Ousting of Makarios was defining moment

As the sun began to blaze just before eight in the morning 25 years ago today, Greek army troops in armoured cars swept up the curving tree-lined drive to the presidential palace. Loyal policemen and bodyguards opened fire, stalling the coup leaders at the top of the rise.

The President, Archbishop Makarios, was entertaining a group of Greek schoolchildren from Egypt. He hurried them out of his office into the palace garden, fled down the back of the hill and escaped in a passing taxi. British forces based on the west coast helicoptered him off the island to safety.

Before dawn on July 20th, mainland Turkish troops invaded, eventually occupying the northern 37 per cent of Cyprus, expelling 125,000 Greek Cypriots to the south and compelling 40,000 Turkish Cypriots to move north. Makarios returned in December to a divided country, its two communities separated by a ceasefire line buffered by a UN force.

The coup mounted by the faltering military junta in Athens, with the blessing of the US, was the defining event during the past quarter-century for an island with 12,000 years of history. Tonight a docu-drama depicting the coup is to be shown on Greek Cypriot television: it will remind Greek Cypriots, who tend to lay all the blame for the division of the island on Ankara, that Athens provided the pretext for the Turkish invasion.

Makarios had expected the coup. A few months before it happened, my husband and I sat in his office while the charming prelate with hooded eyes described how a Greek ship-owner was channelling funds to right-wing Greek Cypriot militants who sought to overthrow the independent republic and proclaim enosis, union with Greece.

He told everyone who would listen, hoping to alert the world. But no one took his warning seriously. Hence the terrible, tragic events of July and August 1974, the painful division of Cyprus.

In 1975 the Turkish Cypriot leader, Mr Rauf Denktash, proclaimed a "Turkish Federated State" in the north, in 1983 an independent "Turkish Republic of North Cyprus", recognised only by Ankara. But de facto partition did not prevent the UN from trying to reunite the island in a federation or discourage members of the two communities from meeting.

In 1997, as hopes for a settlement rose, there was a flowering of bicommunal gatherings of lawyers, artists, journalists, trade unionists and school children. Several thousand Cypriots from both communities attended a rock concert in the moat below the 16th-century Venetian walls of the Old City of Nicosia. More Turkish Cypriot "beneficiaries" of partition attended than Greek Cypriot "victims". The truth is that both are victims.

In August 1997 Mr Denktash walked out of the UN-brokered talks. In December he banned Turkish Cypriots from contacts with their compatriots across the Green Line. Today a few determined souls try to maintain tenuous connections by meeting abroad, in Belfast, Brussels and Berlin. At the end of this month, Greek and Turkish Cypriot writers, artists, film-makers and musicians are to meet at Gotland to take part in workshops promoting cultural co-operation.

Protests against partition are permitted only in the Greek Cypriot south. Women Walk Home began with a mass march in 1975. The movement staged three more crossings of the dividing line in the 1980s. But no one got home.

Others took up seasonal marching. Refugees from the Morphou area march into flowering fields in the buffer zone in spring where they are, routinely, stopped from crossing the line by UN peacekeepers. Refugees from the Famagusta district march to the UN post at Dherynia on the mid-August anniversary of their expulsion. There they can see the derelict modern town of Varosha shimmering in heat haze on the shore of the azure Mediterranean.

In 1996 one Greek Cypriot was beaten to death by club-wielding Turkish Cypriot policemen and ultra-right Turkish Grey Wolves and another shot and killed during two days of demonstrations at Dherynia. There has been no serious violence since.

Neither violence nor progress in the stalled peace process is expected at this season of sad anniversaries. Cyprus swelters at 40s0]C, its people shelter inside their homes, shutters closed, awaiting the mirage of yet another new UN initiative to evaporate with the first cool autumn breeze.

Turkey said yesterday it would reject any attempt to link its candidacy for EU membership to progress on the Cyprus issue. Turkey was left out of the EU's eastward expansion two years ago partly due to Cyprus.