by Lambros George KaoullasIntroduction
Whether by shelling Kurdish fighters in Syria or downing a Russian fighter jet, Turkey undeniably seems more willing to protect and sustain ISIS rather than confront it. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because Turkey has been conducting politics with the same old field manuals for decades. Proxy warfare to destabilise a region and further strategic ends has not been the brainchild of AKP’s government, but has rather been a staple in Turkish military thinking for decades, starting with the Armenian, Pontian Greek and Assyrian Genocides.
So while the nebulous ISIS became a household name, very few heard of TMT (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı), a paramilitary formation that operated as a Turkish proxy in Cyprus between 1957 and 1964. TMT unified under its banner several other political and paramilitary organisations operating since 1955. Its objective was to create the necessary destabilising conditions that would facilitate a Turkish military invasion in order to artificially partition the island into two ethnically clean zones. To do that, it employed provocations, assassinations, fomentation of inter-communal strife, and large-scale demographic engineering.
I will juxtapose today’s events with examples from Cyprus sixty years ago, focusing on ISIS and the Turkmen militias, which are the ones closest to Turkey.
