Demonax wrote:erolz66 wrote:
Are you saying that the GC leadership wanted the 1960 constitution to work ? That they had no aims or desire or plans to see it undermined ? To my mind there was no viable route to partition, whatever TC extremists may have wanted or done, in the absence of GC state sponsored illegal terrorist acts against the TC community. It was the use of state sponsored paramilitary gangs by the GC leadership, as part of a pre determined plan to remove the rights of the TC community post 1960 (Akritas plan) that empowered the TC extremists and made their goal of partition a possibility at all.
I'm saying that by 1957 the Turks had formulated their political objective clearly: the partition of Cyprus, which they set out to achieve by:
• establishing a separate identity for the Turkish Cypriots;
• demonstrating that coexistence between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots was impossible, and that they must therefore be physically separated; and
• creating territorial division between the two communities which were interspersed throughout the island.
The above goals have persisted as the cornerstone of Turkish and Turkish Cypriot policy over the years. As Hayrettin Erkmen, a member of the Turkish cabinet at the time of the Zurich Agreements [1959] and foreign minister after the invasion of Cyprus in 1974, has revealed: ‘Turkey’s posture on Cyprus might appear to be variable, but actually it adheres to a specific line.’ And he goes on to explain that when the thesis that Cyprus should be returned to Turkey failed, the idea of taksim [partition] was upheld: ‘and later we came upon the formula of a Cyprus Republic which was a kind of taksim’. This objective was paramount in Turkish minds during the Zurich negotiations.
It should not be forgotten that the Turkish Cypriot attacks on the Greek Cypriots in 1956-1958 were the first instance of violence between the two communities. These left far deeper and more lasting scars than could have been anticipated.
In the words of Stella Soulioti’s Fettered Independence: Cyprus, 1878-1964; she describes clearly how Turkey and nationalists from the Turkish minority on Cyprus pursued a plan to partition Cyprus and instigated this through a campaign of violence aimed at stirring up of ethnic conflict on the island. Her conclusion on the events of 1963 are as follows:So much distorted publicity has been given by the Turks in later years to the events of 1963-1964, and so much more successful propaganda made out of them, that public opinion has been blinded to the fact that intercommunal strife in Cyprus was initiated as early as 1956 by the Turks themselves, not by Greeks, and that in 1963-1964 the Turks were not – as they have tried to convince the world – merely passive victims of Greek Cypriot violence, but protagonists in the continued pursuit of the Turkish objective of partition.
In assessing the psychological climate within the Greek Cypriot community in 1963-64, the following factors (emanating from the events of 1956-58 coupled with the divisive and unworkable elements of the 1960 constitution) must be taken into account:
• the enduring fear struck in the hearts of the Greek Cypriots by the 1956-1958 Turkish attacks;
• the feeling of helplessness and humiliation caused by the fact that one-fifth of the population had succeeded in terrorizing four-fifths;
• the loss of life, destruction of property and ousting of hundreds of Greek Cypriots from their homes in Nicosia; and
• the realization that the Turkish Cypriots had emerged from the Zurich-London agreements with a manifestly unjust and disproportionate share, which they were quick to exploit to their even greater advantage.
It is important as a matter of historical truth that these facts be remembered.
When did the dream of enosis start and the formation of the terrorist group eoka? the pin of the hand grenade was in your hands and you pulled it...the rest is history.
