by Piratis » Sun Sep 10, 2006 10:43 pm
Greece was at that time ruled by a USA sponsored military Junta. The Americans were afraid that the communists could come to power in Greece and for this reason they sponsored a coup in Greece and the Generals, who were loyal to the "west" came to power.
Under the bad agreements that we (Cypriots) were forced to sign in 1960, Greece, Turkey and Britain were allowed to maintain troops in Cyprus.
At that time Makarios, our president, was considered as leftist by the Americans who were calling him the "Red Monk" and Cyprus the "Cuba of Mediterranean". So they fooled those stupid Generals that ruled Greece at that time to make another coup in Cyprus, kill the "red monk" and put their own puppet president in his place.
Thats what they did. They used their troops in Cyprus, started killing the Greek Cypriots that tried to defend democracy and attempted to kill Makarios. However Makarios managed to escape abroad, and went to the UN to talk about the illegality of the coup.
Turkey, meanwhile was long preparing to finally put in action their invasion plans, first drawn decades earlier. They knew that the coup was coming (the Americans informed them long before it happened) and they were glad that they would finally have an excuse to invade Cyprus.
So the Turkish invasion started just 5 days after the coup, with the excuse of protecting the Turkish Cypriot minority in Cyprus. The "funny" part is that the Greek coup had not harmed any TCs up to that point, and they were only aiming at the Greek Cypriot supporters of Makarios.
So Turkey started the invasion and occupied a small part of Cyprus between Kerynia and Nicosia.
By that time the Junta in Greece had fall and democracy was restored in both Cyprus and Greece.
UN resolutions came out demanding the respect of the sovereignty of Republic of Cyprus and that all foreign armies should withdraw. Even a cease fire was agreed. Unfortunately Turkey violated the cease fire, ignored the UN resolutions, and continued with a second invasion to occupy the part of Cyprus they occupy until today.
6000 Greek Cypriots died from the invasion and 200.000 were made refugees. Today, 32 years after those events, Turkey continues to give lame excuses, ignores the UN resolutions, violates international law and continues to occupy 1/3rd of Cyprus.
Now their insistence on illegality will probably lead to the termination of the EU accession process, since apparently controlling Cyprus is very important for the strategic interests of Turkey that they are willing to sacrifice their EU accession for it.
In general, while GCs and TCs do have part of the blame, most of the blame goes to the big players that manipulated and continue to manipulate Cyprus with their armies and policies to serve their own interests.
