Glafcos Clerides
Glafcos Clerides was president of Cyprus from 1993 to 2003 and, for the five months after the Turkish invasion of 1974, its acting president, the Greek Cypriot who had negotiated with the Turkish Cypriots for forty years, from the constitutional talks of 1959 to the last of the United Nations plans, and who took the island into the European Union in the treaty signed in his last months, in April 2003, without the settlement he had spent his life on. He was a bomber pilot shot down over Hamburg in 1942 who spent the rest of the war in a German camp, a barrister who defended EOKA fighters against the British, and the speaker of the House who was constitutionally next in line when Makarios fled the Greek junta's coup in July 1974. He was born in Nicosia in 1919, the son of a lawyer, was reading law in London when the war came, joined the RAF, and was a prisoner from 1942 to 1945. Back in Cyprus he defended the EOKA men in the British courts in the 1950s while his father served the colonial administration. He was the Greek Cypriot side's negotiator on the constitution of 1960 and speaker of the House of Representatives from independence until 1976, and from 1968 the intercommunal negotiator with Rauf Denktash, whom he had known since they were young lawyers and with whom he was on Christian name terms through every war. In July 1974 the junta's coup drove Makarios out, Turkey invaded on the 20th, and on the 23rd the coup collapsed and Clerides was sworn in as acting president, negotiating at Geneva while the second Turkish offensive took the north. Makarios came back in December and Clerides went into opposition, founding the Democratic Rally in 1976. He lost three presidential elections and won the fourth in 1993 by two thousand votes, and again in 1998. The presidency was the EU application, which he pursued as the island's security, and the plans: the Ghali set of ideas in 1993, the proximity talks, the Annan plan of 2002, on which he was ready to deal and lost the election of February 2003 to Papadopoulos, who was not. He signed the accession treaty in Athens as his last act. He died in Nicosia in November 2013 at ninety-four.
- Lived: 1919 CE – 2013 CE
- Nationality: Cypriot
- Roles: president, politician, lawyer
