Greek Military Coup

By 1974 the conflict that mattered most inside the Greek Cypriot community was between Makarios and the supporters of immediate enosis. Grivas had returned secretly in 1971 and built EOKA B, an armed group funded by the military regime in Athens, which had come to see Makarios as an obstacle. Grivas died in January 1974, but the violence went on, and the junta’s strongman, Dimitrios Ioannidis, believed Makarios had abandoned enosis and suspected him of communist sympathies. Between 1971 and 1974 Greek officers drew up several plans to remove him.

On 2 July 1974 Makarios wrote to the Greek president demanding the withdrawal of the roughly 650 Greek officers who commanded the Cypriot National Guard. The answer came thirteen days later. On the morning of 15 July, National Guard units led by those officers attacked the presidential palace in Nicosia, which was largely burned out. Coup radio announced that Makarios was dead. In fact he had escaped to Paphos, where he broadcast that he was alive. On 16 July a British helicopter flew him to the Sovereign Base Area at Akrotiri, and from there he travelled to London and New York. On 19 July he told the UN Security Council that Greece had invaded Cyprus.

The coup leaders installed Nikos Sampson, a former EOKA fighter, as provisional president. Supporters of Makarios were arrested or killed, and left wing newspapers were shut. The death toll in the days of fighting between Greek Cypriots is still disputed. Most accounts speak of several hundred dead, and some researchers argue that a number of coup victims were later counted among those listed as missing after the Turkish intervention.

The United Nations treated the coup as illegal and continued to recognise Makarios as the legal president. Turkish Cypriots, already wary of enosis, saw a regime that openly sought union with Greece take power in Nicosia. Turkey invoked its rights as a guarantor power under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, and on 20 July its forces landed on the north coast. Sampson’s government lasted eight days.