into with remarkable verve and enthusiasm, more especially by the Greeks. It is a story of ceaseless minor military skirmishes between the two communities, of the clandestine importation of arms and mainland soldiers by both sides, of the sometimes disastrous confusions about UNFICYP’s precise role, of vindictiveness, revenge and great suffering by ordinary Cypriots; and all this while stylish diplomatic letters of mutually contemptuous vilification were regularly reaching the UN Secretary-General from the leaders of the two sides. Masses of Turkish refugees were being humiliated and frequently killed by paramilitary Greeks from whom the Turkish TMT (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı – Turkish Resistance Organization) exacted retribution whenever it could gather the means and strength to do so. As one distinguished British journalist noted: Without powers of search, arrest and disarmament, the contribution [UNFICYP] was able to make to law and order was very limited, and in the last resort its effectiveness was determined by the small size of its own force compared with the vast numbers of armed men circulating in the Republic. The Greek Cypriots became rapidly disillusioned with the UN when they found it was neither prepared to disarm the Turks nor to take over the Nicosia-Kyrenia road from them by force. It soon became evident that they intended to cooperate with the UN only when it suited them. The day after the arrival of the mediator, Mr Tuomioja... Makarios abrogated the Treaty of Alliance and hinted at the possibility of the mediator’s failure even before he had a chance to start work. At the end of the month, while the Commander of UNFICYP, General Gyani, was negotiating a cease-fire on the eastern side of the Kyrenia Pass, Greek Cypriots, led personally by the Minister of Interior, launched a 1 A readable narration of these chaotic events in Cyprus itself during 1964-1965 – not least of the atrocities committed largely by the Greeks – is given in Cyprus (London, 1969) by H. D. Purcell, pp. 326ff. Harry Scott Gibbons’s The Genocide Files (London, 1997) is essential reading for anyone who believes that the malevolence of Greek intentions towards the Turks has been exaggerated. Cyprus: A European Anomaly surprise attack against Hilarion, the Turkish stronghold to the west. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, U Thant, condemned their attack as a ‘planned and organised military effort’.2 In June 1964, Greek harassment of the Turks became so bad that Turkey threatened to intervene under the Treaty of Guarantee, and was only prevented from doing so by a harsh letter from US president Johnson which intimated, very much to Turkey’s dismay, that if a Turkish intervention in Cyprus precipitated an attack on Turkey by the Soviet Union – something that seemed perfectly possible at the time – then Turkey could not expect help from her NATO allies. This letter was deeply wounding to Turkey, who had to think again about its relations with the United States.3 Also in the summer of 1964 General Grivas, the former leader of the Greek EOKA (Ethnike Organosis Kyprion Agoniston - National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters), returned to Cyprus and took command of the ‘national guard’. Early in August, without consulting Makarios, the general launched a major attack on Turkish villages in the Mansoura area. Grivas’s aim was to isolate the Kokkina beach-head, the point on the coast where the Turkish Cypriots received most of their men and arms from Turkey. Turkey stopped this assault by sending in its fighter jets to repel the Greek forces. Unfortunately bombs were also dropped on Greek villages nearby. Makarios openly threatened to devastate every Turkish village in the island unless the air raids stopped, and Greece sent two of her own jets over the Turkish sector of Nicosia as a further warning. War between Greece and Turkey seemed imminent. But a call for a 2 Nancy Crawshaw, The Cyprus Revolt: An Account of the Struggle for Union with Greece (London, 1978), p. 366. 3 Among other things, this disappointment with the US tendency to be insensitively dictatorial led Turkey to seek an improved relationship with the USSR. Rather paradoxically, in view of the Russian support that was simultaneously being given to Makarios, both diplomatically and through the sale of Russian missiles to the Archbishop, the better rapport between Russia and Turkey soon led Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko to suggest, in a public statement on 21 January 1965 that a federal solution to the Cyprus problem might be found through a physical separation of the two ethnic communities. Even earlier the Russians seemed to have become quite sympathetic to the Turkish position. In November 1964, in a joint communiqué with the Turkish Foreign Minister, Gromyko had agreed that ‘the existence of two national communities on the island’ should be recognised. No doubt the Russians themselves did not feel there was any paradox in having positive dealings with both sides in Cyprus. As one American Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs remarked on 3 April 1965, the Soviet objective was simply ‘to exacerbate tensions and disagreements’. See American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1965. Department of State Publications (Washington, 1968), pp. 511 and 526. 51 52 Cyprus: A European Anomaly cease-fire by the Security Council on the night of the 9th or the 10th of August was accepted by both sides. These were just two of the most politically important incidents which occurred during the first few months of the UN’s presence. A useful reminder of just how very bad things were more generally for the Turkish Cypriots was given by Pierre Oberling: In the autumn of 1964 Makarios imposed an economic boycott on the chief Turkish Cypriot enclaves, such as the Turkish Cypriot quarters of Nicosia, Famagousta, Limassol, Larnaca, and Lefka. By then the plight of the Turkish Cypriots had already become acute. During the Greek invasion of 1964, hundreds of houses belonging to Turkish Cypriots had been destroyed, and several thousands damaged. In Omorphita alone, 50 houses had been destroyed and 240 damaged. Apart from losses incurred in agriculture and industry, the Turkish Cypriot community had been deprived of the salaries of more than 4,000 persons who had been government employees or who had worked for public and private concerns located in Greek Cypriot areas. Besides the 25,000 refugees already mentioned, there were 23,000 unemployed persons and 7,500 dependents of missing persons or those who had become disabled as a result of the fighting. Therefore, more than fifty per cent of the total Turkish Cypriot population had been made indigent. Makarios’s economic blockade further exacerbated the suffering of the Turkish Cypriot population. In fact, by mid-September, the Turkish Cypriots were close to starvation. United Nations Secretary-General U Thant sent Makarios a blistering note, pointing out that the economic restrictions ‘which in some instances have been so severe as to amount to a veritable siege, indicate that the Government of Cyprus seeks to force a potential solution by economic pressure as a substitute for military action’.4 Denktaş was in Turkey during this period, from where he could observe, with increasing apprehension, the broadly predictable course of events in his homeland. With the intelligence resources of Turkey at his disposal he was also able to acquire a much better grasp of developments on the international 4 P. Oberling, The Cyprus Tragedy (London, 1989), p. 11. By ‘the Greek invasion’ Oberling means the infiltration into the island of large numbers of Greek mainland military personnel. Cyprus: A European Anomaly front than he would have done had he remained, like the other Turkish Cypriot leaders, in Cyprus. For, as part of the ‘veritable siege’ conditions imposed by the Greek ‘authorities’, Turkish postal and telecommunications services with the external world were frequently, and quite maliciously, interrupted. Denktaş must have benefited, too, from his regular contact with the Turkish leadership. By preventing him from returning to Cyprus, Makarios had in fact unwittingly given the Turkish Cypriots’ most determined and articulate spokesman a unique opportunity to broaden his political experience. In 1995 I asked Denktaş about his life in Turkey in 1964-1968 and he confirmed most of what I had gathered from other sources. He made it clear, however, that his relations with the Turkish government were not always as smooth as I had imagined. At the time he regarded the Turkish authorities as not quite doing enough for the Turkish cause in Cyprus; while they, in turn, sometimes saw him as too outspoken, especially in the presence of foreign diplomats, whom they were occasionally reluctant to let him meet. Nevertheless he soon became known in Turkey as an orator of singular power, fighting in a cause which touched the ‘mother country’s’ collective feelings very deeply. No doubt it was during these four years of exile that Denktaş established the basis of his present reputation in Turkey: as a figure of national significance, transcending all political parties, who would be capable, with, say, a speech in the Turkish National Assembly, of bringing down any Turkish government which attempted to withdraw support from the Turkish Cypriots. Not that such an eventuality seems remotely likely now any more than it did in 1965. Despite the regular pressures that are put on Turkey to be ‘more flexible’ as regards its stance on Cyprus, above all by the powerful, well-funded Greek lobby in the US, it still seems that no Turkish government that weakened in its support of Turkish Cypriot interests could remain in power.5 From his vantage-point on the Turkish mainland, Denktaş was fully aware of the energetic attempts on the part of the Greeks to gain assistance (military, economic or diplomatic) from other countries – mainly America, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Egypt, Albania, Yugoslavia – in relentless pursuit of 5 As an aside, since this very special relation between the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey is perfectly well known to all the powers involved in the Cyprus negotiations, one can not help wondering why there is still so much talk about bringing ‘pressures’ to bear on Turkey in, for instance, the current matter of Turkey’s proposed membership of the European Union. Much such pressures have been tried; none of them worked. The answer, surely, is to do something to reinstate the Turkish Cypriots as equal partners in running their own country. 53 54 Cyprus: A European Anomaly their Hellenic ideal of national ‘self-determination’, a crucial feature of which was their perceived need to quash what they cynically presented to the world as the Turkish Cypriot ‘rebellion’ against the recognised government of Cyprus. Denktaş was not surprised either to observe the incapacity of the guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and Great Britain, to co-operate together sufficiently to produce a viable way out of the desperate state of affairs they themselves had – from different motives and with varying degrees of consciousness – done so much to create. In particular, Britain’s attitude to the tragic course of events in Cyprus must have been quite instructive to him. 2 As we saw in Part A, while the British government had been in the end quite prepared to vote for Security Council Resolution 186, which in effect deemed the Makarios administration to be the legitimate government of the Republic, they could hardly have been entirely happy about it. They felt they had to vote for the resolution but they realised they had now introduced a major inconsistency into their public policy on Cyprus. This was something they would soon have to face up to in the House of Commons debates. Throughout 1964-65 many British MPs, on both sides of the House, showed genuine concern about how the Turkish Cypriots had been arbitrarily deprived of their sovereign rights (indeed, of their rights to sovereignty), and it was to the credit of those MPs that they frequently and pointedly asked the government to defend its increasingly passive position when confronted with Greek Cypriot violations of the 1960 Accords. Apart from the sheer injustice to the Turkish Cypriots, many MPs were of course also fearful that, if Turkey were forced to intervene in Cyprus, NATO’s far from invulnerable position in the Eastern Mediterranean might well be seriously jeopardised. In reply to leading questions on these matters in Parliament, the appropriate government spokesmen, the British Commonwealth Secretary and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of the day, had little choice but to resort to evasion. Admittedly the British government was in a difficult position. Even though they had accepted Resolution 186, they still felt they must uphold the 1960 Cyprus Accords. So when, for example on 1 March 1965, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs was asked in Parliament to what extent it was British policy Cyprus: A European Anomaly to maintain the provisions of those Accords, he had no option but to reply, in a written answer: Her Majesty’s Government consider that the 1960 Cyprus settlement is an international treaty which can only be altered by mutual agreement. Our policy remains that we are prepared to assist the United Nations Mediator in the promotion of any solution to the present dispute which is likely to be acceptable to all the parties.6 A moment’s thought would be enough for anyone to see that this position was inconsistent with the British government’s acceptance of a wholly Greek Cypriot administration as the government of Cyprus. But it should be noted that the Secretary of State affected a posture of political correctness, even of superior diplomatic wisdom, by his appeal to the fact that the Cyprus issue was now in the hands of the UN and that all the British government could reasonably do was to let the UN pacification and negotiation process take its course – a position that successive British governments have found immensely convenient right up to the present time. This has invariably been the path taken by governments. Yet many individual MPs, whether or not in opposition at the time, have been intensely uneasy about the consequent marginalisation of the Turkish Cypriots. Since the early 1990s there has been a growing number of MPs who would like to see the TRNC given some form of recognised diplomatic status.7 After all, the eventual creation of the TRNC in 1983 was almost entirely the result of the international community’s long term neglect of the Turkish Cypriots’ predicament. In the end the Turkish Cypriots had to create their own state, whether or not the international community approved. So why not make amends and rectify that predicament? But what could one say to the Greeks, either in Cyprus or in Greece itself? They could not contemplate such a solution of the Cyprus problem for a moment. And who could blame them when there has been an internationally accepted Greek Cypriot administration ostensibly governing Cyprus since March 1964? In any case, as we know, political problems are not resolved primarily by appeals to justice. Primarily they are the domain of great and not-so-great power interests. Any viable solution of the Cyprus problem 6 Hansard, vol. 707, col. 173. 7 See, for example, The Cyprus Question: A Concise Briefing Note (London, May, 1992), published by the British Parliamentary Friends of Northern Cyprus. The latter describe themselves as ‘A group of 131 Members of both Houses of Parliament and of all political parties’. 55 56 Cyprus: A European Anomaly will have to result from some compromise between those interests and the barely reconcilable interests of the two Cypriot communities. This is a theme I have returned to elsewhere.8 In the 1965 parliamentary debates the British government was given an even rougher ride than it had received in 1964. A number of MPs understood the Turkish position perfectly and knew that a great injustice was being done to the Turkish Cypriot community. For instance, on 30 March 1965, Paul Channon, who had been Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and for the Colonies under the former Conservative government, asked Arthur Bottomley, the then Labour government’s Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, what progress had been made towards a solution of the Cyprus problem. Bottomley replied that the Report of the UN Mediator was about to be published and that in the meantime the British government simply continued to support the UN efforts and to supply men and funds to UNFICYP. Another Conservative MP, Patrick Wall, then asked the Secretary of State ‘what action he proposes to take, as one of the guarantor Powers, to end the present position in Cyprus by which some 10,000 Greek soldiers are serving in Cyprus, contrary to the provisions of the constitution and the Treaty of Guarantee?’ At first the Secretary of State, sheltering behind the UN mandate, tried to be evasive: Mr Bottomley: The British Government as well as the Greek and Turkish Governments accepted the Security Council Resolution of 4th March, 1964, under which the United Nations Peace-keeping Force was set up and a Mediator was appointed to promote a settlement of the political dispute. Her Majesty’s Government’s policy continues to be to give full support to the U.N. Force and to the Mediator’s efforts. We have made it plain to all concerned that we deplore any actions which exacerbate the situation and make the achievement of a settlement more difficult. Wall persisted, though to little effect: Mr. Wall: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the question was not about the United Nations Force? Under the Constitution, the Greeks were allowed 950 troops in the island, but there is now a far larger number there. Does he agree that posts guaranteed to the Turkish- 8 See, e.g., my Britain and the 1960 Cyprus Accords: A Study in Pragmatism (Istanbul, 2009) and R. Denktaş and M. Moran, Cyprus: Unity and Difference: A Discussion (Istanbul, 2009). Both of these books can be downloaded from www.gpotcenter.org. Cyprus: A European Anomaly speaking Cypriots under the Constitution have been taken over by Greek Cypriots? Have we protested? If not, why not? Mr. Bottomley: The Security Council has repeatedly called on both sides to exercise the utmost restraint. We have joined in those representations and I have nothing further to say now. Another Conservative MP then intervened: Mr. Crawshaw: There is more than a suspicion that the Government are committed to an eventual take-over of Cyprus by Greece. If this is not the Government’s view, can we ensure that a one-sided build-up is not being made to the detriment of the Turkish community in Cyprus? Mr. Bottomley: Appeals have been made by the Security Council to both sides not to worsen conditions. I would hope that Members on both sides would not at this stage try to worsen the position by questions of that kind.9 Such was the British government’s characteristic stance. But things came to a head on 23th July when the Greek Cypriot administration passed legislation that once more violated the Cyprus constitution and – in so far as it was bound to seem blatantly provocative both to the Turkish Cypriots and to the government of Turkey – was at odds with Security Council Resolution 186. This resolution had indeed appealed to all parties in the Cyprus dispute to act with ‘restraint’ and to all UN members to refrain from action likely to worsen the situation. An injustice to the Turkish Cypriots was one thing (probably nothing to get really worried about, the international community seemed to think); but the transgression of a UN Security Council Resolution demanded some response. Acting on a proposal of the Greek Cypriot administration, the (now wholly Greek) Cyprus House of Representatives legislated for the extension of the offices of president and of the members of the House for a period not exceeding one year, and had approved an electoral law which abolished the constitutional distinction between Greek and Turkish electors and candidates. The Turkish Cypriot MPs were not able to attend the debate in the House, or participate in the decision, because the House’s president, Glafcos Clerides, had arbitrarily laid down conditions for their attendance which would have meant their 9 Hansard, vol. 709, cols. 1368-1370. 57 58 Cyprus: A European Anomaly accepting minority status. On their predictable refusal to accept the conditions, Clerides deemed that the Turkish MPs had no further legal standing in the House. A more dictatorial and dismissive attitude towards the Turkish Cypriot MPs could hardly be imagined. All the Turkish Cypriots could do was to fall back on their own gradually developing administration and to adopt a parallel measure extending the terms of office of the vice-president and of the Turkish Cypriot MPs for a period also not exceeding one year.10 The UN Secretary-General gave an accurate resumé of these machinations in reports submitted to the Security Council on 29th July and 2nd August. He pointed out that the Turkish Cypriot leadership had declared legislation enacted by the House of Representatives, in their absence, to be without any legal or constitutional basis; while the position of the ‘Cyprus government’ was that these measures were essential for the continued functioning of the state. In a note to the Cyprus Ministry of Foreign Affairs dated 27th July, the Turkish government agreed with the Turkish Cypriot position and added, in an unmistakable warning, that it would not fail to take whatever action was necessary under the Treaty of Guarantee to ensure that the constitutional order in Cyprus was observed. This had followed a note from the British High Commission in Nicosia to Makarios and to the Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Cyprus, which must rank high as perhaps the British government’s most direct and uncompromising criticism of the Greek Cypriot administration’s misuse of their assumed title of ‘the government of Cyprus’. Needless to say, these two diplomatic notes were dismissed offhand (and with evident resentment) by the Greek Cypriots, essentially on the ground that they constituted an attempted interference ‘in the internal affairs of Cyprus’. As the now officially sanctioned government of a ‘sovereign state’, the Greeks believed they could repudiate anything in the 1960 Accords that did not suit them and, in particular, that they could free themselves from the tutelage, as they now chose to see it, of the guarantor powers. This was something that neither Turkey nor Britain – each for their own reasons – was prepared to accept. The short-sightedness of the acquiescence of these two guarantors in Resolution 186 was now becoming apparent, even to them. The Turkish government was, as they implied in their note, prepared if necessary to intervene in Cyprus 10 Denktaş discusses these events in a speech he gave at the Security Council on 4 May, 1984. See Rauf Denktash at the UN: Speeches on Cyprus, pp 215f. Cyprus: A European Anomaly militarily. The British government, however, was not prepared to go further than making verbal representations. On 28th July there was an important exchange in the British Parliament which I will quote at length because it gives the clearest indication of something I touched on just now: while the British government has consistently failed to give adequate support to the Turkish Cypriots in their perfectly respectable quest to regain the rights their Greek compatriots had managed to wrest from them as early as December 1963, many British MPs have been deeply unhappy about this and have tried, in public debate and by other means, to make amends for it. Of course, as everyone interested in the Cyprus problem is aware, after the Turkish intervention in 1974 the massive Greek propaganda machine was given a superb opportunity to disseminate an even more grossly distorted image of the true state of affairs in Cyprus, an opportunity that it has made full use of. With the ‘Cyprus Problem’ thus construed, after 1974, as a problem not merely of alleged Turkish Cypriot ‘rebellion’, but of ‘invasion and occupation’ of ‘little Cyprus’ by a barbaric foreign power, Turkey, those who have been sympathetic towards the Turkish Cypriots, have had to cope with the added difficulty of this more infectious layer of Greek obfuscation. In 1965 it was easier to see – for those who wished to see it – what the Greek Cypriots were up to. Now, and since 1974, with the anomaly of the continuous Greek Cypriot occupation of all Cyprus government offices since December 1963 (and all diplomatic missions abroad since 1964), counter-balanced by the anomaly of 35,000 Turkish soldiers present in the north of the island, and with the Greek propaganda machine working as hard as ever, it is much easier for the international community to forget about the sovereign rights of the Turkish Cypriots altogether. The thesis that the problem is essentially one of ‘invasion and occupation’ is widely believed in, not least, it would seem, by certain groups in the European Parliament. But in 1965 some of the most experienced and informed British MPs on both sides of the House saw the realities in Cyprus quite clearly. And the British politicians were not alone in doing so. Here is the crucial part of the exchange in the House of Commons on 28th July of that year, as given in Hansard: 59 60 Cyprus: A European Anomaly CYPRUS (TURKISH-CYPRIOT COMMUNITY) Mr. Sandys (by Private Notice) asked the Secretary of the State for Commonwealth Relations what action Her Majesty’s Government as co-guarantor of the Cyprus Constitution are taking to uphold the constitutional rights of the Turkish-Cypriot community following the rejection of the representations made by the British High Commissioner to Archbishop Makarios. The Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations (Mr. Arthur Bottomley): The representations made by the British high commissioner to the president of Cyprus were an expression of our often stated view, as a co-guarantor of the Cyprus Constitution, that the validity of the Treaty embodying that Constitution should be upheld until it is freely renegotiated. This remains our view, and it is Her Majesty’s Government’s earnest hope that the Cyprus Government will do nothing to implement the law in question, or take any other action likely to increase tension in the island. Mr. Sandys: Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that the flagrantly illegal action of the Cyprus Government gives to Turkey an unquestionable right under the Treaty of Guarantee to intervene in order to restore the Constitution? In view of the very grave consequences which this might have, may I ask the Government to take this matter immediately to the Security Council? Mr. Bottomley: I think that for the moment we ought to rest on what I have said, and I would further amplify that by saying that we are satisfied that the terms of our representations were clear and correct and were clearly understood by the Government of Cyprus. I do not consider that anything would be added to them by a public debate at this stage. I would consider further action, should it be necessary. Mr. Sandys: Does not the right hon. Gentleman realise that this is a very serious and a very urgent situation? Can he give us an assurance that the Government are in close touch with the Turkish Government and the Greek Government, who are co-guarantors of the Constitution? Will he think again about the desirability of taking the matter to the Security Council so that the nations of the world may bring pressure to Cyprus: A European Anomaly bear on the Cyprus Government not to aggravate this already explosive situation? Mr. Bottomley: No Sir. What I said was that we would not take it to the Security Council. However, we have informed the Secretary-General of the position and of the nature of our representations to the Cyprus authorities. Mr. Shinwell: In view of the possible gravity of the situation which may emerge, is it likely that my right hon. Friend will be able to make a statement before we go into recess, because hon. Members on this side may wish to offer an opinion as to the propriety of the right hon. Gentleman’s suggestion – in my view, it was a very proper suggestion – for referring this matter to the Security Council? Mr. Bottomley: I repeat that we are in touch with the United Nations, and if it should be necessary to take any further action I undertake to keep the House informed. Mr. Biggs-Davison: While the United Nations has its part in this matter, is not the responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government very clear indeed? Is not the subject of this Question one of many acts taken by the Cyprus Government detrimental to the Turkish community and in defiance of the treaty arrangements upon which the Republic of Cyprus is founded? May we take it that Her Majesty’s Government will regard this very seriously indeed? We on these benches have been very restrained. There have been so many acts of discrimination. Can we be assured that Her Majesty’s Government are in full consultation with the two allies also responsible in Cyprus and that this matter will not just be shuffled off on to a reference to the United Nations? Mr. Bottomley: Yes, Sir. We are in touch with all the authorities concerned. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that this is very serious matter. Indeed, last weekend, when I first heard about it, I instructed immediate representation to be made to the Cyprus authorities. I am quite sure that it is the concern of both sides of the House that we should not add to the tension in the island. We will do all we can to keep the peace, and that is what the Government are trying to do. Mr. Sydney Silverman: In view of the suggestions made to my right hon. Friend from both sides of the House about referring this matter to the Security Council, can my right hon. Friend say whether he has any 61 62 Cyprus: A European Anomaly information that he can give the House about the likelihood of any early meeting of the Security Council? Does he not consider that if there were a likelihood of such an early meeting there are far more urgent and far more dangerous questions than this one to refer to it? Mr. Bottomley: That is a point of view which is held by many members of the House. The co-guarantors and the Cyprus Government are in touch with each other about this matter. I think that it is much better to leave it for them to try to settle at this stage rather than to take the matter to the Security Council. Mr. Hooson: In view of the explosive potential of this situation and our previous experience of the difficulties in Cyprus, would it not be better to refer the matter to the Security Council now rather than to await the risk of an explosion there? Mr. Bottomley: I have already indicated why I think that that is not the best way to deal with the matter. There are other authorities concerned in this dispute. They, in turn, have apparently decided not to refer it to the Security Council at this time.11 So, once more, the British government, despite disclaimers to the contrary, was proposing to do precisely what John Biggs-Davison had said, in his somewhat inelegant phraseology: instead of approaching the Security Council themselves as a guarantor power who would insist that the 1960 Accords be upheld, they were hoping to let the matter of the fate of the Turkish Cypriots ‘be shuffled off ’ into the less public domain of the discussions going on between the various parties involved in the UN pacification process. Curiously enough, despite the Secretary of State’s assurances that his government were in close touch with the other guarantor powers neither of whom, he believed on 28th of July, had decided to refer the current Greek Cypriot violation of the Cyprus constitution to the Security Council, this is exactly what Turkey did do only two days later. In a letter dated 30th July addressed to the president of the Security Council Turkey deplored the recent enactments by the Greek Cypriots which were 11 Op. cit., vol. 709, cols. 466f. Duncan Sandys knew all about the situation in Cyprus. He had himself been Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, and for the Colonies, under the recently defeated Conservative government until, that is, October 1964. When Makarios announced that he had abrogated the Treaties of Alliance and Guarantee on 1 January 1964, it was Sandys who persuaded him to rephrase his announcement to a more ambivalent statement of mere intention. Emanuel Shinwell was a distinguished Labour MP, at the time Chairman of the Party’s National Executive. He had been a Defence Minister. Cyprus: A European Anomaly ‘in flagrant violation of solemn international agreements’ and showed ‘utter disregard’ of Resolution 186. The letter asked for an early meeting of the Security Council ‘in order to consider the grave situation’ that had thus arisen. So as not to be seen to be outdone, the next day the Greek Cypriots also formally requested an emergency meeting of the Council on the grounds that Turkey was attempting to interfere ‘in the internal affairs of Cyprus’ and threatening to use force against it, ‘in violation of Article 2, paragraphs 1, 2, 3 and 4, of the [UN] Charter’. This appeal to the UN Charter is something I will return to in a moment. The Council considered the situation at meetings held on 3rd, 5th and 10th August. It was only on the 5th that the Turkish representative applied, and received permission, for Denktaş to speak, as before under rule 39. Nothing surprising was said in the Chamber. Turkey went into some detail about the precise nature of the Greek Cypriot violations of the 1960 Accords and called upon the other guarantor powers to hold consultations to restore the situation established by them. The Greek Cypriots pressed their claim to be the internationally recognised government of a sovereign independent state that could pass whatever laws it liked. Greece felt that Turkey was exaggerating the danger of the recent developments in Cyprus. Denktaş – once more subjected to the absurd fiction of representing no one but himself, of course – did a good demolition job on the arguments put forward by his Greek Cypriot counterpart, the ‘Cyprus’ Foreign Minister, Kyprianou. Britain insisted that the recent Greek Cypriot actions were certainly in conflict with the Council’s resolutions and that the Cyprus administration should function constitutionally until the Accords could be altered, through agreement, by all the parties involved.12 The American representative agreed, on essential points, with his British colleague. Whatever legal arguments might be advanced, he affirmed, the recent Greek Cypriot actions were plainly 12 The British Foreign Office reminded their UN Ambassador that he must walk his familiar tight-rope in the Council debate on Cyprus. In a cipher sent to him on 2 August he was told that ‘Our tactics in the forthcoming Security Council Debate must be to do what we can to meet minimum Turkish expectations while avoiding an open breach with the Cyprus Government’. The next day the FO sent another cipher to New York calculated to tax the British Ambassador’s powers of equivocation to the full. ‘As regards the Turkish request that we should underline the unconstitutional composition of the present Cyprus Government,’ the cipher said, ‘you should not express any view as to whether HM Government consider the present de facto Cyprus Government to be constitutional or not. But you may say that it has always been the view of HMG that it is desirable until the Cyprus Treaties can be altered by mutual agreement that the organs of the Cyprus Government should function constitutionally.’ FO 371/179997. 63 64 Cyprus: A European Anomaly at variance with the Security Council’s call for ‘the utmost restraint’. What was needed to solve the Cyprus problem was a strict adherence to paragraphs 1 and 3 of the 4th March resolution. The only appropriate thing the members of the Council could do, he thought, was to urge the two Cypriot communities and the three guarantor powers ‘to negotiate and accommodate their differences with the fullest respect for the rights of all concerned.’13 In view of the by now well-understood essentially fight to the death that was going on between the two Cypriot communities, as well as the many-sided historic antipathy between Greece and Turkey in which context that fight needed to be further considered, the Anglo-American prescription for a ‘solution’ must seem remarkably utopian. It should have been patently obvious to these Western powers (as it was to the Turkish Cypriots and to Turkey) that Makarios was not someone likely to be affected by mild verbal remonstrations. True, the solution had to be an ‘agreed’ one; as far as a solution was concerned it was not up to Britain, and even less the US, to prescribe one. But could they not both have taken a firmer line with Makarios’s persistent and blatant attempts to abrogate the 1960 Accords? Could they not have told the Greek side, both in international fora and privately, that Makarios’s outrageous treatment of the Turkish Cypriots was certainly the most fatal way to alienate them, to enrage Turkey, and to make any agreed solution an exceedingly remote possibility? They could have done, but they did not. And it was essentially this tepid AngloAmerican prescription that the Council opted for. The Council failed directly to condemn the illegal measures taken by the Greek Cypriots, as the Turkish side had tried its best to persuade them to do. Instead, the representative of Malaysia introduced a joint draft-resolution, sponsored by the Netherlands and a number of Third World countries, the aim of which was, the Malaysian representative said, to steer a course between the various positions put before the Council and to ensure that a peaceful solution to the Cyprus problem would not be hampered. The resolution was brief enough: The Security Council, Noting the report of the Secretary-General of 29 July 1965 (S/6569 and Corr.1) that recent developments in Cyprus have increased tension in the island, 13 UN doc. S/PV 1235. Cyprus: A European Anomaly Noting the further reports of the Secretary-General of 2 August (S/6586) 5 August (S/6569/Add.1) and 10 August 1965 (S/6569/Add.2), Having heard the statements of the parties concerned, 1. Reaffirms its resolution 186 (1964) of 4 March 1964; 2. Calls upon all parties, in conformity with the above resolution, to avoid any action which is likely to worsen the situation. This draft resolution was adopted unanimously on the 10 August as resolution 207 (1965). Thus the Greek Cypriots had effectively got away with their unconstitutional legislation, specifically designed to exclude the Turkish Cypriots from the Cyprus House of Representatives, and were now at liberty to continue with their plans to obtain an indisputable monopoly of power in Cyprus and, of course, to eventually effect enosis with Greece. Once more Denktaş’s warnings about these intentions were simply ignored, or at any rate seemed to have had no detectable effect in the formulation of UN resolutions directly affecting the future of his country – a future that was looking, for those with eyes to see, increasingly bleak. 3 It is not part of my purpose here to examine Denktaş’s speech in detail; his arguments are presented lucidly enough.14 But I must pick up on one thing that Denktaş mentions there, almost in passing, and that is the UN Mediator’s Report. The ‘Plaza Report’, as it was usually referred to, was, as I mentioned at the beginning, presented to the Secretary-General on 26 March 1965. Although neither side in the Cyprus dispute was really happy about it – indeed, the Turkish side rejected it outright as ‘pro-Greek’ and accused the Mediator of going beyond his mandate – the Report is still interesting for a number of reasons. What strikes me as most interesting about it is that the direction it took was entirely in harmony with the approach to the Cyprus problem that Secretary-General Thant, briefed by Ambassador Bitsios and the Greek side generally (as we saw in Part A), had originally taken in February 1964. This is 14 The original speech can be found in Rauf Denktash at the UN: Speeches on Cyprus, pp. 140 ff. 65 66 Cyprus: A European Anomaly not quite the same thing as saying that the Plaza Report was intentionally proGreek. It pleased the Greeks much more than the Turks because the SecretaryGeneral and his Mediator took certain things for granted about the situation in Cyprus which just happened to be much more compatible with what the Greeks wanted than with what the Turks wanted. From the Turkish point of view the negative aspects of the Plaza Report were irredeemable. Plaza accepted the legitimacy of the Makarios administration without argument. Indeed, despite all the atrocities that had been, and still were being, committed by that administration, he seemed rather impressed by the Archbishop personally and was apparently all too ready to believe in various proposals Makarios made to him for the eventual amelioration of the plight of the Turkish Cypriots.15 Plaza was convinced that the 1960 Accords should no longer be applicable in Cyprus. He accepted the view that the ‘oddity’ of the original constitution (rather than the overbearing features of Hellenism, above all the rabid striving for enosis) had been the root cause of all the trouble in Cyprus, and, in a sentence that on its own must have thoroughly alienated the Turkish readers of his Report, he affirmed, as if it were obvious, that ‘the Turkish-Cypriot community obtained from the Zürich and London Agreements [the 1960 Accords] a series of rights greatly superior to those which can realistically be contemplated for it in the future’ (para. 161). In a footnote (to para. 116) that might seem to involve positive toadying to the Greek side, he cautiously explained that he was using the word ‘communities’ ‘in the ordinary sense of two distinct ethnic groups, and not with any legal or political connotation.’ In other words, for him the Turkish Cypriots were not politically equal partners with the Greek Cypriots, but in effect a minority in a Greek Cypriot state. Federation, involving geographical separation, was liable to destroy the Cypriot state, he thought, rather than to re-establish it; and in any case a separation of the two communities could be effected only by a compulsory movement of populations, something ‘contrary to all enlightened principles 15 This is the impression one gets from the official UN documents. However, the British FO documents released in 1994 give a somewhat less positive picture of Plaza’s attitude towards Makarios. In 1964, at any rate, Plaza was well aware that Makarios could be very evasive on matters like the fate of Turkish Cypriot hostages; that Makarios had ‘no control over the various groups of armed thugs on the Greek Cypriot side’; and that the Greek Cypriots ‘had been responsible for all the atrocities and for a great deal of senseless brutality and destruction’. These were some of the points Plaza made to FO official J. O. Rennie who met Plaza at London Airport on 20 May, 1964. See FO 371/174750/1498. Cyprus: A European Anomaly of the present time, including those set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (para. 153). True, Plaza went to some lengths to explain why enosis would not be acceptable at the present time. Indeed, he went so far as to acknowledge that ‘the question of enosis is the most decisive and potentially the most explosive aspect of the Cyprus problem’ (see paras. 138f ). If Cyprus became ‘fully independent’ by being ‘freed from the 1960 treaty limitations’ – in plainer language: if the Turkish Cypriots were reduced from their present partner status to that of a minority in a Greek Cypriot state – then, the Mediator conceded, ‘selfdetermination’ in the form of opting by majority vote for enosis would be the majority’s right. But in view of the likely reaction of Turkey, he hoped that the Makarios administration would not give the Greek Cypriots the option of making Cyprus part of Greece for the time being. These were probably the most negative parts of the Report from the point of view of the Turkish Cypriots. Little wonder that they and Turkey refused to accept Plaza as Mediator any longer. Although the British had told the Mediator that they themselves had no substantial suggestions to make about the form the settlement should take, preferring to agree with whatever the other parties decided, they were not particularly pleased either by Plaza’s suggestion that while the UK did not consider its Sovereign Base Areas on the island to be an issue in the present dispute, it would nevertheless be possible to raise questions about the continued existence of the bases in the overall context of a settlement in Cyprus (para. 112). (After all, this suggestion was only consistent with Plaza’s cavalier attitude to the rest of the 1960 Accords). Feeling that he could be of no further use in helping towards an agreed settlement because of these Turkish rebuffs, Plaza eventually resigned in a letter delivered to Thant on 22 December 1965. The Secretary-General was clearly disappointed by this resignation just as he was displeased about the Turkish wholesale rejection of Plaza’s Report, which he described in his reply, reluctantly accepting the resignation on 30th December, as a document which continued to be ‘a most important contribution to the search for a just and lasting solution to the Cyprus problem’.16 16 UN doc. S/7054. 67 68 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Thant was right that the Plaza Report would continue to be important. Indeed, he made certain that it would. Plaza was, of course, the SecretaryGeneral’s own man, chosen with some care. And although, in this instance, I cannot produce documentary evidence about the ‘backstage’ activities in the Secretary-General’s Office, I think it is safe to say that there was little of real substance in the Plaza Report that Thant had not already approved. 4 The Secretary-General, we have to remember, was a man who set great store by certain political, namely the ones embraced by the NAM. It was not a coincidence that many of his close colleagues in Cyprus, including Tuomioja (from Finland), Plaza (from Ecuador), Carlos Bernardes (from Brazil), and General Gyani (from India) were themselves either former officials from countries deeply involved in the NAM or at least personally sympathisers of it. The Secretary-General’s secretariat was consequently strongly inclined to see the Cyprus problem from a particular perspective. This was not, in my view, an intrinsically bad or misguided perspective – far from it. But, like any other very general outlook – with a penchant for large abstractions and associated appeals to allegedly universal values and imperatives – it was peculiarly open to manipulation by those who sought to use it for their own, far from disinterested, purposes. In an autobiographical work written not long before his death in 1974, Thant gave an enthusiastic account of his impressions of the first Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries held in September 1961, in Belgrade. He was then Burma’s permanent representative at the UN, and he attended the conference as one of his country’s official delegates. Also at the conference were Makarios, his inseparable young Foreign Minister Kyprianou, Rossides, Makarios’s UN representative, and Kranidiotis, Makarios’s Ambassador in Athens. Turkish Cypriots were conspicuous only by their usual absence from the Archbishop’s entourage. In fact, Makarios had made Cyprus one of the founding members of the NAM for a quite specific reason, and in this scheme he naturally neither sought nor expected co-operation from his Turkish Cypriot ministers. He had rightly sensed that his position in the NAM would be invaluable to him in his plan to abrogate the 1960 Accords. Cyprus: A European Anomaly I now come to an important point I tried to introduce more briefly in Part A. This concerns one of the reasons, perhaps the main one, why the Greek Cypriots were so successful at the UN, despite the spirited performances of Denktaş. There was not a conspiracy, but nevertheless a powerful contingent link, between the Secretary-General and the Archbishop. Their mutual implication in the NAM – one out of sincere idealistic motives to do with the betterment of mankind, the other more as a tactical device to realise his Hellenic goals – must surely have been a crucial factor in ensuring that Thant and Makarios would achieve a certain rapport when, as Thant later put it, the Cyprus problem was ‘dropped into’ his lap. ‘My participation at the Belgrade conference and my personal contacts with the leaders of the nonaligned countries’, Thant explained, more generally, in his autobiography, ‘no doubt influenced my political thinking.’ I shall be less than honest if I say that such experience and contacts had no impact on me. In the fifties, I found myself increasingly identified with the cause of small nations, poor nations, newly independent nations, and nations struggling for independence. So my conception of the United Nations was primarily from the vantage point of the Third World. He goes on to talk about his formative experiences of colonialism while Burma was under British rule, of his admiration for George Orwell (who had written so eloquently of his dislike of his job as a British police officer in Burma), and of his deep involvement in international discussions of colonialism long before he became Secretary-General. Thus, he says, ‘in formulating my conception of the role of Secretary-General, the question of colonialism was very much on my mind’. It soon becomes clear that Thant saw himself as a rather special Secretary-General, a man with a developed set of values possessed by no one in a similar position before him: The outstanding difference that distinguished me from all other Secretaries General of the League of Nations or of the United Nations lay in the fact that I was the first non-European to occupy that post. Burma had been a colony of Great Britain for almost a century. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations up to 1961 had been Westernoriented. In fact, the League was almost exclusively a European club. Not only do I have my own set of values, which are different from those of all my predecessors, but I also had first-hand experience of colonialism 69 70 Cyprus: A European Anomaly at work. I know what hunger, poverty, disease, illiteracy, and human suffering really mean.17 How was such a Secretary-General liable to perceive the situation in Cyprus, a ‘newly independent’ country whose deplorable condition of inner strife was causing so much international consternation and which he, Thant, had been given a mandate to cure? Naturally he would see it, first and foremost, as a young Non-Aligned state struggling against the legacy of colonialism. To his mind, the 1960 Accords would be – much as Makarios cleverly made them out to be – impositions by external powers who wished to keep a measure of control over the island for extraneous purposes of their own. The international Cyprus Treaties were legally valid; this could not be denied. But from the point of view of an advocate of NAM values, their moral validity must have seemed dubious, to say the least. For what could a self-respecting supporter of the NAM be expected to make of a treaty which had converted ninety-nine square miles of Cyprus into two ‘sovereign’ military bases belonging to a prominent member of NATO located two thousand miles away? What could he be expected to think of a treaty which allowed military contingents of two other NATO members to remain indefinitely in the Republic of Cyprus? And what about a treaty that allowed NATO members militarily to intervene, either in concert or individually if need be, in order to restore a constitutional arrangement apparently imposed by themselves in the first place? And all this had been done, as Thant would certainly be inclined to see it, to a tiny Non-Aligned country whose only desire was to conduct its affairs in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter. This is the picture Makarios had seductively painted for the Secretary-General. True, as the Secretary-General occasionally had to remind Makarios, the Turkish community in Cyprus were being made to suffer, sometimes with a severity that could not easily be reconciled with the Cyprus government’s 17 U Thant, View From The UN (London, 1976), pp. 36-37. Despite the inevitable experience of many set-backs during his period of office as secretary-general, Thant retained his belief in the great value of the UN as an instrument for securing world peace. Yet towards the end of this autobiographical work he notes with sadness (p. 453) that ‘most member states use the machinery of the United Nations only when they feel that their own interests will be served by such use... In most cases, where national interests are at stake’, he adds, the UN ‘has been by-passed... particularly by the Big Powers’. Cyprus: A European Anomaly professed belief in the principles of the Charter. But these Turks were, after all, just a ‘minority’ who had got out of hand – aided and abetted by certain well-known and highly suspect members of the Western Alliance. One would be failing in one’s duty to take too much notice of their ‘hysterical’ outbursts and self-righteous protests about their so-called partner status. Everywhere in the Third World divided countries created threats to peace and security, Thant thought. Turkish and Turkish Cypriot talk about ‘federation’ in Cyprus seemed most likely to be, as the Greeks maintained, merely a euphemism for partition. And, in any case, the most recent proposals for the partition of Cyprus – in the so-called Acheson Plan18 – were plainly a Great Power ruse designed to place at least one more NATO military base on the island. Moreover, in accordance with enlightened NAM principles, when one spoke of ‘the people of Cyprus’ there was nothing objectionable in meaning by that phrase the vast majority of the island’s inhabitants, i.e., the 80 per cent of Cypriots who were ethnically Greek. Certainly special arrangements should be made for the protection and general welfare of the Turks in Cyprus; but they could hardly be expected, as a community, to be treated as political equals with the Greeks. And they could always leave Cyprus and go back to Turkey if they did not like the new truly ‘democratic’ arrangements; indeed, they could be given financial assistance by the UN itself to go! No one in the UN secretariat seems to have asked themselves whether this benevolent proposal that the Turkish Cypriots should be encouraged to emigrate, to leave their ancestral homes and Cyprus altogether, was not rather worse than the mere geographical separation of the two communities which, as we saw above, Plaza had described as ‘contrary to all enlightened principles of the present time’. True, for many Cypriots (Turks as well as Greeks) to be effective the mere geographical separation would have had to be compulsory, and this was far from ideal. But would it have been any worse – if conducted in an orderly manner by the leaders of the two communities in Cyprus, helped by the UN – than making life so intolerable for 18 As part of what I called in Part A, Section 6, the American determination to operate a kind of ‘parallel negotiating process on Cyprus’, the veteran diplomat Dean Acheson conferred with representatives of the Turkish and Greek governments, together with the UN Cyprus Mediator, in Geneva during June and August, 1964. His Plan was to solve the Cyprus problem by offering the Greeks enosis in exchange for certain concessions being made to Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots, including a Turkish military base on the island. Makarios rejected the Plan. 71 72 Cyprus: A European Anomaly the Turkish Cypriots, and the rewards for leaving so attractive, that they had little choice but to leave?19 However that may be, this was almost certainly the outlook, I believe, that U Thant brought to bear on the Cyprus problem – with all the naive sincerity of a Third World diplomat for whom the highly abstract and ahistorical principles of the NAM had become self-evident truths. He genuinely thought these new arrangements would be the best thing for Cyprus. And, as he saw the situation, in fulfilling his duty by doing his best to implement these arrangements, he was not being in the least ‘pro-Greek’; he was merely applying the values he had come to believe in. Although in the couple of pages he devotes to Cyprus in his autobiography, Thant states quite blandly that ‘The root of the [Cyprus] problem was the divisive provisions of the constitution, which split the people into hostile camps’ (p.46), in 1964-65, as Secretary-General, he could hardly have given overt support to the abrogation of the Cyprus Accords, especially in the face of articulate opposition (if little else) from at least two of the Security Council’s most powerful permanent members, the United States and Britain. Still, this attempted abrogation could be left to the Greek Cypriots to have a go at themselves. What Thant could and did do was, directly and indirectly, to provide considerable help in getting those Accords pushed as far into the background as possible, to the extent of their eventually being almost entirely forgotten. And my point here is that he had a clear conscience about this. To his mind, the 1960 Accords were little more than obstructive remnants of a colonial age now rapidly being superseded by a brave new world of global egalitarianism and, as he fervently hoped, of international peace and security. 19 For an excellent discussion of the legal aspects of the relation between the Cyprus Treaty of Guarantee and certain statements in the UN Charter, as well as astute remarks on the concept of ‘democracy’ when applied to a state consisting of two ethnic communities as in the case of Cyprus, see the important study by Kurt Rabl, ‘The Cyprus Problem before the UN Security Council: A Case Study in UN Crisis Handling,’ The Indian Year Book of International Affairs, 1966. It should not be surprising that Indian analysts found the Cyprus question engaging in the 1960s. As one student of Commonwealth affairs remarked in 1967: ‘The situation in Cyprus has interesting parallels with that in the Indian sub-continent. In both, a significant Muslim minority lived alongside – often intermingled with – a majority of a very different religious persuasion. In both, Britain had kept the peace between the two groups during its period of colonial rule, and when that rule ended communal tension was unleashed. Yet here the parallels end. Muslims were able to force the division of the Indian sub-continent and create their own nation, whereas in Cyprus the two communities were too mixed to make this possible. And each community in Cyprus looks to an outside source for support; each is in effect more the projection of a neighbouring state than an indigenous national group.’ T. B. Millar, The Commonwealth and the United Nations (Sidney University Press, 1967), p. 81. If Millar had been writing after 1974 his parallel would have been more complete. Cyprus: A European Anomaly 5 Already, long before Denktaş’s second appearance before the Security Council, the Greek Cypriots had taken the Cyprus issue to the Second Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries which was held in Cairo between 5-10 October 1964. In the absence of any Turkish Cypriot or Turkish delegates, they had had little difficulty in getting the following eyecatching paragraphs inserted into the long list of points upon which the Conference had agreed:20 The Conference solemnly reaffirms the right of all peoples to adopt the form of government they consider best suited to their development. The Conference considers that one of the causes of international tension lies in the problem of divided nations. It expresses its entire sympathy with the peoples of such countries and upholds their desire to achieve unity. It exhorts the countries concerned to seek a just and lasting solution in order to achieve the unification of their territories by peaceful methods without outside interference or pressure. It considers that the resort to threat or force can lead to no satisfactory settlement, and cannot do otherwise than jeopardize international security. Concerned by the situation existing with regard to Cyprus, the Conference calls upon all States in conformity with their obligations under the Charter of the United Nations, and in particular under Article 2, paragraph 4, to respect the sovereignty, unity, independence and territorial integrity of Cyprus and to refrain from any threat or use of force or intervention directed against Cyprus and from any efforts to impose upon Cyprus unjust solutions unacceptable to the people of Cyprus. Cyprus, as an equal member of the United Nations, is entitled to and should enjoy unrestricted and unfettered sovereignty and independence, 20 I take these passages from the NAM Conference Declaration given in 0. Jankowitsch and K. P. Sauvant (eds.), The Third World Without Superpowers: the Collected Documents of the Nonaligned Countries (New York, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 52 and 55. Article 2, para. 4. of the UN Charter states that `All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations’. One cannot fail to notice how the general propositions enunciated in the first two of the quoted paragraphs from the NAM Declaration had been specifically designed to give apparent justification to the particular observations about Cyprus made immediately afterwards. This is just one example of the great care the Greek side has taken to give plausibility to their case for their own hegemony in Cyprus. 73 74 Cyprus: A European Anomaly and allowing its people to determine freely, and without any foreign intervention or interference, the political future of the country, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations... The Conference also recommends the elimination of the foreign bases in Cyprus and the withdrawal of foreign troops from this country, except for those stationed there by virtue of United Nations resolutions. Now, the Plaza Report should be considered bearing in mind these agreements, in the ‘light’ of which that Report was, to my mind, undoubtedly written. Before the end of 1965 Makarios was able to stage another resounding success at the UN in which the Report and NAM principles were used most effectively to reinforce each other. With such firm backing from the NAM, Makarios had the Cyprus issue raised at the twentieth session of the UN General Assembly, where he knew he should easily get a majority in favour of Greek Cypriot proposals because not only were two-thirds of UN members by then Third World nations, but many of these were the very same countries who had supported him at the NAM conference. The Greek Cypriot demand was essentially for the ‘unfettered independence’ of Cyprus together with ‘the right of self-determination’. As things turned out, the ensuing debates, both in the First Committee and in the General Debate, were exceptionally long and complicated ones. The eventual upshot was, however, very favourable to the Greek Cypriots. The growing prestige of the NAM as a ‘progressive’ voice in international fora was evident in the way the ensuing UN resolution actually refers to the earlier NAM declaration and goes on to borrow its very language. The Plaza Report, though totally rejected months ago by one side in the Cyprus dispute, was now treated as if it, too, were an authoritative document. The existence of the British Bases in Cyprus was not, however, seen as an issue that need be raised. Here is the relevant part of the resolution (no. 2077, 18 December 1965): The General Assembly, Having considered the question of Cyprus... Recalling the parts of the Declaration adopted on 10 October 1964 by the Second Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, held at Cairo, regarding the question of Cyprus, Noting the report of the United Nations Mediator on Cyprus, submitted to the Secretary-General on 26 March 1965, Cyprus: A European Anomaly Noting further that the Government of Cyprus is committed, through its Declaration of Intention and the accompanying Memorandum, to: (a) The full application of human rights to all citizens of Cyprus, irrespective of race or religion, (b) The ensuring of minority rights, (c) The safeguarding of the above rights as contained in the said Declaration and Memorandum, 1. Takes cognizance of the fact that the Republic of Cyprus, as an equal Member of the United Nations, is, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, entitled to enjoy, and should enjoy, full sovereignty and complete independence without any foreign intervention or interference; 2. Calls upon all States, in conformity with their obligations under the Charter, and in particular Article 2, paragraphs 1 and 4, to respect the sovereignty, unity, independence and territorial integrity of the Republic of Cyprus and to refrain from any intervention directed against it; 3. Recommends to the Security Council the continuation of the United Nations mediation work in conformity with Council resolution 186 (1964). The resolution was adopted by roll-call vote of 47 to 5, with no less than 54 abstentions. Only two European countries voted for the motion, Greece and ‘Cyprus’. Even the Soviet Union and its East European satellites abstained, as did Britain and the major commonwealth nations. Albania, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and most significantly the United States, voted against the motion. Still, Makarios had every reason to feel satisfied in December 1965. By allowing the UN, guided by its very idiosyncratic Secretary-General, to take charge of the Cyprus problem early in 1964, Britain and the United States may have hoped to enjoy some short-term gains. Yet, as anyone acquainted with the subsequent UN debates on Cyprus will know, as time went on it became apparent that they had left themselves with a problem considerably increasing in complexity, and one peculiarly resistant to any ‘agreed’ solution. 75 76 Cyprus: A European Anomaly 6 Towards the end of 1965 British diplomats already had a distinct premonition of this. And, at least in private, they expressed serious doubts about the UN as a forum in which an actual solution to the Cyprus problem could be found. Perhaps the most revealing exposition of the British position at that time was given in a confidential letter written by Neil Prichard, Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Commonwealth Office, to the then British High Commissioner in Cyprus, Sir David Hunt, dated 23 December 1965: The basic objectives of our policy over Cyprus have been stated to be: (a) to prevent a war between Greece and Turkey and to maintain the cohesion of the South-East flank of NATO; (b) to secure through negotiation a stable and lasting solution acceptable to all concerned, including both Greece and Turkey; (c) to prevent Cyprus falling under neutralist or Soviet influence or control; (d) to retain our staging and defence facilities in Cyprus for as long as they are required; and (e) to retain our ability to use the Northern route, overflying Turkey... [T]hese objectives are not concerned so much with the situation in Cyprus itself as with its implications for our general foreign policy. It is because of this that we cannot pursue or advocate any ‘solution’... which, however attractive itself, would be seriously damaging to, or not accepted by, any of the ‘other parties concerned’... So far we had no real alternative to maintaining a position of strict neutrality between opposing points of view; and this involves us in eschewing initiatives which, however tempting, would almost certainly have upset the balance... We also have to bear in mind that the existing uneasy balance in Cyprus has suited our basic objectives better than any alternative within our reach... However much we may still dislike it, the fact is that the Cyprus Treaties do still remain in force and can only be altered with the agreement of all parties concerned... [H]owever hard we may strive for a UN solution, until one is in sight (and none is at present) we must maintain the formal status quo so far as the Treaties are concerned, for without that we merely invite anarchy. We never believed that the UN as a whole [i.e., especially the General Assembly] offers the best hope of finding a solution; it is in our view far too subject to extraneous and irrelevant pressures and ‘cold war’ influences to be likely to throw up of its own accord a solution; though it may provide useful endorsement for one which has been negotiated, and can certainly help (e.g., through UNFICYP) to provide an atmosphere in which negotiation can be fruitful. Cyprus: A European Anomaly Proceedings just concluded in the General Assembly seem fully to justify these apprehensions. The resolution passed on the 19 December [sic; but he means resolution 2077 of 18 December, 1965] makes no contribution towards bringing the parties closer together or to reducing tensions; on the contrary, by supporting the Greek-Cypriot point of view and correspondingly frustrating the Turks, it seems likely to have set the various parties to the dispute even further apart than before, thus, once again, contributing not to a solution but only creating disturbance. It will no doubt be exploited to the full by Makarios... Predictably it has provoked anger in Ankara, accompanied by renewed threats of unilateral intervention. It is most unlikely that, whatever efforts we or anyone else make to find a solution through the UN, the Turks will in the foreseeable future have any confidence in them. We should give no impression that the UN can find a solution to the problem. Our policy up to now has been based on a fairly cold-blooded appraisal of where our interests lie, and how best to advance them. Maybe the situation has slightly changed and we may need a reappraisal of policy’.21 As regards the specific legal issue of whether the 1960 Accords, and more particularly the Treaty of Guarantee, were incompatible with certain provisions of the UN Charter (notably with article 2, paras. 1-4), and hence could be shown to be no longer applicable to the ‘sovereign state of Cyprus’, as the Greek Cypriots were eager to maintain, the British government remained confident that its own frequently-asserted position regarding the continuing validity of the 1960 Accords was sound. A Foreign Office legal adviser set out the basis of HMG’s position as follows, in a Minute also dated 23 December 1965: With very few exceptions... resolutions adopted by the General Assembly of the UN have no binding force, and consequently cannot over-ride or supersede existing treaty rights and obligations. The Treaties comprised in the 1960 Cyprus settlement still remain in force, and can only be abrogated or altered by mutual agreement of all the parties to those Treaties and this statement of the legal position is in no way modified by the recently adopted resolution on the question of Cyprus.22 21 FO 371/179984 (Italics added). 22 It is a pity that the British FO finds it inconvenient to insist on this doctrine today: that finding a solution to the Cyprus problem should not be left to the (Greek Cypriot) ‘government of Cyprus’ negotiating alone with the Turkish Cypriot community, but be placed in the hands of the five parties who together created the Cyprus Republic in 1960, and who uniquely have the legal prerogative to change those original binding arrangements, namely, the two Cypriot communities and the three guarantors, Britain, Greece and Turkey. [Note added in 2010.] 77 78 Cyprus: A European Anomaly The FO lawyer went on to note, however, that the resolution ‘will no doubt aid and comfort those who wish to argue that certain provisions of the Treaty of Guarantee are invalid as conflicting with peremptory norms of international law.’ Yet he considered arguments in that direction were far from compelling. For while it was true that article 37 of the International Law Commission’s draft articles on the Law of Treaties stated that ‘A treaty is void if it conflicts with a peremptory norm of general international law’, the concept of ‘intervention’ (a concept implicit in the Cyprus Treaty of Guarantee where it is said – in Article 4 – that each of the guarantor powers individually ‘reserves the right to take action’) was not, at that time, clearly defined in international law. ‘Therefore even if the International Law Commission draft article can be accepted as a statement of a generally recognised principle, it does not follow that a right of intervention provided for by treaty is in conflict with a “peremptory norm” of international law.’ The FO legal adviser was thus reassuring about HMG’s position on the continuing validity of the Accords, a position which, as we saw from the FO document quoted earlier, the British held with some degree of reluctance. He admitted nevertheless that moves like the Greeks were trying to make against those Accords would no doubt continue to be made, since they contained lines of argument ‘which other newly independent states are only too ready to find convincing’.23 None of these international diplomatic manoeuvres, or niceties of legal disquisition, were likely to be of much help to the Turkish Cypriots. It was as if their most urgent and legitimate interests had been quite forgotten – except, of course, by Turkey. Perhaps it would be better to say that their interests – and Denktaş’s voice at the Security Council – had been simply drowned out by the sheer size of the assembled orchestra at the UN and by the number of tunes that were simultaneously being played there, harmony being, when it occurred, a matter of chance. Amid the official babble of self-interested ‘detachment’ on the part of the British and the Americans; the sotto voce, but very effective, anti-colonial dirge issuing from U Thant and his many friends in the NAM; the persistent Soviet bass, denouncing (with some reason) NATO plots over Cyprus; and, not least, because of the shrill Greek Cypriot fanfare declaring Cyprus to be a now redeemed Hellenic republic, soon to be joined with 23 FO 371/179998. For a discussion of the compatibility of the Cyprus Treaty of Guarantee with the peremptory norms of international law, see Zaim M. Necatigil, The Cyprus Question and the Turkish Position in International Law (Second ed., OUP, 1993) especially pp. 116 ff. Cyprus: A European Anomaly Greece – amid this vast minstrel’s gallery of discordant sounds, this hubbub of competing interests, with little mutual concern or comprehension, Denktaş’s appeals for the rule of law and the need for all parties to adhere, really and not just nominally, to the 1960 constitution of Cyprus, were hardly audible. This is how the international community originally contrived, for a variety of reasons and almost without noticing it, to deprive the Turkish Cypriots of their constitutional rights. Those rights have still not formally been restored. 79 Bibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, T.W. and A.J Cottrell. Cyprus: Between East and West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968. Alemdar, Şakir. “International Aspects of the Cyprus Problem.” In Clement H. Dodd, Ed. The Political, Social and Economic Development of Northern Cyprus. Huntingdon: Eothen Press, 1993. American Foreign Policy: Current Documents 1965. Washington: Department of State Publications, 1968. Attalides, Michael. Cyprus: Nationalism and International Politics. Edinburgh: Q Press, 1979. Bitsios, Dimitri S. Cyprus: The Vulnerable Republic. Salonika: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1975. Bulletin of the European Communities. “The Challenge of Enlargement: Commission Opinion on the Application of the Republic of Cyprus for Membership.” Supplement 5/93. European Communities Commission, 1993. Clerides, Glafcos. Cyprus: My Deposition. Vols. 2 & 3. Nicosia: Alithia Publishing, 1989-92. Crawshaw, Nancy. The Cyprus Revolt. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978. The Cyprus Question: A Concise Briefing Note. British Parliamentary London: Friends of Northern Cyprus, 1992. The Cyprus Weekly. 21-27 October: 1994. Denktaş, Rauf. The Cyprus Triangle. London: K. Rüstem and Brother, 2nd ed., 1988. _____. Rauf Denktaş’ın Hatıraları. Istanbul: Bogazici Press, 1996. Denktaş, Rauf and Michael Moran. Cyprus: Unity and Difference: A Discussion. Istanbul: Istanbul Kultur University Publications: 2009. Dodd, Clement H. The Cyprus Imbroglio. Huntingdon. New York: Eothen Press, 1998. The Economist. 14 March 1964. 81 82 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Ehrlich, Thomas. Cyprus, 1958-1967. International Crises and the Role of Law. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Ellis, Robert. The Scandalous History of Cyprus. The Guardian. 5 March 2010. Fischer, H.A.L. A History of Europe. London, 1936. Foley, Charles (Ed.). The Memoirs of General Grivas. London: Longmans, 1964. Hansard, Vol. 707. Col. 173 House of Commons. _____. Vol. 709. Cols.1368-1370. House of Commons. Hill, G. A History of Cyprus. 4 Vol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Jankowitsch, O. and K.P. Sauvant (Eds.). The Third World without Superpowers: the Collected Documents of the Non-aligned Countries. Vol. 1. New York: Oceana, 1978. Joseph, J.S. “International Dimensions of the Cyprus Problem.” The Cyprus Review. Vol. 2. No. 2. Fall 1990. Markides, Kyriacos C. The Rise and Fall of the Cyprus Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Mayes, Stanley. Makarios. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. McGeary, Johanna and Eric Silver. Killing for God. Time. 4 December 1995. Merle, Marcel. The Sociology of International Relations. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987. Millar, Thomas B. The Commonwealth and the United Nations. Sidney University Press: Sidney, 1967. Moran, Michael (Ed.). Rauf Denktash at the United Nations: Speeches on Cyprus. Huntingdon: Eothen Press, 1997. _____. Britain and the 1960 Cyprus Accords: A Study in Pragmatism. Istanbul Kultur University Publications. No: 103. 2009. _____. Sovereignty Divided: Essays on the International Dimensions of the Cyprus Problem. Nicosia: Cyprus Research and Publishing Centre, 1999. Necatigil, Zaim M. The Cyprus Question and the Turkish Position in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1993. Bibliography Oberling, Pierre. The Cyprus Tragedy. Cyprus: K. Rustem, 1989. Purcell, H.D. Cyprus. New York: Praeger, 1969. Rabl, Kurt. The Cyprus Problem before the UN Security Council: A Case Study in UN Crisis Handling. The Indian Year Book of International Affairs, 1966. Reddaway, John. Burdened with Cyprus: The British Connection. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986. Shirley Hazard, Countenance of Truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim Case. New York: Viking, 1990. Sonyel S.R. Cyprus: The Destruction of a Republic. Huntingdon: Eothen Press, 1997. Stavrinides, Zenon. The Cyprus Conflict: National Identity and Statehood. Nicosia: Stravinides, 1976. Thant, U. View from the UN. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Woodhouse, C.M. Modern Greece: a Short History. 3rd ed., rev. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984. Primary Sources The British Foreign Office, FO 371/179984. The British Foreign Office, FO 371/179998. The British Foreign Office, FO 371/174750/1498b. The British Foreign Office, FO 371/179997. UN Security Council S/5543 “Letter Dated 15 Feb 1965 from the Permanent Representative of UK to the President of the Security Council.” 13 February 1964. UN Security Council S/5561, “Letter Dated 24 Feb 1965 From the Acting Permanent Representative of Turkey to the UN Addressed to the President of the Security Council.” 25 February 1964. 83 84 Cyprus: A European Anomaly UN Security Council S/7054 “Exchange of Letters Between the UN Mediator on Cyprus and The Secretary General.” 31 December 1965. UN S/PV 1235. “Security Council Official Records, 20th Year, 1235th Meeting.” New York, 5 August 1965. US-UN Press Release, No. 4363, “Secretary-General’s Special Representative Says Sierra Leone Should be Pilot Project.” New York, 2 June 1998. Appendix APPENDIX Two Speeches at the UN Security Council A Note on the Texts of the Speeches I have taken these two speeches from the UN Security Council Official Records for 1964. I have omitted the paragraph numberings given there and most of the references to speeches given by other delegates, or to other UN documents, provided by the UN editors. Denktaş’s speech, complete with most of my own footnotes and interpolations in square brackets, is reproduced from my edition of all Denktaş’s UN speeches, Rauf Denktash at the UN, a work referred to earlier in this volume. I have not presumed to add any footnotes or interpolations to Kyprianou’s speech, except in the case of one obviously missing word which I have inserted in square brackets. All words within square brackets that occur inside quotations in Kyprianou’s speech are his. Speech delivered by Spyros Kyprianou on 18 February 1964 I have listened with care to the opening speech made by the representative of the United Kingdom. However, I feel that I must study his speech first before I reply to various points which he has raised. So I reserve my position on that. Nevertheless, I would like to make one or two general remarks The representative of the United Kingdom gave what in his view is the historical and the legal background of the situation. I would not like to give the historical background before the signing of the Zurich and London Agreements. One thing which has not been explained is why, suddenly, at a certain stage in the history of Cyprus, there was inter-communal fighting, whereas for years in the past the people of Cyprus as a whole, whether Greek or Turk or Armenian or Maronite, have been living peacefully together without any incidents between them, and in fact, in the course of two world wars, Greeks and Turks in Cyprus were together on the side of the Allies. So one is led to believe that the present situation in Cyprus – and we are quite convinced about it – is not the cause. The incidents which occur in Cyprus and which have been occurring recently are just symptoms of other causes. 85 86 Cyprus: A European Anomaly The representative of the United Kingdom made particular reference to the treaties, how the treaties came about, what the purposes of the treaties were, and, to a certain extent, what the interpretations of the treaties are. On this particular point I would like to reserve my position. I shall reply at the appropriate time in the course of the debate. However, one thing which I must make clear is that if in any of the treaties, in the view of any of the parties, there is a limitation to the independence and the sovereignty of the State, then in our view such a treaty or such a clause of the treaty does not exist. Furthermore, it has not been mentioned that Cyprus, after the signing of the Zurich and London Agreements, became a Member of the United Nations. I would like to remind members of that. On the question of the force, the impression has been given that the only man who is not interested in peace in Cyprus is President Makarios. May I be allowed not to agree with that position, to say the least? He is the President of the country; he is the man most directly responsible for and most interested in keeping the peace in Cyprus. Why is the blame put on him because he has not accepted certain proposals? Let me, in turn, put this question: Why have his proposals not been accepted, and why has an effort been made throughout to keep the Security Council out of the peace-keeping operation in Cyprus? As regards the effort to describe what we call ‘aggression’ as the so-called right of unilateral action, I shall reply in detail at an appropriate time. But in our view, whatever the term means, no country has the right of military action in Cyprus. We shall never accept the contrary position. My Government is most grateful to all the members of the Security Council for the deep and sincere interest which they have shown in our problems. The Security Council has been seized of the situation in Cyprus since the relevant complaint was lodged by my Government on 26 December 1963. On the following day, 27 December, an emergency meeting of the Council was called, in consequence of the imminent threat of aggression by Turkey, whose air and naval units were making it abundantly clear that they were ready for an invasion of the island. I should like to remind the Security Council of the events of last December. The air space of Cyprus was violated three times, although only one violation was admitted. The Turkish contingent in Cyprus – which, paradoxically, is stationed in the island by virtue of the Treaty of Alliance among the three countries, the purpose of which is to defend Cyprus from outside aggression – has itself violated the territorial integrity of our country, and in fact violated Appendix the Treaty of Alliance itself, while Turkish warships were within a few miles of the coast of Cyprus when they suddenly changed course, obviously on account of the action taken by the Security Council in meeting and discussing the situation. All those actions by the Turkish Government were accompanied by threats in unequivocal terms expressed both by the Turkish Prime Minister and by the Turkish Foreign Minister, as well as by Turkish military leaders, the Turkish Press and the Turkish Radio. These were, in short, the events which prompted my Government’s original appeal to the Security Council. On 25 December, two Turkish military aircraft violated the air space of Cyprus and flew very low over Nicosia and the Kyrenia District in the most provocative manner. On the same day, the Turkish military contingent stationed in Cyprus by virtue of the Zurich and London Agreements, moved out of its barracks and took battle positions against the Greek sector of Nicosia, in violation of article V, paragraph 2 of the Application Agreement of the Treaty of Alliance. At the time of the aforesaid violation of the air space of Cyprus by the Turkish military aircraft, the Greek and Turkish members of the Government of the Republic of Cyprus had unanimously agreed on practical steps to secure a cease-fire and had asked the Government of the United Kingdom to assist in the observance of the cease-fire. On the same day, the British Broadcasting Corporation announced that President Inonu had given orders to the Commander of the Second Army to inspect military units with a view to using them for eventual landings in Cyprus. On 26 December – and in spite of the fact that the cease-fire had been maintained by the Cyprus security forces – two military jet supersonic aircraft again violated the air space of Cyprus and flew over Nicosia at a very low height, over the roofs of the houses; obviously, the intention was not to calm the atmosphere. The BBC announced that, according to a cablegram from Ankara, General Kemal Turan, Commander of the Second Turkish Army and Martial Law Commander of Ankara, had inspected troops in the area of Iskenderun and that he was visiting Iskenderun because of events in Cyprus and had found his units well prepared, On the night of 26-27 December, three troop carriers, four destroyers and three submarines sailed to within a few miles of the coast of Cyprus. I am sure that all this can be confirmed by the representative of the United Kingdom. On 87 88 Cyprus: A European Anomaly 25 December, the Prime Minister of Turkey stated that the Turkish warships had sailed from Constantinople toward Cyprus and that their return would depend on the cessation of fire in Cyprus; the landing of troops and the use of force depended on events to Cyprus. General Kemal Turan, Commander of the Second Turkish Army inspected troops, as was reported on the 26 December, in the area of Iskenderun. He once again left it quite clearly to be inferred that the troops were meant for Cyprus. The discussion on the recourse to this Council by my Government was not continued owing to the fact that an agreement was reached for a conference in London to negotiate a new political settlement. We had accepted participation in that conference because we felt that it was our duty under the Charter to exhaust all possibilities for an amicable settlement among the parties before taking any other action, in spite of the fact that we were not optimistic at all about the out come. We believe that during the London Conference we showed the maximum possible degree of patience, and we waited until the very end in the hope that reason might prevail in the minds of the opposite side, our attitude being that we should strengthen the foundation of the independent State of Cyprus whereas the attitude of the other side was to wreck it. While the London Conference was taking place the threat of aggression continued. The concentration of Turkish troops on the southern coast of Turkey and the movement of the Turkish fleet off Iskenderun continued. On more than one occasion we were given to understand that if we did not give way on a particular point the talks might break down, with a Turkish invasion of Cyprus as the result. In view of such pressure we would not have been unreasonable had we walked out of the London Conference. I do not believe that the Government of any country represented in this Council would have agreed to continue discussions in view of the continuous threat of invasion of its country. However, we decided not to walk out in our sincere desire to do our best to arrive at an understanding. There is a wealth of evidence establishing beyond doubt that Turkey, during the London Conference, did not abandon the idea of a military attack on Cyprus. On the contrary, it increased the concentration of warships and troops on the coast facing Cyprus, and continued to make threats of aggression. The Appendix preparations for the attack were stepped up after the failure of the London Conference and the threats were renewed. I shall mention only some reports which evidence Turkish preparations to invade Cyprus. On 27 December, while the Conference was going on, British forces saw Turkish regular troops of the Turkish contingent stationed in Cyprus on both aides of the road around Trakhonas, a village near Nicosia. These Turkish troops dug themselves in and set themselves in control of the road. The foregoing facts were also reported on Saturday, 28 December 1963 in The New York Times which also gave the information that the British commander did not try to move the force because he felt that orders would not be obeyed. Competent military observers did not discount the possibility that Turkey would intervene and send more troops from the mainland to the North of Cyprus. It was pointed out that the Turks controlled not only the road from Kyrenia but also the road that leads to Nicosia from the sheltered port of Vavilas on the north-west. Those facts also were reported in The New York Times of 28 December 1963. Three jet fighters bearing Turkish markings flew low over Nicosia on 28 December. This fact was reported in The New York Times of 29 December 1963. Turkish armed forces stationed in Cyprus remained in positions just north of Nicosia, on the road to Kyrenia, and they are still there. They thus control the potential route of any force to be launched from the Turkish mainland. This fact also was reported in The New York Times of 30 December 1963. On 29 December 1963, in Ankara, a Turkish Government Spokesman confirmed that eleven Turkish destroyers were standing by at Mersin, sixty miles from Cyprus, and that 10,000 Turkish infantrymen, jet fighters and paratroops were on the alert. The above facts were reported in the New York Herald Tribune of 30 December 1963. On 30 December the Turkish Foreign Ministry declared in Ankara that the Turkish army units ‘will not be withdrawn from the Turkish quarters of Nicosia’. On 31 December 1963 the Turkish troops were still digging in at strategic positions on the edge of the capital of Nicosia. This fact was reported in The New York Times of 31 December 1963. On 7 January 1964 Turkish irregular armed forces who, in violation of the Treaty of Alliance, left their military camps and occupied positions to the north of Nicosia, were still manning roadblocks beyond the bridge at Orta 89 90 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Keuy, north of Nicosia. This fact also was reported in The New York Times of 8 January 1964. On 15 February 1964 Reuters reported that Ankara had declared its decision to interfere in Cyprus but had delayed action for forty-eight hours at the request of the United States Under-Secretary of State, Mr. Ball. On 14 February Reuters reported from Ankara that the south-east Turkish port of Iskenderun had been cleared of civilian shipping, that the main quay had been handed over to the control of the Turkish Navy, and that the Turkish division stationed there was at alarm stations. On 15 February the Turkish fleet was reported to have returned from a twenty-two-hour simulated attack on Cyprus – an exercise. Warships carrying an undisclosed number of troops, including commandos, left Iskenderun on Friday night, according to the report. The ships returned to the Turkish port on the Mediterranean after having, approached the coast of Cyprus. They were asserted to have been within some hours’ sailing time from the Cypriot shore when they turned around for the return voyage. The above facts also were reported in The Times of 16 February 1964. At Iskenderun the 39th Division was moved into the area together with special units, including paratroops, stationed at the air base at Adana, and on 16 February The New York Times contained a report that the Turkish Defence Minister stated that Turkey was continuing Mediterranean military exercises. On 30 January 1964, according to our information, the following was the composition of the Turkish fleet near Cyprus. In the Alexandretta and Mersin area a total of 35 ships. At Mersin there were 17, as follows: 6 minesweepers, 4 submarines, 4 attack ships, 2 patrol craft, 1 supply craft. At Alexandretta there were 18, as follows: 4 destroyers, 2 submarines, 4 convoy destroyers, 3 unidentified, 5 lying at anchor. ‘Military personnel are going about in these areas in battle dress.’ That was the report. When it was felt that a political settlement could not be achieved in London the chairman of the Conference turned his attention to the question of an international force to replace the present peace-keeping arrangements. In fact, most of the time was spent discussing that issue. After some weeks of discussion it became clear that an agreement on the question of the force could not be achieved – not because there was disagreement that an international force should be sent there. I do not want to go into the reasons why the other party could not accept our view with regard to the international force. I wish only briefly to put our views to the Council on the matter. Appendix An international force, as we see it, should be under the control of the Security Council, which is the only appropriate international organ for the purpose, and I do not see why, in the particular case of Cyprus, this organ should be ignored. We have offered to agree with the other parties, both on the composition as well as on the terms of reference of the force, before putting the question before the Security Council, in order both to facilitate the task of the Council and to expedite the procedure. In our view, the terms of reference of the force should include not only internal peace-keeping – because, as I am going to point out, the internal incidents in Cyprus are just symptoms – but such a force should also assist the Cyprus Government in restoring law and order and the return to normal conditions, as well as to protect the independence and the territorial integrity of the State from any outside aggression. I do not think that this is an unreasonable attitude. We could not agree to any force composed of contingents from various countries without it being under the control of the Security Council. We do not wish to question the intention of the countries which are ready to participate in the force, but we can not ignore the authority of the Security Council which, for a small country, can provide the most effective guarantee in the light of the various dangers which are involved in the presence of an international force. Final disagreement on the question of the international force virtually brought the London Conference to an end. It is as a result of that that we take it that the British Government has also decided to bring the matter before the Security Council in accordance with the Charter. My Government decided last Saturday to request the Council to proceed with the examination of its complaint. This should be done both in the light of the developments as well as in the light of the renewed threats of aggression. At one stage we were even told that aggression might actually take place if we decided to come to the Security Council. That was one of the means used to stop us from coming to the Security Council. We consider this, to say the least, ridiculous. It is beyond anyone to say that the fact that Cyprus had decided to come before the Security Council would have been a good reason for the Turkish Government to decide to invade the country. In the last few days there have been new movements of Turkish ships and, according to a certain report, a high-ranking Turkish officer in Alexandretta was again seen wearing his battle uniform, while the port was cleared and completely taken over by the Navy, ready for action, as I mentioned earlier. 91 92 Cyprus: A European Anomaly According to another report, the United States Government just managed to persuade the Turkish Government to postpone action. These last few things may come from newspaper reports, but, putting them together with the facts of the situation and with various information we ourselves have from Governments closely related to Turkey, they amount, to say the least, as a first stage of cold war against the people of Cyprus, in addition to the actual threat of aggression. And this is being done by the very people who claim to be sincerely interested in seeing peace prevail in the country. Is Turkey interested in peace? The answer, in our view, is quite simple if one bears in mind the policy the Turkish Government has pursued on Cyprus in the course of the last few years. It has been a policy of interference, a policy of provocation, it has been a policy the main purpose of which was to discourage co-operation between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority on the island rather than to encourage harmony and friendship. This policy, which can easily be substantiated from various statements made by Turkish leaders, is now, I submit, completely confirmed. We have in our possession official documents which prove beyond any doubt that the policy of provocation followed by the Turkish Government is based on a well-prepared plan to advance further the idea of separation in the island with the ultimate purpose of partition. In a document which I am sure the Turkish Government is well aware of, it is stated: We accepted the Zurich and London Agreements as a temporary stage, and it was for this reason that we signed them. If they were not a temporary stage but the final solution we would not have accepted them. We would have prolonged for a further period the disputes between the two communities and we would have asked the United Nations for partition. Here is another quotation from the same document: For us to accept the Zurich Agreement as a final solution means that we ourselves are causing the extermination of the Turkish element of the island. For this reason, it was agreed with the Government of the Turkish Republic at the time that during this transitional period we should be given to a maximum degree economic and other aid for the realization of our final goal. It is worth noting that in the courses of the first contacts we had with Gurser Pasha, President of our Provisional Government, the same things were agreed upon and it was announced to us in the Appendix most definite way possible that the agreements for both Turkey and us are nothing else but a temporary stage. In the same document it is stated: The question of the separate municipalities and the régime of the separate community form the foundation. Although this separation is materially bad and a very expensive project for the Turks, it must, however, be advanced at any price. Today the opposition is trying to the extent possible to destroy this separation and to unite the municipalities. They claim that due to the separation of the municipalities, some people in limited numbers have suffered and that they must go along with the Greeks regardless of the price. Opposition in this context means the Turkish Cypriot moderate element. The document goes on: Of the rivals, Mr. Gurghan and Mr. Hikmet have declared to foreign correspondents that the union of the municipalities is inescapable and that the reason why Denktas and Küçük want separate municipalities is to advance the cause of partition. Members of the Council might be particularly interested to learn that those two persons who are mentioned in this document as being in favour of unified municipalities in Cyprus are not alive now. They were both assassinated on the same night two years ago. This document goes on: There is only one path open to us that we see and it is the following: (a) To propagate all over the island a faith and a conviction to be passed on from generation to generation. This faith and this conviction should make every Turk, young or old, feel that it is most necessary to bring about the vindication of the truth which is that the agreements are a temporary state of affairs and that our communities should form a separate regime; (b) To react to a maximum degree to any effort of the Greeks who are trying to effect the collapse of the régime of the separate community, (c) To contain and obstruct those whose propaganda and publications dissipate the national fight and to dictate to the members of the opposition within the Turkish community that their actions against the national struggle constitute a basic mistake. 93 94 Cyprus: A European Anomaly It goes on: Gurghan and Hikmet, whose writings and actions serve the efforts of the Greeks [I mentioned the two names earlier] all these must stop and, if these people do not believe in the existence of our nationalist struggle, they must be silenced. Another document, dated 14 September 1963, that is to say only three months before the recent incidents started in Nicosia, around Christmas – the other document which I mentioned was of an earlier date – and signed by Turkish leaders, speaks of the possibility of an effort by the Greek Party to amend the Constitution. It says: In the case of official abrogation of the Constitution by the Greeks or of an attempt to amend it, it is our opinion that there is only [one] thing that the Turkish community will do. It will take destiny into its own hands and declare an independent Turkish-Cypriot Republic outside the Agreements. Of course it is known that there have been certain proposals for negotiation on the question of amending certain constitutional provisions and they were put forward to the Turkish leaders by President Makarios. I cannot understand why the representative of the United Kingdom did not make reference to them. Those proposals were turned down, not by the Turkish Cypriots to whom they were addressed, but they were turned down in the most unorthodox manner, to say the least, by the Turkish Government, although the proposals were never addressed to them. The document to which I last referred, which deals with the way the Turkish Cypriots should react to any proposal for amending the Constitution, states: The success of the implementation of such a plan [in other words, to take into their own hands their destiny] will require of the Turkish community the waging of a very hard fight which must command the support of many internal and external factors. Undoubtedly, the material and moral support of the mother country, Turkey, is the most important of the outside factors. Indeed, there is no likelihood that the Turkish Cypriots will be able to fight under present conditions without having secured in advance the consent and subsequent support of the mother country. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that we agree in advance with the mother country on the course of action based on a detailed plan. Makarios has not yet made serious attempts to abrogate or amend the Treaties. Thus we have time ahead of us to prepare such a plan and we should profit from this. Appendix I do not wish to read out the entire document because in it there is the whole plan of action, some details of which I think I should not disclose, at least at this stage. But I would just quote another paragraph: When economically, militarily and morally ready in the full sense of the word, the Turkish community will avail itself of the opportunity presented by the occurrence of a constitutional crisis to strike with some success. The above documents and quotations are, I believe, quite enough as a real background to the incidents which occurred in December last in Cyprus. After all, the only people who would benefit from intercommunal fighting in Cyprus would be those who are in favour of separation and division, and not those who believe in unity and whose policy is that Greeks and Turks and Armenians and Maronites can and should live happily together as citizens of one State, citizens with equal rights. The tragic events of Christmas in Cyprus, tragic to both parties, have been followed by a series of provocations which resulted in a series of other incidents. The efforts to move forcibly populations from mixed villages is part of the whole plan, conceived by Turkish leaders and pursued in co-operation with the Turkish-Cypriot leaders. Even the Turkish Prime Minister, in a recent statement, made it quite clear that the policy of the Turkish Government is either to get geographical partition – that is to say, complete partition – or some form of partition which has now been called ‘federation’. That is what he said on 26 January. And mind you, he is the Prime Minister of one of the countries which are supposed to have guaranteed the integrity and unity of the State. ‘We want a federal state in Cyprus’, the Prime Minister of Turkey says, ‘and if we do not achieve this, we shall ask for partition.’ Apart from the other tragedies of the situation which the Turkish policy has brought to Cyprus, it has also brought grave, and unnecessarily grave, and tragic hardships to the Turkish-Cypriot population of the country. Turkish peace-loving villagers have been forced to abandon their houses, their land, their properties, and some thousands of them are now living as refugees in other places. I would give only one example of how people are forced to leave their villages – which example is also directly connected with the issue before the Security Council today. 95 96 Cyprus: A European Anomaly In the case of a certain village, representatives of the Turkish terrorist organization told the inhabitants, when the latter refused to leave: ‘You have to move because in a few days this area will be bombed by Turkish planes and it will be a pity for Turks to be killed by Turkish bombs. You have to move to some other area where there will be no bombing.’ To conclude this point, the following is an extract of one of the documents dated 14 September 1963, which I mentioned earlier. This quotation is, I feel, of particular importance to the issue: Undoubtedly, this plan of the Turkish community will meet with a strong counter-action and reprisals of the Greeks. These counter-measures will result in an inter-communal fight which will decide the outcome. When the fight begins [this is the quotation of September, three months before the events in Cyprus] the Turkish community, interspersed throughout the island, will be forcibly concentrated into an area which it will be obliged to defend. The site of this area will depend on the strategic plan prepared by the experts. Before the fighting breaks out, the Turkish community must have the necessary supplies, ample food-stock and detailed plans for the strengthening of its ties with the mother country. I can take up a lot of time and speak perhaps for hours quoting examples, and giving evidence of the policy and the pursuits of the Turkish Government. However, I feel that this is enough for the time being. I reserve my right to elaborate further if it proves necessary at a later stage. What is to be done? Much importance has been paid, quite rightly, to the question of the international force. But no importance has been paid to the basic element in the whole issue, which is the protection of the territorial integrity and the independence of the Republic of Cyprus. This is not only in itself important, but, also, this is the best means in our view of bringing about in Cyprus a much calmer atmosphere. If you protect the independence and the territorial integrity of the Republic of Cyprus, realistically and psychologically, the situation will be calmer, because the Greek majority will not be preparing itself to meet the aggression and the Turkish minority – at least, part of it – will not be preparing itself to welcome the aggression. If you have this tension and these threats of outside aggression hanging over Cyprus, you can have a half-million troops in Cyprus – and yet you will have no peace. Together with the international force – which should be under the control of the Security Council, as we stated earlier on – the Appendix Security Council should, primarily, and without waiting, for any other action, take the necessary measures for the protection of the territorial integrity and the independence Of the Republic of Cyprus. That would be the greatest contribution both toward keeping international peace in that area of the world and toward restoring internal peace in the island of Cyprus. I should like to conclude my opening statement by saying that, as far as the Government of Cyprus is concerned, we are open to suggestions and ready for discussions both on the political solution of the problem and on the peacekeeping aspect of the problem within the framework of the United Nations. I must, however, make it quite clear that the territorial integrity, the unity, the sovereignty and the complete independence of our country are not negotiable. These are the very things we call upon the Security Council to safeguard and protect. We are an equal Member of the United Rations, and we feel that we are entitled to this protection. We are confident that the Security Council will not fail us. If the fundamental elements which form the basis of the existence of the Republic of Cyprus are protected and the threat of aggression is done away with, peace in Cyprus can easily be restored. To this end, my Government is pledged to do its utmost, with the assistance of the Security Council. Speech delivered by Rauf Denktaş on 28 February 1964 Mr President, I thank you and I thank all the representatives for having given me the opportunity to address you on the tragic events in Cyprus. My community, which has suffered more than 800 dead or wounded in a matter of two months, will be most grateful. Twenty thousand of them have been rendered homeless or workless and look upon charity for their living. The whole Turkish community has been living under virtual Greek siege since 21 December 1963.1 All these people have been following the deliberations of your Council with anxiety. The 1 This was the date intercommunal fighting began in Nicosia, following Makarios’s presentation on 30 November 1963, of his celebrated ‘13 Points’ suggesting amendments to the Cyprus constitution which were plainly calculated to deprive the Turkish community of many of its constitutional rights. Denktaş describes the particular incident that gave rise to this armed conflict later in this speech. The outbreak of violence was not a random accident. There is much evidence to suggest that it was carefully engineered by Makarios in accordance with the ‘Akritas Plan’ which already existed in written form. In 1964, Denktaş clearly understood Makarios’s motivation - viz., to abrogate the 1960 Accords and reduce the Turkish Cypriot community to the status of a relatively powerless minority in a Greek Cypriot state which, when the time was ripe, would become politically part of Greece. But he had no knowledge of the Akritas Plan as such, the existence of which was revealed only two years later. 97 98 Cyprus: A European Anomaly fact that you have consented to hear their side of the story will be a great relief to them and I thank you once again on their behalf. I have followed the long deliberations here with some anguish because every hour which has passed in valuable argument has meant to my community either another lost life or some more people rendered homeless. Each day for them has been another day under siege and under terror. But I was relieved to find that the consensus of opinion in this Council is to bring the bloodshed in Cyprus to an immediate end, to find means of doing so quickly and effectively. On this point, may I say that the Guarantor Powers, under the treaty which has been the subject of attack in this Council, could have done this conjointly, quickly and effectively, but the Greek Cypriots did not want it as this would be a disservice to their cause. They wanted to do away with the treaties and with the Constitution. While innocent Turkish women and children were being killed or wounded, Archbishop Makarios, in complete disregard of all that was going on in Cyprus, refused to have an immediate peace-keeping force in Cyprus offered by the United States, by the United Kingdom and by Greece and Turkey to be dispatched from European countries. While all this was going on in Cyprus, the representative of Archbishop Makarios in the United Nations tried twice, under the smokescreen of invasion by Turkey, to get a resolution from the Security Council in general terms on the inviolability of the integrity and independence of Cyprus. The intention was to get such a resolution hurriedly and then to interpret it in their own way and be able to declare that the treaties were dead and of no effect and that the Guarantor Powers could do nothing while the Greeks destroyed the Constitution and annihilated the Turkish community. Mr Kyprianou has asked the Council: Is it conceivable, is it possible, that the Greeks should contemplate the annihilation of a hundred thousand Turks? Well, it will take some time to complete the extermination of a hundred thousand Turks, but may I say that it is not necessary that all of us should be killed. It is sufficient if life is made impossible for us in Cyprus and that is the object of the attack on us. I have listened very carefully to the speeches delivered several times by Mr Kyprianou. My conviction is that they do not want a peacekeeping force in Cyprus. This conviction has been confirmed by the speeches I have heard from him. Mr Kyprianou has confined his endeavours to leaving the killing of Turks in Cyprus by what he called the ‘security forces’ out of focus and to blaming Appendix others for those events, while attempting to get the very resolution which Mr Rossides twice before attempted to get from the Council under a false alarm. Mr Kyprianou has said that if the shadow of the Treaties which brought about the Republic of Cyprus was removed, then tension would be eliminated in the island and all would be well. To prove his point he mentioned that since the day this matter has been before the Council, the fear of invasion by Turkey has diminished, and, therefore, the tension has been reduced and there have been only isolated incidents in the island. For persons who have absolute control over the Greek gunmen, be they called security forces or not, such statements are easy to make. It shows that they have given orders to their gunmen to lie in wait while these proceedings go on. Under the guise of isolated incidents, Turkish villagers have, however, been under constant threat and isolation. Turks have continued to die and mysteriously vanish. Guns and ammunition are still rolling in. Turks are still stranded and under siege. We know the pattern of these machinations. We saw them in the years 1955 and 1958.2 Each time the Cyprus case came before the United Nations, the Greek terrorists, under the same leaders they now enjoy, either pulled the trigger or waited, according to orders. Mr Kyprianou has said that if the resolution which he seeks is not forthcoming then the root of evil will continue to be there, meaning that tension will rise and bloodshed continue. I feel sure that this Council will not be blackmailed into an irresponsible action or onesided resolution. I have absolute faith as to that. It is very significant that Archbishop Makarios on 18 February 1964 had this to say to a correspondent of UPI [United Press International]: I do not think a larger peace-keeping force on Cyprus is necessary. If the Greek Cypriot resolution demanding guarantees against aggression is adopted by the United Nations Security Council, the need for a peacekeeping force will be eliminated. The main question now is to abrogate the Cyprus Treaties that give Britain, Greece and Turkey the right to intervene in Cyprus affairs. 2 These were the years of the terrorist activities of EOKA (Ethnike Organosis Kyprion Agoniston National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) led by Colonel (later General) George Grivas, and directed not only against the British in Cyprus but also against any Cypriots, Greek or Turkish, who failed to co-operate with EOKA’s aims. Reverential attitudes towards EOKA are far from dead, even among some of the most influential circles in Greek Cyprus 99 100 Cyprus: A European Anomaly This statement by Archbishop Makarios and the manoeuvres by his representatives here in this Council are sufficient proof of the fact that the Greek Cypriots are trying to abuse the authority of this august Council. While the only urgent need in Cyprus is the taking of such active measures as would ensure a cessation of violence and return to normality by moving in a peacekeeping force, the Greeks maintain that unless they get a resolution the way they want to, nothing can be done in or for Cyprus. This attitude and these declarations are also absolute proof of the already wellknown fact that the attack on the Turks was an organised one for political reasons, and that such murder and violence as we have witnessed in the last few months is a tool in the hands of the Greek authorities for getting their political ends. Had this not been so, how could the Archbishop so forcefully and categorically say that ‘if the resolution I ask for is given, no peace-keeping force will be necessary’? He will get his resolution: he will interpret it as having abrogated the Treaties; he will defy the guaranteeing powers; and then under the umbrella of your resolution, he will deal with the Turks the way he thinks best. If violence is necessary during this process, he will resort to violence and tell world, as he did in December last, that his ‘security forces’ are dealing with some Turkish rebels. This is the pattern of Greek mentality. I repeat my utmost faith in your Council’s wisdom not to fall in with such mentality. Permit me, therefore, to tackle the problem in its essence and essentials. To understand these, it is necessary to understand the basis of the Republic of Cyprus and the reasons for the sui generis provisions in its Constitution, as well as the absolute necessity for the Treaties which brought it about. Each country, each state, has its own peculiar and individual characteristics. That is why it is dangerous to apply general principles in complete disregard of such peculiarities. On the principle of each case to be decided on its own merits, I am sure that you will decide the issue before you on the merits, peculiarities and inherent characteristics of Cyprus. Otherwise, the result will be chaotic.3 Very briefly, these are the facts. 3 The stress on the uniqueness of particular countries, and on the sui generis nature of the Cyprus constitution, is an attempt - here insufficiently elaborated, I would say - to forestall any unreflective application to Cyprus (and to the 1960 Accords) of the abstract principles and values enunciated in the UN Charter, of which the Non-Aligned Movement was so enamoured. The Greek side was already appealing to these principles in order to claim that the 1960 Accords should no longer be seen as valid. Appendix Turks and Greeks have lived in Cyprus together since 1571. They have so lived always as Greeks or Turks. They have each stuck to their separate culture, religion, tradition and national heritage. They are in effect Turkey and Greece projected into Cyprus for the Turkish and Greek populations respectively. Any attempts to make them anything but Greeks or Turks have met with strong opposition from these groups in Cyprus. They each lived as autonomous communities together, yet always separate. Down to the smallest village there have always been and there are, Greek and Turkish authorities looking after the affairs of their communities separately. As long as they enjoyed equality and justice, they lived together happily. As soon as one side attempted to dominate the other politically, trouble brewed and their relations were momentarily estranged. Greeks started this attempt to dominate the Turks after the British rule. Petitions for union with Greece met with counter-petitions from the Turks opposing it. Demonstrations for union with Greece met with counterdemonstrations by the Turks. When the Greeks took up arms in 1955, not for independence – that is very important for the Security Council and for the United Nations, not for independence – but for the union of Cyprus with Greece, it was inevitable that the Turks would oppose them, because the Turks were thus being put from the rule of one colony under another. This opposition brought violence. Turks reacted, inter-communal relations became estranged, bitter and full of mistrust and enmity. The Cyprus question came before the United Nations several times during 1955 and 1958. The Greek Cypriots tried to get a resolution in complete disregard of the Turkish Cypriot factor. The United Nations refused to fall into this trap, and advised the parties, that is to say Greek and Turkish Cypriots who were warring against each other for different political aims, and Greece and Turkey, their recognized and avowed motherlands, to find a just and peaceful solution by negotiation. That is how the Zürich Agreement was reached. Archbishop Makarios and Dr Küçük, representing the two communities, were in constant touch with their respective motherlands during this time. At all stages they consented to what was being agreed to as a compromise solution. There should be no victors and no vanquished. Peaceful settlement necessitated that the two sides should make mutual sacrifices. The fight arose because the Greeks wanted union and offered the Turkish Cypriots the position of a minority. The Turkish Cypriots refused this and 101 102 Cyprus: A European Anomaly demanded union with Turkey, or at least partition. We would never accept to live at the mercy of the Greek Cypriots. We had good examples of what life would be under them. The EOKA gunmen had repeatedly declared that once the fight against the British was brought to a victorious end, the fight against the Turks would be sharp and short. Our struggle on the island was a constant danger to peace between Turkey and Greece. So the compromise was reached fairly and responsibly. A Government of partnership was born. The two communities sat at a conference table and agreed upon the terms and conditions of this partnership. An eminent jurist of international law from Switzerland presided over our deliberations.4 Greece and Turkey – I repeat, the two motherlands – had their representatives there and we, the two communities, had ours. It was a settlement between equals, not between the majority and the minority. The notion of majority and minority would have arisen had there been a Cypriot nation. There was not even the slightest notion of such a nation. Out of this partnership this notion might arise by a process of evolution when, in time, mutual goodwill, trust and friendship became the rule rather than the exception. This notion of unity of Cypriotism could have arisen if the larger community had wanted it and had worked for it. But that has not been the case. From the beginning we were told in no uncertain terms that what we believed to be an honourable compromise was for the Greek Cypriots the beginning of a new struggle for achieving union with Greece. In other words, they had trick-tied us down by international treaties and now want to use the positive parts of the treaties for their own ends. I would like to quote some statements repeatedly made by the Archbishop as from 1 April 1960. He said: These achievements are not, of course, absolute, but the present reality does not completely close the circle of our pursuits. He continues as follows: The realization of our hopes and aspirations is not complete under the Zürich and London Agreements. We have acquired a bastion and a starting point for peaceful campaigns. From these bastions we shall continue to struggle with a view to consummating victory. 4 This was Professor Marcel Bridel of the University of Lausanne. It took Professor Bridel and a commission of eminent experts representing the two Cypriot communities, as well as Greece and Turkey, 15 months to draw up the Cyprus Constitution which was signed on 16 August 1960, in Nicosia. Appendix This was a public statement from a responsible man who was becoming the head of a newly born State. Then, on 20 December 1961, he said: Taking into consideration the general interest of the people of Cyprus, I shall disregard any constitutional provision which, if abused, may obstruct the regular functioning of the State. There was a constitutional court created under our Constitution for abuses and for other matters in Cyprus. An eminent German jurist5 was at the head of it, with Greek and Turkish Cypriot participation. And in spite of that, this was an open declaration that he [Makarios] would disregard any constitutional provisions. This is from the head of a State newly born. On 5 January 1962, he said: The noble struggles of the people never come to an end. These struggles, although they undergo transformation are never terminated. The struggle of the people of Cyprus too will go on. The Zürich and London Agreements form a landmark in the course of this struggle, but at the same time, are a starting point and bastion for further struggles, with the object of capitalizing on what has been achieved for further conquests. On 12 February 1963, he said the following: Even if the Constitutional Court says that what I am doing on municipalities is unconstitutional, I will not respect anything of these things. On 1 April 1963, he said: As we kneel before the graves of our martyrs, we hear them shout: ‘Forward, beyond the graves’... The armed struggle ended, but it is continuing in a different form so that the present may be appraised and the future conquered. On 27 July 1963 he said: The agreements do not form the goal; they are the present but not the future. The Greek Cypriot people will continue their national course and shape their future in accordance with their will. The Zürich and London Agreements have a number of positive elements, but also negative ones, 5 Professor Ernst Forsthoff of the University of Heidelberg was the President of the Constitutional Court in question. 103 104 Cyprus: A European Anomaly and that Greeks will work to take advantage of the positive elements and get rid of the negative ones. There are numerous other quotations, but I shall not delay the Council by reading them.6 Will the United Nations endorse such conduct? Can a man, a party to a simple transaction, take advantage of the ‘positive’ elements and refuse to abide by the ‘negative’ elements? Even in private life this is not allowed. How will the Security Council help Archbishop Makarios, if, in his own words, the Greeks are going to work to take advantage of the positive elements and get rid of the negative ones by completely disregarding the Turks and their rights in Cyprus? What will the fate of other international treaties be if Governments which sign them freely are allowed to advance the excuses which the Greek Cypriots are now advancing for abrogating these treaties? Archbishop Makarios having agreed to the independent Republic solely for the purpose of using this Republic as a spring-board for enosis – union of Cyprus with Greece – his administration could do nothing but serve his purpose. All Turkish rights were denied or refused under humiliating accusations. All government organs set about doing nothing but tracking out all Turkish rights. In spite of the guarantees and the special rights worked into the Constitution, everything possible was done to reduce us and treat us as a mere minority. Nothing was done to stop the rising tide towards the condemnation of the [1960] Agreements by the Greeks. Churches and schools became a training ground for anti-Turkish, anti-Constitution upbringing of youth. A police state was clamped-down upon us. Human rights and constitutional safeguards were completely disregarded. Turkish Cypriots, while necessarily doing their utmost to keep up the morale of their people, bent all their energies to bringing the Greek leadership to reason. Dr Küçük’s message to Archbishop Makarios gives a good picture of the Turkish stand. It is dated 19 February 1964. This was an open letter addressed to Archbishop Makarios. It says: 6 One further quotation in particular could have been included. In a speech given in his native village of Panayia on 4 September, 1962, Makarios went so far as to declare: ‘Until this small Turkish community that forms part of the Turkish race which has been the terrible enemy of Hellenism is expelled, the duty to the heroes of EOKA cannot be considered as terminated.’ Shortly after this statement was reported in the press Denktaş sent a formal protest to Makarios, hoping, as he said, that the Archbishop would take the opportunity to explain that he had been misquoted. As more often than not in dealing with his Turkish Cypriot partners, Makarios did not bother to reply. Appendix Your broadcast last night reminded me of the constant efforts which were made during the short life of the Republic in order to create conditions in which the two communities could live together in peace and prosperity and co-operate in a spirit of friendship with goodwill and understanding. Lest you have forgotten my concrete appeals to you and the negative and evasive attitude which you always showed toward them, may I list below a few instances of this and the response with which they were met by you? You will no doubt recollect that I had to appeal to you many times, both orally and in writing, that you and certain Greek ministers should refrain from taking leading parts in the campaign for enosis and against the Zürich and London Agreements and the Constitution. You refused to entertain my appeals and on the contrary continued to direct and even intensify the campaign. I had asked you repeatedly and also the Council of Ministers and the Attorney-General of the Republic that, as in all other countries, you should provide sanctions in our criminal code for deterring activities and propaganda aimed at undermining our Constitution and the order established thereunder. You refused to take necessary steps for the enactment of legislative provisions for such sanctions. I had requested you and the Attorney-General of the Republic repeatedly to prosecute those who had been publishing statements calculated to promote feelings of ill-will between different classes, or communities, or persons of the Republic, in violation of section 61 of our criminal code. On your instructions, the Attorney-General refused to prosecute such offenders, of whom the most notorious was Nikos Sampson,7 whom you always wanted to protect for reasons known to you. 7 An ex-EOKA thug, Sampson was briefly made President of Cyprus after the 1974 Greek coup which temporarily overthrew Makarios. He acquired ‘heroic’ status during the outbreak of intercommunal violence in December, 1963, when, as a commander of Greek ‘irregulars’, he devised the ingenious plan of using a bulldozer with raised excavator to lead an attack on the Turks. Sampson died in 2001 but even in the 1990s he still had a following among Greek Cypriots. Speaking at a ceremony held by the ‘Dighenis Association’ to celebrate the Greek and Greek Cypriot ‘national days’, Sampson declared himself adamantly against the idea of creating a federal Cyprus with the Turks. ‘We have to expel the Turks from this country’, he said in 1993. ‘I do not believe in lost territories. I do not give anyone the right to give away Hellenic lands. Cyprus was Hellenic and will remain Hellenic.’ (As reported in the Greek Cypriot newspaper Tharros, 29 March 1993). Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric, firmly rooted in the megali idea and related fantasies, still has the power to move significant numbers of people in the south of the island. 105 106 Cyprus: A European Anomaly I had proposed to you that we should hold frequent press conferences together and thereby try to influence journalists to refrain from publishing inflammatory material likely to create enmity, distrust, and causes of friction between the two communities. You refused to do so. I had suggested to you on many occasions that we should visit mixed villages together and advise inhabitants to put aside their differences and live together in a spirit of friendship and neighbourliness. You refused to do it. But, on my own initiative, I visited mixed villages and spoke to Greeks and Turks alike, advocating friendship between them. I had called upon you to show respect for the Constitution and the decisions of the Supreme Constitutional Court. You refused to do so. On the contrary, you made public declarations to the effect that you would disregard constitutional provisions and that you would not respect decisions of the Constitutional Court. I had asked you and the Council of Ministers to stop the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation from broadcasting material which was offensive and insulting to the Turkish community and was of such a nature as to breed hatred toward Turks. You failed to take effective action and even allowed the broadcast of such objectionable material as a sketch in which a six-year-old Greek boy is depicted as declaring that he would repay his debts to his mother by bringing to her the heads of six Turks. I had to request you repeatedly to use your influence on the so-called Minister of Interior to prevent him from turning the security forces of the State into a Gestapo-like terrorist organization. You refused to do so, and the Minister was left free to fill the forces with Greek terrorists under the guise of plainclothes special branch men. I had to complain to you many times that Yiorkadjis has been arming the Greek members of the security forces and thousands of EOKA men with heavy automatic weapons. These rumours, I had said, were causing tension in the country and making Turks feel insecure and anxious about the future. You refused to pay any attention to my warning. I had to make representation to you that Yiorkadjis’s men had been molesting, with ever increasing force, Turkish [Cypriot] citizens by subjecting them and their houses and their places of work to unlawful and unnecessary searches so that they were provoking, intimidating and terrorizing them. You again failed to listen to me. I had to make several approaches to you concerning the nonimplementation of those provisions of the Constitution which gave to us Appendix certain rights. I had represented that the Public Service Commission was wilfully violating the Constitution and acting arbitrarily in an insulting manner. In many instances in government departments, and especially in the Foreign Ministry, Turkish officers were discriminated against and were deliberately pushed aside and prevented from performing any duties compatible with their status. You refused to take necessary action to remedy the situation. Three major constitutional crises occurred during the life of the Republic: taxation legislation, municipalities, and the Cyprus Army. He then deals with these separately. I can give this letter to the Secretariat, to be incorporated in my speech, because it is a long letter. It ends this way: I cannot conclude this letter without stressing the difference of attitude which you and I adopted in our approach to the problems which have confronted us since the independence of Cyprus. As illustrated above, while you did your best to maintain a world of hatred toward Turks and thus destroy all hopes of coexistence in peace and friendship, I, on the other hand, as you well know, toiled hard to keep alive our Constitution and to create conditions in which the two communities could live and prosper together. It is most fitting to quote here from a letter which I sent to you on 22 August 1963 in an effort to bring you to the path of reason and goodwill: ‘Your Beatitude is no doubt aware that the campaign for the abrogation of the [1960] Agreements and for the amendment of our Constitution by unilateral action has recently assumed such proportions that it is no longer possible to accept the rapid spread of the feeling of uneasiness, insecurity, distrust, and enmity. As a result, we have been dragged to the verge of a constitutional crisis, from which runs the risk of falling into an abyss of calamity and devastation’. In the circumstances. I found myself compelled to appeal again to Your Beatitude and to request you to end such a campaign. In that letter I also said: ‘I wish to express the view that, despite what has so far been done, reason will prevail and in the end it will be possible to save Cyprus from plunging headlong into a state of chaos, anarchy, and disaster. I sincerely hope that Your Beatitude will rise to the occasion and abandon such plans and intentions which are against the establishment of constitutional order, and thus avert the danger which is looming over Cyprus. For our part, I wish to emphasize here also that Turks are in 107 108 Cyprus: A European Anomaly favour of the solution of certain inter-communal disputes entirely in accordance with the provisions of the agreement and the Constitution.’ The letter is signed by Dr Fazıl Küçük. This was the Turkish stand. But the Greek Cypriot propaganda machine was directed to convincing the world that the root of all the trouble was the ‘unworkability’ of the Constitution; that, if all Turkish rights were removed and the Turks reduced to the position of a mere minority, accepting the position of living at the mercy of the Greeks, all would be well. Archbishop Makarios, who, on the one hand, told his people that he would use the present regime for achieving enosis, the union of Cyprus with Greece, told us, on the other hand, to help him do so by giving up all our rights. We asked him to try to apply the Constitution, and we told him: ‘If we find out, after this attempt, that there are unworkable parts, we shall certainly sit down with you and consider them. But do not dictate to us without making any attempt to apply these provisions – that they are unworkable, because we cannot accept that.’ We told him that he must first prove his good faith. But he had no good faith to prove. He had one intention: to change the Constitution, to abrogate the agreement, and thus to be free to move on to enosis. His Minister of Interior organised the police on the lines of an EOKA terrorist organisation. Greek youth was illegally armed and trained under his auspices. His own statement, dated 29 July 1963 – the statement of the Minister of Interior, the person responsible for our safety and for law and order in Cyprus – is this: With our eyes always turned toward Greece, which is the symbol of freedom, we exhibited our civilization and strength to those who maltreated us. Keeping our Greek conscience away from every possible influence, we always remained devoted to our ineradicable goal. This country has always been Greek and will remain so. Even though destiny causes our annihilation, Cyprus will always remind us of Greece. Our ancient monuments will be a proof of Greece. Greek spirit and heroism will gush out of this earth, which is watered with blood. Realizing our responsibilities towards our people we shall, depending on the strength of right, stride forward without hesitation and with determination for the materialisation of our aspirations in conformity with the national expectations and dream of the Cypriot Greek people. Appendix All those things which we thought were done away with under the [1960] Agreements in order to reach a compromise agreement were thus carried out and carried on by the most ‘responsible’ people. How could we feel secure? How could we feel happy? About March 1963, Archbishop Makarios openly declared that 1964 would be a decisive year. In 1963 he had forced the German President of the Constitutional Court to resign because this professor of international law had refused to give judgment against the Turks at Greek dictation. He chose his law and his conscience. That was not good enough for the Greeks. Circumstances were created, and he was forced to resign. In an interview given on 27 December 1963 by Professor Forsthoff to an Associated Press correspondent in Heidelberg this is what he said, very briefly and to the point. He said that he himself was convinced that if the Government of Cyprus had been able to stick to the Constitution for five years most of the problems would have been mastered. ‘I have told Makarios that time and again,’ he said. But the Cyprus Government had no intention of sticking to the Constitution, because sticking to the Constitution would bring about trust and confidence, understanding and friendship, and people would settle down to a normal life. That was not what he [Makarios] wanted. He wanted the people to be separated; he wanted people to doubt each other so that he could guide his own policy of abrogating the Agreements. It is a result of this predetermined policy that the police pressure on the Turks of Cyprus increased from day to day. Illegal searches became a rule of the day. Resentment arose, naturally. In the last three years they had tried several times, by deliberate provocation, to make the Turks come out with an attack on the Greeks so that they would find the excuse to hit us back with all their might. We did not fall into that trap, and they knew we would not do so. So, on the night of 21 December 1963, they found the excuse. A Turkish family going to its house was stopped on the way by armed Greek youngsters. They pretended to be policemen. They never disclosed their identity. They said ‘We are the men of the Ministry of the Interior. ‘At gun-point they tried to search the Turkish women and men. The women refused. They said: ‘You must take us to the police station if we are to be searched. ‘Then people, hearing this altercation, gathered round. It is said that about fifteen persons gathered round, and while the altercation was going on, two Greek officers, this time in uniform, came to the scene, shooting their way in and killing a Turkish women and man and wounding five other Turks. We did our best to keep this as a police affair, and 109 110 Cyprus: A European Anomaly we tried to localise the matter, but again that was not good enough for the Government of Cyprus. When this event happened all Greek policemen were called to the police stations and fully armed. No arms were issued to the Turks, and the following day, when we issued the statement by Dr Küçük calling upon the people to remain quiet and calm, the Cyprus Broadcasting Service, which again was under the same Ministry, refused to publish it. They said, ‘We shall publish only police bulletins’, and we soon began to see what those bulletins were to be. By the evening they started telling the world that there was rebellion going on in the Nicosia area and that the security forces were dealing with the rebels. In fact we were all surrounded by Greek policemen, held in by private Greek armies of whose existence we did not know until then, and we were attacked with automatic rifles. The next day Dr Küçük was made to record an appeal to the Turkish community again to keep calm, and telling them that there was a cease-fire. This tape was taken away used by the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation repeatedly making the Turks believe that there was nothing going on, while shooting in fact was going on in the Nicosia area and any Turk who dared to approach Nicosia was either killed or taken as a hostage. I shall not elaborate on the horror which we suffered. For five days we were cut off from the world. Our telephones, including the telephone of the VicePresident, were disconnected. The radio was in the hands of the Greeks, and they issued bulletins continuously saying that a rebellion was going on and that they were dealing with the rebels. The wireless telegraph service was in their hands and no foreign correspondent could come to our side of the world as we were completely surrounded and cut off. It was after the fifth day, after a last appeal had been made by the Turks to all the Guarantor Powers calling for help for the last time – previously they had not heeded our appeal at all – telling them that we had received an ultimatum from Mr Pandelidis, the police officer who had started the whole thing and who had told his number two on the Turkish side that if we did not all surrender they would smash us out from our homes with mortar bombs by next morning – it was after that that the Turkish contingent moved out of its barracks and took a position as the result of which the Greeks who were attacking us had to leave unfinished a work which they were doing thoroughly. It was only after that that we were saved. Appendix I understand the resentment of Mr Kyprianou as a result of the moving out of the Turkish contingent.8 It prevented them [the Greeks] from completing a very thorough job, and our insistence on the Treaty of Guarantee must be appreciated because it has saved us. That is why I am here. That is why so many thousands of Turks can still look to this Council with hope. A great deal of complaint has been centered around the moving of this contingent, which did not fire even one shot, but it is on record that at the time the Turkish contingent moved out, the Greek contingent also moved out from the other side, taking over charge of the airfields and other parts of the Greek town. These people were there to maintain law and order, and they had done so without firing a single shot. In the meantime the British forces came and took over the control and command of these two contingents. They are doing an admirable job. I think they deserve thanks. It is these Powers which have needed further help from their other allies in order to maintain peace in Cyprus and bring sanity and reason to all of us. I think that is the reason we are all here – not to change Treaties, not to insist on conditions which we shall later use for our own ends. That is the urgent work before this Council, and that is why all Cypriots in Cyprus, Turks or Greeks, who want peace and who want a cessation of bloodshed look to the Council for a decision on that particular issue. There is one very important factor which I should like the Security Council to understand. Innocent and unarmed people may die in a fight: that may be the result of any fight and it can be explained. But in our case, women and children have been killed deliberately and brutally in their houses. Seven hundred people were taken as hostages by the so-called security forces. I have before me a Greek publication, Cyprus Today, Supplement No. 2, November-December 1963; the actual date of the issue is 3 January 1964. This is a publication of the Greek Communal Chamber. I shall read out part of paragraph 13, as follows: On the question of hostages, [Mr Yiorkadjis] said the Turkish leaders have been informed officially by the President of the Republic that approximately 700 Turkish citizens have been evacuated from areas 8 The reference is to the 650 Turkish mainland soldiers that the Treaty of Alliance allowed Turkey to keep in Cyprus. When it was clear that the Greeks intended a serious assault on the Turkish Cypriot community, the Turkish contingent decided unilaterally to move from its camp north of Nicosia on the 25 December 1963, and took up strategic positions at Ortaköy and Gönyeli at either side of the Nicosia-Kyrenia road. 111 112 Cyprus: A European Anomaly in which fierce fighting was taking place and have been removed and housed in Greek schools in safe areas.... Now, the information came to us officially after the cease-fire that they had approximately 700 people. When we demanded the release of these people, we were told that they had been taken for safety purposes. Only 534 were returned to us. We asked what had happened to the others. The answer was: we have no others; that is the number we had. But there were British eye-witnesses who saw some of these hostages lined up and shot. Later we saw several of them buried in mass graves, fully clothed, women and children included. As I have said, the information came to us officially that the number was approximately 700. In any case, a responsible security force should have known the number of people they had removed: we should not have been given an approximate number. We have asked what happened to the missing. It is no use insisting that the total number was delivered to us. We want to know what happened to the missing, the people who did not return to their homes, who have not been found, who have vanished. Their families are entitled, in the name of humanity, to know at least where the graves of these people are. Turks that were ill have been removed from the hospitals. They have vanished. We want to know where they are, or at least where their graves are. In all humanity, we are entitled to know. Of course, this is not one of the Security Council’s tasks, but it is material to the issue before the Council. It helps the Council to understand why we insist on these treaties, why we insist on these rights. Without them we shall just vanish. After the cease-fire and after foreign correspondents came into our sector and the horror was disclosed, there was no more fighting in Nicosia. But it is very significant that the houses of the 700 people and of other persons who had fled from the Greek sectors were completely destroyed, either gutted by fire or pulled down by bulldozers. This happened all over Cyprus. Wherever the Turks had to leave their homes, those homes were gutted or pulled down. The message which this teaches us is: you have to bow to our will or to die if you defy us – or you have to leave Cyprus for good. There is no room for us in Cyprus. I cannot say who is behind this, but this is the mentality of the people who hold the power and have the guns in their hands today, and stand there to do so for a long time to come. Appendix Will the Security Council, then, adopt a resolution which will leave us completely at the mercy of these people? It is held that in order to achieve a resolution which will be acceptable to the Cyprus Government something must be said about the integrity and independence of Cyprus. They say: in order to make the Turks feel secure, let us have a United Nations force in Cyprus, but the resolution must state that the independence and integrity of Cyprus are to be maintained by the Security Council. As we see it, the trick in such a position is the following. The United Nations force will go to Cyprus for a matter of three months. But they [the Greeks] have made no secret of the fact that they will immediately interpret the resolution as rendering the Treaty of Guarantee invalid, and that resolution will be in their hands for good. Thus for three months they will tell their gunmen: do not shoot. Then the United Nations Force will go away, and with the Security Council resolution in their hands, they will defy the guarantor Powers and argue that the Treaty of Guarantee is invalid because the Security Council has adopted this resolution. And on that basis they will deal with us as they please. It may be said that I am a very suspicious Turk. I may have been suspicious before the incidents, but now the facts have confirmed what I have just told the Council. The other day Mr Kyprianou said that there is now little or no activity in Cyprus, that everything is normal, that in some parts Greeks and Turks have signed declarations that they will keep the peace. Well, my information from Dr Küçük is that Turks continue to be under a state of siege. In some places they are running short of food. In some places they cannot get medicine. No one can go to work. Life is at standstill as far as the Turks are concerned. In some small places, there may be Turks working. But that is not the question. The question is: are we entitled to live in human dignity as free people in a land where we have lived for 400 years, or are we to be put at the mercy of the Greek Cypriots and to be treated as a mere minority when we have never had that status in 400 years? Are we to be tricked out of our right to bargain equally just because they have killed some of us? That is the main issue before the Security Council today. It must not be forgotten that it was because Greeks feared partition and Turks feared Greek discrimination and eventual union with Greece that these guarantees had to be worked into the Constitution. If these guarantees are now removed, there will be no authority whatever to rule out the union of Cyprus 113 114 Cyprus: A European Anomaly with Greece. They may say, ‘Let us enter into another treaty’. But the assurances of people who have defied treaties within a few days of signing them certainly cannot satisfy us. In spite of these guarantees we have suffered discrimination, we have suffered indignity, and finally we have suffered the killings and the destruction of property. They now want you to tell them, ‘Bravo for all this, you have done well!’ ; and they want you to honour them by giving them a free licence to argue that the treaties are invalid and, under this illusion, continue to subjugate the Turks, take away our constitutional rights and, if necessary, resort to further violence. We all stand for the rule of law; there is a rule of law in Cyprus that is the Constitution. If it is necessary that it should be changed it can be changed only by argument and by making the other side see your point of view. It cannot be changed by killing, by massacre; it cannot be changed in this way. Before I conclude – and I apologise for having taken up so much of your time; time is valuable for you, for me and for my community – I should like to deal with one or two points which Mr Kyprianou dealt with. He has shaken in his hand since the London meeting some secret and mysterious documents stating that the Turkish leadership has put its signature to certain documents which prove beyond any doubt that there was a plot between the Turkish leadership and Turkish Government in order to partition the island and he has read parts of this document. In London I challenged him to produce these documents for the public to read as a whole and to prove in whose custody they were at the time they came into their hands – who gave it to them, when they got them, who signed them. All these things must be proved before documents can be discussed. I challenged this; nothing was produced. Now I challenge again. If they got these documents before these incidents, then they should have done their duty as a responsible Government and taken some action against these people. If they got them after the incidents – and I think that was their case in London – then they must tell us where and how they got them. They must produce proof and then rest on it. But the facts disprove the documents. If the Turkish leadership in Cyprus was involved in such a plot for partition in conjunction with the leaders in Turkey, the two months’ fight in Cyprus would not have ended in the way it did; the facts in Cyprus would not be as they are today: some Turks armed mostly with shotguns and all Greeks armed thoroughly; Turks shrieking for help from Turkey and Turkey, adamant to Appendix come in without being sure that a wholesale massacre is taking place and then all it does is to give warning and nothing more; it is a call to the Guarantor Powers to take a hand. Do these facts prove the existence of a plot between the Turkish leadership and the Turkish Government? Do they prove that we were ready for such a plot? There was one side in Cyprus which wanted to abrogate the Agreements by hook or by crook, by murder if necessary, and that side has proved its case. That is the case before you. Today no Constitution is in effect in Cyprus. None of the provisions of the Constitution are being complied with or applied. In the circumstances which have been created it cannot be applied. So the two communities have fallen apart. It is not the fault of Mr Kyprianou that he has not been able to get full instructions from Dr Küçük and the Turkish Ministers to have this discussed fully in the Ministerial Council. The Greek gunmen will not let the Turks go to the other side and the ministerial function is finished. But with due respect to him, I do not think he can say or that he can claim in justice and fairness and humanity that he can represent the Turkish [Cypriot] voice, that he can fully represent the Turkish [Cypriot] side in this Council. He cannot. Mr President, I thank you most sincerely for giving me this hearing, I have done my best to tell you our side of the story. I thank you for your patience and I thank you for your kindness. It has been a great help to me and it will be a great help to my community, as I hope what I have just told you may be a help to you in your deliberating and in reaching your decisions. 115 116 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Two Legal Documents The Three Cyprus Treaties of 1960 (1) TREATY OF ESTABLISHMENT The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Kingdom of Greece and the Republic of Turkey of the one part and the Republic of Cyprus of the other part; Desiring to make provisions to give effect to the Declaration made by the Government of the United Kingdom on the 17th of February, 1959, during the Conference at London, in accordance with the subsequent Declarations made at the Conference by the Foreign Ministers of Greece and Turkey, by the Representative of the Greek Cypriot Community and by the Representative of the Greek Cypriot Community and bye the Representative of the Turkish Cypriot Community; Taking note of the terms of the Treaty of Guarantee signed to-day by the Parties to this Treaty; Have agreed as follows; ARTICLE 1 The territory of the Republic of Cyprus shall comprise the island of Cyprus, together with the islands lying off its coast, with the exception of the two areas defined in Annex A to this Treaty, which areas shall remain under the sovereignty of the United Kingdom. These areas are in this Treaty and its Annexes referred to as the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area and the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area. ARTICLE 2 (1) The Republic of Cyprus shall accord to the United Kingdom the rights set forth in Annex B to this Treaty. (2) The Republic of Cyprus shall co-operate fully with the United Kingdom to ensure the security and effective operation of the military bases situated in the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area and the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area, and the full enjoyment by the United Kingdom of the rights conferred by this Treaty. Appendix ARTICLE 3 The Republic of Cyprus, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom undertake to consult and co-operate in the common defence of Cyprus. ARTICLE 4 The arrangements concerning the status of forces in the Island of Cyprus shall be those contained in Annex C to this Treaty. ARTICLE 5 The Republic of Cyprus shall secure to everyone within its jurisdiction human rights and fundamental freedoms comparable to those set out in section I of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental signed at Rome on the 4th of November, 1950, and the Protocol to that Convention signed at Paris on the 20th of March. ARTICLE 6 The arrangements concerning the nationality of persons affected by the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus shall be those contained in Annex D to this Treaty. ARTICLE 7 The Republic of Cyprus and the United Kingdom accept and undertake to carry out the necessary financial and administrative arrangements to settle questions arising out of the termination of British administration in the territory of the Republic of Cyprus. These arrangements are set forth in Annex E to this Treaty. ARTICLE 8 (1) All international obligations and responsibilities of the Government of the United Kingdom shall henceforth, in so far as they may be held to have application to the Republic of Cyprus, be assumed by the Government of the Republic of Cyprus. (2) The international rights and benefits heretofore enjoyed by the Government of the United Kingdom in virtue of their application to the territory of the Republic of Cyprus shall henceforth be enjoyed by the Government of the Republic of Cyprus. 117 118 Cyprus: A European Anomaly ARTICLE 9 The Parties to this Treaty accept and undertake to carry out the arrangements concerning trade, commerce and other matters set forth in Annex F to this Treaty. ARTICLE 10 Any question or difficulty as to the interpretation of the provisions of this Treaty shall be settled as follows: (a) Any question or difficulty that may arise over the operation of the military requirements of the United Kingdom, or concerning the provisions of this Treaty in so far as they affect the status, rights and obligations of United Kingdom forces or any other forces associated with them under the terms of this Treaty, or of Greek, Turkish and Cypriot forces, shall ordinarily be settled by negotiation between the tripartite Headquarters of the Republic of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey and the authorities of the armed forces of the United Kingdom. (b) Any question or difficulty as to the interpretation of the provisions of this Treaty on which agreement cannot be reached by negotiation between the military authorities in the cases described above, or, in other cases, by negotiation between the Parties concerned through the diplomatic channel, shall be composed of four representatives, one each to be nominated by the Government of the United Kingdom, the Government of Greece, the Government of Turkey and the Government of the Republic of Cyprus, together with an independent chairman nominated by the President of the International Court of Justice. If the President is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies or of the Republic of Cyprus of Greece or of Turkey, the Vice-President shall be requested to act; and, if he also is such a citizen, the next senior Judge of the Court. ARTICLE 11 The Annexes to this Treaty shall have force and effect as integral parts of this Treaty. ARTICLE 12 This Treaty shall enter into force on signature by all the Parties to it. Appendix (2) TREATY OF GUARANTEE The Republic of Cyprus of the one part, and Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of the other part; I. Considering that the recognition and maintenance of the independence, territorial integrity and security of the Republic of Cyprus, as established and regulated by the Basic Articles of its Constitution, are in their common interest; II. Desiring to co-operate to ensure respect for the state of affairs created by that Constitution; Have agreed as follows: ARTICLE I The Republic of Cyprus undertakes to ensure the maintenance of its independence, territorial integrity and security, as well as respect for its Constitution. It undertakes not to participate, in whole or in part, in any political or economic union with any State whatsoever. It accordingly declares prohibited any activity likely to promote, directly or indirectly, either union with any other State or partition of the Island. ARTICLE II Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom, taking note of the undertakings of the Republic of Cyprus set out in Article I of the present Treaty, recognise and guarantee the independence, territorial integrity and security of the Republic of Cyprus, and also the state of affairs established by the Basic Articles of its Constitution. Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom likewise undertake to prohibit, so far as concerns them, any activity aimed at promoting, directly or indirectly, either union of Cyprus with any other State or partition of the Island. ARTICLE III The Republic of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey undertake to respect the integrity of the areas retained under United Kingdom sovereignty at the time of the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, and guarantee the use and enjoyment by the United Kingdom of the rights to be secured to it by the Republic of 119 120 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Cyprus in accordance with the Treaty concerning the Establishment of the Republic of Cyprus signed at Nicosia on to-day’s date. ARTICLE IV In the event of a breach of the provisions of the present Treaty, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom undertake to consult together with respect to the representations or measure necessary to ensure observance of those provisions. In so far as common or concerted action may not prove possible, each of the three guaranteeing Powers reserves the right to take action with the sole aim of re-establishing the state of affairs created by the present Treaty. ARTICLE V The present Treaty shall enter into force on the date of signature. The original texts of the present Treaty shall be deposited at Nicosia. The High Contracting Parties shall proceed as soon as possible to the registration of the present Treaty with the Secretariat of the United Nations, in accordance with Article 102 of the Charter of the United Nations. (3) TREATY OF ALLIANCE The Republic of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, I. In their common desire to uphold peace and to preserve the security of each of them, II. Considering that their efforts for the preservation of peace and security are in conformity with the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, Have agreed as follows: ARTICLE I The High Contracting Parties undertake to co-operate for their common defence and to consult together on the problems raised by that defence. ARTICLE II The High Contracting Parties undertake to resist any attack or aggression, direct or indirect, directed against the independence or the territorial integrity of the Republic of Cyprus. Appendix ARTICLE III For the purpose of this alliance, and in order to achieve the object mentioned above, a Tripartite Headquarters shall be established on the territory of the Republic of Cyprus. ARTICLE IV Greece and Turkey shall participate in the Tripartite Headquarters so established with the military contingents laid down in Additional Protocol No.I annexed to the present Treaty. The said contingents shall provide for the training of the army of the Republic of Cyprus. ARTICLE V The Command of the Tripartite Headquarters shall be assumed in rotation, for a period of one year each, by a Cypriot, Greek and Turkish General Officer, who shall be appointed respectively by the Governments of Greece and Turkey and by the President and the Vice-President of the Republic of Cyprus. ARTICLE VI The present Treaty shall enter into force on the date of signature. The High Contracting Parties shall conclude additional agreements if the application of the present Treaty renders them necessary. The High Contracting Parties shall proceed as soon as possible with the registration of the present Treaty with the Secretariat of the United Nations, in conformity with Article 102 of the United Nations Charter. 121 122 Cyprus: A European Anomaly Additional Protocol No. I I. The Greek and Turkish contingents which are to participate in the Tripartite Headquarters shall comprise respectively 950 Greek officers, non-commissioned officers and men, and 650 Turkish officers, noncommissioned officers and men. II. The President and the Vice-President of the Republic of Cyprus, acting in agreement, may request the Greek and Turkish Governments to increase or reduce the Greek and Turkish contingents. III. It is agreed that the sites of the cantonments for the Greek and Turkish contingents participating in the Tripartite Headquarters, their juridical status, facilities and exemptions in respect of customs and taxes, as well as other immunities and privileges and any other military and technical questions concerning the organisation and operation of the Headquarters mentioned above shall be determined by a Special Convention which shall come into force not later than the Treaty of Alliance. IV. It is likewise agreed that the Tripartite Headquarters shall be set up not later than three months after the completion of the tasks of the Mixed. Commission for the Cyprus Constitution and shall consist, in the initial period, of a limited number of officers charged with the training of the armed forces of the Republic of Cyprus. The Greek and Turkish contingents mentioned above will arrive in Cyprus on the date of signature of the Treaty of Alliance. Appendix Additional Protocol No. II ARTICLE I A Committee shall be set up consisting of the Foreign Ministers of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, It shall constitute the supreme political body of the Tripartite Alliance and may take cognizance of any question concerning the Alliance which the Governments of the three Allied countries shall agree to submit to it. ARTICLE II The Committee of Ministers shall meet in ordinary session by its Chairman at the request of one of the members of the Alliance. Decisions of the Committee of Ministers shall be unanimous. ARTICLE III The Committee of Ministers shall be presided over in rotation and for a period of one year, by each of the three Foreign Ministers. It will hold its ordinary sessions, unless it is decided otherwise, in the capital of the Chairman’s country. The Chairman shall, during the year in which he holds office, preside over sessions of the Committee of Ministers, both ordinary and special. The Committee may set up subsidiary bodies whenever it shall judge it to be necessary for the fulfilment of its task. ARTICLE IV The Tripartite Headquarters established by the Treaty of Alliance shall be responsible to the Committee of Ministers in the performance of its functions. It shall submit to it, during the Committee’s ordinary session, an annual report comprising a detailed account of the Headquarters’ activities. 123 124 Cyprus: A European Anomaly UN Security Council Resolution 186 Adopted by the Security Council at its 1102th meeting, on 4 March 1964 The Security Council, Noting that the present situation with regard to Cyprus is likely to threaten international peace and security and may further deteriorate unless additional measures are promptly taken to maintain peace and to seek out a durable solution, Considering the positions taken by the parties in relation to the Treaties signed at Nicosia on 16 August 1960, Having in mind the relevant provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and its Article 2, paragraph 4, which reads: All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. 1. Calls upon all Member States, in conformity with their obligations under the Charter of the United Nations, to refrain from any action or threat of action to worsen the situation in the sovereign Republic of Cyprus, or to endanger international peace; 2. Asks the Government of Cyprus, which has the responsibility for the maintenance and restoration of law and order, to take all additional measures necessary to stop violence and bloodshed in Cyprus; 3. Calls upon the communities in Cyprus and their leaders to act with the utmost restraint; 4. Recommends the creation, with the consent of the Government of Cyprus, of a United Nations Peace-Keeping Force in Cyprus. The composition and size of the Force shall be established by the Secretary-General, in consultation with the Governments of Cyprus, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The commander of the Force shall be appointed by the Secretary-General and report to him. The Secretary-General, who shall keep the Governments providing the Force fully informed, shall report periodically to the Security Council on its operation; Appendix 5. Recommends that the function of the Force should be in the interest of preserving international peace and security, to use its best efforts to prevent a recurrence of fighting and, as necessary, to contribute to the maintenance and restoration of law and order and a return to normal conditions; 6. Recommends that the stationing of the Force shall be for a period of three months, all costs pertaining to it being met, in a manner to be agreed upon by them, by the Governments providing the contingents and by the Government of Cyprus. The Secretary-General may also accept voluntary contributions for the purpose; 7. Recommends further that the Secretary-General designate, in agreement with the Government of Cyprus and the Governments of Greece, Turkey and United Kingdom a mediator who shall use his best endeavors with the representatives of the communities and also with the aforesaid four Governments, for the purpose of promoting a peaceful solution and an agreed settlement of the problem confronting Cyprus, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, having in mind the well-being of the people as a whole and the preservation of international peace and security. The mediator shall report periodically to the Secretary-General on his efforts; 8. Requests the Secretary-General to provide, from funds of the United Nations, as appropriate, for the remuneration and expenses of the mediator and his staff. Adopted unanimously at the 1102nd meeting. 125 ISBN: 978-605-4233-45-8