“The Turkish Cypriots must support the Greek Cypriots’ struggle for liberation from British imperialism. […] Only when the British imperialists leave the island will its Turkish residents be truly free. […] Those who encourage Turks to oppose Greeks actually only support the interests of the foreign ruler.”
Message of the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet to the Turkish Cypriots, 1955
By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
The UN Secretary-General has convened a five-party conference on Cyprus in Geneva on March 17 and 18. Are invited to participate to the conference the two “communities” of Cyprus, the Greek Cypriots (82% of the population) and the Turkish Cypriots (18%), Greece, Turkey, and Britain. The Republic of Cyprus itself, the victim of the Turkish invasion of 1974 and subsequent occupation of a large part of its territory, has not been invited to this conference which will negotiate its own future!
The five parties will negotiate a solution to the Cyprus problem based on the Annan Plan, the so-called “bizonal bicommunal federation,” which was rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Cypriot people in a referendum, back in 2004. This plan envisages essentially, through a series of provisions, the transformation of the Republic of Cyprus, a UN and EU member state, through a labyrinth of legal provisions, into a “post-modern protectorate” of the US, Britain, and Israel, as well as the inclusion of Turkey “through the back door” into the European Union (due to the decisive influence it would acquire, through the Turkish Cypriots and the Annan plan, over Cyprus’ vote in the EU, along term strategic goal of London and Washington).
The idea of the five-party conference was proposed by Victoria Nuland, one of the darkest and most criminal figures in US politics, who introduced it in 2016 in her effort to find another procedure and overthrow the result of the 2004 referendum.
Both the leadership of the Greek Cypriots under Christodoulides and the Mitsotakis government in Greece, which agreed to participate in this parody of a negotiation process that essentially violates the UN Charter itself, are dependent on the US, the EU, and Israel. In reality they are the most dependent governments Greece and Cyprus had in all their history. They act practically like “agents” of the “collective West,” indifferent to what their citizens want.
Greece has largely lost its sovereignty, turning into a “debt colony” with the EU and IMF bail out programs since 2010. Cyprus has also lost a significant part of its independence with the 2013 bail-in program imposed by the IMF and the EU, the objective of which was to remove Russian capital from the island and, with it, any Russian influence, to the benefit of the American Jewish capital. The close relations between Cyprus and the USSR and, subsequently, Cyprus and Russia, was one of the main assets of Nicosia which permitted to the Cypriot state to resist the constant efforts of the “collective West” (including Israel) and Turkey to dismantle it.
The Christodoulides government in Cyprus is one of the most unpopular in history, supported by only 20% of the population according to polls, while millions of Greeks have held massive demonstrations against the Mitsotakis government throughout Greece and abroad. These demonstrations were the largest in Greek history, perhaps only surpassed by those of 1944, when the country was liberated from German occupation.
As in most countries of the “collective West,” so too in Greece and Cyprus, societies seem to have been “castrated,” “decapitated.” In the sense that the public sphere, politics, media, and “intellectuals” are dominated by completely different ideas than those of the social base. So for society it becomes very difficult to find organizations, leaders, or spokespersons to fight for its aspirations.
This situation makes it easier to implement monstrous plans like the five-party conference on Cyprus, a conference both irrational and illegal, as we will show.
An “absurd” Conference
The five-party conference is absurd because, if the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots cannot resolve their differences through negotiation, why would they resolve them by inviting three other states to the discussion? Obviously, the other three states will be interested in their own interests, not in the interests of Cyprus and the good of the Cypriots. Nor is it their business how the Cypriots will live, under what regime. They do not know better than the Cypriots themselves what should be done on the island.
Moreover, these three states are, literally, the executioners of Cyprus, as their governments are responsible for the greatest tragedies that have befallen the island. Britain has always denied the right of self-determination to the inhabitants of Cyprus, wanting to keep it as its colony due to its enormous strategic importance. It has exercised terrible violence against the island’s inhabitants when they rebelled, constantly fueled conflicts between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, and involved Turkey in the Cyprus issue, even though it had renounced any claim to the island with the Treaty of Lausanne.
After 1960, NATO’s Gladio operated among both Greek and Turkish Cypriot (Denktash) extreme nationalists, pushing them to commit such crimes against the opposite commune as to make reconciliation between themselves impossible. British military officer David Packard in his book describes how US Undersecretary George Ball reprimanded him for his peacekeeping work in 1964, explaining that their goal in Cyprus was not reconciliation but conflict between the two communities.
The Cypriot anti-colonial revolution (1955-59) of EOKA is considered one of the most significant and brilliant episodes in the international struggle against colonialism, and Nicosia was added in 1960 to Cairo as one of the centers of revolutionary struggles in Asia and Africa, before being followed by Algiers. Archbishop Makarios and the President of the Cypriot Socialist Party EDEK were extremely popular in Africa and Asia and close friends to all the leaders of national liberation movements.
Before this revolution, in 1945 and 1947, the British and Americans intervened in Greece to crush the gigantic Greek resistance movement against the Nazis – the largest (taking into account the size of the country), strongest, and deepest in all such movements in occupied Europe. Official Greece had become a protectorate of the US and did what the Americans and British asked, namely undermining the liberation struggle of the Greek Cypriots. But there were some limits as to what a Greek governments could do, as long as a fully pro-US dictatorship had not been imposed on the country, because of the pressure of the Greek public opinion.
It is worth noting at this point that the Cyprus issue has always been a top priority for Israel. The initial goal of the Zionist movement was to create Israel in Cyprus, and the island is included in all maps of “Greater Israel.”
The main reason the US imposed a dictatorship in Greece in 1967 was precisely this. To use a military government to overthrow and assassinate the President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, and dismantle his state. This happened in July 1974, when, under the general supervision of Henry Kissinger, the Greek military (and in reality, American agents) staged a coup in Nicosia, almost identical to that of Chile in 1973. And the Cypriot state would have been dismantled if Makarios had not survived, as opposed to what happened to Allende. With Makarios (and also the leader of Cypriot Socialists Lyssarides) alive their state also survived!
Then again, under the supervision of Kissinger and the lobby, which probably also deceived President Nixon, preoccupied with Watergate, Turkey invaded the island, supposedly to restore constitutional legality and protect the Turkish Cypriots. Within a few days, legality had been restored, and no one was threatening the Turkish Cypriots. This did not, of course, prevent Turkey from carrying out a second military operation in August 1974, proceeding to ethnically cleanse the Greeks, who were the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Northern Cyprus. To this day, Turkish troops remain on the island, refusing to withdraw, in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. The losses of the island’s population during these operations exceeded the losses of the Iraqi population during the American invasion. The Greek armed forces did not react at all, as they were tightly controlled by the CIA.
It is those three states, vastly responsible for all Cypriot tragedies, the UN General Secretary has invited to the Geneva Conference to solve the problems they themselves. It does not seem very logical.
An Illegal Conference
The real legal basis of the five-party conference is the Zurich and London Agreements of 1960, which provided for the institution of “guarantor powers”, Greece, Turkey, and Britain, agreements that represent one of the triumphs of the darkest era of British colonialism and of its “divide and rule” strategy.
These agreements were imposed by the colonial power through threats, blackmail, and pressure, were never accepted by the majority of the EOKA (the national liberation movement) and the mayors who accompanied Makarios to the London conference of 1960, and were never subjected to the judgment of the sovereign Cypriot people.
They belong to the category of arrangements imposed coercively by colonial powers on their colonies, which, for this reason, UN resolutions have declared invalid and illegal.
If they are valid today, they are valid only to the extent that they concern the obligations of the so-called “guarantor powers” towards Cyprus, not of Cyprus.
Nicosia has, moreover, challenged their validity since 1964, while Turkey itself did not dare to invoke them until recently.
Their resurrection is due to one and only one reason: Ms. Nuland had to transfer the responsibility for solving the Cyprus problem from Cypriot society itself to a colonial body that she would control. Implementing these ideas, at the behest of Washington and London, the UN Secretary-General is turning the legal reality of Cyprus (remember, a state—member of the EU) back to the era of colonialism!
Illogical from the point of view of finding a suitable solution for the people of Cyprus, the Geneva conference becomes thus very logical from the permanent point of view of US and British imperialism and neocolonialism, that is to return the island to the status of a colony, albeit a “post-modern” one as we will explain.
Who and for what purpose needs the five-party conference
Until the invention by Nuland of the five-party conference, negotiations were taking place in Cyprus between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. If the negotiations resulted in an agreement, the agreement would be put to a referendum. The failure of the negotiations to result in an acceptable agreement meant one thing. That at present and under the existing political conditions, there is no possibility of a solution to the Cyprus problem that the two communities can agree on.
But if there is none, why should they be forced to agree? And what hopes are there that an agreement imposed on the two communities, without them wanting to implement it, will not result in new and worse bloody tragedies, like in the past?
That, of course, does not concern the US and Britain, who want to dismantle the Cypriot state, either by violent means, as with the 1974 invasion, or by “peaceful” ones, as in 2004 with the Annan Plan.
Because their goal is not, of course, to solve the problems of the Cypriot state, problems which they themselves created with their policies, but to use them and abolish it, turning the island into their colony, which is exactly what the Annan Plan did, the most outrageous “constitution—straitjacket” that has appeared in world constitutional history.
What did they imagine, then? Nuland wanted to have the three guarantors, the President of Cyprus, the UN, and the EU agree to create a new Cypriot “state” of the kind US and Britain wanted, which they would immediately recognize, after the first five-party conference. This was explicitly stated by the European Commissioner for Foreign Policy, Mogherini, back in 2017, who had not been told that she should not publicly say what they had agreed in private. She specifically said that as soon as an agreement is reached in Geneva in 2017, the EU will recognize as a member the new entity that will emerge.
But even if this does not happen, even if a new referendum is provided for, how easy will it be, how free will the Greek Cypriots be to vote against a text on which their President and at least half of their parties, Greece, Britain, Turkey, Turkish Cypriots, the EU, and the UN through Guterres have already agreed?
This is the trick with the five-party conference. This whole procedure was conceived in order to “abduct” the state from the great majority of its population and to bypass the will of the Cypriot people, the majority of whom might be ready for major concessions, but certainly do not want to risk living in a monster state.
But where and when such methods have been applied, the final result has been bloody tragedies.
What solution are they negotiating?
The solution that will be negotiated again in Geneva on March 17 and 18, is a variation for the worse of the Annan Plan. This plan provides for the abolition in the new state of the “majority rule” (i.e., of democracy). It also provides for the abolition of the fundamental principle of the separation of powers, with the concentration of the final legislative, judicial, and executive power in a Supreme Court. This will be a body of nine appointed judges, three Greek Cypriots, three Turkish Cypriots, and three foreigners, who would be appointed by the UN Secretary-General, not even the Security Council, i.e., in practice, the United States, Britain, and Israel, the three countries with dominant influence in the UN. In the very likely event that the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot judges do not agree, any decision would be taken by the three foreigners, who would very probably elect their successors. (Now these arrangements have worsened to the most irrational. Among other things, they are discussing having Greek Cypriots have the majority half of the time and Turkish Cypriots the other half, i.e., constantly canceling each other’s decisions.)
Thus, Cyprus would be transformed from a formerly independent, democratic, and sovereign state into a “post-modern protectorate” of the US, Britain, and Israel, who would appoint the three judges through the UN Secretary-General, while the Byzantine labyrinth of the internal workings of the state, which would require more lawyers than inhabitants to function, and the built-in injustice in the arrangements that would fuel the eternal enmity of the two communities, would likely cause very serious problems in the functioning of the new state, for which no way of addressing them was provided.
The Annan Plan, which is again the basis of the negotiations in Geneva, also abolished, especially for Cyprus, the most basic of the rights provided for by the UN Charter, namely the right to self-defense and the existence of armed forces. Such a provision of perpetual disarmament and prohibition of having an army was not imposed even on defeated Germany and Japan after World War II. If the Annan Plan provided for the establishment of a new state, it would certainly provide for it to have an army. Because it provides for the abolition of the state and the establishment of a protectorate, a colony, it cannot provide for an army.
What else can we say about a plan that leading legal experts have characterized as a monstrosity?
Among other things, the plan also brings Turkey itself through the back door into the EU, since it has decisive influence over Cyprus’ vote in the EU! Without, moreover, fulfilling any of its obligations towards Greece and the Union.
Interim Conclusion
For all the reasons mentioned above, the convening of the five-party conference on Monday is absolutely unacceptable for very serious reasons related to the security and the very existence of the Cypriot state.
If it leads anywhere, it can only lead to a monster solution, which, instead of ending the Cyprus problem, will exacerbate and complicate it, if we do not have new bloody episodes.
Even if it leads nowhere, the perpetuation and legitimization of such an irrational and illegal mechanism and the pursuit of irrational and destructive solutions constitutes a permanent Sword of Damocles over the head of the Cypriot state and people, which will fall on it when international and internal conditions allow it.
The Conference is probably being convened now in an effort to urgently find a solution to bypass the objections of Greece and Cyprus to Turkey’s participation in the new war mechanisms that the Europeans are building with the mission of waging war against Russia.
And subsequently to push Turkey into joining the EU, even though there are no conditions today for a beneficial accession for both the EU and Turkey.
The very policy of Turkey’s accession to the EU has been designed for decades by the British and Americans, in order to forever prevent the EU from becoming a politically autonomous and economically unified Union, and to forever bind Turkey to the West. The British and Americans imposed this policy on Germany and France despite their objections.
The attempt to solve the Cyprus problem, the Greek-Turkish problems, and to accelerate Turkey’s accession to the EU without conditions for success will not solve any problem. On the contrary, it is likely to cause new conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean and new crises in the EU and in EU-Turkey relations.
