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Kill Or Be Killed:

The Greco-Turkish War of 1969

 

By Chris Oakley

 

Part 9

 

 

 

Summary:

In the first eight parts of this series we examined the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the 1969 Greco-Turkish war; the early battles of the war itself; the catastrophic defeats Turkey suffered in its failed attempt to seize control of Greece’s Aegean islands; the ill-fated Turkish bid to mount an overland invasion of Greece in the final days of the war; the Vienna cease- fire negotiations which eventually ended the war; the formation of Turkey’s National Reform Alliance Party as dissatisfaction with the the Demeriel regime in Ankara escalated in the war’s aftermath; the political turmoil that swept Greece in the early months of the postwar era; the United Nations’ efforts to avert a civil war in Greece in early 1971; and the crisis that erupted between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus in the summer of 1974. In this final installment of the series we’ll review the climax of the Cyprus showdown and look at how the September War has shaped modern Greek and Turkish history.

 

******

Every sign in late July and early August of 1974 pointed in the direction of Greece and Turkey going to war over Cyprus. All attempts to bring Athens and Ankara to the negotiating table had ended in abject failure; not even a direct appeal from the Vatican had been successful in persuading the Greek and Turkish governments to holster their respective guns. So what was it that finally got the two sides to pull back from the edge? One factor was Turkey’s National Reform Alliance party, which by then had grown into the country’s third-largest political organization. The Alliance was deeply opposed to the use of force in the Cyprus crisis; memories of the catastrophic losses Turkey had sustained in the September War were still fresh in the minds of party members, and they were alarmed at the possibility that history might repeat itself.

In hopes of influencing the Ankara government to turn back from its collision course with Athens on the Cyprus issue, the Alliance began holding what it called “open air peace forums” in Ankara’s main square at which relatives and friends of troops who’d been killed in the September War read personal statements urging Turkey’s prime minister to accept a negotiated solution to the Cyprus dispute lest the Turkish people should suffer the same kinds of horrors in a Cypriot war they had experienced in the 1969 Greco- Turkish border conflict. Sparsely attended at first, these rallies gradually drew larger and larger crowds until eventually they seemed to form a human blanket covering all of downtown Ankara.

Across the Aegean Sea, a cadre of young Greek leftists was inspired by the Alliance’s example to begin organizing their own anti-war demonstrations in opposition to the Greek government’s plans to militarily confront Turkey over Cyprus. Dubbed “the August 3rd movement” after the day they’d held their first formal meeting, this group defied the wrath of the Athens government to launch a grass-roots campaign whose primary goals were to pressure the Greek establishment into accepting a non-violent resolution to the Cyprus standoff and to reform Greece’s political structure in order to make the country more democratic.

    On Cyprus itself, zealots within both the Greek and Turkish communities on that island watched this turn of events with both disbelief and a certain measure of frustration. To fanatics who advocated either total Turkish or total Greek control of Cyprus these political acts threatened to ruin everything that they were working for. But their voices were being increasingly drowned out by the calls of a younger generation for the continuation of peace in the Aegean. For that matter, many older Greeks and Turks were disturbed by the prospect of a new war between Greece and Turkey scarcely five years after the last one had ended.

    In the days following the August 3rd Movement’s inaugural formal meeting, the anti-war movement continued to gather steam on both sides of the Aegean, and in the process drew the attention of the UN. In the belief that there was nothing left to lose, new UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim invited the leaders of the movement along with the Greek and Turkish heads of state to meet with him in Geneva at a date to be mutually agreed upon by all parties for the purpose of negotiating an end to the Cyprus standoff. This time, Athens and Ankara were ready to listen to Waldheim; on September 5th, 1974 Greek and Turkish diplomats gathered in Geneva to confer with UN mediators on a settlement of the Cyprus dispute.

******

The Geneva conference lasted nearly three weeks, and they were a rocky three weeks indeed. It seemed every other day as if one side or the other-- and sometimes both --were threatening to walk out of the proceedings and go home. But miraculously the negotiations continued, and about ten days into the conference the first vague outlines of a possible settlement emerged. On the final day of the Geneva talks the the Greek and Turkish delegations signed an accord which essentially put the island under U.N. trusteeship and made Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, a so-called “open city” where no military presence of any type would be permitted except in cases of severe national emergency. Today, nearly four decades after the Geneva talks on Cyprus were concluded, the Greco-Turkish relationship remains as contentious as ever. Although thankfully there has been no further threat of war in the Aegean since the Cyprus settlement was signed, the United Nations continues to maintain a peacekeeping presence on the border between Turkey and Greece as an insurance policy against a recurrence of the chain of events which led to the September War and the Cyprus crisis. At least three times since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the U.S. Sixth Fleet has been called to the Aegean to maintain the precarious truce between Ankara and Athens; a 2007 U.N. white paper on the Aegean situation has described it as “a potential geopolitical land mine” for the European Union. Some geopolitical analysts have even suggested the financial crisis currently plaguing Greece may be an indirect result of the political upheavals both she and Turkey have experienced since the September War.

In Turkey the National Reform Alliance continues to be a major force on the political scene in that nation; despite repeated stern challenges to its position, most recently by Islamic fundamentalist movements seeking to institute Sharia law in Turkey, the Alliance has largely succeeded in fending off attempts to undermine its influence in the Turkish political system. On several occasions the party has actually reached out to prominent members of the Muslim community in Turkey as a pre-emptive strike against those who would use the Islamic faith as a justification for disenfranchising Alliance members. By the same token, the party has also established coalitions with influential Turkish Christians as a means of protecting itself from efforts by the more far right elements of Turkey’s Christian community to brand the Alliance as far leftist.

Across the Aegean Sea the August 3rd Movement is in a state of decline after having been one of the most powerful left-wing factions in Greece from the mid-1970s through the late 1990s. Several of the organization’s most revered leaders have been implicated in a bribery scandal, and many younger Greeks consider the Movement’s old-school socialism to be out of touch with the political realities of life in the Occupy era. In Greece’s most recent parliamentary elections all but one of the Movement’s candidates lost their races; some of them were beaten by a landslide.

Modern Greek and Turkish military policy is influenced to a significant degree by the lessons of the September War-- which is hardly surprising given that the current defense ministers of both Greece and Turkey are September War veterans, as are their army and navy chiefs of staff and three of the Turkish air force’s highest- ranking generals. In the two countries’ military academies cadets are frequently quizzed on their knowledge of September War history and trained through exercises based on the war’s most significant based on the war’s most significant battles; in 2004 a Greek naval cruiser was renamed in honor of one of the war’s most distinguished naval commanders.

In the last fifteen years or so the war has been a popular topic for counterfactual history buffs. As might be expected, the greatest number of counterfactual books and articles regarding the war come from Greece and Turkey; one of the most popular novels in contemporary Greek literature during the 1990s was the action thriller No Retreat, printed in 1994 around the time of the 25th anniversary of the war’s outbreak. No Retreat was set in a timeline where the Turkish armed forces succeeded not only in invading the Greek mainland during the September War but also in pushing their way to the very outskirts of Athens; it was a somewhat far-fetched premise given how the actual Turkish attempt to invade mainland Greece turned out, but few readers seemed to notice or care as they followed the exploits of the novel’s heroic protagonists in defending a besieged Athens against the Turkish forces fighting to capture the city.

In Turkey the most memorable counterfactual exploration of the September War to date has been the 1989 action movie 2nd Platoon 1st Battalion. Filmed on nearly a shoestring budget-- the entire cast payroll for the movie barely added up to a fifth of the director’s salary for one day’s shooting on a typical Hollywood blockbuster -- 2nd Battalion was the highest-grossing domestic film and the second highest-grossing film overall in Turkey during the ’89 summer movie season. It also did respectable business in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and received a Best Foreign Language Film nomination from the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Today, at a time when terrorism and nuclear proliferation are America’s two greatest international security concerns, we can ill afford to forget the lessons of the September War. The last time that Greece and Turkey went to war it seriously damaged the NATO alliance; the next time they go to war it may destroy the alliance altogether.

An exception was made for guard units defending government ministries and foreign diplomatic outposts in the Cypriot capital.

Certainly it didn’t bother the Greek film industry all that much; during the late 1990s there was a major bidding war for the movie rights to No Retreat, and when the movie version of the saga finally hit theaters in 2003 it played to packed houses all over Greece. Hollywood seems to be showing an interest in it too; an English-language miniseries based on the novel is currently in production for cable TV with plans to air it
in the summer of 2013.

 

THE END

 

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