[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 125 (Monday, July 31, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11036-S11037]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                        THE SITUATION ON CYPRUS

 Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, the fall of communism and the 
reunification of Europe makes it easy to forget that there is still one 
country in the world that remains artificially divided. I am speaking 
of Cyprus, which has been divided since 1974, when the Turkish military 
intervened on the island to stop a bloody coup that was threatening to 
become an all-out attack against the smaller Turkish Cypriot community 
there.
  There is now some movement in the effort to find a solution to the 
Cyprus issue that has lingered for so long; longer, in fact, than the 
21 years which have passed since the Turkish military action. The truth 
is that the physical partition of the island was the logical result of 
the de facto partition that occurred in the early 1960's, when Greek 
Cypriot extremists began a campaign to drive the Turkish Cypriots off 
the island forever. That is why U.N. peacekeepers have been on Cyprus 
since 1963--more than a decade prior to the intervention of 1974.
  Brian Crozier, a contributing editor at the National Review, has 
recently written an article for the magazine entitled ``The Forgotten 
Republic,'' which provides an excellent review of the situation on 
Cyprus. I commend it to anyone interested in Cyprus, and submit it for 
publication in the Congressional Record.
               [From the National Review, June 12, 1995]

                         The Forgotten Republic

                           (By Brian Crozier)

       Lidice is remembered with sorrow and anger: the Czech 
     village razed by the Nazis, its inhabitants massacred. I was 
     unaware of the similar fate of Sandallar and Atlilar, in the 
     Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
       There is not much to see: a few burnt-out houses, and two 
     simple monuments to the inhabitants. The dead at Sandallar 
     numbered 89, including some old people and a baby of four 
     months. The toll at Atlilar was 37, including two babies, in 
     16 days old, the other 15 months.
       The Greeks who carried out the massacres included a few 
     uniformed members of the National Guard, armed with machine-
     guns, and civilians who knew their victims and called them 
     out by name to meet their fate.
       The date is important. The deeds were done on August 14, 
     1974, less than a month after a Turkish force of six thousand 
     troops and forty tanks had landed near Kyrenia. Was it an 
     invasion? Or a rescue operation? Or, more neutrally, just a 
     landing? It all depends on who you are, and where you stand.
       A backward look is necessary. This was not my first visit 
     to this beautiful Mediterranean island, only 40 miles from 
     Turkey (and 560 miles from Greece). I had gone there 39 years 
     ago, when the Greek Cypriot terrorist movement, EOKA, led by 
     a political bandit called George Grivas, was in full swing. 
     Grivas had one simple aim: Enosis, or union with Greece.
       At that time, in 1956, Cyprus was still a British colony, 
     and Britain was not eager to hang onto it. The dismantling of 
     the British Empire was already well under way, but Cyprus was 
     a tough case with some 100,000 Turkish Cypriots, scattered in 
     vulnerable enclaves, and perhaps five times as many Greeks.
       EOKA's initials were designed to confuse: they stood for 
     National Organization for the Cyprus Struggle, but meant in 
     reality, ``for Greek Cypriots and uninon with Greece.'' There 
     was no room in EOKA for Cypriots of Turkish origin.
       Cyprus, indeed, was a fully qualified member of the New 
     World Disorder before History began again after the collapse 
     of the Soviet system. Cyprus reminds me of Ireland: two 
     ethnic and religious communities living on the same island, 
     the majority wanting to control the minority, and the 
     minority looking to a nearby ancestral homeland for 
     protection.
       During the EOKA terror campaign (1955-58) hundreds of Turks 
     were killed and more than 30 villages destroyed (logically, 
     one might say, since Grivas was committed to eliminating all 
     ``traitors,'' defined as opponents of Enosis).
       The British achieved their aim of getting out of Cyprus in 
     1959 after meetings with the Greek and Turkish governments, 
     which resulted in the London-Zurich Agreements, specifying 
     that the two Cypriot communities would be the founding 
     partners of the forthcoming republic. As for Enosis, it was 
     outlawed; and so, to be fair, was Taksim (partition); which 
     is what the Turks wanted.
       The new Republic that emerged in 1960 was, however, 
     virtually stillborn. The president, the Greek Orthodox 
     Archbishop Makarios, is often described as a ``moderate,'' 
     but the facts are otherwise. He gave 

[[Page S 11037]]
     the Interior Ministry to a known EOKA killer, Polycarpos Yorgadjis, and 
     similar appointments followed. At the end of 1963, he moved 
     closer to the Grivas model, unleashing a secretly trained 
     army of Greek and Greek Cypriot irregulars against the 
     Turkish community. The Turks hit back, reportedly with arms 
     from Turkey.
       Makarios declared the Agreements null and void and expelled 
     Turkish members of his government. By late 1963, the small 
     British peace force was out of its depth, and in mid February 
     1964, Britain referred the Cyprus problem to the U.N. 
     Security Council. The outcome was another set of initials: 
     UNFICYP, or the United Nations Peace-Keeping Force in Cyprus. 
     It came in 1964 and is still there, more than thirty years 
     on. Before flying from London to Kyrenia this time, I watched 
     a relevant installment of a documentary television series 
     titled A ``Soldier's Peace,'' in which the Canadian Major-
     General Lewis MacKenzie summed up the decades of U.N. peace-
     keeping in a telling phrase: ``It fails even when it 
     succeeds.''
       The long-drawn-out conflict came to a climax on July 15, 
     1974, when an ex-EOKA terrorist named Nicos Sampson, with the 
     backing of the Colonels' regime then in power in Greece, 
     overthrew Archbishop Makarios and took over. But not for 
     long. There was an element of farce in Sampson's coup, which 
     put him in power for not quite a week--one of the shortest-
     lived takeovers in history. Within days (on July 23) the 
     Greek Colonels decided, after seven years in power, to hand 
     the country over to civilian politicians.
       There was, however, drama as well as farce, for the Turkish 
     military landing had started on July 20. Of the questions I 
     put to President Rauf Denktash on my recent visit, the key 
     one, to me, was whether the Turkish government had decided 
     unilaterally to intervene, or whether he had asked the Turks 
     to come in. His reply was frank. He had been in constant 
     touch with the then premier of Turkey, Bulent Ecevit, and had 
     pleaded with him to rescue the heavily out-numbered Turkish 
     minority.
       The Turkish operation was followed by a massive transfer of 
     populations, obligatory for the Greeks in the north, 
     voluntary for the Turks from the south, in fear of a Greek 
     backlash.
       Another glance backward. On my visit in 1956, Denktash had 
     called to see me at my hotel in Nicosia. Denktash has not 
     changed very much--a short, now even broader man of 71. Like 
     his counterpart in southern Cyprus, Glavcos Clerides, he is a 
     London-trained lawyer, and his exposition of the long crisis 
     and his efforts to solve it was admirably judicious.
       The little Republic needs Denktash, but came close to 
     losing him in the first round of the presidential election 
     this April 16, when he won only 40 per cent of the vote, with 
     his right-wing rival Dervis Eroglu, close behind. But in the 
     run-off on the 22nd, he won a fifth term with 62 per cent.
       Meanwhile, back in 1975, the Denktash government, under 
     Turkey's protection, proclaimed a Turkish Cypriot Federated 
     State on February 13. Initially, Denktash did not seek 
     international recognition. His aim was to negotiate a deal 
     with his Greek Cypriot opposite number, Acting President 
     Clerides, for a partition of the island into two separate, 
     but federally linked, entities.
       That was twenty years ago, and the deadlock has been frozen 
     ever since. Clerides and his advisors were not interested in 
     Denktash's federal fantasy, as they saw it. There seemed only 
     one way out, and Rauf Denktash took it in 1983. He dropped 
     the federal initiative and, on November 15, proclaimed the 
     independence of his enclave, under the name of ``the Turkish 
     Republic of Northern Cyprus.'' Three days later, on the 
     initiative of the (Greek) Republic of Cyprus, the UN Security 
     Council voted for non-recognition of the Northern Republic.
       And there, you might think, the matter rests; except that 
     it does not, and should not. Life in the unrecognized 
     republic is at least peaceful, but not as comfortable as it 
     might be. The Greek Cypriots see to that, by cutting off gas 
     and electricity daily, although the Turkish northerners hope 
     to have enough supplies of their own before long. Inflation 
     is running at 200 percent, and life without Turkish handouts 
     would be grimmer still. The Greek government tried to block a 
     mainland-Turkish move for a customs deal with the European 
     Union, but eventually lifted its veto.
       In southern Cyprus, meanwhile, there are worrying signs. 
     For months past, a Russian-mafia and ex-KGB presence has been 
     building up there; there is a massive arms build-up as well 
     ($2 million worth a day, according to northern sources), 
     including equipment from the former Warsaw Pact as well as 
     from NATO via Greece. There are also reliable reports on a 
     still more sinister development, with the training of anti-
     Turkish, Leninist terrorists of the PKK (Kurdish People's 
     Party) in the south.
       Meanwhile, Turkey's military presence in the north has 
     officially grown from 6,000 to 30,000. Unconfirmed whispers 
     put the total at closer to 130,000. Reminder: Greece and 
     Turkey are both members of NATO. In February 1975, the U.S. 
     Congress imposed an arms embargo on Turkey; in retaliation, 
     Turkey closed 25 U.S. defense installations. President Gerald 
     Ford partially lifted the embargo in October 1975 and under a 
     new agreement, the following year, Turkey took control of the 
     installations and received substantial grants and credits 
     from the United States.
       Time to declare? In my view, the Turkish intervention of 
     1974 was not an invasion, as widely accepted, but a morally 
     justified rescue operation. I understand the Greek ancestral 
     memories of Ottoman oppression, but I do not think they 
     justify Greek Cypriot repression of the peaceful Turkic 
     minority. I regret the Greek rejection of a federal solution, 
     which alone makes sense to me. Still more do I regret the 
     international failure to recognize the independence of 
     northern Cyprus. As it happens, talks on ways to reunite 
     Cyprus, sponsored by the U.S. and Britain, opened in London 
     on May 20. This encourages me (but only just) to end on a 
     note of hope, though not of optimism.
     

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