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(Youth Lead the Struggle: From the Mediterranean to the World) Contribution of the Union of Cypriots at the International Youth Symposium
10.01.2026 – Whenever imperial power declares itself order, youth are the first to refuse it. When dissent is criminalised, futures are stolen, and obedience is enforced as stability, neutrality becomes a lie. Young people meet empire face to face through repression, surveillance, militarised streets, and economic exclusion. This is why, throughout history, youth are forced to the frontlines of resistance, not as a choice but as a condition imposed by empire, where resistance becomes the only way to exist with dignity.
The Mediterranean, at the junction of West Asia and North Africa, has been one of the central theatres of imperial confrontation. Because of its strategic position, it was turned into a militarised corridor of foreign bases, proxy wars, and permanent intervention. NATO structures, stay-behind networks, and the permanent presence of the U.S. 6th Fleet operated directly against popular sovereignty, enforcing imperial control through military dominance, coercion, and political intimidation. Peoples across West Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean basin lived strikingly similar experiences not by coincidence but because the same machinery of domination was applied everywhere. In this landscape, youth were the first targets, surveilled, imprisoned, recruited, or eliminated, because they possessed the capacity to refuse discipline and disrupt imposed order.
From Algeria to Palestine, from Greece to Egypt, youth became the backbone of resistance when all other forms of political agency were closed. In Algeria, students and young workers became central to the National Liberation Front (FLN) after reform demands were crushed by repression and massacre, driving them into armed struggle against French colonial rule. In Palestine, youth transformed streets and neighbourhoods into spaces of struggle when sovereignty was denied. In Greece, youth organised mass resistance through the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON) against Nazi occupation and later confronted foreign-backed authoritarianism. Youth and student movements were central to anti-imperialist organising and protest against British domination long before later uprisings.
Cyprus was not an exception to this pattern, but one of its clearest expressions. By the 1950s, the island was ruled through emergency laws, censorship, collective punishment, and military courts. British colonial domination eradicated any possibility of self-determination or political life. Under these conditions, the armed liberation struggle of 1955–1959 did not emerge from illusion or escalation, but as a historical necessity. Youth became its driving force, not through participation in a political sphere that did not exist, but by confronting colonial power directly through organised resistance and armed struggle.
As in many other places, the sacrifice of youth marked the moment when resistance crystallised. On 10 May 1956, Michalis Karaolis, only 23 years old, became the first National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) revolutionary to be hanged by British authorities in Nicosia Central Prison. The execution was intended to terrorise the population and deter youth participation. Instead, it exposed the reality of colonial “law and order” and politicised an entire generation. Writing against the execution, French writer Albert Camus exposed the logic behind the gallows, describing Cyprus as an advanced aircraft carrier of British and Western power.
But the gallows were not the only language of colonial power. Alongside them operated a calculated machinery of fragmentation. The Turkish Resistance Organization (TMT), a terrorist organisation functioning as a counter-insurgency apparatus, shaped by British divide-and-rule logic and sustained through Turkish state patronage, was created to crush Turkish-speaking Cypriot youth and workers’ movements. Fazıl Önder, founder of the newspaper İnkılâpçı (“Revolutionary”), who had given voice to workers, socialists, and anti-imperialists, was marked for elimination. On 24 May 1958, at just 32 years old, Önder was shot but not killed. Wounded, he resisted, pursued his attackers, and was stabbed. His body was then thrown into a Land Rover and driven through the streets of Nicosia until he slowly bled to death. Even in death, Önder refused silence. His final resistance condensed the defiance of Cypriot youth against colonial terror and imposed segregation.
The sacrifices of Karaolis, Önder, and countless other Cypriots found political articulation in the words of Kyriakos Matsis, another young EOKA guerrilla fighter, remembered for his words that “this land belongs to those who work it, whether they are Greek or Turkish Cypriots.” On 19 November 1958, at the age of 32, Matsis was killed by British forces after refusing to surrender. He was not only a militant, but a political thinker whose vision of liberation rejected colonial ownership and ethnic claims alike, grounding the struggle in patriotism and sacrifice.
Only weeks earlier, on 22 October 1958, Panayiotis Toumazos, just 19 years old, was killed by British forces. Before entering the ambush, he placed an olive branch in his pocket and said, “If I fall, let the British find it and learn that we are fighting for a just peace.” Driven into armed struggle by colonial violence, yet refusing to surrender justice as its horizon, Toumazos carried both resistance and its purpose in his body. His death exposed the contradiction empire imposed on youth: to fight not for war, but to make a just peace possible.
Independence in 1960 did not end the anti-imperialist struggle. Although Cyprus joined the Non-Aligned Movement and its first president, Makarios, emerged as an international anti-imperialist figure, sovereignty arrived fundamentally constrained. An imposed ethnicist, apartheid-style bicommunal constitution, the imposed authority of foreign powers to intervene, the continued presence of foreign military bases, and covert operations were built into the new state from its inception. Imperial power did not withdraw. It reorganised itself, restructuring through stay-behind mechanisms designed to preserve political control and neutralise popular sovereignty.
Ayhan Hikmet articulated one of the clearest visions of constitutional citizenship beyond ethnicism. Together with Ahmet Muzaffer Gürkan, he founded Cumhuriyet (“Republic”) on the very day the Republic was proclaimed, advancing the uncompromising slogan “Cyprus belongs to Cypriots.” Their politics aligned with a broader anti-imperialist republican current, alongside figures such as İhsan Ali and Derviş Ali Kavazoğlu, that placed popular sovereignty and democratic unity above the imposed fragmentation of the Cypriot people. On 23 April 1962, when Hikmet was just 33 years old, both he and Gürkan were assassinated by TMT. Their murder confirmed that the post-colonial order would not tolerate youth who challenged ethnicism and foreign control.
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Cypriot youth continued to resist imperial remnants and domestic reaction. The Red Berets (Kokkinoskoufides) constituted a socialist militant armed formation confronting imperialist interests and foreign-controlled terrorist forces operating under Turkish and British patronage. Doros Elia, a former EOKA fighter who had spent his youth in the anti-colonial struggle, emerged as a central figure of this period. At only 27 years old, he led armed resistance against TMT in the Pentadaktylos mountains. His trajectory revealed the continuity of struggle. Youth who had fought colonial domination were forced to confront its reconfigured forms, now operating through proxy violence and internal repression.
This cycle culminated in 1974, but its groundwork was laid earlier. In 1971, at the NATO Ministerial Meeting in Lisbon, the framework leading to the occupation of Cyprus was effectively set. At the time, Greece was under a US-backed military junta of colonels that brutally repressed youth, trade unions, and the left. In Turkey, another US-supported intervention brought Nihat Erim to power, the same figure who helped draft the Zurich–London post-colonial constitution of Cyprus and whose government oversaw the execution of Turkish revolutionary youth leader Deniz Gezmiş and his comrades. Osman Olcay, former NATO Deputy Secretary-General, served as Turkish Foreign Minister at this meeting. Later that same year, EOKA-B was established as a paramilitary organisation linked to the stay-behind network.
In July 1974, EOKA-B carried out a coup against Cypriot President Makarios. Youth were again the first to take to the streets in defence of the Republic, alongside patriotic citizens, resisting EOKA-B. Five days later, Turkey invaded Cyprus. Even amid invasion, EOKA-B continued assassinating Cypriot progressives, completing the internal front of repression.
On 30 August 1974, Doros Loizou, aged 30, was assassinated by EOKA-B while driving Vassos Lyssarides, leader of the socialist party EDEK. A poet and youth organiser, Loizou gave voice to a generation that understood anti-imperialism as resistance to fascism, occupation, and imposed segregation. In To Tragoudi tou Lefterou (“The Song of the Free One”), he wrote of taking to the streets and squares with rifles, shouts, and slogans, demanding bread and freedom, a demand that continues to echo across the Mediterranean. Youth who carried his name later stood in solidarity with liberation struggles from Palestine to Kurdistan.
The Cypriot experience confirms a broader truth that youth are not only the future of anti-imperialist struggle. They are its most exposed present. From colonial gallows to assassinations carried out by imperial proxy and terrorist organisations, youth have been the first to confront empire and the first to pay the price. This is not unique to Cyprus. It is a recurring pattern wherever imperial power governs through coercion, fragmentation, and force.
In Cyprus today, the Union of Cypriots honours the young revolutionaries who devoted their lives to the struggle and continues to defend the values they forged through resistance to occupation, settler colonisation, and imposed apartheid systems, while also fighting for a unitary Cyprus, free from foreign military and political presence, grounded in the democratic and class unity of the Cypriot people.
To remember Karaolis, Önder, Matsis, Toumazos, Hikmet, Elia, and Loizou, and countless others, is not to mourn the past. It is to recognise a continuous condition of struggle. This struggle is not confined to Cyprus. From West Asia and North Africa to Africa, Latin America, and Asia, youth continue to face occupation, authoritarianism, proxy violence, and the criminalisation of resistance. The forms shift across regions, but the logic of domination remains the same.
The struggle, therefore, remains unfinished, not because resistance has failed, but because empire survives by adapting. What remains constant is the task ahead, to break imposed segregation, to strengthen the interconnection of peoples’ struggles beyond geography, and to act in solidarity against a shared system of domination. From the Mediterranean to the world, the direction is clear: unity against fragmentation, sovereignty against intervention, liberation against colonisation.
