Blog • March 14, 2026 • By Anastasia
To oust the British bases from our island, we must first dismantle the Turkish occupation.
Treating the British bases as if they exist independently of the geopolitical structure created by the Turkish occupation is naive at best and manipulative at worst: such mindsets deeply lack a materialist understanding of change. They also evince an inability to comprehend the political ubiquity of fear, the logics of guarantor securitisation and the threat of imperialist retaliation, and how these factors perpetually create the conditions in which the maintenance of the British bases can be legitimised and realised.
A brief history
In 1960, Britain, Greece and Turkey were given guarantor powers following Cyprus’ nominal independence under Treaty of Guarantee, permitting these colonial overlords to take action to maintain the security of the Republic of Cyprus. No provision was made for the removal of the British bases in Akrotiri and Dhekelia: in fact, their retention was a precondition for “independence”. Just four years later, President Archbishop Makarios stated that the 1960 Zurich and London Agreements had “called into question…the future of the British bases”, and reaffirmed his commitment to a Cyprus free from “Greek bases, Turkish bases, British bases, NATO bases”. Yet in 2026, the British bases remain, with siloed anti-bases organising proving insufficient in dismantling the bases, yet inversely quite adept at completely obscuring the material conditions created by the primary contradiction¹ of occupation.
Colonial narratives of securitisation
In the modern era, Britain can easily frame its continued imperialist presence as “stabilising” and “securitising” under guarantor obligations: Turkey’s occupation provides permanent instability, which makes a “security justification” politically usable. It is also important to note that colonial discourse has always portrayed colonised populations as uncivilised, emphasising their inability to self-govern. This is no different in the case of Cyprus, where the reality of an island under occupation is frequently distorted into a narrative of “civil war”, “intercommunal conflict” and “division”, in order to obfuscate the centrality of imperialism in dictating historical events, and legitimise continued foreign supervision under the guise of inherent native incivility.
Ofcourse, Cypriots across the political spectrum have always been against the existence of the British bases. Nobody is under any disillusion that the bases bring “stability” or “security”: the bases have repeatedly been recognised by Cypriots as a symbol of incomplete decolonisation and as a fragmentation of Cypriot territorial sovereignty. It is worthwhile noting that even the most pro-Western Cypriot president, Nikos Christodoulidis, makes Cyprus’ position on the bases clear: that they are a colonial remnant, and that they do not belong to the UK.
In July 2005, Cyprus’ House Of Representatives unanimously adopted a resolution spearheaded by Giorgos Perdikis, leader of the Movement Of Ecologists (MOE) (Cyprus’ Green Party), which rejected British sovereignty over the base areas and any use of the bases for “offensive purposes” that could violate sovereignty, territorial integrity and international peace.
In March 2005, Perdikis had called for a nationwide referendum on the British bases. Perdikis believed that the majority of Cypriots would vote in favour of the bases’ closure, but noted little to no resolve from the Government or other political parties. He has also noted the health risks posed by military antennas to Cypriots living in villages surrounding the Akrotiri base area.
Fear of imperialist retaliation
Despite this widely-held sentiment against the bases, governments since Makarios have not been willing to take action or pursue a proactive strategy against them, or against British imperialism more broadly, as is also noted by Perdikis above. We can trace this reluctance to a fear of imperialist retaliation.
Simply put, many believe the Turkish occupation was orchestrated to punish the Cypriot people for Makarios’ anti-imperialist and anti-NATO policies. Under Archbishop Makarios, Cyprus was one of the founding members of the Non Aligned Movement, cultivating strong bonds and solidarity with Palestine, Cuba and other oppressed Global South anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles. These solidarity networks materially threatened imperialist interests, especially given Cyprus’ strategic location, and as Daniele Nunziata notes, NATO sought to encourage the imposition of a “pro-Western, Eurocentric agenda onto Cypriots with which to destabilise political networks of resistance between decolonising Afro-Asian nations”.
Only the occupation can explain how this explicit anti-imperialist stance of a Cypriot President was replaced by a lack of any serious sustained opposition to the bases within contemporary Cypriot political leadership. Successive Cypriot Governments since Makarios were and are unwilling to take action out of fear that Anglo-American imperialism might retaliate and punish Cyprus again, for instance through a further Turkish invasion – this could easily be justified under the logic of guarantor securitisation, as it was in 1974.
It is through the lens of occupation that we must also view Cyprus’ diplomatic, military and intelligence-sharing relationship with the Zionist entity in recent years: as a semi-colonised state operating under serious geopolitical constraints, it has succumbed to a certain political orientation in pursuit of “survival”. The permanent instability created by the ongoing Turkish occupation creates an environment of fear and a demand for security, wherein local political elites sell-out, pursuing a strategy of alignment with the Zionist settler colony. It is occupation that creates the conditions in which the British bases, and Cyprus’ diplomatic relationships with the Zionist colony, are even possible.
Occupation as perpetual securitisation
If we study history, we will know this fear of imperialist retaliation to be entirely predictable and inevitable. The imperialist powers knew that the Turkish occupation would benefit them: that it would transform the Cypriot anti-imperialist alignment under Makarios into what we have today. As Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig state in The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion (2001), the invasion “was a conspiracy by America, as Britain stood by, to divide the island [due to] the island’s strategic value as a military and intelligence base…The maintenance of the military facilities on Cyprus was deemed of paramount importance by the British and American governments…and they thought this would more easily be achieved in a divided Cyprus”. In other words, the Turkish occupation was specifically engineered by NATO powers in order to secure the continued presence of the British bases in perpetuity.
Bicommunality legitimises empire
Throughout this piece, I have argued that the continued existence of the British bases in Cyprus cannot be extricated from the material conditions created by a 50+ year occupation. It is however, also important to note that the notion of bicommunality will do nothing to aid in the liberation of the region.
It is important to emphasise that the local momentum we saw against the British bases in 2005 was the product of Cypriotist and anti-separatist organising against the Annan Plan. The Annan Plan, though lauded as progressive, was in fact an imperialist concoction that would have legitimised the partition of Cyprus under separatist ethnicisation (more on that to come!). Famously, the Plan also did not resolve the issue of the British bases on the island, in fact, it also included a granting of rights to the UK to unilaterally define the continental shelf and territorial waters around the two base areas, and provisions allowing the UK to claim potential mineral rights. NATO powers repeatedly push such bicommunal proposals precisely because they do not challenge British imperial control in any meaningful way. The UK would never accept a solution that removes its ability to use Cypriot land to project imperialist power over the region: in other words, any plan based on ethnic separatism will serve as a guarantee for the continued existence of the bases. As British colonial governor Richmond Palmer wrote in 1936, “in order to have ease in the future on the island, we have to continue the administration on the basis of districts…the concept of Cypriot nationalism should be pushed away as much as possible and left in the dark”.
Conclusion: liberation demands strategy
The liberation of Palestine and the entire region demands rigorous strategy, and we must be clear to not conflate symptoms with primary contradictions, or to obfuscate primary contradictions by acting like symptoms exist independently of them. Turkish nationalists benefit from treating the bases as entirely separate to and independent of the Turkish occupation, as they are able to present themselves as being in favour of Palestinian liberation without reckoning with the geopolitical reality that keeps Cyprus as a NATO base aiding in the destruction of Palestine. Only Cypriotism can address the primary contradiction of Turkish occupation in Cyprus. And only through addressing the primary contradiction can Cyprus’ secondary contradiction – British imperialist military installations – be dismantled.
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¹ When we say that the Turkish occupation is the primary contradiction, we mean to say that it is materially and numerically the biggest affront to Cypriot territorial integrity. Turkey has claimed almost 40% of our island, whereas the British retain 3%.
