Is it time for UK to revise its perspective on Cyprus?
Opinion By Michael Moran
11 March,1999, Turkish Daily News

A letter written by a British diplomat in 1964 has recently been released from the "secret files" of the British Foreign Office. Sent from Sir Patrick Dean, the head of the U.K. mission at the United Nations in New York to the Foreign Office in London, the letter asks a question that might well be raised once more today in only slightly modified form: "What is our policy and true feelings about the future of Cyprus and about Makarios ... What do we think we should do in the long run?"

Why was a senior British diplomat seeking such fundamental advice in 1964? The answer is that he was personally very unhappy about the way the all-Greek Makarios administration had taken over the Cyprus government and about the way the Turkish Cypriots, the co-founder partners of the Republic of Cyprus, were being treated generally. Sir Patrick Dean knew that Makarios was not the government of Cyprus, which government Britain had guaranteed. Indeed, following a dispatch from the U.K. representative to the United Nations in New York, Sir Alec Douglas-Home had noted on May 2, 1964, "Is not the first thing to do for the United Nations to insist on Makarios and Kutchuk meeting together and for the United Nations to deal with them jointly. Makarios is not the government of Cyprus!"

Ever since U.N. Security Council resolution 186 of March 4, 1964 referred to what it called "the government of Cyprus," naively asking that government "to take all ... necessary measures to stop violence and bloodshed in Cyprus," the Cyprus problem has become impossible to resolve. This is because, from the time of resolution 186 to the present day, the international community seems to have assumed that a legitimate Cyprus government can be one like that which Makarios actually headed in March, 1964: a government consisting solely of Greek Cypriots.

Yet, as everybody knows, this idea cannot survive even the most casual scrutiny. According to the 1960 Cyprus Constitution, any legal Cyprus government would have to be a bi-communal one in which the Turkish Cypriot contribution would be three ministers and the Cyprus vice president. The international agreements of 1960, which made Cyprus an independent partnership state -- the 1960 Accords, as they are often referred to -- are still legally valid agreements. These accords laid the foundations of the future in Cyprus as an island in which one community would have no right to dominate the other, while outlawing union with Greece or partition! Nevertheless, the international community (with the exception of Turkey) has, since 1964, continued to recognize a sequence of wholly Greek governments in Cyprus as legitimate.

Whether intentional or not, this remarkably shortsighted behavior has very greatly contributed to the marginalization of the Turkish Cypriots, almost excluding them from having any voice in the international arena. It has served also to obscure Turkey's own legitimate interests in Cyprus as a "guarantor" power. There have been even more harmful effects.

This decision to regard the Greek Cypriots as the only Cypriot community with any legitimate political authority on the island has had two fairly disastrous results which are now being experienced by large segments of the international community itself.

1. Having now accepted that "Cyprus" should become a full European Union member, the EU is about to inherit the Cyprus problem. For it is impossible for the Turkish Cypriots to join in EU accession talks when these are conducted by a wholly Greek "Cyprus government." That is why the U.N. Security Council had put forward the formula that EU matters should be taken up after a settlement and decided upon through the separate referenda of the two sides! Sanctioned by the Security Council and initially agreed by Mr. Vassiliou, the then "president" of the Greek Cypriots, the EU disregarded this formula, thus putting a bigger impediment in the way of a solution. So if the EU continues to treat the Greek Cypriot administration as if it does indeed represent the whole of Cyprus then, at best, the EU will end up with only the Greek south of the island in the EU. This will underline (even more than it is manifest today) the division of the island and seriously exacerbate all the unfortunate attendant consequences of that division, consequences (such as the weakening of NATO's eastern flank) which the international community has been so keen to avoid or minimize;
2. Since 1968, the United Nations has been the main forum in which an attempt is being made to solve the Cyprus problem. The internationally most favored solution is one in which the two Cypriot communities would share sovereignty once more in some bi-zonal federal arrangement. So long as the Greek side is already regarded as the perfectly proper government of Cyprus -- itself already a "sovereign state" -- they can hardly be expected to cooperate in the formation of another Cyprus government in which they will merely share sovereignty with the Turks, whom in any case they regard as their traditional historic enemy.

So it is all the more strange that the international community shows -- officially, at any rate -- no sign of revising its stand on the legitimacy of current Greek Cypriot governments. How it was that this situation came about in 1964 is pretty well understood now, and a useful account of the political maneuvering at the United Nations that led to it can be found in a recent book by Michael Moran: "Rauf Denktash at the United Nations: Speeches on Cyprus" (1997), pp. 1-61 (also repeated in Moran's "Sovereignty Divided: Essays on the International Dimensions of the Cyprus Problem," 1998).

A point that emerges from that account is that while all U.N. members, except Turkey, went along with the view that the all-Greek government of Archbishop Makarios was the legitimate government of Cyprus which everyone had to deal with, the British -- including many diplomats as well as MPs -- had, in private at least, grave doubts about the wisdom of this. The recently released letter we quote here gives graphic expression to these doubts.

The diplomat who wrote the letter, dated Aug. 12, 1964, was an extremely able and experienced man. In fact Sir Patrick Dean, then aged 55 and Britain's permanent representative to the United Nations since 1960, had moved steadily through the more elevated stages of promotion in the Foreign Office to this prestigious position, after which he was made U.K. ambassador in Washington, where he served from 1965 until his retirement in 1969.

The letter's recipient, John Ogilvie Rennie, was five years younger than Dean and only a little less distinguished (eventually he was knighted too). At the time assistant undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office, Rennie was deeply involved in the Cyprus question. As a number of then secret papers now made available by the Foreign Office show, Rennie knew exactly what Makarios was up to -- to marginalize and if necessary even physically eliminate the Turkish Cypriots, abrogate the 1960 Accords and join Cyprus politically to Greece.

In one of the papers released by the Foreign Office, Rennie relates how he met the U.N. secretary-general's Cyprus representative, Galo Plaza, at a London airport on May 20th, 1964. Plaza told him of the extent to which the Greek Cypriots "had been responsible for all the atrocities and for a great deal of senseless brutality and destruction" in Cyprus, despite Resolution 186, which had called for restraint. Rennie could see no reason to doubt the truth of this. So Sir Patrick was writing to a colleague who already knew as well as he himself did what Makarios was up to and what was happening in Cyprus. One is particularly struck by Dean's reference to Makarios's "so-called government." We have not yet discovered if there is an existing reply to this letter. But we know that whatever Sir Patrick may have been told for his "private consumption" at that time, the official policy of the British government remained one of doing its very best not to "offend" the greek Cypriots (upon whose goodwill the running of the British bases largely depended).

Most important, the British continued to instruct their diplomats not to directly confront the Makarios administration with the obvious illegality of their all-Greek Cyprus government. They had at least two reasons for this.

1. For reasons of its own, the Soviet Union wanted the Greek Cypriots to remain in power in Cyprus, and Moscow would almost certainly have vetoed any Security Council resolution that attempted to reinstate a bi-communal government in Cyprus against Greek wishes.
2. The 1960 Accords only gave Cyprus restricted independence, lest it used its right for self-destruction in the name of enosis! The three "guarantors" retained small contingents of their own on the island which functioned under the Treaty of Alliance through a tripartite headquarters. Indeed, Britain had retained 99 square miles of Cyprus for its own military purposes, making its two bases "sovereign British territory" and hence formally not part of the Republic of Cyprus at all. Given the then-current belief (by the vast majority of U.N. states) in the necessity for all states to have the power of "self-determination," there was a grave danger that in any direct confrontation with Makarios at the United Nations (especially in the General Assembly), Britain would find itself accused of anachronous imperialistic behavior that contravened the U.N. Charter.

Britain, therefore, felt that it had to trade very warily in her dealings with the Greek Cypriots. Her official view was that while this was very unfortunate for the Turkish Cypriots and for her NATO ally Turkey, British defense interests had to come first.

Does Britain still need to be so cautious and so tolerant of wholly Greek governments in Cyprus?