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        This was a pattern in many troubled places, often (if not always) at the behest of the United States or Britain.  Marginalizing the left was a standard element of America's containment strategy during the Cold War; by reducing the influence of left-wing unions in countries where they had wide following, for example, U.S. policymakers believed they had denied the Soviet Union a beachhead in that country.  One of the more acute cases of this occurred in Iran in the early 1950s, where a democratically elected leftist premier was deposed in a CIA coup. Years of repression followed under the Shah, and the left was virtually destroyed.  When the Shah's corrupt regime began to weaken, the only credible opposition remaining were the Islamic clerics, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.  In many of these cases, destroying the left created a undernourished political culture, and the consequences were deleterious.  
        In Cyprus, the effect (and possibly the intention) was not only a successful defanging of the left-wing labor unions, but the diminution of one of the major institutions of Cypriot society that had strong participation from both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities.

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