Dr. Fazıl Küçük, leader of Turkish Cypriot people’s struggle for existence and freedom, is annually commemorated. His legacy plays a crucial role in making the Turkish Cypriots’ existence known widely across the globe as well as conveying the moral, social, political and cultural values as well as historical heritage of the Turkish Cypriot people.
But what do we know about the modern history of Cyprus? What do we know about the 1960-1963 crisis? What does the Armed Forces Controversy have to do with the other controversies on the island? And what can we learn from looking at the first formal veto of Vice President Dr. Fazıl Küçük on this issue?
By Mustafa Niyazi
By looking into attempts to form a monolithic Greek and EOKA officered National Army, and to discount the constitutionally mandated Turkish contingents of the island’s legal security forces in the process, and juxtaposing that with the Rise and Fall of the Republic of Cyprus, we can better understand the Turkish Cypriot leader’s veto, its causes, and its implications.
The Rise of the Republic of Cyprus
At two conferences, which took place in Zurich and London in 1959, the prime ministers of Turkey and Greece, Adnan Menderes and Constantine Karamanlis, in consultation with the leaders of the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities, Dr. Fazıl Küçük and Archbishop Makarios, negotiated a settlement of the Cyprus conflict.
The Zurich-London Accords, which were signed by the prime minister of Great Britain , Harold Macmillan, as well as by the above-mentioned leaders, on February 19, provided for the creation of an independent, bi-communal Republic of Cyprus and furnished guidelines for the framing of a constitution.
A Joint Constitutional Commission, composed of legal experts from Turkey and Greece, as well as from Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities, and chaired by a Swiss professor of international law, Marcel Bridel, then drafted the new constitution, taking some eighteen months to do so.
Finally, on 16 August, 1960, the constitution was signed by all parties concerned and Cyprus became an independent country.
This arrangement constituted a victory for Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots. By signing the Zurich-London Accords, the Greek Cypriots officially lost any chance for achieving enosis and, by signing the Constitution of 1960, they provided the Turkish Cypriots with the legal protection they needed to survive in a highly ethnocentric society.
With the Greek Cypriots still feverishly polarised to the relentless pursuit of enosis, that is, forcing the island to cede to Greece against the democratic will of the actual people of Cyprus, and witnessing first hand the culmination of more than half a century of forced demographic changes by Greece, anti-Turkish agitation and violence, legal protections were demonstrably needed.
Sowing the Seeds for Dissension
When Cyprus became independent, there was every reason to be optimistic about its future, but social and political dissension soon shook the new Republic to its foundations.
In 1960, the leader of the Greek Cypriots and the EOKA terrorist organisation, Archbishop Makarios, and who had been elected its first president, insightfully remarked that the Constitution, which he had helped to draft, had created a state but not a nation, ensuring a sense of nationhood could not be developed, and he ensured that the Greek Cypriots would both harbour hatred for the Turkish Cypriots and not be open to reconciliation.
He also reiterated his commitment to bringing about enosis, as well as that he regarded the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus as a mere tactical maneuver in his struggle to attain this goal.
In a speech at Lefkoşa (Nicosia), on 1 April 1960, he made the following controversial remarks: “The realisation of our hopes and aspirations is not complete under the Zurich and London Agreements… the glorious (terrorist) struggle, whose fifth anniversary we celebrate today, has secured for us advanced bastions and impregnable strong holds for our independence. From these bastions we will continue the struggle to complete victory.”(1)
More alarming was the fact he named Polykarpos Yorgadjis, one of the most fanatical of the EOKA terrorists, as Minister of the Interior, with responsibility for internal security and another, Tassos Papadopoulos, as the Minister of Labour.
He further used his position to deliver inflammatory speeches which left no room for doubt as to his ultimate intentions. During a sermon at Kykko monastery on 15 August, 1962, he stated the following: “Greek Cypriots must continue to march forward to complete the work begun by the EOKA (terrorists)”, and that “the struggle is continuing in a new form, and will go on until we achieve our goal”.(2)
In a speech in his native village of Panayia, on 4 September 1962, he made the even more ominous statement: “Unless this small Turkish community forming a part of the Turkish race which has been the terrible enemy of Hellenism is expelled, the duty of the (terrorists) of EOKA can never be considered as terminated”.(3)
But this was not just contained to Makarios himself.
His cabinet ministers, other Greek Cypriot members of government, and even educators in schools passionately spoke in a similar vein, and gave platform to anti-Republic of Cyprus, anti-Turkish, pro-Greek sentiment.
In 1962 Minister of the Interior, Yorgadjis, publicly declared: “There is no place in Cyprus for anyone who is not Greek, who does not think Greek and who does not constantly feel Greek”.(4)
In the schools, the British Journalist Michael Wall informs us, children were taught that “Cyprus is Greek, and that the Turks are intruders”, with the result that they emerged “more Greek than they were”.(5)
The Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation also regularly broadcast virulently anti-Turkish plays. In one a mother asks her son what he wants to become, to which he replies “a hero”. When she asks him “what will you bring us?”, he answers “I am going to bring seven Turkish heads to you”.(6)
And if simply this rhetoric was not enough, the Greek flag also flew over the Presidential Palace in Lefkoşa and on the Greek Cypriot leader’s official limousine.
The Six Big Controversies
It is to this backdrop that a number of controversies started to prop up, most topically the Armed Forces Controversy, but in order to understand that, we also need to understand that although the Turkish Cypriots had a constitutional right of veto in foreign affairs, they were actually unable to exercise any influence in that field.
The Greek Cypriot leadership insisted on making all foreign policy decisions and controlled the Republic’s chief outlets to the outside world – the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the ambassadors to the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom etc, all of them were Greek Cypriots.
What could be more relevant than the fact that Küçük usually learned about important foreign policy decisions only by reading about them after-the-fact in the newspapers.
The foreign policy of the nation also remained one which had no other purpose but to gather support for enosis.
They tried to wipe out all the advantages gained by the Turkish Cypriots, blatantly violating many of the articles of the Constitution of 1960 which they had signed and were pledged to uphold.
Because these articles were designed to protect the Turkish Cypriots from official persecution, the Greek Cypriot leadership’s actions were stubbornly resisted and led to a series of bitter controversies, the major ones of which were: 1) the Armed Forces Controversy, 2) the Civil Services Controversy, 3) the Constitutional Court Controversy, 4) the Municipalities Controversy, 5) the Security Services Controversy, and 6) the Tax Controversy.
And Küçük’s veto on the military units is considered a part of the Armed Forces Controversy.
The Armed Forces Controversy
According to Article 132 of the Constitution, “Forces which are stationed in parts of the territory of the Republic inhabited in a proportion approaching one hundred per centum only by members of one Community shall belong to that Community”.
This essentially mandated the formation of separate Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot units, to Küçük’s credit, this also had to mean at least at the platoon and company levels.
He felt that such a system was vital for the safety of his community.
The fact that all 150 Greek Cypriot officers chosen for the force were ex-EOKA terrorist men led him to suspect that sooner or later the Cypriot army would be used against his people and he did not want to leave the many scattered and vulnerable Turkish Cypriot enclaves unprotected.
He also believed that differences of language, religion and disciplinary standards would make a completely integrated force unworkable.
But the Greek Cypriot leadership insisted upon the formation of a monolithic force which they could control and, on 20 October 1961, introduced a motion in the Council of Ministers to integrate the armed forces at every level.
Because the Greek Cypriots had a majority of seats in the Council of Ministers, the motion was approved.
This left Küçük with no option but to veto the measure.
On 20 October, 1961, Küçük used his constitutional veto power for the first and only time to halt the development of a fully integrated force, and Makarios stated that the country could not afford an army anyway.
Stalemate
Because the Greek Cypriot leadership refused to accept any compromise, a stalemate ensued.
As a consequence, no national army was created and the Greek Cypriot officers were used to train the secret army which was being readied for action against the Turkish Cypriots, which finally took place in 1963-1964.
Going back once more to the background provided about the different controversies, the Greek Cypriot leadership felt confident that once they had obtained the backing of the United Nations for their scheme to bring about enosis through the application of the principle of self-determination, they would be able to crush the Turkish Cypriots without fear of outside intervention. This required extensive military preparations as well as the nullification of any possible resistance which would be found in a Turkish Cypriot formed-and-led military force.
This means that it can also be concluded that the Armed Forces Controversy was a by-product of the pursuit of these policies to find work-arounds to the articles of the Constitution of 1960 which were designed to protect the Turkish Cypriots, something they very fairly had a right to.
And as “extensive military preparations” are mentioned in conjunction with the Armed Forces Controversy, this might also benefit from further clarification, with a juxtaposition to the Security Services Controversy.
Accordingly, Interior Minister Yorgadjis was ordered by the Greek Cypriot leadership to organise a new EOKA-like secret army.
In the words of the late Professor Richard A. Patrick, one of the outstanding authorities on modern Cyprus:
“The clandestine recruiting, training and organising of the Greek Cypriot “secret army” began early in 1961. Although the EOKA organisation of the 1955-1959 campaign had been disbanded, many of its weapons had never been handed over to the Cyprus police and the loyalties and obligations of its cells remained intact. These cells became the cadres of the new force. In 1962, weapons training for company-sized units was being conducted in the Troodos Mountains under the guidance of the Greek Cypriot officer-cadets of the Cyprus Army and using arms “borrowed” from government armouries. By December 1963, there were up to 10,000 Greek Cypriots who had been recruited and trained to some extent.”(7)
Also pointed out by Patrick, there were also armed Greek Cypriot gangs who refused to be integrated into the “official secret army”. The primary objective of many of these gangs were “to exact revenge on Turkish Cypriots for events which occurred during the enosis campaign of 1955-1959…”(8)
It is also suggested they were possibly responsible for setting five small bombs in two mosques in Lefkoşa on 25th March 1962 (Greece’s Independence Day), in an act of terrorism possibly designed to scare and displace the Turks.
The Fall of the Republic of Cyprus
The Armed Forces Controversy, the Security Services Controversy and indeed all the other controversies of the time, can all be inexplicably linked in some manner, and correlate as products of the same policies which were demonstrably designed to strip the Turkish Cypriots of their rights or find work-arounds to that end.
To that effect, Küçük’s veto in the Armed Forces Controversy can also be seen as testament to the anti-Turkish agenda of the Greek Cypriots which characterised the period from 1960-1963 and beyond, and whereby by the Turkish Cypriots consistently voiced their concerns, resisted attempts to strip them of their constitutionally guaranteed rights, safeguards and protections, and even made compromises and concessions to that end, but this always fell on deaf ears, and ultimately the Turkish Cypriots were forced into doing the only thing they could, which in this case was to exercise that right to a veto.
Yet sadly, of all the controversies going on at the time, the Armed Forces Controversy was by no means the last or the worst.
The final nail in the coffin of the fledgling republic was the Constitutional Controversy, that the Greek Cypriots would ultimately use to springboard and justify the 1963-1964 coup, and to prepare for the all-out-war against the Turkish Cypriots, which ultimately led the Fall of the Republic of Cyprus.
And as the Greek Cypriots made their final preparations for this planned conflict and behaved in an ever more provocative fashion, and as the clouds of an all-out war gathered before them, the Turkish Cypriots, albeit woefully outgunned and outnumbered, were not in the end leaderless, nor were they completely defenseless, and could concentrate on defending themselves from Greek Cypriot mobs, snipers, police patrols, army patrols, abductions and assassinations, and that owes itself in no small part to the political resistance they showed during the period of 1960-1963.
That is most characteristic of the Cyprus Problem and why it still exists to this day.
Bibliography
(1) Stavrinides, op. cit., p. 40
(2) Osman Örek, Makarios on Enosis (Lefkoşa, 1974), p. 22
(3) Ibid
(4) Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, by Nail Atalay, Representative of the Turkish Federated Stated of Cyprus at the United Nations, 29 June 1978
(5) Cyprus – Island of Hate and Fear, The New York Times Magazine, 8 March 1964, p.93
(6) Telegram to the U.N. by Dr. Fazıl Küçük, 24 November 1978
(7) Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict: 1963-1971 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1976), pp. 37-38.
(8) Ibid., p. 36
