A case study of the Cypriot Civil War (1963–1967) demonstrates that existing scholarly definitions of civil war are inadequate. The arbitrary death thresholds that qualify conflicts for inclusion in civil war datasets are demonstrably biased against smaller countries and do not account for all internal conflicts that exhibit the qualitative characteristics of civil war. An alternative model of study showcases how quantitative data might be better supported by qualitative analysis through the use of relative death thresholds.

In 1963, violent conflict broke out on the island of Cyprus that would culminate in the de facto partitioning of the country. Yet, sixty years after the fact, recognition of this conflict as a civil war is almost nowhere to be seen. How scholars define and measure civil war as a category of academic research has clouded understanding. Crucially, civil wars have been too narrowly defined by arbitrary, absolute death tolls.

The last three decades have seen an emphasis on quantitative research in peace and conflict studies and a shift from external to internal conflicts, not least to civil war studies. This literature has deepened our understanding of where, why, and how civil war might erupt. At the same time, overreliance on quantitative modelling has produced blind spots in the recognition of civil wars in smaller countries and suggests an under-theorization of civil war. In presenting a case study of civil war in Cyprus between 1963 and 1967, we offer a model of how quantitative data might be better supported by qualitative analysis.

In our exploration of why some armed conflicts are not widely considered to constitute civil wars, we critique the quantitative literature, but we also look for other causes. We articulate, for instance, how the language used to describe conflicts has very real and often grave consequences beyond the academy and, in many historical cases, the cold war propaganda of the sides involved. Taking the Cypriot case study of the 1960s, this article shows that what has variously been described as “intercommunal fighting,” “hostilities,” “clashes,” and “ethnic conflict” does indeed mask civil war—a fact that has been obscured by both the overwhelmingly quantitative research predilections of the field as well as the (official) propaganda and (more general) language used to describe ongoing conflict.

In this article, we challenge two received wisdoms. The first relates to the shortcomings of the civil war studies literature, most notable among which is the longstanding commitment to an absolute death threshold when categorizing conflicts. Following Sambanis, we critique both the wisdom of mechanistically applying an absolute threshold without recourse to relative measures and the notion that death itself should be the determining factor in identifying civil war. Second—and contrary to this literature, Cypriot historiography, and the official histories of both sides—it is submitted that there was a Cypriot Civil War between 1963 and 1967 that has gone almost entirely unrecognized. This claim is in response to Varnava’s call for a systematic study on the subject and his use of the term Cypriot Civil War. This term has been accepted by Richter, Hardy, and Lamnisos, but none has explored why it is appropriate.1

In elaborating upon the qualitative aspects of this research, we aim to show how a particular case study might be analyzed qualitatively to provide a necessary complement to quantitative studies that categorize violent conflicts. We argue that violent conflicts cannot only be measured and assessed in quantitative terms and that qualitative analysis is equally important. Sambanis has already made this argument well. Yet the fact that current major datasets, not least the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, maintain the requirement of 1,000 battle-related deaths in a calendar year as a precondition for a conflict’s definition as civil war strongly suggests that Sambanis’ recommendations, though perhaps appreciated, have not yet been strongly embraced. We offer a suggestion for how qualitative analysis can be used either to reinforce or to ask questions of quantitative studies.2

For differing reasons, the civil war studies and Cypriot literatures have largely failed to acknowledge the civil war in Cyprus. In the civil war studies literature, Sambanis appears to be the only researcher to have recognized the conflict as such after estimating that it resulted in 1,000 deaths, the threshold of the Correlates of War project’s dataset. Yet death should not be the only factor in identifying a civil war, and this death threshold prejudices against low-population states. Problems with the data make it difficult to say whether the Cypriot Civil War passed this 1,000-death threshold, but from 1963 to 1967, it is a credible estimate.3

In absolute terms, such a figure seems marginal next to the large-scale civil wars over the last century. Yet if relative measures are applied, a different picture emerges. According to the 1960 census, Cyprus had a population of 573,566, of whom 77.1 percent were Greek Cypriots and 18.2 percent were Turkish Cypriots. When the principle of relative measures is applied to Cyprus, the requirement of a high absolute death threshold seems misplaced. Deaths totaling 1,000 would amount to 0.175 percent of the Cypriot population. If a civil war with the same proportion of deaths had occurred, for instance, in France in the same year, with a population approaching 50 million people, 83,000 people would have died. A similar civil war in the United States, with a population of nearly 195 million in 1960, would have resulted in over 341,000 deaths. In short, the Cypriot Civil War only seems insignificant when couched in the absolute terms favored in the quantitative literature. In relative terms, and in light of its qualitative characteristics, it patently was a highly significant war with an immense impact on the island, its peoples, and its history.4

The widespread scholarly and public negligence of the Cypriot Civil War is an unsurprising consequence of the failure to view conflicts in per capita terms. The reverse side of the coin, however, is the official propaganda of both sides. Two propaganda machines, independently of each other, sought to cover up the historical fact of civil war in the service of their respective political agendas. Subsequent historical accounts, even by non-Cypriots, largely did not interrogate the terminology and—generally unknowingly—served to perpetuate the dominant narratives manufactured by these propaganda efforts. Greek Cypriot officialdom refers to the events of 1963/4 as a Turkish Cypriot “revolt,” which started the “inter-communal troubles”; its Turkish Cypriot counterpart, on the other hand, refers to the same events as Greek Cypriot “massacres” or as a “genocide” perpetrated against them during “bloody Christmas,” causing them to flee their homes. In fact, both communities were at the same time perpetrators and victims of the violence. On both sides, the term civil war has been avoided officially to deny culpability and wrongdoing more plausibly and to lay the blame and responsibility more effectively at the feet of the other community. More recently, scholars have employed seemingly neutral terminology (such as hostilities and inter-ethnic violence). This article argues that the only designation that reflects the historical reality is civil war and that this designation has important implications.5

We offer three main criticisms of the existing civil war studies literature. First, the reliance on absolute thresholds in the coding rules creates biases in our understanding of civil war, which relative measures are essential to overcome. Second, civilian deaths need to be counted alongside combatant deaths, and other forms of human suffering need to be considered. Third, we argue that the literature has suffered from under-theorization, resulting in little substantive change in the field. We employ Sambanis’ definition of civil war to show how the conflict in Cyprus in the 1960s meets all commonly agreed-on qualitative aspects of civil war, even if its relatively low death toll has excluded it from major datasets.

One of the most problematic aspects of the way armed conflicts are coded in the quantitative literature is that some of the coding rules produce a bias toward large countries. Since the establishment of the Correlates of War (cow) project in 1963, civil war datasets have heavily relied on an absolute death threshold to distinguish civil war from other forms of lower-intensity armed conflicts. Following the first cow dataset, this coding rule stipulated that in addition to other requirements, battle-related deaths must reach 1,000 within a calendar year for a conflict to be deemed a civil war. The rule originally included only combatant deaths. Although later changes seem to have dropped this element of the rule, it is unclear whether the dataset was then updated to include civilian deaths. In either case, the death toll is assumed to be the sine qua non of armed conflict. It is telling that, although civil wars almost by definition produce a high degree of human suffering, no other metric is considered within the coding rules.6

Sambanis and others have criticized the cow project’s coding rules for maintaining a threshold of 1,000 battle deaths annually, but newer datasets gaining in popularity—foremost the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (ucdp)—reiterate the same threshold. The only instance in which it is logically sound to apply an absolute threshold is when political violence is highly localized. It would be illogical and undesirable to implement per capita measures when, for example, violence is contained within a country’s capital city (unless as a percentage of the city’s population). The nature of large-scale political violence, however, tends to reveal a diffuseness and range not delimited by convenient demarcation (that is, a capital city’s bounds or a nation-state’s borders). As such, for most cases where it is not logically sound to apply an absolute threshold, a per capita measure holds considerable advantages. It eschews the large-country bias inherent in high absolute measures. The threshold of 1,000 battle-related deaths is more likely to be met in a populous country that can more easily suffer more deaths due to war than a smaller one. A small state might experience a catastrophic upheaval that is singularly significant in its history, yet which nonetheless results in only 500 fatalities. The ucdp dataset is less problematic in its criteria than the cow dataset, but it should be seen as a step in the right direction rather than a solution to the problem.7

Sambanis has argued for relative measures by illustrating the case of the Dhofar Rebellion in Oman (1965–1976), in which “the pattern of armed conflict and organisation of the rebellion are consistent with a common understanding of civil war, but [the Rebellion] is typically excluded from civil war lists because of a low death count, even though, in per capita terms, this conflict caused more damage than many others that are typically included as civil wars.” Therefore, although Sambanis does not make the same point about the Cypriot Civil War, he established with the Omani case that it was not just fatalities in a per capita frame that revealed its nature as a civil war. The internecine, fratricidal violence inherent in the normative understanding of civil war was clearly as applicable to Oman as anywhere else since the 1960s, with or without a high death toll.8

Other scholars have likewise questioned the widespread use of an absolute death threshold. Baev has argued that scholarly debates over what threshold of violence to use “hide rather than clarify the inescapable fact that a criterion of this kind is inherently artificial, besides being biased against small countries.” Citing the conflict in the Ivory Coast in the 2000s, Gersovitz and Kriger observed that a “contest for the monopoly of force in a country can be under way without involving large numbers of deaths.” That conflict was another civil war that did not meet the threshold of 1,000 battle-related deaths, but contributed to and revealed the dissolution of the rule of law and caused de facto partition and widespread suffering. This partition formed “the very essence of a contestation of the monopoly of force and civil war.” These objective and experiential components—illegal territorial change and diffuse civilian suffering—could well be argued to be more indicative of a state of civil war than a particular death toll on its own. Such was certainly the case in Cyprus, though a narrow insistence on arbitrary death thresholds leads to the a priori exclusion of such cases. The salient point here, however, is not just about death thresholds, but about the civilian experience of the war, which is something that macro-level studies are ill-equipped to consider.9

Civilian deaths should categorically be included in any civil war dataset’s death threshold. As a percentage of all war-related fatalities, civilian deaths have risen from approximately 50 percent in the eighteenth century to as high as 90 percent in 1990. Moreover, the outlook for civilians caught up in modern warfare has not improved following the collapse of the Soviet Union, as some authors have maintained. According to research commissioned by the International Committee of the Red Cross (icrc) and published in 2001, “civilians have—both intentionally and by accident—been moved to centre stage in the theatre of war, which was once fought primarily on battlefields. This fundamental shift in the character of war is illustrated by a stark statistic: in World War I, nine soldiers were killed for every civilian life lost. In today’s wars, it is estimated that ten civilians die for every soldier or fighter killed in battle.” To ignore this lopsided proportion of fatalities, as the cow project and others like it have done, is untenable.10

Civilian suffering should also be considered. In the Cypriot case, Bryant noted that Cypriots “have long lived in a context in which the future is uncertain and the conflict is ‘unfinished.’ [They] live in a prolonged ceasefire, a suspension of war, while ongoing negotiations promise a radical change in the status quo.” Bryant was referring to the still-unresolved post-1974 “Cyprus problem,” but her comments apply equally to earlier years when actual violence coupled with the threat thereof arguably prompted more fear and insecurity. In Cyprus, much of the suffering was caused not by deaths but by the high rate of abduction experienced on both sides and the immense internal displacement that affected almost every Turkish and Armenian Cypriot. Such a situation cannot be proxied simply by counting the dead. Sambanis has been perhaps the only political scientist to recognize that “one might also consider counting refugees and internally displaced persons as a measure of the human cost of the war.” That none of this has been extensively scrutinized is evidence of the need for a renewal of ideas and thinking in the field.11

Compounding these problems is the fact that civil wars are often punctuated by periods of inactivity when few to no deaths occur but suffering continues in a state of cold war. Again, the quantitative literature sacrifices nuance for generalizability; suffering that does not result in death is considered irrelevant or too difficult to deal with. In civil wars in larger countries with higher death tolls, cold war has no effect on coding those conflicts as civil war. In smaller countries with lower death tolls, however, the distinction becomes far more important. One of the greatest problems with the dominant datasets for cases like Cyprus is that they reduce complex concepts such as peace and war to dichotomies and thereby deem them mutually exclusive. These concepts, however, are not binary variables; the absence of a state of war suggests peace, though violence may continue even if deaths and casualties are low or even absent. It is accepted that the Greek Civil War had three phases (1943 to 1944; December 1944 to January 11, 1945; and March 30, 1946, to October 16, 1949), which are considered part of the same civil war. Similarly, in the Lebanese Civil War, the “end” signaled by the peace agreement of October 1989 did not bring peace, but obscured the continuation of violence (for example, with the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri).12

To make matters worse, the quantitative literature is also guilty of under-theorizing civil war. Over the last forty years, researchers have collected enormous quantities of data to study, yet not all agree on what civil war is in the first place or how to measure and codify war. For Florea, “it would not be a gross exaggeration to state that a conceptual morass has engulfed the field whereby concepts remain abstract and highly aggregated; conceptualisation of civil conflict has been insufficiently integrated with empirical research, [and] conceptual fuzziness has led to potential incomparability of cases in large-N research.”13

Within this conceptual morass, many scholars have demanded more robust causal explanations of civil war onset, duration, characterization, and termination. Correlation does not equal causation, yet some of the most-cited researchers working in the field have committed this logical fallacy. Fearon and Laitin, for instance, state that “mountainousness” is a “key explanatory variable” for civil war onset, yet, as Tarrow notes, the authors “had little to say about the mechanisms that produce more civil wars in (some) mountainous countries than in (most) relatively flat ones or about which mechanisms are at work where.” So the authors identified the correlation, but could not sufficiently explain it, thereby weakening their central arguments and revealing a lack of explanatory power. For Tarrow, “the quantitative studies of civil wars that became popular around the turn of the new century … have reached a plateau in their capacity to inform or enlighten.” Even more damningly, Weinstein argued that the quantitative data has “limited the questions scholars have been able to ask about civil war.”14

One of our recommendations is that researchers turn their attention to two interrelated methodologies: integrating macro- with micro- and meso-level approaches and developing a bidirectional qualitative-quantitative method in which one asks and answers questions of the other. In a recent book, Balcells integrated all three levels to offer alternatives to the common explanations of civil war violence (which focus on economic, organizational, or political factors). Ultimately, macro-level work is often too abstract and lacks grounding when it does not have a foundation in the micro-level. At the same time, micro-level work runs the risk of making its focus too myopic or decontextualized without recourse to the meso- and macro-levels. Researchers should use highly disaggregated data sets when testing their hypotheses empirically. They must also reconsider the scale of conflict in coding civil wars. The threshold of 1,000 battle-related deaths biases against lower population countries and obstructs the recognition of civil war in such countries.15

In 2004, Sambanis proposed what remains the best operational definition of civil war. We have modified it only by removing the final four clauses, which pertain to coding a civil war’s end. Sambanis argues that a civil war is distinguishable from a lower-intensity armed conflict if:

  • (a) 

    The war takes place within the territory of a state that is a member of the international system with a population of 500,000 or greater.

  • (b) 

    The parties are politically and militarily organized, and they have publicly stated political objectives.

  • (c) 

    The government (through its military or militias) must be a principal combatant. If there is no functioning government, then the party representing the government internationally and/or claiming the state domestically must be involved as a combatant.

  • (d) 

    The main insurgent organization(s) must be locally represented and must recruit locally. Additional external involvement and recruitment need not imply that the war is not intra-state. Insurgent groups may operate from neighboring countries, but they must also have some territorial control (bases) in the civil war country and/or the rebels must reside in the civil war country.

  • (e) 

    The start year of the war is the first year that the conflict causes at least 500 to 1,000 deaths. If the conflict has not caused 500 deaths or more in the first year, the war is coded as having started in that year only if cumulative deaths in the next 3 years reach 1,000.

  • (f) 

    Throughout its duration, the conflict must be characterized by sustained violence, at least at the minor or intermediate level. There should be no 3-year period during which the conflict causes fewer than 500 deaths.

  • (g) 

    Throughout the war, the weaker party must be able to mount effective resistance. Effective resistance is measured by at least 100 deaths inflicted on the stronger party. A substantial number of these deaths must occur in the first year of the war. But if the violence becomes effectively one-sided, even if the aggregate effective-resistance threshold of 100 deaths has already been met, the civil war must be coded as having ended, and a politicide or other form of one-sided violence must be coded as having started.16

The case of Cyprus meets all of these requirements. Following this definition, we have dated the end of the civil war in Cyprus as 1967. Although the effects of civil war continued to be felt long after this date, the period 1967–1974 (pre-invasion) produced relatively few deaths, which, according to the definition above, rules out coding the war as ongoing between 1963 and 1974. Nonetheless, we believe that the conflict continued to exhibit various qualitative features commonly associated with civil war, though more work is needed to determine whether the conflict should be viewed as one uninterrupted war leading up to the Turkish invasion in 1974 (at which point the conflict definitively became inter- as well as intra-state).

The shortcomings of the quantitative literature can be better grasped through a case study of the Cypriot Civil War from 1963 to 1967. The war cannot be understood outside its modern historical context. The island has been shared between Christians and Muslims for centuries, first under Ottoman rule (1571–1878) and then under British rule (1878–1960) before becoming a Republic. Throughout the 300-year Ottoman period, the two communities lived in mixed and neighboring towns and villages relatively amicably. The polarization of the two communities came later. Mass violence started in 1955 with a pro-enosis (political union of Cyprus and Greece) revolt against British rule led by right-wing Greeks and Greek-Cypriots. The outbreak of the civil war in December 1963 was spurred by the demand from a small group of Greek Cypriots for enosis. The group divided Turkish and Greek Cypriots and further divided Greek Cypriots into groups that were pro-enosis, indifferent, or even opposed.

From 1878, the British, who annexed Cyprus when the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in November 1914 in World War I, ushered in a period of modernization, which improved agricultural production, internal communications, and public health and also led to the collapse of the power of the Cypriot Orthodox Church, which relied on the Ottoman system for its authority. Greek Cypriot political and intellectual elites split; one group supported the continuation of British rule while the other supported enosis as part of “the Megali Idea” (the Great Idea)—the imperialist, irredentist policy of the larger Greek state. By World War I, both groups splintered further; some pro-British loyalists adopted “soft” enosis (that is, enosis with British approval) and mostly aligned with the Anglophile Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos. A more uncompromising group, which had close links to King Constantine in Greece, was perceived by the British as anti-entente. In October 1916, Whitehall, which had considered the island a strategic backwater, offered Cyprus to Greece on the condition that Greece immediately enter the war in aid of Serbia. Ironically, the pro-Constantine government rejected that request. Meanwhile, Venizelos, who returned to power in 1916, did not press the question, believing that the British would one day renew their offer.17

The idea of enosis was not supported beyond the Greek Cypriot elites and, eventually, portions of the growing middle classes. Most of the population were peasants and rural laborers who focused on subsistence farming, leading to mass emigration to the United Kingdom and Australia. Turkish Cypriot elites resented the fact that enosis threatened their existence and opposed it strongly, generally preferring the continuation of British rule or, in the absence of the British, the return of the island to the Ottoman Empire or Turkey. British rule, focused on protecting itself and the Turkish demographic minority from the threat of enosis, tended to divide rather than unite the two communities, contributing to the development of an uncompromising “enosis and only enosis” policy of the Greek Cypriot far right (and, from 1949, the far left) with violent consequences.18

Violence that began in 1955 originated with the formation of the National Radical Union of Cyprus (erek), a clandestine far-right group, in 1929. Following a period of cooperation between British and Cypriot politicians, a group of Greek Cypriots with fascist inclinations, led by the journalist Savvas Loizides and financed by the then Bishop of Kyrenia, Makarios, established the secret organization. Its goal was to bring about enosis immediately, without a period of self-government or independence, through violence. In 1931, while the Cypriots suffered from the impact of the Great Depression, erek attempted to lead pro-enosis, anti-British mobs in riots and in damaging government property, which included burning down the Government House in the capital. The colonial authorities suspended the constitution, imposed press censorship, deported many individuals implicated in organizing the riots and violence, and sent others to rural areas under house arrest. Yet far-right exiles in Athens, including Loizides, with their coterie in Cyprus, seemingly orchestrated the January 1934 assassination of politician Antonios Triantafyllides for trying to rebuild Cypriot relations with the British through the Advisory Council.

World War II, like World War I, saw Cypriots contributing to the British forces, but in October 1946, the British rescinded earlier deportation orders to bolster the right wing against the communist Ανορθωτικό Κόμμα Εργαζόμενου Λαού (akel, the Progressive Party of Working People), created in 1942.19

The probable assassins of Triantafyllides, now rehabilitated, helped form the Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών (eoka, National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) in 1951 to achieve enosis. Formed from the remnants of erek, eoka included former Axis collaborators in Greece and royalists from the Greek Civil War, who brought their anti-Communism to Cyprus in 1947, opposing self-government and independence. This group was aided by Archbishop Makarios II and his successor, Archbishop Makarios III, who, in March 1951, agreed to an “armed group” like erek. In May 1951, Colonel George Grivas, a Cypriot-born far-right paramilitary leader in Greece who was notorious for collaborating with the Axis occupiers and for his brutality during the Greek Civil War, accepted the leadership of eoka, signaling a new militant phase in pursuit of enosis. eoka began a campaign of violence against its opposition and the British in April 1955.20

eoka believed that enosis only concerned them, Greece, and Britain, but failed to consider that it also concerned Turkish Cypriots and Turkey. They wanted to unite with Greece, so it was not surprising that Turkish Cypriots would want to unite with Turkey, a larger country with greater military capacity and strategic importance to Britain in the Cold War than Greece.

From April 1955 to February 1959, three main factors led to a further deterioration of the situation: eoka attacked its opposition, including both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and the British; the Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı (tmt, Turkish Resistance Organization) was formed by Turkish Cypriots and Turkey to bring about partition, or taksim, thereby further damaging bicommunal relations; and the British hit back against eoka and the Greek Cypriot population, who were often collectively punished for eoka acts. At the end of 1958, Makarios, who had spent a year in exile in Seychelles, announced that he would accept independence if both enosis and taksim were prohibited unless supported by the United Nations. Cyprus became an independent consociational republic in 1960, with power shared between the two constituent communities, the Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom (which retained sovereign bases) guaranteed the constitution. Yet behind the facade of rapprochement, the Greek Cypriot leadership’s plans for enosis were far from being shelved.21

The first phase of the Cypriot Civil War is dated here as December 21, 1963, to August 10, 1964. In the last days of 1963, the Republic collapsed after violence broke out in the streets on December 21. Pro-enosis Greek Cypriot leaders were finally relaunching what they saw as the redemptive armed struggle for union with Greece. Entire Turkish Cypriot villages from across the island were abandoned when they, or neighboring villages, were attacked. Even when most Turkish Cypriots had retreated to armed enclaves in early 1964, violence continued through siege warfare, economic blockade, hostage taking, and firefights. Greek Cypriot assaults were welcomed by tmt; they hoped the international community would see the Turkish Cypriots as the victims, thereby strengthening their argument for the geographical separation of the two communities (although they downplayed the death toll for the benefit of morale).22

The nature of civil-war violence could generally be thought to be more symmetrical than the scenes taking place in Cyprus in 1963/4 would suggest, but the outwardly one-sided combat is a result of the Turkish Cypriots being a demographical minority of 20 percent, their leaders expecting the violence in January 1964 but not in December 1963, and their secessionist aims. As in most wars, ordinary people bore the cost, giving rise to an element of ethnic cleansing within the civil war that was not perpetrated solely by Greek Cypriot fighters but, perversely, by the Turkish Cypriot community’s own leadership in the hopes of gaining international sympathy. By August 10, 1964, about 600 Cypriots had lost their lives according to official counts, mostly Turkish Cypriots, yet the real number could be as much as twice that figure (which does not include foreign nationals).

In early 1963, the Greek Cypriot leadership set about showing that the constitution was unworkable and that it favored the demographical minority. tmt largely remained unchanged after the signing of the Zurich-London Accords and independence, but, with arms continuing to arrive in secret and only inferior arms being turned in, eoka splintered into several armed groups. One was led by Vassos Lyssarides, a Panhellenist socialist and the personal physician of President Archbishop Makarios. Another was more like a gang of thugs and was led by Nicos Sampson, a brutal eoka gunman. The largest, however, was under the command of the Minister of the Interior Polycarpos Georgajis, who, with the approval of President Archbishop Makarios, implemented a clandestine plan to abrogate the treaties and constitutional provisions that prevented enosis and Greek Cypriot domination—the so-called Akritas Plan. Akritas trained thousands of Greek Cypriots in firearms use, while arms and materiel were smuggled from Greece by far-right elements in the military and intelligence services. By December 1963, the Greek Cypriots had fully trained 5,000 men, with another 5,000 in training.23

On November 30, 1963, Makarios proposed thirteen amendments to the constitution that were aimed at removing or reducing the Turkish Cypriot protections. The proposal was never intended to succeed; its political utility lay in the pretext for more extreme action that it created. On December 3, 1963, Akritas conducted a false flag operation in Nicosia, blowing up the statue of the eoka hero Markos Drakos. Three days later, the Turkish Council of Ministers in Ankara rejected the proposed constitutional changes. On the same day, the Greek Chief of Staff advised the Greek Defence Minister (who sent the report to the Foreign Minister) that it was time for Greece to support Makarios’ proposals by providing resources to the Akritas Organization, thereby supporting Greek Cypriot forces against Turkish Cypriot forces. Meanwhile, the Turkish Cypriot Vice President, Fazıl Küçük, promised to study and reply to the proposed constitutional changes early in the new year.24

Minister of the Interior Georgajis acted preemptively because he did not want to wait for the Turkish Cypriots to establish their defensive capability. On December 21 one of his paramilitary cells initiated a conflict. It stopped a Turkish Cypriot couple on their way home after a night out in Nicosia and demanded documentation, which the couple refused. When a Turkish Cypriot crowd surrounded the patrol, it fired, and the couple were killed instantly. Shooting spread throughout the capital after the funerals the following night. Akritas members had cut telephone and telegraph lines to the Turkish Cypriot areas and closed Nicosia international airport. Sampson led his gang in a foray into the primarily Turkish Cypriot suburb of Omorphita, indiscriminately killing Turkish Cypriots, including women and children, and taking hundreds of hostages. An American source puts the figure of casualties (mostly Turkish Cypriots) at eighty-seven, including seventeen dead.25

Greek Cypriots encircled Nicosia’s Turkish Cypriot quarter, which also included Armenian Cypriots, cutting off electricity, water, and food supplies. Patrick estimated that over 100 Cypriots, at least 79 of them Turkish, were killed in Nicosia alone during these early days. The journalist Scott Gibbons claimed that he had talked to the Turkish Cypriots: “They say about 300 of their people have been killed, many of them women and children.” There were, he continued, “dozens of dead and hundreds wounded … in houses mortared and set on fire.” The Turkish Cypriot community was clearly not prepared for the start of violence in December 1963 and Turkish Cypriot actions remained largely defensive, as the British ambassador to Turkey advised London.26

Over the next few months, apart from a lull in January, hostilities continued apace internally as the external aspect of the war reared its head. In March, while Turkey was threatening to invade, the United Nations Security Council responded with an international peacekeeping force (unficyp), which became operational on March 27. unficyp’s attempts to stop the violence were ignored until April 29, when Makarios announced that his forces had secured the Kyrenia Pass. unficyp only marginally helped to deescalate the bloodletting. Official records show seventy-five fatalities in March, sixty-five in April, and fifty-four in May. Patrick identified eight stages during this first phase of the Cypriot Civil War, as shown in Table 1.27

Table 1

Patrick’s Eight Stages of the First Phase of the Cypriot Civil War

stagedatesdescription
Dec. 21–31, 1963 The initial outbreak of violence, including massacres in various locations. 
Jan. 1–31, 1964 Violence subdued while negotiated settlement was sought at London Conference. 
Feb. 1–14, 1964 Violence reintensifies after failure of London Conference, and includes the attack by Lyssaridies’ group on Ayios Sozomenos and Potamia. 
Feb. 15–Mar. 4, 1964 Violence subsides while the United Nations Security Council discusses crisis and decides to form unficyp
Mar. 5–26, 1964 Violence re-intensifies as both sides, especially the Greek Cypriots, attempt to expand and consolidate their positions before unficyp became operational. 
Mar. 27–June 13, 1964 unficyp operational but unable to always stop violence, which climaxed in Famagusta. 
June 14–Aug. 5, 1964 Violence subsides after Grivas returned to head the National Guard and regroup the Greek Cypriot forces. 
Aug. 6–10, 1964 A Greek Cypriot attack on Turkish Cypriots at Kokkina led to Turkish air raids and a temporary end to the violence until 1967. 
stagedatesdescription
Dec. 21–31, 1963 The initial outbreak of violence, including massacres in various locations. 
Jan. 1–31, 1964 Violence subdued while negotiated settlement was sought at London Conference. 
Feb. 1–14, 1964 Violence reintensifies after failure of London Conference, and includes the attack by Lyssaridies’ group on Ayios Sozomenos and Potamia. 
Feb. 15–Mar. 4, 1964 Violence subsides while the United Nations Security Council discusses crisis and decides to form unficyp
Mar. 5–26, 1964 Violence re-intensifies as both sides, especially the Greek Cypriots, attempt to expand and consolidate their positions before unficyp became operational. 
Mar. 27–June 13, 1964 unficyp operational but unable to always stop violence, which climaxed in Famagusta. 
June 14–Aug. 5, 1964 Violence subsides after Grivas returned to head the National Guard and regroup the Greek Cypriot forces. 
Aug. 6–10, 1964 A Greek Cypriot attack on Turkish Cypriots at Kokkina led to Turkish air raids and a temporary end to the violence until 1967. 

source Richard Arthur Patrick, Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict, 1963–1971 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1976), 47.

The violence visited upon Nicosia in 1963 quickly fanned outward beyond the capital. Between December 21 and 31, firefights erupted throughout the island. On December 23, Greek Cypriot paramilitaries attacked Mathiatis Village, just south of Nicosia, and all the Turkish Cypriots fled. The following day, a Greek Cypriot gang abducted and murdered twenty-one Turkish Cypriot villagers from Ayios Vasilios in Kyrenia. Thirty-eight Turkish Cypriots appear to have been killed in massacres (the majority dying in more balanced fighting), which disproves the official Turkish Cypriot propaganda that the violence was predominantly characterized by massacre.28

On Christmas Day, at least two Turkish Cypriots from the coastal town of Lapithos (also in Kyrenia District) went missing, and the townspeople subsequently barricaded themselves in the most secure houses before buses evacuated them to tmt-defended villages. The Turkish Cypriot retreat to armed enclaves, largely organized by tmt under direction from Ankara, gathered pace. The enclaves were subject to Greek Cypriot blockade, so Turkish army training of Turkish Cypriots remained hidden from the Greek Cypriots. The retreat left more and more properties abandoned. A United Nations study conducted in February the following year found that 527 Turkish Cypriot houses had been destroyed completely and another 2000 heavily damaged in 109 Turkish Cypriot or mixed villages.29

The destruction was not merely the work of out-of-control irregulars. It was also carried out by neighbors, the very people who had formed the pre–civil war communities. The ransacking and demolitions were likely motivated not just by greed or grievance, but by more personal antagonism to the Turkish Cypriots—both indiscriminate and selective. Patrick reports that much of the violence directed toward Turkish Cypriots was in the form of reprisals for the supposed “revolt against the Republic”—as Greek Cypriot propaganda characterized it.30

As shown in Table 2, almost 30,000 Cypriots were displaced by the violence in 1963 and 1964, 25,000 of whom were Turkish Cypriots. By the end of December, the Turkish Cypriot residents of some twenty-two villages had fled their homes. The residents of a further fifty-five villages were displaced by the end of January. All in all, some 90 percent of the Turkish Cypriot community lived in enclaves, which were spread over just 3 percent of the island’s landmass. Among them were the 7,500 dependents of missing persons, many of whom would never return. The towns where the villagers took refuge quickly became overpopulated, leading to regular food shortages. Most (23,000) of the displaced Turkish Cypriots remained in separate enclaves across the island until 1974, suffering from a harsh economic blockade imposed by Greek Cypriots.

Table 2

Expulsions and Displaced Persons in 1963/4 Cypriot Civil War

groupnumber displacedtotal pop. (1960)% displaced of total pop.
Greek Cypriots 2,500 442,363 0.6% 
Turkish Cypriots 25,000 104,333 24% 
Maronite Cypriots 2,752 
Armenian Cypriots 1,500 3,630 41% 
Total 29,000     
groupnumber displacedtotal pop. (1960)% displaced of total pop.
Greek Cypriots 2,500 442,363 0.6% 
Turkish Cypriots 25,000 104,333 24% 
Maronite Cypriots 2,752 
Armenian Cypriots 1,500 3,630 41% 
Total 29,000     

source U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary-General to the Security Council on the UN Operation in Cyprus, 26 Apr. to 8 June 1964, S/5764; U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary-General on the United Nations Operation in Cyprus, 10 Sept. 1964, S/5950; Richard Arthur Patrick, Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict, 1963–1971 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1976), 340, 343.

The blockade was partially inspired by the belief that isolating the Turkish Cypriots and depriving them of basic goods would dispose tmt to giving up their partitionist struggle. The Turkish Cypriots were prohibited from acquiring products in twenty-five categories on the pretext that the materials could be put to military use. The list included building materials, cement, iron, electrical equipment, batteries, timber, large bags, automobile accessories and parts, tires, and fuel. Consequently, most Turkish Cypriots lived in tents, though some of the more resourceful among them constructed ramshackle huts from driftwood and mud.31

U Thant, the United Nations Secretary-General, condemned the blockade in his September 10, 1964, report: “the economic restrictions being imposed against the Turkish communities in Cyprus, which in some instances have been so severe as to amount to veritable siege, indicate that the Government of Cyprus [that is, Greek Cypriot authorities] seeks to force a potential solution by economic pressure as a substitute for military action.” Altogether, 56,000 Turkish Cypriots, roughly half their total number, depended on emergency relief; almost all of them relied on supplies from Turkey because an estimated 8,000 Turkish Cypriots outside enclaves were denied government services. Ultimately, more than half of the Turkish Cypriot community suffered various states of deprivation for several years, and thousands emigrated to the United Kingdom, Australia, and Turkey.32

As Sant Cassia observed, hostage taking was “a central feature of Greek, then Turkish, paramilitary activity”; in fact, it was the one constant activity as massacres and expulsions subsided, although firefights and random revenge killings continued. U Thant recognized in his report of June 15, 1964, that hostage taking was a war crime: “The practise of abducting people and holding them as hostages or killing them in retaliation is most reprehensible. It has been employed by both communities, but, because of the circumstances, to a considerably greater extent by Greek Cypriots. The taking of hostages is prohibited by international law, and the killing of hostages is a universally recognised war crime.” Although many hostages were killed, especially in the early days, hostage taking was a feature of the Cypriot Civil War partly because Akritas failed to defeat the Turkish Cypriots quickly.

The gaze of the world made further massacres difficult and risked provoking a Turkish invasion. Hostage taking was seen as a deterrent to a land invasion. By December 26, at least 700 Turkish Cypriots had already been abducted. Only a British-engineered exchange saw any released.33

Many hostages were never returned. Moreover, as Patrick argued, “the location of many abductions has never been ascertained.” The withdrawal of Turkish Cypriots from the government meant that many violent incidents were never reported, especially before unficyp arrived. A hostage exchange on March 7 sparked further firefights when only 49 of an estimated 225 Turkish Cypriots hostages were returned. The subsequent killing of a Turkish Cypriot in Ktima (Paphos), provoked tmt to take hundreds of Greek Cypriots hostage at the municipal market. The Greek Cypriot response was decisive, overrunning Ktima’s Turkish Cypriot quarter and killing twenty-five Turkish Cypriots.34

As shown in Table 3, the last United Nations report for the period 1963–1967 to deal with missing persons gave what may be the best official figures of the missing: 198 Turkish Cypriots and 45 Greek Cypriots. Today, hostage taking is a war crime, and because hostage taking and the missing are such dominant dimensions of the war in Cyprus, it is indefensible to exclude them as criteria in coding the war.35

Table 3

Estimated Dead and Missing, December 21, 1963, to June 12, 1967

groupdeadmissingtotal dead and missingtotal pop. (1960)% dead and missing of total pop.
Greek Cypriots 133 45 178 442,363 0.04% 
Turkish Cypriots 191 198 389 104,333 0.4% 
British Nationals       
German Nationals       
Total 324 248 572     
groupdeadmissingtotal dead and missingtotal pop. (1960)% dead and missing of total pop.
Greek Cypriots 133 45 178 442,363 0.04% 
Turkish Cypriots 191 198 389 104,333 0.4% 
British Nationals       
German Nationals       
Total 324 248 572     

sources U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary-General to the Security Council on the UN Operation in Cyprus, 26 Apr. to 8 June 1964, S/5764; U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary-General on the United Nations Operation in Cyprus, 10 Sept. 1964, S/5950; Richard Arthur Patrick, Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict, 1963–1971 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1976), 46.

A turning point came in early August when Greek Cypriots, responding to reports suggesting that Turkish arms and troops were being smuggled into the island through the northwestern Tylliria area, attacked Turkish Cypriot villages. The Turkish Cypriot villages of Ayios Theodoros, Mansoura, and Alevga in the west fell to the attackers. Though unficyp was able to evacuate women and children, it failed to deter the attackers. Makarios, in a characteristic game of brinkmanship, was testing how much pressure he could apply to the Turkish Cypriots before Turkey would intervene. Ankara answered with a three-day bombing operation in the Tillyria region of northwest Cyprus. The Turkish government cited its right as a guarantor power to protect the rights and security of the Turkish Cypriot community.36

When the Greek Cypriots failed to respond to a Turkish ultimatum to cease the offensive, sixty-four Turkish bomber pilots bombed Greek Cypriot villages. By the time the Security Council secured a ceasefire on August 10, 1964, fifty-five Greek Cypriots and ten Turkish Cypriots had been killed. The wider significance of the early August period was that it provoked a major change in the Greek Cypriot leadership’s strategy and marked the end of the most violent period of the Cypriot Civil War. From this point on, the violence took on forms that frequently resulted less in outright death and more in deprivation of everything from food to building materials. Makarios could no longer deny the threat of a full-scale Turkish invasion. Henceforth, until 1967, Greek Cypriot policy directed enosis along political and economic lines.37

As few as 567 people were confirmed dead in the period December 21, 1963, to August 10, 1964, but it is likely that the true figure was much higher. The Greek Cypriot authorities understated the deaths; many deaths were not fully investigated, were not deemed “intercommunal” in cause, or were otherwise considered accidental. Furthermore, some died later from wounds, lack of medicine, or other causes in the enclaves, and non-Cypriots, including unficyp officers, were not counted in the death toll. Thus, Sambanis’ estimate of 1,000 deaths is plausible.38

Though much of the first, hot stage of the war was over by late 1964, the following cold stage was scarcely less severe on the Turkish Cypriot population. In the second phase of the war (August 11, 1964, to November 15, 1967), Turkish Cypriots suffered punitive economic sanctions and movement restrictions that greatly diminished their quality of life. By this stage, Ankara was injecting nearly £8 million a year into the Turkish Cypriot economy via the provisional Turkish Cypriot administration created to keep it afloat. It is unknown how many deaths occurred in this period, yet it is apparent that violence continued, with tmt having transformed into a standing army and its soldiers given salaries by the Turkish Cypriot administration. In addition to subjective violence, systemic (objective) violence perpetrated against the Turkish Cypriot community continued until November 15, 1967, although there were a further thirty-one bomb explosions until December 7. They caused no serious injury but did major damage to property.39

The cold stage of the war began in the summer of 1967 to give way to another hot stage. The coming to power of the “Colonel’s Junta” in Greece on April 21, 1967, and their push to achieve “double enosis” (the union of most of Cyprus to Greece and a smaller part to Turkey, with the Turkish Cypriots having a special protected status if they lived in the part united to Greece), triggered a response from Grivas, who favored it. Makarios had previously rejected double enosis in 1964 when it was suggested by the American envoy and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. From July 8 to August 18, 1967, there were a series of murders of Turkish and Greek Cypriots in the Paphos district that amplified the existing climate of fear, especially for Turkish Cypriots, who needed to be escorted by unficyp officers to get around. Five Greek Cypriot men and two women and four Turkish Cypriot men and one woman were killed, and three Turkish Cypriots from Ktima and two from Ayios Georgios disappeared and were presumed dead.

There were further shootings and murders across the island, some of which the United Nations claimed were “intercommunal” without providing evidence to substantiate their findings.

The “incidents” of November 15–16, 1967, at Ayios Theodoros in the west and Kophinou in the south, which caused heavy loss of life, were “among the gravest” since 1963/4, according to a United Nations report. They were triggered when Greek Cypriot police decided to resume patrols in the mixed village of Ayios Theodoros, which the Turkish Cypriots opposed. The United Nations believed that the “magnitude” of the operation and “the speed with which it was carried out clearly indicate[d] that the National Guard had planned in advance to carry out this operation in the event of any show of opposition by the Turkish Cypriots.” In addition to the deaths, both the National Guard and tmt took out their frustrations on unficyp, with multiple acts of violence against officers, including assaults, forcible disarmament, and threats to shoot.40

With unreliable data, it is difficult to estimate accurately the total number of deaths during the entire war. The figure could be as low as 600 or over 1,000. Yet arriving at definitive figures is less important than gaining an appreciation of the effects that the war had on ordinary people’s lives. Sant Cassia writes that the 1963/4 period was one of mass fear; unfortunately few personal accounts describing this period have been published from either side. One from December 1963 to August 1965 was published anonymously by a Turkish Cypriot in diary form. It provides a distressing account of the various forms of violence and persecution against Turkish Cypriots (as well as the organization of their forces), revealing a sense of disbelief at how the situation evolved, yet also a resolute defiance against Greek Cypriot actions: “Fire has now fallen on our hearths and it burns. How does one console a wife whose husband has been kidnapped by a band of murderers? How can one console the children who want nothing but their fathers and will not accept excuses for their not returning home from work?”41

Hale Erel, a Turkish Cypriot child, reveals this climate of fear in her account:

We cannot escape from this imprisonment. We go in[side our house] and my mother sends me under the table again. A little while later the door is almost crushed again with fists, in the front the man with a long beard and a long coat, with a lot of men with guns are everywhere. That day I swear … I will never be near a gun ever [again]. I know that man, my father had said … They shout and they search the men, they enter the rooms, they push everyone. I get out from under the table, my brother comes running and holds my hand, my eyes search my other brother[’s], he comes and holds my hand. Then they take away all men above 11 years old, 17 men away and I learn what is mourning in a house. The voices of women crying for their brothers, women crying for their husbands, women crying for their children and children crying for their fathers get mixed up. Big sisters start collecting from the ground what has been thrown out from cupboards, my mother learns what is it to cry and it’s as though she teaches us this. [M]y auntie throws herself around for her brother, the baby in the couchette learns how to cry again. I wrap myself around the skirts of my mother, for my father that I will never see. [M]y mother does not see me, she does not feel me, she does not recognize me, she does not recognize anyone, she just throws herself all over the place. She forgets us, she actually forgets herself.42

For a long time, a number of factors prevented the public dissemination of such stories. What such personal stories convey most strongly are the qualitative aspects of civil war not captured in macro-level studies. Many such stories show that, even when Turkish Cypriot enclaves were not facing any immediate threat, the possibility of attack precluded even superficial returns to normality.43

This article has demonstrated that the period of hot and cold violence in Cyprus between Greek and Turkish Cypriot armed groups from 1963 to 1967 was greater than mere “intercommunal conflict,” its usual label. It goes beyond the scope of this article to explore whether the period from 1967 to the coup and invasion of 1974 should be considered along with the 1963–1967 period as one civil war. It suffices here to explore briefly, using the same approach as for the earlier stages, whether further research might lead to an understanding of the period 1963–1974 as one Cypriot Civil War.

Using our approach, the period from the end of the violence in 1967 until the coup in 1974 could be seen as a third phase. This phase has similarities with the period from 1964–1967 when the conflict, as described above, “froze” before violence erupted again in 1967. During this possible third phase, the Turkish Cypriots largely remained confined within their enclaves, continuing to endure much hardship and isolation. The main difference between the earlier phases is the development of intracommunal conflict in the Greek Cypriot community following Makarios’ declaration—after the Regime of the Colonels came to power in Greece in April 1967 and just before the 1968 presidential elections—that he now followed the policy of what was “feasible” (independence), rather than what was “desirable” (enosis). He had also initiated negotiations with the Turkish Cypriots over amending the constitution and their return to the government, sending the mixed message that he still desired enosis, but was willing to postpone further attempts at its realization. Meanwhile, this stance antagonized the Greek Cypriot far-right supporters of enosis, leading Grivas to return from Greece in 1972 to found eoka b. This organization had close connections with extremists within the mainland Greek Junta, who eventually came to power in Greece in November 1973.44

The coup orchestrated by these extremists possibly ushered in the fourth and most violent phase. This period was also marked by the increased role of the Greek and Turkish forces. Greek armed forces in Cyprus, under orders from Athens, and collaborating with the small yet fanatical eoka b and other pro-enosis supporters, toppled Makarios and tried to suppress his supporters. According to Athanasopulos, at least 500 Greek Cypriots were placed on the list of 1,617 Greek Cypriots missing from 1974 and their deaths blamed on the Turks and Turkish Cypriots. On July 20, 1974, the Turkish government (ostensibly fearing the massacre and forced expulsion of Turkish Cypriots) landed armed forces in northern Cyprus—an act permitted under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee to restore the 1960 constitution.

The result was the de facto partition of the island, between an internationally recognized Greek Cypriot south, and an internationally unrecognized Turkish Cypriot north reliant on a substantial Turkish armed presence of up to 35,000 troops.

These two differences, the coup and invasion, do not invalidate whether this phase should be considered as part of a long civil war from 1963 to 1974. The Greek and Turkish armed forces were already in Cyprus as part of the Treaty of Guarantee and had played instrumental roles in the violence earlier, and the coup and invasion could represent extensions of these previous roles. The second reason is that, following the coup and the ending of the hostilities, there was substantial violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriot armed groups against each other, resembling the previous violence, though worse in terms of massacres. The worst case was the massacre of 126 women, children, and elderly Turkish Cypriots from Aloda, Maratha, and Sandalaris by eoka b on August 14, 1974.

Based on the above brief analysis, it is possible that the period 1963–1974 can accurately be described as one Cypriot Civil War broken into various phases that exhibit both the hot and cold characteristics of civil war.45

 

 

This article has shown that the quantitative literature must begin to consider qualitative aspects of war where possible. War produces a great many forms of suffering, including bodily and psychological damage, hostage taking, blockading, and displacement—all features of the Cypriot Civil War. Extensive fighting, characterized by the intimacy of the combatants, the number of dead and missing, and widespread displacement produced immense suffering for many Cypriots, proportionally more so for Turkish and Armenian Cypriots for the period 1963–1967.

In elaborating on the case study of the war in Cyprus in the 1960s, we hope to have furnished a model for how qualitative analysis might be used to support quantitative studies. Absolute thresholds should be replaced by relative thresholds. Instead of assuming away conflict intensity as an absolute, researchers ought to see conflicts in relative terms—one conflict is only “large” in relation to another. Thus, to apply the same absolute standards to all conflicts is illogical and indeed harmful to our understanding of war. The underlying aim of the field is to understand better which variables are correlated with the outbreak, duration, and termination of war, yet the existing literature, in excluding civil wars in small countries, has been unable adequately to determine whether the same factors are at work in small countries as in large countries.

More attention must be paid to the language used to describe conflicts. How a conflict is popularly perceived has a direct effect on real-world consequences—it is likely that a conflict considered too small scale to constitute civil war would receive less timely and less effective international attention than one deemed to cross the threshold into war. In the case of the Pakistani Civil War, for example, various groups called the conflict a rebellion, genocide, or civil war. West Pakistan invoked the rule of law to justify its brutal suppression of the “rebellion” of East Bengal. Similarly, regarding the Nigerian Civil War, Doron notes that “Biafra’s propaganda was designed to create a coherent message and intended to elicit sympathy from world public opinion and to instill a survival ethos in its population at home.” The parallels with the Greek Cypriot official rhetoric of putting down a “rebellion” to restore law and order, and with the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot official rhetoric of suffering massacres, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide at the hands of their more numerous oppressors, should be apparent. These comparisons demonstrate the need to reappraise the terms that we use to describe conflicts.46

The political situation in Cyprus is still bound up in the kind of divisive and often militant rhetoric that has helped to keep the two communities separate since the civil war and which mostly denies the suffering of each side. Greek Cypriots deny that Turkish Cypriots were victims of Greek Cypriot violence in 1963/4, for example. This is one of the many reasons why the conflict on the island remains unresolved and has become a long-running frozen civil war; both sides blame each other, deny responsibility, and claim that only their community really suffered.47

The argument that the Cypriot conflict of the mid-1960s constitutes a civil war is not mere semantics. Cypriot recognition that both sides suffered the deep scarring from civil war can help to erode official nationalist histories on both sides. These narratives claim a monopoly on suffering and victimhood for the ethnic group that they represent, whitewashing the atrocities that these groups themselves committed. Yet victims and perpetrators existed on both sides. Coming to terms with a violent and traumatic past is a crucial step in the reconciliation process. But as the Turkish political scientist Canefe has written, “Cypriot society in toto has yet to come to terms with what happened during the active phases of the Cypriot conflict.” Only when Greek and Turkish Cypriots can acknowledge their own community’s culpability for a civil war that caused the other to suffer can reunification become a viable objective.48

1 

For claims that the term civil war should be used, see Varnava, “Remembering the Cypriot Civil War 50 Years on,” Cyprus Review, XXV (2013), 113–116; Heinz Richter, A Concise History of Cyprus (Ruhpolding, Germany, 2010), 120; Samuel Hardy, “Using Open-Source Data to Identify Participation in the Illicit Antiquities Trade: A Case Study on the Cypriot Civil War,” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, XX (2014), 459–474; Tasos Lamnisos, “Hyphenated Identities: Voices from the Watchtower during the Cypriot Civil War,” Nationalities Papers, LII (2024), 640–660.

2 

For an overview of the major datasets and their coding rules, see Bastian Herre, “How Major Sources Collect Data on Conflicts and Conflict Deaths, and When to Use Which One,” Our World in Data, available at https://ourwoldindata.org/conflict-data-how-do-researchers-measure-armed-conflicts-and-their-deaths (accessed October 16, 2024).

3 

Melvin Small and Joel David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil War, 1816–1980 (Beverley Hills, 1982), 14–15; Nicholas Sambanis, “What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, XLVIII (2004), 814–858.

4 

The population in 1960 was composed of 442,363 Greek Cypriots (77.1%), 104,333 Turkish Cypriots (18.2%), 3,630 Armenian Cypriots (0.6%), 2,752 Maronite Cypriots (0.5%), and 20,488 (3.6%) others (e.g. Latin Catholics, British, Roma). See also Varnava, Nicholas Coureas, and Marina Elia (eds.), The Minorities of Cyprus: Development Patterns and the Identity of the Internal-Exclusion (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009). In 1963 France’s population was 47,560,826 people, 0.175% of which is 83,231. “France Population 1950–2021,” Macrotrends, available at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FRA/france/population (accessed November 15, 2021). In 1963 the United States had a population of 194,932,403 people, 0.175% of which is 341,132. “U.S. Population 1950–2021,” Macrotrends, available at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population (accessed November 15, 2021).

5 

See Varnava, “Remembering the Cypriot Civil War 50 Years On.” For information on the various historical accounts, see Emel Esin, Aspects of Turkish Civilisation in Cyprus (Ankara, 1965); Stanley Kyriakides, Cyprus: Constitutionalism and Crisis Government (Philadelphia, 1968); H. Scott Gibbons, Peace without Honour (Ankara, 1969); Pierre Oberling, The Road to Bellapais: The Turkish Cypriot Exodus to Northern Cyprus (Boulder, New York, 1982); Salahi R. Sonyel, Cyprus: The Destruction of a Republic: British Documents 1960–1965 (Huntingdon, U.K., 1997); Gibbons, The Genocide Files (London, 1997). See also James Ker-Lindsay, Britain and the Cyprus Crisis 1963–1964 (Mannheim, 2004); Paul Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus (New York, 2005), 1–2; Olga Demetriou, “‘Struck by the Turks’: Reflections on Armenian Refugeehood in Cyprus,” Patterns of Prejudice, XLVIII (2014), 167–181; Margot Tudor, “Reputation on the (Green) Line: Revisiting the ‘Plaza Moment’ in the United Nations Peacekeeping Practice, 1964–1966,” Journal of Global History, XVI (2021), 227–245, 233.

6 

Small and Singer, Resort to Arms, 205–206, 14–15; Singer and Small, The Wages of War 1816–1965: A Statistical Handbook (New York, 1972), esp. 1–38. Small and Singer defined war, be it inter-, intra-, or extra-state, as sustained conflict resulting in substantial fatalities: “For our own particular research goals, we must define war in terms of violence [and] we consider the taking of human life the primary and dominant characteristic of war.” Consequently, Small and Singer stipulated that armed conflicts must reach a threshold of 1,000 battle-related deaths within one calendar year to be deemed “war.” This arbitrary definition has not received widespread critical attention and has become a definitional criterion of civil war and war more broadly in much of the subsequent literature. As such, the concept of civil war was effectively reduced to deaths, which is just one of its many elements.

7 

Per the ucdp dataset, the events of the 1960s in Cyprus would be designated as a “state-based armed conflict,” which is coded as “at least 25 battle-related deaths in one calendar year” where the contestation represents an incompatibility in which at least one of the two parties is the government of a state. See “ucdp Definitions,” Uppsala Universitet, available at https://www.uu.se/en/department/peace-and-conflict-research/research/ucdp/ucdp-definitions (accessed October 23, 2024). See also Alison J. Ayers, “Beyond the Ideology of ‘Civil War’: The Global-Historical Constitution of Political Violence in Sudan,” Journal of Pan African Studies, X (2012), 261–288; Christopher Cramer, Violence in Developing Countries: War, Memory, Progress (Bloomington, 2006), esp. 1–14; Sambanis, “What Is Civil War?” 821.

8 

Ibid.

9 

Mark Gersovitz and Norma Kriger, “What Is a Civil War? A Critical Review of Its Definition and (Econometric) Consequences,” World Bank Research Observer, XXVIII (2013), 160, 168; Pavel K. Baev, “Defining Civil War by Examining Post-Soviet Conflicts,” Terrorism and Political Violence, XIX (2007), 249.

10 

A total of 115 armed conflicts were recorded in the decade following the end of the Cold War in one dataset. See Nils Petter Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research, XXXIX (2002), 615–37; Michael W. Doyle and Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations (Princeton, 2011), 4; for statistics regarding civilian deaths in civil wars, see Stanley B. Greenberg and Robert O. Boorstin, “People On War: Civilians in the Line of Fire,” Public Perspective, XII (2001), 19. Roberts opposes this generalizing about civilian deaths, yet he too points to a number of conflicts that support the 9:1 ratio, including Cambodia (1975–1979) and Rwanda (1995). See Adam Roberts, “The Civilian in Modern War,” Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, XII (2009), 13–51. Small and Singer included civilian deaths, but the latest dataset does not. See Meredith Reid Sarkees, “The cow Typology of War: Defining and Categorizing Wars (Version 4 of the Data),” 15, available at https://correlatesofwar.org/wp-content/uploads/COW-Website-Typology-of-war.pdf. For more views on the debate about counting civilian deaths, see Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel, “Civil War,” Journal of Economic Literature, XLVIII (2010), 3–57, and Edward Newman, “Conflict Research and the ‘Decline’ of Civil War,” Civil Wars, XI (2009), 255–278.

11 

For civilian suffering in Cyprus, see Rebecca Bryant, “History’s Remainders: On Time and Objects After Conflict in Cyprus,” American Ethnologist, XLI (2014), 683; Sambanis, “What Is Civil War?” 823.

12 

In critiquing the quantitative literature, Florea makes the related point that “civil war may be a longer process, with several waves of escalation and de-escalation, than generally described in the extant literature.” Adrian Florea, “Where Do We Go from Here? Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological Gaps in the Large-N Civil War Research Program,” International Studies Review, XIV (2012), 78; for more views on the problem of seeing war and peace as a binary couplet, see Kristine Höglund and Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs, “Beyond the Absence of War: The Diversity of Peace in Post-Settlement Societies,” Review of International Studies, XXXVI (2010), 367; for the Greek Civil War in general, see David H. Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War (London, 1995); lastly, the point about the “end” of the Lebanese Civil War was made well by Faten Ghosn and Amal Khoury, “Lebanon after the Civil War: Peace or the Illusion of Peace?” Middle East Journal, LXV (2011), 381–397.

13 

Large-N data are those that cover a large number of cases. Newman, “Conflict Research,” esp. 258–263; Florea, “Where Do We Go from Here?” 81.

14 

Sidney Tarrow, “Inside Insurgencies: Politics and Violence in an Age of Civil War,” Perspectives on Politics, V (2007), 587–600; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods: Putting It Together Again,” in Robert E. Goodin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Science (Oxford, 2013; orig. pub. 2001), 8. According to Google Scholar, Fearon’s research output has been cited 53,526 times as of October 2024, and Laitin’s research has been cited a total of 40,247 times. Tarrow, “Inside Insurgencies,” 589; ibid., 587; Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge, 2009), 366.

15 

Others advocate a bidirectional qualitative-quantitative approach. In critiquing a macro-level study of the Greek Civil War by Gerolymatos, Tsoutsoumpis shows that Gerolymatos failed to explain the civil war in a broader international context, which would have required a “different approach that would bridge the micro- and macro-approaches and explore the interplay between national, international, and local politics in the outbreak of the civil war.” Spyros Tsoutsoumpis, “An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 by Andre Gerolymatos, and: The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy by Spyridon Plakoudas (Review),” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, XXXVII (2019), 431–436. Cederman and Vogt wrote: “In the future, conflict scholars will have to steer a middle course between overgeneralized macromodels and myopic microinvestigations.” Lars-Erik Cederman and Manuel Vogt, “Dynamics and Logics of Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, LXI (2017), 1992–2016; for Balcells’ approach to integrating the three levels, see Laia Balcells, Rivalry and Revenge: The Politics of Violence during Civil War (Cambridge, 2017); for more on the idea of disaggregating datasets, see Chong Chen and Kyle Beardsley, “Once and Future Peacemakers: Continuity of Third-Party Involvement in Civil War Peace Processes,” International Peacekeeping, XXVIII (2021), 285–311.

16 

Sambanis, “What Is Civil War?” 829–830.

17 

For more information about the 1878–1960 period of Cypriot history, see Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (Manchester, 2009), esp. 246–271; idem and Irene Pophaides, “Kyrillos II, 1909–16: The First Greek Nationalist and Enosist Archbishop-Ethnarch,” in Varnava and Michalis N. Michael, The Archbishops of Cyprus in the Modern Age: The Changing Role of the Archbishop-Ethnarch, Their Identities and Politics (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013), 148–176; Varnava, “Sophronios III, 1865–1900: The Last of the ‘Old’ and the First of the ‘New’ Archbishop-Ethnarchs?” in ibid., 106–147; idem, Serving the Empire in the Great War: The Cypriot Mule Corps, Imperial Identity and Silenced Memory (Manchester, 2017), 31–57; idem, British Cyprus and the Long Great War, 1914–1925: Empire, Loyalties and Democratic Deficit (London, 2020), 14–60, 155–217; idem, Assassination in British Cyprus in 1934 and the Origins of eoka: Reading the Archives against the Grain (London, 2021), 23–46.

18 

Sant Cassia, “Religion, Politics and Ethnicity in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878),” European Journal of Sociology, XXVII (1986), 3–28; Varnava, “Border Control and Monitoring ‘Undesirable’ Cypriots in the UK and Australia, 1945–1959,” Immigrants & Minorities, XL (2022), 132–176; idem, Serving the Empire in the Great War, 83–106, 118–125, 161–226; idem, British Cyprus and the Long Great War, 61–120; idem, Assassination in British Cyprus, 85–98.

19 

Ibid., 30–31, 33–83, 85–102.

20 

Ibid.

21 

Ibid.; Varnava, “Revisiting the Road to Cypriot Independence,” European Review of History, XXXI (2024), 612–634; David French, Fighting eoka: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–1959 (Oxford, 2015); Varnava, “Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy, 1957–1960,” Cyprus Review, XXII (2010), 79–106; for the brief consociational period, see Christalla Yakinthou, Political Settlements in Divided Societies: Consociationalism and Cyprus (London, 2009).

22 

Makarios Drousiotis (trans. Xenia Andreou), The First Partition: Cyprus 1963–1964 (Nicosia, 2008), 113; Glafkos Clerides, Cyprus: My Deposition (Nicosia, 1989), I, 202–220.

23 

Charles Foley, Legacy of Strife: Cyprus from Rebellion to Civil War (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1964), 166–168; Drousiotis, The First Partition, 113.

24 

Foley, Legacy of Strife, 113–114; Report by Ioannis Pipilis to Dimitrios Papanikolopoulos, 6 Dec. 1963, in Spyros Papageorgiou, Τα Κρίσιμα Ντοκουμέντα του Κυπριακού, 1959–1967 (Athens, 1983), A, 258–261.

25 

Andrew Borowiec, Cyprus: A Troubled Island (Westport, CT, 2000), 56; John Reddaway, Burdened with Cyprus: The British Connection (London, 1986), 56, 146; Gibbons, The Genocide Files, 135–137; Drousiotis, The First Partition, 117.

26 

Ibid.; Demetriou, “‘Struck by the Turks,’” 167–181; Richard Arthur Patrick, Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict, 1963–1971 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1976), 48–66; Daily Express, 27 Dec. 1963, 1–2. The large disparity between Patrick and Gibbons’ figures demonstrates the problem of poor statistics; the official counts are undoubtedly conservative, but it is impossible to know the true death toll. Andreas Avgousti, “The Indigenous Foreigner,” Cyprus Review, XXI (2009), 128.

27 

See also James A. Stegenga, The United Nations Force in Cyprus (Columbus, 1968); Patrick, Political Geography, 48, 66.

28 

Major firefights occurred in Nicosia, Larnaca, Mathiati, Ayios Vasilios, and the Kyrenia Pass. See Patrick, Political Geography, 49–52. A mass grave was exhumed on January 12, 1964, containing the dead villagers, some of whom had been tortured before being executed. Bearing witness were international reporters, British army officers, and officials from the International Red Cross. See ibid., 50; Ali Suat Bilge (ed.), Cyprus: Past, Present, Future (Ankara, 1964), 35–36; Turkish Views on the Question of Cyprus (Ankara, 1964), 14–16.

29 

Bryant, The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (Philadelphia, 2010), 11; Drousiotis suggests that 800 Omorphitan Turkish Cypriots fled to the Turkish sector of Nicosia but does not mention Temblos or Boğaz. See Drousiotis, The First Partition, 118, 133; see also U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary-General on the United Nations Operation in Cyprus, 10 Sept. 1964, S/5950. A Turkish Cypriot woman from Lapithos described the looting: “When we returned to our homes, not even a needle was left … we didn’t find anything—they took the roof, the windows, the doors.” Bryant, The Past in Pieces, 65.

30 

Ibid., 60. The Greek south, at least officially, “remembered to forget” the destruction in order to begin the ethnonational narrative in 1974; the Turkish North has similarly ignored the issue because, as Bryant recognizes, “the property problem had been ‘solved’ after 1974, when Turkish Cypriots settled in Greek Cypriot property.” The phrase “greed and grievance” is derived from the economy-centric approach of Collier and Hoeffler, whose thesis is that civilian involvement in civil war is more often the result of a cost-benefit analysis than a personal investment in the cause. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers, LVI (2004), 563–595. This reductionist approach is reflective of a tendency within the field to simplify complex factors into basic dichotomies. Regarding the supposed “revolt against the republic,” see Patrick, Political Geography, 49.

31 

For photos of destroyed villages and homes and Turkish Cypriots living in tents, see Bilge (ed.), Cyprus: Past, Present, Future, 51; Cyprus Turkish Cultural Association, Cyprus, Why? Why? (Ankara, 1964). The estimated 8,000 Turkish Cypriots who remained outside the enclaves refused to submit to government control and were excluded from government services. See Bryant, The Past in Pieces, 11–13; Patrick, Political Geography, 463–465; U.N. Secretary-General, Report, S/5950, 51–52; for background on the economic blockade, see Turkish Views on the Question of Cyprus, 25–27; see also Oberling, The Road to Bellapais, 100; Drousiotis, The First Partition, 133; Bryant, The Past in Pieces, 108; idem, Displacement in Cyprus: Consequences of Civil and Military Strife, Report 2, Life Stories: Turkish Cypriot Community (Nicosia, 2012), 9, 57.

32 

U.N. Secretary-General, Report, S/5950, 63–64; Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence, 19; Bryant, The Past in Pieces, 11–13; Patrick, Political Geography, 463–465; Panikos Panayi, Migrant City: A New History of London (New Haven, 2020), 19–20, 48–53, 78–79, 87–89, 104–106, 139–140, 163–165, 312–314; see also Serkan Hüssein, Yesterday and Today: Turkish Cypriots of Australia (Taylors Lakes, Australia, 2007).

33 

Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence, 26–29. Major incidents occurred in the city of Nicosia, Ayios Sozomenos (Nicosia District), Ayios Theodoros (Larnaca District), the city of Limassol, Episkopi (Limassol District), Asomatos (a Maronite village in Kyrenia District), and Ktima and Polis (both in the Paphos District). See Patrick, Political Geography, 56. In Limassol, a Greek Cypriot attack on the Turkish Cypriot quarter resulted in the deaths of at least fifteen Turkish Cypriots and one Greek Cypriot. Acting British High Commissioner Sir Cyril Pickard (Clark was sick at the end of 1963) reported 150 casualties. See Drousiotis, The First Partition, 158; Patrick, Political Geography, 49, 62; U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary-General to the Security Council on the UN Operation in Cyprus, 26 Apr. to 8 June 1964, S/5764, 36. See Table 3 for missing persons; the exchange was for 26 Greek Cypriots taken in revenge.

34 

Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence, 51; Costas M. Constantinou, “On the Cypriot States of Exception,” International Political Sociology, II (2008), 145–164; Bryant and Mete Hatay, “Guns and Guitars: Simulating Sovereignty in a State of Siege,” American Ethnologist, XXXVIII (2001), 631–649; Patrick, Political Geography, 51, 62–63.

35 

U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary-General to the Security Council on the UN Operation in Cyprus, 6 Dec. 1966 to 12 June 1967, S/7969, 36; International Committee of the Red Cross, Rule 96. Hostage-Taking, available at https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule96 (accessed October 2, 2024).

36 

For the attacks on Turkish Cypriot villages, see Patrick, Political Geography, 72; Halil Ibrahim Salih, The Impact of Diverse Nationalism on a State (Tuscaloosa, 1978), 44; regarding Turkey claiming its right to “intervention” as a Guarantor Power, see Nasuh Uslu, The Cyprus Question as an Issue of Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish-American Relations, 1959–2003 (New York, 2003), 64.

37 

For the bombing, see cia Memorandum, “Cyprus as of 1500, August 9, 1964”; for the turn in Greek Cypriot policy to directing the enosis movement along economic lines, see Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence, 18–37; Karen A. Mehmet and Ozay Mehmet, “Family in War and Conflict: Using Social Capital for Survival in War Torn Cyprus,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies, XXXV (2004), 295–309.

38 

Esin, Aspects of Turkish Civilisation in Cyprus, 5; Patrick, Political Geography, 451–452; Sambanis, “What Is Civil War?” 822.

39 

For the payments from Ankara, see Patrick, Political Geography, 108; for the continuation of violence, see Bryant, “Displacement in Cyprus,” 9; for continuing systemic violence, see U.N. Secretary-General, Report by the Secretary General on the United Nations Operation in Cyprus, for June 13 to December 8, 1967, 8 Dec. 1967, S/8286. In the “enclave period” of 1964–1967, both types of violence occurred. Constantinou showed that derogation from legal and moral norms became the norm in Cyprus. The politics of double exceptionality in Cyprus has enabled systematic, structural violence against Cypriots living on the margins of the norm. Constantinou, “On the Cypriot States of Exception,” esp. 146–151.

40 

Stephen claims that 26 Turkish Cypriots were massacred by Greek Cypriot militia. Michael Stephen, The Cyprus Question (London, 2001), 35–42; for violence or threats of violence against the unficyp, see U.N. Secretary-General, Special Report by the Secretary General on the Recent Developments in Cyprus, 16 Nov. 1967, S/8248; U.N. Secretary-General, Special Report by the Secretary General on the Recent Developments in Cyprus, 18 Nov. 1967, S/8248; U.N. Secretary-General, Report, S/8286.

41 

The Diary of a Cypriot Turk, 1963–1965 (Nicosia, 1965), 53.

42 

Erel’s story appears in Sevgül Uludağ, “I Don’t Like Humans with Guns, I Don’t Call Those Who Hurt People ‘Human,’” available at https://sevgululudag.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-dont-like-humans-with-guns-i-dont.html (accessed October 23, 2024); see also Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence, 35.

43 

See idem, Cyprus: The Untold Stories: A Reader (Mannheim, 2005); idem, Oysters with the Missing Pearls: Untold Stories about Missing Persons, Mass Graves and Memories from the Past of Cyprus (Nicosia, 2006).

44 

See Peter Loizos, The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village (Oxford, 1975); see also Kyriakos S. Markides, The Rise and Fall of the Cyprus Republic (New Haven, 1977), 31.

45 

For the toppling of Makarios, see Şevki Kıralp and Ahmet Güneyli, “Ousting the Cypriot Ethnarch: President Makarios’ Struggle against the Greek Junta, Cypriot Bishops, and Terrorism,” Religions, XII (2021), 1–19. For the Greek Cypriot missing persons, see Haralambos Athanasopulos, Greece, Turkey and the Aegean Sea: A Case Study in International Law (Jefferson, NC, 2001), 15. Regarding the ongoing violence and the massacre of 126 people, see Jan Asmussen, Cyprus at War: Diplomacy and Conflict during the 1974 Crisis (London, 2008), 349; The Times, 21 Aug. 1974, 1; Daily Express, 21 Aug. 1974, 1; The Times, 3 Sept. 1974, 1, 5; Daily Express, 3 Sept. 1974, 4; The Times, 4 Sept. 1974, 8. See also European Commission of Human Rights, Applications Nos. 9780/74 and 6950/75, Cyprus versus Turkey, Report of the Commission, 10 July 1976; The Sunday Times, 23 Jan. 1977, 1; Alfons Cucao, Report on the Demographic Structure of the Cypriot Communities (Nicosia, 1994); Tony Angastiniotis, Trapped in the Green Line: The Story behind the Documentary Voice of Blood (Nicosia, 2005); “Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus,” available at https://www.cmp-cyprus.org/.

46 

See A. Dirk Moses, “Civil War or Genocide? Britain and the Secession of East Pakistan in 1971,” in Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar (eds.), Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development (New Delhi, 2014), 142–164; Roy Doron, “Marketing Genocide: Biafran Propaganda Strategies during the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–70,” Journal of Genocide Research, XVI (2014), 227–246.

47 

One example is the Greek Cypriot misuse of the photo by Don McCullin that won World Press Photo of the Year in 1964, of a Turkish Cypriot woman mourning her murdered husband in 1964, being used to memorialize Greek Cypriot victims of the 1974 war. For more information on the photograph, see “Career of UK Photojournalist Who Captured Iconic Cyprus Picture on Show in London,” In-Cyprus, February 11, 2019, https://in-cyprus.philenews.com/local/career-of-uk-photojournalist-who-captured-iconic-cyprus-picture-on-show-in-london/; “Don McCullin’s Prize Photo of Cypriot Misused for Propaganda,” The Times, July 29, 2020, https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/don-mccullins-prize-photo-of-cypriot-misused-for-propaganda-gqksb9qj8. See also Jorge Lewinsky, The Camera at War: A History of War Photography from 1848 to the Present Day (New York, 1979).

48 

Michael G. Wessells and Di Bretherton, “Psychological Reconciliation: National and International Perspectives,” Australian Psychologist, XXXV (2000), 100–108; Nergis Canefe, “Refugees or Enemies? The Legacy of Population Displacements in Contemporary Turkish Cypriot Society,” South European Society and Politics, VII (2002), 1.