ABSTRACT
After the breakdown during the summer of 1974 the situation that emerged was mainly due to the fact that the Security Council acted as a brake on the Turkish troops amassed along the green line and also because of the Secretary-General's strategy of turning UNFICYP into an interpositionary force. 3 This enabled the intercommunal discussions to begin soon after the fighting had stopped. Two distinct phases emerged during the period from 1975 to 1983. The first involved the emergence of a new situation and the enlivened attempts to bring the two side closer together. This phase tailed off with the death of Makarios in 1977 and, despite the second high-level agreement of 1979, the second phase, from 1980 to 1983, was characterized by increasing despondency and frustration as a result of a combination of the tendency of non-substantive issues to fog the thinking of the negotiators and calculated efforts to delay progress as both sides focused on relatively inflexible objectives.
