The European Parliament’s decision focusing on the socio-psychological effects of the 1974 Cyprus Operation on Cypriot women and girls is a text detached from historical reality, one-sided, and constructed through political motives. The inclusion in the decision of allegations of sexual violence and human rights violations directed at members of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) is devoid of objective and legal grounds and constitutes baseless accusations targeting the international legitimacy of the TAF. Through this decision, the EP ignores the systematic attacks and massacre actions to which the Turkish Cypriot community was subjected before 1974, and problematizes the Cyprus Issue asymmetrically through the Turks.
The fact that the decision was adopted after NATO’s Ankara Summit is noteworthy, especially because it coincides with a period in which Türkiye’s strategic role, its contributions to regional stability, and its obligations within the alliance were discussed in the context of European security. This timing points to a diplomatic pressure and containment strategy directed at Türkiye by European institutions and regional actors. The timing and content of the decision function as an element of leverage against Ankara at a conjuncture in which Türkiye’s regional influence is increasing. Particularly within the framework of the multi-actor geopolitical competition in the Eastern Mediterranean, the struggle over energy resources, and regional balances of power, this approach constitutes part of broader strategic calculations aimed at limiting Türkiye’s international position. Therefore, the decision in question by the European Parliament is rejected by Türkiye and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) on the grounds that it lacks a basis in international law and human rights law and ignores the historical entirety of the issue.
When the historical background of the Cyprus Issue is examined, it can be seen that the ENOSIS policy, adopted as a structural objective by Greece and the Greek Cypriot political and religious elites, lies at its foundation. In other words, this pan-Hellenist vision, which aimed to unilaterally determine the geopolitical future of the island, formed the basic cost of the radical political and sociological separation of the two communities. One of the most concrete breaking points of this process was the plebiscite held in the early 1950s under the auspices of the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church.[i] In this so-called referendum, which completely ignored the will of the Turkish population on the island and had no legitimacy under international law, it was announced that the overwhelming majority of the Greek Cypriot community had voted in favor of ENOSIS.
However, for the Turkish Cypriot community, this development represented not merely an administrative change but a direct threat to its existential security, political status, and physical survival. Indeed, the scenario in which ENOSIS would be realized rightly gave rise to the concern that Turkish Cypriots would completely lose their status as a founding partner of the island, that the principle of political equality would disappear, and that the Turkish community would be reduced to minority status and eliminated in its own homeland. In the face of this threat perception, the Turkish community also developed a defensive reflex and began to defend the “Taksim” thesis, which envisaged the partition of the island. Thus, polarization on the island turned into a two-sided geopolitical struggle.
Indeed, the EOKA organization, founded in 1955, was organized with the aim of realizing the goal of ENOSIS through armed actions. Although the organization’s initial target was the British colonial administration, over time this strategy turned into a process of violence directed against the Turkish Cypriot community, which was seen as anti-ENOSIS. As a result of bomb attacks, sabotage, and assassinations carried out within the scope of the organization’s activities between 1955 and 1959, hundreds of people lost their lives. Especially during the conflicts that escalated in 1957 and 1958, Turkish Cypriot civilians were directly targeted; serious casualties occurred in some settlements, and forced migrations/displacements took place due to security concerns. These violent incidents throughout the period reinforced the existential security perception within the Turkish Cypriot community and deepened mutual distrust between the two communities.
During this process, intensive diplomatic negotiations were conducted with the participation of the guarantor states in order to end the escalating conflicts on the island and determine a permanent status. As a result of these negotiations and the compromise reached, the Republic of Cyprus, established in 1960, was built upon a consociational constitutional order based on the political partnership of the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities. Within the framework of this sui generis model, executive power was shared between a Greek Cypriot President and a Turkish Vice President, who had absolute veto authority on vital matters such as foreign policy, defense, and security. While a 70 percent Greek Cypriot and 30 percent Turkish Cypriot balance was observed in state offices, parliament, and bureaucracy, independent of population ratio, this ratio was determined as 60 to 40 in the armed forces. In addition, for critical laws such as taxation, the separate absolute majority of the deputies of both communities in parliament was required.
Türkiye, Greece, and the United Kingdom, under the Treaty of Guarantee that was signed, were designated as guarantor states responsible for the protection of the island’s constitutional order and security through a system that strictly prohibited the island’s union with another state, ENOSIS, or its partition, Taksim.[ii] However, this partnership model, established to end the conflicts, soon faced serious political crises due to the legacy of distrust from the past and the sensitive structural balances that led to deadlock in decision-making. The debates that began in 1963 following then-President Makarios’s constitutional amendment proposals, which aimed precisely to restrict these veto and separate majority rights, completely disrupted the fragile balances on the island and once again turned into intercommunal conflict. While the Turkish side argued that the proposed changes would eliminate the bicommunal partnership structure and its own rights, the Greek Cypriot side argued that state functioning needed to be facilitated on the grounds of these deadlocks.
This political deadlock and escalating tension quickly turned into an armed conflict on the ground, and the events that began on 21 December 1963, known in Turkish Cypriot history as “Bloody Christmas,” became one of the most tragic turning points of the security crisis on the island. Turkish Cypriot neighborhoods and villages were subjected to these organized attacks carried out by Greek Cypriot gangs under the umbrella of the EOKA organization, and during this process, in which 364 Turkish Cypriots lost their lives, hundreds of people disappeared and thousands of Turkish Cypriots were forced to leave the regions where they lived for security reasons in the face of an existential threat. In particular, the attack that took place on the night of 24 December 1963 in the Kumsal district of Nicosia was engraved in memory as one of the most symbolic and painful events of this period. The brutal murder of Mürüvvet, the wife of Medical Major Nihat İlhan, who was serving in the Turkish Cypriot Forces Regiment at the time, and his children Murat, Hakan, and Kutsi, who were shot in the bathtub by Greeks who entered the house, became the symbol of this entire conflict process and the tragedy experienced.
While the direct targeting of defenseless civilians, especially women and children, created a deep trauma in the collective memory of the Turkish Cypriot community, the single-story house where the massacre took place was later turned into the Museum of Barbarism in order to ensure that what happened would not be forgotten.[iii] Similarly, the discovery of Turkish-origin civilians in mass graves after the massacre in the Ayvasıl region also revealed the extent reached by intercommunal violence and attempts at ethnic cleansing.
As a direct result of the bloody attacks and mass migration movements on the ground, in the post-1963 period the Turkish Cypriot community faced not only physical threats but also systematic political and economic isolation. The complete exclusion of Turkish Cypriot representatives from the state structure and institutions of the Republic of Cyprus through the violation of their constitutional rights, the forced confinement of the Turkish community into narrow ghettos and security zones corresponding to only 3 percent of the island,[iv] and the severe embargoes experienced in access to basic necessities clearly showed that the 1960 partnership state had effectively collapsed and had been usurped by the Greek Cypriot administration. The decision of the United Nations Security Council in March 1964 to deploy a Peacekeeping Force to the island after this humanitarian tragedy and security crisis reached an international dimension also showed that the status had become unsustainable in a unilateral form.
Despite the presence of the UN Peacekeeping Force on the island and diplomatic initiatives, the Greek Cypriot side’s pursuit of realizing the ENOSIS ideal by force of arms could not be stopped, and the Geçitkale and Boğaziçi incidents of 1967 clearly demonstrated that the existential security problem of the Turkish Cypriot community and the threats it faced had not ended. In these heavy sieges and attacks, in which Turkish villages were directly targeted by the Greek Cypriot National Guard and EOKA elements under the command of General Grivas, many Turkish Cypriots were brutally massacred and dozens of civilians were wounded.[v] In the face of this massacre, which escalated through the execution of defenseless villagers and captured wounded people, Türkiye reacted very harshly to these developments with the authority granted to it by the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee and with its determination for military intervention. By announcing that it would launch a full-scale landing operation on the island and issuing a definitive ultimatum to the Greek-Greek Cypriot duo, Türkiye brought the necessity of protecting the security of the Turkish Cypriot community to the international agenda at the highest level and in an irreversible manner.
Although Türkiye’s determined stance in 1967 ensured a temporary ceasefire on the island, by the 1970s the terrorist activities of EOKA-B and the renewed strengthening of the goal of annexing the island to Greece within the radical wing of the Greek Cypriot leadership irreversibly increased instability on the island. As a result of this escalation, on 15 July 1974, the Makarios administration was overthrown through a military coup directly supported by the Greek military junta and led by Nikos Sampson, one of the leaders of EOKA-B; this aggressive process aimed at realizing ENOSIS through bloodshed created an all-out threat of annihilation against the existence of the Turkish Cypriot community, which had been struggling to survive in ghettos for twelve years. In the face of this acute risk that emerged on the island and the exhaustion of diplomatic channels, Türkiye launched the Cyprus Peace Operation on 20 July 1974 on the grounds that the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee had been clearly violated. With the peace operation, Türkiye’s official and legal objective was not to take control of the entire island, but rather to restore the constitutional order destroyed by the coup and to permanently guarantee the life and property security of the Turkish community.
Indeed, one of the gravest tragedies confirming that the operation was a military and humanitarian necessity was the mass massacres carried out in the villages of Muratağa, Sandallar, and Atlılar during this process. The brutal massacre of 126 defenseless Turkish Cypriot civilians, ranging from infants in cradles to 95-year-old elderly people, by EOKA-B militants and armed Greek Cypriot elements revealed the most ruthless extent reached by escalating ethnic violence.[vi] The mass graves uncovered after the operation, witnessed also by the international press, clearly show why this brutality turned into an indelible and deep trauma in the collective memory of the Turkish Cypriot community. These mass civilian massacres, which are considered among the gravest war crimes in terms of the law of war and international humanitarian law, became the most painful historical document proving to the world that the Turkish presence on the island could survive only under geographical and physical security.
When all these historical realities and institutional tragedies that trampled international law, such as Muratağa, Sandallar, and Atlılar, are taken into account, the philosophical basis of the fundamental and structural critique directed at the European Parliament’s Cyprus decisions becomes clearly apparent. The EP’s chronological approach, which confines the issue almost entirely to the post-1974 period, virtually ignores the systematic attacks, mass massacres, disappearances, and forced displacements into narrow ghettos to which the Turkish Cypriot community was subjected between 1955 and 1974. Yet the principles of universal human rights and international law, by their very nature, require that all victimizations be assessed according to the same objective criteria, independent of time and ethnic identity. In this context, the European Parliament’s stance, far from such balance, is nothing other than an openly political partiality with a selective and misleading historical narrative that conceals the root causes of the conflict.
The European Union defines itself globally as the absolute defender of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. However, the Cyprus example clearly shows how geopolitical and political factors become decisive in the application of these normative principles. The admission of the Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus as a full member of the EU in 2004, despite the absence of a comprehensive political settlement on the island and despite its rejection of the Annan Plan, in violation of the EU’s own accession criteria, fundamentally damaged the neutrality and structural legitimacy of the institution. The attitude displayed by EU institutions during this process was not that of an objective mediation, but rather a biased approach completely attached to the unlawful political theses of the Greek Cypriot side.
This bias displayed by the EU and the European Parliament, when combined with their selective moral stance in global crises, turns into complete institutional inconsistency and double standards. Today, the EU bureaucracy, which cannot even dare to define Israel’s mass massacres and open acts of genocide in Palestine, especially in Gaza and across the Middle East, as “genocide” or “war crimes” within the framework of legal norms, and which refrains from suspending trade and strategic partnership agreements with Israel or applying concrete embargoes, can rapidly produce condemnation and sanction decisions when the issue concerns Türkiye and the Turkish soldier who established peace on the island. Behind this deep inaction and silence lies the direct influence and weight of the Zionist lobby, which has taken root in European capitals and Union institutions, over decision-making mechanisms. The fact that European countries act under the control and pressure of this lobby, which makes itself felt through financial, political, and institutional networks, results in the continent completely suspending the universal legal norms it has itself constructed when Israel is concerned.
Indeed, this institutional incapacity and insincerity have been registered as a much more striking geopolitical contradiction, especially after NATO’s Ankara Summit. It is complete irony that European allies, who struggle to produce concrete decisions on vital issues concerning the security, defense architecture, and strategic future of the continent and whose security and defense policies become completely deadlocked in the face of crises, announced this unjust decision against Türkiye and the Turkish soldier, which alone bears the southeastern flank of Europe and the alliance, immediately after the Ankara Summit where these strategic weaknesses were discussed. This institutional paralysis, which turns a blind eye to the massacre of thousands of civilians, and these moves incompatible with the spirit of alliance, clearly expose the deep insincerity, selective memory, and geopolitical partisanship behind the EU and EP’s claim to defend universal values.
[i] Kıralp, Şefki,” Kıbrıs Cumhuriyeti’nde Etnik Uyuşmazlık ve Türkiye’nin Kıbrıs Politikası: Anayasa Krizi, Şiddet ve Uluslararası Siyaset (1960-1963)”, Cumhuriyet Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi, Year 19, Issue 37, 2023, p. 634.
[ii] Baytal, Yaşar,” Kıbrıs Cumhuriyeti’nin Kuruluşu, Türklerin Ada’daki Durumu ve Rum Tedhiş Faaliyetlerinin Sonuçları”, Avrasya Uluslararası Araştırmalar Dergisi, 11 (35), 2023, p. 954.
[iii] Kuzey Kıbrıs Türk Cumhuriyet Enformasyon Dairesi Dışişleri Bakanlığı, “Rum çetesi, Tabip Binbaşı Nihat İlhan’ın Kıbrıs’ta eşi ve 3 çocuğunu katletmişti!”, https://pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr/rum-cetesi-tabip-binbasi-nihat-ilhanin-kibrista-esi-ve-3-cocugunu-katletmisti/, (Date Accessed: 12.07.2026).
[iv] T.C. Dışişleri Bakanlığı,” Kıbrıs Meselesinin Tarihçesi, BM Müzakerelerinin Başlangıcı”, https://www.mfa.gov.tr/kibris-meselesinin-tarihcesi_-bm-muzakerelerinin-baslangici.tr.mfa, (Date Accessed: 12.07.2026).
[v] Eme, Akın Faruk,” 1958-1974 Yılları Arasında Kıbrıs’ta Yerel Basında Rum Mezalim”, Adnan Menderes Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Tarih Anabilim Dalı Yüksek Lisans Tezi, 2014, p. 19.
[vi] Habertürk,” Katliam çukuru’ tesadüfen bulundu”, https://www.trthaber.com/haber/dunya/katliam-cukuru-tesadufen-bulundu-637101.html, (Date Accessed: 12.07.2026).
