Spyros Kyprianou

Spyros Kyprianou, lawyer and politician: born Limassol, Cyprus 28 October 1932; called to the Bar, Gray's Inn 1954; Minister of Foreign Affairs 1960-72; President, Committee of Foreign Ministers of Council of Europe 1967; President of Cyprus 1977-88; married 1956 Mimi Papatheoklitou (two sons); died Nicosia 13 March 2002.

Spyros Kyprianou, a former president of Cyprus, never lived to see the ending of the Turkish occupation of the north of the island – the cause to which he devoted the last three decades of his life.

Kyprianou was not a man who favoured compromise over the issues that resulted in Cyprus's becoming divided after the Turkish invasion of 1974, and showed little enthusiasm for the United Nations proposal for a bizonal federation which is currently forming the basis of negotiations between the island's two communities.

He was one of the old school of Greek Cypriot politicians – a London-trained lawyer, urbane and articulate, and, above all, a survivor. While he was a skilful and tricky player in domestic politics, he lacked the charisma to become a major figure on the international stage – a difficult enough goal for anyone succeeding a man of Archbishop Makarios's stature to become the island's second president.

Spyros Kyprianou was born in the southern port city of Limassol in 1932. After completing his schooling in Cyprus he studied law in London, during which time he founded a Cypriot students association in Britain. During the early 1950s he acted as Makarios's special representative in London. In the second half of the decade, with Eoka fighters doing battle with British forces on the island, Kyprianou was expelled from Britain and moved to Greece. From his base in Athens he became an international spokesman for the Cypriot cause.

When Cyprus eventually won independence from Britain in 1960, Makarios – the first president of the new republic – appointed Kyprianou as his foreign minister. But in 1972, after a disagreement between Kyprianou and the ruling military junta in Greece, the latter put pressure on Makarios to replace him.

For two years, Kyprianou was out of the public spotlight. But he returned in 1974 after the Turkish invasion, acting as an adviser to President Makarios and a member of the Cypriot delegation at the United Nations. Two years later he was back in Cyprus laying the foundations for what would be a long career in domestic politics, becoming the right-hand man of the president. When Makarios died in August 1977, Kyprianou was elected to serve the last few months of the presidential term. In a poll in the following January he was re-elected unopposed.

Spyros Kyprianou remained as the island's president until his defeat by George Vassiliou in elections in February 1988. His decade in power saw the fabric of much of the southern part of the island change beyond recognition. With the main tourist resorts lying either under Turkish occupation or in the UN-controlled buffer zone, Greek Cypriots set about developing the towns on the island's south coast as holiday centres, leading eventually to the tourism boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Kyprianou will be remembered as a key figure in encouraging this development and making possible the economic prosperity that the republic now enjoys.

But economic development was not matched by progress in resolving the issues that kept the island divided. Kyprianou's insistence on the need for the Turkish army to leave Cyprus and for Greek Cypriot refugees to be allowed back to their homes in the north of the island was met by equally dogged opposition from the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash. While the two men, both British-trained lawyers, held a number of meetings, neither entered the talks with a desire for compromise. In 1985, Kyprianou defended his hard line on the Cyprus issue in the following terms:

Ours is not a struggle for formalities but for substance . . . There is another achievement, which some people may describe as a failure. We have avoided a bad solution to the Cyprus problem.

Even after his defeat, Kyprianou remained a leading figure in the centre-right Diko party which he had established in 1976, and served as Speaker of the House of Representatives (parliament) from 1996 to 2001, when ill-health – which had often dogged him over the years – forced him to retire. With his characteristic single-minded determination he ended a farewell address to the Cypriot media with the following declaration: "I will never give up the struggle for the solution of the Cyprus problem, not for as long as I live."

Gerald Butt