Cyprus War, 1974 and Waqf Lands

Cyprus was transferred from the Ottomans to the British in 1878, under dubious conditions, right after the opening of the Suez Canal, primarily as a place of arms (Stephens in Cyprus: a place of arms; power politics and ethnic conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean, Pall Mall Press, 1966). British Cyprus lasted just over eight decades. When it ended in 1960, sovereignty was transferred to Turkish and Greek Cypriots in a bi-ethnic Republic, guaranteed by the UK, Greece, and Turkiye. The UK acquired two sovereign military bases, Turkiye and Greece obtained their own bases. The Republic collapsed in just 3 years, when it was “hijacked” by the Greek Cypriot leadership in 1963 (Hannay in Cyprus: The search for a solution. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005, 13). Inter-ethnic violence erupted during Noel, 1963, and the UN intervened with a peacekeeping force and peacemaking mediation by the UN Secretary General. The UN peacekeeping got nowhere. A second ENOSIS Coup was staged in the summer of 1974 to annex the island to Greece, then under military rule, causing a wider Greek-Turkish war, at the end of which Cyprus was divided into four parts: The British bases, the Turkish North, Greek-speaking South, and a UN Buffer Zone. The 1974 war created a major population displacement (Oberling in The road to Bellapais: the Turkish Cypriot Exodus to Northern Cyprus (No. 25). East European Monographs, 1982; Coufoudakis in Cyprus: a regional conflict and its resolution, 1992), along with a bitter land dispute that has deep Ottoman roots.