TMT and the ENCLAVES

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Eu Accession Dynamics and Conflict Resolution: Catalysing Peace Or Consolidating Partition in Cyprus By Nathalie Tocci
(p.46)

.............If the British were to leave Cyprus, the island should be relumed to Turkey and should under no circumstance be annexed to Greece.
This spontaneous rejection nurtured by the British led to a British-Turkish Cypriot front against EOKA in the mid-1950s. In 1956 the Turkish Cypriots began countering EOKA through VOLKAN and then in 1957 the TMT (Turk Mukavemet Teskilati).
These groups cooperated with British forces in resisting enosis. As a consequence, the Turkish Cypriots were automatically transformed into the enemies of the Greek Cypriot cause.
Active Turkish political interest in Cyprus began in 1955. This was partly a response to external events, namely EOKA violence and the UN debate on Cyprus. But domestic factors also encouraged Turkey's attention. By the mid-1950s, Turkish Prime Minister Adrian Menderes was beginning to face serious economic problems, with a significant slowdown in growth, rising internal and external imbalances and inflationary pressures. Aiming to distract public attention from internal problems, Menderes turned to the external realm. The government stepped up its nationalist rhetoric on Cyprus. Initially, in the early and mid-1950s Turkey supported a retention of British rule. However, by 1957 Turkey formulated its own counter-position to enosis: taksim or partition of the island into Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot zones.

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Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger By Christopher Hitchens p.116-117



The real power in the North is held by the Turkish army and its allies. Among the latter, the most prominent is Mr Rauf Denktash's National Unity Party. Ever since the days of the TMT underground, this faction has expressed the ambitions of conservative Turkish nationalism in Cyprus. Dr Kuchuk, again writing in his daily Hatkin Sesi, confirms that from 1957 he was in touch with Riza Vuruskan, the Turkish officer who led and founded TMT; first to help the British and then to fight against the Greeks and the Turkish Cypriot radicals. Dr Kuchuk recalled, on Vuruskan's death in 1979, that in the 1950s he

used to go to Ankara very frequently. During one of these visits, the late Prime Minister of Turkey, Adnan Menderes, introduced Riza Vuruskan to me . . Later on I met him at the office of a lieutenant general and talked with him there. During our meeting it was decided that Vuruskan should come to Cyprus as 'civilian adviser'. He arrived in Cyprus under an assumed name.

Mr Denktash has also given his reminiscences of that period, in which he admitted for the first time what had long been suspected - that he had been among the founders of TMT:

Everybody thought 1 was the leader but I was not. I was political adviser. Immediately after forming it I handed it over. It was a good mask because even the British and American intelligence thought I was the man who decided everything. I was not. The leaders were former army officers from Turkey. [The Times. 20 January 1978]

In Turkish political terms, before the abolition of independent parties, the NUP would have straddled the right wing of the conservative Justice Party, with room at its extremity for supporters of the Fascist National Action Party of Colonel Turkes. Through forces like the Idealist Hearth Associations, exact duplicates of those on the mainland and known under the same name of Ulku Ocaklari, the NUP is able to remind dissenters of the reserve strength possessed by the old TMT.
In interviews with Turkish Cypriot political leaders, I have been able to form some impression of the nature of Mr Denktash's regime. It is described by the main opposition leader. Mr Alpay Durduran of the Communal Liberation Party, as 'a Rightist movement with Fascist tendencies'. The leader of the more radical Republican Turkish Party, Mr Osker Ozgur, agrees with this characterization and stresses that Mr Denktash is a client of the Turkish military. He told me that on 21 August 1981. when elections had left Mr Denktash's party without a dependable majority (despite its resources as the governing party and despite its hidden support from mainland settler voters) there was a meeting to discuss a coalition government. Mr liter Turkmen, then the Turkish junta's Foreign Minister, was present at the meeting and told Mr Ozgur personally that his party would not be allowed into a coalition because of its criticisms of NATO. As a result of this direct interference from Ankara, Mr Denktash's party survived its electoral reverses at the hands of disgruntled Turkish Cypriots.

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Cyprus and International Peacemaking By Farid Mirbagheri p. 48


The separation of the two communities has remained a contentious issue ever since the 1963 crisis began. The Turkish Cypriots claim that they were driven out of their homes by the Greek Cypriots and were therefore forced to take refuse in the enclaves. The Greek Cypriots. on the other hand, claim that the Turkish Cypriots imposed isolation on themselves to convince the world that the two could no longer live together in harmony.

All the evidence points towards the validity of the Greek Cypriots' claim:
an official Turkish Cypriot document leaked to the Greek Cypriois stated that :

"a fine of £25 or other severe punishment, and one month imprisonment or whipping' would be imposed on Turks residing in the enclaves who entered Greek areas without special permit, or who did so (permit or no permit) for the purpose of visiting Greek courts, hospitals or other state institutions, or nor business with Greeks or friendly association with Greeks, or merely for a walk or for amusement.


In a report to the UN on 11 March l965 U Thant -stated: '

The Turkish Cypriot policy of self-isolation has led the community in the opposite direction from normality.'

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Mediating in Cyprus: The Cypriot Communities and the United Nations By Oliver P. Richmond p.79




The result of the escalation of violence was that the Turkish Cyprints' semi-voluntary withdrawal to enclaves became permanent, these areas being beyond the control of the government. This was both for their security and because they were under pressure from hard-liners within the community to withdraw from any cooperation with the Greek Cypriot side.

This implied that the Turkish Cypriote also wanted to change the I960 constitution and effect greater political and practical separation, despite the fact thai later they would call for a reversion to the constitution. The Turkish Cypriot leadership then declared that the constitution was dead, that the two sides could no longer live with each other and that partition was the only solution. Two of the enclaves provided a spark for further violence. Kokkina and Mansoura were Turkish Cypriot-dominatcd areas on the coast, close to Turkey and the Greek Cypriote feared that these points might be used to land arms from Turkey for the Turkish Cypriots

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Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World - p.105-107
by Thomas Blom Hansen, Finn Stepputat




105 • The Spirit of Terror

Unlike political regimes which have been transformed or turned over in the last decades, whether it be in Eurupe, in the postsocialist world, or in the Third World, a specific regime of authority has been more or less maintained in Turkish-Cypriot enclaves and territories in Cyprus, now, for almost forty years. Here, it is interesting to study the workings of an old-fashioned regime in the contemporary period. Indeed, an old political ethos haunts the contemporary in northern Cyprus, "the spirit of the TMT* ("TMT ruhu"), as Turkish Cyprinls call it.
The TMT (Turk Mukavemet Teskilati), the Turkish Resistance Organization, was a guerrilla group founded underground in 1958 by Turkish-Cypriot community leaders in collaboration with Turkey's Special War Unit (Akkurt 2000, 35; Tansu 2001, 27-29). It took its inspiration from the Greek-Cypriot EOKA' that was fighting the British for indepen¬dence and for union with Greece (ENOSIS). The mimicry and mirroring between these two underground organizations and the administrative practices they engendered is significant. Now, as they generated what is problematically called the "inter-communal conflict between Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots," the members of EOKA and TMT also became community administrators early on. They took their place in the administrative body of the Republic of Cyprus, when declared independent (from the British) in I960. When in 1963 EOKA attacked Turkish-Cypriot communities, the whole island was parceled into ghettolike enclaves with complicated borders guarded by the United Nations. Turkish-Cypriot administrators defected from the bi-communal Republic of Cyprus and under the organizing initiative of the TMT began to form their own separate statelike system. The kernels of the contemporary unrecognized state in Cyprus (the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus") and its specific culture of politics-' were planted in that period.

The structure of the TMT and its political spirit was what organized the successive administrative entities under which the Turkish-Cypriots became subjects. A Turkish-Cypriot lawyer explained: "The TMT was protecting the Turkish-Cypriots from attacks by EOKA. And the Turkish-Cypriots had to recognize this force that was protecting them."



106 • Yael Navaro-Yashin

Now, Turkish-Cypnots still speak of what they call "the spirit of the TMT" as metaphor for the culture of politics in northern Cyprus. The old guerrilla fighters arc now leaders and members of the administration, more than forty years onward after the formation of the TMT. There is still a taboo around discussing the culture of terror inflicted by the TMT on its own subjects, the Turkish-Cypriots- And in official representations (in the administration's newspapers and in propaganda speeches delivered in national ceremonies, school textbooks, and programs on TV), TMT fighters are represented as "heroes" who saved Turkish-Cypriots from being exterminated by the Greek-Cypriots. If this interpretation is partially accepted by Turkish-Cypriots, it is also complicated, by most who are not associated with the establishment, in spaces where people feel they can speak their mind. In the most intimate encounters, among close friends and family, people tell stories "of Turkish-Cypriots murdered by the TMT," commonly speculating whether their "martyred" relatives may have been assassinated by the TMT and not, as officially claimed, by EOKA or by Greek-Cypriots. Numerous stories are circulated in private quarters about TMT atrocities against its own subjects, the Turkish-Cypriots.

Cemil, who was bom around the time when the TMT was created, said:
The system that has, to this day. continued to govern this country is the TMT system. The TMT was founded in 1958 and started to administer the Turkish-Cypriots. Even the postal service was in TMT hands in the period of enclaves between 1963 and 1974. Now we have the continuation of that administration, only under a different name, the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus."
The spirit of 1958 still haunts us. People who have grown under this system learned to be discrete, to watch their words and speech.

I never learned to be this way; this is why they sacked me from a number of jobs. Somebody heard that I was saying something critical about the administration to somebody else. And that was the end of that.

"The TMT spirit" could be studied and analyzed as the political unconscious of Turkish-Cypriots. With the old guerrilla-fighters still in power, if in civilian or administrative garb, and offshoots of the old organizational circuits springing up under new names, the TMT is alive not only as a culture of politics but also as actual and implemented political organization. But when Turkish-Cypriots refer to what they call "the TMT spirit' they are referring to the culture of terror, tacit fear, and enforced secrecy that was the order of the day at the height of conflict with Greek-Cypriots, between 1963 and 1974, a culture of politics that has remained as practice and precipitation since.

A former guerilla, Savalas Bey gave an account of the culture of politics spread through the TMT:


107

I joined the Organization at the age of eighteen. During the day, I used to work in the village cooperative. But in the nights, I used to leave home and go underground. There was secrecy then. You couldn't tell anything even to your mother or father. My old man was a bit slow. One time, two times, he didn't understand what I was up to. But one night, again he saw me returning home very late. He asked me: "What are you up to?" "I was tying the donkey to the tree," I told him. When he saw that I kept returning late, he got mad. I was married then. I realized this wouldn't work. I spoke with my wife; I said to her, "Look, I am in the Organization, that's why I am constantly going out at night. But don't tell anybody, or they would have me killed." My wife went to my parents and told them I need to work in the cooperative at night and everyone locked their mouths. They never asked me anything again. Anyway, our language was coded then; we spoke with passwords so nobody would understand.

People almost viseerally remember the fear instigated by the TMT. Pembe Hanim, in her sixties, said:

The TMT came to our village and made a "guerrilla" out of every thief and idle man. These men became the leaders of the TMT in our village- We used to be afraid of both Greeks and Turks.
The TMT spread fear amongst us; that fear remains. They killed many Turks, you know.

For example, they killed the husband of our neighbor Behice Hanim who was a policeman in the British bases. One night the TMT came to his house and said he should leave the gate to the bases open for them to go in and smuggle guns. But if he were to hide this from his British employers, he would be left without a job, so of course he told the British. The following day, the TMT called him up to the village square. There they beat him up violently. His bones were broken. He was practically lynched. He died soon after.
If subjects of the administration in northern Cyprus speak of the endurance of "the TMT spirit," that culture of fear they refer to with periodical lynchings and terrorization is relatively less intense today than it was at the height of conflict. The difference is that people have become used to being administered under such a system and have been inhabiting its culture of politics

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Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide By Yiannis Papadakis p.196- 197





BETRAYAL

'My father was a farmer. We were doing OK until 1963 when the killings broke out. I was only a boy then, feeling so afraid the Rums would kill us. The Green Line was drawn, the land was divided and my father's land, our fields, had become "the other side".' Jemal's eyes dampened as he spoke of how his father was killed. Jemal was in his late thirties, and he invited me to his house to talk and to meet his children:
My father was a stubborn man. 'So what, I have been going there all my life, who will stop me now? Anyway, all the Rums around are my friends,' So he kept on going there. The TMT came to our house and told us that he should stop. The new 'law' was no working on the other side- no relations, no trade, no nothing with the Rums. And, of course, no speaking Greek among ourselves. But my father was stubborn like a donkey. He kept on going. One day a Rum friend of my father took him aside and cautioned him. 'Don't come here any more. It's too dangerous. I don't know if I can help you if anything goes wrong.' He said that his own son had taken arms and joined the groups fighting against us. My father would not listen. 'I only fear God, nothing else,' he said and kept on going.

One day the TMT came to our house again. 'Hey Mustafa, come with us. we just want to talk,' they called and he went. Late in the night I heard my mother's screams, like a dog was being slaughtered. My father came back with his face alt broken and bloody. 'It's nothing,' he said, 'I fell on a doorstep.' But later he told Ihe family what had happened. I only found out after many years that they had beaten him with his head covered. One day five months later, my father did not come back from the fields. We started searching. First his dog was found, the one he used to take with him out in the fields. Then his body. The TMT came at once. 'You see, we told him not to go there.' They even told us the name of the killer. He was a Rum who drove a lorry. Bui later, when I was around sixteen perhaps, I began to hear things. That he was not killed by the Rums. That TMT killed him. But I refused to believe them. It was impossible to believe them.


I joined the TMT as soon as I was allowed to carry a gun because I hated Rums so much. I don't know what made me change later. I think it was two things, the university and the war in 1974.

He went on:
In 1974 i understood what TMT really meant. When the Rums attacked us and my friend right next to me was injured, none of those brave TMT guys came to help. It was confusion in the war, the Rums were attacking us in the village and we had explosives stored all around us. I kept calling for help to carry them away, otherwise we would all get blown up, but they just sat there talking or giving orders. They were so scared they were going crazy, saying all kinds of things that just came into their heads. Like one said: 'Let us dig a big hole underground and hide the women and children there.' You know Yianni, it's not impossible that some of the mass graves of Turkish Cypriots from 1974 were created like that, by a lunacy that someone like him came up with.

After the war I went to university. In Turkey I started to see things differently and hear other things from Turkish Cypriot students around me. And then one day I went back to our house. Now I had to know. 'Why didn't you tell me that my father was killed by the TMT? That so and so killed him?' It was like a bomb fell in the house. Everybody froze. 'For us the issue is closed,' my uncle said. 'It's not good to talk about these things, it's not safe,' my mother said. In the beginning they didn't want to talk about it, but when they realized that I knew everything they told me what happened.

How a TMT man killed my father under orders, how other Turkish Cypriots were killed by TMT and were later declared 'martyrs', as if they had been killed by Rums. And how the TMT even came to tell us the name of the killer, who was not the real killer.

That way they could kill two birds with one stone. Say that my father was killed by a Rum and make us take revenge and create more animosity. From then on I couldn't stand the TMT. I felt ashamed for having been one of them, and for being so nationalist in the past. Many people were killed by TMT but people still pretend that they don't know, even though everyone does. The worst thing was to grow up thinking that your father was killed by the Rums and then find out.

Can you understand how I felt, Yianni?

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Cyprus: A Troubled Island By Andrew Borowiec p.56


As usual in such circumstances, the escalation of the conflict raced out of control. Already after dawn on December 21. after the initial shooting incident, Turkish crowds began to gather in the northern part of Nicosia and near the road to the seaside town of Kyrenia. apparently prodded by the secret "Turkish Defense Organization" (TMT). which in many cases provided the leadership in the demonstrations and clashes. The funeral of the two Turkish Cypriots killed in the postmidnight hours took place on December 22 without an incident but shooting broke out in the evening hours. The intensity of firing in the heart of Nicosia was such that the Greek side cut telephone and telegraph communications to the distinctive Tuirkish areas while Greek Cypriot police took control of Nicosia airport a short distance from the city.

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Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger By Christopher Hitchens p.46



5. Though the Turkish Cypriot terrorist group Volkan was founded in 1955, and carried out many lethal attacks on civilians, very few members of it were ever tried, let alone punished by the British crown.

In contrast, numerous supporters of the Greek Cypriot EOKA were hanged and hundreds more imprisoned. The British trained an exclusively Turkish mobile reserve to combat EOKA and employed many more Turks in the police and auxiliary forces. Members of these echelons were involved with Volkan, which later changed its name to the Turkish Defence Force or TMT. In a celebrated case in 1958, a Turk, Sergeant Tuna, was convicted of possessing bombs and ammunition by a British court. The good sergeant, unlike his Greek counterparts, was allowed bail in his own recognizance and left immediately for Turkey.

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Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger By Christopher Hitchens p. 47

Imperial favouritism towards the Turks did not 'work', in the sense that it did not succeed in crushing the Greek Cypriot rebellion. Nor did any policy succeed in this impossible objective. But it did succeed in damaging intercommunal relations very severely and perhaps permanently. It is important to remember that before 1955 there was no history of internal viciousness in Cyprus.

The island had been aptly described as 'an ethnographical fruit cake in which the Greek and Turkish currants were mixed up in every town and village and almost in every street'. In spite of political clashes over the future of Cyprus, the Cypriots never had to endure the bitter, venomous, protracted hostility that was the experience of religious and national struggle in Crete and other islands warring on the Ottomans. Even during the First World War. with Britain and Greece on one side and Turkey on the other, there was no analogous hostility between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. It was only when Turks put on British uniforms to oppose a popular movement that they were shot at by Greeks. And even after that, it took some time before people resorted to the final obscenity of killing people just because they were Greek or Turkish.

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Keeping the Peace in the Cyprus Crisis of 1963-64 by Alan James; Palgrave, 2002
page 71


Meanwhile, many Turkish Cypriots had been taking steps to provide themselves with greater security by moving from mixed to nearby Turkish Cypriot villages, or to areas where their community was trying to create something in the nature of defensible enclaves. One report said that about 42 out of the 102 mixed villages in Cyprus had thus been ‘evacuated’. 75 Two of the largest Turkish Cypriot enclaves were northern Nicosia, and an area stretching northwards from just beyond Nicosia to the mountain range which lay above the coastal town of Kyrenia. Movement along the road between the two towns was controlled by the contingent of the Turkish Army in Cyprus, which had moved out of its Nicosia barracks for this purpose. Following the Turkish Cypriot members’ withdrawal (or, as they would say, exclusion) from the Government of Cyprus at the start of the crisis, a separate Turkish Cypriot administration was in the process of being set up to manage the areas under their control.

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Two NATO Allies at the Threshold of War: Cyprus, a Firsthand Account of Crisis Management, 1965-1968 by Parker T. Hart; Duke University Press, 1990

page 39


The first clash took place without casualties on May 2, 1964, when Turkish Cypriots at Ayios Theodhoros lit bonfires to celebrate the annual Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice (Kurban Bayram) and fired off blanks. Misunderstood on the Greek side, this developed into an exchange of shooting which did not last. On June 15, 1964, a second and more serious incident was narrowly averted by the UNFICYP, which was able to persuade a detachment of the Turkish Cypriot Gendarmerie to withdraw from hill positions overlooking Ayios Theodhoros that threatened free passage by its Greek population.

From here the record is silent until December 1966, when there were three cases of Turkish Cypriot interference with freedom of movement, two involving Greek Cypriot Police and one a National Guard vehicle. In January 1967, Turkish Cypriots removed road signs at Kophinou bearing the usual English transliterations of Greek place-names and re-erected them with Turkish versions.
The Turkish Fighters Organization ( TMT) began to initiate local actions stemming from island-wide political bargaining or in retaliation for harassment of Turkish Cypriot buses at Famagusta. They exploited their command of Kophinou's strategic location just north of Ayios Theodhoros, astride the main junction of the Nicosia and Larnaca road links with Limassol. In Kophinou, Turkish Cypriots well outnumbered Greeks, 710 to 18.

Under a mainland Turk officer with the nom de guerre "Mehmet," sent from Turkey outside treaty limits to maintain discipline in the TMT but proving to be a hothead, Turks demanded that bus destination signs carry the appropriate Turkish, not Greek names. The National Guard, backed by mainland Greek officers and men introduced into Cyprus far beyond treaty limits, then moved into the area to neutralize this challenge to vital communications. After a few days of standoff, UNFICYP was able to restore the status quo. However, General Grivas, not noted for his coolheadedness, ordered a battalion of Greeks supported by armored cars to Skarinou, where it remained despite UNFICYP objections that it was unnecessary. UNFICYP then increased its own presence between the opposing forces and negotiated freedom of movement.



page 41


UNFICYP, with a sharp reaction behind it from the Greek Cypriot government, informed the Turkish Cypriot leadership that patrols must be allowed to pass. To make the point stick, on September 16 a patrol from Skarinou was escorted by the UNFICYP. On its way south it encountered a road block, which it removed; on the return north, farm vehicles and tractors fully barred passage. Major Charles Huxtable, UNFICYP escort commander, had his men remove the obstacles, but under the order of "Mehmet," he and his company sergeant were pushed, kicked, and spat at by TMT elements. It required strong representations by UNFICYP with Turkish Cypriot leaders and the Turkish Embassy in Nicosia to get the road reopened. Soon afterward "Mehmet" assaulted Huxtable near Kophinou and threatened to kill him. "Mehmet" was then relieved of his command by Ankara and ordered back to Turkey.

It was always clear to the U.S. embassy in Ankara that the basic reasons for TMT intransigeance and troublemaking at Kophinou and Ayios Theodhoros lay in the widespread intercommunal challenge and violent response that had prevailed on the island since December 1963.

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Cyprus: The Impact of Diverse Nationalism on a State by Halil Ibrahim Salih; University of Alabama Press, 1978

page 9


The Turkish Cypriots were opposed to the EOKA operations and joined British law-enforcing operations in attempts to crush the guerrilla movement.
At first, the objective of EOKA was to leave the Turkish Cypriots alone and to concentrate on the British; however, when the Turkish Cypriots joined hands with the British in hunting down the guerrillas, they also became targets. The Turkish Cypriots created their own underground organization, known as VOLKAN ("volcano"); and later it changed its name to Türk Müdafaa Teşkilati ("Turkish Resistance Organization") or TMT. TMT was able to organize a united front against the EOKA forces, but it never did become as organized or as disciplined as the groups under Grivas.



page 10

The TMT members did undergo some military training in Turkey, and money and arms were also supplied by the Turkish government. Under the leadership of Dr. Fazil Küçük, the Cypriot Turkish party was organized all over the island and among the Turkish Cypriots on the mainland. The conflict on the island was no longer between the British colonial government and the Cypriots but had shifted to a confrontation of the two major ethnic groups.





page 111

As the EOKA guerrilla warfare intensified against the British colonial administration in all parts of the island, the tension between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots escalated, and civil war seemed imminent. The Turkish Cypriots organized their own underground movement called Volkan (Volcano); later it was named the Türk Müdafaa Teşkilate (Turkish Resistance Movement) or TMT. The objective of TMT was to protect Turkish Cypriots and deter those who challenged the guidance of their leaders. The EOKA members were also antagonized by the willingness of certain Turkish Cypriots to assist the British forces in the interrogation of the captured guerrilla members and to join the sweeping operations in tracking down the terrorists. A number of Turkish Cypriots lost their lives in serving the British colonial government.