Introduction

“Now the island lies in ruins, it is partially occupied, untold refugees have been created, and the American Ambassador has been killed.”¹ Thus wrote the late Greek American James Pyrros, political aide to Congressman Lucien Nedzi, in his diary as tensions on the island of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey reached their zenith on 19 August 1974. Since then, a political impasse has existed.

Is Cyprus on the cusp of a significant political change in the situation that has existed more or less since the summer of 1974, when the island experienced a Greek-inspired coup followed by two Turkish military offensives that have left it divided?

The summer of 2014 marks the fortieth anniversary of perhaps one of the lowest points in the post-1945 history of the eastern Mediterranean region (see figure 1). During the summer of 1974, a political and military confrontation over the island nation erupted between two North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies—Greece and Turkey—that had direct ramifications for other NATO members, notably, the United States and Great Britain.

Throughout its history, Cyprus has proved to be something of a political enigma. Situated five hundred miles east of Greece and only forty miles south of Turkey, Cyprus’s strategic location made it a prized possession over the centuries for many great powers wanting direct access, by sea and later by air, to the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Yet Cyprus’s demographics presented unique challenges. Today, Greek Cypriots make up approximately 77 percent, Turkish Cypriots 18 percent, and others 5 percent of the island’s population, which is estimated at 1.16 million people.² The associated ethnic divisions, along with the relative geographic proportions of the island in which the Greek-and Turkish-Cypriot communities live, have been a source of tension and recrimination for the local population—and, naturally, for Greece and Turkey—since independence in 1960.

Figure 1.

Cyprus as of 2014, the fortieth anniversary of the island’s division. Source: Image courtesy of the Press and Information Office, Republic of Cyprus. Used with permission.

The fateful summer of 1974 was not only the beginning of a de facto physical partition of the island but also the culmination of what had become a forty-year domestic struggle between the Greek-Cypriot majority and the Turkish-Cypriot minority for a more workable political arrangement for Cyprus. The London and Zurich agreements of 1959 and 1960 established the Republic of Cyprus (with the exception of the two military bases of Dhekelia and Akrotiri, which remained under British sovereignty); created a treaty of alliance among Greece, Turkey, and Great Britain for the maintenance of the independence and territorial integrity of Cyprus; and established that the three countries would act as guarantor powers to ensure Cyprus could neither join Greece (enosis) nor be partitioned. In the fullness of time, the resulting political environment became the fuel for subsequent confrontations between Athens and Ankara over Cyprus (which in turn drew in Great Britain and the United States) in 1963–64 and in 1967. On these two occasions, Turkey had threatened to intervene militarily in Cyprus as a guarantor power, only to be deterred by the United States. As one author has noted, these were some very tense and “uneasy years” for both Cyprus and for the region as a whole.³ When the 1974 crisis overturned the London-Zurich paradigm for Cyprus, the world witnessed the loss of varying degrees of political credibility among all of the parties to the crisis.

The military dictatorship in Athens had largely been at odds with Nicosia since coming to power in 1967. The Greek military junta, and in particular Brigadier General Demetrios Ioannides, the key ringleader, deeply mistrusted the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios. Athens considered him too liberal for the junta’s extreme right-wing tendencies, and Makarios, for his part, ensured relations between Nicosia and Athens would be strained. Consistently refusing to follow Athens’s lead, Makarios strongly criticized the policies of the Greek military dictatorship and resisted entreaties regarding enosis with Greece.

In the early morning of...