For the last half-century, every year, on July 15 we hear and read the same narratives about the Greek Junta-inspired coup against President Makarios, which gave Turkey the pretext to invade Cyprus five days later. Apart from the obligatory outrage, justifiably, expressed by Akel about the right-wing governments honouring the Greek Cypriot commandos who fell in the national guard’s attack on the presidential palace, there is the usual Nato/US-bashing.

Although 52 years have passed since the coup, we have still not been able to look at how the conditions for the coup were created. It was as if it had happened in a vacuum, the Americans allegedly deciding that Makarios must be toppled, because they feared that he would turn Cyprus into a Cuba of the Mediterranean. His misguided cultivating of close ties with the Soviet Union, at the height of the Cold War, gave substance to these fears, which were compounded by Makarios’ close ties with the island’s powerful Soviet-controlled communist party, Akel.

Perhaps it was the CIA that gave the orders to the Greek Junta to stage a coup to overthrow Makarios, perhaps there was a plan for Turkey to use this coup as an excuse to invade and station troops on the island and perhaps the then secretary of state Henry Kissinger was the brains behind this dastardly scheme as the accepted narrative says. This is a convenient narrative as it absolves Makarios for what happened in 1974, presenting him as a noble leader who fell victim to the forces of the evil West.

This theory ignores the context – the Cold War era in which the two superpowers were in a continuous confrontation. Cyprus’ independence was guaranteed by Greece, Turkey and Britain, all of which were Nato members and belonged to the West. Yet Makarios, placed Cyprus in the Non-Aligned Movement, a Soviet creation through which the Kremlin exercised influence and promoted it strategic interests. And as if this was not enough of a provocation in the paranoid world of the Cold War, he also pursued close relations with the Soviet Union, which was more than happy to cause division in Nato’s southeastern flank by encouraging Makarios’ machinations that maintained the Greece-Turkey hostility.

This is the context in which the coup took place. The politically immature Makarios consistently made the wrong choices, which eventually led to the coup and the Turkish invasion. This is not meant as justification for what was done to the island, by the Junta and Turkey, but it is a very brief and incomplete explanation of why there was a coup, which led to the invasion. Fifty years later we have acknowledged these mistakes, indirectly, by seeking membership of Nato and pursuing close ties with the leader of the evil West. But it is too late.