$Unique_ID{COW01033} $Pretitle{222} $Title{Cyprus Chapter 4B. Political Dynamics} $Subtitle{} $Author{Margarita Dobert} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{party makarios political cyprus greek turkish cypriot enosis church cypriots} $Date{1979} $Log{} Country: Cyprus Book: Cyprus, A Country Study Author: Margarita Dobert Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1979 Chapter 4B. Political Dynamics Many centuries of foreign domination have provided Cypriots little experience in political participation beyond the village. The last foreign rulers-the British-preempted decisionmaking power almost entirely. In a society numbering fewer than 700,000 persons and lacking broad political experience, it was not surprising that, during the first two decades of self-rule, personal attributes and personal relationships were major determinants of political allegiance. Political leaders operated on the basis of loyal personal followings, and many political parties were known informally by their founder's names. Changing Alignments in Greek Cypriot Society Circumstances have produced three successive basic patterns of political alignment within Greek Cypriot society since the struggle for enosis began. The demand for enosis itself produced the first political cleavage insofar as the Church of Cyprus, which became the foremost spokesman for enosis, excluded the Communists, as atheists, from the struggle. After independence Makarios managed to create a consensus, helped after 1963 by the intercommunal strife that united Greek Cypriot society in the face of common danger. Under the banner of his Patriotic Front, he brought together the vast majority of Greek Cypriots including the Communists. But a new pattern of political alignment became discernible, opposing the supporters of Makarios against a minority on the extreme right who considered him a traitor to the cause of enosis. By the time Makarios died the radical right had been discredited and had all but disappeared. The death of the longtime leader set the stage for still another alteration in the basic political alignment in the form of a gathering on the right under the leadership of Clerides who posed a challenge to Kyprianou, Makarios' successor. The Church and the Communists in Opposition The Orthodox Church, represented on the island by the Church of Cyprus, had been for four centuries not only the spiritual fountainhead of the Greek Cypriot people but also a central and powerful institution concerned directly in economic and political affairs. Under the Ottomans, the church hierarchy had been used as an administrative device for governing the Orthodox Christian Cypriots, providing them a degree of autonomy, just as had been done with other non-Muslim minorities elsewhere in the empire. The archbishop represented Cypriot Christians at the sultan's court in Istanbul (see The Ottoman Era, ch. 1; The Church of Cyprus, ch. 2). In the process of secularizing the island's public institutions, the British administrators inevitably weakened the church's position. They took away the right of the church to appoint teachers in schools as well as its right to collect taxes. Inevitably friction developed between the church and the colonial authorities, and in the early 1900s the church hierarchy became intensively involved in the intermittent agitation for enosis. The attachment of Greek Cypriots to their church, viewed as the prime advocate of cultural and national aspirations, was thus further cemented. By becoming the foremost spokesman for enosis, the church preempted leftist forces from becoming identified with the struggle. Rightist forces were summarized under the term ethnikofron, which literally meant believing in the national idea. For nationalist Greek Cypriots that was synonymous with believing in the tradition of Greco-Christian culture, in the unbreakable unity of church and state, and in union with Greece. Being Christian meant being Greek. When George Grivas organized EOKA in the mid-1950s he excluded all leftists, whom he labeled as atheists and pro-Soviet, and right-wing forces came to monopolize the enosis movement. At the same time the growth of a communist party pushed the middle-of-the-roaders toward the right, thus polarizing society between church and communism. In a country where the church played the predominant political role, the Communists were the only organized force proposing secular solutions to social problems. Communist efforts on Cyprus went back to 1924 when a handful of intellectuals in Limassol established the Communist Party of Cyprus (Kommunistikon Komma Kyprou-KKK). KKK support came predominantly from labor, and the party began organizing leftist trade unions in the early 1930s-an effort in which it was without competition inasmuch as Cyprus had at that time no socialist party. The British made no effort to interfere with the rise of such unions, and they quickly expanded, offering loans, establishing coffeeshops and football teams for workers, giving scholarships, and occasionally medical treatment outside the island. However, the Communists managed to gain recruits among a broader range of groups, including urban intellectuals and small farmers. The KKK was banned in 1933, but a new political party, the Progressive Party of the Working People (Anorthotikon Komma Ergazomenou Laou-AKEL), founded in 1941, effectively succeeded the KKK in 1945 as the communist party of Cyprus. In 1946 AKEL won municipal elections in four out of six major towns. Proscribed during the 1955-59 emergency period, it was legalized again in 1959. Makarios, in an electoral pact, offered AKEL five unopposed seats out of thirty-five Greek Cypriot seats in the Legislative Assembly. The Communists had never publicly denounced enosis and might have welcomed it at one time with a democratic or communist Greece. But because the enosis issue had been appropriated by the church, they supported the goal of self-government for Cyprus instead, to be gained by nonviolent means. Politics of the Makarios Years The commitment to enosis among many Greek Cypriots declined in the early years after independence. As first president of the republic, Makarios advocated politics he saw as feasible and realistic, and in his view, for the time being at least, enosis did not fall in that category. The advantages of independence became discernible to a growing number of persons. Jobs became available for many, including EOKA members, and the economy flourished. A prospering middle class realized that it enjoyed a living standard higher than that in Greece. Racked by civil strife and communist agitation, Greece seemed too weak to protect the island against a possible Turkish intervention. After 1967 the government installed by the colonels in Athens did not appeal to democrats and liberals. Greek Cypriots continued to see themselves as Greeks, but no longer necessarily as part of a Greek state. While the drive for enosis subsided as a mobilizing force, the difficulties of creating a nation out of a bifurcated society took center stage. Makarios failed to draw the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities together but, helped by his unusual position and special gifts, he managed to create a consensus among the Greek Cypriots. Although the authority of the Church of Cyprus diminished somewhat with the rise of new secular institutions, Makarios, as its head, nevertheless embodied the traditional authority of Cypriot Hellenism and, as elected president, had legitimate political authority. Coupled with this were an extraordinary charisma and a mastery of diplomacy that his enemies saw as deviousness or prevarication. For whatever reason, Makarios was able to win allegiance along a wide political spectrum. The only opposition to him was from the extreme right. In the first general elections held on July 31, 1960, thirty of the thirty-five seats allotted to Greek Cypriots went to supporters of Makarios, the other five went to AKEL. The president's supporters formed a loose group known as the Patriotic Front, which was lacking in either a cohesive social base or unifying ideology. Members of AKEL saw Makarios as a symbol of resistance to pressure from outside powers and supported him on foreign policy issues and some domestic issues as well. They supported his nonaligned policy within the UN and his diplomatic overtures to so-called Third World countries. Makarios willingness to work with the Communists in his own country seemed to lend credibility to his nonaligned foreign policy. Greek Cypriot voters in the presidential election of 1968 returned Makarios to office by a majority of more than 95 percent of votes cast. His only opponent had been Takis Evdokas, running on an enosis platform. The results were seen as a massive endorsement of Makarios' personal leadership and support for his domestic and international policies. At the investiture ceremony, the president asserted that the Cyprus problem could not be solved by force but had to be worked out in the framework of the UN. He said that Greek Cypriots wanted to live peacefully with Turkish Cypriots in a unitary and undivided Cyprus and indicated that new proposals were to be submitted to the UN to find common grounds for discussions. His remarks reflected the nature of the dominant concern of his government at that time-resolution of the problem presented by the withdrawal of the Turkish Cypriot community into separate enclaves under a "provisional" autonomous administration (see The Republic of Cyprus, ch. 1). Meanwhile, in the face of the ongoing intercommunal crisis, important developments were taking place in the political life of the Greek Cypriot community. Up to that time political organization had encompassed only AKEL and the loose coalition of Makarios supporters in the Patriotic Front. In the late 1960s the Patriotic Front dissolved, and its various factions formed new political parties, all ostensibly loyal to the president. According to Cypriot political observer Kyriacos C. Markides, Makarios was pleased with this development, viewing it as a sign of the maturation of the island's political life. One of the parties that emerged out of the defunct Patriotic Front was Clerides' moderately right-wing Unified Democratic Party, usually referred to as Eniaion, which won fifteen seats in the general elections to the House of Representatives held on July 5, 1970. Two other former Patriotic Front politicians were prominent in the leadership and formation of Eniaion: Papadopoulos, minister of labor, who later became Greek Cypriot negotiator for intercommunal talks with the Greek Cypriots, and Polykarpos Geokajis, minister of interior. Georkajis was an ex-EOKA leader, with a reputation as one of its toughest guerrilla fighters. As minister of the interior and head of an organization of former guerrilla fighters, he was regarded as the second most powerful leader in the country, outranked only by Makarios himself. His own private army was at the disposal of Eniaion. In 1969 Georkajis was assassinated (see The Republic of Cyprus, ch. 1; The Cyprus Conflict, ch. 5). Eniaion aimed at becoming the successor to the Patriotic Front by unifying all nationalist forces. It stood for free enterprise and a practical solution to the intercommunal deadlock. It was pro-West and pro-NATO, and it drew its support from the right-wing middle class of professionals, businessmen, and white-collar employees. Clerides at that time fully supported Makarios, although some Eniaion members did not. Another new party, the Progressive Coalition (Proodeftiki Parataxis), headed by Odysseus Ioannides, competed with Eniaion at the polls since it also appealed to former supporters of the Patriotic Front. In the 1970 elections the party won seven seats in the House of Representatives, as compared with Eniaion's fifteen. Among its leaders was Nicos Sampson, who, like Georkajis, was a former guerrilla fighter in EOKA and who also had his own paramilitary force. Unlike Georkajis, however, who enjoyed a powerful position in the government, Sampson remained on the outside, a bitter rival of Georkajis of whose acceptance by the establishment he was said to have been highly envious. In the 1970 elections the Progressive Coalition won seven seats, drawing votes mostly from among the rural population, especially members of the right-wing Panagrarian Union of Cyprus (Panagrotiki Enosis Kyprou-PEK). It also tried to gain control of the right-wing Cyprus Confederation of Labor (Synomospondia Ergaton Kyprou-SEK). However, the labor union split into two factions, one supporting Eniaion, the other the Progressive Front. The socialist party, the United Democratic Union of the Center (Eniaia Dimokratiki Enosis Kendrou-EDEK) founded in February 1969 by Makarios' personal physician Vassos Lyssarides, put up twenty candidates in the 1970 elections, winning two seats. The party advocated socialized medicine and nationalization of banks and foreign-owned mines. It was anti-NATO, pro-nonaligned bloc, and pro-Arab in foreign policy. It stood for enosis, but only with a democratic Greece, strongly opposing the military regime then in power in Athens. It also militantly opposed continued British sovereignty rights on the island of Cyprus, assailing the bases at Dhekelia and Akrotiri as military bridgeheads for Anglo-American imperialist designs in the region. It was thus close to AKEL in some respects, but it condemned AKEL's loyalty to the Soviet Union. EDEK appealed to noncommunist leftists, intellectuals, white- but not blue-collar workers, and gained some support in the countryside. AKEL won 40 percent of the vote and nine House seats in the 1970 elections. To judge by the returns, its supporters were uniformly distributed throughout the island. Despite its strength at the polls and its control of more than half of the labor union members, including a number of affiliated peasant organizations like the Union of Cypriot Farmers (Enosis Kyprion Agroton-EKA), AKEL was only minimally represented in positions in the government at both the national and local levels. In contrast to the political violence of the extreme right, the Communists appeared peaceful and even respectable. Political analysts have defined them as cautious, rational, and law-abiding realists rather than revolutionaries. Moscow, facing NATO in that part of the world, was satisfied to let AKEL pursue a program of welfare reformism within capitalism rather than agitating for a total transformation of society. All of these parties except AKEL still had the call for enosis in their platforms, although by 1970 their leaders appeared to be doing nothing more than paying lip service to the idea. The one enosis advocate who had run in the House elections, Evdokas, had been defeated, as he had earlier when running as the only opposition candidate to Makarios in the 1960 presidential election. Despite its broad power base and the conversion of the electorate to a policy of independence for Cyprus, the Makarios government was overthrown just four years later. Support from the mainland Greek government enabled a small group of right-wing extremists to successfully carry out a coup d'etat against Makarios on July 15, 1974. Makarios was forced to flee the country, and former EOKA gunman, Sampson, proclaimed president, appointed a cabinet dominated by people dedicated to enosis. In quick succession thereafter, Turkey invaded Cyprus, Sampson stepped down and Clerides became acting president of Cyprus, and the Greek junta in Athens was toppled from power (see The Republic of Cyprus, ch. 1; Conflict within the Greek Cypriot Community, 1963-74, ch. 5.). Makarios returned in December 1974, taking over the reins of government from acting President Clerides. By the time elections were held for the House of Representatives in September 1976, Makarios had managed to create an alliance of three political parties that supported him at the polls. Together they won thirty-four out of thirty-five seats. Among them, twenty-one seats went to the newly founded Democratic Front (subsequently renamed Democratic Party-Dimokratiko Komma), nine went to AKEL, and four to EDEK. Of eleven independent candidates only Papadopoulos, deputy president of the House of Representatives, won a seat. Cracks had begun to show in Makarios' broad political base in his last years, however. Opposition to the pro-Makarios alliance was consolidating around Clerides and his newly established Democratic Rally (Dimokratikos Synagermos). Before the Turkish intervention, Clerides and his party, Eniaion, had been one of the major elements in the base of support for the president and his policies. But disagreement developed between Makarios and Clerides over the handling of the intercommunal negotiations, and Clerides was asked to resign. Clerides also lost his position as president of the House of Representatives and was replaced by Papadopoulos. In May Clerides formed the Democratic Rally, apparently taking many former Eniaion members along with him. In the elections this opposition party won no seats but pulled more than 24 percent of the popular votes. Joining forces with the Democratic Rally was the extreme right-wing group calling itself the Democratic National Party. Post-Makarios Politics After Makarios' death Kyprianou succeeded to the presidency, and Clerides continued as the principal opposition leader. The two men differed, among other things, in over how to deal with the intercommunal problem. Kyprianou's Democratic Party had run in 1976 on a platform of long-term struggle over the Turkish occupation of the north and nonalignment in international affairs. AKEL and EDEK gave Kyprianou their support, obviously preferring his foreign policy positions to the generally pro-Western policies of his opponent, Clerides. Kyprianou appeared to welcome their support but tried, at times unsuccessfully, to lessen his dependency on it. The two parties approved Kyprianou's attempt at solving the intercommunal problem within the framework of the UN, although AKEL has at times appealed directly to the workers in the north and advocated economic cooperation between the two sectors as a first step. EDEK agreed fully with Kyprianou's uncompromising stand and remained unwilling to legitimize the results of the Turkish intervention. Sharing the political stage with Kyprianou were several other major figures, including Archbishop Chrysostomos, who had succeeded Makarios in the latter's traditional role as head of the Church of Cyprus. In the spring of 1979, before the scheduled resumption of intercommunal talks, the archbishop traveled to the United States, as Makarios had done in the past, seeking support for the cause of the Greek Cypriots. The archbishop spoke to Greek-American audiences, met with senators, congressmen, and President Jimmy Carter and talked to UN Secretary General Waldheim. Clerides charged Kyprianou and is predecessor with having mishandled the Cyprus problem. He advocated a pro-Western policy on the grounds that only the United States and members of the European Community (EC) could pressure Turkey into making concessions. He kept referring to the lost opportunities-to concessions made too late after the Turkish side was no longer willing for a quid pro quo. He advocated greater flexibility and a step-by-step settlement based on concrete proposals. Clerides also blamed Kyprianou for not pardoning those involved in the coup against Makarios. He said that the past should be forgotten and demanded an end to what he called the persecution of the right wing. He met with Kyprianou in April 1979, and Kyprianou suggested that political prisoners and detainees might be released in the interest of Greek Cypriot unity. Clerides also called for the dissolution of the House of Representatives and a change in the electoral system based on simple proportional representation. This was bound to give a sizable number of seats to the Democratic Rally and possibly entail a different trend in domestic and external policies. However, the increasing popularity of the right wing did not seem to signify in mid-1979 a resurgence of the extremism that had marked the opposition to Makarios. Enosis had been publicly discarded. Alecos Michaelides, president of the House of Representatives, told the UN in November 1978 that all settlement proposals expressly excluded annexation of part or all of Cyprus to any country. Turkish Cypriot Politics Material on which a description of political patterns in northern Cyprus could be based was sketchy. The central element in the situation was the presence of Turkish military forces in the area, reinforcing the administration of President Denktas, whose intimate links with the mainland government in Turkey were maintained through frequent communication with Ankara. The principal internal concern of the administration in mid-1979 appeared to be the worsening economic situation that had prompted the resignation of the first cabinet in March 1978. That cabinet, assembled in July 1976 and headed by Konuk, had lasted less than twenty-one months (see The Regime in the North, this ch.). Acting in the face of growing criticism of rising prices, Konuk had resigned and was replaced as prime minister by Osman Orek, former president of the Legislative Assembly. Eight months later the administration was in further difficulty as disputes with the ruling party, the UBP, prompted Orek to tender his resignation. Denktas sought without success to persuade Orek to change his mind, then offered the position to Vedat Celik, who also declined. Orek resigned from the UBP, as did the party's secretary general Orhan Zihni Bilgehan, setting off a chain reaction among party members holding positions in the administration. By February 1979 the UBP had lost eleven of the thirty seats it had held in the Legislative Assembly through the resignation of deputies from the party. In the meantime, Denktas had offered the position of prime minister to Mustafa Cagatay, who had been Minister of Labor, Social Affairs, and Health in Orek's cabinet and was a UBP deputy in the Legislative Assembly. Cagatay accepted the offer. The major opposition party was the Communal Liberation Party (Toplumcu Kurtulus Partisi-TKP) founded in 1976 by Alpay Durduran. It showed its strength in the May 1976 municipal elections when its candidate was elected mayor of Lefkosa, Nicosia's Turkish quarter. In the June 1976 Legislative Assembly elections, the party won six seats; in the December 1978 elections, it won eight. At its second congress held in April 1979, Durduran claimed that the party's strength continued to increase and that the party was willing to form a coalition with any of the other parties except the UBP. Durduran, who had proclaimed his support of the Denktas-Makarios guidelines of 1977, was criticized by opponents outside the party for being too conciliatory toward the Greek Cypriots. Durduran urged his fellow Turkish Cypriots to work hard in order to close the social and economic gap between the two communities and thus make possible a genuine federal solution between equal parties. He appealed for contacts and ties with the opponents of Kyprianou in the Greek Cypriot community. Oldest of the parties in the north was the socialist opposition party, the Republic Turkish Party (Cumhuriyetci Turk Partisi-CTP) founded in 1970. Led by Ozker Ozgur, the party, which had a stable constituency mainly in the labor movement, held two seats in the Legislative Assembly. Another party, holding two seats in the Assembly was the Populist Party (Halkci Partisi-HP). It had been founded in 1975 by Alper Y. Orhon, a former minister, who ran on a platform of rigid social democratic principles, and Kucuk, first president of the republic and leader of the Turkish Cypriot community until 1971. In early 1979 former Prime Minister Konuk and several other former UBP deputies in the National Assembly, including newspaper publisher Ismet Kotak, established a new party organization to which they gave the name Democratic People's Party. According to its leadership the party was to be molded in the tradition established by the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal (more popularly known as Ataturk) and would work toward economic and social self-sufficiency for the north, which it saw as a requisite for intercommunal stability. Konuk asserted that the north was "an indivisible part of the lofty Turkish nation," but added that his party supported the concept of an independent, nonaligned, biregional, and bicommunal sovereign Cyprus. He went on to demand an end to British control of Sovereign Base Areas (see Foreign Policy, this ch.). Three other political party organizations were announced in early 1979, all of which presumably commanded only small followings. These were the Turkish Unity Party founded by a former officer of the Turkish Air Force and allegedly gaining its constituency among mainland Turks living in the north; the Reformation and Prosperity Party, established by a Famagusta merchant, distinguished from all other Turkish Cypriot political parties by its religous ethos, and the Democratic Party whose aspirations were stated in terms of anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism. The Turkish Unity Party advocated closer ties with Turkey and national sovereignty for the Turkish-Cypriot administrated area. The worsening economic situation manifested itself in sectoral unemployment, and inflation continued a sharp upward spiral that had begun in 1975. Unwelcome emigration of skilled labor to Turkey and abroad from the north was a particularly serious concern. According to the chairman of the Turkish Cypriot Labor Federation (Turk-Sen) emigration and unemployment were the most serious economic problems facing the leadership in the north in the late 1970s. Turk-Sen members met with members of the Greek Cypriot labor movement in early 1979 to discuss possibilities for economic cooperation. Other sources of unrest lay in social and cultural matters. Conflicts arose between the islanders and the settlers from Turkey caused by cultural and linguistic differences and rumors that the newcomers were said to get preferential treatment in housing and employment. Unrest was also fostered by students who had gone to study in Turkey, were drawn there into the intense ideological struggles plaguing the mainland, and then returned with extremist views that they injected into their home communities. Turkish Cypriots also complained about the disadvantages of not being represented internationally. Foreign states did not recognize the travel papers issued by their administration. Turkish Cypriots, except for those still holding Republic of Cyprus or even Commonwealth passports, were treated like stateless persons.