The 1960 Cyprus constitution (Based on the London-Zurich agreements), and the asscoiated Treaty of Guarantee, were unique in two major respects. The agreements were devised by three conservative Goverments in London, Athens and Ankara-non of them destined to last for very long. The Cypriots were simply presented with the results and told brusquely that if they did not accept they would be faced with Partition. Actually, the constitution itself, contained the seeds of partition within it. It continued the old Ottoman and British colonial practice of creating seperate categories of citizenship-now designated as Greek and Turkish instead of the traditional 'Muslim' and 'non-Muslim'. Separate municipalities were provided for. Greek and Turkish voters were to have seperate elections. Civil service and police posts were to be shared in a ratio of seventy per cent Greek and and thirty per cent Turkish; almost doubling the Turkish presence. In the army, in fact, the ratio was fixed at sixty-forty. The seventy-thirty ratio also obtained in the House of Representatives and the cabinet. The Vice Presidency of the Republic, reserved for a Turk, carried the right of Veto. Turkey also won the right to station troops on the Island, as did Greece. The Treatyof Guarantee gave the Goverments in Ankara, Athens and London the right to intervene in Cyprus either together or (in a clause inserted at the instigationof Turkey) alone. A 'seperate majority' provision on matters concerning tax and electoral law gave the Turkish Cypriot minority an additional right of veto in the House of Represenattive. In that House, seperate majorities of Greek and Turkish members were required to modify fiscal, electoral or municipal laws. This meant that a bill supported by thirty-five Greek and seven Turkish members could in theory be defeated by eight Turkish votes. Those who look kindly on measures of 'affirmative action' and 'positive discrimination' for minorities do so in order to compensate for past injustices. It is not obvious for which past discriminations the Turkish Minoritywas being compensated. Meanwhile, ninety-nine square miles of Cyprus were removed from the territory of the Republic and placed under British authority. To this day, the Cypriot goverment has no juristiction over these basis or the uses to which they are put. No other democratic country has ever imposed or accepted conditions of that kind. Cyprus then, got a form of independance long overdue. But it was compelled to concede more than one-third of it's legislative and administrative machinary, not to a minority, but to an eighteen per cent minority which, supported by a foreighn country, had opposed that independance all along. It was an unpromising start. During the London negotiations, Archbishop Makarios raised thirteen objections to the agreements and presented them to the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. Makarios was told to 'take it or leave it', with the clear implication that 'leaving it' meant partition and his own destruction. He took it. Many if not most, commentators on the unhappy years that lay ahead have stressed Greek and Turkish atavism, sectarianism, intransigence and intolerance. The word 'Byzantine' gets hurled around a good deal. Such observations fail to account for two things. One is that, even at the hour of their independance, the Cypriots were treated as objects rather than subjects in their own country and their own deliberations. The second is that a legacy of intercommunal tension had been created by outside powers, and then built into an imposed constitution. Most culpable in this were the British, whose crass and ocasionally capricious policy had led to the bloodshed and discord in the first place. There are enough villains in the story withought inventing new ones; this was not an occasion when Anglo-Saxon phlegm and fair-mindedness were seen to their best advantage. Cyprus got it's independance unnecessarily late, and under very trying and onerous conditions. Archbishop Makarios was right when he said that the agreement had created a state but not a nation. The fragility of it's institutions and it's alliances, internal and external, might have been overcome with time. But time, for various reasons, was something that Cyprus was not to be allowed.
...Sir Hugh Foot, now Lord Caradon, the last British Governer of the Island, and the least inclined to play the bully or the manipulator, still gives the game away in some respects in his memoirs. In discussing the 1958 plan for limited self-Goverment, which represented a retreat from the earlier policy of British cum Turkish colonial rule, in 'A start in Freedom':
"I knew of course that the Turks, who were to be approached first, would strongly dislike some aspects of the policy, and I wrote to the Deputy Governor on 7 January from London to say that everything would depend on whether the British goverment would stand up to the Turks. But I thought that our absolute assurance that no final decision on the future of the island would be made withought Turkish approval might outweigh their objections. They were in fact given absolute veto on long term policy."
Having thus confirmed Melih Esenbel's account above, Sir Hugh adds, with the sort of British fair-mindedness that tends to drive one wild: "Much more difficult to persuade Archbishop Makarios and the Greeks, it seemed to me. But the return of the Archbishop to Cyprus, the ending of the Emergency, the promise of self-goverment might be sufficient to sway them" Archbishop Makarios, who had emerged as the spiritual and temporal leader of the Greek Cypriots, was then in Athens, having been deported and held without trial in the Seychelles islands before his release. In other words, if the Greek Cypriot majority would accept a Turkish 'absolute veto on long term policy', they could be allowed the return of their chosen religious and political leader, the end of Emergency rule by foreign soilders (though not the departure of those soilders) and 'the promise of self-goverment'-which meanwhile looked rather qualified by the Turkish 'veto'. But Britian held the force majeure, and it was made clear to the Cyrpiots that they could choose only between this and a worse offer. It took a while for the Turkish Leadership to realize the bargain it was getting. Sir Hugh records the riots instigated from Anakara and the rough deplomacy exerted from the same quarter, noting that, "Turkish instransigence was such that no concievable proposal we put to them would be acceptable-short of partition"....
