In the final chapter (Conclusion) of his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens asserts again that whatever the shortcomings of the way Greek Cypriots sought to achieve independence and self-determination, these deficiencies weren’t what brought devastation to the island in 1974. Rather, guilt for Cyprus’s tragedy lies with a group of malign external actors who, in pursuit of their own interests or shared interests, colluded to stoke ethnic violence on Cyprus and, ultimately, partition the island, regardless of the consequences of such a policy on Cypriot lives and culture.
9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 6: Conclusion
‘On the third day – and final morning – the Archbishop and I had a quiet talk alone in his study. Rather whimsically, he said, “I like you, Mr Secretary, you speak candidly and I respect that. It’s too bad we couldn’t have met under happier circumstances. Then, I’m sure, we could have been friends.” A brief pause and then he said, “We’ve talked about many things and we’ve been frank with one another. I think it right to say that we’ve developed a considerable rapport. Yet there’s one thing I haven’t asked you and I don’t know whether I should or not, but I shall anyway. Do you think I should be killed by the Turks or the Greeks? Better by the Greeks, wouldn’t you think?”
“Well,” I replied, “I agree that we’ve talked frankly to one another about many things and that we have established a rapport. But as to the matter you’ve just raised with me, Your Beatitude, that’s your problem!”’
George Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern
‘Afterwards, Ball made no secret of his unforgiving resentment of Makarios’s role in 1964. During a Brookings Institution conference in 1969, Ball said in the presence of State Department colleagues, “That son of a bitch Makarios will have to be killed before anything happens in Cyprus.”’
Laurence Stern, The Wrong Horse
The owl of Minerva, said Hegel, takes wing only at dusk. Students of his difficult and idealistic theory of history take this to mean that only when an epoch is closed can it be properly understood. Hegel, of course, thought that the only thing to be learned from history was that nobody did learn from history. The Cyprus problem is rich in support for his view. But a certain dusk, not yet night, has fallen across the island, and it might not be impertinent to try and deduce some lessons.
The Cyprus problem consists of not one, but four, related questions. The most important of these is the relationship between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, which sets the difficult conundrum: can two widely separated national groups find a peaceful coexistence involving two languages, two religions and two interpretations of history?
The second, which is related but by no means identical, makes Cyprus the site of a longstanding difference between two great states: Greece and Turkey, both inheritors of vast, bygone empires. It is unlikely that the future of the island can be divorced from the wider settlement of differences between these larger rivals.
The third element is one of time rather than place. Cyprus came to independence during the Cold War, which has made every country in the world a place of conflict between the superpowers. Ideological commitments are strong in the island, but have not proved strong enough to transcend the first two tensions.
Finally, there is an element involving place rather than time. Cyprus occupies a strategic position in the Levant, and outside powers have never scrupled to employ local and regional rivalries in order to get their own way there. It is this, last, factor combined with the second one which has promoted Cyprus, like Lebanon, from a local dispute to an actual and potential international confrontation. It is this aspect, also, which has made it possible to give the wishes of its inhabitants such a lowly place on the order of priorities, and often impossible to ‘synchronize’ better inter-communal relations with better Greek-Turkish mainland relations.
Now that the debris of the 1974 explosion has settled, and now that some of those responsible have either stood trial or published their memoirs, it has become possible to attempt some conclusions. Mine are that Cyprus was plunged into war by the operations of the fourth element on the first and second –- with the third element acting as an occasional incitement or justification. The Greek Cypriots would be mistaken in blaming all the disasters that have overtaken them on outside meddling. But they have considerable warrant for doing so. Turkish Cypriot propagandists, who hasten to blame everything on Greek ambition, ignore the fact that they, too, have been used and exploited by powers larger than themselves.
Many outsiders have accused the Greek Cypriots of hubris; the sin of pride which tempts fate to take retribution. By behaving as if Turkey was four hundred miles away instead of forty they asked for trouble and (the outsider usually adds with satisfaction) they got it. In our day, as in classical antiquity, hubris is defined by the consequent nemesis. The trouble with this argument or method is that those who encounter nemesis are presumed to have done something to deserve it. Cyprus is the victim of a miserable fate, ergo there must have been a crime or an error which beckoned it on. This opinion, like the belief in original sin, is hard to rebut.
At almost every stage in the drama, however, the weaknesses or errors of Cypriots were exploited and compounded by external intervention. This was true when the British fomented intercommunal distrust, first to consolidate their rule and then to maintain it. It was true when the Turkish government organized an anti-Greek pogrom in Istanbul to bring pressure to bear on the Cyprus negotiations with London, and was rewarded with concessions. It was true when the Greek and Turkish governments put local extremists into commanding positions by giving them money and weapons. It was true when the Greek junta, itself the product of foreign intervention, decided to eliminate President Makarios. Perhaps most of all it was true when the United States government, in the words of George Ball, ‘established an underground contact’ with the terrorists of General Grivas, and did so in the name of protecting the Turks! In that incident, both ends were played against the middle and the manipulation of internal tensions was dovetailed with a great-power calculation designed to abolish the island’s independence. From that incident, also, stems the foreign involvement with Greek-sponsored subversion in Cyprus, which led to the coup and to the Turkish invasion. When Makarios put his question to George Ball, asking mischievously whether it would be Greeks or Turks who would be set on to kill him, he was being shrewd and not, as the unironic and literal Ball supposes, offensive. Mr Ball obviously thinks that he comes well out of the exchange, or he would not have published it. But his rejoinder is thunderously inept. It was not Makarios’s ‘problem’ whether he lived or died. It was the responsibility of those who wished him ill, and Ball is at least honest enough to make it plain that he was one of those. His successors, especially in the Nixon administration, behaved in such a way as to justify the Cypriot belief that foreign meddling has been the chief problem at both the local and the international levels. At the risk of overstressing the point, let me just point out again that by helping General Grivas, Mr Ball and his colleagues more or less ensured the animosity of the Turkish Cypriots, who felt menaced by Grivas far more than they felt threatened by Makarios. By helping further to poison an ethnic conflict, the United States deliberately created the very conditions which it was later to cite, hypocritically, as the justification for partition. Where the British had made an opportunistic use of Greek-Turkish rivalry and distrust, the United States and its proxies made an instrument out of it.
Or I’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublie bien des choses.
Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation
(With acknowledgements to Benedict Anderson)
Obviously, things could have been different. The navies of the Catholic powers, later bombastically celebrated by G.K. Chesterton, inflicted a shattering defeat on the Turks at Lepanto in October 1571. If the victory had come three months earlier, it might have raised the siege of Famagusta and redeemed its commander Marcantonio Bragadin from the necessity of being flayed alive, for the glory of Venice, by the Turkish invader Lala Mustafa. Cyprus would never have become Turkish. Alternatively, if the late Sultan had not been so gullible, the island might never have passed from Turkey to Britain. Again, if Britain had been more sincere, or Greece more determined, then Cyprus might have achieved enosis long enough since for it to be uncontroversial today. Like Rhodes, it might even have got it without a fight. These are not the real ‘ifs’ in the present situation, though speculation about the latter ones can fill Greek Cypriots with alternating moods of sobriety and anger.
The real ‘if is the one which inquires of the Greek Cypriots, since they are the majority, whether they could have averted the frightful events of 1974. I have argued, I hope persuasively, that there were forces at work which would have victimized the Greek Cypriots whatever they did. This does not and should not free them from the obligation to consider their missed opportunities. These seem to cluster under four headings:
1. Economics. The Turkish Cypriots, despite their history of political and national privilege as an organized group, were most often economically underprivileged in the mass. During the period 1960-74, when the Greeks were morally and legally responsible, as the majority, for all citizens on the island, they gave this problem a low priority. Greek trade unionists made admirable efforts to enlist Turkish Cypriots as fellow-workers. But at central-government level there was a perceptible stinginess in allocating economic aid or in sharing resources for education, development and housing. This reproduced, in social terms, a version of the wider and deeper national problem. The Turks, who were a minority but whose leaders talked as a majority, were economic inferiors. While the Greeks, who were a majority in Cyprus but a minority in the region, were economic and entrepreneurial superiors. This jealousy only reinforced the ‘double minority’ problem of Cyprus, where each side felt itself the aggrieved party.
2. Culture. The Turks are a minority in Cyprus, but they are a Turkish minority. This makes them the heirs of a very strong and distinct national identity. Throughout the years of independence, the Makarios government failed to set up any institution specifically designed to meet Turkish needs. As Kyriakos Markides puts it in his book The Rise and Fall of the Cyprus Republic, ‘Not a single committee of experts was established for the rational and systematic study and analysis of data relating to internal Turkish Cypriot and Turkish politics.’
And as Costa P. Kyrris of the Cyprus Research Centre put it in his estimable book Peaceful Coexistence in Cyprus (1977):
‘The very fact that the present book, whatever its value, has been written only in 1976-77 instead of some sixty or eighty or at least thirty years ago, points to our belated realization of the crucial importance of systematic knowledge of our Turkish neighbours, their problems, mentality, origins and relations with us. This delay has been fatal for the inter ethnic developments in the island.’
Since 1974 there has been an upsurge of interest and feeling on this point among Greek Cypriots, but it is difficult not to agree with Mr Kyrris that it came rather late. Minerva’s owl took wing only when the dusk was thickening.
Greek Cypriots are fond of quoting those British figures from the past, notably Sir Ronald Storrs, who were sensible enough to realize that if they felt themselves to be Greek, they were Greek. The same must be held to apply to the Turks. It is true that Cyprus has a long history of symbiosis, typical of Ottoman Asia Minor. There was for some time a local sect known as the Linobambakoi or in English linen-cottons’ who, as their nickname implies, were dualists. They practised both Christian and Muslim rites, and each took both a Christian and a Muslim name. Perhaps as a partial result of this and other symbiotic elements, Turkish Cypriots had adopted the practice of giving themselves surnames long before Kemal Ataturk’s reforms made the adoption of a surname obligatory on the mainland. Many Christian Cypriots converted to Islam under Ottoman rule, if only to escape the special taxes from which ‘believers’ were exempt. Several Turkish Cypriot villages bore the names of Christian saints as a result – or did until the enforced Turkification of place names by the Denktash regime.
All of this deserves to be remembered, as do the dozens of mixed villages that existed before the 1974 apartheid system was imposed. But the Turks, if only in response to the nationalist revolt among the Greeks, have taken to a more assertive definition of their Turkishness, and it is idle to pretend otherwise. You cannot make a child grow smaller, and the Turkish Cypriots will not, whatever their disillusionment with Anatolian rule, voluntarily revert to the position they occupied before 1974. A future solution will depend largely on the intelligence of the Greeks (who also have little nostalgia for that period of junta menace) in recognizing this. It goes without saying that a Turkish occupation which prevents Greek and Turkish Cypriots from even meeting one another is the chief obstacle even to a consideration of this point.
3. Religion. There is every reason why the Orthodox Church should occupy a special place in Greek Cypriot life, since it has been one of the guardians and repositories of national feeling for centuries past. Yet the presence of a Greek ethnarch as simultaneous head of state made it that much more difficult for Turkish Cypriots to identify with the new order inaugurated by independence. With the accession of President Kyprianou, Church and state have become more separated. In retrospect, it would have been politic for Archbishop Makarios to have made more efforts in the same direction. A future unified Cyprus would have no choice but to be secular in politics and law.
4. Military forces. It was clearly a mistake ever to permit the stationing of foreign military forces on Cyprus. Archbishop Makarios once told me, when I asked him what he considered to have been his greatest error, that he most regretted allowing the Greek contingent to settle permanently on the island. We have seen how the Turks used a small, initial military presence to expand their army from a few enclaves across one-third of Cyprus. And the British bases have been used to assist in partitioning rather than securing the island. The bases have also acted as a constant temptation to outsiders to treat Cyprus as a tactical or strategic pawn rather than as a country with a complex individuality. They serve no purpose that cannot be discharged in another way, and the original reason for their presence – the safeguarding of British control over Suez, Jordan and Iraq – has long since evaporated. A unified Cyprus would require international guarantees of demilitarization, which would have to be complete if it was to have any point.
Having started with Milan Kundera’s warning about amnesia, it may seem perverse to end with Renan’s advice about forgetting. But, if Cyprus is to recover from the blows it has been dealt, it will have to acquire a common memory and this will mean less stress on individual or sectarian grievances. If people remember everything, they go mad. What needs to be remembered, set down and memorized, is the injury done to all Cypriots, to the common home, by distant, uncaring enemies.
One can write the word ‘solution’ glibly, at a time when such a term seems more Utopian than ever. The enemies of an independent Cyprus still seem overwhelmingly strong. Even if the neglected steps towards intercommunal composure had been taken in the brief and arduous years of independence, it is impossible to doubt that these enemies would have been just as assiduous. And one chauvinist or Fascist can destroy in one day (a rumour of rape, a fire in the church or mosque) what the inhabitants of a peaceful, integrated village have spent generations building.
Those who believe that the Cypriots ‘brought it on themselves’ have a duty to explain away the known facts of British colonial policy; the intrusion of the Greek junta and its backers; the creation by Ankara of an armed movement in favour of partition; and the declared desire of the United States government to ‘remove’ Makarios. These pressures, exerted on a small people with almost no defences of their own, were the major determining causes of the present misery.
This is not to say that the present misery is, in all its aspects, the intended result of outside interference. The Acheson-Ball partition might, if implemented to the strict letter, have been less outrageously inconsistent with demography than the status quo. But the policy and its implementation, both formulated without the consent of the Cypriots, cannot be so easily distinguished. The groups and parties who were chosen to bring about partition were violent, unstable and selfish. The responsibility for what occurred, then, rests with those who equipped and encouraged them. The apple did not fall very far from the tree.
I am confident that I will be accused of putting forward a ‘conspiracy theory’. Actually, what I have argued is that there was collusion between unevenly matched and differently motivated forces, who for varying reasons feared or disliked an independent Cyprus. Ten years after the disaster, we know more than the victims did at the time. Nothing that has been published or uncovered since, however, contradicts the terrible suspicions that the victims had then. Those who deny the collusion theory; those who interpret events as a mere chapter of accidents, have a great deal more to explain away than those who accept it.
My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?
I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your minds
As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,
Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.
Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.
New prisoners bring news. The evening air unravels
The friendly scents from fruit trees, creepers and trellised vines.
In airless rooms, conversations are gently renewed.
An optimist licking his finger detects a breeze
And I begin to ignore the insidious voice
Which insists in whispers: The chance once lost is life lost
For the idea, for the losers and their dead
Whose memorials will never be honoured or built
Until they and those they have betrayed are forgotten –
Not this year, not next year, not in your time.
From ‘Prison Island’ by James Fenton (The Memory of War: Poems 1968-1982)
These lines, from the best English poet of his time, have a certain ache to them. They have all the melancholy of remembered bravado and betrayal, as well as all the agony of loss and defeat. Yet they are, just, redeemed from utter despair. ‘The insidious voice’, which argues that an opportunity missed is the knell of finality, has to be heeded but answered – even, perhaps, resisted.
We are all prisoners of knowledge. To know how Cyprus was betrayed, and to have studied the record of that betrayal, is to make oneself unhappy and to spoil, perhaps for ever, one’s pleasure in visiting one of the world’s most enchanting islands. Nothing will ever restore the looted treasures, the bereaved families, the plundered villages and the groves and hillsides scalded with napalm. Nor will anything mitigate the record of the callous and crude politicians who regarded Cyprus as something on which to scribble their inane and conceited designs. But fatalism would be the worst betrayal of all. The acceptance, the legitimization of what was done – those things must be repudiated. Such a refusal has a value beyond Cyprus, in showing that acquiescence in injustice is not ‘realism’. Once the injustice has been set down and described, and called by its right name, acquiescence in it becomes impossible. That is why one writes about Cyprus in sorrow but more – much more – in anger.
Read all parts of the serialisation here:
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.
