Iphestos File: The dark face of Greek Cypriots |
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Prof. Dr. Ata ATUN |
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Very few people have bare idea what it was. Majority of the people had not heard of it yet.
Even most of the Greek Cypriots not heard of it. They innocently think that the Cyprus Problem had started in 1974. The reason I call it innocently is that, they were and still are, deceived by the Greek Ad-ministration or by their good old Politicians and by their ecclesiastics systematically.
The dense Greek propaganda, convinced the world that the problems or the disputes in Cyprus, started by the Turkish intervention in July 1974. Before that the island was so peaceful, that it could be ad-dressed as the paradise on the earth.
But in contrary to this allegations and the false propaganda, Archbishop Makarios II, the first president of the Republic of Cyprus, initially admitted to the press in New York after the coup that there was indeed a plan, before December 1963, to exterminate the whole Turkish Cypriot population overnight in order to remove the impediment to the “Greek national aspirations.”
This was in fact nothing but the Akritas Plan.
It was not some body else but again the “Black Monk” Makarios who had the Akritas Plan prepared, and the underground political and military organization established to support its execution as of December 1963.
Iphestos plans were not ever part of the dispute between Makarios and Ioannides, neither was the “sacred cause” of enosis.
The core of the dispute was about who would do it and be the eternal “Hero” of the Hellenic Nation.
Sampson was installed as the henchman of the Greek junta, Greek and Greek Cypriot armed forces had already started to surround Turkish Cypriot enclaves and villages. Communications had been se-vered, roadblocks set up, martial law and a curfew imposed and the airport sealed off.
The Iphestos Plan had been designed to cut off Turkish Cypriot enclaves and villages from each other, to isolate and besiege them and to deal with each of them individually, but simultaneously. Than erase them from the map and from the registry of the Bureau of vital statistics.
Black Monk Makarios and the Greek military junta, which came to power in 1967, were increasingly locked into a power struggle. This duel turned as of 1973 into a messy feud and a personal fight for survival between the “Black Monk” and Gen. D. Ioannides of the military police, the strong man of the revised junta in Athens.
The origins of the feud ran back to 1963-64 when Ioannides had served as a major in the Greek military contingent in Cyprus, be-friended Nicos Sampson and developed both a plan on how to get rid of the Turkish Cypriots and a hatred for the “treacherous ways of the Black Monk.”
The plan developed by Ioannides and his friend Sampson back in 1963 was, “to attack the Turkish Cypriots suddenly, all over the island, and eliminate them once for all”
The truth about the meeting in 1963 between the Black Monk Makarios and Sampson was somewhat different.
In 1976, that is two years after the coup had taken place and the Greek junta gone, he accused Gen. Ioannides of being “criminal” and alleged that, “he couldn’t even conceive the idea of killing so many innocent people”.
This allegation is of course out of character and not supported at all by the facts, by the way Black Monk Makarios behaved towards the Turkish Cypriot people under the Akritas Plan.
It was Makarios himself who had declared in 1964, in the course of the brutal Greek and Greek Cypriot onslaught against Erenkoy (Kokkina), that, “he would order an attack on every Turkish village, and Turkey would find no Turkish Cypriots left alive if they landed!” .
Quite scared of his tyrant attitudes towards Turkish Cypriots, he knew Turkey would step in one day, to save the lives of their collateral, which he faced with it in 1974…
Ata ATUN
ata.atun@atun.com
http://www.ataatun.com
