For the Turkish Cypriots, the Zurich-London agreements were a fairytale solution
On December 21, it will be 57 years since the start of the intercommunal armed conflict of 1963-64. The state broadcaster and some paid henchmen of nationalist newspapers will refer to these events, as they do every year, as the “Turkish rebellion”. A foreigner without any knowledge of Cyprus history would conclude, if he believes the official version by the Greek Cypriots, that the Turkish Cypriots rose violently against the hapless Greek Cypriots who were devoutly and unwaveringly upholding the constitution and the law.
To examine through an objective and not a Greek Cypriot lens whether the term ‘Turkish rebellion’ is correct or misleading we should refer to the Zurich and London agreements on which the establishment of the Cyprus Republic was based. It was an arrangement which the Turkish Cypriots celebrated while the Greek Cypriots lamented despite Makarios’ notorious boast that “we triumphed”. The Turkish Cypriots celebrated because they secured the functional federation they had made their objective, territorial separation being totally impracticable at the time (1960).
From a minority, they became a community as the Cyprus Republic was set up as a partnership state, with the two Cyprus communities as its equal co-founders. Political equality was firmly established. In the House, for a bill to be approved and become a law it had to be approved by the majority of the Turkish Cypriot representatives. The Turkish Cypriot vice president of the Cyprus Republic could veto the government’s decisions. The constitutional court that was the custodian of the constitution was made up of three judges – a Greek Cypriot, a Turkish Cypriot and a foreigner. In the public service and the police 30 per cent of the positions were reserved for Turkish Cypriots who made up 18.2 per cent of the population.
And as if all these rights and privileges granted to the Turkish Cypriots were not enough, there was also the Treaty of Guarantee which allowed Turkey (and the other two guarantor powers) to station troops on the territory of the Cyprus Republic and to have the right of unilateral intervention if and when it considered there was a violation of the constitution. In short, for the Turkish Cypriots the Zurich-London agreements provided the fairytale solution of the Cyprus problem. They would have been foolish to want to overturn them.
The Greek Cypriots were not happy at all with this solution. Makarios and his followers were not prepared to honour our signature and almost immediately, from May 1959, they started pursuing practices aimed at undermining independence, so as to achieve enosis. These practices culminated in the establishment in 1961 of National Organisation of Cyprus (EOK), better known as the Akritas Organisation that had enosis as its exclusive objective. In one of the first pamphlets circulated by the organisation it was stressed: “The feat of our indomitable national spirit and our unwavering desire and resolve to achieve the completion of the work started by Eoka. The work that our side began, our generation will complete.” (The First Partition: Cyprus 1963-64, Makarios Drousiotis)
The organisation, of course was established with the blessing of Makarios, who was “ubiquitous and all-pervasive”. The men of EOK were trained militarily by officers of the Greek contingent (Eldyk), former section leaders of Eoka, while until 1963 EOK had groups and ‘battalions’ all over Cyprus. I should also remind readers that in a letter sent by Makarios (March 1, 1964) to Greek prime minister, Giorgos Papandreou, he wrote the following about the agreements: “…. Not for a moment had I believed that the agreements would constitute a permanent regime.”
In short, to call things by their name, it was the Greek Cypriots that tried to change the status quo and not the Turkish Cypriots who were super-happy with the form the establishment of the Cyprus Republic took. The two communities were, from a political viewpoint, on a divergent rather than convergent course. But when a community or class is content it does not stage revolutions. All the revolutions staged in Europe had one common feature: they were really social revolutions of poor workers and the hard-done-by (The Age of Capital, EJ Hobsbawn). And today, if there were a revolution in Saudi Arabia it would not come from the emirs with their millions and secret harems but from the poor and from women who are suppressed.
Some may wonder that if this was the situation, why were the Turkish Cypriots arming themselves as evidenced by the capture of the ship Denize that was carrying a large quantity of guns for TMT? The explanation, which is difficult to challenge, was that, judging by the rhetoric of the Greek Cypriot newspapers and other sources, the Turkish Cypriots feared that sooner or later the Greek Cypriots either on their own or in cooperation with Greece would have tried to secure enosis. The Turkish Cypriots wanted to avert that at all costs. The astute Rauf Dentash considered such a development a matter of time and unfortunately he was proved correct on July 15, 1974.
The ‘Turkish mutiny’ would have been the correct term if the Greek Cypriots defended the treaties that established the Republic (which Tassos Papadopoulos described as a ‘blessing’ in 2005, better than enosis) and were models of legal and constitutional behaviour, in contrast to the Turkish Cypriots who supposedly rose against the Cyprus Republic to destroy it, despite the privileges it gave to them. But “everyone understands what his perception allows him to,” according to a wise saying. In Cyprus this perception is affected by immoral, hostile, aggressive and blind nationalism.
George Koumoullis is an economist and social scientist
