Turkish general admits campaign of provocations in Cyprus

source: Hellenic Antidote
date: 24 September 2010

Turks have always sought to justify the invasion of Cyprus by suggesting it was designed to save the Turkish minority on the island, which they say had been under attack since 1955 – but particularly since 1963 – from Cypriot Greeks hell bent on uniting Cyprus with Greece. Of course, this is typical Turkish falsification; but so unwaveringly have Turks been pushing this line that not only do they believe it, but many Greeks, both in Cyprus and Greece, have also come to accept that our side mistreated the island’s Turks and, as such, that we share the blame for Cyprus’ tragedy and must take punishment for our ‘crimes’ in the form of submitting to Annan-type plans.

The truth of the intercommunal clashes in Cyprus is, of course, not one of Greek persecutors and Turkish victims; but of provocations by Turkey aimed at setting Cyprus’ communities at each other’s throats and promoting Turkey’s goal of ethnic and geographical separation on the island.

And just to prove that the intercommunal violence in Cyprus in 1958, 1963 and 1967 were not attempts by Greek Cypriots to wipe out the Turkish minority and achieve unhindered their dream of Enosis, but provocations by Turkey designed to pave the way for partition, we have had this week retired Turk General Sabri Yirmimbesoglou, who served in Cyprus in the 1950s and 1960s in his country’s Special Warfare Department, admitting to Turkish TV that ‘to stir up the Turkish Cypriots, we carried out sabotage, such as the burning of mosques, and then blamed this on the Greek Cypriots. This was the modus operandi of the Special Warfare Department. In Cyprus, we burned mosques.’

It should be noted that outbreaks of intercommunal violence in Cyprus often started with bombs going off against Turkish ‘targets’, mosques, newspaper offices, etc, which were blamed on Greek Cypriots. Turkish Cypriots would then riot, attack homes and businesses belonging to Greeks, who retaliated. The Greeks, being better armed and more numerous, would often overwhelm Turkish Cypriots, who cried ‘massacre’ and then demanded Turkey’s protection, i.e. Turkey pursued a deliberate policy of exposing Turkish Cypriots to danger so that they could then use their (exaggerated) plight as proof that Cyprus’ communities could not live together, that Turkish Cypriots were being subjected to ‘genocide’ and that Cyprus had to be partitioned.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Yirmimbesoglou cut his teeth in the Turkish security services helping organise the Constantinople pogrom in 1955, which began with Turkish agents bombing Mustafa Kemal’s childhood home in Thessaloniki, blaming this on Greeks, and false claims that Greeks were massacring Turks in Cyprus, and culminated in a two-day orgy of violence and destruction targeting Constantinople’s Greek community, an event Yirmimbesoglou boasts ‘was a Special Warfare [Department] job. It was a magnificent operation. And it achieved its aim.’