The Ancient Roots of Today's Bitter Conflict

Different invasions weathered and eroded it, piling monument upon monument. The contentions of monarchs and empires have stained it with blood, have wearied and refreshed its landscape repeatedly with mosques and cathedrals and fortresses. In the ebb and flow of histories and cultures it has time and time again been a flash-point where Aryan and Semite, Christian and Moslem met in a death embrace...

--Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons

With its golden beaches, dependable sunny weather and centuries-old monasteries, Cyprus would probably be known to the world only as a vacationers' paradise were it located in the South Pacific or the Caribbean. Fate, however, has placed the tiny island (3,572 sq. mi.) at the far eastern end of the Mediterranean, close to the cradle of Western civilization. A mere 40 miles south of Turkey, 100 miles west of Lebanon, and 525 miles east of Greece, Cyprus for millennia has been a strategic prize for any power seeking to control the politics and commerce of the region.

The ancient Egyptians invaded Cyprus around 1500 B.C. to strengthen the defense of their empire. Then came a string of conquerors that included Alexander the Great and the generals of the Roman Republic. Greek domination began in the 4th century A.D., when Cyprus became part of the Byzantine Empire. The Greek-speaking Byzantines founded the island's many monasteries, which became the source of the Orthodox Church's power on Cyprus and the most important cultural and linguistic link to Greece.

Byzantium ruled Cyprus for more than eight centuries.

After the Crusades, during which Richard Coeur-de-Lion conquered the island on his way to the Holy Land, Cyprus fell to the Franks and then to the Venetians. In 1570 the Turks arrived, carrying the standard of the Ottoman Empire. From the start, the Turkish rulers demonstrated a ferocity that the inhabitants of Cyprus never forgot. After capturing the city of Famagusta in 1571, the Turks publicly flayed to death the commander of the defending troops, then stuffed his skin with straw and paraded it around the island. About 30,000 Turkish soldiers were granted land on Cyprus, encouraging them to settle their families there. Those settlers were the ancestors of Cyprus' Turkish community, which today comprises about 18% of the island's 660,000 inhabitants.

In 1878, Britain took Cyprus in "trust" from the declining Ottoman Empire and later annexed the island outright when Turkey sided with Germany and its allies during World War I. Under British rule, a wary but peaceful coexistence developed between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Greek landowners in the jagged Troodos Mountains leased their pastures to Turkish shepherds; Turkish shopkeepers bought oranges and carobs from Greek farmers. In the village taverna, Turk and Greek sat at separate tables but spoke politely to each other, usually in Greek.

This amiable state broke down after World War II. Archbishop Makarios, then the religious leader of the island's Greeks, along with the legendary Greek General George Grivas, fostered a guerrilla force known as EOKA (an acronym from the Greek words for National Organization of Cypriot Fighters). They wanted to free Cyprus from British rule and achieve enosis--unification with Greece.

Enosis terrified the island's Turks. To them it meant becoming a tiny minority within Greece--a country once ruled by the Ottomans. Instead they proposed taksim, a kind of double enosis that would enable the Turkish sectors of the island to unite with Turkey and the Greek with Greece. They established a guerrilla unit of their own, T.M.T. (Turkish Defense Organization). Violence erupted between the two groups in the mid-1950s, and Turks began to move out of sectors of Cypriot towns in which there were Greek majorities, and establish their own enclaves. Nicosia, for instance, saw a mass exodus of Turks from the south side to the north. Greek lawyers hesitated attending trials at law courts located in what became almost exclusive Turkish enclaves.

When they were not fighting among themselves, Cypriots fought the British. After four years of guerrilla warfare, which claimed more than 500 lives, Cyprus attained independence in 1960. The settlement was negotiated by Britain, Greece, Turkey and representatives of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities. However, it pleased few of the Cypriots, since it fulfilled the yearnings for neither enosis nor taksim. A hybrid government was created that called for a Greek as President and a Turk as Vice President. In the Cabinet and legislature, the Turks were given 30% of the seats --nearly double their percentage of the island's population.

The two communities each formed their own militia, manning checkpoints on roads leading from one sector into the other. Inside Nicosia, tourists wandering from the south side to the north to visit the Turkish quarter felt that they were crossing a frontier into another country.

Makarios, who was elected President of the new republic, resisted giving Turks enough high positions in the government, with the result that battles constantly erupted between the two communities. Frustrated, the Turks withdrew from the Cabinet and legislature at the end of 1963. Several months later, fighting between Turks and Greeks became so fierce that United Nations troops were sent in to keep the two sides separated. Ever since, a U.N. force of about 2,000 men has been stationed on the island to police the borders between Greek and Turk enclaves. But despite the U.N. troops, fighting between the communities erupted again, and in August 1964, Turkey sent warplanes to strafe and bomb Greek positions on the island. The U.N. arranged a cease-fire that lasted until 1967, when Greece and Turkey again nearly went to war.

Cyprus' independence in the face of pressures from Athens and Ankara was due in large part to Makarios' wily ability to play both sides against each other. After the confrontation of 1967, he abandoned enosis, which also helped defuse Turkish suspicions about whether his loyalties lay with Greece or Cyprus. Actually, Makarios continued to believe in the ideal of enosis but he feared--and events last week proved him right--that any attempt to achieve union with Greece would lead to war with Turkey.

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