Patrick Comerford
Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of Turkish invasion of Cyprus on 20 July 1974. It is difficult to grasp that, after 50 years, a member state of the European still remains divided and part occupied, and that Nicosia, a European capital city, remains divided.
The memory of the invasion of Cyprus is still sharp in my mind. A few months later, I joined the staff of The Irish Times, and Cyprus later became one of the places I wrote about on a regular basis when I was a journalist on the Foreign Desk.
I first visited Cyprus earlier in 1987, 13 years after the invasion, and the memories of the Turkish invasion were still raw then and continued to hurt deeply. I stayed in Limassol at the end of the summer season that year, but travelled throughout the island, visiting Paphos, Larnaca. Ayia Napa, the RAF base at Akrotiri, Mount Olympos, the Troodos Mountains above Nicosia, and the grave of Archbishop Makarios in a tomb he had designed himself on Throni Hill, 3 km from Kykko Monastery.
Archbishop Makarios was the spiritual and political head of his people, and in the late 1950s he was a firm supporter of both enosis or full union with Greece and the armed guerrillas in EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) led by George Grivas.
After Cypriot independence, Archbishop Makarios became President of Cyprus in 1960. He believed Cyprus was too close to Turkey and that enosis was a dangerous demand. Turkey was much closer than Greece, with the Turkish coast a mere 40 miles away. But relations between both Athens and Ankara deteriorated, and EOKA B was formed to continue fighting for enosis, with daily kidnappings and murders.
The Greek Cypriot majority and the Turkish Cypriot minority remained polarised, and the colonels who had seized power in Athens in 1967 were determined to force enosis on Cyprus.
The presidential palace was attacked by Soviet-made tanks on 16 July 1974 and set on fire. The coup plotters claimed the president had been killed, but he survived the fourth attempt to murder him by escaping by the back door of the palace with his bodyguards.
He was spirited away to safety in Paphos, where he was born. From there, a British helicopter took him to the RAF base at Akrotiri and he was then flown to London and New York, where he addressed the UN Security Council on 19 July.
Meanwhile, the new Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit – a translator of TS Eliot into Turkish – warned the regime in Athens that unless the junta immediately climbed down and Cyprus reverted to the previous state of affairs, including restoration of Archbishop Makarios, Turkish military would intervene.
The colonels installed Nikos Sampson, a former EOKA hitman, as an acting, puppet president. Sampson had once been a reporter for the Cyprus Times but was also a target spotter for EOKA, and had spent time in Wandsworth Prison.
Cyprus had a ¬sizeable Turkish Cypriot minority, and the Turkish Cypriot leader was Rauf Denktash, a London-trained lawyer. Turkey began Operation Attila shortly after daybreak on 20 July 1974, with an air and sea assault, and Turkish ¬paratroopers were dropped to reinforce the Turkish Cypriot militia in the northern sector of Nicosia.
The fighting dragged on for almost a month, and reliable sources estimate between 4,500 and 6,000 Greek Cypriots were killed, wounded or missing, believed dead, and between 1,500 to 3,800 dead Turkish Cypriots. The refugee figures estimated 200,000 Greek Cypriots moved south and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots moved north.
There were countless broken ceasefires and failed rounds of peace talks in Geneva. In the last hours of the fighting, a Turkish tank attack captured Famagusta, the only deep-water port in Cyprus. The Ledra Palace on the Green Line in Nicosia became part of the buffer zone UN troops Canadians tried to establish between combatants.
Sampson resigned on 23 July and the presidency passed to Glafkos Klerides. Archbishop Makarios remained in London for five months. Meanwhile, the military policies and oppressive actions of the regime eventually brought down the colonels’ junta in Athens, and democracy was restored.
Archbishop Makarios secured international recognition for his administration as the legitimate government of the whole island, he returned to Cyprus and was restored as President on 7 December 1974. He was still in office when he died on 3 August 1977 aged 64.
Turkey occupied over one-third of the island, although the Turkish Cypriot community is less than one-fifth of the population, and a puppet state was set when the Turkish-occupied sector declared itself the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus in 1975. The name was changed to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983.
When I had visited Cyprus in 1987, the memories of the Turkish invasion were still raw. I visited both Greece and Turkey constantly in the years that followed, and continued to follow Cypriot politics closely.
After the Turkish invasion of the rock islet of Imia in the Aegean in 1996, I spent some days with the Greek navy in the sea around Rhodes, Kos, Kalimnos and other, smaller islands, and was taken to see Imia for myself despite Turkish threats to both Greek and international journalists, and was interviewed for a Greek television news channel. During those tense weeks and month, Greeks were reminded of the invasion of Cyprus and were in their fears that Turkish aggression is an ever-present threat.
That year, I also took part in a high-level conference organised by the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Hellenic Centre in London on the Cypriot ambitions for EU membership, and analysed these hopes in a feature in The Irish Times.
On visits to Greek military headquarters in Athens, I noticed how the names of senior figures involved in the colonels’ regime and in plotting the failed coup in Cyprus had been wiped off the honour boards, their spaces left blank as an indication of the ignominy in which they are held.
The memories of the Turkish invasion were still raw then and continued to hurt deeply when I returned to Cyprus in 2000, spending Orthodox Holy Week and the Easter season on a working visit in Nicosia. I climbed the viewing platforms, crossed the Green Line at the Ledra Palace, visited churches, mosques and a Sufi tekke, met politicians, journalists, econmists, bankers, business leaders, and elderly men who had fought in EOKA, and spoke to UN peacekeepers. I also interviewed Clive Handford, the Anglican Bishop in Cyprus and the Gulf. In a personal touch, they prayed for me in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Anglican cathedral in Nicosia, as I prepared for my ordination a few weeks later.
I wrote features in The Irish Times on Cypriot politics and economics, and an ‘Irishman’s Diary’ on the Irish links with Cyprus, including Sir Garnet Wolseley from Dublin who was the first British High Commissioner of Cyprus, and the Anglican chaplain in Ayia Napa, the Revd Robin Brookes, a former Rector of Drumcondra. I wrote features too on Church life in Cyprus for the Church of Ireland Gazette and diocesan magazines.
The following year, I reported on the election in Cyprus in 2001 for The Irish Times, and I interviewed Dr George Vassiliou, a former President of Cyprus (1988-1993) who was the Chief Negotiator for Cyprus during the talks on accession to the EU from 1998 to 2003.
During that Easter working visit to Cyprus in 2000, I bought a limited edition prints that were hanging on the walls and on the stairs of my home in Knocklyon, Dublin, for many year.
One is a bright, colourful picture of a bride preparing for her wedding. The other is a print showing two small boys, probably brothers, the older boy protecting his younger brother, who may have been blinded. They are Greek Cypriot refugees from Northern Cyprus, huddled in a tent after fleeing the Turkish invasion in 1974.
At the time I bought this print in Nicosia, I was hurt and broken as it reminded me of my own two sons back in Dublin, and I fretted and prayed about their future.
After framing the print, I came across a copy of the original photograph of the two boys who inspired this print or painting. It is still heart-breaking. I wonder whatever happened to these boys, who must now be in their 60s, and I still pray for them.
But the plight of the refugees in the Mediterranean still lives with us, and that image continue to remind me to speak up today for the refugees and to condemn our poor response to their plight and needs.
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