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The Divisive Problem of the Municipalities
Among all the political difficulties arising from
Cyprus's awkward constitutional structure, none was more important than how the
municipalities of Nicosia, Limmasol, Famagusta, Paphos, and Kyrenia would be
governed. Here is where much of the dispute about power sharing took
place, and the municipalities---both an example of how Cypriots could live
together, and an equally vivid example of how they choose not to---became the
locus of discontent by all parties. In understanding the breakdown of the
constitutional order in 1960-63, no issue of governance is more significant.
No scholar has done more to explain this issue than Diana
Markides, a British researcher associated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies,
University of London, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the
topic. Below is a summary article produced for the Journal of
Mediterranean
Studies.
THE ISSUE OF SEPARATE MUNICIPALITIES IN CYPRUS 1957–1963: AN OVERVIEW
This article is an introduction to the municipal issue which dogged attempts to
make the Zurich framework viable in the early years of the Republic. It takes a
brief look at its origins in the last years of British rule and at the
background to the provision for separate municipalities in the Zurich and London
Agreements. The article outlines the history of the failure to resolve the issue
between 1959 and 1963. It suggests that its significance lies in the symbiosis
of Turkish national security interests in the organisation of local government
on the island and that the failure to resolve it reflected a failure to
reconcile the conflicting perceptions of the nature of the state created by the
Zurich and London Agreements.
Introduction
An understanding of the interaction between international, regional and domestic
political tensions must underpin any analysis of the chronic Cyprus problem.
This paper will take an introductory look at the history of that symbiosis of
external interests in the most parochial of domestic political spheres, local
government. One of the factors creating constitutional deadlock in the early
years of the Republic was the difference between the Greek and Turkish
leadership in the island and between Ankara, Athens and London, on the timing
and method of implementation of Article 173 of the constitution. It stated, with
certain provisos, that separate municipalities should be created in the five
main towns of Cyprus by their Turkish inhabitants.[footnote
1] This
article had been incorporated in the Zurich Agreement of 11 February 1959 and
was therefore considered a basic article of the constitution. As such, it could
not be amended in any way. Why was the municipal provision included in the
agreements and why was it never fully implemented?
The municipal issue has been called ‘a parish pump affair’.[2]
Historical evidence suggests, however, that neither in concept nor evolution was
it essentially parochial. It was part and parcel of the political struggle for
Cyprus which was not successfully resolved by the London and Zurich Agreements.
There was, therefore, no radical change in the causes of Greco-Turkish tension
between 1957 and 1963. By 1957, the two metropoles and the communities on the
island were manoeuvring in the expectation of a British withdrawal. This
manoeuvring continued after the British withdrawal in 1960 because of the lack
of confidence between the parties regarding commitment to the Zurich status quo.
Looking at Cyprus from the perspective of a series of Turkish Governments during
this period and beyond, it is clear that some control over the status of the
island, 40 miles from Turkey’s southern shores, was perceived not so much as a
political priority but a matter of national security. What, then, was the
connection between the organisation of local government in Cyprus and Ankara’s
perceptions of national security requirements? In the absence of territorial
partition, the Turkish demand for communal local government, enshrined in the
Zurich Agreement in 1959, was intended to facilitate the establishment of a
clearly separate political identity for the Turkish Cypriots. This in turn would
give them community rather than minority rights and thereby ensure political
leverage for Ankara over the island’s status. The Turks envisaged the Zurich
framework as functional or administrative partition. It is, of course, the
essence of the mutual significance of the relationship between Ankara and
Nicosia that the Turkish Cypriots, or a substantial number of the politically
conscious Turkish Cypriots, were as anxious not to become a vulnerable minority,
as Ankara was to prevent such an occurrence. The Greek Cypriots, on the other
hand, having been denied union with Greece, were determined that their state,
should be truly independent and democratic. They interpreted the Zurich
framework as providing majority rule with very strong minority safeguards—in
effect a Greek state in the Eastern Mediterranean. Thus the growing relationship
of the separate municipalities issue to the respective perceptions of the Turks
and the Greek Cypriots, as to the nature of the state that had been created by
the Zurich Agreements, puts it at the heart of any analysis of the viability of
the settlement. Indeed, the failure to reach a solution to the issue reflects an
inability to reconcile the two conflicting perceptions.
The Origins of the Municipal Issue
Municipal government was the only area of the administration presided over by
elected bodies when the Enosis struggle exploded into violence in April 1955.
The councils were elected on the basis of communally-based proportional
representation which meant that, with the exception of the small town of Lefka
where the Turks had a substantial majority, the main towns of Cyprus were run by
Greek-dominated councils presided over by Greek mayors. This form of municipal
government had been envisaged and put in place by the 1882 constitution. That
constitution had, from the start, been resented by the Turkish Cypriot community
who had been used to wielding disproportionate power in the Mejlis-i-Idare, the
Ottoman organs of district administration.[3]
The Turks, although an 18% minority in the island as a whole, because of
their Ottoman heritage, were initially, more urban than the Greek Cypriots, and
continued to have some political sway, particularly in Nicosia and Paphos, in
the early years of British rule. However, since the Turkish citizens of the
towns were actually benefiting from Greek motivated improvements and since the
rate of urbanisation of Greeks after the British occupation was much higher than
that of Turks, municipal councils elected by proportional representation soon
became the accepted norm throughout the island.[4] The municipal councils,
however, remained highly politicised and the distinction between Greeks and
Turks clearly defined.
In the absence of an elected legislature abolished after the disturbances in
1931, municipal elections, reintroduced after a twelve year ban, in 1943
acquired extraordinary significance in the post-war years. They provided an
outlet, long denied, for both national and party political passions. Once
elected, the Greek Cypriot mayors considered it their duty, not only to carry
out their municipal obligations, but also to promote the overriding national
aspiration for union with Greece given new impetus in post-war circumstances.
This use of the mayoral office to promote a cause they opposed, provided a
perennial irritant for the Turkish-Cypriot councillors. Nevertheless,
interethnic cooperation in the municipalities progressed in line with the more
integrated habits introduced by modern sociological trends and was not, until
1957, seriously disrupted, even in the face of nationalist agitation which
became a feature of life in the island after World War II.
The municipal issue, as it emerged in 1957, was a break with the past. While the
earlier moves had been straightforward jibbing at the levelling before the law
which followed the British take-over, the new Turkish policy was directly
related to a more radical and comprehensive move to shape the political status
of the island after a British departure. Whereas in the past the Turks had
sought to redress the balance within the existing municipal councils, they now
sought clearly defined geographical areas that would be under their control. The
consolidation of political control in areas in which the minority were more
concentrated was a method of maximising political strength vis-à-vis the
majority by making more impact numerically in certain areas.[5] In Cyprus
it was natural, in view of the urban concentration of Turkish Cypriots, that
their efforts should be focused on the towns. Municipal councils were perceived
by the Turks, not so much in the modern sense for control over municipal matters
of public hygiene and recreation, but like the Ottoman Mejlis-i-Idare as the
organ of district administration. Once communal separation took place, the
Turkish municipal councils became centres of communal district administration,
their position being formalised after December 1963.[6]
Turkish policy after 1957 was directed by the fear that in the circumstances
created in the Eastern Mediterranean after the Suez crisis, the British would
fail to stand by their commitment to separate self-determination for the Turkish
Cypriots or partition, in the event of a British withdrawal. The subsequent
espousal by the Americans of the idea of guaranteed Independence as a
NATO-saving compromise reinforced Turkish determination to prevent any
possibility of Greek majority rule on the island.[7] Although their objections
were always focused on Enosis, which smacked of anachronistic irredentism, their
less publicised objections to majority rule, which was all the rage in the era
of decolonisation, were equally strong. The emphasis on objections to Enosis
throughout the period we are covering, tended to obscure the extent of control
Ankara intended to assert over the island once Independence was achieved.
While at a diplomatic level, the Turkish Government began demanding not only a
military presence in the island but a political presence established through the
Turkish Cypriot community, the mobilisation, within the island, of mob pressure
for partition was a sure sign that the Turks no longer believed the prevention
of Enosis could be safely left to the British. Setting the scene at street level
was an important part of Ankara’s methodology in pursuit of policy aims in the
Cyprus issue. An increasing focus on the possibilities in the municipal sphere
must be seen in this light.
On 3 June 1957, the Turkish Cypriot municipal councillors resigned, en masse
from the municipal councils of the five main towns. It was a defining moment in
the direction of Turkish Cypriot politics. There was little attempt to attribute
the resignations to municipal grievances. They were the beginning of a campaign
to pressure the British into the legal establishment of geographically-separate
Turkish municipalities. During the following year, a series of Turkish Cypriot
resolutions demanding separate municipalities culminated, in May 1958, in a
warning that ‘the Turks would govern their own affairs by force’ if the
colonial government, whom they accused of ‘remaining a spectator before the
arbitrary rule of the Greek majority’, did not respond speedily.[8]
This threat was realised on 7 June 1958, after the British failed to include a
provision for separate municipalities in the tridominium plan for the island
about to be launched and which the Turks initially rejected. The ‘force’
took the form of the most serious riots since the start of the Emergency, the
objective of which were to facilitate the forcible seizure of central markets
and other municipal properties, to instill an atmosphere of fear and hostility
conducive to separatism and to clear and enlarge the predominantly Turkish areas
in the towns. De facto Turkish municipal councils were declared unilaterally in
the wake of these riots. It was clearly an organised operation with the same
tactics used at least in Nicosia and Limassol. Murder took place both of Turkish
municipal employees in the Greek areas and Greek municipal employees in the
Turkish areas. The Turkish employees—some 72 in Nicosia—were obliged by the
Turkish Cypriot leadership to give up their jobs, while the Greek municipal
employees refused to work in the Turkish areas.[9] On 3 July 1958, Sir Hugh
Foot, the governor, reported to London that de facto separation of
municipalities was taking place with no joint use of markets and no conservancy
being undertaken by the lawful corporations in Turkish areas. In Nicosia, the
Turkish municipal employees were working for the illegal Turkish bodies and
being paid from dues from unofficial markets that had been set up in the Turkish
quarters. Nicosia, which was being taken as a test case, was being closely
followed by other towns where services were still functioning normally. The
governor believed that the Turkish community, ‘almost certainly under the
direction of the Turkish Government, intended to force the issue’ and that
Nicosia would ‘make the pact’. He reported ‘great intimidation of Turks by
members of their own community, preventing them from having any dealings at all
with the lawful municipal corporation and even from trading in the markets in
the Greek quarter’.[10]
The Turkish Cypriots, having thus forcibly achieved a large element of
separation in the towns, proceeded to petition the Cyprus Government for the
legalisation of the status quo. On the significant grounds that there were now
‘no Greeks living in the Turkish quarters and no Turks living in the Greek
quarters’ and that it was not possible for the two communities to live
together, they demanded immediate recognition of their unilaterally declared
municipalities and the transfer of taxes collected in the first six months ‘belonging
to the Turks’ to be transferred to the Turkish municipalities.[11]
These bulldozing tactics were successful in persuading Macmillan to include a
provision for separate municipalities in the modifications to his plan,
announced in the House of Commons on 15 August 1958 as a quid pro quo for
Turkish acceptance. On the island, the governor, whose tactics were defensive
and procrastinatory, rather than manipulative, sought to delay implementation of
the provision which he feared would result in an intercommunal bloodletting. He
therefore took the slower route of announcing the formation of a municipal
commission to make recommendations on the matter, hoping that circumstances
would have improved by the time the report was completed. This move, however,
did not cover two immediate problems confronting the Cyprus Government. The
first was how to cope with increasing health hazards created by the absence of
effective municipal services in the Turkish areas of the towns which had become
no-go areas for the Greeks. The second was how to counter the probability that
the lawful Greek mayors would sue the illegal Turkish councils for absconding
with municipal property. By promulgating an interim measure in September 1958—the
Emergency Powers (Municipal Taxes and Fees etc.) Regulation—Foot facilitated
the collection of taxes by the Turkish ‘unofficial committees’ and
subsequently the provision of some municipal services in the Turkish quarters.
At the same time, the regulation which forbade legal action from being taken
against the Turkish committees without the permission of the governor, protected
the government from exposure in the courts for tolerating an illegal situation
brought about by intimidation, violence and theft. Municipal legislation, as
such, however, awaited the report of the Municipal Commission, dubbed the
Surridge Commission, after its chairman.[12]
The official report of the Surridge Commission, submitted to the colonial
government in December 1958, makes interesting reading. Although it duly
recommended municipal partition, it had the effect of clarifying to the colonial
government its great difficulties. At the end of a long list of administrative
disadvantages, the commissioners commented that:
in short, the disadvantages of establishing two communal municipalities in one
town are so serious and widespread that we should not, in normal circumstances,
have accepted the proposal, nor do we think that any Cypriot, either Greek or
Turk would have done so—in normal circumstances.
Such argumentation as there is for municipal partition is based on the friction
created by the cultivation of intercommunal hatred and the need to satisfy the
national pride of the Turkish community. It is clear that the commissioners felt
that municipal services would be less satisfactory under separate
municipalities. Paragraph 29 points out that ‘However strong a minority’s
national feelings may be, there are places where a division of municipal
administration would have the effect of making impossible the provision of
tolerably efficient municipal services’. It was proposed that such services
would be undertaken by the central government.[13]
The Surridge Commission report included maps delineating proposed municipal
boundaries. However, it emphasised that all citizens should have free access to
all areas—provided law and order was maintained.[14] In view of
the absence of law and order and the multiple evictions of Greek Cypriots
attending the de facto establishment of Turkish municipalities, there would be
every reason for all concerned to have doubts on this score. Most notably, there
had been, during the June riots, forcible evictions from Omorphita in Nicosia
and Ayios Antonios in Limassol, while the entire Greek minority, over 600
people, fled from the town of Lefka leaving many of their houses in flames. The
problems of delineating mutually acceptable boundaries based on the principle of
separating areas of Greek habitation from areas of Turkish habitation and the
fear of a violent reaction from both communities was the main factor in the
colonial government’s reluctance to legislate for, far less implement,
municipal partition. It remained the main factor in the failure to set up legal
separate municipalities from 1958 until 1963. There had always been areas on the
margins of the old Greek and Turkish quarters that were utterly mixed. It was
not a question of Greek streets and Turkish streets, or even of streets that
were half Greek and half Turkish. Streets consisted not only of Greek, Turkish
and Armenian houses but of properties in which Greek-owned businesses rented
Turkish premises and vice-versa while houses owned by a member of one community
might house tenants of the other. The modernising trends of the previous decade
had encouraged this tendency. Moreover, while affluent Turks, like their Greek
counterparts moved out of their cramped quarters in the old city into the airier
suburbs, Greek businessmen bought up or rented cheaper properties in the areas
they had left, for industrial enterprises and warehouses. Delineating boundaries
on a communal basis in the late 1950s was therefore even more difficult than it
would have been earlier in the century.
Privately, Surridge described the separation of municipalities as ‘an
administrative nonsense but a political necessity’.[15] His phrase
encapsulates the British perception of the municipalities issue in 1958. The
natural feelings of dissatisfaction and insecurity of the minority community of
Turkish Cypriots, once the majority Greek Cypriots had embarked resolutely on a
course of action which they did not perceive to be in their interest, was
grasped by the metropolitan country Turkey, to enforce a policy in her strategic
interest. This policy depended on the cultivation of separatism. At the same
time, the dependence of the incumbent colonial power on the Turkish Government’s
cooperation to retain sovereignty over its colony, resulted in its espousal of
separatist measures. At no time was the decision to separate municipalities made
with the municipal interests of the citizens concerned in mind. The decisions
were locked into Turkey’s long-term policy and Britain’s need to keep Turkey
in harness on the Macmillan Plan.
The municipal issue featured also in the Greco-Turkish negotiations resulting in
the Zurich agreement. It was, from the start, a key factor in the negotiations
raised by the Turkish Foreign Minister, Fatin Zorlu at the famous meeting with
the Greek Foreign Minister Evangelos Averoff in the UN cafeteria in New York
where the prospect of a Greco-Turkish negotiated Independence was first mooted.
The Greek Government took the position that the separation of municipalities on
which the Turks insisted, was a partitionist measure and refused to contemplate
it. Archbishop Makarios, however, had inadvertently eased the way towards
Greco-Turkish agreement when he insisted, on being briefed on the state of
negotiations by the Greek foreign and prime ministers, that the provision was a
practical arrangement and should be included in the agreement.[16]
The Transitional Period
Article 20 of the Zurich Agreement duly provided for separate municipalities to
be created in the five main towns by their Turkish inhabitants.[17] Why
then was the municipal provision not enforced during the Transition, that, is
between the signing of the Zurich Agreements in February 1959 and the
declaration of Independence in August 1960?
The overriding concern of the Greek and Turkish Governments during the
Transition was that the Republic should be safely and speedily inaugurated.
Failure to do so would result in a collapse of the fragile détente in their
relations that had arisen from the Zurich and London Agreements. The British
Government were also anxious for a smooth and speedy transition, but, at the
same time, they were determined to ensure a satisfactory arrangement for British
defence requirements on the island. Thus the difficulties of implementing the
rigid and artificial Zurich basic structure, were complicated by parallel
problems arising from the negotiations on the Treaty of Establishment.
Throughout the transition all the parties concerned were driven to work for
implementation rather by the fear of what might happen if the agreements were
not implemented, than by any great faith in their intrinsic quality.
While Archbishop Makarios was, in the view of all three guarantor powers, the
only leader who could carry the unpopular and, from the Greek Cypriot point of
view, largely unsatisfactory agreements through to implementation, he was not a
leader with whom the Turks could identify. Success in gaining the confidence of
the Turkish Cypriots could only ever be relative when balanced against the need
to retain the support of his nationalist Greek Cypriots. The rigidly communal
framework of the electoral system obliged politicians to accommodate and appeal
to the nationalist tendencies in their own communities, which had been strongly
cultivated in the previous years and which would not suddenly disappear because
of agreements made by third parties elsewhere. His main route to gaining the
confidence of the Turkish Cypriots was through cooperation with their leaders to
implement the agreements. During the Transition, Makarios established a good
working relationship with Dr. Fazil Kutchuk, which became important in riding a
series of crises. However, the scope of the cooperation was limited by the fact
that Kutchuk’s word was not final, while divergent perceptions of the new
republic which lay at the heart of the problem, dogged all attempts at
cooperation throughout the period we are looking at.
The ambiguity of the wording of key provisions of the Zurich Agreements tended
to make them the cause of dispute while their immutability prolonged its
duration, the provision for separate municipalities being a case in point.
Pedantic Turkish insistence on separatism at every level reinforced the
scepticism of the Greek Cypriots who were resigned to the agreements only as a
buffer against further hostilities. The recently cultivated habits of violence
and extremism in both communities, the presence of large quantities of arms on
the island and the problems of collection, uncertainty about the future and
exploitation of this uncertainty by factions opposing Makarios and Kutchuk, kept
Cyprus on the edge of destabilisation. Intrigue within the communities which
tended to be the precursor of intercommunal strife, found fertile ground in the
atmosphere that prevailed as long as there was no settlement.
More specifically, we can group the reasons for the shelving of the municipal
issue under the following headings: the Archbishop’s hesitation on witnessing
a strong Greek Cypriot reaction to the realities of municipal partition, the
ambiguity of the wording of Article 173, the failure of the guarantor powers to
make the necessary clarification and thus nip the problem in the bud before it
became complicated by its involvement in domestic politics, the governor’s
unwillingness to act arbitrarily on the matter and finally the complications
created by the protracted Anglo-Cypriot negotiations on British defence
requirements.
Immediately after the signing of the agreements, Ankara had sought the arbitrary
establishment of legal Turkish municipalities with clearly defined boundaries.
They considered their establishment to have been pending since 1958. The British
preferred, since the provision would eventually have to be enforced by the
Cypriots, that the new law should be based on a mutually-agreed formula.
Makarios was, initially, quite prepared for legislation to be drafted on the
basis of the Surridge recommendations, as was Kutchuk. However, once the
Surridge maps had been shown to the municipal councils, Makarios’s easy-going
attitude to municipal partition came under pressure from the Greek mayors and
influential Greeks whose property fell within the boundaries of the proposed
Turkish municipalities. On legal advice that since Article 20 of the Zurich
Agreement did not specifically mention geographical partition, the form in which
the municipalities should be divided was open to interpretation, he proposed on
26 March 1959 that the decision should be postponed until a
constitutionally-elected legislature was in place to legislate on the matter, or
that it should be deferred to the constitutional commission.[18]
It was to avoid the issue getting bogged down in the constitutional commission,
that the governor, Sir Hugh Foot, made the important proposal that a clear and
unambiguous interpretation of Article 20 should be sought from the Greek and
Turkish Governments who had drawn up the Zurich Agreements. This was accepted by
Makarios and Kutchuk. The British Government objected, fearing that such a
course would lead to a series of disruptive appeals for international
intervention.[19] However, given that the establishment of separate
municipalities was not parochial in concept or purpose, it was unlikely to be
solved at a parochial level. A clear statement from the Greek and Turkish
Governments at this point would indeed have clarified the situation at a time
when the Greek Cypriots were still viewing municipal partition in terms of civic
inconvenience, rather than Turkish tactics. Moreover, this was the only occasion
on which Makarios readily accepted the idea of Ankara’s overt intervention in
the municipalities issue.
Greek suggestions from time to time that they should be allowed to be citizens
of Turkish municipalities to facilitate the drawing of boundary lines, were
rejected by the Turks on the grounds that this would be unconstitutional. Greeks
could not be under the jurisdiction of the Turkish communal chamber. Turkish
Municipalities would be in some minor legal respects under the jurisdiction of
the Turkish communal chamber, but the communal chambers had no jurisdiction over
territory.[20] These were some of the several points at which the
definition of municipal affairs as communal affairs fell apart. The matter had
simply not been thought through at Zurich. The Turks clearly intended to
circumvent the constitutional difficulties and suit their own political purposes
by bringing about the movement of Greek Cypriots from Turkish municipalities.
Far from encouraging Greeks to stay in Turkish areas, they were being pressured
to move—this was, indeed, consistent with the forcible evictions that had
attended the 1958 riots. The economic boycott against Greek Cypriot businesses
was harshly enforced by the Turkish Cypriot leadership. At the same time, more
basic forms of pressure were also applied. Mountains of refuse, whose collection
was now under the control of the Turkish municipalities, was dumped in streets
with large numbers of Greek inhabitants, while the Turks for a long time
resisted pleas by the Greek municipalities to be allowed to remove them.[21]
They wanted Greek properties to remain within Turkish municipalities but not the
Greeks; in effect, they aimed for ethnically cleansed municipalities. For the
Turks, whose preferred policy had been partition of the whole island, causing a
major dislocation of population islandwide, the displacement of a handful of
citizens and their businesses in each town did not seem unreasonable, but to the
Greek Cypriots it seemed monstrous that they should abandon their homes and
properties in order to go along with a nonsensical scheme. Moreover, they saw it
as encouraging partitionist tendencies. The Turks, in fact, considered municipal
partition the only system less than outright partition that they were prepared
to tolerate, since it would facilitate their political control over the Turkish
Cypriots and pave the way, administratively, for federation.
Seen together with the economic boycott, Turkish insistence on separate
municipalities, ‘nonsensical’ in purely municipal terms, took on a certain
logic and was in line with the Turkish concept of the partnership state. The
extraordinary power given to the 18% minority at Zurich could only be maintained
for as long as the minority retained its communal autonomy. The perennial
Turkish fear was that the Turkish minority would, in time, be assimilated into a
Cypriot whole. Ankara’s political control over the island therefore depended
on reducing the areas which required individual interaction between Greek and
Turkish Cypriots to a minimum. The Greek Cypriots, however, failed to grasp the
extent to which geographical control of the municipalities was the sine qua non
of the Cyprus settlement for Ankara. Indeed it was generally obscured throughout
this period by Turkish public insistence on the full implementation of the
constitution as a whole, rather than on any particular provision. Yet the real
situation, as the Turkish Government saw it, was, as Nihat Erim (the Turkish
delegate) once told the constitutional commission, that ‘the successful
organisation of the administrative structure of the new republic was the
touchstone of the close future friendship between Greece and Turkey’.[22]
The problem was precisely that the theoretical and distant manner in which the
arbitrary and immutable framework had been formulated, was far removed from
realities on the ground. Greco-Turkish relations did, indeed, flourish
post-Zurich. The new bond between the Greek and Turkish premiers, Constantine
Karamanlis and Adnan Menderes, was described by the Greek Foreign Minister,
Evangelos Averoff, as ‘a love affair’.[23] This contrast between the
euphoric state of Greco-Turkish relations, and the problems arising from the
practical difficulties of implementation of some of the key basic articles of
their agreements, reflects the extent to which the agreements were made by the
metropoles for the benefit of the metropoles, without enough attention to the
situation on the island itself—notably the distribution of population in the
towns and the number of Greek Cypriots already working in the civil service in
1959.
A series of proposals for municipal partition, made first by the constitutional
commission and then by Makarios, failed because the issue was by now becoming a
significant factor in internal Cypriot politics. Politics at local authority
level had acquired a strong tradition during British rule and there was
considerable personal and party political capital invested in them. This
political clout was threatened not only by the loss of area to the Turkish
municipalities, but because the impracticalities of partition meant that all
proposals, from Surridge onwards, turned over many of the functions of local
authorities—and their inherent political value—to a coordinating or central
body. Thus while Makarios and Kutchuk themselves were willing to go ahead, they
found themselves under increasing attack from power seekers within their own
constituencies. The powerful Greek mayors (three communist and two nationalist)
ganged together in a bid to save their power base and in doing so, formed the
basis of an anti-Makarios faction led by the mayor of Nicosia, Themsitocles
Dervis, during the presidential elections.
Similarly, Rauf Denktash sought to consolidate his power as guardian of the
interests of the Turkish community, leaving Kutchuk out on a limb negotiating
cooperation with the Greeks. The Kutchuk-Denktash diarchy accurately reflected
Ankara’s political targets on the island. It was formalised after Independence
when Kutchuk became Vice-President while Denktash was elected President of the
Turkish Communal Chamber. Denktash’s role was to consolidate the Turkish
community and inject in it a distinct sense of self sufficiency and identity,
while Kutchuk’s role was to implement those parts of the agreement which
necessitated a degree of collaboration with the Greek Cypriots. However, the
divergent aims of the two leaders, primed by the momentum of intracommunal
politics, invariably caused the tenuous cohesion of Turkish policy to fragment
into its component Jekyll and Hyde parts.
The governor determinedly resisted considerable Turkish pressure to delineate
boundaries and enforce municipal partition arbitrarily. His main concern was to
avoid creating a situation in which Makarios might fail to hold the Greek
Cypriot community together in the face of continued truculence and provocation
from the Turks. In this connection an incident occurred in October 1959, which
strained to the limits the efforts of Makarios and Kutchuk to retain
intercommunal goodwill—the interception by a British naval patrol of a Turkish
motorboat, the Deniz, off the Karpass peninsular carrying large quantities of
arms and ammunition. The Deniz incident and the dramatic failure of Kutchuk’s
appeal for the Turkish Cypriots to cooperate in a subsequent arms collection,
confirmed that TMT were in control in the Turkish community and that the Turks
intended to arm, rather than disarm, for security.
The Deniz incident, however, also had the curious effect of instilling new
urgency to complete preparations for Independence before any further incident
threatened the fragile situation. The Turks, embarrassed by the exposure, were
particularly conciliatory in this respect. Foot was able to promulgate temporary
municipal legislation, which left the Turkish ‘unofficial municipal committees’
with the same limited cover, chiefly to collect municipal taxes, for which they
had been covered by Emergency regulations. The delineation of boundaries and
formal jurisdiction awaited the provision to be drawn up by the constitutional
commission. Multiple extensions of Foot’s temporary law through the early
years of the Republic remained the only threadbare legal cover the Turkish
municipalities ever had.
Political developments for the remaining eight months of the Transition were
dominated by the Anglo-Cypriot negotiations regarding the bases. Their interest
for this study lies in the effect, both in terms of their protracted duration
and of the tactics used, on the internal political situation on the island. They
are unique in the island’s history in being an occasion when the Greek and
Turkish Cypriots found common cause and negotiated together unencumbered by the
overmighty presence of their respective metropoles. Faced by this unaccustomed
display of solidarity, the British became preoccupied with finding ways of
getting the Cypriots to agree to the pervasive foothold they believed their
strategic demands required on the island. The joint tough stand of Makarios and
Kutchuk was treated with delight by the Greek Cypriots and was, on the whole,
popular with the Turkish Cypriots. The intercommunal climate was good and the
standing of both leaders high in February 1960 when Independence was due to be
declared. Once responsibility for negotiations was put in the hands of the
Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Julian Amery, however, British
tactics not only prolonged the transition by six months, but also contributed to
a deteriorating political climate both within and between the communities.[24] The internal situation could hardly have been less
auspicious in the summer of 1960.
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