“Criminal plots against the Cypriot state: coup and intervention.” That was Phileleftheros’s main front page on 12 August 1973.
The report was damning: “While Grivas’s coup plotters were drawing up plans to seize power and install a ‘revolutionary leadership’ (…) Turkish forces are already on full alert and ready to intervene to seize the province of Kyrenia, which would mean the definitive partition of Cyprus.”
12 August 1973. A full year before the coup and the invasion took place. Not to seize the province of Kyrenia, as it turned out, but to seize almost half of Cyprus.
It leaves you baffled today. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, and the clarity history gives us: didn’t everyone see the disaster coming? It’s unthinkable. Because everything pointed to it being inevitable. Cyprus was a volcano, boiling away, and the eruption would come at any moment. That’s precisely why, on that same front page, on that same day, 12 August 1973, calling the plan monstrous, Phileleftheros warned that the outcome would be “the definitive partition of Cyprus,” which “is clearly already within the scope of the coup itself.” The headline, in capital letters: PARTITIONISTS.
What more do you need? Looking at it in a newspaper today, you can’t quite believe how diseased our thinking was, in Cyprus and in Greece, that people couldn’t see catastrophe bearing down on them. This wasn’t simply failing to spot the danger. It was conscious, deliberate betrayal, nothing else. And the warnings had been coming for years, not just in 1973.
In another Phileleftheros front page, years earlier, on 5 August 1966, the lead story covers the briefing Turkey’s foreign minister, İhsan Sabri Çağlayangil, gave to Turkey’s National Security Council. Phileleftheros’s main headline read: “Turkey quietly preparing for war.” The next day, 6 August 1966, the lead story covered Çağlayangil’s briefing to the Turkish National Assembly. Headline: “Separate Turkish authority already established in Cyprus.”
Turkey preparing for invasion. EOKA B carrying on with its lawless campaign. And on the other side, the lawless activity of Turkish Cypriot groups grinding on without pause, as if the whole thing was running on parallel tracks that could only ever end one place: tragedy.
Take, for example, 27 January 1967, front-page headline: “New climate of terror: buses stopped by Turks to detain Greeks at Kofinou.” The report describes the tension and the climate of terror the Turks were seeking to create in the area. “After the arrest of a priest the day before,” the paper wrote, “yesterday the terrorists stopped two buses at Kofinou and seized their passengers, intending to hold them. This was averted, however, following a strong protest to the authorities of the International Peacekeeping Force.”
All of it aimed at a country that could have been paradise. We turned it into hell. Day by day, year by year. Did we lack the sense to see it? We had it. We just used it like ammunition, each side turning it on the other. Community against community, you’d think, and leave it there? Not even close. Within each community too, turned against itself. Years spent, whole years, working to bring on hell. And they managed it.
So that today we’re left reading the testimony of Michail Georgitsis, the man the dictatorship appointed to lead the coup, who claims that when he received the order he asked, supposedly, what Turkey’s reaction would be, and the dictator Ioannidis told him “there was a cover-up.” Presumably from America, or so he says…
You couldn’t even call them fools.
