The Road to 1974: Britain unleashes Turkey on Cyprus

Makarios’ brinkmanship in his talks with Gov. John Harding went too far, snapping British patience and building up Turkey as an indispensable NATO partner

Archbishop Makarios with field marshal Sir John Harding in 1955

Early 1955 was probably the last opportunity Cyprus had to resolve the issue of its self-determination consensually with Britain, Greece and NATO, without the Turkish factor becoming dominant and unremitting.

In April, the philhellenic Winston Churchill resigned as prime minister in favour of his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Invoking Cyprus’ ethnic Turkish minority, Eden on June 30 invited Greece, Cyprus and Turkey to a tripartite discussion in London.

Archbishop Makarios and his Ethnarchic Council saw a trap in the inclusion of Turkey as an interested party, but the ailing Greek prime minister, Alexandros Papagos, accepted immediately, seeing greater risks if fellow NATO members formalised a discussion that excluded Greece. At the same time, Papagos caved in to Cypriot pressure to file a second claim for Cypriot self-determination at the UN, the first having been rejected the previous December. This claim, too, would fail in September. The fact that Papagos both offended NATO with these claims and pandered to it encapsulates the ineffectiveness of Greek foreign policy in the early 1950s.

Turkey’s attitude was entirely more combative and self-interested. Turkey had, after defeat in the First World War, agreed it “renounces all rights and title whatsoever” over former Ottoman territories lying outside its frontiers, “the future of these territories and islands being settled or to be settled by the parties concerned.”^[1]