50 Years of Division

On 20 July 1974, five days after a coup backed by the military junta in Athens overthrew President Makarios, Turkish forces landed on the north coast of Cyprus. By the time fighting ended in August, Turkey controlled more than a third of the island. Estimates of the Greek Cypriots who fled or were expelled from the north run from more than 160,000 (Reuters) to about 170,000, while about 48,000 Turkish Cypriots moved from the south to the north, close to 60,000 when those displaced in earlier years are counted. Turkey describes the operation as a peace operation under the Treaty of Guarantee; Greek Cypriots and most of the international community regard it as an invasion.

Fifty years later the date was marked in two very different ways. In the south, air raid sirens sounded across Nicosia at dawn and churches held memorial services for the dead and missing. That evening Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke at the Presidential Palace, the first Greek prime minister to do so on the anniversary. President Nikos Christodoulides said everything possible had to be done for dialogue to restart.

In the north, Turkish Cypriots celebrated what many of them regard as their salvation in 1974. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended a military parade in north Nicosia, with an air show and a visit by a Turkish aircraft carrier. Turkey still keeps more than 35,000 troops in the north, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognised only by Turkey.

Both communities still carry the human cost. The Committee on Missing Persons, a bicommunal body, lists 2,002 people as missing from the conflict: 1,510 Greek Cypriots and 492 Turkish Cypriots. By August 2022 just over half of them had been identified.

The anniversary came with talks frozen since 2017. Greek Cypriots backed a federation and the Turkish Cypriot leadership two states. The UN envoy María Ángela Holguín had reported to Secretary General António Guterres, who was weighing whether to call a new round. The EU urged both sides to show genuine commitment, warning that too much time had been lost. Meanwhile, breaches of the UN buffer zone that year were up by about 70 per cent, mostly from construction by both sides.