UK's murky role in Cyprus crisis

[Orphic_Hymn]

UK's murky role in Cyprus crisis
By Jolyon Jenkins
Producer, BBC Radio 4's Document

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41238000/jpg/_41238380_majortedmacey203.jpg
Major Ted Macey
Major Ted Macey demonstrated weapons to Turkish Cypriots


Evidence has emerged that British undercover forces were involved in fomenting the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots ten years before the 1974 partition of Cyprus.

The new evidence found by BBC Radio 4's programme Document centres on the mystery of Ted Macey, a British army major who was abducted, presumed killed by Greek Cypriot paramilitaries.

I had no strong expectation that we would find the Turkish Cypriot village. We had a 40-year-old British army map, bearing only the old Greek names. Our guide, Martin Packard, had not been here for decades. The countryside was deserted, no one spoke English, and night had fallen.

In 1964, Martin was a naval intelligence officer, sent to Cyprus to do an extraordinary job. Fighting had broken out in the capital, Nicosia, between Greeks and Turks.

Unrest spread, and the British troops in Cyprus stepped in to keep the peace. But the British General, Peter Young, thought that peace meant more than keeping the two sides apart. He believed the communities could live side by side, sometimes in mixed villages, as they had for centuries.

But that meant small disputes had to be prevented from turning into big ones. Gen Young appointed Martin, a fluent Greek speaker, as a roving trouble-shooter and negotiator. With two officers from the mainland Greek and Turkish armies, he roamed the north of Cyprus by helicopter, settling disputes.

Diplomacy

We eventually found the village, and even an interpreter. Here, in Easter 1964, Martin had resolved a conflict over a flock of sheep, stolen from the Turkish villages by their Greek Cypriots neighbours. Martin tracked down the flock in a Greek village.

But none of the Turkish Cypriots were prepared to come with him to get them. So he went himself. He took the youngest lamb and flung it across his shoulder. The mother followed, and so did the rest of the flock.


"It is my feeling they wanted to have fighting
between the two sides.
They didn't want us to get together"
Nicos Koshis

"I walked a very long way, I was very tired, leading this flock of sheep," he said. "We arrived at the village and all of the villagers rushed out as if I were Moses coming back with some great message."

The old men of the village remembered the incident, but were not conspicuously grateful. It was a good thing Martin had got their sheep back, they said, grudgingly, because otherwise they were planning to steal a Greek flock in retaliation.

Martin believes such small episodes were the key to preventing the island drifting towards ethnic separation. But, he says, this was not what the Americans and British had in mind.

He recalls being asked to take a visiting US politician, acting secretary of state George Ball, around the island. Arriving back in Nicosia, says Martin, "Ball patted me on the back, as though I were sadly deluded and he said: That was a fantastic show son, but you've got it all wrong, hasn't anyone told you that our plan here is for partition?"

Cyprus museum
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41149000/jpg/_41149078_museum.jpg
The division that followed - and still exists - caused pain for both sides


Undaunted, Martin pursued plans to move Turkish Cypriots back to the villages they had fled. But just as the first resettlement was about to take place, British General Michael Carver had him arrested and flown off the island - in an unmarked CIA plane.

The ostensible reason was that Cyprus had become too dangerous for Martin to operate in; the evidence given was that a British liaison officer, Major Ted Macey, had been abducted and presumed murdered just a few days before.

All the evidence points to the murder having been carried out by Greek Cypriot extremists.

In the Public Record Office in London, I found files showing that British military commanders in Cyprus had received "very reliable information" that Major Macey's abduction was planned "by Greek security forces with approval of high government circles and connivance of the police to extract information about Turkish invasion plans".

The Greek Cypriots were convinced that Major Macey was aiding the Turks.

Listening bases

Could it be true? I spoke to a former Para who accompanied Major Macey on expeditions to Turkish Cypriot villages. There, says the Para, he demonstrated the use of British ammunition and sub-machine guns to the Turkish Cypriot irregular forces.

I also tracked down one of Major Macey's former drivers, who showed me a curious note, in the major's handwriting. It is a list of arms and explosives being stored in civilian premises in Nicosia: arms, says the driver, which Major Macey had supplied, under British orders, to the Turkish fighters.

So did the peacekeeping forces, and the big powers, really want Cyprus to remain an independent, unitary state? Or was it more important to head off the threat of a "Mediterranean Cuba" by keeping the island within Turkey's - and hence Nato's - sphere of influence?


Britain had, and has, electronic listening bases on the island - important parts of the Nato intelligence effort.

Nicos Koshis, a former justice minister, thinks that it was those bases that determined the fate of the island: "It is my feeling they wanted to have fighting between the two sides. They didn't want us to get together. If the communities come together maybe in the future we say no bases in Cyprus."

You can hear Radio 4's investigation into Britain's role in the 1964 Cyprus conflict in Document on Monday 23 February at 2000GMT or afterwards at the Listen again page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml)

[Orphic_Hymn]

Dhekelia

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/maps/dx-map.gif


Akrotiri

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/maps/ax-map.gif



By terms of the 1960 Treaty of Establishment that created the independent Republic of Cyprus, the UK retained full sovereignty and jurisdiction over two areas of almost 254 square kilometers in total: Akrotiri and Dhekelia. The larger of these is the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area, which is also referred to as the Eastern Sovereign Base Area.
The southernmost and smallest of these is the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area, which is also referred to as the Western Sovereign Base Area

Source :
CIA FACTBOOK.
Akrotiri (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ax.html)
Dhekelia (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/dx.html)


Now to the interesting parts...

In the Treaty of Accession to the EU for Cyprus we find this specific term..

Protocol on the British Sovereign Base Areas

A protocol to the Accession Treaty deals with the British Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus (SBAs). The SBAs cover 3% of the island and have open borders with Cyprus. The protocol aims at protecting the interests of those Cypriots resident or working in the SBAs. Hence the open boundaries between the SBAs and the rest of the island will be maintained.

(But who is a resident or a worker in a British only military base ?
Note that Agios Nikolaos in Dhekelia is the well know spying network also known as EHELON)
LINK (http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/negotiations/pdf/negotiations_report_to_ep.pdf)

It gets even more interesting when we look into the Annan FIASCO that also proposed :

ANNEX II: ADDITIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE TREATY OF ESTABLISHMENT
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey
Desiring to make provision to give effect to the intention of the Government of the United Kingdom to relinquish sovereignty over parts of the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area and Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area,
Have agreed as follows

Article 1
The areas in respect of which the United Kingdom relinquishes its sovereignty are described in the Appendix to this Protocol. Those areas are in this Protocol referred to as the relinquished areas.

Article 2

1 All international obligations and responsibilities of the United Kingdom in relation to the relinquished areas shall henceforth, insofar as they may be held to have application to the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area or the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area, be assumed by the United Cyprus Republic.
2. All international rights and benefits heretofore enjoyed by the United Kingdom by virtue of their application to the relinquished areas shall henceforth be enjoyed by the United Cyprus Republic.


(Instead of posting the whole thing, they relinquish some lands but obviously not the two military bases)

Original UN Source (http://www.cyprus-un-plan.org/Annan_Plan_April2004.pdf)(wouldn't work)

Source used (http://unannanplan.agrino.org/Annan_Plan_MARCH_30_2004.pdf)

Am I the only one that sees a persistance to acknowledge part of the Cypriot lands as British ??

[Ptolemy]

FANOULA ARGYROU, a professional researcher, looks at allegations made this week in a BBC Radio programme about a British spy ring operating to support the Turkish Cypriots in 1964 and finds that the truth is even more amazing.THE murky side of Britain's role in Cyprus was highlighted this week by a BBC Radio 4 programme that claimed a British spy ring cooperated with the Turkish Cypriots during the troubled days of 1964.

The following summary of the documentary was also available on the same day on the BBC 4's website:

" Ever since the Turkish army invaded and occupied Northern Cyprus in 1974, the partition of the island between ethnic Greeks and Turks has seemed set in stone.

"But the first Green Line, through the capital, was drawn ten years earlier, by a British general (Young) using a green chinagraph pencil that happened to be at hand. Throughout 1964, British troops were on the island, supposedly for peace-keeping. But were they really bringing peace?

"In this programme, Mike Thomson examined new documents that suggest that the real motives of some of the peacekeepers were less than honourable."

The documents reveal the existence of a spy ring of British troops who were materially aiding Turkish insurgents by gun-running and spying on Greek Cypriot military installations.

Although one of the men was caught by the Greek Cypriots, the rest were spirited off the island by the British authorities before the Cypriot police could interrogate them.

The programme also investigated the long-standing mystery of a British army major, who was abducted, presumed murdered, by Greek Cypriot paramilitaries. New documentary evidence uncovered by the programme shows that he, too, was aware of illicit gun-running on behalf of theTurks and that, although the British authorities had good intelligence about the identities of his murderers, they chose not to press the Greek Cypriot authorities to investigate the case.

Intelligence officer

Many Greek Cypriots have long believed that the Nato powers, notably Britain and America, were opposed to the idea of an independent Cyprus because of fears that it could fall into communist hands and become a "Mediterranean Cuba" - a scenario that would have put at risk British electronic spying bases on the island.

The programme assesses the evidence that pro-American elements on the island in 1964 actively conspired to foment inter-communal strife in order to justify the effective partition of the island - a situation that came to pass in 1974."

The most striking part of the BBC documentary was the story of Martin Packard, a British naval intelligence officer who was sent to Cyprus from Malta on account of being a fluent speaker of Greek, to help prevent small incidents between Greek and Turks from escalating into serious ones.

It seems, though, that he was taking his mission very seriously, for just as he was being very successful in stopping bloodshed, he was virtually abducted by his superiors, put on a plane and flown out of the island.

Packard related his experience to the BBC that, after mediating successfully between a Greek and a Turkish village over some stolen sheep: "The US Acting Secretary of State George Ball, visiting the island at the time, patted me on the back, as though I were sadly deluded and he said: 'That was a fantastic show son, but you've got it all wrong, hasn't anyone told you that our plan here is for partition?' "

Undaunted, Martin pursued plans to move Turkish Cypriots back to the villages they fled. But as the first settlement was about to take place,
British General Michael Carver had him arrested and flown off the island in an unmarked CIA plane.

[Ptolemy]

Not new documents


I listened to the programme very carefully and as a researcher I have the following comments to make.


It is necessary from the offset to set the record straight by underlining that these documents are not new releases but documents that were released ten years ago and ever since have available for research at the Public Records Office (PRO) in London.


As a regular researcher at the PRO myself, I have seen and researched thoroughly these documents long ago and refer to them in length in two of my books - 'Conspiracy or Blunder?' published in Nicosia in 2000, and 'Top Secret,' also published in Nicosia in 2004.


I have no doubt that the Radio 4 programme, although well intentioned, gave half the truth around the existence of the 'spy ring' in Cyprus that was aiding the Turkish Cypriots.British 'conciliators'

Both Lt Commander Martin Packard and Major Ted Macey were, in fact, working in Cyprus under the instructions of the Foreign Office, specifically under the instructions of high-ranking official Sir Cyril Pickard.

Sir Cyril was at the time an Assistant Under Secretary directly involved with the Cyprus problem.

Their secondment to UNFICYP -?Martin Packard as Conciliator for the Greek Cypriot side and Ted Macey as special Liaison Officer attached to Turkish Cypriot leader Dr Kutchuk's office - had a hidden agenda.

In 1963, Lt Commander Martin Packard was rushed to Cyprus from Malta, where he was serving as a naval intelligence officer.

He mastered the Greek language perfectly.

After his peacekeeping in Cyprus he was awarded an MBE.

Invasion preparations

The same went for Major T. Macey. He mastered both the Greek and Turkish languages and had served in Greece for a number of years.

He had a rough 'Rambo' image and his 'terms of reference' were quite different from those of Packard for obvious reasons if one studies the British documents analytically vis-a-vis the Foreign Office policy of the
period (which has hardly changed at all!).

Macey, indeed, provided the Turkish Cypriots with arms and ammunition, offered them training and, in general, he headed the preparation for an eventual Turkish invasion.


Packard, on the other hand, was working on a different level; that of a friendly conciliator, as the British policy needed the Greek Cypriots to be kept in check, quiet, unarmed, restrained and behaving themselves.


The knowledge of the local languages in these cases was a definite must and the best way to gain the confidence of the people.

According to PRO documents (which refer to a statement made by the then President Archbishop Makarios) Major Macey and his driver were murdered by a ringleader of a gang active in the Famagusta-Larnaca area.


Macey and his driver were accused of spying and working for the Turks.


In another document, it is revealed that two Greek Cypriot informants gave the British authorities information as to the place where the bodies lay.

The informants were helped by the British authorities to take asylum in England and also received the 72,000 reward offered.


Macey was also employed to make visits to Greek and Turkish villages throughout Cyprus (just like Martin Packard) reporting on the state of feeling in the countryside. In other words, both were engaged in collecting
intelligence in a manner undetected by the locals and keeping things in check for their superiors.


The Foreign Office also regarded the positioning of British officers within the UN a necessity, in order to be privy to all information received by the UN. " His special experience (Macey's) enabled him to play a unique role in
efforts to maintain peace and save lives through his personal contacts with Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots," it was noted in a report in the PRO files.


The British documents reveal the true 'unique' role of T. Macey as a British 'spy ring leader' aiding the Turkish Cypriots against the Greek Cypriots.


Martin Packard's superiors, fearing for his life, days after Macey's murder, rushed him out of Cyprus via a CIA plane that took him to an American base in Greece.British subversion


As it was correctly stated in the BBC programme, British officers were directly involved in subversive activities on the island: the manufacture of bombs, bombing Turkish properties to blame the Greek Cypriots, espionage and so on.


Their main objective was to de-stabilise Cyprus, bring chaos and confusion and assist the Turks in the execution of their long-term plans.


As Nicos Koshis stated, the British policy was to keep the two communities separated. But with an enlarged hidden agenda.


In February 1964, Archbishop Makarios handed a document to the British High Commissioner regarding those activities.


He referred to the case of Colonel Thursby who, on January 20, 1964, went to the Manager of the Cyprus Asbestos Mines Co Ltd and, under false pretences, demanded to be allowed to collect all the explosives in the stores.

Makarios also wrote to General Gyani (UN force) complaining and listing instances when British troops with the UN contingent did nothing to stop Turks from firing at Greek Cypriots. Marley (mentioned in the programme), Bachelor, Bass (mentioned), Heron, Tyft, Offard and Jones are among those accused of aiding and providing the Turks with arms, ammunition and other military equipment.

Some of those arrested had given sensational information but the Cypriot authorities were totally ignorant of the even more damning information they could have extracted.


But they did not have the chance. The British authorities, who knew full well the extent of the consequences in such a case, quickly arranged for them to be flown out of Cyprus. Marley, who was arrested (as stated in the programme) and gave vital information under interrogation, was tried and condemned to 15 years imprisonment.


However, the British authorities again 'arranged' with the then Attorney General (ex Colonial employee) Tornaritis (and not the Cypriot Government) to get him out of for health reasons.

Partition plans

Although Martin Packard refers to George Ball's statement regarding "their policy being partition," he and the programmers make no mention whatsoever of the policy of the Foreign Office, which is clearly demonstrated in no uncertain terms through the PRO files.


In fact, George Ball was at the time referring to the British plans to which he and his department were privy.


In February, 1964, the Planning Department of the Foreign Office (Packard's superiors) devised a comprehensive plan named ' The Future of Cyprus' which stated: "It is now clear that any long term solution in Cyprus must involve geographical separation of the Greek and Turkish communities.


"This could of, course, be achieved by wholesale removal of the Turkish community elsewhere. Less drastic alternatives following some redeployment of the population in the island are:


"a Partition so that a predominantly Greek area is united with Greece and a predominantly Turkish area is united with Turkey.


"b Partition so that one or both areas are independent, perhaps with special relationships with Greece and Turkey respectively, or


"c A Federal Constitution, in which the island would be divided into cantons, one or two of which were Turkish.

"It would already be difficult for the Greeks to intervene successfully in Cyprus. The Turks would have completed their intervention before they could prevent it.


"The obvious Greek counter-move would be to invade Turkish Thrace. One way of preventing this would be for a small force drawn from all NATO countries to police the frontier.


"We could make much greater use of United States and British naval power to deter Greek naval assault across the Aegean. The ability of the Greeks to mount an airborne intervention is strictly limited.".


(A month before, in London, where representatives of both communities were summoned for a conference, Rauf Denktash had placed on the table in the presence of Glafcos Clerides, Tassos Papadopoulos, Stella Soulioti and
others his and Turkey's demands i.e. geographical federation...). ?


From the masses of the PRO documents released so far, one can build upon the theory that it was in fact the British and not the Americans who thought of, prepared and instigated the Greek Junta takeover in Greece in 1967, in order to achieve their planning objectives over Cyprus.

The Americans were used as and when it suited the British, always retaining a secondary and assisting role to date.


?False accusations


Upon leaving Cyprus, Martin Packard prepared a report, which he handed to his superiors, in which he accused the Greek Cypriots of slaughtering 27 Turkish Cypriots in the Nicosia General Hospital.


His accusations appeared on April 2, 1988 in the 'Guardian' newspaper through his friend at the time Chief Editor of the paper Peter Preston, who, in 1964, was also working in Cyprus.


On February 10, 1994 Channel 4 Television showed a documentary called 'Secret Story - Dead or Alive' which in a way addressed the drama of the 1,619 missing Greek Cypriots since the brutal Turkish invasion of Cyprus in
July 1974.

Martin Packard made an unexpected appearance to say that in 1963/64 he had prepared a report in which he included that: "The largest single element of these missing people were the Turkish Cypriot patients at the General Hospital. Nothing had been heard of any of them. It was assumed that they were being held in custody somewhere. The outcome of my investigation suggested that they had all of them been killed in the General Hospital. They had been removed at night, the bodies from there had been taken out to outlying farms up in the region of Skilloura and out there they had been dismembered and passed through farm dicing machines and they had then been seeded into the ploughed land."


I found these accusations too horrific to be true. Immediately, I wrote to the then Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Heathcoat-Amory and demanded to be allowed to view Packard's report.


As he spoke about this report having definitely not been released, I found Mr Packard's liberty to disclose such damning secret information, with no evidence at all to substantiate it, extraordinarily questionable.


Five-year fight


I raised the issue that he either had breached the Official Secrets Act as he spoke from knowledge of a report still retained or he spoke in his capacity of a British conciliator with the Department's permission. Whatever
the case, we had a right to see the evidence of what he was so freely accusing us.


My fight with the Foreign Office and other government departments lasted five years (1994-1999) until he was finally 'ordered' to close the matter by withdrawing the accusations.


Peter Preston, with an article in the 'Guardian' (which was equally guilty and responsible for printing unsubstantiated allegations), on May 3, 1999, wrote that Martin Packard revisited the island and found out that he was given wrong information, no evidence at all, and that in fact no Turkish Cypriot had been harmed.

[Ptolemy]

wrote an article in Simerini on May 18, 1999 and another one was written by Charalambos Charalambides on May 19, 1999, finally revealing the truth.


Packard was wrong and had no evidence whatsoever for those horrific allegations against us.


The damage, however, to the Greek side was immeasurable. The Turks had used Packard's allegations to the full and in all international forums, as admitted by Peter Preston.


Packard was obliged to write to Kofi Annan withdrawing the allegations and restoring the truth, which is that no Turkish Cypriot had been killed.

They were all protected under Makarios's orders.


And that was the result of Packard's role in Cyprus in 1964 which had nothing to do with petty conflicts over..sheep between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots.?Finally: "The programme assesses the evidence that pro-American elements on the island in 1964 actively conspired to foment inter-communal strife in order to justify the effective partition of the island - a situation that came to pass in 1974", is stated on the BBC 4's
website.

This is totally wrong.


The British documents reveal exactly the opposite. I find it extraordinary after such a broadcast to reach such a ridiculous assumption!


It was not the so called pro-American elements on the island in 1964 who actively conspired to foment inter-communal strife in order to justify the effective partition of the island, but the very British intelligence men -
the 'spy ring' - as they chose to name them under direct orders of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.

They were the ones who were aided on the island by their pro-British elements within both communities who in their own way assisted the British and Turkish partitionist policy to gain ground.


This was an assistance they enjoy to this very day with disastrous results for our national cause.



Fanoulla Argyrou


Researcher/author


London


24.1.2006

[Tsontos]

Kissinger’s Secret Phone Calls Concerning Cyprus

BY: Alekos


The following is a translation of an article which appeared in Eleftherotypia on July 20. It includes a transcript of telephone conversations between Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby.
Kissinger’s Secret Phone Calls Concerning Cyprus

Makarios Drousiotis

The morning of the 20th of July, 1974 when the Turkish invasion of Cyprus was announced, Henry Kissinger was in San Clement, California, where President Nixon had his vacation residence.

In California, it was late in the afternoon. Kissinger had continued telephone conversations with President Nixon, CIA Director William Colby, his British counterpart James Callahan and other State Department officials in Washington.

Kissinger was trying to enact his strategy, which was aimed at avoiding a war between Greece and Turkey and negotiating the Cyprus conflict after the successful landing of Turkish forces on the island. For this to succeed, Greece could not get involved in resisting the Turkish invasion and treat this problem as one that merely concerned Cyprus.

According to the testimony of commander Nikolopoulos, at 6:00 a.m. on July 20, when it became evident that there were Turkish landing operations, in his capacity as the information officer, appealed to the Commander of the Armed Forces Gregorios Bonanos, asking him to give the order to mobilize his fleet. Bonanos answered, “Turks are attacking Cyprus, but we are Greece.” The stance of the Junta leadership, that developments in Cyprus did not concern Greece, was also known to the Director of the CIA, William Colby, explained this to Henry Kissinger in a telephone conversation at 7:35 a.m. on July 20. In that same conversation, Colby also told Kissinger that the Turks would not occupy the entire island and would only advance as far as Amohostos. The capture of Amohostos occurred twenty-four days later, on August 14.

Kissinger: Hello?

Colby: Hi Henry!

Kissinger: Bill, how are you? I am sorry I kept you on the line.

Colby: No problem.

Kissinger: I simply wanted to check with you and verify that you will also things closely. I am in San Clement- can you send us your supporting facts and projections here?

Colby: Sure, fine.

Kissinger: And also, what is the Turkish capability of landing troops? Do you know exactly?

Colby: It is very strong. (some static follows)

Kissinger: One regiment is how many? Two thousand?

Colby: It’s two or three thousand, yes.

Kissinger: And how many can they send?

Colby: (The answer is unintelligible)

Kissinger: How many is that?

Colby: It looks like they are going to Kyrenia, on the north shore. That is the first step.

Kissinger: What do you think their objective is? They don’t want the whole island, right?

Colby: No, no. What they want it Kyrenia and Amohostos and a line between the two.

Kissinger: So, only the northeast quarter.

Colby: Yes. So, say approximately (unintelligible) from Larnaca and up, since they are advancing they will be in a position to bargain.

“The locals will fight”

Kissinger: What do you think the Greeks will do?

Colby: The local Greeks will fight and there are several reports of bombing in Kyrenia. Primarily the National Guard will put up a fight. It depends on how much power the commanding officers have.

Kissinger: They will fight.

Colby: We will have a very undesirable situation in Cyprus. To be honest, the Greeks are a little far off. Their air force is too far away to be deployed. They won’t be able to do much from there.

Kissinger: Even from Rhodes?

Colby: Excuse me?

Kissinger: Even from Rhodes?

Colby: Their central air base is back in Greece, near Athens.

Kissinger: What is the relative strength of the two armies?

Colby: The Turks number around 300,000, and the Greeks around 100,000. But most of the Greek forces are located further North, inThrace. If there were to be any kind of conflict, it would be there, up in the northern region, near Thessaloniki.

Kissinger: Do you have any good ideas for what we should do?

Colby: I believe that the most important thing is to convince the Greeks not to fight, to say we’ll negotiate and discuss what should happen.

Kissinger: Alright.

“Let’s keep it in Cyprus”

Colby: Their basic stance is that it concerns the internal affairs of Cyprus. You know, they will save face by saying, “That was a local issue. It isn’t Greece.”

Kissinger: Yes, alright. Thank you.

Colby: In a way they will be able to say, “Yes it was a big mistake on that island, but we are above that.” I believe that the most important thing is that we should keep it limited to Cyprus and not let it advance from there.

Kissinger: Alright, Thank you.

Colby: Update me with any additional information you may have, Henry.

Kissinger: Thanks. Bye.

“I don’t give a damn”

Approximately an hour later, Kissinger discusses the issue of Cyprus again with CIA director William Colby:

Kissinger: Divisions? They are on water?

Colby: (unintelligible)

Kissinger: Indeed. Colby can I tell you something?

Colby: Yes

Kissinger: I don’t even know where the hell Amohostos is. Can I tell you something else?

Colby: What?

Kissinger: I don’t give a damn. Will someone bring me a map? Just because you can throw some name in my face doesn’t make you smart.

Colby: (laughs)

Kissinger: You most likely have a map in front of you. Is it Amohostos?

Colby: Yes, in the East?

Kissinger: I have it in front of me. You mean it will proceed by land? Will they take the whole island?

Colby: No, they will just make a landing. They have landed in Kyrenia on the northern side and several parachutes have fallen over Lefkosia.

Kissinger: Why?

Colby: Because it’s the capital and because there isn’t much of a Turkish population between there and Kyrenia in the North. This way they can make advance to them more easily.

Kissinger: Do you think they will take Lefkosia?

Colby: Yes, uh, there will be several battles there. But, you see, what they will be able to do is land at the airport there and meet up with troops advancing from the sea in the North, then they will fight the National Guard in that region. Of course, there will be some severe fighting there. Later they will have a landing in Amohostos on the eastern side and one further down in Larnaca, on the southeastern front. Their goal will be to strengthen their position for three or four days, but that is less certain, and later they will be in a position to negotiate. The problem is that the Greeks can only defend themselves in that region (Cyprus). In reality, they cannot get enough support from Greece since the majority of the forces are located in the North, near Thessaloniki and Thrace.

“Double union”

Kissinger: You mean they will only be able to defend themselves with what they have on the island?

Colby: With the National Guard on the island, around 30 thousand troops, a large number.

Kissinger: They have 30 thousand National Guardsmen? I thought it was nine thousand.

Coby: No, excuse me, nine thousand ready to deploy, around thirty thousand total.
Kissinger: But they won’t be able to mobilize them.

An unintelligible dialogue (Kissinger) follows. Colby, in answering a question to Kissinger, responds with the comment: “It could result in a double union.”

Eleftherotypia – 07/20/2004


http://www.aegeantimes.net/index.php?name=...rder=0&sid=1043 (http://www.aegeantimes.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&thold=-1&mode=flat&order=0&sid=1043)


http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/2151/natojosephluns700bg5ve.jpg

[akritas]

Very good topic BigTakis.:clapping:
You open the big issue regarding the Kissinger and the US involve regarding the Turkish invasion in Cyprus

[Tsontos]

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/4333/deptofstate2cyprusembasfe9.jpg

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/1493/deptofstatekissinger700do7.jpg

BTW, check the date on the last telegram, May 74. The Americans knew/arranged it prior to May 74, that's more than 2 months before it took place.

[Tsontos]

Brendan O'Malley at MIT



In 1971 NATO powers once more began secret talks on the future of Cyprus in Lisbon and Paris. US analysts believed a deal for double enosis was on the cards, but it would have to be initiated by Greek action against Makarios because this could be passed off as an internal affair between Greeks, and would stand more chance of avoiding Soviet intervention. A senior Turkish official reported that at the talks Turkey demanded a break-up of the Cypriot state and the Greeks seemed willing to offer a military base.

Following the meeting, Grivas who had been pulled out of Cyprus in 1967, was allowed to return to set up a second EOKA organisation called EOKA-B, dedicated to the overthrow of Makarios and union with Greece. Cypriot officials later told former US Ambassador Taylor Belcher in the strongest terms that there was documentary evidence that the CIA was financing EOKA-B through money passed through the Junta in Athens

Makarios, on the other hand, sought to bolster his position by making an eight-day visit to Moscow and landing Czech arms to prepare against a possible coup. This prompted more fears in the West that he was becoming a Castro of the Mediterranean who, backed by the strongest communist party in the Middle East, might hand the island to the Eastern Bloc, allowing the Soviets to turn the south-eastern flank of NATO.

There is some evidence to suggest a co-ordinated response by Greece and Turkey. When, in retaliation, Papadopoulos ordered a coup against Makarios in February 1972 the Turks and Turkish Cypriots were informed of the plan in advance, which ties in with the schemes for double-enosis mooted by the

Americans and at NATO. Glafkos Clerides told me that Makarios's intelligence services first heard of the danger of that coup from decoding messages sent from Turkey to the Turkish Cypriots telling them to store food in their homes and to be on alert.

SNIP

Callaghan said "high-level" State Department officials repeatedly made representations urging the British not to abandon their bases and intelligence stations. This was a very serious issue for the Americans because under an annex to Cyprus's 1960 independence agreements, negotiated after the main framework was in place, the Americans could not have taken over the running of the British spying sites in the bases or Cypriot territory if Britain pulled out. Callaghan told me: "The Cold War was hotting up and and there were new Soviet missile test facilities being developed near the Caspian Sea, which we were able to look over. So the Americans didn't want us to go." So when Ioannides decided to try to cut Makarios down to size in July 1974, it gave the Americans the opportunity they had been waiting for to split the island.

On at least seven occasions previously, many of them when the Greeks had taken the law into their own hands on Cyprus, Ankara had mobilised for war only to be held back by pressure from Washington. Given these historical precedents, and the history of the United States talking to each side about the plans to carve up the island between them, decisive American pressure on Ioannides not to stage a coup in Nicosia or on Ecevit not to respond with a military intervention was the only way to prevent the division of the island in 1974.

Damning evidence from the CIA and State Department Bureau of Intelligence shows that Washington was repeatedly warned of the junta's intention to overthrow Makarios and of Turkey's preparations for a retaliatory invasion, but the State Department failed to act to stop them, as it had in the past, when Tasca forcefully warned Papadopoulos against any heavy stuff in 1972 and Johnson issued his explosive veto to Turkey in 1964. CIA analysts reported that in 1974 "more and clearer warning of the coup against Makarios was given in this case than is usual". Yet Tasca testified that he was never given any firm evidence and if he had been he would have turned the place upside down to make sure Ioannides got the message. Communications with Ioannides had been conducted not by him but the CIA and he only knew what the CIA chose to tell him. Ioannides himself later claimed that far from dissuading him, the United States had encouraged him to go ahead with the coup.

[Tsontos]

"Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good.... We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long."
-President Lyndon B. Johnson

-From the book:

Deane, Philip. "I Should Have Died." Atheneum, New York, 1977. Pp113-114. Composed of conversations with Greek and American individuals in or close to the conspiracy, and references to testimony from the 1975 trials of the junta members and torturers

[Tsontos]

A quote from the then commander of the EU who explained the heroism of the Cypriot National Guardsmen with inferior weaponry making it impossible for the Turks to capture Nicosia airport as they had planned.

General Prem Chand, Commander of the UN Peace-keeping Force in Cyprus 1974,
From an interview with CNA, in New Delhi, India.
“Chand believes that a report by the Commander of the British UN Contingent, Francis Henn, in 1974 to the effect that "an initiative taken by UNFICYP with a view of consolidating an agreed but precarious ceasefire came dangerously close to having an altogether contrary and unforeseen consequence, a fight between the UN force and mainland Turkish forces," reflects "one hundred per cent what had happened at the time."
The report says Turkey had three prime objectives during the first phase of its invasion of Cyprus, launched on July 20, 1974 using as a pretext a coup d'etat engineered by the Greek military dictatorship in Athens against the legitimate Cyprus government.
These objectives were "to capture the port of Kyrenia, to effect a link- up over the Kyrenia mountain pass between it and the main enclave, and to seize Nicosia airport."
Despite Turkish anticipations, Henn argues, Turkey failed to reach all its objectives due to "a lack of drive on the part of their troops (Turkish), the courageous resistance of inferior National Guard forces, equipped generally with a hotch-potch of obsolescent weapons and without air support of any kind" and UNFICYP's "unexpected pre-emptive intervention at the airport."
On July 22, the Turkish army defied a ceasefire agreement reached between Turkey and Cyprus and advanced towards Nicosia International Airport. Commenting on the ceasefire, Henn points out that despite General Chand's "determined efforts", no ceasefire conditions were signed by the two sides because of Turkey's refusal.

[Tsontos]

"When we were trying to convince Turkey to allow the passage of our troops through its territory in Northern Iraq, we gave Turkey two motives: several billion dollars in the form of donations and loans and Cyprus in the form of the Annan plan."
-Daniel Fried (member of the National Security Council and special advisor to President Bush), 26 June 2004

[Tsontos]

You must read this if you have any interest in the Cyprus problem, it is long but the subject matter is fascinating.

The Role played by Foreign powers in Cyprus

An article by Brendan O'Malley

Anyone interested in the recent history of Cyprus and in the role played by foreign powers in the Cyprus problem will find this article very interesting. It is a lecture given recently by Brendan O'Malley to an audience of G/Cs, T/Cs, Greeks and Turks in Boston.



Origins of the Cyprus Problem, a lecture by Brendan O'Malley at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, 16.1.01

"Ladies and gentleman, it is a great honour to be asked to come here today to address the first lecture in this series launched by the Cypriot friends of Boston.

The peace movement in Cyprus has already shown what a powerful force young people can be in bringing people together and breaking down barriers to reconciliation and I hope the students of Boston and elsewhere in the United States can emulate their example in winning hearts and changing minds.

So let me begin:

In Britain we have an award they call the Turner prize, named after the famous 19th century painter William Turner, which is meant to go to the best young artist of our time, but many think it actually goes to the one who can provoke the most outrage.

One of its most famous winners is Damien Hirst who made his reputation with a sculpture in two halves, called Mother and Child Divided. It was a cow and calf that died due to complications during pregnancy and birth. To keep things simple I want you to focus on the calf. Picture a calf sliced lengthways down the middle, each side encased and preserved in formaldehyde in a separate glass tank. The two tanks were placed alongside each other so that from one flank or the other, at a particular angle, it looked like a whole dead animal. But in reality the two halves of the calf did not meet -- a corridor of space kept the tanks apart and you could walk right down the middle of them.

You can imagine the public reaction. While some art critics thought it sensational, many ordinary people were shocked and appalled by the defilement of an animal's body, which no doubt was one of the artist's aims. It seemed to provoke questions about the sanctity of life and our own hypocrisy -- for do we not slice up millions of animals daily for our dinner, and in periods of political turmoil do some of us not also butcher our fellow human beings?

For next year's Turner prize, if the outcome of the Geneva talks is not a successful one, perhaps we should nominate the Green Line on Cyprus. We could argue that is one of the finest functioning conceptual works depicting man's inhumanity to man and the failure of politicians to lead by statesmanship.

Actually, thinking about it, the line could be the centrepiece of a wider collection from across the island. This could include the ghostly remains of Varosha with 26-year-old washing still hanging on the line, doors left swinging in the wind, after the Greek-Cypriot inhabitants fled invading troops, and perhaps the Museum of Barbarism in Kumsal with gory pictures of Turkish-Cypriot children shot to pieces in 1963 and the actual bloodstained bath in which they tried to hide, where their bodies lay for five days until the press arrived.

And bringing in some more. modem forms, why not include the geodesic domes and pylons of the British strategic spying station at Troodos and the nearbyMount Olympus radar, both blots on the landscape on top of two of Cyprus's most beautiful mountain tops, yet retained by the former colonial power long after granting independence.

We can include, too, the command and control centre gouged out of the peak below Olympus for the Greek-Cypriot National Guard's S300 missiles even though the actual missiles have since been assigned to Crete instead; and to complete the set let's add the vast NATO-standard military airport on the great northern plane at Lefkonico, its long walls and observation posts giving it the air of a prison camp.

What the judges will want to know, of course, is who is the artist who produced this startling collective work. And how could they ensure a such a small country like Cyprus remained bitterly divided in two, giving these works meaning long after the Cold War has ended, when even the Berlin Wall has been turned into souvenir lumps for tourists? Just why is it, they would ask in puzzlement, that Cyprus is still bristling with troops, a trip wire away from a future conflict? Or put more bluntly, as one British military officer said to me last month: "So who is to blame for the Cyprus problem?"

The conventional simplified answer is that it all began in the 1950s when the 80 per cent majority Greek-Cypriot population campaigned to overthrow British rule not to achieve independence but to secure union with Greece. By contrast the Turkish Cypriots -- who made up about 18 per cent of the population --preferred the option of partition if the British left. Both diametrically opposed options were banned by the 1960 agreements establishing independence.

You can't ban aspirations, however, and the new country got off to a bad start. The division of the body politic along communal lines, though designed as a safeguard against dictatorship by the majority, played into the hands of nationalist leaders who, lacking experience of democratic politics or treating independence as a mere stepping stone to another goal, made too little effort to win a consensus between both sides. The consequent deployment by Turkish Cypriots of powers of veto over political decisions created a political crisis which eventually spilled over into fighting on the streets in 1963.

There were brutal killings, intercommunal clashes and gun battles. Turkey sent jets to buzz Nicosia and put naval ships to sea, threatening an invasion; and the Turkish Cypriots pulled out of the system of government. The trouble continued throughout most of 1964 and re-emerged in 1967 when meddling in already roiled waters by Greece and Turkey repeatedly threatened to spark a war between the two NATO allies. With arms from Turkey and support from the Turkish army contingent on Cyprus, many of the Turkish Cypriots retreated into enclaves, a first step towards partition; while Greece smuggled thousands of troops on to the island, strengthening the Greek Cypriots' hand.

When a military junta took power in Athens in 1967, its leaders discussed with Ankara proposals to get rid of President Makarios by splitting Cyprus in two, but they couldn't agree on the Turkish demand for two military bases and 10 per cent of territory. An all-out Greek-Cypriot attack on Kophinou drew another threat of invasion by Turkey and brought her once more to the brink of war with Greece.

This forced a humiliating climbdown by the junta, which pulled its 10,000 troops out of Cyprus and concentrated instead on trying to eliminate Makarios. This drove a chasm between pro-enosis and pro-independence Greek-Cypriot parties and led Makarios to rely ever more heavily on the communist movement, AKEL, at home and the Soviet Union internationally. After a series of failed assassination attempts, with Greek Cypriots virtually at civil war with each other, the Junta finally succeeded in staging a coup, though Makarios escaped with his life.

As Britain seemingly took no military action, Turkey ostensibly exercised its right as a guarantor of the 1960 treaty establishing Cyprus to intervene to restore the status quo ante. They had the perfect excuse, personified in Nicos Sampson, the man installed as "President" after the coup. A former EOKA guerrilla, who led assassination squads against the British in the 1950s, in 1964 he had accompanied Dimitrios Ioannides, the future head of the Athens Junta, when he proposed in vain to Makarios a plan to eliminate the Turkish Cypriots.

However, once Turkish troops had landed in Cyprus, Sampson resigned, Makarios's legitimate deputy (today's head of state Glafkos Clerides) was installed as temporary president, and Ioannides's junta collapsed. Yet in a second military operation and the Turks still went on to seize the top third of the island by force, splitting Cyprus in two, as it remains to this day, leaving 200,000 refugees unable to return to their homes. The crisis left 6,000 Greek Cypriots and 900 Turkish Cypriots dead or missing.

The Greek coup and the ensuing Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus sparked international outrage. Congressmen demanded to know why their country, as the main supplier of arms to the two NATO partners had allowed one country to usurp democracy in a friendly state and the other to occupy a major slice of its territory, bringing both of them to the brink of a disastrous war. British MPs cross-examined Foreign Secretary James Callaghan on why Britain, as a guarantor of Cyprus's independence, with a major air base, numerous spying facilities and thousands of troops on the island, took no military action to prevent the crisis erupting. But Callaghan was evasive and no-one could cut through the shroud of secrecy that descended on the subject. The MPs concluded: "The full truth will never be known unless, and until, all official papers of the period can be seen."

US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger fought long and hard to prevent key officials releasing documents or answering questions on the period, and in his memoirs Years of Upheaval he was uncharacteristically reticent. He said: "I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion."

It wasn't until 1999 that he finally returned to the subject in his new book Years of Renewal, under the chapter heading: "Cyprus, a case study in ethnic conflict." He likened the Cyprus troubles to later wars in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and Chechnya; a blood feud between Greeks and Turks with the Americans as firefighters simply trying to put out the flames before they set light to the whole south-east wing of NATO.

But Kissinger's account is highly selective. We should remember that he writes not as an objective historian but as a key player in that period of history with his own record to defend.

By painting the situation as a purely ethnic conflict, Kissinger overlooks the paradox that Greece and Turkey, as well as being age-old enemies, are also allies who continuously plotted together with the aim of serving their own interests against the wishes of the Cypriots; and he conveniently avoids addressing the responsiblity that Britain and the United States must bear for contributing to the problem.

Most bizarrely, he makes great play of the need to keep Turkey sweet because of the 26 intelligence and monitoring stations there but neglects to make a single mention of the intelligence bases on Cyprus, to the point that he refers to Britain having two air bases, which wasn't true in 1974. They had and still have one strategic air base, but two sovereign base areas stacked full of intelligence hardware and a series of sites retained in the Republic of Cyprus for electronic spying and other military installations.

The Americans had a direct interest in these installations because all the information gleaned was shared with Washington under the terms of a secret intelligence pact drawn up in 1947, called the UKUSA agreement. They also benefited from the use of the strategic air base to supply western forces in conflicts in the Middle East -- for instance Akrotiri is now used to resupply forces operating the no-fly zone in Iraq and monitor the Camp David Peace agreements between the Arabs and Israelis. Most importantly of all, at the time of the Cyprus crisis the British spying stations were being used to monitor Soviet nuclear missile tests in central Asia.

At the same time there were four US intelligence and communications stations on Cyprus, which the Americans had kept open after independence was granted, without seeking permission from the Cypriot government. According to Laurence Stern these included CIA radio monitors used to eavesdrop on

Middle East and Communist bloc traffic (a role also undertaken by the British facilities). So Cyprus was not and is not a Kosovo, an ethnically disputed region with no intrinsic strategic value other than the negative one of its potential to inflame a wider conflict among important allies in Europe. Cyprus's problems stem as much from its geostrategic location close to the oilfields of the Middle East and its suitability as a location for monitoring Soviet missile tests and potential Soviet incursions into the region, as they do from the ebb and flow of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

Unlike the United States, western Europe was very heavily dependent on that supply of oil, which is why Britain fought long and hard to keep hold of Cyprus. And on this point too, Kissinger got it wrong, the main elements of the 1959 independence agreements were not brokered by London but discreetly by Washington, as British records of NATO meetings and US diplomatic activity show in great detail. And they were shaped not in the interests of giving the Cypriots self-determination, but with the aim of preserving in perpetuity the use of the defence facilities on the island by the West.

It was for similar reasons that for years Britain had waged a deliberate policy in Cyprus of repression and denial of democracy -- so that it could continue to use the island to preserve and exploit its position in the Middle East, providing a nuclear bomber base and electronic spying facilities tasked, among other things, on preventing the Soviets taking the oilfields on which the West depended. When Cyprus took over from Suez as the British military headquarters for the entire region in 1955 the policy was simple: Britain could never give up Cyprus and could never let it go communist. Or as British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden put it: "No Cyprus, no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil, unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as simple as that."

When the Greek Cypriots rebelled through a political and guerrilla campaign led by Archbishop Makarios and EOKA leader George Grivas, Eden secretly encouraged Turkey to stir up a violent reaction among the island's Turkish-Cypriot minority and its own population. The aim was to swing international opinion against the Greek Cypriots, who were told that some countries could "never" expect independence. To underline the point, Eden ordered a military crackdown on the island, brought in the death penalty for possessing arms, banned communists and political strikes and sent thousands of troops into the mountains to hunt down Grivas.

Eden's undoing was the Suez crisis. The ambushes and assassinations by EOKA guerrillas increased and the building of military facilities needed to deter the Arabs and Israelis from war in the Middle East was fatefully delayed by political strikes and bombings -- which included most spectacularly the sabotage of the runway at Akrotiri. President Eisenhower urged Eden to compromise with Makarios to eliminate the problems hindering the military use of Cyprus. But before any agreement could be found Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and Eden plotted behind Eisenhower's back with France and Israel to launch a military operation from Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean to prevent what they saw as an attempt by Nasser to unite Arabs and take over the Middle East.

However, because of the problems on Cyprus the operation was delayed disastrously and collapsed under political pressure from the United States. General Sir Charles Keightley, commander of the Suez operation, admitted: "We suffered badly from a shortage of airfields and ports in Cyprus. When operations started both the airfields in use in Cyprus were under construction or repair ... our Cyprus bases were dangerously vulnerable to even a single bomber Aircraft had to stand wing-tip to wing-tip, with insufficient dispersal area and the limited port facilities were overcrowded."

In retaliation against the British, the United States sold sterling, provoking a financial crisis for Eden. Eisenhower then plotted with Harold Macmillan to force Eden out of office in return for Britain pulling out of the Canal Zone. More British troops had died in Cyprus during the crisis than at Suez. But the Government undermined its own envoy's proposal to offer the Cypriots self-government by secretly encouraging Turkey to demand that if self-determination were offered the Turkish Cypriots must have the right to it too, thus stoking future Turkish demands for a slice of the island through partition.

In reality the British had no intention of giving up Cyprus as long as they needed it. But at a meeting in Bermuda Eisenhower struck a deal: as part of the price of giving Macmillan a nuclear missile deterrent he demanded compromises on Cyprus, starting with the release of Makarios from enforced exile in the Seychelles.

When he came back from Bermuda, Macmillan relaxed the repression on Cyprus and privately looked at ways of retreating from a position of holding sovereignty over the whole island to simply retaining a number of bases on it and handing control over the rest of it to either a NATO mandate or a tridominium of the UK, Greece and Turkey.

British generals were horrified. They feared for the defence of NATO's southern wing. But Macmillan admitted post-Suez that it would take "more troops than we can afford" to hold Cyprus against the Greek Cypriots' will over the coming years -- a bald, private admission that EOKA and Makarios had won their war.

History records that the independence agreements were concluded after Macmillan tried to force though his proposals for a tridominium; that due to a surprising change of mood in relations between Greece and Turkey a different deal was struck. But British accounts of NATO meetings and diplomatic telegrams reveal that the final agreement was in fact the result of two years of secret behind-the-scenes arm-twisting from the United States. Having bloodied Britain's nose after Suez, the Americans wanted to find a solution that would preserve the island for use for Western rather than purely British defence purposes and prevent conflict between Greece and Turkey on the issue from damaging NATO.

The result was a system of "guaranteed independence", an option US officials had first proposed to the British at a private meeting in September 1957 and which Macmillan's government had opposed all the way down the line. It was no coincidence that in 1959, two weeks after Greece and Turkey finally agreed to the American plan, Washington sanctioned the stationing of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Turkey and a few months later agreed to supply nuclear weapons to Greece.

The British remained worried that independence might be the worst option for fear of "letting the Russians in". But Turkish Foreign Minister Fatin Zorlu told them privately not to worry because this was "not really a form of independence". Note that it was Zorlu relating the details to the British and not the other way around, it was not a British plan.

Britain was left with sovereignty over two military bases and rights verging on sovereignty over numerous military sites within the new Cypriot republic. The island's territory and constitution was to be guaranteed by the three NATO allies, Britain, Greece and Turkey. The Greek Cypriots would be prevented from taking the island out of the Western sphere of influence or into political union with Greece by a system of vetoes which the Turkish Cypriots could exercise over government decisions. In addition, Greek premier Constantine Karamanlis and Turkish premier Adnan Menderes had struck a secret gentleman's agreement to press for the new Cypriot state to join NATO and ban the island's popular communist movement, AKEL.

Within three years the bicommunal system of government established at independence broke down. But the key British and American goal of keeping the Cyprus military and intelligence facilities available for the defence of the West has been upheld to this day.

A contributing factor to the quick constitutional collapse was the fact that the ministers in the new government came to power with no experience of real democracy -- because it had been denied them - and many had a history of pursuing the narrow interests of their community through violent or confrontational tactics.

Among the Greek Cypriots, a number of ministers were ex-EOKA men who overcame British rule by the bullet and the bomb, with Athens' support, and a strong element of the EOKA struggle had involved summary punishment or execution -- without a fair trial -- of those who dissented or were suspected of betrayal. Turkish-Cypriot leaders also had been continuously encouraged by London and Ankara to make their voice heard through violence. They have admitted for instance that an agent provocateur planted a bomb in their own information centre in June 1958, an act which sparked two months of massacre, riot and arson, prompting Selwyn Lloyd to tell the British cabinet that the Turkish Cypriots appear to be "deliberately creating the impression that it was impossible for the two communities on Cyprus to live together harmoniously".

When Makarios tried to rewrite the constitution in 1963, apparently encouraged by British high commissioner Sir Arthur Clarke, whose advice he valued, it sparked more bitter intercommunal fighting. The Soviet leader Kruschev offered Makarios his support and there were reports that the Greek Cypriots were importing arms from the Eastern Bloc.

As Turkey privately demanded one or two autonomous areas involving an exchange of population of 35,000 Greek Cypriots and 45,000 Turkish Cypriots, and threatened an invasion; the State Department drew up an astonishing contingency plan to allow Turkey to occupy temporarily a triangle of territory in the north of Cyprus. It was similar to, but bigger than, the area eventually occupied in the first Turkish intervention in 1974, and if necessary an additional enclave was to be occupied in the West at Paphos. Only when Britain requested the UN Security Council to consider sending a peace-keeping force and sent its own command structure to Cyprus in preparation for such a force, did Turkey's landing ships turn back.

The head of the new command structure, Major General Michael Carver, who became the deputy commander of the UN force when it arrived in March has since admitted that the force was deployed in ways that reinforced the Turkish Cypriot enclaves. These were organised into a civil and military structure with local security decisions made by Turkish-Cypriot TMT fighters, and regional ones by Turkish army colonels under the command of a single Turkish army general. This structure made a Turkish occupation a more practical option.

This policy ran directly counter to that of the UN force's precursor, the Truce Force sent in after the Christmas 1963 fighting. Its tripartite patrols were led by a British naval lieutenant commander, Martin Packard, who criss-crossed parts of the island working tirelessly on a plan to reintegrate villagers from both sides. He managed to win the support of communal leaders for a plan to use UN troops to escort Turkish Cypriots out of the enclaves into which they had been withdrawing and back into mixed villages.

Currently writing his memoirs of this period, Packard says that the main trouble occurred in the towns influenced by political leaders and those he calls the wild men, individuals on either side who were bent on provocation. Generally in the rural villages, he says, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots were living peacefully together as they had for generations, though it was often a form of co-existence rather than wholehearted integration. He said in that crucial period there were two ways forward, one was for reconciliation and a unitary state, favoured by international opinion, by moderates and the UN; the other was towards separation and federalism or partition. "That route was favoured by some Turkish extemists and by American and British strategic planners," he said. "The role played by the military under Carver helped move events towards the separatist route, which led in due course to the 1974 Turkish invasion."

Ground battles were fought over Kokkina, where Turkey was landing arms, and for control of the Kyrenia-Nicosia road, but sectarian incidents had largely subsided by May 1964, except for the disappearance of 32 Turkish Cypriots in Famagusta after two Greek army officers and a Greek-Cypriot had been shot dead. However, when Makarios announced plans to conscript all 18 to 50-year-olds, Turkey prepared to invade. The invasion was stopped only after

President Johnson sent what acting Secretary of State George Ball described as "the most brutal diplomatic note I have ever seen". In it he threatened to drop NATO's guarantee to defend Turkey if their action prompted a Soviet intervention. To back up the note, he moved a naval task force including one carrier, one cruiser and four destroyers into position within reach of Cyprus. Turkish premier Ismet Inonu admitted to the Americans that the key aim of the Turkish military threat was to stop the Packard plan to reintegrate the villages dead in its tracks, and prevent any UN mediation which might force Turkey to give up the progress it had made towards Turkish-Cypriot separatism.

The Americans had pulled back from their plan to allow a controlled invasion, probably because with a UN force in place and without prior Greek agreement it would be politically disastrous. But they immediately sought to find that agreement through diplomatic means.

The immediate signal of this policy was that four days after Johnson stopped the Turks, Packard's plan, which had gained remarkable support even from military leaders on both sides in Cyprus was axed. Twelve hours before the first Turkish Cypriots were due to go back to their villages with their UN escort, Packard was ordered off the island and sent to Athens on an unmarked CIA transporter plane with only one seat bolted to its fuselage. The same day acting US Secretary of State George Ball flew to Athens and Ankara to begin discussions on a deal to exclude the "Red Priest" Makarios and divide the island between Greece and Turkey.

The British and Americans also acquiesced in the return to the island of exiled General Grivas, with the aim of getting rid of the Archbishop, whose flirtations with the Soviet Union had now convinced even the Greek government that there was a danger of Cyprus going over to the other side in the Cold War. George

Ball had told Packard of his attempts on re-integration: "You've got it wrong, son. There's only one solution to this island, and that's partition."

Packard concluded that the maintenance of the sovereign base areas and other military facilities on the island was deemed of paramount importance by the British and American governments, and their advisers certainly thought this aim would more easily be achieved in a divided Cyprus than in a cohesive, military state.

By August US proposals to partition Cyprus between Greece and Turkey were discussed openly at Geneva. When agreement couldn't be reached, the key architects of these schemes, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and George Ball devised an astonishing plan to use NATO to force Athens and Ankara to divide the island between them. If the Soviet Union intervened NATO would move in. The high-risk scheme would involve putting the Sixth Fleet between the Greeks and Turks to prevent either of them opposing it. But Johnson refused to give the green light.

In September Acheson and Ball told Johnson over lunch, which was attended by McGeorge Bundy, Kissinger's dean at Harvard, that they had talked to Turkish generals about a plan to let the Turks occupy the Karpas peninsula, triggering instant enosis by the Greeks "with the consequent supercession of Makarios". It could be triggered by almost any event, such as the refusal to let Ankara rotate the troops in its 650-strong Cyprus contingent with fresh troops from Turkey. The generals had shown great interest in the plan, which seemed to assume that a resort to action was inevitable. In the previous eight months there had been at least five occasions on which Washington had to stave off major threats of Turkish military intervention in Cyprus and a Greek-Turkish war. The choice, Johnson said, according to Bundy, was "whether it should be messy and destructive or controlled and eventually productive, in accordance with a plan".

But, wary of the spiralling commitment in Vietnam, Johnson decided against overt intervention in Cyprus, leaving George Ball to reflect wistfully on the days when great powers were ready to use their combined strength ruthlessly, without concern for the rights of sovereignty, the integrity of territory, or the abstract principle, as he called it, of self-determination.

The next critical change for Cyprus came in Greece, where a military Junta seized power, headed by Colonel Papadopoulos, who had been on the paylist of the CIA since 1952. Over the next few years the Greek Colonels' collaboration with and encouragement of violent opposition to Makarios by those who favoured enosis over independence, eventually moved the island's majority community into a state of virtual civil war.

From the start, the Nixon administration showed an unhealthy willingness to develop close ties with the dictatorship in Athens. Henry Tasca, the US Ambassador to Athens between 1970 and 1974 testified that in 1968 the junta funnelled funds to Nixon's election campaign via Tom Pappas, the wealthy Greek-American who had major interests here in Boston. Pappas was later named on the Nixon tapes as one of the first people they asked for cash to pay off the Watergate burglars. Nixon restored arms supplies to the Junta and sealed his condonement of the regime by securing an agreement to home-port the US navy at Piraeus and airforce rights on Crete.

Papadopoulos's men made repeated attempts to solve the Makarios problem by trying to assassinate him or oust him by force. In several instances the Americans had advanced knowledge of these attempts, in one of them the CIA in Athens seemed to be deeply involved. Paradoxically every time a plot looked like being made public, US diplomats applied pressure to have it stopped. At this point there was a clear dichotomy between covert and public US foreign policy on this issue.

Behind the scenes US officials admitted they would not get satisfaction on Cyprus until Makarios was eliminated from the equation. In 1969 former Acting Secretary of State George Ball was quoted by State Department officials as saying of Makarios: "That son of a bitch will have to be killed before anything happens in Cyprus."

In 1971 NATO powers once more began secret talks on the future of Cyprus in Lisbon and Paris. US analysts believed a deal for double enosis was on the cards, but it would have to be initiated by Greek action against Makarios because this could be passed off as an internal affair between Greeks, and would stand more chance of avoiding Soviet intervention. A senior Turkish official reported that at the talks Turkey demanded a break-up of the Cypriot state and the Greeks seemed willing to offer a military base.

Following the meeting, Grivas who had been pulled out of Cyprus in 1967, was allowed to return to set up a second EOKA organisation called EOKA-B, dedicated to the overthrow of Makarios and union with Greece. Cypriot officials later told former US Ambassador Taylor Belcher in the strongest terms that there was documentary evidence that the CIA was financing EOKA-B through money passed through the Junta in Athens.

Makarios, on the other hand, sought to bolster his position by making an eight-day visit to Moscow and landing Czech arms to prepare against a possible coup. This prompted more fears in the West that he was becoming a Castro of the Mediterranean who, backed by the strongest communist party in the Middle East, might hand the island to the Eastern Bloc, allowing the Soviets to turn the south-eastern flank of NATO.

There is some evidence to suggest a co-ordinated response by Greece and Turkey. When, in retaliation, Papadopoulos ordered a coup against Makarios in February 1972 the Turks and Turkish Cypriots were informed of the plan in advance, which ties in with the schemes for double-enosis mooted by the

Americans and at NATO. Glafkos Clerides told me that Makarios's intelligence services first heard of the danger of that coup from decoding messages sent from Turkey to the Turkish Cypriots telling them to store food in their homes and to be on alert.

This time, when Clerides contacted the US embassy, the Americans acted quickly and in Athens Henry Tasca made strong representations to Papadopoulos. Within an hour the message came back that the coup was off. By the end of 1973 Makarios had survived five plots against his life, ranging from attempts to blow him up as he drove past in his car to the shooting down of his helicopter, when he escaped from the wreckage untouched. Papadopoulos by contrast was ousted by Ioannides, a headstrong character whose volatility rapidly proved damaging to American interests. Ioannides, for instance, interfered with US home-porting arrangements in Greece, he let his army -- an important part NATO's chain of defence -- run down, and he was constantly spoiling for a fight with Turkey, recklessly handling disputes over oil and sea limits in the Aegean. Washington thought him irrationally anti-Turk to an extreme degree and had to find some way to prevent a disastrous conflict between two NATO! partners, even if it put its own relations with Greece at risk in the short term.

Into this unstable mix add a new Labour government in Britain. It came to power in March 1974 determined to slash defence spending and considering whether to pull out of the Cyprus bases at a time when the West's spying bases on the island had become critically important. This was only six months after the Conservatives under Edward Heath had refused to let Washington use the Cyprus bases to re-supply Israel in the Yom Kippur war, a refusal which defence sources have said led Kissinger to shut down the intelligence relationship with Britain for a week as punishment, though Kissinger strongly denies this.

Now even the use of the intelligence gleaned by the spying bases seemed at risk. This crisis of trust with Britain came at crucial point in the Cold War. By spring 1974 the Soviets had overtaken the Americans in the numbers of intercontinental nuclear missiles they possessed by 50 per cent and threatened to catch up in the level of missile technology -- greater accuracy, the ability to send up a number of independently targetable warheads on one missile and so on. In February and March 1974 alone the Soviets tested four new types of intercontinental missiles with these new capabilities. In April Secretary of State for Defense James Schlesinger admitted that the Americans had monitored

Soviet tests since SALT 1 and discovered Soviet research and development in intercontinental ballistic missiles of astonishing depth and breadth. Missile experts said Moscow was fast closing the technology and deployment advantage that the US enjoyed when it agreed to maintain fewer missiles than the Soviets in the SALT arms limitation agreement in 1972. Kissinger and his colleagues had miscalculated and he now admitted that within a decade the main nuclear deterrent of the West could be vulnerable to wipe-out by a Soviet nuclear attack. In other words the Soviets could win the Cold War. No issue was more important than this, the survival of the Western world was potentially at stake. James Callaghan remembers that when Secretary of State Kissinger first met him after he was appointed foreign secretary that spring the nuclear weapons issue wiped virtually everything else off the agenda. It was the number one issue on Kissinger's mind.

To keep ahead in the arms race, the Americans had to keep a close eye on medium and long-range nuclear missile tests launched from the Soviet Union's two main test sites in central Asia at Kapustin Yar and most importantly at Tyuratam, which had 80 operational launchpads. To track these tests they used facilities in Cyprus, Turkey and Iran among others. Information picked up by British spy stations on Cyprus was shared with the Americans under the UKUSA agreement. Cyprus housed some of the most sophisticated equipment needed to monitor the Soviet tests. These included state of the art over-the-horizon radar facilities, which were better placed than facilities in other countries, experts say, because of the need for an over-water propagation path and the island's ideal distance from the target. The Cyprus facilities were the only ones able to pick up missile signals at the earliest stage of the launch, whereas stations in Iran could pick up the signals from 100 kilometres up! and those in Turkey could normally track them from 400 kilometres up. Kissinger did not once mention these facilities in Cyprus in his accounts. Yet James Callaghan confirmed to me that Cyprus at that time had "extreme value" as a "centre for electronic surveillance of the Soviet Union's nuclear activity".

This intelligence capability was the most important reason why Britain needed to keep hold of its Cyprus bases. Yet Callaghan also confirmed that at the time the Cyprus crisis blew up the British were looking to slash their defence budget and as part of this were considering whether to pull out of one or both of their Cyprus bases.

Contrary to Kissinger's assertion to me that the Americans did not believe this would happen, Callaghan said "high-level" State Department officials repeatedly made representations urging the British not to abandon their bases and intelligence stations. This was a very serious issue for the Americans because under an annex to Cyprus's 1960 independence agreements, negotiated after the main framework was in place, the Americans could not have taken over the running of the British spying sites in the bases or Cypriot territory if Britain pulled out. Callaghan told me: "The Cold War was hotting up and and there were new Soviet missile test facilities being developed near the Caspian Sea, which we were able to look over. So the Americans didn't want us to go." So when Ioannides decided to try to cut Makarios down to size in July 1974, it gave the Americans the opportunity they had been waiting for to split the island.

On at least seven occasions previously, many of them when the Greeks had taken the law into their own hands on Cyprus, Ankara had mobilised for war only to be held back by pressure from Washington. Given these historical precedents, and the history of the United States talking to each side about the plans to carve up the island between them, decisive American pressure on Ioannides not to stage a coup in Nicosia or on Ecevit not to respond with a military intervention was the only way to prevent the division of the island in 1974.

Damning evidence from the CIA and State Department Bureau of Intelligence shows that Washington was repeatedly warned of the junta's intention to overthrow Makarios and of Turkey's preparations for a retaliatory invasion, but the State Department failed to act to stop them, as it had in the past, when Tasca forcefully warned Papadopoulos against any heavy stuff in 1972 and Johnson issued his explosive veto to Turkey in 1964. CIA analysts reported that in 1974 "more and clearer warning of the coup against Makarios was given in this case than is usual". Yet Tasca testified that he was never given any firm evidence and if he had been he would have turned the place upside down to make sure Ioannides got the message. Communications with Ioannides had been conducted not by him but the CIA and he only knew what the CIA chose to tell him. Ioannides himself later claimed that far from dissuading him, the United States had encouraged him to go ahead with the coup.

Members of the US Intelligence Select Committee wanted to know why when Tasca had not been told of the real danger of the coup, the Turks went ahead andmassed troops for an invasion.

Once the coup took place, given the history of Turkish invasion threats the only way to deter an invasion was to reverse the coup or place ships between Cyprus and Turkey. Yet, when Callaghan tried to muster urgent international pressure on the junta to withdraw its officers, Kissinger thwarted him, and the UN Security Council critically delayed meeting for four days, by which time Sampson had consolidated his position and the Turkish paratroops were poised to land on Cyprus.

British prime minister Harold Wilson, by contrast, had taken urgent contingency action against an invasion threat within a day of the coup by ordering a potent naval task force to the area, led by an assault carrier and a destroyer. The British hope was to take joint action with the Americans, along the lines of Johnson's deterrent in 1964, but that action was effectively vetoed. Callaghan admitted privately that this was the most frightening moment of his career. "We nearly went to war with Turkey," he said. "But the Americans stopped us." Tom McNally, Callaghan's political adviser in 1974, who attended the War Room briefings at which the Navy said they could put a deterrent force in place between Cyprus and Turkey, recalled that "it was made quite clear that Henry Kissinger was not going to get the Americans involved and didn't think it was a good idea for Britain to get involved either". The British believed they could provide a deterrent jointly with the Sixth Fleet bu! t without the Americans the British could have had a war in the eastern Mediterranean and lost. Callaghan was convinced that the British task force could have combined with the US Sixth Fleet to deter the Turkish invasion, but he was equally sure that it would be risking a "second Suez" to block the Turks militarily in the face of US opposition.

Dr Kissinger, who was in a uniquely powerful position at the time, as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, responsible for covert and overt diplomatic activity, strenuously denied that there was any grand design to get rid of Makarios and told me the idea that the US might have encouraged the coup and invasion was "absolute nonsense". He has also justified US inaction on the grounds that his energies were taken up by the denouement of the Watergate debacle, though he stressed that once the crisis began, he was on top of it.

There is plenty of evidence, if any were needed given the intelligence hardware Britain has on Cyprus and the US has in Turkey, of preparations for both phases of the Turkish invasion. Not least a plan found by the Greek Cypriots on a captured Turkish tank major, it's contents rushed to Callaghan at the Geneva talks after the first invasion, only for the Greek Cypriots to be told this was nothing more than expected. Or the account from McNally of the warning the British were given from information gleaned by a CIA agent posted to watch the comings and goings of Turkish generals in Ankara. Yet Kissinger also slapped down attempts by Callaghan to threaten military force against Turkey to avert the second, main phase of the invasion.

Curiously, the Americans never discussed with the British arrangements to defend their own intelligence facilities on Cyprus. Callaghan admitted that during the second phase of the invasion the Turks advanced to a line drawn up on maps used by Britain,Turkey and Greece during the Geneva negotiations, that left the major British facilities intact in the south -- and the American ones in the north. He also confirmed that the American spying stations continued operating in the occupied area after the crisis -- even though the US refused to recognise the Turkish-Cypriot administration.

"The Turks were willing to let the Americans carry on operating because their presence was a political safeguard against the Russians," Callaghan told me in 1999. If the Americans were operating to a plan similar to those drawn up in 1964, the fly in the ointment was the failure to prevent Congress imposing an arms embargo on Turkey and the failure of the northern administration to gain international recognition to this day. Eventually the Americans persuaded the British to stay in Cyprus too, but they had already ensured that if they left there would still be a NATO stake in the territory of Cyprus where future military facilities could be developed. Lelkonico airport, for instance, having been built to NATO standards, might come in very handy in any global or Middle East conflict.

So to conclude we can see that the architects -- or artists -- who created this monument to division are many. And there is not one power or community involved in Cyprus -- the US, Britain, Turkey, Greece, Greek Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots who have not contributed to or exacerbated what we call the Cyprus problem at some point, or even at many points, in its sorry history. It is interesting to note, however, that the three key goals for which Britain and America strived throughout it all -- to secure the future of the military and intelligence facilities on Cyprus for the West, to prevent the island going communist and becoming a Soviet base, and to avoid a conflict that would tear the south-east wing of NATO apart -- have been upheld throughout.

Superficially, Cyprus looks no nearer being put back together than Damien Hirst's cow and calf in formaldehyde. But history does not standstill, the Cold War is long over, the Soviet threat no longer exists, and no other global threat has yet emerged to replace it. And there is a dynamic at work in Cyprus, created by the applications of Cyprus and Turkey to join the EU and by increasing friction between Turkish Cypriots and Ankara.

One lesson from the past is that if you seek a settlement that will involve a peaceful reconciliation of both sides on the island it is most likely to be achievable when the military and economic interests of all parties - Cypriots, Turkey, Greece, Britain and the United States -- converge. Membership of the EU for Cyprus and Turkey, alongside Greece, would seem to offer the best hope of that for those three countries. And tactically the process of joining the EU - and the prize to Turkey of economic development -- offers the best hope of persuading Ankara to agree to an internationally acceptable solution on Cyprus.

For the United States, where once they had a strategic interest in dividing Cyprus to save the military facilities for the use of the West, they could now see the latter achieved by the convergence of all parties' defence interests under the aegis of the EU -- and perhaps NATO membership for Cyprus too. Greece, Turkey and Cyprus could provide a triangle of stability in an otherwise volatile area.

But another lesson of the past is that you can't build a united and peaceful Cyprus if you don't address the emotional triggers that have enabled leaders on both sides to lead their people down either a separatist route or a route to double enosis, and you have to demonstrate statesmanship.

There is a dangerous air of complacency, albeit mixed with exasperation at the tortuous pace of negotiation, among Greek Cypriot leaders, who believe the 2002 deadline for meeting the conditions of the EU entry will force Turkey to reach a critical decision on whether to compromise over Cyprus.

The ambivalent messages emanating from Turkey -- such as the reports this month of a secret plan to annex Cyprus and subsequent denials -- suggests the government is torn between those who see advantages in meeting the conditions for early entry into the EU, which will involve backing a compromise deal on Cyprus, and those who believe these conditions are unachievable in the near future, especially in respect of relations with the Kurds, democratic freedoms, human rights and the undue political influence of the military.

Greek-Cypriot leaders can help the process by reaching out to the Turkish Cypriots and addressing their fears for their safety and their concern at being swamped politically if the island is reunited. And both sides can help by acknowledging the mistakes, and wrong-doings, of the past -- for how can you solve a problem before you admit that it exists?

In the north, demonstrations of political opposition to Rauf Denktash's hardline on the Cyprus negotiations and to the power of the Turkish army over people's lives there -- under a slogan "Gives us our country back" -- are a wake up call to the rest of the world that Turkish Cypriots are not content with the status quo. Without a settlement many fear their community, and with it their identity, will ebb away. The bicommunal peace movement, to which the Cypriot friends of Boston will be a welcome addition, has demonstrated that there is a will for people on both sides to overcome the pain of the past and build a future together.

What better legacy could Glafkos Clerides and Rauf Denktash leave in the twilight of their political careers, than to reunite Cyprus in a way that allows both communities to flourish. But to make that happen they cannot rely exclusively on the efforts of the greater powers, whose priorities do not always coincide with those of the Cypriots. The United States, for instance, may decide to put short or medium-term military alliances and interests above a seemingly more high-risk strategy of seeking long-term peace.

As Tom McNally, Callaghan's political adviser, remarked of the 1974 crisis: "In the end, the essential military interests of the West remained intact -- the intelligence (facilities) and the Turkish membership of NATO -- and any other scenario put those in jeopardy." And Henry Kissinger, when I asked him if he had any misgivings about the way he handled the crisis, said emphatically: "I have no regrets." "



Copyright Brendan O'Malley 2001. All rights reserved.

Brendan O'Malley is foreign editor of The Times Educational Supplement and co-author with Ian Craig of The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion (IB Tauris, 1999), which was shortlisted for the 1999 Orwell Prize and was named as a Book of the Year 1999 by the influential British newspaper The Guardian

[Orphic_Hymn]

"When we were trying to convince Turkey to allow the passage of our troops through its territory in Northern Iraq, we gave Turkey two motives: several billion dollars in the form of donations and loans and Cyprus in the form of the Annan plan."
-Daniel Fried (member of the National Security Council and special advisor to President Bush), 26 June 2004

http://usembassy-australia.state.gov/hyper/2004/0526/daiywash.gif



QUESTION: Another disclosure on Cyprus. According to an article written
by established Greek-American organization, to be published soon in a
very well known American magazine, a full copy of which is in my
possession, reveals the following:

"Why then the consternation about the rejection of the Annan plan?
Because the true purpose was not the claimed goal of the reunifying the
island, divided since the Turkish invasion of 1974, but the one stated
by Mr. Daniel Fried, a senior State Department official. At a public
meeting in Washington on June 26, 2003, in the presence of this writer
and others, Mr. Fried declared: 'When we were trying to persuade Turkey
to allow the passage of our troops through its territory into Northern
Iraq, we offered Turkey two incentives, several billion dollars in
grants and loans, and Cyprus, in the form of the Annan Plan.' When
Turkey refused passage, the billions were dropped; however, the Annan
plan survived, until it was dropped by the Cypriots on April 24th."


Can you comment on that? Because it's coming from the mouth of Mr.
Fried, Daniel.


MR. BOUCHER: Daniel Fried works at the National Security Council.


QUESTION: But at times he was --


MR. BOUCHER: He's a State Department officer.


QUESTION: Correct.


MR. BOUCHER: He's been Ambassador to Poland. He now works at the
National Security Council.


http://usembassy-australia.state.gov/hyper/2004/0526/epf302.htm

[Tsontos]

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[Tsontos]

"The Turkish fighters have pledged to fight on until the realization of partition. The attitude of the Turkish minority has been admittedly one of provoking division and instigating armed conflict with the aim of partition."

Halkan Sesi, mouthpiece of Turkish Cypriot leadership, 29 February 1964

[Ptolemy]

MEDIA BYPASS


Vol. 8, #11, November 2000


pp. 28-31


Torturing Cypriot History
Hostile Environment of Yesteryear Still Remembered


by Matthew J. Stowell


As an American with no Cypriot or Greek ancestry, I understand how Cyprus'
complex and, to most Americans, obscure past can make many easy prey to the
disinformation fed our press by the Turkish government.


A common propaganda bite used by the Turkish state to legitimize its 1974
invasion of Cyprus is that "The Greek Cypriots then unleashed a campaign of
extermination and eviction that killed or wounded thousands and drove a
frightening percentage of Turkish Cypriots into besieged enclaves.."
(Insight Magazine, "Fences Might Be the Right Thing for Multiethnic Nation
of Cyprus", Ahmet Erdengiz, Feb. 7).


This claim has been refuted by findings of impartial sources such as the UN
Secretary General's report No. S/5950, para. 142 which confirms that as a
result of the brief but turbulent period of hostilities between Greek and
Turkish-Cypriot extremists from December 21, 1963 to June 8, 1964, a total
of 43 Greek Cypriots and 232 Turkish Cypriots are missing and presumed dead.
Clearly, this was no "campaign of extermination".


Moreover, these deaths were a direct result of Britain's documented policy
of arming Turkish separatists and encouraging Greco-Turkish conflict to
facilitate its control over Cyprus.


While extremists of both communities are to blame for intercommunal
violence, fueled by British attempts to prevent this overwhelmingly Greek
island-nation from achieving its self-determination, history is clear that
Turkish extremists initiated the cycle of violence that claimed victims on
both sides.


In June of 1958, a bomb explosion outside the information office of the
Turkish Consulate-- later shown to have been planted by Turkish extremists
(the "TMT")--set off the first intercommunal clashes on Cyprus. As noted by
British author Christopher Hitchens in his highly acclaimed work on Cyprus,
Hostage to History, the self-proclaimed president of Cyprus' occupation
regime, Rauf Denktash, admitted in a 1984 interview that it was a Turkish
Cypriot friend who planted the bomb. As a result, "Turkish Cypriots
promptly burned out a neighboring district of Greek shops and homes, in what
was to be the first Greek-Turkish physical confrontation on the island. A
curfew was imposed, and Greek guerrillas [were] blamed [by British
authorities] for the bomb as they were for everything else."


Next the British released from jail eight Greek Cypriot EOKA fighters,
forcing them to walk through the Turkish village of Guenyeli, where they
were quickly set upon and murdered. Thus began two months of violence by
extremists on both sides, killing 56 Greeks and 53 Turks. Tellingly, the
British arrested 2,000 Greeks, but only 60 Turks.


In addition to the hostile environment that was created by combatants on
both sides, there was a second factor that led to the polarization of both
communities: with a view toward partition, the Turks withdrew from
predominantly Greek areas and evicted Greeks from areas where Turks were in
the majority. In a single week over 600 families, two-thirds of them Greek,
left their homes, and many Turks who left Greek areas did so under intense
pressure from Turkish separatists.


Turkish Cypriots who favored compromise or a close relationship between the
two ethnic communities were targets of TMT violence. Turks caught smoking
Greek cigarettes or visiting Greek shops were beaten, and Turkish gangs
forced some Turkish Cypriots to resign from Greek Cypriot trade unions. In
Limassol, a Turkish Cypriot owner of a restaurant popular with Greeks was
threatened and later murdered by the TMT. Two progressive-thinking,
London-educated Turkish barristers who spoke against partition were killed
outright by these same Turkish gangs.


Turkish extremists forced several thousand Turkish peasants to abandon their
farms and animals and move into an overcrowded Turkish enclave in Nicosia.
"Thus the aim of partition, camouflaged by Turkish propaganda as
'federation,' was relentlessly pursued regardless of loss of human life and
the human misery created. However, this so-called 'first phase' of the
invasion of Cyprus by Turkey only partly succeeded, since well over half of
its brethren refused to obey instructions to abandon their homes for the
predetermined enclaves" (The Making of Modern Cyprus, Panteli). On December
23, 1963, Turkish gangs also moved through the Armenian quarter of Nicosia
and forced the inhabitants at gunpoint to leave their houses, shops, church,
school and clubs to make room for more Turks.


This forced population transfer continues in occupied Cyprus today. Since
1974, Turkey has relocated over 125,000 mainland Turks to northern Cyprus.
In this clearly illegal, Soviet-style effort to alter the demographics of
northern Cyprus, one which the UN has condemned, Turkey has displaced not
only the few remaining Greek Cypriots but also Turkish Cypriots, who are
often treated as second-class citizens and denied the rights and privileges
of the alien settlers from Turkey.


As a result, a diminishing number of Cyprus' indigenous Turks remain.
Turkey has made it easy for them to obtain visas to emigrate, and they have
left en masse, mostly for Britain and Turkey as well as other Mideast
countries; some have even escaped through the Green Line and returned to the
Greek south.


Apologists for Turkey's invasion disingenuously omit the imperative fact
that it is the Greek Cypriot community that bore the overwhelming brunt of
violence on Cyprus. As a result of Turkey's 1974 invasion, fittingly
codenamed "Operation Attila", Turkish troops perpetrated more than 6,000
killings, widespread rape, torture, the systematic obliteration of cultural
property including the destruction of churches, and the ethnic cleansing of
200,000 Greek Cypriots--making them refugees in their own country and
bringing twenty-six years of heartbreak for the families of more than 1,500
missing persons.


Placing Turkey's invasion of neighboring Cyprus in a contemporary context,
four times as many Greek Cypriots were killed by Turkish troops as Albanians
were killed in Kosovo prior to NATO's intervention--and in one-sixth the
time frame. Yet Serbia was bombed back to the Stone Age, while Turkey's
occupation of Cyprus continues to enjoy tacit US support.


In numerous applications to the European Human Rights Commission, Turkey was
found guilty of widespread violations of human rights in Cyprus. Although
the European Court of Human Rights has ordered the Turkish government to
compensate Greek Cypriot Titina Loizidou for the loss of her property seized
during its invasion, Turkey remains the only member of the 40-nation Council
of Europe to refuse compliance with a compensation order from its human
rights court -- a breach that could lead to Turkey's expulsion from the
Council.


The 1963 constitution forced on the Cypriots by the British in a
take-it-or-leave-it standoff--with the alternative being partition--was
known as "the most rigid, inflexible, and probably the most complicated in
the world" (S.A. DeSmith, The New Commonwealth and Its Constituents). The
president, a Greek Cypriot, and the vice president, a Turkish Cypriot, could
each veto legislation. Despite comprising only 18% of the population,
Turkish Cypriots were granted three of the ten seats in the Council of
Ministers and thirty percent of the deputy positions in the House of
Representatives. A Turkish Cypriot was to be made minister of defense,
foreign affairs and finance. Turkish Cypriots were allotted 30% of the
civil service jobs and 40% of the command positions in the Army. Any change
to the constitution required a two-thirds majority of representatives from
both communities. Even the most rudimentary of governmental functions
became impracticable--for example the Turkish Cypriot leadership's voting
against income and other taxes had placed the government in danger of
bankruptcy. In short, the government was hog-tied; Cyprus' very undoing was
written into its own constitution.

[Ptolemy]

Other assertions by the Turkish government, that "President Makarios craved
union with Greece and the subjugation of Turkish Cypriots . and proposed
amendments to the constitution to achieve these objectives" (Insight
Magazine, Feb. 7), are patently false. By the time this ill-conceived
marriage of a government and its unworkable constitution was imposed on
Cyprus, Makarios was opposed to union with Greece. He sought complete
independence for Cyprus and a unified sovereign state that protected the
rights of all Cypriots, both Greek and Turkish.


It was precisely because Makarios opposed union with Greece that Greek
extremists shelled the presidential palace and twice attempted to
assassinate him. The amendments he proposed to the constitution were
designed to make the government (which has been described by legal experts
as "the first in the world to be denied majority rule by its own
constitution") somewhat workable and to reflect a closer approximation of
the true ratio of Greeks to Turks in Cyprus. Makarios submitted these
proposals to the Vice President, a Turkish Cypriot, who did not respond.
Instead, the Turkish government, reflecting its dominant role in separatist
efforts, answered for him: Turkey rejected the proposals out of hand and
forbade the Turkish Cypriots from even discussing them. Shortly thereafter,
the Turkish Cypriots abandoned the government completely.


Turkey's 1974 assault on Cyprus is commonly referred to by many in the media
as a "landing", a "dispatch of troops" or as anything other than what it
was: a brutal invasion. Turkey also misleadingly argues that the invasion
was authorized by the Treaty of Guarantee. The Treaty of Guarantee provided
that one of the guarantor powers (England, Greece or Turkey) could intervene
in an emergency but only in order to restore the country to its original
(unified) state, and certainly not to partition, ethnically cleanse or
occupy it. And under the U.S.-Turkey Agreement of July 1947, American
consent was required for the use of military force by Turkey because
virtually all of Turkey's military equipment, weapons, tanks and fighter
jets, was supplied by the U.S. This consent was never given. On the very
day of the invasion, July 20, 1974, the United Nations Security Council
condemned Turkey for its aggression, demanding that Turkey withdraw all
troops and allow the displaced Greek Cypriots to return to their confiscated
homes.


There have been at least three further UN resolutions since 1974 demanding
the same, but Turkey has ignored them all. This is why the "Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus," the TRNC, is not recognized by any country in
the world except for Turkey and has no legitimate international standing.


The continuing insistence on partition by Turkey, using the protection of
the Turkish-Cypriot community as a pretext, is merely part of Turkey's
long-held expansionist plans for the island. According to Professor John L.
Scherer, in Blocking the Sun: The Cyprus Conflict, "Since the 1950s, [Turkey
's] plan had been to turn northern Cyprus into a Turkish-run province.
Ankara needed an excuse to intervene, and that was provided by George Grivas
and EOKA fighters. If there had been no EOKA, however, the Turks and
Turkish Cypriots would have found another pretext. They would have planted
their own bombs in Turkish-Cypriot areas and blamed the Greek Cypriots in
order to justify the Turkish invasion."


Attempts are also made to minimize the 80% Greek majority's cultural and
historical claim to the island through assertions like: "Turkish and Greek
Cypriots occupied the island for centuries under a succession of sovereigns
before the Republic of Cyprus was established in 1960" (Insight Magazine,
Feb. 7).


Because of its geo-strategic position in the Mediterranean and the bounty of
its natural resources, Cyprus has been invaded and intermittently ruled over
by many: Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, Romans, English, Lusignans,
Genoese, Marmelukes, Venetians, Ottomans, and again the English. The
Ottomans invaded in 1571 and controlled Cyprus for three hundred years (its
longest period of cultural stagnation), but through all of its decidedly
civilized history it has remained a Greek nation in language, architecture,
art, music, culture and spirit.


As noted by Christopher Hitchens in Hostage to History, "the complexity and
variety of Cypriot history cannot efface, any more than could its numerous
owners and rulers, one striking fact. The island has been, since the Bronze
Age, unmistakably Greek." Out of 7,000 years of history, the Turks have
been in Cyprus a mere 300 years. Based on this and an 18% minority, Turkey'
s military establishment, with a seemingly truncated memory, believes that
Cyprus should be part of Turkey.


Most troubling for the future of Cyprus is the apartheid-like creed,
parroted by some journalists covering the issue, that Greek Cypriots and
Turkish Cypriots will never be able to live in harmony (although they did so
for three hundred years), therefore let's maintain the Attila Line that has
been imposed on both communities by the Turkish military and forget about
finding a solution. It is no accident that this is identical to the
argument used by Turkish extremists in the 1950s to promote the idea of
partition-one separate state for Turkish Cypriots, another for Greeks.


It is this very separatist objective-engineered by Turkey's ruling military
establishment to achieve its goal of taksim, or the partition of Cyprus (and
further exacerbated by Britain, America and the Greek junta's disastrous
intrigues in Cyprus)-that initiated the cycle of violence by extremists of
both communities in 1963 after centuries of peaceful coexistence.


While Turkey has refused to allow Greek Cypriot refugees to return to their
homes in the occupied north, the Cypriot Government has kept Turkish-Cypriot
homes in trust for them in the hope that they will one day return when
Cyprus is united.


Situated in the UN-controlled buffer-zone, Pyla serves as an example of what
can be achieved when the divisive effect of Turkey's occupation regime is
removed. It is one of the few villages on the island where Greek and
Turkish Cypriots still live together peacefully as they had done for
centuries.


A recent mobilization by Turkish Cypriots to find a blood donor for a
6-year-old Greek Cypriot boy with leukemia further underscores the
speciousness of the myth, propagated for the very purpose of keeping Cyprus
divided, that both communities are somehow inherently incapable of living
together.


Another disinformation bite promoted by the Turkish government and its
spindoctors here is that the Turkish-occupied part of the island functions
as a democracy.


As confirmed by the State Department's most recent Human Rights Report and
by independent human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch, Turkey is among the worst human rights violators on
earth, where torture and extra-judicial killings remain a part of its
political landscape. For the fifth consecutive year the Turkish state has
led the world in imprisoned journalists ahead of China and Syria, and has
recently admitted to using death squads to kill as many as 14,000 people
since the 1980's.


As the TRNC is in reality a puppet administration that answers directly to
the Turkish state, the same authoritarian repression that afflicts Turkey
also pervades occupied Cyprus. Turkish Cypriots critical of Denktash's
occupation regime have asked that their identities be kept confidential, as
one economics professor did, for example, when interviewed by the BBC ("the
fact that she didn't want to be identified was significant", BBC News,
9/1/98).


The assassination of prominent Turkish Cypriot journalist Kutlu Adali in
1996 is instructive--his assassination is widely attributed to extremists
working on behalf of the Turkish state. According to Professor Claire
Palley, a British constitutional law expert, Adali was murdered six days
after the European Human Rights Commission declared Cyprus' application
against Turkey admissible and "after it became obvious he would have been a
witness" in the case. Adali's writings had been extensively quoted in the
application, and Palley stated that Adali "proved Turkey's colonisation of
Cyprus . . . [and its] compelling Turkish Cypriots to emigrate"


Anyone who wants to believe that the TRNC is a democracy will soon be
disappointed upon visiting occupied Cyprus, and taking note of the
square-helmeted, goose-stepping soldiers wielding machine guns on every
corner. Cross the Green Line in Nicosia into the Turkish sector and try to
photograph any building or videotape any street scene and you will soon find
yourself camera-less, in jail, or both.


That apologists of the occupation regime are under the misperception that
this is how a democracy should function is indeed part of the problem. And,
much like the situation with the former Berlin Wall, now there are Turkish
Cypriots from the north escaping to the south to return to their old
neighborhoods among the Greeks; their homes, as guaranteed by Cypriot law,
still waiting for them.


As was recently reported by Gregory Copley of The International Strategic
Studies Association in Washington DC, "[t]he Turkish Cypriots' standard of
living has declined compared with that of their Greek Cypriot neighbors
since 1974. Turkish Cypriots, with 37 percent of the land and the best
agricultural and tourist areas of the island, earn only 30 percent of the
average wage of the Greek Cypriots."


European Foreign Affairs Commissioner Hans van den Broek protested that the
Turkish Cypriot community was being "victimized" and withheld from "a better
and more prosperous future" as a result of Turkey's insistence on an
occupied and divided Cyprus.


An increasing number of Turkish Cypriots have realized that the future of a
prosperous Cyprus is a united one without Turkish troops. Rejecting the
hard-line partitionist stand of the occupation regime, in October 1999 an
influential bloc of 23 Turkish-Cypriot trade unions and professional
organizations appealed directly to visiting U.S. envoy Alfred Moses to work
for the reunification of war-divided Cyprus on the basis of UN Security
Council resolutions that call for a unified Cyprus and a withdrawal of
occupation troops.


The TRNC's occupation regime has trapped Turkish Cypriots in a political and
economic black hole, all the while importing Turks from the depths of
Anatolia to wrest control from Cyprus' native Turkish population. As a
result, as many as half of all Turkish-Cypriots have fled their own homeland
in search of greater economic and political freedom elsewhere.


In conclusion, it should be emphasized that there were extremists on both
sides of the Cyprus conflict, while power-brokering by colonial-minded
Britain and interventionist violence by junta-era Greece clearly added fuel
to the Cypriot powder keg. But insiders know that it was Turkish designs
for partition that ultimately caused the breakdown in government and the
terrible tragedy of 1974, the repercussions of which all indigenous
Cypriots, both Greek and Turk, are still suffering today.


Cyprus is Berlin all over again, with one difference. Rather than taking
the side of civilian-controlled governments, pluralistic societies, and
democratic values, our own government has instead decided to ratify
invasion, occupation, and transnational aggression in order to sustain an
alliance of increasingly questionable value.
_______


About the author: Matthew J. Stowell is an Associate with the American
Hellenic Media Project (AHMP), a non-profit think-tank created to address
bias in the media and encourage independent, ethical and responsible
journalism. Commentaries, letters and opinion/editorials by AHMP have been
published in The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science
Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Detroit News, The Economist, The
Financial Times, Forbes Global, The Miami Herald, The New York Post, The New
York Times, The Toronto Sun, USA Today, The Village Voice, The Wall Street
Journal, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and World Press Review.


A shorter version of this article was published in the form of a letter to
the editor of Insight Magazine.


_________________


American Hellenic Media Project
PO Box 1150
New York, NY 10028-0008
a...@hri.org
www.ahmp.org

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