Glafcos Clerides
(Γλαύκος Κληρίδης)

Glafcos Clerides, the former President of Cyprus, who has died aged 94, was earmarked from the earliest days of independence as the natural successor to Archbishop Makarios, first President of the new Republic; however, he only succeeded to office in 1993, at his fourth attempt.

Cyprus was still under British rule when Clerides first became involved in politics. During the 1955-59 uprising he served with the guerrilla group Eoka under the nom de guerre “Yperides”. Although he claimed never to have been directly involved in any violence, as a lawyer he defended numerous Eoka fighters arrested by the British.

As a member of Eoka, Clerides had been committed to its rallying cry of “Enosis” — union with Greece. But after Cyprus achieved independence in 1960, he was said to have stood aloof from the intrigues which weakened the new government; nevertheless, as Makarios’s closest adviser, he bore some responsibility for the constitutional violations by the Greek Cypriot majority against the Turkish Cypriot minority that provoked the outbreak of inter-communal violence in 1963.

During the years of unrest that culminated in the partition of the island following the Turkish invasion of the northern part of Cyprus in 1974, Clerides acted as Makarios’s chief negotiator in the inter-communal talks with the Turkish Cypriots. He won the trust and respect of Turks for his humanity and common sense — though both he and Rauf Denktash, his opposite number on the Turkish Cypriot side, were prevented from achieving anything of any substance by Makarios’s byzantine machinations.

After Makarios’s death in 1977, Clerides’s realism and his pro-American sympathies counted against him and denied him the presidency for many more years. Memories of the Turkish invasion meant that few Greek Cypriots were minded to heed calls for compromise.

Clerides’s election in 1993 was welcomed by the international community as a hopeful sign that a settlement might be reached on the island’s future. But despite the prospect of eventual EU membership, not even he could overcome decades of hatred and suspicion. A final settlement of the island’s constitutional future remains elusive.

Glafcos Yiannis Clerides was born in a mountain village near Nicosia, Cyprus, on April 24 1919, the eldest son of a distinguished lawyer, Yiannis Clerides, QC. His father, a political moderate, became Attorney General with the Governor’s executive council under the British and would stand unsuccessfully as a moderate presidential candidate in the 1959 presidential elections, against his son’s mentor, Archbishop Makarios.

Glafcos studied at Nicosia’s leading Greek college, the Pancyprian Gymnasium, but was suspended for writing to a newspaper in defence of demotic Greek and against the “mandarin” variety he had been taught. He asked his father to let him study in England.
After studying Law at King’s College, London, he trained as a barrister at Gray’s Inn. There he became friends with the young Rauf Denktash, who was studying at Lincoln’s Inn. The two men remained friends, despite their political differences. Following the Turkish invasion of the northern part of Cyprus in 1974, there were widespread rumours that Clerides had helped Denktash’s family escape from the Greek sector to the Turkish-occupied part of the island.

Clerides’s studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war and he volunteered for the RAF, one of 30,000 Cypriots who joined the British armed forces. He became a bomber pilot, but in 1942 had to bail out when his Wellington was shot down over Germany. He broke a leg in the parachute drop; in prison he hacked the plaster off with a pair of stolen shears and escaped by cutting through two barbed wire fences.

Recaptured a week later, he tried again within the year, breaking out of Stalag 5B and heading for Yugoslavia. But he was again picked up. A third escape in 1944 was successful. He broke away from a column of prisoners on a forced march ahead of the Allied advance, found an American tank and climbed aboard. He was mentioned in despatches.

Clerides was called to the Bar in 1951, subsequently joining his father’s chambers in Nicosia. In the 1955-56 uprising he defended political prisoners in court and found himself acting as courier between Eoka and its jailed members, once helping to arrange the escape of Polycarpos Georgadjis, who would become interior minister of the new republic before being assassinated.

He participated in the 1959 London Conference on Cyprus, and during the transitional period from colonial administration to independence (1959-60) served as Minister of Justice. During the same period he was head of the Greek Cypriot delegation in the Joint Constitutional Committee which agreed a democratic power-sharing constitution for the new republic.

In July 1960 Clerides was elected to the House of Representatives, becoming its first president, a position he held until July 1976. He liked to recall how, out canvassing during the election, he had been approached in a local taverna by a large, belligerent man who challenged him to drink zivernia, the local firewater. Since he had been brought up on the stuff, Clerides cheerfully accepted and left the challenger under the table. It was this feat, he claimed, that earned him a handsome majority.

As Makarios’s right-hand man, Clerides often stepped in as acting President during Makarios’s absences from Cyprus. But it was clear from the early days of the new republic that Makarios and the Greek Cypriot majority in the House of Representatives had no intention of implementing constitutional provisions which did not suit them, and intended to replace the bi-communal republic which gave a veto to the Turkish minority with a unitary state in which their voting power would be paramount.

As violence broke out between the two sides, Clerides led the Greek Cypriot delegation at the 1964 London Conference called to find a way out of the crisis. But Makarios continued to press for Enosis and brought back the former Eoka terrorist leader, the notorious General Grivas, to command the National Guard.

In 1967, after a massacre of 27 Turks at Kophinou, the Turkish government threatened to invade unless Greek irregular forces were withdrawn from Turkish areas and Grivas exiled. Under American pressure, the invasion was called off; but the crisis apparently convinced Makarios and Clerides that further attempts to grab Enosis would almost certainly provoke a Turkish invasion. Instead they sought to negotiate on the basis of an independent Cyprus, distancing themselves from the ruling junta in mainland Greece.
Makarios appointed Clerides representative of the Greek Cypriot side to the inter-communal talks that began in 1968. On several occasions over the next six years Clerides seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough, only to find his position had been undermined by the Archbishop and by unofficial advisers such as the hawkish Dr Lyssarides, Makarios’s personal physician.
On July 23 1974, following the short-lived coup orchestrated by the junta which gave the Turks the pretext for an invasion, Clerides temporarily assumed the duties of the President pending Makarios’s return.

But he found himself in an almost impossible position. While the 40,000-strong Turkish army steadily increased its hold to include the booming tourist resort of Famagusta and the rich citrus-growing region of Morphou, causing 200,000 Greek Cypriots to flee their homes, he had to try to maintain order between rival Greek militias while avoiding further provocation of the Turks.

Though he refused to negotiate under duress, Clerides sought to delay Makarios’s return to Cyprus, fearing that it might provoke the Turks to further military action. He thus found himself attacked from all sides for passivity in the face of the Turkish advance: from Right-wing supporters of Eoka B still committed to Enosis, and Left-wingers campaigning for the return of Makarios.

Moreover, he found himself increasingly at odds with the new democratic leadership in Athens. Clerides believed that American pressure would be the key to persuading the Turkish army to withdraw, and that it would therefore be advisable to remain on good terms. However, the invasion and the toppling of the military junta on the mainland unleashed a tide of anti-American hysteria during which the new Greek government announced its withdrawal from Nato. When the American ambassador to Cyprus was murdered in August during violent rioting, Clerides personally donned a gas mask to get through tear gas to the embassy and help carry out the ambassador’s body. It was a gesture that was personal as well as symbolic.

When Makarios returned to Cyprus in December, he pointedly omitted to pay tribute to Clerides during his first public address; but he again appointed him chief negotiator for the Greek Cypriot side during peace talks convened by the UN.

Makarios continued to make Clerides’s task difficult, with belligerent talk of a long struggle to oust the Turks from Cyprus, and in January 1976 Clerides resigned from the talks.

He founded a new Right of centre party, the Democratic Rally Party, to fight the parliamentary elections the same year, but the party won no seats; and when Makarios died in 1977 Clerides was out of office. It was the centrist Spyros Kyprianou who stepped in as acting President.

As the most Right-wing grouping, the Democratic Rally Party attracted support from members of Eoka B. Clerides found himself unwillingly portrayed as sympathetic to the hated junta, an impression confirmed in Greek eyes by his avowedly pro-Western stance. Though the party fared better in the 1981, 1985 and 1991 Parliamentary elections, Clerides failed to achieve his ambition of becoming President.

The Right-wing tag was exploited for all it was worth by his opponents. On the eve of the 1988 presidential elections (won by the Socialist millionaire George Vassiliou), forged documents were published in a Greek newspaper purporting to show that Clerides had been recruited as a Nazi agent in Hamburg during the war.

He was finally successful in February 1993, winning a slender majority over Vassiliou. In his acceptance speech, Clerides pledged to be a leader of all Cypriots irrespective of their class or political persuasion. In 1998, despite his earlier intention to retire after one term as President, he won a second five-year term.

Over the next five years Clerides was credited with getting Cyprus ready for its accession to the European Union, which took place in 2004, but he lost much of his popularity over the strong backing he gave to a UN peace plan, promoted by the UN’s Secretary General Kofi Annan, that would have made Cyprus a federation of two states with a loose central government. In a referendum held in April 2004, 65 per cent of the Turkish Cypriot community voted in favour, but the Greek community rejected it by more than 75 per cent. Clerides was defeated in the 2003 elections by Tassos Papadopoulos.

Clerides was no demagogue, and was always far more comfortable talking to small groups than addressing mass rallies. Yet from the early 1960s onwards he was the only Cypriot politician who was capable of winning the respect and trust of both sides.

He married, in 1946, Lilla Erulkar, who died in 2007. Their daughter survives him.

Glafcos Clerides, born April 24 1919, died November 15 2013