Historical Background From Independence to the Turkish invasion, 1960–1974 Cyprus was proclaimed an independent, sovereign republic on 16 August 1960. The independence of Cyprus was based on the 1959 Zurich and London Agreements negotiated by Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom. These agreements included a Constitution and three treaties: the Treaty of Guarantee, the Treaty of Alliance, and the Treaty of Establishment. These agreements ended 82 years of British rule following many years of a national liberation movement that included peaceful mass anticolonial protests and demonstrations, recourse to the United Nations for self-determination for the people of the island to decide their own future, and eventually a four-year armed struggle (1955–59). Active opposition to colonial rule came from the Greek Cypriot community, whose majority at the time aspired to union of Cyprus with Greece. Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot leadership, on the other hand, prompted by the British, advocated partition of the island with a Turkish Cypriot sector uniting with Turkey. (These diametrically opposed visions were later specifically prohibited by the 1959 agreements that established Cyprus’ independence). British rule did not encourage the emergence of a Cypriot national identity. Instead, Britain used the “divide and rule” policy as an instrument to control anticolonial sentiment on the island. It enlisted Turkish Cypriots on its side against the Greek Cypriot liberation movement, thereby planting the seeds of intercommunal discord and polarisation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, a development that was to prove detrimental to their cooperation upon independence. Although they eventually signed the Zurich and London agreements, the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities had no serious role in their drafting or in the drafting of the Constitution for the new republic. In fact, the very people who would be affected the most by these elaborate documents were never given the opportunity to vote on them. In effect, both the agreements and the Constitution of the nascent republic were imposed on the people of Cyprus. As a result, the fate of the new republic was jeopardized in vitro. Certain provisions of the agreements and the Constitution, rather than promoting peace through intercommunal solidarity and loyalty to a common state as well as respect for the sovereignty of the new republic, proved conducive to domestic conflict and foreign interference. It soon became clear that Cyprus was granted a fettered independence and dysfunctional constitutional arrangements. The Constitution itself emphasised differences between Greek The Cyprus Question| A brief Introduction 26
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