In Chapter 4 (Attila: Intervention to Invasion/Invasion to Occupation/Occupation to Expulsion/Expulsion to Colonization/Colonization to Annexation) of his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens describes how Turkey’s justification for invading Cyprus – that it was to prevent union of the island with Greece and protect the Turkish Cypriots – was quickly exposed as disingenuous and mendacious, as the Turkish army and its Turkish Cypriot accomplices set about what, two decades later, became known as ‘ethnic cleansing’. In the case of Cyprus, this involved driving out the majority Greek population from northern Cyprus, obliterating its cultural presence, dividing the spoils among favoured cohorts and bringing in thousands of colonists from Turkey, all part of a long-term plan to, essentially, annex the northern part of the island to Turkey.
7. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 4: Attila: Intervention to Invasion/Invasion to Occupation/Occupation to Expulsion/Expulsion to Colonization/Colonization to Annexation.
These things actually happened. That is the thing to keep your eye on.
George Orwell
In the summer of 1983 a Turkish embassy spokesman in Washington told the Washington Post that Turkey supported the Indonesian position on East Timor at the United Nations because it saw a ‘parallel’ with the Turkish case in Cyprus. The spokesman was being a little ungenerous to his own government. All verifiable and independent reports show the government of Indonesia to have been guilty of near-genocide in East Timor, using the weapon of starvation, and indulging in the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. One wonders at any government which would voluntarily associate itself with such an atrocity. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus was not as bad as the Indonesian subjugation of Timor. But it was bad enough.
Supposing that one takes the most sympathetic view of the original Turkish intervention – that it was a necessary counter stroke to a Greek putsch – and suppose that one regards the Turkish minority as blameless in the disruptions and brutalities of the 1960s. Suppose, further, that one ignores the long and tenacious attachment of the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot leadership to partition irrespective of the majority will. Suppose, still further, that one can forget or discount the outside involvement of the British and the United States in the same cause. Put the case that there might have been – indeed, would have been – murderous attacks on Turkish Cypriots en masse by a consolidated Sampson leadership. Put the case that the Cyprus problem is purely a question of the security of the Turkish Cypriots. Admit that the first Turkish intervention of 20 July 1974 did everybody a favour by demolishing the rule of Fascism in Greece and Cyprus. Agree and allow all this, and the second Turkish invasion becomes more reprehensible rather than less. By the time it took place, on 14 August 1974, the Greek irredentist forces had fallen from power in both Athens and Nicosia. Negotiations were underway, and relations be tween the communities on the island were stable if nervous. The pretext for the original invasion had ceased to exist, and if Mr Ecevit had withdrawn his forces he would have been remembered as the man who rid Greece of the junta, saved Cyprus from its designs, and rebuilt the image of Turkey in the West. The moral and (given such an impressive demonstration of Turkish force) the actual pressure for a lasting and generous settlement with the Turkish Cypriots would have been irresistible. Instead Mr Ecevit and his generals embarked on a policy of conquest and annexation.
Many Turks feel that European opinion is, so to speak, culturally and historically biased against them. The memories of Lepanto and the gates of Vienna, the catchphrase ‘Terrible Turk’, the use of the term ‘Little Turk’ to describe obnoxious children in nursery rhymes, all these and more have created an impression of something fearful and brutish lurking in Anatolia. There is also the strangeness of Islam to most Europeans, and the vivid, terrifying accounts of what happened to Christian Bulgaria and Armenia under Turkish rule. Greeks, in particular, have a national memory of Ottoman subjugation and it is not difficult to find strong views among them about the shortcomings of Turks as a people.
All of this is deplorable. But there is no need to draw upon ancient prejudice in examining what the Turkish army did in Cyprus in August 1974. The record is a clear one, compiled for the most part by neutral outside jurists, and it shows that Turkey employed deliberate means of terror cruelty. It did not do so because of something in its nature or because of the inheritance of some presumed streak of barbarism. It did so for the very modern and cold-blooded reason that it wanted territory without inhabitants. The policy was designed to make the civilian population run away, and in this it succeeded. To understand the success, one need only examine the report, adopted on 10 July 1976, of the European Commission of Human Rights. The eighteen distinguished lawyers of the commission, which was chaired by Professor J.E.S. Fawcett, a Briton, and included jurists from most of the nineteen members of the Council of Europe, spent the year between May 1975 and May 1976 preparing their report. It was thus in no sense a ‘rush to judgement’. Nor was it conducted in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, when rumours and tempers were both at a high pitch. The final draft is at once meticulous and horrifying. It finds that the Turkish army engaged in the killing of civilians, in the execution of prisoners, in the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, and in organized looting, as well as in arbitrary mass detention of civilians. Revolting offences against women were also found to have been committed. (A telling fact here is that the Orthodox Church in Cyprus, for years a stern foe of abortion, was compelled to relax its rules on the termination of pregnancy because of the devastating number of rapes.)
The worst instances, and the best documented, were the shootings of unarmed civilians at the village of Palekythrou, and the treatment of 2,000 Greek Cypriot males taken as prisoners to mainland Turkey. Medical evidence taken in the last case showed deliberate malnutrition and organized sadistic mistreatment, violating all the rules of war.
There is one consolation for the researcher who reads this and other reports, who watches the films of victims’ testimony, or who talks as I have done to ordinary doctors on the island about what they were finding in their surgeries during and after those appalling days. In case after case, Greek Cypriots reported that their Turkish Cypriot neighbours came to their aid. In several instances, Cypriot Turks intervened to save women from rape, or brought food and water to those being held without either. They often, also, arranged for messages to be taken from villages that had been cut off or surrounded. None the less, the Turkish authorities chose to regard the commission as an insult to the entire Turkish nation, and rejected its findings out of hand. The commissioners were not permitted to visit the occupied north, or the Turkish mainland ports of Mersin and Adana where prisoners had been taken. The Turkish member of the commission, Professor Bulent Daver, entered a dissent to the report, in which he challenged the jurisdiction of the Republic of Cyprus and drew attention to the wrongs suffered by Turkish Cypriots in the past. But he did not contest or deny the substantive findings of the commission.
The report, of course, could examine only violations of the existing rules of war and conventions on human rights. It could not pass judgement, for example, on the use of napalm by the Turkish air force or the heavy bombing of the undefended cities of Nicosia and Famagusta. The destruction of the Athalassa mental hospital and other clinics clearly marked with the Red Cross, the ruining of the fine Armenian Melkonian Institute, the burning of the forests – these are the crimes of war rather than the crimes in war. To the population which endured both, this may seem a distinction without a difference.
Between 14 and 16 August, in a rapid and obviously well-planned advance, the Turkish forces moved to occupy thirty-four per cent of Cyprus. Over 180,000 Greek Cypriots fled their homes, for reasons which were made clear above. The advance halted on a line which was almost precisely the one proposed by Turkey as the demarcation of partition in 1965, and rejected by United Nations mediator Galo Plaza. This line put, and puts, three of the island’s ports (Famagusta, Karavostassi and Kyrenia) in Turkish hands, as well as the important town of Morphou and the northern half of the capital Nicosia. The fertile agricultural plain of the Messaoria also came under Turkish control. These towns, ports and districts represented more than just one-third of Cypriot territory and population. They contained two-thirds of Cypriot tourism, two-thirds of cultivated land, sixty per cent of water resources, sixty per cent of mining and quarrying, and almost the same proportion of industrial plant.
Invasion rapidly led to consolidation. There was no pretence that Turkey was moving in response to Greek or Greek Cypriot military activity – its command of the air alone was enough to insure against that. On 22 August Mr Rauf Denktash proclaimed the establishment of an ‘autonomous’ Turkish Cypriot administration, thus inaugurating what was to become a consistent policy of negotiating from faits accomplis. And on 9 September the Turkish mainland authorities announced that 5,000 farm workers were to be sent to Cyprus as ‘seasonal workers’ to look after the abandoned farms and orchards. This, too, was a prefiguration of a future policy. While the Greek Cypriots were still reeling from the impact of the coup and the invasion, Turkey began to transform its ‘peace-keeping’ presence into an occupation.
This was accomplished in three related ways. First, the Turkish Cypriots in the south had to be induced to move to the Turkish-held north. Second, the Greek Cypriots remaining in the north had to be persuaded to move south. Third, the resulting shortfall in manpower, especially skilled manpower, had to be made up. These things had all to be done quickly; more quickly than the cumbersome machinery of international disapproval could move. Already there were signs that the United States Congress was exasperated by Kissinger’s private foreign policy, and that sanctions against Turkey were being sought energetically. Most of the Turkish objectives were completed within a very short span of time. Help in this process came from three other forces, all of which we have met before. These were American cynicism, British naiveté about American cynicism, and Greek chauvinism.
When the ‘ceasefire’ line was drawn by Turkey on 18 August, and after a general exchange of prisoners had been agreed on 20 September, there were still many thousands of Greeks and Turks on either side of the border. The Greeks were mainly concentrated, in the number of some 11,000, in the Karpass peninsula, which forms the ‘panhandle’ shown on the map by the north-eastern extremity of the island. This had been by-passed in the Turkish army’s dash to split the country across the middle and further to the south. The Turkish Cypriots, mainly from Paphos and Limassol at the diametrically opposed extremity of Cyprus, had taken refuge in the British Sovereign Base Area of Akrotiri. Some of them had been threatened or harshly treated by Greek Cypriot extremists, including the disbanded sweepings of the National Guard and EOKA-B, who had attempted to use them as hostages against the Turkish advance. In other scattered villages there had been killings of helpless Turkish Cypriot villagers, no less disgraceful for being ‘unofficial’ or performed by uniformed riff-raff ‘off duty’. This was, perhaps, the last favour that EOKA-B and its junta allies were to do for the cause of partition.
In the north, harassment and cruelty were a matter of official policy, all of it designed to create a refugee mentality among the remaining Greeks. Nevertheless, the numbers were large enough to allow, on both sides, a certain solidarity in the face of attempts at ‘winkling’. So the year 1975 began with Cyprus still avoiding a final separation of communities, and with Congress pressing urgently for an arms embargo on Turkey for its abuse of American ‘defensive’ weaponry during the invasion. Dr Kissinger was holding out strongly against any sanctions on his new ally, but it looked as if the democratic process would have its revenge on him. Turkish policy then became more active. Mr Denktash refused to discuss the return of refugees, citing it as a ‘political’ issue rather than a humanitarian one. He increased pressure on the United Kingdom to send the 10,000 Turkish Cypriots at Akrotiri base to Turkey, whence, he made it clear, they would be sent on to northern Cyprus to populate abandoned Greek properties. Asked whether he would count this as a concession, he was evasive. At a meeting of the NATO foreign ministers in December 1974, Dr Kissinger had urged James Callaghan to send the Akrotiri refugees to Turkey, in spite of the fact that many of them had expressed a clear preference for remaining near their old homes. Kissinger argued that this would inspire Turkish concessions and help him in his tussle with Congress over the arms embargo.
On 15 January, without consulting the government of Cyprus and without linking their departure to any reciprocal Turkish action, the British authorities sent the Turkish Cypriots to Turkey en masse. Among other things, this action violated a provision in the Sovereign Bases Agreement which forbade their use as civilian airports. Mr Roy Hattersley, then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, later told the House of Commons that, ‘We hoped that an act of compassion and humanity on our part would be reciprocated by the Turks in the north. In fact it was not.’
It may be doubted that the transfer of the Turkish Cypriots was ‘an act of compassion and humanity’ in any case. Many of them had no wish to depart. A staff report of the Refugees Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, published in 1975, contains the following paragraphs:
‘The last of the Turkish Cypriots in Paphos moved on 11 August 1975, leaving homes they had lived in for decades. The following excerpt from a despatch published in the Washington Post of 11 August 1975 tells the story: “In Paphos today, where some 500 Turkish Cypriots were being transferred to the north, the main square resounded with the sobbing and wailing of elderly women abandoning their homes after a lifetime. Greek and Turkish Cypriots mingled easily with no apparent hostility toward each other. Many of the departing Turkish Cypriots handed over the keys of their homes to the Greek Cypriot refugees, with apparent pleasure, ‘to look after them well’, as one said.”’
The Paphos transfer completed the process begun at Akrotiri. Three weeks after the Akrotiri transfer, Congress imposed an arms embargo on Turkey. One week later, on 13 February 1975, Mr Denktash proclaimed the ‘Turkish Federated State of Cyprus’.
So far from being ‘reciprocated’, to use Mr Hattersley’s lazy phrasing, the British action was duplicated, but in reverse. Secure in their control of most Turkish Cypriots, the Turkish authorities began to clear the north of its hereditary Greek inhabitants. On 30 June Mr Denktash threatened to expel all the Greek Cypriots of the Karpass peninsula unless all the remaining Turkish Cypriots were moved to his zone. One month later, at a meeting in Vienna, the Greek Cypriot negotiator Glafkos Clerides agreed to this demand, securing in return a commitment from Mr Denktash that, ‘The Greek Cypriots at present in the north of the island are free to stay and they will be given every help to lead a normal life, including facilities for education and for the practice of their religion, as well as medical care by their own doctors and freedom of movement in the north.’
In January of the following year (1976), the Staff Report of the Subcommittee on Refugees of the US Senate was published and contained the following sentences: ‘Life among Cypriot Greeks in the north has not only not improved, it has deteriorated since the Cypriot-Turkish administration solemnly pledged in Vienna to take steps to normalize and protect their lives… In no respect has the Turkish administration fulfilled its obligation entered into at the third round of intercommunal talks.’
What was happening has been graphically described by several independent eye-witnesses as well as by the survivors themselves. Throughout the Karpass peninsula, Turkish soldiers and police set about making life insupportable for the inhabitants. Long, arbitrary curfews were imposed. Brutal and vandalistic searches, on the pretext of ‘security’ were common place. Livestock and other property was taken at gunpoint. Villagers were pointedly offered forms ‘applying’ for a transfer to the south. Often, the forms came already filled in and the family was simply driven to the border and dumped. One thousand, five hundred of the 9,000 or so remaining Karpassians were removed in this way, and one year after the Vienna agreement the survivors addressed a petition to Dr Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the United Nations. They implored him to prevent their forcible expulsion. On 9 December Dr Waldheim reported to the United Nations that, ‘from 7,371 on 5 June 1976 the Greek Cypriot population in the north decreased to 3,631 on 6 December’. Expulsions were continuing at the rate of forty each day. At that rate, the Karpass peninsula soon became almost completely empty of its former inhabitants. Today, a few Greeks remain in the village of Rizokarpasso, near the very tip of the ‘panhandle’. I visited them in October 1979, without the escort on which the Turkish authorities normally insist, and found that most of them are old men, too old to move. There was an atmosphere of desolation in the village. The old men were afraid that visitors would bring trouble to the place – the exact reverse of the reception a stranger in Cyprus would usually be accorded. Police surveillance was continuous. It was evident that time would soon close the little coffee-shop where the old men sat and the church which they used.
The counterpart to the expulsion policy was one of colonization. As the Greeks were decanted or driven over the border, leaving their homes and farms and orchards, immigrants were brought in from mainland Turkey to settle and work. The undisguised purpose of this policy, which like the expulsion programme was implemented even as intercommunal negotiations were in progress, was to alter the demographic basis of the island. It is unclear to this day quite how many colonists were brought in from Anatolia, but the numbers were in the tens of thousands. Three important facts about the importation are beyond dispute. The first is that the settlement of newcomers was hasty and inept. The second is that it was connected to the plans of extremist forces in Turkey itself. The third is that it was not a success with the indigenous Turkish Cypriots.
In July 1975, the United Nations representative in Cyprus sent a letter to Dr Kurt Waldheim, in which he reported that, ‘Several hundred mainland Turks are being transferred each week from Turkey and are settling in Karpass villages and villages south of the new Nicosia-Famagusta road.’ Other reports from UN officials referred to the arbitrary way in which the new arrivals were allotted land and property, and the opportunities for corruption that were evident in the allocation of fictitious Cypriot passports and identity cards. Turkish Cypriot journalists and commentators also stressed that the immigrants were of a rather motley sort – unwanted in their places of origin, often with criminal records and unfamiliar with the cultural and linguistic patterns of the Turkish Cypriots. Many were unqualified for the jobs which they were ostensibly brought to the island to perform; citrus husbandry and hotel management are not as simple as they may appear to tourists.
More ominously still, many of the settlers had links with, or provided recruits for, the extremist parties based on the Turkish mainland. In the mid-seventies these parties, especially the National Action Party of Colonel Turkes, indulged in a frenzy of anti-democratic violence aimed at a ‘Greater Turkey’ and the establishment of a despotic system of militarist rule. An important element of this movement consisted of ex-army officers with primitive opinions, many of whom came to use occupied Cyprus as a base of operations. They helped to form a political party of a Fascist stripe, the Turkish Unity Party, which is led by former air force colonel Ismail Tezer, and which has succeeded in electing a deputy from the Famagusta district. Its programme advocates the extension of Turkish rule to the whole of Cyprus. Its public propaganda is openly addressed to Turks from the mainland, and adopts a threatening tone in addressing local political figures who speak in favour of amity with Greeks.
Incontrovertible evidence that the settlers had indeed arrived, and had not contributed greatly to the peace or the beauty of the island, was provided in May 1978. Dr Fazil Kuchuk, the veteran leader of Turkish conservatism in Cyprus; the man who cried that ‘Cyprus is Turkish’ in 1955, penned a series of articles in his daily newspaper Halkin Sesi (Voice of the People). At long last, northern Cyprus now was Turkish. But Dr Kuchuk found that it was not all he had hoped:
‘We warned the officials once again. We told them that these newcomers will be a nuisance to our decent citizens; we told them to halt them before it becomes too late. They turned a deaf ear to us and did nothing. On the contrary, the newcomers were given houses, land, food and money. They were even given “bonuses” amounting to tens of thousands of Turkish lira under the cover of settlement credits… We are writing bitterly because we have to. Those who opened the door without thinking are primarily responsible for the malice brought to the Turkish Cypriot community as well as to the newcomers, and they will never be able to shrug off this historic responsibility. Piling people on the island without planning has been of primary influence in the creation of the present situation on the island. We could not let the places we had won remain empty. However, without planning and without calculation, people were brought who had sectarian conflicts among them, who lived away from each other because of blood feuds and who belonged to two different faiths. All these people were put together and “Oriental sultanates” were established in many of our villages.’
Dr Kuchuk ended his articles with the plea, in capital letters, that the Ecevit government should not turn Cyprus into a grave. He wrote that because of the authorities and the colonists, ‘this paradise island is being turned into hell’. The good doctor never alluded to the sufferings of the Greek Cypriots in his article; he always was a dedicated chauvinist. It is so much the more telling, then, that he should have realized that for Turkey the Turkish Cypriots were not the main point after all.
His protest, and others like it, had some effect. Some of the settlers were quietly shipped home. But tens of thousands remained, and have been augmented by more discreet arrivals. How could it be otherwise? The brutal eviction of the Greek population necessitated the ‘dumping operation’, as it was called, of mainland colonists. And the need for haste, for action to make military conquest as far as possible irreversible, made its clumsiness inevitable. According to the original citizenship law of the ‘Turkish Federated State of Kibris’ – since supplanted by the ‘Turkish State of North Kibris’ – any member of the Turkish armed forces to have served in Cyprus, any member of the ‘Turkish Resistance’ and any member of their families is eligible for citizenship rights. The Turkish Cypriots are defined as members of the Great Turkish Nation.
Afterword
As early as September 1975, Mr Rauf Denktash was authorized by his supporters to drop the word ‘Federated’ from the ‘Turkish Federated State of Kibris’, and to declare ‘independence’. He held this card in reserve, occasionally deploying it as a threat or using it as a bargaining point, until 15 November 1983. In a recorded interview with me in August 1983, he made clear his determination to proclaim a separate state very soon. When he did so, it came as a shock rather than a surprise (though the State Department and the Foreign Office professed themselves to be caught unawares as did, scarcely more credibly, the Turkish government in Ankara).
The declaration came in the afternoon of the day on which President Reagan had signed a billion-dollar Bill for military aid to Turkey. It came a few days after the Turkish military government had conducted a carefully managed quasi-civilian quasi-election. And it came a few days before the United States Congress was due to go into recess. Two weeks earlier, the Greek Cypriot side had accepted in writing a proposal from the United Nations for a personal initiative by Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. Mr Denktash had rejected it.
There had, obviously, been direct collusion between Mr Denktash and the Turkish military junta in the timing of the move. It is quite possible that the newly chosen civilian Prime Minister, Mr Turgut Ozal, was as innocent of knowledge as he claimed to be. If so, the fact that the army by-passed him is also of significance. But the main point of the declaration, which was for all practical purposes a declaration of dependence on Turkey and a declaration of secession from the Republic, was that it formally nullified Turkey’s 1974 claim to have intervened in defence of the ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of Cyprus. Like its predecessors, this Turkish move made up in decision for what it lacked in subtlety or finesse.
Desecration
Perhaps nothing illustrates the real nature of the Turkish invasion and occupation better than the pillage of northern Cyprus. It is a hard thing to say, but if the Greek Cypriot refugees were now to return to their old homes, they might well find them unrecognizable. Not only did the original landings give the signal for widespread looting, arson and vandalism, in which many Turks orgiastically celebrated their new mastery by destroying Christian and Hellenic monuments; but the resulting occupation has followed a policy of eradication. The position is made worse, and also made harder to investigate, by the related facts of widespread corruption and incompetent bureaucracy. There is something unbearable in the contemplation of this process, in the knowledge that the beauty and traditions of Cyprus are being defiled beyond repair. But the evidence for it is overwhelming, and constitutes a further proof that the Turkish plan for the island is designed to be irreversible.
The most eloquent testimony on this point comes from the Turkish Cypriot writer Mehmet Yasin. In a series of articles published in the weekly review Olay in April 1982, he horrified archaeologists and antiquarians who had been trying to discover what had happened to the Cypriot heritage. It was well known that rare antiquities were turning up, often broken or disfigured, on the international black market. Very often, the pieces could be directly attributed to well-established collections, such as the Hadjiprodromou collection in Famagusta which was broken up after the invasion. But not even the Cyprus National Museum had a comprehensive account of the damage done to the national patrimony. Mehmet Yasin’s report fills in a number of gaps, and his prose style also gives something of the flavour of desolation. For a lover of the island to read his articles (entitled Perishing Cyprus) is a very painful experience. His prologue is hauntingly recognizable as the work of a fellow-lover and a fellow-sufferer:
‘This is the island of Cyprus which we now see, recognize and know. Orange groves, wheat fields, vineyards, sandstone buildings, Gothic-arched buildings, mosques, churches, bay-windowed houses, gardens of jasmine, cement houses with geraniums and flowers; Venetian, Ottoman and British coats of arms along the streets; the moufflons, donkeys and recently, speeding cars; old people who display olives; halloumi at the fairs and Friday markets; children who sell jasmine; mines and later factories; war and death all over again, living again and finally the sandbags at the borders, the listening stations of the British, radars, sieges…’
From this evocative and tender, but ominous, beginning, Mehmet Yasin moves to his theme, which is that, ‘We have abandoned our historical masterpieces – with their Greek columns, Gothic ornaments, yellow-stoned arches and Seljukian domes – to destruction and pillage.’ Discussing the ruin of the Kyrenia district, he writes:
‘There you will see small churches which have suffered the fate of the Armenian monastery in Halevga and of other churches. You will ask, well, where is that old Omer Tekke? It used to stand on the sea like a water lily before 1974. Now it has become a withered flower with its crude wall plasters, with its destroyed marble fountain abandoned to nature’s destructive forces. Do not ask any questions about the condition of the first-century city of Lamboussa, which is now a military zone.’
Adds Yasin,
‘Be careful, do not expose the grief of your heart to the Kyrenians, because they will tell you even worse things. They will explain how Kyrenia castle was robbed – actually, hasn’t the whole of Kyrenia been stolen? If you sit at a coffee-shop you will observe that the Limassoleans in Kyrenia constantly express their longing for Limassol. But what will you say when you see that even the Kyrenians long for Kyrenia? – I think this is the most agonizing longing.’
Yasin makes it clear that religious bigotry as well as greed is at work here. He describes the ‘hysteric obliteration’ in Morphou, where ‘a concrete mosque has been erected in front of the Byzantine church of St Mamas, which is adorned with Gothic arches’. Then he gives more detail:
‘Haven’t you heard that the 2,000-year-old Christian church in Cyprus, St Barnabas’s Church, has been robbed? Haven’t you heard that thirty-five icons were stolen, that eleven of them were found in Kythrea, that eleven were retrieved at Ankara airport while being smuggled out, and that the rest are lost?
‘Haven’t you heard what’s happening in Varosha (Famagusta)? Haven’t you heard that figurines belonging to the Catholic period and kept in the Archaeological Museum have been stolen and smuggled to London?
‘What about the icons in the other churches; the mosaics, the private collections, the illegal digs? Haven’t you heard of these? Why have they stopped the digs started before 1974 at the city of Gastria, which belongs to the Geometric age? Do you know what has happened since then? The government has issued permits to certain businessmen from Turkey to set up a gypsum factory there. The tombs were destroyed and plundered.’
The Turkish archaeologist Dr Turhan Kamil takes up Yasin’s story. He describes how both the ancient city sites of ‘Salamis and Engomi are completely abandoned. In my latest research I noticed that the wire fencing Salamis had been stolen. No serious work is being done in Engomi.’
Though he writes with some circumspection, and confines himself as far as possible to the battle to save the antiquities of Cyprus, Mehmet Yasin makes it clear that three strong forces really control the destiny of the Turkish Cypriots. These are Mr Rauf Denktash’s National Unity Party (NUP), the Turkish army and the Islamic religious foundation Evkaf. This is interesting, because these are the three forces that more than any other have obstructed a negotiated settlement in Cyprus and have devoted themselves to making the north of the island into a de facto province of Turkey. Yasin, then, has described a microcosm of the colonization which is apparent at the political and the international levels.
As he says in describing the ancient city of Lamboussa, a city with an immense past in the Roman and Byzantine periods:
‘You will see chambers cut out of the rocks, lighthouses, the remains of baths, mosaic lay-outs and the military camps set up on the ruins both before and after 1974. Today Lamboussa is a military zone closed to tourists. Here there are many important churches and the mythological Akhiropietos Monastery. Now you cannot see it because it is being used as a military warehouse.’
Lamboussa has that in common with other areas of Cyprus, including the city of Varosha and the area of Apostolos Andreas. These are off limits even to Turkish Cypriots. No Turkish Cypriot official is empowered to authorize a visit there, even for a visiting foreign journalist or specialist. The real power in the north is held by the Turkish army and its allies.
Among the latter, the most prominent is Mr Rauf Denktash’s National Unity Party. Ever since the days of the TMT underground, this faction has expressed the ambitions of conservative Turkish nationalism in Cyprus. Dr Kuchuk, again writing in his daily Halkin Sesi, confirms that from 1957 he was in touch with Riza Vuruskan, the Turkish officer who led and founded TMT; first to help the British and then to fight against the Greeks and the Turkish Cypriot radicals. Dr Kuchuk recalled, on Vuruskan’s death in 1979, that in the 1950s he
‘used to go to Ankara very frequently. During one of these visits, the late Prime Minister of Turkey, Adnan Menderes, introduced Riza Vuruskan to me… Later on I met him at the office of a lieutenant general and talked with him there. During our meeting it was decided that Vuruskan should come to Cyprus as “civilian adviser”. He arrived in Cyprus under an assumed name.’
Mr Denktash has also given his reminiscences of that period, in which he admitted for the first time what had long been suspected – that he had been among the founders of TMT:
‘Everybody thought I was the leader but I was not. I was political adviser. Immediately after forming it I handed it over. It was a good mask because even the British and American intelligence thought I was the man who decided everything. I was not. The leaders were former army officers from Turkey.’ [The Times, 20 January 1978]
In Turkish political terms, before the abolition of independent parties, the NUP would have straddled the right wing of the conservative Justice Party, with room at its extremity for supporters of the Fascist National Action Party of Colonel Turkes. Through forces like the Idealist Hearth Associations, exact duplicates of those on the mainland and known under the same name of Ulku Ocaklari, the NUP is able to remind dissenters of the reserve strength possessed by the old TMT.
In interviews with Turkish Cypriot political leaders, I have been able to form some impression of the nature of Mr Denktash’s regime. It is described by the main opposition leader, Mr Alpay Durduran of the Communal Liberation Party, as ‘a Rightist movement with Fascist tendencies . The leader of the more radical Republican Turkish Party, Mr Osker Ozgur, agrees with this characterization and stresses that Mr Denktash is a client of the Turkish military. He told me that on 21 August 1981, when elections had left Mr Denktash’s party without a dependable majority (despite its resources as the governing party and despite its hidden support from mainland settler voters) there was a meeting to discuss a coalition government. Mr Ilter Turkmen, then the Turkish junta’s Foreign Minister, was present at the meeting and told Mr Ozgur personally that his party would not be allowed into a coalition because of its criticisms of NATO. As a result of this direct interference from Ankara, Mr Denktash’s party survived its electoral reverses at the hands of disgruntled Turkish Cypriots. Both Mr Durduran and Mr Ozgur are opposed to partition. But they will both admit, ruefully, that their relatively large electoral following is not primarily due to their stand on the national question. It comes from the strong popular resentment about the division of the spoils. In Dr Kuchuk’s Halkin Sesi again, there has been constant criticism of this state of affairs. One editorial complained that, ‘only a handful of people have become rich by plundering and stealing; the majority of the Turkish Cypriots are low-income people.… Today there is a rich class in the Turkish Cypriot community created by the government for its own ends.’ Life in the north is dominated by those who operate concessions with Turkey and who have the right contacts in the nouveau riche occupation establishment. This can decide anything from an import licence to a permission to operate a confiscated Greek hotel. It can also decide positions of political influence. Mr Nejat Konuk, the first Prime Minister of the ‘Turkish Federated State of Kibris’ and Mr Osman Orek, the first president of its assembly, both departed from Mr Denktash’s party in protest at this kind of exorbitance and parasitism. Other political leaders have issued strong criticisms of the economic ‘Caesars’ who form the new class. Clearly, since the economy of the ‘state’ is a function of Turkey, and since the only legal currency is the Turkish lira, it is businessmen connected with the motherland who stand the best chance. Thus when Mehmet Yasin writes about the horrible desecration of the Geometric city of Gastria, he mentions quite naturally that the gypsum and cement factory, run by mainland Turks, was erected on the site because, ‘the mouthpiece and partners of the two Turkish Republic citizens, Fevzi Akkaya and Sezai Turkes, who own the cement factory, are NUP people’.
The third important presence mentioned by Mehmet Yasin is that of Evkaf, the Islamic religious trust. He notes the indifference of Evkaf to any cultural or environmental or historic consideration, unless that consideration bears upon mosques in active present-day use. Evkaf’s role is not well understood by many Turkish Cypriots, who are secular in their everyday habits, but it has been known to play an important part in events. In 1979, for example, when it was proposed that the return of the empty city of Varosha (Famagusta) to the Greek Cypriots could open a settlement negotiation, the whole discussion was thrown awry by Evkaf’s insistence that all of Famagusta (including the Greek-owned houses and businesses modestly estimated by Yasin at sixty per cent) was legally Turkish. This claim, founded on untenable Ottoman imperial precedents, was not pursued after it had had the desired effect of negating the talks. The mainland Turkish daily Aydinlik (Clarity), a radical paper admired by its rivals and since closed by the Turkish army for good, commented scornfully that: ‘One wonders to which Pashas Athens, Salonika, Belgrade and Budapest belong. If they also belong to Pashas, then we could soon reach the gates of Vienna again.’
On other occasions, Mr Denktash and his allies have found it convenient to invoke Islam. They have done so selectively, usually in order to gain or woo support from the Arab world – which has so far been unimpressed. There was even, in 1979, an opportunistic flirtation with the idea of declaring northern Cyprus an Islamic republic. The scheme came to nothing. For one thing it would logically have necessitated the removal of all the busts and plaques of the great secularist Kemal Ataturk, mass-produced and mass-installed across the island since 1974. Even without this embarrassment, there would have been political difficulties. Turkey is too closely linked to Israel, and its imperial hegemony over the Arab world is too well remembered, for it now to pose as the champion of the oppressed faithful.
Turkish Cypriots are very defensive about their ‘state’. They tend to keep quarrels and complaints within the family, to publish them only in Turkish, and to answer all objections and criticisms with a recitation of their past woes at the hands of the Greeks. This makes Mehmet Yasin’s testimony the more impressive. I have read many laments by Greeks for the world they have lost, and for the ruin of their beloved island home. Few are as affecting as Yasin’s from 'the other side’.
Attila is quite a common first name in Turkey. It is also well-known in western Europe, with the difference that there it is a name used to frighten children. The code-name ‘Attila’ was given at one stage to the Turkish army’s move on Cyprus. The name stuck long after the code-name had been superseded. One can see why. Such a titanic failure in public relations was, from the Greek point of view, irresistible. It summoned every image of pitiless barbarism, and evoked every memory of the Asiatic hordes. Precisely for that reason, it is almost valueless as a metaphor for the 1974 invasion. That invasion, as I hope to have shown, was not a medieval or fanatical blood-feast. It was conducted, and is sustained, with the help of men whose habitat is air-conditioned and whose style is sophisticated. It was a thoroughly modern and political attempt to amputate the Republic of Cyprus. The weapons used were twentieth-century, and so were the methods.
The powers of the modern, advanced world accepted the dismemberment of Cyprus when they did not actually collude with it. Nevertheless, the events of the summer of 1974 were disturbing to political life in many countries. There had to be an accounting, which in four capitals was very educational.
1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.
2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.
3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction.
