The Cyprus Problem:
An Opportunity To Defeat an Ethnic Lobby

4,100 words

“Until the special interests of the minorities and the special enthusiasms of liberals are again made subservient to the national interest, America’s diplomatic incoherence will continue to be one of the great destabilizing forces in the world social order. A foreign policy directed by lobbies instead of statesmen is worse than no foreign policy at all.”—Wilmot Robertson

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When George Washington warned America about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address he might have had the political entity that is modern Cyprus in mind. America has rivals, America has enemies, America has allies, but there is no word that describes the relationship of Cyprus to the United States. To understand the ongoing Cyprus situation, one needs to look back at centuries of history.

The people of Cyprus are mostly Greek. Their religion is Eastern Orthodox Christianity. French Lusignan Knights held Cyprus from 1192 until 1489, then the Venetians held Cyprus from 1489 until 1571. Both groups attempted to convert the island to Western Christianity in the same way that the Normans converted Sicily: by appointing Latin churchmen to high church offices and thereby shifting the population’s allegiance over time. This failed. The Cypriots remained stubbornly Eastern Orthodox.

In 1571, the Ottoman Turks captured the island. Ottoman policy was to win hearts and minds by allowing the native Greeks to follow their faith freely. The Ottomans were seen as liberators by the Greek Cypriots and the Ottoman Turks confiscated the lands of the former Latin rulers. The Ottoman Sultan did, however, seek to increase the economic value of the island by sending in Turkish settlers. The initial settlers comprised of peasants who, because of poor land, could not make a decent living, sons of peasants whose names had not yet been inscribed on the provincial tax registers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. Altogether quarrelsome individuals who ceaselessly indulged in litigation concerning summer pastures, vineyards, and other kinds of property. [1]

Later, skilled Turks came to the island to mine saltpeter. The Sultan also sent troublemakers and nomads to Cyprus as exiles. The demographics stabilized so that Greeks were roughly 80% of the population and Turks roughly 18% in 1960. The Turkish Cypriots were scattered around the island. The British Empire acquired a lease on Cyprus in 1878 due to British support for the Ottoman Turks during a period of diplomatic intrigue. British interest in the island was mostly military. The island was used as a military base to help protect the British-controlled Suez Canal. The British annexed Cyprus outright during World War I since the British Empire was at war with the Ottoman Empire.

Greek Cypriots are members of a wider civilization, namely Orthodox Civilization. Orthodox Christians draw their heritage and traditions from the Greek speaking parts of the Roman Empire. Western Christians (in Western Europe, the Americas and the British dominions) draw their heritage and traditions from the Latin speaking parts of the same. The Turks are part of Islamic civilization, and they are cool-headed followers of the Prophet Mohammed. Civilizations are absolutely critical to a nation’s identity and its place in the wider world. Samuel Huntington writes:

A civilization is the broadest cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Chinese or Hindu communities. Chinese, Hindus, and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he strongly identifies. Civilizations are the biggest “we” within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other “thems” out there. [2]

The Greek Revival

The cause of World War I was partially due to the destabilization that the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire brought upon the rest of Europe. The Ottoman Empire was a strange mixture of European excellence and Islamic and anti-European ways. It was both well-governed and oppressive. It was also part of the wider Islamic civilization. All those within who were not Muslims were living under the occupation forces of a different civilization. The most important and critical resource of the Ottoman Turks was the Greek and Balkan Christians. There was a special tax that drafted the children of the Sultan’s Christian subjects into the Imperial Service. Not every draftee was sent to a good job in the headquarters of the Sultan, however. Girls were made sexual slaves in harems, some of the boys were castrated.

The relationship of the Turks to their Christian subjects was therefore always tense. It proved impossible to integrate Muslims and Turks with Orthodox, Assyrian or other types of Christians. To put it in a simplistic American context, the ethnic relationship between the Turks and the Greeks was like that between heritage Americans and Somali migrants: the presence of the latter was always resented by the former and no merging across the racial and civilizational divide was possible.

The Ottoman Empire’s collapse started when wealthy Greek shipping magnates became inspired by the nationalist ideas that emerged in Western Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. With the help of the British and others, Greek nationalists had freed the Peloponnese and Attica by 1830. From their newly won kingdom, the Greeks started a metapolitical campaign aimed at the Greek-speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire which encouraged “union” or enosis with the newly emerged Kingdom of Greece.

There was a religious and civilizational element to the Greek national revival. The Greeks believed with a millenarian expectation that they would one day be free of the Islamic yoke, and a restored Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire would emerge. They called this, to Romaiko, to Romaic [i.e. Byzantine] Restoration. The liberation movement was therefore fanatic and bloody. Historian William St. Clair writes:

The Turks of Greece left few traces. They disappeared suddenly and finally in the spring of 1821 un-mourned and unnoticed by the rest of the world. Years later, when travelers asked about the heaps of stones, the old men would explain, ‘There stood the tower of Ali Aga, and there we slew him, his harem, and his slaves’. It was hard to believe then that Greece had once contained a large population of Turkish descent, living in small communities all over the country, prosperous farmers, merchants, and officials, whose families had known no other home for hundreds of years. As the Greeks said, the moon devoured them. [3]

The example of successful violence and ethnic cleansing set by the Greeks spread to all the peoples within the Orthodox lands which were part of the Ottoman Empire at some point. In the north, Orthodox Serbs clashed with Roman Catholic Croats during World War II, throughout the Yugoslav Era in the form of minor terrorism, and most fiercely in the 1990s. In the east, Islamic Turks clashed with Orthodox Armenians.

The word “clash” hides an ugly reality. The areas formerly part of the Ottoman Empire are where the conflicts with ethnic cleansing came early and stayed late. After the Greeks killed the Turks in the Peloponnese, the Orthodox and Moslems of the Ottoman Empire were drawn into a vortex of killing which included rape, murdering children, crucifying people in the desert, and forceable population transfers. The Turks could be perpetrators of racial murder in one part of the Empire and the victims of it in another. It was a war of civilizational and national extermination.

Decolonized Cyprus

While the Ottoman Empire was unable to contain the ethnic violence between its captive nations, the British ruled Cyprus such that the island appeared to stand away from the bloodshed. However, the Orthodox and Islamic civilizational networks reached out to Cyprus. There was an especially powerful metapolitical effort on the part of ethnonationalist Greeks in the Kingdom of Greece directed at the Greek Cypriots that aimed to achieve enosis. The directors of this effort in Cyprus were Greek diplomats, Greek Cypriot teachers, Greek patriotic organizations, the Greek Kings George I and Constantine I, and the Athenian press. In 1901, British officials found that every Greek Cypriot school had the flag of the Kingdom of Greece in every classroom. One Greek Cypriot teacher was encouraged by the Greek king to give a speech to Greek Cypriot youths ominously encouraging them to conduct target practice in 1903. The leader of the Greek Cypriots when Cyprus became independent in 1960 was Archbishop Makarios, born in 1913.

After the Egyptians gained control of the Suez Canal, there was no reason for the British to control the whole of Cyprus. The British kept two locations on the island to serve as military bases and then they and Greece and Turkey created a republic which took ethnic factors into account in the constitution. Essentially, the republic’s vice president was to be a Turkish Cypriot and the president a Greek Cypriot. The police, military, and civil service were to be integrated with ethnic percentages equal to that of the population. There was also a plan for separate municipal governments that was vaguely defined and would never come into being. The constitution of the Republic of Cyprus was to be guaranteed by Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

To make a long story short, Archbishop Makarios, who was made President, ignored the constitution from the get-go when Cyprus became independent in 1960. One critical figure on Makarios’s cabinet was the Cypriot Turk, Vice President Dr. Fazıl Küçük. He became increasingly frustrated by the actions of Makarios in subverting the constitution. Matters came to a head between the two men over the military. The armed forces were expected to be manned by both Turks and Greeks but segregated at the platoon level. However, Makarios refused to admit any Turks. In response, Küçük, vetoed legislation which would allow for an army.

Makarios responded to the veto by organizing an illegal army staffed by Greeks who were dedicated believers in enosis. Many of the shadow army’s new recruits had served in the anti-British terrorist group the Organization of Cypriot Fighters, the EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών). Makarios equipped the unconstitutional Greek Cypriot army with weapons from the Soviet Union, communist Czechoslovakia, and nations in the Third World.

Makarios’s choice of weapons suppliers reflected a civilizational ethos. The Archbishop was reaching out, through the Orthodox civilizational world, to Moscow for assistance and got it. His outreach to the Third World, especially those in the Non-Aligned Movement, reflect the alienation of Makarios and his followers from Western Europe and America. It was the Cypriot Turks who were anti-communist and anti-Soviet.

Ethnic tensions increased as the Greek Cypriots sabotaged the constitution. Then, across the Christmas Season of 1963, Greek fighters pounced on the Cypriot Turks. The attack started when police shot a Turkish couple at a checkpoint Nicosia, the capital. The fighting was spread by the illicit Greek Cypriot army. The Turks were outgunned and completely surprised. Turkish Cypriots responded by retreating from their isolated villages to enclaves in the larger cities. Turkish neighborhoods which only held hundreds of residents hitherto filled with several thousand refugees, straining everything.

The American response to this was confused, to put it simply. Greek Cypriots deliberately disinformed and lied to the global media about the true nature of the events. Furthermore, the United States was still in in uproar over President Kennedy’s murder by an antifa gunman acting alone. America was also struggling under the agitation of the “civil rights” movement and thoroughly locked in the Cold War. US troops were already deployed to Vietnam, and worries over that situation were growing. Additionally, there was not a vocabulary that described the political situation in Cyprus that the American public could reference. Explanations of conflicts abroad were framed in the structure of the Cold War. Terms like ethnic cleansing and the “clash of civilizations” were unknown.

To add to the confusion, there was domestic lobbying by “paper” Americans. President Lyndon Baines Johnson was seeking re-election in 1964 and he wanted the support of the Greek Lobby. In the 1960s, the Greek Lobby consisted of those of immigrant stock with US citizenship who retained loyalty to modern Greece and its enosis ideals. Jews are not the only people in America who have dual citizenship and dual loyalties. Today the Greek Lobby is fully professionalized, and it has an exaggerated historiography of “fighting the Klan” in the 1920s. There is a Turkish Lobby, but it consists of K Street professionals hired by the Turkish government. There is not a collection of dual citizenship Turks that can swing a congressional race.

After what has come to be called “Bloody Christmas,” the Turkish Cypriot leadership shifted from their support for civic nationalism to armed resistance and appeals to Turkey for help. Aytuğ Plümer writes:

It was clear to Küçük and his colleagues that…events had removed any possibility for the two peoples to live together and to cooperate in the sense envisaged by the constitution. Although Greeks and Turks of Cyprus had lived together for centuries they had never intermingled. Each community had preserved its tradition, way of living, culture, and educational institutions as well as national aspirations. [4]

Indeed, the Turks in Turkey had already recognized the problems described above. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks removed Christian Orthodox minorities from Anatolia. They didn’t do this harsh move in a vacuum, the Turks fully understood the ongoing nature of ethnic and civilizational violence in the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and they’d been invaded by the Greeks in the 1920s. The Turks were led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who’d served valiantly during World War I. Atatürk recovered the Turkish nation from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Pierre Oberling writes:

Having realized that the Ottoman Empire could not be saved, Atatürk decided to make a clean break with the past. Believing…that language is “the touchstone of nationality” he created a new nation-modern Turkey-out of those parts of the empire which were inhabited by a majority of Turkish-speaking peoples. But… Atatürk relinquished all of Turkey’s territorial claims beyond Eastern Thrace, Anatolia and the sancak of Alexandretta. “Rather than increasing the number of our enemies and their coercion over us by chasing concepts which we cannot realize” he recommended, “let us withdraw to our national and legitimate limits” He also declared that the goal of his government was “to work within our national boundaries for the real happiness and welfare of the nation” Thus, his political creed, Türkçülük (Turkism) was a fundamentally pacific ideology. As Lord Kinross has pointed out in his excellent biography of Atatürk, “peace at home and peace abroad” were his watchwords. [5]

There are parallels to post-World War I Turkey with post-Cold War Poland, where irredentist claims against neighboring countries were dropped and tolerating border minorities—Germans in Poland and Poles in Lithuania—was encouraged. The Poles, however, were faced with a different situation than the Turks. The Polish minority living in Lithuania share a common civilization with their Lithuanian hosts. Additionally, the Poles and Lithuanians were not harming their respective ethnic minorities in any way. The Greek Cypriots were carrying out a war of extermination against the Turks of Cyprus.

The Turkish military— in Turkey, not the Turks of Cyprus—mobilized for action in Cyprus but in 1964, President Johnson sent a strongly worded diplomatic letter to Ankara. The Turks backed down, only sending fighter-bomber jets to protect the Turkish Cypriots in Kokkina that April. Matters in Cyprus continued to be violent thereafter but entered into a sort of stalemate where the Turks stayed in their respective enclaves. There was a UN force that deployed to set up a “Green Line” in Nicosia that separated one faction from another. Makarios used this time to organize the disparate forces in his illicit army to form a National Guard which included soldiers from Greece.

On 21 April 1967, in Greece, a group of colonels took over the government. This had an impact on Cyprus. The colonels were all anti-communist and somewhat hostile to Makarios. This wouldn’t have been that much of a problem except that the Greek Cypriot National Guard was staffed with officers from Greece who supported the Greek military junta. By the early 1970s, Makarios had a loyalty problem with his military as well as a hostile (to him) “EOKA B” paramilitary terrorist organization consisting of ethnonationalist Greek Cypriots and ethnonationalist Greeks from Greece who were frustrated by Makarios alleged lack of progress against the Turkish Cypriots.

In 1974, the Greek military junta launched a coup against Makarios. Tanks shelled the Presidential Palace while he was meeting with ethnic Greek schoolchildren from Egypt. Makarios fled and was replaced by a more extreme regime. The attacks on the Cypriot Turks increased as the EOKA B was free to act.

Makarios’s was an ethnonationalist. He was very successful in establishing a proto-ethnostate. By 1974, he had bottled up the Turks in enclaves while most of the territory of Cyprus was held by ethnic Greek Cypriots. The situation was unstable and probably unsustainable in the long term, but Makarios was encouraging Turks to emigrate, so it might have worked given enough time.

Time and fate were no longer on the side of the Greek Cypriots, however. In the United States, the Nixon administration was on fire because of the Watergate Scandal. Additionally, the Turks (of Turkey) were in no mood to back down while a second round of ethnic violence against their racial kinsmen played out on nearby Cyprus. They intervened with a sea and airborne assault and successfully captured the northern part of Cyprus, including the areas with the best farmland. This area is in effect, and ethnostate for the Turkish Cypriots and defended by the Turkish army of Turkey. It is called the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

With the Turkish army successfully on the ground, the Greek Cypriots reluctantly agreed to population exchanges and insisted that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was in illegitimate entity. It is possible under international law that Northern Cyprus is an illicit state, but the real reason why no nation outside of Turkey recognizes Northern Cyprus is Greek lobbying efforts, especially in the United States. The island remains divided and Turkish troops routinely deploy to Northern Cyprus.

Who won? The Cypriot Turks won an ethnostate after eleven years of endless hostility. They won a greater percentage of the island than their percentage of the population in Cyprus prior to 1960. Why did the Greek Cypriots lose? The only way to avoid any bloodshed and population transfers was for the Greek Cypriots to completely control the government at independence and continuously hold Turkish Cypriots as second class citizens in a segregated, rank-ordered society. This was probably not possible or sustainable, however. Given the history of fighting between the Greeks and Turks since 1800, it is difficult to believe war and ethnic cleansing could have ever been avoided. The reason why the Cypriots lost much of their country is enosis. The Greek Cypriots made the romantic imperialist cause of the revived Kingdom of Greece their particular nationalist ambition. This made them beholden to the whims and interests of a racially related, but far away power given the economic and military capabilities of modern Greece.

They also failed to recognize that it was only a matter of time before the Turkish military would intervene. That the 1974 invasion came as a surprise is a tremendous failure of intelligence, which could have been fatal for a small nation attacked by a much larger one. Throughout this time, it was the Turks of both Cyprus and Turkey who were the rational actors; the Greek Cypriots were the irrational bullies.

Today both Greece and Turkey remain in NATO. Turkey remains out of the European Union and Cyprus is in the EU, but not in NATO. Given the civilizational differences between Orthodox Greece and Orthodox Cyprus and the rest of the West it is certain that both nations will be uneasy members of in alliances that are based on the folkways and mentality of Western Christendom. Samuel Huntington wrote in 1996 that:

In the post-Cold War world, Greece’s policies have increasingly deviated from those of the West. Its blockade of Macedonia was strenuously opposed by Western governments and resulted in the European Commission seeking an injunction against Greece in the European Court of Justice. With respect to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Greece separated itself from the policies pursued by the principal Western powers, actively supported the Serbs, and blatantly violated the U.N. sanctions levied against them. With the end of the Soviet Union and the communist threat, Greece has mutual interests with Russia in opposition to their common enemy, Turkey. It has permitted Russia to establish a significant presence in Greek Cyprus, and as a result of “their shared Eastern Orthodox religion,” the Greek Cypriots have welcomed both Russians and Serbs to the island. In 1995 some two thousand Russian-owned businesses were operating in Cyprus; Russian and Serbo-Croatian newspapers were published there; and the Greek Cypriot government was purchasing major supplies of arms from Russia. Greece also explored with Russia the possibility of bringing oil from the Caucasus and Central Asia to the Mediterranean through a Bulgarian-Greek pipeline bypassing Turkey and other Muslim countries. Overall Greek foreign policies have assumed a heavily Orthodox orientation. Greece will undoubtedly remain a formal member of NATO and the European Union. As the process of cultural reconfiguration intensifies, however, those memberships also undoubtedly will become more tenuous, less meaningful, and more difficult for the parties involved. The Cold War antagonist of the Soviet Union Is evolving Into the post-Cold War ally of Russia. [6]

The America First Opportunity in Northern Cyprus

Western Civilization is based on the civilization of Greece, but ancient Greece not modern Greece. The issue here is that both the Greeks and the Turks are in different civilizations from a Western Civilization belonging American. A person who is ethnically of the American “Anglo-Saxon” majority taking on the cause of modern Greeks against modern Turkey is an irrational actor who is fighting for a hallucination.

The Neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen wrote, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Ledeen was Jewish, so “crappy little countries” tended to be who the leadership of the so-called state of Israel wanted “thrown against the wall.” Nonetheless, it seems that with Cyprus, Americans have the opportunity to throw the ethnic lobbyists for some small crappy little country up against the wall to show them we mean business.

An America First foreign policy success can quickly be made by recognizing Northern Cyprus as legitimate and establish diplomatic relations. This will bring defeat upon the paper Americans in the “Greek lobby” who are ultimately supporting groups like EOKA B who do nothing for America. This is an easy victory. The situation in Cyprus is not likely to explode in a new war because the ethnic Greeks are in one place and the ethnic Turks in another. Segregation works.

The symbolism of recognizing Northern Cyprus will be significant in domestic politics. Defeating the Greek lobby in this circumstance means other ethnic lobbies can be defeated. While this might seem to be a revival of the WASP vs. Ellis Island ethnic conflicts of the past, those on the journey to America First must cross the obstacles on the path as they are, not as we’d like them to be.

Notes

[1] Pierre Oberling, The Road to Bellapais: The Turkish Cypriot Exodus to Northern Cyprus, (Boulder, Colorado: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 5)

[2] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations & the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 42/3)

[3] William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers 2008, p. 1)

[4] Aytuğ Plümer, Cyprus, 1963-64: The Fateful Years, (Ankara, Turkey: CYREP, 2003, p. 31)

[5] Pierre Oberling, The Road to Bellapais: The Turkish Cypriot Exodus to Northern Cyprus, (Boulder, Colorado: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 50/1)

[6] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations & the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 163)