Cyprus The 1974 Crisis and Division of the Island
The Archbishopric in Nicosia as it appeared after the
violent summer of 1974
The Archbishopric after its restoration,
with a statue of Archbishop Markarios III, president of the
Republic of Cyprus, 1960-77
Courtesy Embassy of Cyprus, Washington
Pressures mounting within the Cypriot communities and
within
the military junta ruling Greece converged in the summer
of 1974.
Greek military officials, angered by Makarios's
independence from
Greece and his policy of nonalignment, backed a coup
d'état by
Greek Cypriot National Guard officers intent on enosis.
The coup
imposed Nicos Sampson as provisional president.
The Turkish response was swift. On July 20, Turkish
troops
reached the island and established a beachhead in the
north. A
ceasefire was reached two days later, with the North
Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) allies of Greece and Turkey
working
urgently to avoid an intra-alliance confrontation. Peace
talks were
hastily convened in Geneva, but those talks did not
satisfy Turkish
concerns. On August 14, the Turks began a second offensive
that
resulted in their control of 37 percent of the island. The
ceasefire lines achieved after the extension of Turkish
control
formed the basis for the buffer zone manned by the United
Nations
Peace-keeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), which has been in
place
since 1964
(see United Nations Peace-keeping Force in Cyprus
, ch.
5).
The events of 1974 dramatically altered the internal
balance of
power between the two Cypriot communities and coupled
their
prevailing political and institutional separation with
stark
physical and geographical separation. In a grim historical
echo of
the widely praised 1930 Greek-Turkish
exchange-of-population
agreements, roughly a third of each community, displaced
by the
war, was transferred to the side of the island that its
community
controlled. As a consequence, in 1990 nearly a third of
the people
of Cyprus lived outside their birthplaces or places of
residence in
1974.
Institutionally, Turkish Cypriots simply consolidated
what had
been a separate administration run out of Turkish Cypriot
enclaves
across the island into the northern third, made secure by
Turkish
troops. That presence altered the political life of the
Turkish
Cypriots, however. Many decisions affecting the life of
the
community had a security dimension, and the economy of the
small
entity has been dependent on Turkish subsidies and trade.
Thus, the
extent of the real autonomy of Turkish Cypriot authorities
from
their mainland protectors and benefactors was the subject
of
continued speculation and uncertainty.
Data as of January 1991
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