tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31313504239570682042024-02-20T16:51:00.177+00:00Hellenic Antidote‘The unexamined life is not worth living’
SocratesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger187125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-25499936072621680582023-08-12T23:25:00.005+01:002023-08-12T23:26:56.562+01:00America in Cyprus: a history of malice, cynicism and hypocrisy<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkINV9DaCUPIvtB2z2m_kPHacM81tHQQlKrzwjJjWxx9SgI1wzUpjQGk1j189jP39GEu7inAX0PhDDWUCfqFlt4tfyuLaU3PI6SiGcGvhLsZGqI5BL-B8O8wXksc0cd97wY70XrOGGOckOPxoDPhuI9lhkgLLWk6hrghM8aQIOuRCF3fq_1zf0F0P5HAE/s269/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="188" data-original-width="269" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkINV9DaCUPIvtB2z2m_kPHacM81tHQQlKrzwjJjWxx9SgI1wzUpjQGk1j189jP39GEu7inAX0PhDDWUCfqFlt4tfyuLaU3PI6SiGcGvhLsZGqI5BL-B8O8wXksc0cd97wY70XrOGGOckOPxoDPhuI9lhkgLLWk6hrghM8aQIOuRCF3fq_1zf0F0P5HAE/s1600/images.jpg" width="269" /></a></div>Here’s a fascinating and, ultimately, nauseating <a href="https://adst.org/Readers/Cyprus.pdf" target="_blank">document</a> compiled by the US <a href="https://adst.org/" target="_blank">Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training</a> consisting of 500+ pages of oral history interviews with some 70 American diplomats – ambassadors, consular officers, desk officers, special emissaries, etc – who served in or covered Cyprus, Greece, Turkey during the period 1950-2005 and their observations about Cypriot political developments during the period. <br /><p></p><p>The events the US foreign service bureaucrats discuss include the EOKA uprising; Cyprus’ independence; the Turkish Cypriot insurrection in 1963; the deterioration of the political situation in Greece and the emergence of the junta – how this affected Cyprus; the junta’s coup against Makarios; the Turkish invasion; the efforts by Greek Cypriots to recover from the devastation of Turkey’s onslaught; the various efforts to achieve a Cyprus settlement, concluding with the Annan plan in 2004.<br /><br />The accounts of these officials provide an insight into how America’s global power was put together and maintained. In Cyprus’s case, we see it was done with malice, cynicism and hypocrisy. Of the dozens of US diplomats involved with Cyprus over 60 years, only one or two can escape denunciation. <br /><br />The primary interviewer in these oral histories is Charles Stuart Kennedy, who was US consul general in Athens from 1970-74. Kennedy is not interested in any critical or sophisticated assessment of American policy on Cyprus. Rather, he relentlessly tries to direct his interviewees into supporting his own prejudices and views – which involve an intense dislike of Greeks, a contempt for Greek Cypriots, and an obsession with the influence of the Greek American lobby, which he blames for the Cyprus problem not being decisively taken off the agenda as it should have been, according to him, in 1974 with Turkey’s invasion.<br /><br />It’s become unfashionable nowadays to talk about America’s responsibility for bringing catastrophe to Cyprus and cliched to point out Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s malign influence in the entire affair. <br /><br />However, the view that America abetted, one way or another, the Athens junta in overthrowing the Makarios government and, then, Turkey in its invasion and partitioning of Cyprus – and that Henry Kissinger played the dirtiest of roles in these events – is fully vindicated by these oral histories. <br /><br />Here are a some more specific points that emerge from reading these oral histories: <br /><br />From the outset, the prevailing US view was that: ‘Cyprus was not going to be allowed to destroy NATO’. Everything had to be done to stop Greece and Turkey going to war over this insignificant dot on the map. <br /><br />In effect, America’s desire to protect the smooth functioning of NATO meant placating Turkey, since Turkey was regarded as far more important to the US’s cold war and strategic interests than Greece.<br /><br />The democratically-elected president of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, for the Americans, was ‘a very unsavory, untrustworthy, unpredictable man.’ He is further described as uncooperative, slippery, Byzantine, a tribal chieftain.<br /><br />However, Washington didn’t really despise Makarios for his ‘Byzantine’ personality, but because he objected to US plans to ‘solve’ the Cyprus problem by doing away with Cyprus’ independence, Cyprus’ ability to determine its out future, and making the island a NATO protectorate. Makarios opposition to the Acheson plans, devised by former secretary of state Dean Acheson, which envisaged abolishing the Republic of Cyprus and partitioning Cyprus between Greece and Turkey, was explained by Washington by suggesting Makarios was vain and enjoying the trappings of being head of an independent country.<br /><br />Making Cyprus a NATO outpost is what mattered to Washington and Cypriot independence – embodied by Makarios – was the obstacle to its ambitions. <br /><br />This is how Walter Silva, part of the State Department’s Cyprus Task Force in 1974 describes the prevailing US view of Cyprus: <br /><br /><b>‘It was such a small problem. There was a great deal of searching in the Department to find out what possible interest we had in whether Cyprus was divided between Greece and Turkey, whether it was united with Greece under the "enosis" plan or whether it all went with Turkey. In any of those scenarios Cyprus would be part of NATO and become a NATO stronghold, the head of the spear aimed at the heart of the Middle East sort of thing. I don't recall any strong feelings among those who had served in Greece, served in Cyprus or served in Turkey. They usually took the positions of their former hosts. There was some of that clientitis thing. But other than that it was hard to get anybody above the Desk level really excited. They were excited by the possibility that we could use Cyprus, that would be the thing. It would have been nice.’</b></p><p><b>Q: Use Cyprus how? </b></p><p><b>SILVA: As a military forward base. That would have been very nice, you see, if we could replace the British there and have naval and air forces that close to our interests in the Middle East. But it didn't turn out that way. Independent Cyprus was not about to become a forward base for the Sixth Fleet.’</b></p><p>American officials needed to justify Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, which they knew was accompanied by atrocities and ethnic cleansing, by asserting that Greek Cypriots had it coming for the way they had supposedly mistreated the Turkish Cypriots – not just in the 1960s but, apparently, throughout Cyprus’ history. Partition, therefore, not only served NATO/US interests but was somehow justice being served to Greek Cypriots for their oppressive chauvinism. </p><p>This is James Morton, State Department Cyprus Desk Office 1975-6:<br /><br /><b>‘I think, and I had previously served in Greece, basically the feeling amongst most officers serving in Cyprus, and it wasn't a large embassy, was that the Greek Cypriot community had brought it on themselves. The distribution of population was such that small isolated pockets of Turkish Cypriots kind of sprinkled around the larger Greek sea within the island of Cyprus. We heard stories of how for fun on a Sunday Greek Cypriots would jump in their car and ride through villages and fire and even shoot and kill women and children in these pockets. The Turks were totally vulnerable. Finally because of all sorts of events… the coup, Nicos Sampson and a lot of stuff that has been recorded elsewhere… the Turks had just had it. I feel personally, and I can say it now more than I could say it then, that they were fully justified in coming in to protect their brethren.’</b></p><p>American maligning and dehumanising of Greek Cypriots continued after Turkey’s invasion. What Greek Cypriots had endured was minimised, if not dismissed. <br /><br />This is Geoffrey Chapman, State Department Cyprus Desk Officer, 1977-79, claiming that the refugees were pampered and exerted undue influence in determining the island’s future:<br /><br /><b>‘The Greek Cypriot government was of course under heavy pressure from the refugee organizations, representing Greek Cypriots who had been forced out of their homes in the north and would settle for nothing less than returning to them. A lot of these refugees quite deliberately refused to integrate with the rest of Greek Cyprus, which they could easily have done, and instead maintained a refugee status. The U.S. taxpayer [through foreign aid] funded quite luxurious housing for them; they by no means lived in what one normally would conceive to be refugee camps. The refugees were a very powerful lobby and no Greek Cypriot president or other leading politician could afford to ignore them, and their demands were absolute. So Greek Cypriot flexibility and ability to compromise was circumscribed from the word go.’</b> </p><p>In these oral histories, American officials overwhelmingly reject any responsibility for the Greek junta’s coup against Makarios and Turkey’s invasion and are contemptuous of Greek and Greek Cypriot anti-Americanism after 1974, believing it represented Greeks’ political immaturity, always looking to blame others for their own problems and mistakes.</p><p>US hypocrisy and deceit is also conspicuous whenever Nikos Sampson enters the Cyprus story. <br />Sampson is variously described in these oral histories as despicable, a psychopathic killer, an extreme Greek nationalist, a Turk-hater, a thug, etc, and that with him installed as president of Cyprus by the Athens junta, Turkey was fully justified in invading the island. </p><p>This is how James Williams, political officer Nicosia (1973-75) described his encounters with Sampson: </p><p><b>‘Sampson would usually be sitting at a huge desk when you went into his office with shelves that were lined with newspapers and magazines and books. I doubt he’d read many of them. But quite often, and I’m not joking, he would be looking at the centerfold of a Playboy magazine when you came in. I don’t know if this was for my benefit as an American diplomat, or if that was his standard reading material. But he was totally unembarrassed about it, put it to the side, and then would talk rather freely about how he saw the political development within the Greek Cypriot community, or within Cyprus.’</b><br /><br />Not once is it recognised that Sampson was a long-standing CIA asset, valued for his anti-communism, and that the small media empire that allowed him to become well-off and prominent in Cypriot society was covertly funded by American intelligence services.</p><p>The ‘institutionalised tilt’ towards Turkey in US foreign policy, a result of Turkey’s perceived geo-strategic worth, leads to Turkish motives in Cyprus being taken at face value and rarely, if ever, described in negative or critical terms. </p><p>Rather, Turkey’s interests in Cyprus – defined as a desire to protect the ‘beleaguered’ Turkish minority and prevent the encircling of Turkey by Greek islands – are presented as rational and reasonable.<br />Even when the Turks tell the Americans to their faces the real reason they invaded Cyprus, the Americans don’t demur let alone understand the implications of what they have unleashed. </p><p>This is William Crawford, US ambassador to Cyprus, 1974-78 reporting a discussion he had with Turkey’s ‘ambassador’ in occupied Cyprus after the invasion: </p><p><b>‘The [Turkish ‘ambassador’] said, “Turkey is an imperial power and a continental power. That we are unnaturally prevented from breathing to the north and the east by the presence of the Soviet Union makes it all the more important that we be able to breathe to the south and to the west. 1974 solved the southern dimension. It remains to solve the western dimension.”’</b></p><p>America’s efforts to contribute to UN initiatives aimed at a Cyprus settlement after 1974 come across as half-hearted and cynical. Most American diplomats shared the Turkish view that the Cyprus problem had been solved in 1974 and that any attempts to reverse matters were superfluous. </p><p>Others, who did acknowledge that the status quo was not entirely desirable, expended most of their energy trying to get Greek Cypriots to agree a settlement that accepted the ‘facts on the ground’ created by Turkey’s invasion. </p><p>American interest in Cyprus after Turkey’s invasion only ever peaked when they believed a settlement would help Turkey. It’s clear from these oral histories that the entire Annan plan process was developed as a means to remove obstacles to Turkey’s accession to the EU. </p><p>The interests of Cypriots, fairness and functionality, were last on America minds when it came to devising settlement proposals. In fact, the US worked towards a bizonal bicommunal federation even though they knew such a plan, if ever implemented, would likely fail. </p><p>This is Nelson Ledsky, US special coordinator on Cyprus (1989-1991), giving his oral history in 2003, on the fairness and durability of a bizonal bicommunal federation:</p><p><b>‘I think there will be a negotiated solution. Whether that will also lead to peace on the island, I cannot say. I don’t think the agreement now being negotiated will actually work. I don’t think the country of Cyprus is a viable entity as it is currently envisaged by the draft agreement. This agreement does not provide for a workable solution; it provides for a solution, which over time will probably not be sustainable. Changes will have to be negotiated or imposed. I think, for example, that the Greek Cypriots will eventually take over the whole island. [Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf] Denktash’s fears may be realized. I think it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the agreement as presently constituted will fall apart, two or three or five years after it has been assigned. The governmental system now being envisaged is intrinsically unworkable.’</b></p><p><b> </b>Finally, to bring things up to date, there is nothing new in the current Turkish insistence that before negotiations for a Cyprus settlement can start, the ’Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ and Turkish Cypriot ‘sovereign equality’ have to be recognised. </p><p>This is the same position Denktash took in the 1990s. </p><p>Alfred Moses, special presidential envoy for the Cyprus conflict, 1997-2000, describes how these seemingly impossible Turkish demands were overcome in 2000 during the Annan process:</p><p><b>‘We later had another long session in Geneva in November 2000. [I came up with an initiative] intended to deal with Denktash’s insistence that there be prior recognition of the sovereignty of the TRNC as a condition to moving to meaningful negotiations on a final agreement. I came up with language for Secretary General Annan to use which was to the effect that the parties would be equal in the negotiations, and that any final resolution would take into account the equal status of the parties. Denktash saw that as an enormous victory. It was really intended to move Denktash off his position on recognition of TRNC’s sovereignty. He played it as a big win, whereupon Clerides [Cyprus’ president] played it as a big loss, and withdrew from the talks. I had to hold his hand, literally, in his suite in the Waldorf Towers, before he announced he would continue the proximity talks.'</b><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-54142502671537789842023-04-07T17:05:00.004+01:002023-04-08T13:21:44.252+01:00An unsettled state: majority rule versus federalism in Cyprus, 1957-1964, by Diana Markides<p><b><u></u></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><u><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8dlscfmvzbwMIhA9c_T8grMJxiE0BUO1WUJh5p3DVYn8V3MWss3_GgrYvLh3PKpHC427YGpoIGBvelen52IxJFCviGCkE0Trfv_9mmZKmdANvlOD9eoO8YZbY7yA9wJTF5ZE5RtA1q5d_Wi98QAwodVVkPASfbFPC9t5w2_4lHYVCHtI4kjbTmMKj/s636/makarios-kucuk-1960.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="437" data-original-width="636" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8dlscfmvzbwMIhA9c_T8grMJxiE0BUO1WUJh5p3DVYn8V3MWss3_GgrYvLh3PKpHC427YGpoIGBvelen52IxJFCviGCkE0Trfv_9mmZKmdANvlOD9eoO8YZbY7yA9wJTF5ZE5RtA1q5d_Wi98QAwodVVkPASfbFPC9t5w2_4lHYVCHtI4kjbTmMKj/s320/makarios-kucuk-1960.jpg" width="320" /></a></u></b></div><b><u><br />An unsettled state: majority rule versus federalism in Cyprus, 1957-1964</u></b><u><b>, by Diana Markides</b></u><br /><br />The violent Greek-Cypriot campaign for union with Greece was launched in April 1955. A year earlier, confronted with a groundswell of political agitation, the British Government had withdrawn its Middle East Headquarters from Egypt and settled hurriedly at Dhekelia and Episkopi. The move was overseen by Sir Antony Eden while he was Foreign Secretary in Winston Churchill’s final Government. In July 1956, by which time Eden had become Prime Minister, Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and, in doing so, exposed the Anglo-French inability to react effectively. These events, occurring in quick succession, fuelled Turkish fears that Britain would shortly withdraw from Cyprus as well. In fact, fierce reactions to the events in Egypt within the imperialist right wing of the Conservative party made it impossible for Eden’s Government and, subsequently, Macmillan’s, to contemplate such a move. Meanwhile an all-time low in Anglo-American relations resulted in enhanced British dependence on Turkey in the region.<br /><br />British regional concerns, the Greek-Cypriots’ Enosist ambitions and Turkey’s plans for a post-British Cyprus all combined to ensure the decolonisation of the island would not be a strictly Anglo-Cypriot affair: it would be characterised by the ambiguity and the competing regional ambitions that had surrounded the acquisition of the island by Britain in 1878, and which had confounded attempts to make it a run-of-the-mill Crown Colony after the Great War. Aspirations for self-determination in Cyprus, aroused by the Wilsonian vision of a post-war world, would be ever-dogged, as they were throughout the lands once ruled by the Ottoman Sultans, by the hotchpotch of populations they contained and the inevitable frictions that ensued once attempts were made to make ethnicity the main criterion of sovereignty.<br /><br />The Greek-Cypriots had not taken into account the discomfort of the Turkish-Cypriots at the prospect of union with Greece – they believed their co-islanders to be an insignificant minority. More dangerously, they had not considered any possible Turkish reaction, making a wrong assumption, one that continued well into the 1960s and beyond, that Turkey was a tame creature of the Western Powers and would do their bidding. This was a salient error. On the contrary, in pursuing its aims in Cyprus, the Turkish Government took full advantage of British dependence on the Turkish Cypriots within the island, once the violent campaign for <i>Enosis</i> was in full swing, and of British dependence on Turkey in the region.<br /><br />In March 1956, in an attempt to bring the Greek-Cypriots to call a cease-fire and come to the negotiating table, the British Government conceded an enigmatic acknowledgement of Greek-Cypriot self-determination in principle, but summoned international arguments to postpone its implementation while hoping to persuade the Cypriots to opt for a new plan for internal self-government. Indeed, the British proposals, being drawn up at that time by the eminent lawyer, Lord Radcliffe, indicated a British willingness, subject to certain restrictions, to consider a Greek-Cypriot majority in the legislature. It was the prospect of a British-led move towards a majority-ruled self-governed island that led Ankara to go beyond diplomatic representations regarding Britain’s Cyprus policy and become directly involved in creating conditions on the island to maintain the Turkish-Cypriot community as a separate political entity. Ankara had already proposed a communally federal system of government in Cyprus to Lord Radcliffe by April 1956. He had rejected the idea outright on the grounds ‘there was no pattern of territorial separation between the two communities’. Moreover, he considered ‘the equal representation for the two communities of such different sizes, undemocratic’.<br /><br />Maintaining influence in a post-colonial Cyprus, a <i>sine qua non </i>for the Turkish Government, meant ensuring there would <i>not</i> be Greek-Cypriot majority rule. In its view, the Turkish-Cypriot minority needed to be perceived as a politically distinct community. From the start of 1957, the Turkish Government would begin creating circumstances in which the two communities would be increasingly separated. In this they had the growing support of Turkish-Cypriot leadership which began to look to Turkey, rather than to Britain, for security. Increasingly, the British were drawn to positions that would accommodate the stronger party, Turkey at the expense of the Greek Government, on whose never more than lukewarm support the Greek-Cypriots depended. Whitehall felt the Greek Government’s demands could be ignored with impunity, since its loyalty to NATO was a given and Greece’s strategic role in the Middle East was limited, compared to that of Turkey.<br /><br />In December 1956, in the midst of the Suez crisis and under growing pressure from Ankara, Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, made a statement in the House of Commons offering separate self-determination for the Turkish-Cypriots in the event of a British withdrawal. He stated that it would be:<br /><br />‘The purpose of Her Majesty’s Government to ensure that any exercise of self-determination should be effected in such a manner that the Turkish Cypriot community, no less than the Greek Cypriot community, shall, in the special circumstances of Cyprus, be given freedom to decide for themselves their future status. In other words, Her Majesty’s Government recognise that the exercise of self-determination in such a mixed population must include partition among the eventual options.’<br /><br />This statement has been interpreted as the launching of a partitionist policy for Cyprus. This was not exactly the case. Partition of Cyprus would have been considered, according to Governor, Sir John Harding a ‘confession of failure’. The intention was to use it as a threat. The partition of the island between Greece and Turkey would entail a British departure, and the British did not want to leave. On the contrary, they hoped that the promise of separate self-determination for the Turkish-Cypriots would be enough to satisfy Ankara and, at the same time, frighten the Greek Government and the Greek-Cypriots into abandoning <i>Enosis</i> and negotiating Lord Radcliffe’s plan. The trouble was that it was precisely the fear that Lord Radcliffe’s plan would be put into effect that brought Turkish-Cypriots out onto the streets in Cyprus to demand ‘partition or death’. In a sense, by 1957 the British had been left behind. The other parties immediately involved were manoeuvring for a stake in a post-British Cyprus and pursued very specific and contradictory aims to this end. Britain was trying to juggle appeasing Ankara while conceding enough to the Greek-Cypriots to make the continuation of British rule palatable. Thus the pill of Lennox Boyd’s declaration offering separate self-determination to the Turkish-Cypriots was sugared, at the Americans’ bidding, by the release of the Greek-Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios, from the Seychelles in March 1957.<br /><br />This chapter will suggest that from 1957, increasingly, the <i>de facto</i> struggle was between <i>majority</i> rule, espoused by Makarios, and <i>federation</i> – rather than between <i>Enosis</i> – and partition. Majority rule would mean, inevitably, rule by a very substantial Greek-Cypriot majority, leaving 18 per cent of the population, which was Turkish-Cypriot, with little political leverage. These diametrically opposed political aims were in place well before independence, and they remained at the heart of the failure to implement the complex constitution of the new republic after 1960 – they also predated inter-communal violence. While Makarios was already signalling a guarded interest in self-government, as he offered ‘an encouraging word about Radcliffe’ while still in the Seychelles, a federal structure was, from 1956, the preferred control valve for the Turkish Government and the Turkish-Cypriot leadership: it would ensure the Turkish-Cypriot minority was perceived as a community, a distinct political entity, rather than as a minority that could be politically swallowed up by the majority.<br /><br />Turkish efforts to secure and sustain a communal administrative structure to establish a communal power base, as well as Greek-Cypriot efforts to resist this tendency, will be examined. The chapter will highlight the central but elusive role of communal control over territory in this regard. It will be argued that disputed control over territory, which could be physically defended, was perhaps a more combustible element in the outbreak of violence in December 1963 than the 13 point constitutional proposals submitted by the Greek-Cypriot leadership. From the late 1950s the Damoclean sword of partition, threatened continually by Turkey and, subsequently, by Britain, as the likely consequence of the continuing violent campaign for Enosis, disguised the fact that it would not be enough for the Greek-Cypriots to give up their demand for union with Greece. They would also have to eschew majority rule.<br /><br />In the wake of the first wave of inter-communal violence that came to a head in the summer of 1958, Archbishop Makarios publicly declared a willingness to negotiate for an independent republic. In doing so, he believed he was making a massive compromise, and would thus avoid the partition of the island between Greece and Turkey. Indeed, a large number of his Greek-Cypriot flock believed he had gone too far and had betrayed the cause. In fact, the regional context in which majority rule might have been possible had been superseded by 1957. Greek-Cypriot majority rule was as unacceptable to Ankara as <i>Enosis</i>, and Ankara was a vital ally for Britain in the region. Although it was never publicly stated to be Ankara’s policy, the gradual separation of the population begun in <i>Dark 1958</i>, as Niazi Kizilyurek has recently described the year, was to continue through the 1960s, culminating in the surgical ethnic cleansing carried out by the Turkish army in 1974.<br /><br />After independence, each side pushed harder and faster for these ends than the other side was prepared to tolerate; the position of each side was complicated by the extremist elements within it that still insisted on nothing less than the immediate union with Greece, on the one hand, and the partition of the island between Greece and Turkey on the other. Generally, the Greek-Cypriot community would not disavow its vision of <i>Enosis</i>. Given its long history, to abandon the quest for such a holy grail would be political suicide, and this remained the case beyond 1960. To allow the spectre of <i>Enosis</i> to linger, however, to hint that it was still the ultimate goal, fuelled fears for the security and well-being of the Turkish-Cypriot minority and legitimised the Turkish insistence on iron-clad safeguards against its political extinction.<br /><br />Consolidation of political control in areas where the minority was more concentrated was a method of maximising political strength vis-à-vis the majority. Cyprus has been described by Charles Foley as an ‘ethnographical fruit cake’ with Greek and Turkish-Cypriot fruit throughout. It was the demographic intermingling of the two communities on the island that led Radcliffe to declare communal separation impossible. Nevertheless, the Turkish-Cypriots were more concentrated in the main towns of the island. Since the beginning of British rule, these towns had been run successfully by mixed councils. In 1957 a Turkish campaign had been launched for communally separate municipalities. This was the start of a gradual but persistent strategy to consolidate the Turkish-Cypriot population in certain areas under exclusively Turkish-Cypriot political direction. In territorial terms, the Turkish-Cypriots set out to turn the municipalities, for so long a platform for the Enosist ideal, into the Trojan horses of separatism.<br /><br />A <i>de facto</i> separate Turkish-Cypriot administration was set up unilaterally during the inter-communal riots in June 1958. The forcible takeover of municipal property in the five main towns took place under the cover of these riots; indeed, this must have been their major objective. In occupying the municipal markets in Nicosia, Limassol and Paphos, Turkish-Cypriot leadership also struck at the hub of traditional urban commercial interaction on the island, as drawing the Turkish-Cypriots away from dependence on the majority community was an integral part of separatist policy. June 1958, then, saw the beginning of a long process of creating situations which facilitated the segregation of communities. Although the movement of population at this stage was very marginal (‘about three tenths of one per cent’, according to United States Consul, Toby Belcher), it was indicatively described by Turkish Foreign Minister Fatin Zorlu as ‘a population exchange’.<br /><br />These adjustments to demographic distribution on the island were not intended to be short-term, nor were they restricted to the five main towns – they were made from the top down. A telling example is that of Vroisha. In the summer of 1958 the Turkish-Cypriot leadership in Nicosia pressed the Colonial Administration to transfer the population of the tiny Turkish Cypriot hamlet of Vroisha, deep in the Paphos forest, to Mora, a Turkish-Cypriot village north-east of Nicosia. On investigation, the British District Commissioner discovered a petition was circulating among the villagers couched in terms of ‘the poverty of the villagers, their unemployment and their constant terror of EOKA’. In fact, he reported, they were quite safe, in high spirits and more interested in lobbying for a new road. The petition had been sent to the Mukhtar by the Federation of the Associations of Turkish-Cypriots, an organisation run by Rauf Denktash. It was printed in English, which no one in the village could read. The Vroishians stayed in their village in 1958, finally abandoning it in 1964, when they sought refuge in the Turkish-Cypriot enclave of Limnitis/Yesilirmak. There is no record of inter-communal strife in Vroisha, but the security situation island-wide had deteriorated considerably for the Turkish-Cypriots in the intervening years. Fear, spiked by news of individual incidents elsewhere, was a potent factor in creating insecurity.<br /><br />The material in an interesting ‘migrated’ Cyprus file, recently released by the British National Archives, suggests the internal migration of Turkish-Cypriots was already being organised by the Turkish Cypriot leadership in Nicosia with the encouragement of the Government in Ankara, sometimes with a less than willing Turkish-Cypriot population. It is clear it was discouraged by the Colonial Government, as developments concerning Vroisha in 1958 indicate. In one of many characteristic accounts in this file, the Governor reported to the Colonial Secretary in September 1958:<br /><br />‘The heads of six families who left Akoursos (Paphos district), for Skylloura (north of Nicosia), have now returned to Ktima. They added that 28 of the 30 families who had moved now wished to return but cannot do so without Government assistance in transport and in repairing such of their houses as have been damaged during their absence. Commissioners are being informed that Government is prepared to assist in the provision of transport to enable persons who’ve left their villages to return … It is also reported that other families from Lemba would be willing to return but are apprehensive of the welcome they would receive from the Turks of Lemba.’<br /><br />Meanwhile a telegram from the Foreign Office to the British ambassador in Ankara, in August 1958, instructed him to take:<br /><br />‘A suitable opportunity to remind the Turkish ministers of the Colonial Secretary’s remarks to the Turkish Amb[assador], and to impress upon them that if migration is encouraged for political reasons, this would only have an adverse effect on community relations in the island, apart from the sufferings of the villagers concerned.’<br /><br />Nevertheless, during the transition period at the end of 1959, Rauf Denktash, the president of the Turkish Communal Chamber and the more abrasive of the two Turkish-Cypriot leaders, was still refusing to co-operate with Sir Hugh Foot, the last Governor of Cyprus, in facilitating the return of Greek-Cypriot inhabitants to the large rural centre of Lefka. They were a minority there, had fled en masse during the inter-communal riots in 1958 and never did return. This tendency of the Turkish-Cypriots to stall in the face of – admittedly mild – British pressure to facilitate the return of refugees to their original homes was again apparent in 1964. That Ankara was solidly behind this reluctance was indicated most explicitly by a conversation between Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Cemal Erkin and the British ambassador, Sir Bernard Burrows. At this time, the British in Cyprus were anxious to increase their waning credibility as peacekeepers for the Greek-Cypriots, who accused them of bolstering the Turkish-Cypriot enclaves and the federal or partitionist policy this entailed, instead of encouraging the return home of Turkish-Cypriot refugees. The British Government wanted the Vice-President, Fazil Küçük, to make a statement to the effect that ‘Turkish Cypriots had left their homes and properties only because of the threat to their lives and properties and that if that threat were removed, they would resume their place in the Cyprus Administration’. They attempted to enlist the help of the Turkish Government in bringing this about. Feridun Cemal Erkin was indignant. ‘This amounted’, he said, ‘to asking the Turkish Cypriots, and indeed, the Turkish Government, to give up their aim of federation based on the geographical separation of the two communities’. There could be no question of their doing this, and he wanted assurances that the Turks were not being asked to ‘do the impossible by renouncing their policy of federation’. The close involvement of Ankara in this strategy of demographic consolidation of the Turkish-Cypriots within the island, and its connection to avoiding majority rule and promoting the prospect of a federal system, can be traced from 1956 right through to the present.<br /><br />Back in 1958, when the British had balked at the creation of two minute, dysfunctional municipalities in each of the island’s towns, Denktash indicatively accused them of being ‘arbitrary spectators before the tyrannic rule of the Greek majority’. Perhaps Denktash picked up the phraseology from the military circles in Ankara to whom he was close. Ismet Inönü’s Government came into power in 1959 as a result of a military coup against the popular Menderes. Inönü’s military Government urged strict adherence to the <i>Turkish</i> constitution as ‘a shield against the tyranny of the majority’.<br /><br />The Turkish Government was sensitive to the link between majority legislatures and legitimising changes of status because of developments in Crete, for example, during the European-guaranteed autonomy there in the first years of the twentieth century. More recently and more significantly, on the eve of the Second World War Ankara manipulated the electorate in the Hatay, then in French mandated Syria, so the legislature there would legitimise its ultimate annexation by Turkey. This episode has been recently analysed in detail by Sarah Shields in her fascinating book, <i>Fezzes in the River</i>.<br /><br />First, Turkey insisted upon the Hatay’s independence for French-mandated Syria, and this was achieved by international agreement in September 1938. The reluctant agreement of the Syrian Government followed promises of full independence or Damascus. The Hatay State’s independence was guaranteed by France and Turkey, with proportional representation introduced by the League of Nations to protect minority rights. This tended, on the contrary, to fuel confrontation, as the attempt to ethnically categorise a population that had never considered its ethnicity was transformed into an international struggle for political influence. If Turkey’s influence over the sanjak required a Turkish majority, then by hook or by crook a Turkish majority must be created. For the League of Nations electoral commission sent out to supervise electoral registration, the attempt to categorise the population in ethnic terms proved a nightmare, and the French, reluctant to risk losing the Turkish alliance, were dragged along. William George Rendel, head of the Eastern Department at the Foreign Office, described the situation:<br /><br />‘We have very good reason to believe that the Turks are in fact no more than about 40 per cent of the total population of the Sanjak, as the French and local authorities have always contended. What the Turks want is that, whatever the true proportions of the population may be, there shall be at least a 60 per cent Turkish majority. The work of the committee will therefore consist in altering those provisions of the electoral law which are intended to secure a free expression of the wishes of the inhabitants of the Sanjak, so as to ensure a Turkish majority in any circumstances.’<br /><br />As with the French Government in the Hatay in the late 1930s, the British Government found itself dragged along in Turkey’s wake with regard to Cyprus. Britain needed a Turkish alliance in the 1950s just as Syria had in the 1930s.<br /><br />In contrast to the Turkish Government, during the 1950s the Greek Government was neither willing nor able to assert much political leverage over the Greek-Cypriots or the British. Their main aim was first to achieve and then to sustain a <i>détente</i> with Turkey; this was essential to the defence of the country’s long and exposed border with the Soviet Union. The post-colonial struggle was essentially between Greek-Cypriot leadership, on the one hand, and Turkish-Cypriot leadership and Ankara on the other. If majority rule, rather than <i>Enosis</i>, had become Makarios’s immediate aim by the end of 1958, it was because of the contrast between the political reality on the island, where the Greek-Cypriots had a substantial majority, and the political reality in the region, where a weak Greek Government had international (Cold War) political and strategic interests that precluded them from confronting Turkey or their other Western allies on this issue. Makarios would thereafter focus on his local numerical advantage and appeal to the international community for votes in favour of independence. But Greek-Cypriot majority rule, in effect, meant a Greek republic in the eastern Mediterranean, and this Turkey intended to avoid at all costs. Threatened with encirclement by efforts underway since 1957 in Iraq, Syria and Egypt to create a non-aligned United Arab Republic, the growing stature of Makarios, in the non-aligned movement to which by then they all belonged, was a further irritant.<br /><br />Ankara mobilised a willing Turkish-Cypriot leadership to insist on separate communal administration within the island and pressed the beleaguered British to depart from the concept of <i>minority</i> rights for Turkish-Cypriots. The words <i>minority</i> and <i>majority</i> were still used by the British Government in formal proposals until 1957. Lord Radcliffe, for example, stated in the tenth paragraph of the covering note of his 1956 proposals:<br /><br />‘When I use the word ‘minorities’ I do not at all forget that the minorities themselves are racial communities which possess, though in varying degrees, historical traditions and religious, cultural and social bonds, different from those of the majority race in Cyprus, the Greek Cypriot.’<br /><br />In the new era punctuated by the inter-communal riots of 1958 and the introduction of the Macmillan plan, this significant phraseology had been replaced by the word <i>community</i>.<br /><br />At a diplomatic level, too, the Turkish Government began to prepare the way. To this end, in 1958 Fatin Zorlu, the Turkish Foreign Minister, stressed to the British ambassador in Ankara that a post-colonial Cyprus should be ‘Turkish-Greek, not Greek or <i>Cypriot</i>’. If the island was to be federal so as to be Turkish-Greek, rather than Cypriot, then the two nationalisms assiduously cultivated in the previous years were an important part of maintaining this balance, an important part of curbing Cypriot sovereignty and of maintaining external control. Thus the Zurich constitution seeks to provide for authority to be communally divided. A member of one community could not elect members of the other community to office: Greek-Cypriots voted for the President, Turkish-Cypriots voted for the Vice-President. Specific articles of the constitution provided for all communal institutions, as well as individual members of the Greek and Turkish communities, to have the right to fly their national (Greek and Turkish) flags and to celebrate their separate Greek and Turkish national holidays. In other words the settlement incorporated and emphasised these differences. It did not attempt to reduce them. This tendency reflected the contradictory national claims of the time within the two communities; it sought to make the settlement palatable to their national sensitivities but, at the same time, facilitated their political polarisation. It was enhanced by the Cold War tendency of the Western powers to encourage anti-communist – and therefore nationalist – factions to prevent the possibility of the communist party, AKEL, creeping into power through the ballot box, always the Americans’ greatest fear.<br /><br />In order for the island to be Turkish-Greek, rather than Cypriot, it would need to be governed by an equal partnership between two numerically unequal communities, not by representatives of the majority of Cypriots. Communally separate town councils were the intended first step towards a communally separate government that would ultimately make federation possible. The issue remained central to the failure to implement the Zurich constitution, and a resolution to the method of implementation of the most problematic articles, including article 173 on the municipal issue, remained pending when the Republic of Cyprus came into existence in 1960. Article 173 remained unresolved until the inter-communal crisis of December 1963. Because it involved control over territory, it was, perhaps, a more potent cause for the breakdown at that point than the thirteen-point constitutional proposals submitted by the Greek-Cypriots on 19 December 1963. Never fully implemented, article 173 (on municipalities) was the only point in the constitution that sought to define communality in territorial terms. It thus acted as a bridge between the desired federal concept and the <i>actual</i> unitary nature of the new republic.<br /><br />Its significance becomes clearer if we relate it to an observation made at that time by the Turkish ambassador in London, Nuri Birgi, to Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary. Nuri Birgi was a lawyer and a Turkish diplomat who was to represent Turkey on the Constitutional Committee set up to draft the constitution for the new republic of Cyprus. He told Selwyn Lloyd that for Ankara to drop its increasingly violent demands for partition, it wanted not only a military base but also a political presence in Cyprus. ‘This could be established’, he said, ‘through the Turkish Cypriot community’. He thought this would be ‘the best guarantee against Greek imperialism’. They would need ‘something equivalent or even better than partition such as an ‘equal share in the administration of the whole island’. He perceived this equal share being translated into some form of federation.<br /><br />The conflict over administrative structure had thus revealed a deeper malaise over the issue of <i>sovereignty</i>. The sovereignty the Greek-Cypriots were beginning to assert flew in the face of Ankara’s perception of the state the London and Zurich Agreements had created. Fatin Zorlu had mentioned to Lennox Boyd in 1958 that Cyprus should not be independent, ‘just not a colony’. In May 1963 Turan Tuluy, the Director General of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, stressed that Ankara was prepared ‘to live indefinitely with the present conditions in Cyprus, however unpleasant they might be’ (the reference was to what the British were by then describing as ‘Turkish ghettos’), ‘rather than allow the reintegration of municipalities’. He went on to make a clear connection between retaining control over these tiny but exclusive pockets of power and the prevention of majority rule by stating that Makarios and the Greek-Cypriots would have to begin treating the Turkish-Cypriots as ‘an equal and esteemed community rather than a minority whose position could be whittled away with impunity’ before any thought of unification could be contemplated. The disproportionate share of power gained by the Turkish-Cypriots at Zurich could only be legitimised by the existence of a clearly separate – and otherwise threatened – political entity.<br /><br />Ankara’s long-term policy therefore effectively concentrated on enclosing as many Turkish-Cypriots as possible within enclaves controlled by the Turkish-Cypriot leadership, regardless of any hardship this might cause them. Although military intervention was threatened regularly in the following years, Turkish policy, which once more concentrated on political leverage over the status of Cyprus, was directed by the principles that had dictated municipal partition since 1958. The extended Turkish municipalities and other predominantly Turkish areas, such as the town and environs of Lefka which, as a result of inter-communal fighting in 1963, had become defended enclaves, were the basis on which Turkey, in the following decade, would seek to establish a federal system in the Republic of Cyprus. By 1964, the Turkish-Cypriot leadership actually felt abandoned, in the absence of the expected Turkish deliverance. In the following years, by failing to intervene, while at the same time insisting that Turkish-Cypriots remain isolated from the Greek-Cypriot majority, Turkey had, to some extent, sacrificed the welfare of the Turkish-Cypriots to the interests of the motherland. By keeping them geographically and politically isolated from the Greek-Cypriots, as long as the problem remained pending Ankara could rest assured there would be no change in the status of the island: the Turkish Government could continue to argue for a federal solution, described by the British ambassador in Ankara in February 1963 as ‘their prime objective’, and thus maintain a political foothold without disturbing Greek-Turkish relations. The policy inevitably entailed the Turkish-Cypriots’ isolation from the economic boom enjoyed by the Greek-Cypriots between 1964 and 1974, however, and condemned them to a ghetto existence largely dependent on Turkish Government subsidies.<br /><br />The Greek-Cypriots assisted Ankara in this in this strategy by subjecting the Turkish-Cypriots to undue harassment. Greek-Cypriot attempts to prevent the creation of defended enclaves resulted in a blitz against the smuggling of guns and ammunition between them. Heavy-handed treatment by Greek-Cypriot police, including constant, humiliating searches and the confiscation of Turkish buses that had to run a gauntlet of Greek-Cypriot roadblocks between their villages and the town centres, destabilised the way of life of many Turkish-Cypriot villagers. Moreover, the Cyprus Government did not adequately address the sporadic kidnapping and sometimes assassination of Turkish-Cypriots by irregular Greek-Cypriot paramilitary units, which underlined the growing sense of vulnerability the minority community felt. Consequently, its members gravitated towards the enclaves.<br /><br />But let us look more closely at the immediate consequences of the dramatic inter-communal deadlock at the end of 1962 that heralded the preparation for alternative ways forward. On 24 December 1962 the <i>Cyprus Mai</i>l carried the headline ‘Breakthrough in Municipal Talks’, but the apparent agreement between Makarios and Küçük, reached after five years’ negotiation, was retracted the following day by Küçük on orders from Ankara. Through 1963, this new awareness of Ankara’s intimate involvement goaded the Greek-Cypriots towards a dangerous unilateral assertion of sovereignty, an assertion that could only make the situation worse. At the end of December 1962 the Council of Ministers, where Greek-Cypriots had a majority vote, had replaced the existing municipal councils with municipal boards, its members appointed by the Council of Ministers. Since municipal administration had ceased to be parochial, it would be centralised, brought firmly under the control of the Greek-Cypriot-led central Government – the Turkish-Cypriot communal chamber countered by enacting its own municipal law to cover the Turkish Cypriot bodies. In May 1963 the constitutional court declared both moves illegal. After May, the illegal Turkish-Cypriot municipalities continued to exist with impunity, while the Council of Ministers dissolved the municipal boards and put the towns under the direct administration of the district officers.<br /><br />In February 1963 the announcement of the newly appointed municipal boards was welcomed across the Greek-Cypriot political spectrum as ‘the first step to normalisation, uniting the services of the republic and preventing the creation of a state within a state.’ At the same time, it raised new expectations in the Nicosia bazaar, deeply scarred since the restrictions on intercommunal movement in place since 1958. On 18 January 1963 Greek-Cypriot shopkeepers from the surrounding streets in the old city combined to challenge the Government to face up to its responsibilities and take over the Turkish-held central market. They complained that by blocking the market entrances in Hermes Street, the Turkish leadership had not only prevented Greek-Cypriots from shopping in the market, but it had also stopped Turkish-Cypriots from shopping in Greek-Cypriot shops in the neighbouring streets. Business in the area had dried up, and the shopkeepers were being forced to move out. They warned of an escalating exodus until the old city of Nicosia, like that of Famagusta, was entirely Turkish. These domestic pressures fed the increasing Greek-Cypriot sense that it was time the state took control.<br /><br />By February Makarios had introduced a stick-and-carrot approach. New Greek-Cypriot proposals for gradual reunification, while offering generous subsidies for Turkish-Cypriot municipal committees to spend on the Turkish-Cypriot quarters of each town, were accompanied by measures intended to demonstrate that Greek-Cypriot patience on this issue was not unlimited. The Council of Ministers refused to issue the annual grant due to the Turkish communal chamber which covered education, among other things, because some of it would be used to finance the illegal Turkish-Cypriot municipalities. Telephone lines to these municipalities were cut because bills had not been paid, and Turkish-Cypriot employees were ordered to pay personal taxes to the new (Greek-Cypriot) municipal boards. The most dangerous decision the Council of Ministers made in January 1963 was to attempt to reclaim territory taken forcibly by the Turkish-Cypriots in 1958, by empowering the new municipal boards to acquire all municipal property, including the iconic central markets. This decision followed a submission made to the Council of Ministers by the Minister of the Interior, Polycarpos Georgadjis, who appears to have been preparing the way for a physical takeover of this property. In charge of the police in his ministerial capacity, Georgadjis also presided over the Greek-Cypriot paramilitary organisation established in 1962 under the cryptonym Akritas.<br /><br />The day after the submission a bomb exploded in the Byraktar mosque in Nicosia in circumstances similar to those of a similar explosion a year earlier. This was a Turkish-Cypriot message, reiterated in Turkish diplomatic representations, that any such attempted take-over would lead to inter-communal fighting. Makarios was, in fact, threatening to take the arbitrary action Sir Hugh Foot, the last Governor, had shrunk from 1958 and 1959 for fear of a relapse into violence. Foot had insisted this issue must be resolved by a joint decision amongst the leaders of the two communities. After five years of failed negotiations on the municipal issue, the Greek-Cypriots now intended to impose unified municipalities by force, if necessary. They believed international support for unification, together with the newly appointed boards that had been purged of the communist councillors and mayors so numerous in the elected municipalities, would bring Western pressure on Ankara to capitulate. On the island itself, Turkish-Cypriots were faltering in their defence of municipal separatism because of its commercial disadvantages. Arthur Clark, the British High Commissioner, was convinced ‘Dr Fazıl Küçük, Orek, Muftizade and Denktash had all abandoned the idea of geographic partition of municipalities by 29 December 1962’, although they had subsequently retracted agreement on unification at Ankara’s bidding. Confidence was expressed within the Ministry of the Interior that now that the British were no longer governing Cyprus, ‘Government forces [would] be able to control the Turks and maintain order without difficulty’ if this policy led to disturbances. This implicit but flawed assumption, that Turkish behaviour in 1958 had been the result of British manipulation, also underpinned Greek-Cypriot assessments of the strength of their position in diplomatic exchanges in the months that followed.<br /><br />In February 1963 Arthur Clark strongly advised the Cyprus Government to delay the decision to take over Turkish-held municipal properties, arguing that the positions of the Turkish-Cypriots and, more importantly, Ankara, had stiffened as a result of this decision. He asked the Cyprus Government to delay acting on it. It is clear from his March 1963 letter to Air Chief Marshall Sir Denis Barnett, Commander of British Forces in Cyprus, that he feared the municipal issue might end in armed conflict ‘because of the rigid attitude of Ankara’. He feared:<br /><br />‘A clash between Greeks and Turks in one of the main towns, most probably Nicosia (e.g., over the Nicosia Municipal Market, if Greek policemen on government orders tried conclusions with the Turkish butchers, or between rival demonstrations, egged on by extremists): this would lead to disturbances and rioting mainly in the central areas or old town where the two communities are cheek by jowl.’<br /><br />The atmosphere remained edgy. A chain reaction had set in. There were repeated Turkish threats of inter-communal violence in the event of a Greek-Cypriot attempt to retake municipal property, and preparations were made for its defence. In September 1963 Turkish-Cypriot irregulars were still mounting an armed guard around the central market in Nicosia, reflecting the tensions aroused over territory once freely accessible to all. By this time the Greek-Cypriots had actually abandoned any thought of attempting to take Turkish-held municipal property by force. Even the document Stella Soulioti describes as ‘rendered notorious by quotation, misquotation and mutilation’, the Akritas plan, written in the autumn of 1963, stresses in a rarely quoted paragraph:<br /><br />‘Actions which require positive dynamic action such as the unification of municipalities must be avoided. Such a decision would require dynamic intervention by the government to bring about unification and take over municipal properties by force which would probably compel the Turks to act forcefully.’<br /><br />Although the Greek-Cypriots’ January 1963 decision to take over municipal property forcibly, if necessary, had clearly been reversed, largely to avoid precipitating inter-communal violence, the fact that such an action had been planned and threatened, heightened tensions that could not be easily relaxed. The presence of smuggled guns and the penchant for paramilitary gangs had been a consequence of the nature of the anti-colonial struggle. The subsequent policy revealed by the <i>Deniz</i> incident during the transition period in the autumn of 1959, that Ankara planned to ensure the Turkish-Cypriots were armed, rather than disarmed, for their security, had the inevitable consequence of provoking Greek-Cypriots to defend themselves. Cyprus was full of guns. The Turkish Cypriot Minister of Agriculture’s obsession with spending large sums of money on enlarging the obscure little fishing shelter of Mansoura on the north-west coast of the island to take large vessels, invited suspicion that Ankara intended to supply and reinforce the Turkish-Cypriots on a larger scale. The creeping policy of the leadership to establish a chain of exclusively Turkish-Cypriot command in their areas became more ominous in the face of a clear strategy to prepare for their defence. While Greek-Cypriot policy sought to eliminate areas of exclusive Turkish-Cypriot control, what in fact was taking place, under the cover of talks for municipal reunification, was the consolidation and defence of these areas under Ankara’s supervision. There was a growing sense among the Greek-Cypriot leadership that the Turkish side was perniciously creating a republic ‘riddled with holes’ that must be plugged for the state to remain afloat. They may have been perceived as ‘holes’ in the state for the Greek-Cypriots, but they were fortresses against political emasculation for the Turkish-Cypriot leadership and for Ankara.<br /><br />During the early years of the Cyprus Republic, each side sought to undermine the independent state, which both maintained they were endeavouring to preserve. The spectres of <i>Enosis</i> and partition were paraded regularly before domestic and international audiences to justify each side’s respective actions or refusal to act. The more chronic the failure to settle inter-communal disputes became, the more the practical difficulties, solutions to which were often in sight, gave way to polarised perceptions of the threat under which each community lived. There were a host of contributory factors, but failure to resolve constitutional issues was essentially the result of differing perceptions of the nature of the republic that had been created and the extent of its sovereignty.<br /><br /><u>Epilogue</u> <br />The struggle between majority rule and a federal system in Cyprus has been essentially a struggle over sovereignty and an assertion of control over any future change of status. The Greek-Cypriots sought to control the future status of the island, while Turkey and the Turkish-Cypriot leadership sought to prevent them from doing so. Political influence through the indigenous population is a more internationally acceptable alternative for achieving geopolitical ends than raw military intervention – the manipulation of the political system in Cyprus since 1957, and of the political system in the Hatay on the eve of the Second World War, are cases in point. Communal polarisation brought about by competing nationalisms within the indigenous communities certainly occurred through the twentieth century, but it was an international agenda which made that polarisation confrontational and divisive. Fast forwarding to 2017, we find the Cyprus problem still on the international agenda, while neighbouring Syria has been reduced to rubble by civil strife in a war-torn Middle East. The Turkish Government, according to an agreement reached with Russia in December 2016, may be a co-guarantor with Russia of the shape of Syria that emerges from the rubble.<br /><br />At the same time, the Turkish Government has been summoned to the negotiating table in Geneva by the Secretary General of the United Nations, where its role as a guarantor of the Cyprus republic is, for the first time, being called into question. The notional lines now being drawn on the map of Cyprus representing the constituent states of the federal republic of Cyprus will be, for all intents and purposes, a modification of the line created by the occupying Turkish forces in 1974. In that year, following a coup by the Greek junta, the Turkish Government, invoking its guarantor rights, intervened militarily to restore the status quo created by the 1960 constitution. Instead, in 1975, the north of the island, still under Turkish occupation, unilaterally declared itself to be the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus. Greek-Cypriots were constitutionally and physically excluded from this state. It has, in the following years, with the gradual introduction of Turkish settlers to boost its tiny population and with the obliteration of all traces of the previous inhabitants of the area, drawn ever closer to Turkey. While considering whether Turkey should or should not retain its role of guarantor of the federal republic of guarantor of the federal republic of Cyprus currently being negotiated, it is worth examining events in the sanjak of Alexandretta, or the Hatay, in the later 1930s. The analogue is very telling and merits some detail.<br /><br />By 1938 it had become increasingly clear that the Turkish Government had failed to bring about a ‘Turkish majority’ in the Hatay, as planned. The sanjak was of salient interest to Ataturk, who described it as ‘the strategic key to Cilicia’. His aim, having negotiated its independence from Syria in December 1937, was to secure a Turkish majority in the elections for its legislature. In spite of the reluctant collaboration of the French mandatory power, the international electoral commission, appointed by the League of Nations to draw up electoral registers, had balked at the sometimes violent manipulation of the electorate they were being pressed to register, and in June 1938 they suspended the registration and resigned. When they left, Turks made up 46 per cent of the register, with only five thousand voters still to be included.56 This would not do. Citing its obligations as a guarantor of the state to restore law and order, the Turkish army marched into the Hatay so the process of registration could be completed under Turkish supervision. A majority of two Turks was elected to the new assembly which, in contravention of the Fundamental Law the Turkish Government had ostensibly intervened to enforce, enacted legislation incorporating Turkish law and currency into the new state, closing the border with Syria, providing free access through the northern Turkish border and sending delegates to the Turkish National Assembly in Ankara: it became, for all intents and purposes, a Turkish province. The non-Turkish population of the Hatay fled in large numbers, replaced by incoming Turks. In June 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, the Hatay Assembly voted to annex the shot-lived state to Turkey by a majority of two, while a Franco-Turkish friendship treaty secured French passivity.<br /><br />In the case of the Hatay in the 1930s and in the case of Cyprus in 1974, Turkey’s guarantor powers were invoked and interpreted unilaterally to assert control: in the Hatay to secure Turkish majority rule and in Cyprus to secure a tightly controlled federal (or preferably confederal) state to replace the constitution, whose severely restricted majority rule the Greek-Cypriots had been so arrogantly eager to amend. The Turkish army remains on the island to secure this goal as, for the first time, Ankara’s claim to the right to guarantee the new federation, and to back that guarantee with a military presence, is being challenged. Turkey’s underlying motivation for insisting on these continuing guarantor rights can be found in a statement made by President Erdogan on 5 January 2017:<br /><br />‘We have to eliminate threats to our country at the source. We should always keep in mind that Turkey’s security begins not in Gaziantep but in Aleppo, not in Hatay but in Idlib, not in Mersin but in Cyprus, not in Kars but in Nakhchivan, not in Artvin but in Batumi, not in Thrace but in the Balkans.’<br /><br />A Turkish military presence and guarantee is perceived by Ankara as necessary for the security of the Republic of Turkey. It is perceived as necessary for the security of the Turkish-Cypriots as well, of course, in as much as the maintenance of the Cypriot community as a separate political entity is perceived as integral to the security of the Turkish nation as a whole. The federal republic of Cyprus being negotiated is to be a member of the European Union, while Turkish membership of the European Union seems increasingly unlikely. Therefore, in a future scenario in which the European Union may be hostile to Turkey, Cyprus would be as much a ‘security risk’ for Turkey as a Cyprus united with Greece, or an independent Cyprus ruled by a Greek-Cypriot majority. The Turkish-Cypriots might become so European they could no longer be counted upon to look to Ankara for security. In the same way, the area beyond the Turkish borders mentioned above are perceived as possible threats to Turkey in certain circumstances, some more immediately than others, for example the Kurdish-inhabited areas of Iraq and Syria currently being fought over.<br /><p></p><p><b>From: Anastasia Yiangou, Antigone Heraclidou (eds). <i>Cyprus from Colonialism to the Present: Visions and Realities</i>.</b></p><p><b><u>Addendum <br /></u></b></p><p><b>A couple of points of disagreement with Markides: 1. She insists Britain became susceptible to Turkish pressure for partition/federation of Cyprus because of the UK's diminishing power in the Middle East/East Med and the need to ally with Turkey in the region. I'm not convinced.<br /><br />Arguably, Britain's interests in the region would've been better served by accepting Greece's offer of extensive military installations in Cyprus (and Greece) in exchange for the transfer of the island's sovereignty to Athens.<br /><br />2. Markides equates the demand for Enosis with the demand for partition. However, firstly, as Markides notes, it wasn't Enosis the Turkish side objected to but any form of majority rule, i.e. proper decolonisation and independence, that would give GCs sway on the island.<br /><br />Secondly, the implications of Enosis or majority rule for the Turkish Cypriots would likely not have been the calamity to their lives she implies. On the other hand, partition was predicated on ethnic cleansing – and not only of Greek Cypriots but of Turkish Cypriots too.<br /><br />Turkish Cypriot security was more jeopardised by the logic and actual campaign for partition than by the pursuit of Enosis/majority rule. In achieving the Turkish aim of geographical separation, more Turkish Cypriots, proportionately, had to flee their homes than Greek Cypriots.</b><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-54112794222019273032022-12-27T15:24:00.004+00:002022-12-27T16:56:40.235+00:00Cyril Radcliffe, from India to Cyprus: partition and British imperial policy<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/17Yuz_Q7xjc" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<p>This piece is in response to a <a href="https://twitter.com/johnakritas/status/1605650437813768194?s=20" target="_blank">small twitter exchange </a>with the eminent historian of India <a href="https://twitter.com/DalrympleWill" target="_blank">William Dalrymple</a>, which had me pointing out that, at the fag end of British colonial rule in Cyprus, Cyril Radcliffe who had, a decade earlier, devised plans to carve apart India as the sub-continent moved towards independence, was also responsible for being the first to codify British proposals to partition Cyprus in 1956.<br /><br />On further study, this is not quite right. <br /><br />In fact, as some in the UK colonial establishment began to seriously consider partitioning Cyprus – parcelling out portions of the island to Turkey and Greece and retaining a chunk for the UK for the purposes of military bases – Radcliffe, who had been appointed Constitutional Commissioner for Cyprus in February 1956, came up with proposals that reflected those in the British ruling elite squeamish about butchering Cyprus.<br /><br />The background to Radcliffe’s involvement in Cyprus is, of course, the EOKA uprising that broke out in April 1955 and was aimed at ending British rule (which had begun in 1878) and the union of the island with Greece. <br /><br />To Greek Cypriot demands for self-determination, Britain responded that some parts of the British empire were too strategically important to ever be allowed this kind of freedom. <br /><br />Initially, EOKA’s campaign was intended to be limited and put on display how serious Greek Cypriots were about ending British colonial rule; but, as often happens with armed insurgencies, the violence escalated and took on a life of its own.<br /><br />While the departure of the Greek Cypriots from purely political means to achieve their ends somewhat played into the hands of more hardline British imperialists, who could now treat the Cypriot clamour for an end to colonial rule as a security not a political issue, there was still a British recognition that there needed to be some movement to satisfy Greek Cypriot demands (Greek Cypriots constituted 80% of Cyprus’ population) for greater political involvement in running the island.<br /><br />This is where Radcliffe enters the story. In February 1956, Radcliffe was tasked by the British government to survey the island’s political landscape and come up with a constitution that would square the circle of maintaining British sovereignty while, at the same time, allow for self-government for Cypriots based on liberal democratic principles. <br /><br />The first interesting point to emerge from this is that less than a decade after what we now regard as one of the great human catastrophes in history – the partitioning of India – in which Radcliffe is somewhat of a villainous figure, in 1956 his reputation was still high enough in British colonial circles for him to be called on when British rule in Cyprus had run into trouble.<br /><br />It also suggests that Radcliffe, often portrayed as a man tortured by the consequences of his role in the partitioning India, was not averse to becoming involved in another colonial quagmire where partition was high on the agenda.<br /><br />As with India, Radcliffe had no previous experience of Cyprus and only nine months elapsed from the time of Radcliffe being appointed as Constitutional Commissioner to the release of his report. He visited Cyprus twice, from July to September 1956, always under armed escort, for four weeks in total, where he spent most of his time conferring with the island’s governor, Field Marshall Sir John Harding, and listening to Turkish demands for partition. Greek Cypriot luminaries on the island refused to meet with Radcliffe, in protest at the treatment of Archbishop Makarios, the undisputed political leader of the Greek Cypriot community, who had been deported by Harding to Seychelles in March 1956.<br /><br />Radcliffe’s report, submitted to the colonial office in late 1956, began inauspiciously, purporting to be impressed with the educational and cultural accomplishments of the Cypriots but bewildered that this hadn’t resulted in political advancement, seemingly oblivious to the distortions colonial repression and manipulation had on political life on the island. <br /><br />‘The people of Cyprus, I have reminded myself,’ Radcliffe declared, ‘are an adult people enjoying long cultural traditions and an established education system, fully capable of furnishing qualified administrators, lawyers, doctors and men of business. It is a curiosity of their history that their political development has remained comparatively immature.’<br /><br />Cyprus had, since 1931, following small-scale anti-colonial riots, been run as a tinpot gubernatorial dictatorship, with the constitution and legislature suspended, political parties banned, censorship, petty restrictions on the expression of anti-colonial feeling, deportations, and so on, and it was Radcliffe’s task to end this sorry state of affairs and, hopefully, earn the loyalty of Cypriots, particularly Greek Cypriots, whose attachment to Greece had perennially posed the biggest threat to the colonial status quo. <br /><br />The constitution Radcliffe envisaged for Cyprus depended, as Robert Holland says, on ‘the old imperial device of dyarchy’ – in which powers devolved to the local population, in the form of a Legislative Assembly, would be balanced (or, in reality, superseded) by those retained by the colonial authorities, in the person of the Governor of the island, who would also have exclusive powers in matters of defence, foreign affairs and internal security.<br /><br />Having rejected Greek Cypriot demands for a full-blown democratic constitution and self-determination – which would have inevitably led to Enosis – Radcliffe also spurned Turkish and Turkish Cypriot demands for a federation, which everyone understood, if adopted, would be nothing more than the prelude to the Turks’ ultimate aim, partition.<br /><br />Even if the Turks regarded partition as a compromise – their original aim in the event of a British withdrawal from Cyprus was the annexation of the entire island – Radcliffe saw no merit or justice in sundering the island and instead proposed widespread safeguards for the island’s Turkish minority within a unitary state.<br /><br />Holland suggests that Radcliffe’s experience of partitioning Punjab and Bengal in 1947, the horrors that accompanied this, had prompted him to agree with Harding that partitioning Cyprus was a ‘confession of failure’ and ‘a counsel of despair’. <br /><br />In this regard, Radcliffe said in his report that it would be manifestly unjust and undemocratic that the Turkish minority, comprising 18% of the island’s population, ‘be accorded political representation equal to that of the Greek Cypriot community’. <br /><br />In Radcliffe’s opinion, acceding to the Turkish demand for a federation was not logical. There was ‘no pattern of territorial separation between the two communities and, apart from other objections, federation of communities which does not involve also federation of territories seems to me a very difficult constitutional form’.<br /><br />Given the fact that Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities were mixed throughout Cyprus with no discernible geographic separation, it was clear to British colonial administrators, like Radcliffe, that Turkish demands for a federation/partition could only come about as a result of civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, widespread ethnic cleansing and a probable war between Greece and Turkey. <br /><br />Not only did the British balk at the humanitarian consequences of agreeing to Turkey’s partitionist aspirations, but the subsequent convulsions would not only likely make Britain’s position in Cyprus untenable but would also jeopardise the entire southern flank of NATO – a scenario that prompted the Americans to warn the UK at the time against the ‘forcible vivisection’ of the island.<br /><br />However, Radcliffe’s good sense in rejecting partition for Cyprus was not reflected among Tory party imperialists and the British defence establishment – smarting now over the Suez humiliation and the prospect of Britain being ejected wholesale from the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean – or those in the colonial administration in Cyprus who resented the EOKA uprising and wanted to punish the Greek Cypriots for it. These three centres of power all came to the conclusion that partition would be preferable to Enosis and that even if they couldn’t envisage Britain doing the dirty work of ethnic cleansing, on which partition was predicated, then at least the threat of partition should be used against the Greek Cypriots to frighten them into accepting continuing British sovereignty of the island. </p><p>Thus, despite Radcliffe resisting Turkish demands for partition, when presenting his report to the House of Commons, colonial secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd insisted that partition of Cyprus was very much on the agenda and, indeed, that Radcliffe’s proposals for self-government could be interpreted as portending a long-term outcome of ‘double self-determination’.<br /><br />‘As regards the eventual status of the island,’ the colonial secretary said in the House of Commons on 19 December 1956, ‘Her Majesty's Government have already affirmed their recognition of the principle of self-determination. When the international and strategic situation permits, and provided that self-government is working satisfactorily, Her Majesty's Government will be ready to review the question of the application of self-determination.’</p><p>He went on: ‘When the time comes for this review, that is, when these conditions have been fulfilled, it will be the purpose of Her Majesty's Government to ensure that any exercise of self-determination should be effected in such a manner that the Turkish Cypriot community, no less than the Greek Cypriot community, shall, in the special circumstances of Cyprus, be offered freedom to decide for themselves their future status. In other words, Her Majesty's Government recognise that the exercise of self-determination in such a mixed population must include partition among the eventual options.’</p><p>Whether Lennox-Boyd was cynically using the threat of partition to coerce Greek Cypriots to stop demanding an end to British rule or if the British really had decided at this point that partition of the island was the best way to protect imperial interests is a moot point. <br /><br />What is not moot is that Britain in 1956 had the opportunity to explicitly tell Turkey that its ambition of partition was unacceptable and would never be considered while Britain had responsibility for the island. Rather than doing this, the British chose instead to appease Turkey, giving it to believe that partition was a viable solution for Cyprus and one that Britain was prepared to consider.<br /><br />As for the immediate effect on Radcliffe’s constitutional proposals, Lennox-Boyd’s allusion to partition, even if it was only made to tantalise the Turks and scare the Greeks, proved fatal for their prospects.<br /><br />For Greece and Greek Cypriots, Radcliffe’s diarchy proposals were the same old British colonialist hypocrisy – <i>Time</i> magazine said Radcliffe’s constitution offered Cyprus ‘a façade of self-government carefully designed to preserve what the British in India used to call their paramountcy’ – and conceit, espousing liberal democracy while at the same time insisting that it be severely curtailed to preclude any challenge to British colonialist rule and sovereignty.<br /><br />Worse than the prospect of continuing British ‘dictatorship’ in Cyprus was the inevitable suspicion felt by the Greek side, after Lennox-Boyd’s performance in the House of Commons, that Britain would use its remodelled administration of Cyprus to gradually steer the island towards partition.<br /><br />Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots were more amenable to Radcliffe’s report. Even if Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes couldn’t persuade Lennox-Boyd to ditch Radcliffe’s ‘academic exercise’ and go for immediate partition – Menderes told Lennox-Boyd, no doubt referring to the genocide/ethnic cleansing of Greeks from Anatolia and Asia Minor from 1915-23, 'we have done this sort of thing before, and you will see that it is not as bad as all that’ – the Turkish side was reassured that Britain regarded Radcliffe’s constitutional proposals as a potential stepping stone towards dividing Cyprus and thus ‘logical material for negotiation’.<br /><br />While the British were furious with the Greek side for rejecting Radcliffe’s proposals for self-government – the Foreign Office referred to the Greek government’s reaction to Radcliffe as 'ungracious and ungenerous and very stupid' – what really did for Radcliffe’s attempt to end the violence on Cyprus wasn’t the stubborn attachment of Athens and, more especially, the Greek Cypriots to immediate self-determination and Enosis – but the drivel and machinations of Lennox-Boyd who, in order to appease Turkey and play to the gallery of diehard imperialists in the Tory party, introduced the spectre of partition.<br /><br />In her book <i>Fettered Independence: Cyprus 1878-196</i>4, Stella Soulioti, a close ally and confidante of Makarios, suggests that – had Harding not made the stupid decision to deport Makarios and Lennox-Boyd hadn’t sought to clumsily blackmail Greek Cypriots with the threat of partition – Radcliffe’s proposals could well have served as a basis to end the conflict in 1956. Makarios, she says, was not inflexible in pursuing self-determination/Enosis and was prepared to contemplate a constitution that provided for self-government.<br /><br />In fact, Soulioti says that Christopher Woodhouse, the Conservative politician with a long record of political, military and academic connections to Greece, had advised the Greek ambassador to London at the time, Giorgios Seferis, that Athens should accept Radcliffe’s proposals because they would eventually lead to Enosis; Woodhouse adding that he had consulted Radcliffe about this and that Radcliffe had agreed that this was the case even if he ‘could not say so publicly’. <br /><br />Meanwhile, Nancy Crawshaw, in her book, <i>The Cyprus Revolt,</i> which is hostile to the Greek pursuit of Enosis, lauds the Radcliffe proposals and praises Radcliffe for his ‘outstanding contribution to the search for a compromise’.<br /><br />Regardless of the merits of Radcliffe’s constitution and who was responsible for its precipitate demise, it was the last time proposals that aimed at a unitary state were put to Greek Cypriots. <br /><br />After 1956, violence on the island intensified, with an increasingly fanaticised Turkish side now turning to riots, bombs and bullets in pursuit of partition, an aim for which they didn’t just have support and sponsors in Ankara but also from many in London and in the colonial administration in Nicosia.<br /><br />Thus, while Britain still had legal sovereignty of the island, all post-Radcliffe proposals aimed at ending the conflict took on a greater tendency towards federation and, thus, partition. This process ended with the so-called Zurich-London agreements (1959-60) – negotiated by the UK, Turkey and Greece and from which Cypriots were excluded. <br /><br />These agreements, which provided for a highly circumscribed independence and precarious bicommunal constitution for Cyprus, quickly began to unravel and by 1963-4 collapsed in a convulsion of violence as Turkish Cypriots withdrew from government and retreated into armed enclaves from where they hoped to create partition on the ground. Again, Britain – which, as a result of the deal that brought independence to Cyprus, had retained two large sovereign military bases on the island and a role as a Guarantor Power dedicated to ensuring ‘ the independence, territorial integrity, and security of Cyprus’ – had a choice: work towards calming the deteriorating situation in Cyprus or exacerbate it by leaning towards partition. <br /><br />Martin Packard says in his book, <i>Getting it Wrong: Fragments from a Cyprus Diary 1964</i>, that reconciliation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots was possible in 1964 and that Britain was committed to this at first, only for a sudden change in policy to occur, with the same circles that had argued for partition during the EOKA period gaining the upper hand over those in the British establishment opposed to it. <br /><br />Britain’s increasing acquiescence to partition coincided with greater US involvement on the island. If the Americans had been skeptical of partition in the 1950s and warned the British colonial authorities against it, by 1964 they saw partition as the optimal solution for the island and, unlike the British, were not squeamish about bringing it about. <br /><br />America's cynicism, British dereliction, Greece’s stupidity and Turkey’s opportunism converged in 1974 when the partition that had first been mooted by the British in 1956 as a bluff to appease the Turks and terrify the Greek Cypriots came to pass as a result of the Athens junta’s botched coup against the Cyprus government (the junta had by now come around to the idea of the partitioning Cyprus and intended to do so on Greek terms) and Turkey’s two-phased invasion of the island. <br /><br />To end, and to bring us back to where we started, with Cyril Radcliffe, inextricably tied to Britain’s colonial legacy in India and Cyprus, both of which suffered the same calamity – partition, massacre, lost homelands, unresolved bitterness and pain – it’s worth pointing out how, in fact, while India’s dismemberment has been much written about and is a well-known part of the story of the end of empire, the catastrophe in Cyprus is largely ignored. <br /><br />Christopher Hitchens says such a loss of memory in Cyprus’ case would be unforgivable.<br /><br />‘It would mean,’ he says, ‘forgetting about the bad and dangerous precedent set by [Turkey’s] invasion; by a larger power suiting itself by altering geography and demography. It would mean overlooking the aspiration of a European people to make a passage from colonial rule to sovereignty in one generation. And it would mean ignoring an example, afforded by Cyprus, of the way in which small countries and peoples are discounted or disregarded by the superpowers (and, on occasion, by liberal commentators).’<br /><br />Indeed, if we include in the discussion another British-empire-in-retreat partition, that of Palestine in 1948, we can see that the partition of Cyprus finalised by the Turkish invasion of 1974 bears bitter comparison with the the <i>Nakba</i> as well as the Partition of India.<br /><br />Thus, the <i>Nakba</i> (1948) saw 700,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.1m in Mandatory Palestine (i.e. 70 percent of the Palestinians) ethnically cleansed, with the number of Palestinians killed 10,000 (i.e. one percent of the Palestinian population). <br /><br />Indian partition (1947) resulted in 15m people out of a population of 340m (i.e. 4.4 percent of Indians) being made refugees, with 1-2m killed (i.e. 0.3-0.6 percent of Indians).<br /><br />As for Cyprus, as a result of the Turkish invasion that brought about the partition of the island, 220,000 Cypriots – (180,000 Greek Cypriots and 40,000 Turkish Cypriots) – were, at the behest of the Turkish army and Turkish Cypriot militias, either expelled, in the Greek Cypriot case, or encouraged to move, in the Turkish Cypriot case, i.e. 33 percent of the population of 642,000. Seven thousand Cypriots were killed during partition – 6000 Greek Cypriots and 1000 Turkish Cypriots, i.e. 1.1 percent of the the island’s population.<br /><br />British-inspired, Turkish-imposed partition had a devastating effect on Cyprus, equivalent to the <i>Nakba</i> and Indian partition in its human consequences, though Cypriots have had to shout louder to tell the story of the outrage done to their country, their voices drowned out by British colonial and Turkish expansionist narratives that put Cyprus’ fate down to a squabble between primeval and perennial ethnic rivals who needed to be separated from each other for their own good.<br /><br />Bibliography<br />1. Crawshaw, Nancy: The Cyprus Revolt<br />2. Hitchens, Christopher: Cyprus: Hostage to History<br />3. Holland, Robert: Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus<br />4. Novo, Andrew: The EOKA Cause<br />5. Packard, Martin: Getting it Wrong<br />6. Soulioti, Stella: Cyprus: Fettered Independence<br />7. Time: <a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,867492,00.html" target="_blank">Cyprus: Proposed Constitution</a> <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-2089640878384716962022-11-23T16:17:00.003+00:002022-11-23T17:39:12.775+00:00Review: Andrew Novo's ‘The EOKA Cause: Nationalism and the Failure of Cypriot Enosis’<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLLk3nBsaQiuCKS11KQseVCSahT8x2b5ZIbdzM5jTEFX45Uo64xyimU6sZZOFA-z5VEu7iK2BXscI2EFqtZi82pGuuIgng5Q1xjod9otEBWuAPX4UcYa5B45NsnXqCRFOWX3vTmz_WYT95LHZZTaw0TLadPA1c5mjEnl-enTqHhXE8wp7RTUQp_pJS/s543/9780755635344.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="543" data-original-width="360" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLLk3nBsaQiuCKS11KQseVCSahT8x2b5ZIbdzM5jTEFX45Uo64xyimU6sZZOFA-z5VEu7iK2BXscI2EFqtZi82pGuuIgng5Q1xjod9otEBWuAPX4UcYa5B45NsnXqCRFOWX3vTmz_WYT95LHZZTaw0TLadPA1c5mjEnl-enTqHhXE8wp7RTUQp_pJS/s320/9780755635344.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>This is a review, originally posted as a <a href="https://twitter.com/johnakritas/status/1594098428937543681?s=20&t=DZeBVMbRtV_9ZJkCr9uCKQ" target="_blank">thread on Twitter</a>, of Andrew Novo's ‘<a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/eoka-cause-9780755635344/?utm_content=1668531112&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter" target="_blank">The EOKA Cause: Nationalism and the Failure of Cypriot Enosis</a>’.<p></p><p>1/18 Very disappointing book. Superficial, naive, uninformed, full of
misinterpretation and oversights that ends up excusing British
colonialism, Turkish expansionism, Turkish Cypriot fanaticism and
largely pins the blame for Cyprus' downfall on Greek Cypriots: </p><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974531651248128" dir="auto" id="tweet_2"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974531651248128" dir="auto" id="tweet_2">2/18 Britain's expressed desire to deny Cyprus self-determination
because it would mark further British retreat from the Middle East is
taken at face value… </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974531651248128" dir="auto" id="tweet_2"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974531651248128" dir="auto" id="tweet_2"><sup class="tw-permalink"></sup></div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974531651248128" dir="auto" id="tweet_2"><sup class="tw-permalink"></sup></div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974531651248128" dir="auto" id="tweet_2"><sup class="tw-permalink"><i class="fas fa-link"></i></sup>
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3/18 Since Greece was prepared to satisfy British demands to maintain a
military presence in Cyprus – something Novo doesn't mention – then
we're left asking why did Britain really want to stay in Cyprus? </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974534407094273" dir="auto" id="tweet_3"><sup class="tw-permalink"></sup></div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974534407094273" dir="auto" id="tweet_3"><sup class="tw-permalink"></sup></div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974534407094273" dir="auto" id="tweet_3"><sup class="tw-permalink"><i class="fas fa-link"></i></sup>
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974537397235712" dir="auto" id="tweet_4"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974537397235712" dir="auto" id="tweet_4">4/18 The answer is ideological; that Britain couldn't stand the idea
that it was a declining power and that people it regarded as nothing
more than subjects had the audacity not to want to be ruled by them. If
Britain was to leave Cyprus, it wanted to leave on its terms.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974540022996999" dir="auto" id="tweet_5"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974540022996999" dir="auto" id="tweet_5">5/18 Novo downplays Britain's role in inciting Turkey and the TCs. He
claims Britain was limited in what it could do for GCs because of
reactions it might provoke in Turkey and the TCs. This is rubbish.
Britain could have faced down Turkey and the TCs but chose not to do so.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974544108339200" dir="auto" id="tweet_6"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974544108339200" dir="auto" id="tweet_6">6/18 Rather, Britain found it more useful to drag Turkey into Cyprus and
indulge the more extreme Turkish Cypriots because Britain wanted to
scare the GCs into maintaining the British presence. Bringing Turkey and
the TCs into the equation was a choice not necessity.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974547484647425" dir="auto" id="tweet_7"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974547484647425" dir="auto" id="tweet_7">7/18 Britain's supposed sensitivity to Turkish and TC interests was
cynical and hypocritical. In the past, it hadn't prevented the British
from offering Cyprus to Greece and leading GCs to believe that Cyprus
uniting with Greece was the natural evolution of British rule.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974550106193923" dir="auto" id="tweet_8"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974550106193923" dir="auto" id="tweet_8">8/18 Greek Cypriots were not, therefore, naive or hindered by fanaticism
in wanting Enosis. It was a legitimate and natural demand that Britain
had, previously, been willing to grant. Wariness of Turkish and TC
objections had not swayed Britain's Cyprus policy before.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974552626954241" dir="auto" id="tweet_9"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974552626954241" dir="auto" id="tweet_9">9/18 While Novo expends a lot of words doubting the legitimacy of the
Enosis demand, he says nothing about the legitimacy or otherwise of the
Turkish Cypriot objections to it, i.e. that it would lead to the
annihilation of the TCs.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974555395096578" dir="auto" id="tweet_10"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974555395096578" dir="auto" id="tweet_10">10/18 In fact, Turkish Cypriot objections – like the objections of
ex-colonial rumps in South Africa and Ireland (i.e. the whites and
Protestants) – weren't just to Enosis but any form of status for Cyprus
that would leave them being 'ruled by Greeks'.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974558016487424" dir="auto" id="tweet_11"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974558016487424" dir="auto" id="tweet_11">11/18 The logic of Turkish Cypriot objections was to thwart not only
Enosis but any united, independent Cyprus in which the 80% majority had
effective say in running the island.
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<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974560440844288" dir="auto" id="tweet_12"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974560440844288" dir="auto" id="tweet_12">12/18 Rather than recognising TC objections to Enosis and independence
for what they are/were – a rallying call for ethnic cleansing – Novo
dresses this up as legitimate concerns for security and identity and
blames GCs for not recognising them as such.
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</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974563012071430" dir="auto" id="tweet_13"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974563012071430" dir="auto" id="tweet_13">13/18 Eventually, the British decided that if Greek Cypriots wanted
self-determination, then it was only right that Turkish Cypriots should
be allowed the same thing.
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</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974565436358657" dir="auto" id="tweet_14"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974565436358657" dir="auto" id="tweet_14">14/18 But self-determination for Greek Cypriots, which essentially meant
Enosis, did not mean annihilation of the TCs; whereas
self-determination for the TCs, which essentially meant partition, would
have exactly that outcome for Greek Cypriots.
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</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974568947007488" dir="auto" id="tweet_15"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974568947007488" dir="auto" id="tweet_15">15/18 Throughout, GCs are blamed for not recognising the 'realities' of
'genuine' Turkish and Turkish Cypriot objections to Enosis and Britain's
determination to maintain its – and the West's – strategic position in
the East Med.
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</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974572780503042" dir="auto" id="tweet_16"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974572780503042" dir="auto" id="tweet_16">16/18 But Turkey's strategic objections to a Greek-dominated Cyprus are
borne of Turkey's paranoid hyper-nationalism, the perception of Greece
as a threat and Greeks as the eternal enemy. Greeks, in Cyprus and
elsewhere, cannot curtail their freedom to satisfy Turkish delusions.
<sup class="tw-permalink"><i class="fas fa-link"></i></sup>
</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974576261857280" dir="auto" id="tweet_17"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974576261857280" dir="auto" id="tweet_17">17/18 While Cyprus – independent or as part of Greece – would never have
threatened the West's strategic position in the East Med.
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</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974579982225411" dir="auto" id="tweet_18"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1593974579982225411" dir="auto" id="tweet_18">18/18 At no point does Novo see Cyprus in the context of the end of the
British and Ottoman empires, as an anti-colonial struggle for freedom
and democracy. Uniquely, Cypriots, who'd lived under foreign rule for
800 yrs, should've put aside the desire to decide their own future.
</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1594013713379491841" dir="auto" id="tweet_19"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1594013713379491841" dir="auto" id="tweet_19">Also, Novo, who declares the Enosis campaign a failure, has a narrow
view of what that campaign meant. </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1594013713379491841" dir="auto" id="tweet_19"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1594013713379491841" dir="auto" id="tweet_19">At some level, it did, of course, mean
that Cyprus should be incorporated into the Greek state, that Cypriots
would be Greek citizens and the island would be run from Athens…
<sup class="tw-permalink"><i class="fas fa-link"></i></sup>
</div>
<div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1594013716147712001" dir="auto" id="tweet_20"> </div><div class="content-tweet allow-preview" data-action="click->thread#showTweet" data-controller="thread" data-screenname="johnakritas" data-tweet="1594013716147712001" dir="auto" id="tweet_20">However, on another level, Enosis meant GCs would be able, without
interference, to express their Greek identity and defy British colonial
policy that had gone from seeing Cypriots as Greek to the core to
identifying that Greekness as a threat and trying to undermine and deny
it.
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</div><p>Thus, as an assertion of Hellenic identity, in establishing the Republic
of Cyprus in which Greeks predominate, and in making the Republic of
Cyprus and the Hellenic Republic inseparable if not indistinguishable,
Enosis fulfilled its task.</p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-66446339758458717702022-11-02T23:15:00.000+00:002023-04-07T18:09:31.386+01:00A review of Diana Markides’ The Cyprus Tribute and Geopolitics in the Levant 1875-1960<div class="separator"><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbwxP7qkxU2G0z8I-kv3hwMYsJsHkF7Bvlmvk7G4JSgK2bLSWLRxXoDVMAzDj0beJdCISWecM2BuztLLHRQlAGSg5BajAMvQHM4rLvKe5FkyfjSJZkSA9dE27WsM4oy6pRrf00a6QRQq8/s499/51XfYXfnSVL._SX329_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="331" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbwxP7qkxU2G0z8I-kv3hwMYsJsHkF7Bvlmvk7G4JSgK2bLSWLRxXoDVMAzDj0beJdCISWecM2BuztLLHRQlAGSg5BajAMvQHM4rLvKe5FkyfjSJZkSA9dE27WsM4oy6pRrf00a6QRQq8/s320/51XfYXfnSVL._SX329_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" /></a></div><br /><b><br /><br /></b></span></div><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Diana Markides’ <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/3030137767?pf_rd_r=XVMAB4C04GKSDEGF662S&pf_rd_p=6e878984-68d5-4fd2-b7b3-7bc79d9c8b60&pd_rd_r=1aae5f29-7b2e-498c-b306-9bd38f6d98d1&pd_rd_w=Sd7AQ&pd_rd_wg=TI6tu&linkCode=ll1&tag=helleantid-21&linkId=f3c09e6c12f5953e6fa3ea5c4e6f1b5c&language=en_GB&ref_=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">The Cyprus Tribute and Geopolitics in the Levant 1875-1960</a></i> is a remarkable account of the political economy of British imperial rule in Cyprus.</b></span></div><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b style="font-family: arial;">Acquired from Turkey by Disraeli at the Congress of Berlin (1878), which settled yet another Russo-Turkish war, the British prime minister boasted that Cyprus would become a crucial asset for the empire, a place of arms in the Eastern Mediterranean to serve Britain’s grandiose ambitions to extend its influence in Egypt, the Levant and Asia Minor, securing the land route to India and protect shipping and trade east of Suez.</b></div><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><div style="font-family: arial; text-align: left;"><b>Markides argues that Britain’s geopolitical and military justification for acquiring Cyprus was half-baked – for example, Cyprus had no natural deep water harbours and to develop them was uneconomical – and, indeed, a fabrication designed to conceal the real reason for taking over the running of Cyprus from the Ottoman empire, which was to secure money to service the loan British and French creditors had made the Ottoman empire that enabled it to fight the Crimean War (1855). </b></div></b></div><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>In a convoluted scheme, any surplus (the excess revenue over expenditure) Cyprus generated would not be recycled into the local economy but sent to the Ottoman government in Constantinople – the Turkish sultan nominally held suzerainty over the island until 1914 – which would then divert the money to pay back British and French bankers and bondholders. <br /><br />This ‘tribute’ would make up for the shortfall a similar Ottoman debt repayment scheme imposed on Egypt was encountering because of the weakness of that country’s finances and, at the same time, assuage any objections Paris had at Cyprus falling into British hands in a region where France, ensconced in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, felt was its sphere of influence.<br /><br />With all surplus money raised on the island wending its way via Constantinople into British and French coffers and with no money forthcoming from London for any expenditure on infrastructure projects on the island, Cyprus was left to stagnate. Desperately needed improvements to hospitals, quays, customs houses, hotels, antiquities management, public utilities, prisons, roads could not be paid for, while, without a properly-capitalised agricultural bank, peasant-farmers couldn’t take out affordable loans and were left at the mercy of the bane of the peasant-farmers’ existence, the village money-lender.<br /><br />Despite repeated appeals from colonial officials on Cyprus made to London – particularly the Treasury – to loosen the island’s financial burden or to find money to send directly from the metropolis to spend on the island’s development and gain the loyalty of a population smarting at being fleeced – the Whitehall mandarins, crass and short-sighted, wouldn’t budge.<br /><br />However, as elsewhere, there was more to the British imperial project in Cyprus than financial exploitation. To hide the iniquitous side of empire, Britain cloaked its rule in a veneer of liberalism and modernity.<br /><br />Thus, in Cyprus, as well as rescuing Cypriots from 300 years of arbitrary Ottoman depredation, Britain also allowed a free press, laid the foundations for a modern legal system, expanded educational opportunity and introduced a popularly elected system of local government and a national legislature. <br /><br />But here we encounter the fatal flaw in the British imperial model that eventually would spell curtains for it: Britain couldn’t control what modernity unleashed while liberalism had its limits, i.e. it was permissible so long as it didn’t significantly challenge British rule.<br /><br />In Cyprus’ case, what this meant was that while a legislative council was instituted in 1882, not only was it rigged so that the six British-appointed representatives plus the three Muslim legislators could always out-vote the nine Greek Cypriot officials – a tie gave the casting vote to the island’s high commissioner; but its powers were also severely circumscribed, bills involving finance and taxation could not be introduced while decisions taken by the legislature could ultimately be struck down by Orders in Council. <br /><br />While the advantage of the legislative council to Greek Cypriots was that it allowed political expression and popular opposition to government policies – particularly the loathed tribute; its con was was that by binding the Muslim community to the British imperial authorities, the ethnic split on the island became entrenched and institutionalised.<br /><br />Thus, even if the tribute was as crushing to the Muslim population as it was to the Greek Cypriot majority, the fact that the money was going to Constantinople and into the sultan’s purse reassured the Muslims that Cyprus was still in the Ottoman orbit. It wasn’t until the formalisation of the British occupation in 1914, the end of the Ottoman empire in 1923 and the penetration of Kemalist Turkish nationalism into the consciousness of the island’s Muslims that its political co-operation with the British colonial authorities deteriorated.<br /><br />Still, the British never gave up trying to play off the Turks against the Greeks, regarding the latter as a far greater threat to its authority than the former, and when, as in 1931, politics on the island became too heated – economic malaise and government attempts to rein in expressions of Greek nationalism prompted popular protest that ended with the burning down of Government House – the government simply shut the legislature and resorted to political repression.<br /><br />Only after the Second World War was the issue of the tribute finally laid to rest allowing Cyprus to embark on rapid economic growth. This coincided, however, with a shrinking British empire that increased the significance of Cyprus to Britain both from a strategic and ideological point of view. Military facilities imagined since 1878 finally began to be built – in 1954 Middle East Headquarters were moved from Egypt to Cyprus – and the government in London was declaring that some British colonies were too important to the economic well-being and security of the UK to be allowed independence. Cyprus had now become a symbol of British prestige and part of the delusion that Britain was still a superpower. <br /><br />As for the Greek Cypriots, greater prosperity had not increased their loyalty to Britain or convinced them of the British argument that they were materially better off under the current regime than uniting with impoverished Greece. Rather, the Pandora’s box of liberalism and modernity – exacerbated by the social changes on the island and global political realignment brought about by the Second World War – made Britain’s presence in Cyprus unsustainable.<br /><br />The scene was set for the denouement of British rule in Cyprus – EOKA’s guerrilla campaign to drive the British off the island and unite the island with Greece and the revenge Britain exacted on Greek Cypriots for their audacity, which entailed bringing Turkey into Cyprus politics and encouraging partition of the island, a goal Turkey fulfilled with its 1974 invasion.<br /><br />Markides’ book digs deep into the peculiar nature of British rule in Cyprus, but it is much more than a case study. Its interest also lies in demonstrating the grubby economic motivations that sustained the British empire in its entirety and how, at its worst, the imperial project was an expression of avarice and misanthropy. <br /><br />It also convincingly locates the island’s fate within the geopolitics of the day – the Eastern Question, the crumbling of the Ottoman empire and the anxiety of France and Britain to limit the advantages accruing to Russia from the fallout – and hints at how issues of debt and selfish financial interest continue to this day to prevail when it comes to the Eastern Mediterranean.<br /><br />The EU’s squeezing of every last penny out of debtor nations such as Greece and Cyprus, regardless of economic sense and socio-political consequences, and the EU’s refusal to sanction Turkey for its threats and violations of Athens’ and Nicosia’s sovereignty for fear of disrupting the Turkish economy and putting at risk Turkey’s ability to pay debts to Spanish, French, Italian and German banks, is eerily reminiscent of European powers’ obtuse attitudes to the region 150 years ago.</b></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-86471807433584240952022-07-15T13:19:00.001+01:002022-07-15T18:31:43.544+01:00Five myths about the 1974 coup against Makarios<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZzv-z4SKTbsiRef3xyu9kRDqm0gf3iDwnSw08lw4-m924bBpfpmDZX4lIarxB1Hsuhb3RTy1bay-knKXhiFMrfKGqy4F-BsD_rdtjQzp3qsap77vJZ34ui1HcicEbvMULkPQ6ymyTQAM/s1600/Markarios_47113c.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZzv-z4SKTbsiRef3xyu9kRDqm0gf3iDwnSw08lw4-m924bBpfpmDZX4lIarxB1Hsuhb3RTy1bay-knKXhiFMrfKGqy4F-BsD_rdtjQzp3qsap77vJZ34ui1HcicEbvMULkPQ6ymyTQAM/s320/Markarios_47113c.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
This is an interesting piece, <i>Cyprus 1974: five myths about the coup</i>, written by Marios Evriviades in 2014, who is professor of International Relations at Panteion University. (Read the entire article in Greek <a href="https://ardin-rixi.gr/archives/18235" target="_blank">here</a>). <br />
<br />
The five myths, according to Evriviades, are that: 1. Sampson and EOKA B organised the coup; 2. The objective of the coup was enosis; 3. The objective of the coup was partition; 4. Makarios was deliberately allowed by the junta to escape from the assault on the presidential palace; and 5. The Americans tricked junta leader Dimitrios Ioannides into carrying out the coup.<br />
<br />
Below I’ve translated into English extracts that relate to the first three myths Evriviades refers to. I believe Evriviades’ repudiation of the first two myths is compelling and even though I agree with the assertion he makes in discussing myth number three that Turkey’s invasion and partitioning of the island in 1974 did not alter Turkey’s deeper geostrategic goal of controlling the whole of Cyprus, I have my doubts about his view as to when Turkey came to regard partition as falling short of its long-term objectives. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdMAoUF8q7n2cThOzwsG63YohMwGN9KjW_07Udnc5QDT-G39OchKyt7POV0wvg3gCxISTbdKHJyKfS6hto-31y7PiFTyreBPidIL-xwrHt7Lgd_VjA5cvZt3fQYX6ZEkLdWADlAa3h9k/s1600/eggrafo_foreign_office.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdMAoUF8q7n2cThOzwsG63YohMwGN9KjW_07Udnc5QDT-G39OchKyt7POV0wvg3gCxISTbdKHJyKfS6hto-31y7PiFTyreBPidIL-xwrHt7Lgd_VjA5cvZt3fQYX6ZEkLdWADlAa3h9k/s200/eggrafo_foreign_office.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Evriviades starts off his piece by referring to a UK Foreign Office document dated 12 September 1956 revealing that, despite Cyprus being in the throes of its campaign for enosis, Greece, through its foreign minister Evangelos Averoff, was actively promoting the idea of partitioning the island. Evriviades’ says:<br />
<blockquote>
‘In July 1956, while EOKA’s liberation struggle was fully underway, Evangelos Averoff was pushing the idea to American diplomats that Cyprus should be partitioned. In September 1956, Averoff repeated to Norway’s foreign minister Halvard Lange that partition was the only possible solution to the Cyprus Question. Two weeks later, Averoff suggested partition in two meetings with Turkey’s ambassador in Athens.’</blockquote>
On to the myths:<br />
<br />
<b>1. Sampson and EOKA B organised the coup</b><br />
Evriviadis says that EOKA B was not involved in the coup and that Nikos Sampson [later installed as president] was completely irrelevant to it. The coup was organised from Athens and was carried out by junta officers in Cyprus, using forces from ELDYK [Hellenic Force in Cyprus] and elite units from the Cyprus National Guard. <br />
<br />
Sampson, with a number of bodyguards, came out on to the streets of Nicosia on the morning of the coup on 15 July to find out what was going on. He was arrested along with his bodyguards and held in the basement of the headquarters of the National Guard. Only later, when his identity became known, was Sampson taken to the office of the junta’s main henchman in Cyprus, Brigadier Michalis Georgitsis, who had orchestrated the coup. Because no eminent Cypriots – such as Glafkos Clerides – would agree to be sworn in to replace the deposed (but still alive) president, Archbishop Makarios, Sampson was chosen, even if Sampson was regarded as ‘insane’, both by Athens junta leader Dimitrios Ioannides (who became head of EOKA B when General Georgios Grivas died in January 1974) and Ioannides’ EOKA B representative in Cyprus, Lefteris Papadopoulos. <br />
<br />
Despite, Ioannides’ anger and disappointment that the ‘insane’ Sampson was the only man that could be found to make president of Cyprus, the two began to co-operate, with Ioannides’ first order to Sampson being: ‘Nicky, bring me Mouskos’ (i.e. Makarios’) head.’(«Νικολάκη, θέλω το κεφάλι του Μούσκου»).<br />
<br />
As for EOKA B, by the beginning of July 1974, it was disintegrating, with its entire local leadership in prison. With the coup, its remaining members took the opportunity to kill resisters and other political opponents. Prior to the coup, EOKA B actions sought to foment conditions of civil war among Greek Cypriots, following the strictures and techniques laid down by the Nato-inspired anti-communist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio" target="_blank">Operation Gladio</a>. The Greek version of Gladio was <i>Κόκκινη Προβιά</i>, and this was applied in Cyprus throughout the reign of the Athens junta (1967-1974). The creation of EOKA B in 1971 and its subsequent activities were products of <i>Κόκκινη Προβιά</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>2. The objective of the coup was enosis</b><br />
Not at all.<br />
Unadulterated, real enosis had been abandoned by Athens in 1957, if not 1956. Any discussion of enosis after the events of 1963-64 [i.e. the Turkish Cypriot uprising] referred to ‘double enosis’, i.e. partition or, more correctly, the dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus and the annexation of some 60% of the island by Greece, with the rest going to Turkey.<br />
<br />
Any assertion by the junta that its actions in Cyprus were motivated by a desire for enosis is sheer hypocrisy. The aim of the Ioannides junta was more simple: it was the survival of the junta regime – which felt threatened by a free and democratic Cyprus and by Turkey in the Aegean. By removing the ‘Red Priest’ [Makarios] in Cyprus, Ioannides believed he was providing a valuable service to his sponsor, the USA, which loathed Makarios and regarded him as an impediment to their plans for the island. Ioannides hoped that by doing the Americans a favour, Washington would restrain Turkey not only in Cyprus but also in the Aegean, where Turkey had begun to make threatening noises in November 1973. <br />
<br />
<b>3. The objective of the coup was partition</b><br />
Yes and No.<br />
It’s true that both the Georgios Papadopoulos (1967-73) and Dimitrios Ioannides (1973-74) juntas were reconciled to the partition of Cyprus, which when they weren’t calling it ‘double enosis’ were calling it ‘enosis with something in return’. Partition was also the ideal solution and strategic aim of the USA. <br />
<br />
However, was partition Turkey’s objective on Cyprus? And was Ankara prepared to work first with the Papadopoulos’ and then the Ioannides’ regimes to bring about the division of Cyprus? <br />
<br />
Here we are confronted with another myth, that Turkey’s aim was and continues to be the partitioning of Cyprus. Until August 1964, this was the case, but afterwards, it is not so. In August 1964, Turkey rejected partition as envisaged by the <a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/acheson-plan-for-partition-of-cyprus.html" target="_blank">Acheson Plan</a> (Greece had accepted the plan), because partition would not have solved its main strategic preoccupation, which was to prevent Greece extending its sovereignty to Cyprus. From this point on, Turkey altered its Cyprus policy in favour of the dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus and the creation of a federation of two autonomous states on the island [the ‘rulers in the north, partners in the south’ scenario] which would allow geostrategic control of Cyprus to pass to Turkey. Ioannides may have had the aim of partitioning Cyprus, but not Turkey. The form the Turkish invasion of Cyprus took and Turkey’s current Cyprus policy prove this beyond doubt. Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-44664457717188653772022-04-28T13:26:00.002+01:002022-04-28T13:26:59.590+01:00The religious dimension of the Crimean War<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd8a1-kwLIr-K6UwlKs6ws6wLAx7UEVCx8gFusSQuGKGMFMWc5sI6VZIvorqCSbJEupY530OwycSTY5KCgl1isleaQDWnBGwvLaU6EtOPrbKDdxZCVkHClwIirhcqFfiIACe7WEV7zzjVzoVoBYOKZlfFAdl4wDbc_fatXQNP3pYPE_2Ch-bIr2dRI/s200/index.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="130" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd8a1-kwLIr-K6UwlKs6ws6wLAx7UEVCx8gFusSQuGKGMFMWc5sI6VZIvorqCSbJEupY530OwycSTY5KCgl1isleaQDWnBGwvLaU6EtOPrbKDdxZCVkHClwIirhcqFfiIACe7WEV7zzjVzoVoBYOKZlfFAdl4wDbc_fatXQNP3pYPE_2Ch-bIr2dRI/w208-h320/index.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><b>In his book, <i>Crimea: The Last Crusade</i>, Orlando Figes argues the Crimean War's ideological underpinnings were religious. </b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b> </b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>French Catholic opinion feared Russia wanted to spread the Orthodox ‘heresy’ across Europe and called for a ‘holy war’ against Russians and Greeks in defence of Catholicism.<br /><br />The Turks viewed the Crimean War as a jihad to regain land around the Danube, Black Sea and Caucasus humiliatingly lost to the Russian infidel in the last 80 years.<br /><br />While Russia, a Byzantine formation, saw it as its right and duty, ‘its divine mission’, to crush the Ottoman empire, retake Constantinople and redeem its brethren, both Slav and Orthodox, living under Muslim yoke.<br /><br />British Protestants saw Orthodoxy as ‘semi-pagan’, the Russians as modern Attilas whose hordes threatened Western civilisation while the Greeks – seen as collaborating with Russian imperialism against Turkey – were ‘a besotted, dancing, fiddling race’.<br /><br />British Protestant distaste for Orthodoxy, the view that Orthodox Christians weren’t really Christians at all, justified fighting on the side of Muslim Turkey against Christian Russia. <br /><br />For British Protestants, Orthodox Christians were best off under Turkish rather than Tsarist rule. Protestants felt more affinity to austere Islam than Orthodoxy and Turkish rule also gave British missionaries more chance to convert Orthodox Christians to Protestantism.<br /><br />Some British Protestants even hoped to convert the Turks, encapsulating the liberal imperialist belief, still around today, that the barbarian once exposed to the self-evidently superior ways of the West will give up his culture for the more advanced one being offered to him.</b><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-42095689653717818072022-04-16T18:35:00.002+01:002022-04-17T18:42:11.092+01:00Kazantzakis on the raising of Lazarus<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3k0gQCg7nPNfqmpkIzTYcTlu2NLFI15EJwsGafvygweDrygWiqYS51lv4F559HfrVUtdfub9OUyQTDHc_hHEE7n916sDaXTzd4Fygtbb9IdxaziXuIBjK6xWRUfJlNyzcOErC7WMYPOlAELN8ISROl6FTbv5oBETFy64vQaDrL2FRRY5-E1I1nJo6/s2048/E-MFKBhVcAcJRsQ.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1375" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3k0gQCg7nPNfqmpkIzTYcTlu2NLFI15EJwsGafvygweDrygWiqYS51lv4F559HfrVUtdfub9OUyQTDHc_hHEE7n916sDaXTzd4Fygtbb9IdxaziXuIBjK6xWRUfJlNyzcOErC7WMYPOlAELN8ISROl6FTbv5oBETFy64vQaDrL2FRRY5-E1I1nJo6/s320/E-MFKBhVcAcJRsQ.jpg" width="215" /></a></div> <b><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">In Nikos Kazantzakis’ <i>The Last Temptation</i>, Lazarus (whose feast day is on the Saturday before Holy Week), after being resurrected by Christ, doesn't seamlessly resume his old life but carries around the taint of death with him and becomes an object of fear, loathing, suspicion and ridicule.</span></b><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><div class="css-901oao r-18jsvk2 r-37j5jr r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-rjixqe r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0" dir="auto" id="id__n57d2ih8vyo" lang="en"><b><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"> </span></b></div><div class="css-901oao r-18jsvk2 r-37j5jr r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-rjixqe r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0" dir="auto" id="id__n57d2ih8vyo" lang="en"><i><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">‘Fatigued and reticent, Lazarus sat in the darkest corner of his house, for light bothered him. His legs, arms and belly were swollen and green. His bloated face was cracked all over and it exuded a yellowish-white liquid which soiled the white shroud which he continued to wear: it had stuck to his body and could not be removed. His sisters Martha and Mary were cleansing him of the soil and of the small earthworms which had attached themselves to him. The peasants came and stayed just a few moments to examine him attentively and speak to him. He answered their questions wearily with a laconic yes or no; and then others came from the village or the surrounding towns. Today the blind village chief came too. He put out his hand and fingered him avidly. “Did you have a pleasant time in Hades?” he asked, laughing. “You’re a lucky fellow, Lazarus. Now you know all the secrets of the underworld. But don’t reveal them, wretch, or you’ll drive everyone up here crazy.” He leaned over to his ear and, half joking, half trembling, asked, “Worms, eh? Nothing but worms?” He waited a considerable time, but Lazarus did not answer. The blind man became enraged, took his staff, and left.’</span></i><b><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><br /></span></b></div></div><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-1dbjc4n r-1loqt21 r-1pi2tsx r-1ny4l3l" href="https://twitter.com/johnakritas/status/1515314769825259535/photo/1" role="link"></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-10278163738851757262022-03-25T00:32:00.000+00:002022-03-25T17:28:19.132+00:00Theodoros Kolokotronis: ‘one of the leaders of our race’<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>One of my favourite parts in one of my favourite Nikos Kazantzakis’ books is the following from <i>Travels in Greece: Journey to the Morea</i>, in which the Cretan author reflects on the character of perhaps the foremost hero of the Greek War of Independence, Theodoros Kolokotronis, the Old Man of the Morea. I’ve always liked Kazantzakis’ description of Kolokotronis, which has him, for 50 years, patiently preparing for the fight against the Turks, for the moment when his life would begin and take meaning.</b><br />
<br />
<i>The Old Man of the Morea</i><br />
Today as I sit in a Tripolitan coffeehouse watching the people and listening to their talk, I sense that if I were a young man living in Tripolis, I would concentrate – in order to save myself – upon the rich, aggressive and valiant soul of Kolokotronis. Here in Tripolis, air and mountain are still filled with his ample breath. From the days he spent as a merchant in Zakynthos, gazing at the mountains of Morea across the way, sighing:<br />
<br />
<i>I see the spreading sea, and afar the Morea,<br />
Grief has seized me, and great yearning…</i><br />
<br />
until his censure by the land that he liberated, and those final serene moments when Charon found him, Kolokotronis’ life was a dramatic, characteristic unfolding of a rich modern Greek soul: faith, optimism, tenacity, valour, a certain, practical mind, deceptive versatility, like Odysseus.<br />
<br />
When the penpushers all lost their bearings, or the tin-soldier generals bickered among themselves, Kolokotronis would see the simplest, most effective solution. Gentle and softhearted when it served the great purpose, harsh and savage when necessary. Harsh and savage most of all with himself. When he served as a corsair on the ‘black ships’ he once found himself without tobacco. He opened his pipe and scraped it in order to get some burned tobacco to make a cigarette. But at the same instant he started to smoke, he felt ashamed. ‘Here’s a man for you,’ he muttered to himself with scorn. ‘Here’s a man who wants to save his country, and can’t even save himself from an inconsequential habit.’ And he flung the cigarette away.<br />
<br />
Thus he conditioned and hardened himself, in order to be prepared. For years in foreign armies he studied the art of war, the ‘manual of arms’; aboard ship he learned the <i>risalto</i>, the assault; he made himself ready. And when the revolution burst out he was primed, fifty years old by then, organised from top to toe. Armed to the teeth. He had amassed knowledge by the quintal, cunning, bravery, wide experience; he wrought songs to relieve his ‘yearning’; by contributing an axiom at a crucial moment he would silence the unorganised chatter. Our modern Greek problems have not yet found more profound, humorous and epigrammatic expression.<br />
<br />
He had both impulse and restraint, he knew how to retreat so that he could advance; hemmed in by enemies, Greeks and Turks, he was forced to mobilise all his bravery and wile so that the Race would not be lost. Often all would desert him, he would be left alone in the mountains, and then burst out weeping. He sobbed like the Homeric heroes, with his long hair and helmet; he sobbed and was refreshed. He regained his fortitude, formulated new schemes in his mind, sent off messages, involved the elders once more, mocked the Turks, conciliated the Greeks; and the struggle began again.<br />
<br />
Kolokotronis, with all his faults and virtues, is one of the leaders of our race. Here in Tripolis, which he took with mind and sword, his scent still lingers dissipated in the air; with patience and concentration a youth should be able to reconstruct, as model and guide, the peerless Old Man. And thus, with a struggle now invisible and spiritual, to reconquer and ravish Tripolis.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-89465184401832066792022-02-22T17:46:00.001+00:002022-02-22T17:46:42.337+00:00Eric Ambler on the Smyrna holocaust<div style="text-align: left;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEibPqAT95avpK_WpYYNBqCAqBukP5dXX2S6yp8ckYBlCKtMzkNwAjmFmKdHisFbZDEuCAKl-oMhwxCXb3lZOyAka6Mljsjc4hljWM-kO6jvaw5WuDL1YOoLdfeCkkMeajC8PRTJrs9N54vAPlPO8HZgCoobisbVfXoyDXwBnBvVXW50rMNIy4i-vJ-e=s400" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="257" data-original-width="400" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEibPqAT95avpK_WpYYNBqCAqBukP5dXX2S6yp8ckYBlCKtMzkNwAjmFmKdHisFbZDEuCAKl-oMhwxCXb3lZOyAka6Mljsjc4hljWM-kO6jvaw5WuDL1YOoLdfeCkkMeajC8PRTJrs9N54vAPlPO8HZgCoobisbVfXoyDXwBnBvVXW50rMNIy4i-vJ-e=w400-h258" width="400" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">In his classic noir novel <a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-mask-of-dimitrios-mark-mazower-on.html" target="_blank"><i>The Mask of Dimitrios</i> </a>(1939), which concerns the efforts of second-rate crime writer Charles Latimer as he pieces together the murky life and career of Dimitrios Makropoulos, from his time in Smyrna’s dying days to his subsequent rise through the inter-war Balkan and Parisian underworlds, betraying, robbing and murdering his way into becoming a respectable European businessman, Eric Ambler provides a graphic account of the events that propelled the Levantine on his dark path, the fall of Smyrna to Kemalist forces in 1922.<br /><br /><b>‘Their lust for infidel blood still unsatisfied, the Turks swept on. On the ninth of September, they occupied Smyrna.<br /><br />‘For a fortnight, refugees from the oncoming Turks had been pouring into the city to swell the already large Greek and Armenian populations. They had thought that the Greek army would turn and defend Smyrna. But the Greek army had fled. Now they were caught in a trap. The holocaust began.<br /><br />‘The register of the Armenian Asia Minor Defence League had been seized by the occupying troops, and, on the night of the tenth, a party of regulars entered the Armenian quarters to find and kill those whose names appeared on the register. <br /><br />‘The Armenians resisted and the Turks ran amok. The massacre that followed acted like a signal. <br /><br />‘Encouraged by their officers, the Turkish troops descended next day upon the non-Turkish quarters of the city and began systematically to kill. Dragged from their houses and hiding places, men, women and children were butchered in the streets which soon became littered with mutilated bodies. The wooden walls of the churches, packed with refugees, were drenched with benzine and fired. The occupants who were not burnt alive were bayoneted as they tried to escape. In many parts looted houses had also been set on fire and now the flames began to spread.<br /><br />‘At first, attempts were made to isolate the blaze. Then, the wind changed, blowing the fire away from the Turkish quarter, and further outbreaks were started by the troops. Soon, the whole city, with the exception of the Turkish quarter and a few houses near the Kassamba railway station, was burning fiercely. The massacre continued with unabated ferocity. A cordon of troops was drawn round the city to keep the refugees within the burning area. The streams of panic-stricken fugitives were shot down pitilessly or driven back into the inferno. <br /><br />The narrow, gutted streets became so choked with corpses that, even had the would-be rescue parties been able to endure the sickening stench that arose, they could not have passed along them. Smyrna was changed from a city into a charnel-house. Many refugees had tried to reach ships in the inner harbour. Shot, drowned, mangled by propellers, their bodies floated hideously in the blood-tinged water. But the quayside was still crowded with those trying frantically to escape from the blazing waterfront, buildings toppling above them a few yards behind. It was said that the screams of these people were heard a mile out at sea. Giaur Izmir – infidel Smyrna – had atoned for its sins.<br /><br />‘By the time that dawn broke on the fifteenth of September, over one hundred and twenty thousand persons had perished; but somewhere amidst that horror had been Dimitrios, alive.’</b><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-78768601138225517692022-02-06T18:23:00.001+00:002022-02-06T18:25:15.467+00:00The Mask of Dimitrios: Mark Mazower on Eric Ambler and the decay of European civilisation<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4Cihb4yEYlg" title="YouTube video player" width="500"></iframe>
<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Eric Ambler’s brilliant noir novel <i>The Mask of Dimitrios</i> (1939), peopled by the flotsam and jetsam of the inter-war and post-Ottoman period, relates the obsessive quest by an English writer to trace the career of the Smyrniot Dimitrios Makropoulos, who is a thief, killer, spy, assassin, drug dealer, drug addict, white slave trader and successful businessman, a quest that takes him on a journey through Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Switzerland and France. The book was made into a classic film noir of the same name in 1944, directed by the Romanian Jean Negulesco and starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet – both the novel and film are resonant of <i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, the film of which in 1941 debuted the enduring Lorre and Greenstreet partnership.<br /><br />The film can be seen in its entirety <a href="https://ok.ru/video/2546502928898" target="_blank">here</a>. Above is a trailer for the film. Below, historian of modern Greece and the Balkans Mark Mazower provides an introduction to Ambler’s novel.<br /><br /><u><b>The Mask of Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler. Introduction, by Mark Mazower</b></u><br /> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>The Mask of Dimitrios is the work of a writer at the height of his powers. Saturated with the despairing mood of a world in rapid decay, it is also a manifesto for a new kind of crime novel, a bomb intended to blow up the vicarage whodunnit as decisively as the fifty tons of TNT that the eight-year-old Eric Ambler had watched devastate the Silvertown storage depot in 1917 in London’s biggest-ever explosion. One might think it was written yesterday with its Balkan drug dealers, unscrupulous Eurasian businessmen and bedraggled refugees drifting across the continent. In fact, moving between London, Paris and New York, Ambler finished it as the Nazis marched into Prague in the spring of 1939. But although the war’s threat lurks in the background, and international machinations impart a sweaty tension to the fast-paced story, the real action occurs elsewhere, in a naive Englishman’s efforts to set aside the comfortably parochial values of his homeland and come to terms with the harsher realities of the world across the Channel. Back home they are playing cricket on the sundappled sward; but meantime the action is in cheap hotels and sleazy bars with names like<i> La Vièrge St Marie</i> and <i>Le Kasbah</i>, figuring out Grodek and Marukakis, Madame Preveza and the sinister Mr Peters. They are the real diagnostians of the ‘disappearing civilization’ that is Europe.<br /><br />Charles Latimer, the hero, is sketched with Ambler’s characteristically ironic economy: former lecturer at some minor university, he earns a living from writing old-fashioned detective stories. But like Ambler himself, he is curious about the world and again like Ambler, he needs the sun and the Mediterranean, and the unknown pulls him in. Is it coincidence that the catalyst for his enquiry, the urbane Turkish Colonel Haki, should evoke by his very name the word for Truth (Hakk)? The world-weary Kemalist police officer seeks Latimer’s advice about his own unpublished foray into murder mystery. What he offers in return triggers Latimer’s journey into the heart of Europe’s darkness – reality in the shape of the bloated corpse of a man called Dimitrios laid out on a slab in a stinking Istanbul mortuary. As a curious Latimer retraces Dimitrios’s crime-laden peregrinations, the doubts begin, the interrogations and questions pile up, and soon it is Latimer himself who is being tracked down.<br /><br />Ambler had not been to the Balkans when he wrote this book, although you would never guess it from the sureness of the writing. Instead, he had hung out in seedy Turkish cafes in the backstreets of Nice, where refugees had told him their stories in bad French. He must have listened carefully. This book’s émigrés have seen things and have little time for words: they list their stations of the cross, scarcely bothering to fill in the gaps. ‘Odessa, 1918. Stambul 1919. Smyrna 1921. Bolsheviks. Wrangel’s army. Kiev. A woman they called The Butcher.’ This is a world where London is a distant haven across the water, as the dust settles on the collapse of “the Ottoman empire and the Russian civil war. Refugees and conmen teach the former professor their hard truths of deception and violence. The police file away their details in the archives, all too aware of the falsehoods they contain. The civil servant’s card index is a fiction: names and dates change for a few small banknotes. International bureaucrats pontificate about stopping drugs and preventing trafficking in women. But the real power is elsewhere and the hope of a rational and benign world is an illusion. Violence – assassination, ethnic cleansing, military coups, war – courses through the book but it is not the ultimate problem. That problem is money, and what men will do for it.<br /><br />Soon Latimer finds that behind the gunmen and the spies lies the mysterious Eurasian Credit Trust which bets on currency markets and makes huge profits from the heroin trade. Standing above Left and Right, international finance pulls the strings and makes the puppets dance. A stranger tells Latimer to accept the will of the Great One: chance rules men’s affairs, unpleasant deeds are sometimes inevitable and stoical acceptance is best. Latimer objects. His impulse is still to rationalize: he wants to see the criminal not as a man but as ‘a unit in a disintegrating social system’. Yet the people he meets, those who know much more about the mysterious Dimitrios than he does, find this superficial: an engaging blackmailer tells him men are like rats – everyone has one impulse which masters all others. Meanwhile, the malevolent Peters tells Latimer that having read one of his books he found it terrifying for its ‘ferocious moral rectitude’.<br /><br />And lurking in the background, the instability of identity and the question of who Dimitrios really was. Greek, Muslim, Jew? He had been born in the Ottoman Balkans, in Salonika in 1889, a time and place of labile ethnicities, and had exploited the chaos of war, the mindless nationalist passions of more stupid men around him, to carve out a small fortune. ‘The drug pedlar, the pimp, the thief, the spy, the white slaver, the bully, the financier’: all of these at one time or another. One is reminded of the arch-villain of interwar pacifists, the arms-dealer Basil Zaharoff, whose rapid rise to power disguised his murky origins. In Paris, at the book’s climax, a shaken Latimer confronts the reality of his amoral times. Beyond Good and Evil, there is nothing more than logic and consistency; beyond Beethoven quartets and Michelangelo’s David lies poison gas and ‘the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town’. Europe was a jungle and its rules were set by the <i>Stock Exchange Year Book</i> and <i>Mein Kampf</i>.<br /><br />Ambler’s prose, taut and fiercely etched, still has the power to shock. His style combines the precision of the chemist and engineer – two skills he deeply admired – with the thespian flair he inherited from his parents, eking out a living as music-hall artistes on the southeastern fringe of Edwardian London. There had been nothing romantic about his lower-middle-class upbringing but nothing either to constrain an imagination fuelled by the attractively disturbing stories of violence, war and foreign lands his returning uncles brought home with them in 1918. As Ambler’s talent propelled him upwards between the wars, his level gaze skewered the hypocrisies of a continent on the way down. Courteous yet unillusioned, Ambler remains one of the best guides to that low, dishonest decade. He is without doubt the most entertaining.</b><br /><br /><br /></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-14242079698214602112022-01-28T13:56:00.008+00:002022-01-28T22:39:50.657+00:00Mazower, the Greek Revolution and anti-colonial violence<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7sipKxju-_tVLpxaOzA-Uh_pi1WeDqXlss3GnK9EgFRg43GcGzUp-cE2osp4RftWObx8BE3Y8QcmBanUAQkWWuzwEOLng7DTHLa0ABs1oxPxy3SqMFd8iTgmdw4xbJraiByc5hLDfQQk8mZo_xvCLMVgh9M9soMdfIZsR7ZFXS9WXF5vhKNk3uxV=s499" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="325" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7sipKxju-_tVLpxaOzA-Uh_pi1WeDqXlss3GnK9EgFRg43GcGzUp-cE2osp4RftWObx8BE3Y8QcmBanUAQkWWuzwEOLng7DTHLa0ABs1oxPxy3SqMFd8iTgmdw4xbJraiByc5hLDfQQk8mZo_xvCLMVgh9M9soMdfIZsR7ZFXS9WXF5vhKNk3uxV=s320" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Mark Mazower has written three books that deal with modern Greek history: <i>Inside Hitler’s Greece: the Experience of Occupation 1941-44</i>; <i>Salonica, City of Ghosts;</i> and, most recently, <i>The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe</i>. </span></span></b></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The first is a compelling study of the Nazi subjugation of Greece and its impact on ordinary Greeks; the second a more controversial account of the Muslim and Jewish communities that thrived in Thessaloniki during the Ottoman occupation – the controversy stemming from Mazower’s apparent nostalgia for ‘cosmopolitan’ Thessaloniki and sadness at its demise, when, of course, to Greeks and Greek nationalists the Ottoman occupation of this historic Greek city was a disaster and its liberation in 1912 and its re-Hellenisation remains one of the paramount achievements of modern Greece. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Mazower’s work on 1821 is a narrative account of Greeks’ grim and remorseless determination to end Turkish rule, which shows that when Greeks said Freedom or Death they meant it and when they said No Turk in the Morea, No Turk in the World, they meant that too. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />As with his work on the Nazi occupation of Greece, Mazower is keen to avoid regurgitating the mythical exploits of those from the pantheon of revolutionary heroes, heroines, political and military leaders and, instead, wants to record the experiences of those, perhaps, previously neglected in the genre – women, children, non-combatant villagers. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Indeed, Mazower’s case is that it was the grotesque abuses suffered by civilians – particularly the Muslim practice of enslavement and forced Islamisation – that decisively turned European public opinion in Greek favour and convinced the continent’s leading powers – Great Britain, France and Russia – to intervene, even if they did this not so much because they wanted to establish Greek independence but to end Ottoman and Egyptian atrocities. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />(Mazower claims that the final straw for the three European powers was the concern that the Egyptian commander Ibrahim Pasha would overrun the Peloponnese, exterminate the Greek population there and replace it with Arabs. This caused consternation in London, St Petersburg and Paris not only because it was intolerable to countenance such a slaughter of Christians by Muslims but also because it would represent a dangerous resurgence of Islam on European soil).</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />A grievance is that Mazower’s book – like Roderick Beaton’s recent <i> Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation</i> – tends to equate the violence suffered by the Greeks at the hands of Turks, Bosniaks, Albanians and Egyptians with that inflicted by Greeks when ridding their country of the Ottoman presence. (This anti-Muslim violence often shocked philhellenes who came to Greece with their heads full of ideas about noble Greeks and universal human dignity, seemingly oblivious to just how dehumanising Turkish rule was and how this seeped into Greek attitudes and morés).</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />However, not only was Ottoman violence far more widespread than its Greek equivalent but it also often took place where Greeks had not risen to overthrow Ottoman rule – Constantinople, Asia Minor, Cyprus – and amounted to grotesque reminders to Greeks of their subordination. Indeed, religious discrimination and persecution were ingrained in the Ottoman system. Order was maintained through terror and repression and peace dependent on the whims of the sultan or his pashas or beys who, at any moment, could decide that their Christian subjects, their culture, shrines and very lives, were an affront to Muslim ascendancy and should be suppressed or eradicated. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Thus, while it’s true that the Revolution turned decisively in the Greeks’ favour with external intervention – Mazower’s argument is, in fact, that the original revolutionaries of the Philiki Eteiria always knew that, for the Revolution to be successful, help from outside, specifically from Russia, would be required; it’s also right to attribute Greek existence and victory to Greek refusal to submit to the genocidal logic of the Ottoman state and the religious malice that underpinned it.</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In terms of religion, Mazower is good at distancing the Greek revolution from the Enlightenment-inspired revolts in France and America by stressing that most Greeks involved in the Revolution had no interest in the Rights of Man or Reason (certainly marginalising the church and its dogma was a minority preoccupation) but were guided by a popular millenarianist tradition entrenched in Orthodoxy that spoke of the illegitimate and sacrilegious authority of the Muslim sultan in Constantinople and how it would inevitably come to an end with the restoration of a Christian ruler in the City.</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Ethnic hatred, religious zeal, a sense that a previous state of affairs had existed in which freedom and justice reigned and would come again, were felt more widely among Greeks than Western ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity held by the more ‘educated’ strata. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />If the uprising was not the child of the American War of Independence or the French Revolution, then perhaps it was more akin to the Haitian revolution (and subsequent revolutions aimed at overthrowing colonial regimes). Both the Greek and Haitian revolutions start with mythical religious convocations – the Bois Caiman ceremony in Haiti and the Agia Lavra doxology in Greece; are reactions to regimes of tyrannical abomination; and proceed to be characterised by mind-boggling acts of violence and brutality. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In explaining the violence of the colonised oppressed, it might be useful to refer to Frantz Fanon and his classic anti-colonial diatribe <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i> (1961), in which he justifies (if not demands) the use of violence to overthrow colonial tyranny. </span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Decolonisation is always violent,’ Fanon says. ‘National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it – individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank – decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another.’</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />On the individual level, Fanon goes on, violence is a process of cleansing, which ‘rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence’.</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In vanquishing injustice, in raising their heads again – to use General Makriyiannis’ terms in describing the Greek Revolution – Greek revolutionary violence was a necessary act of decolonisation. It purified individual souls and the soul of the country after 400 years of humiliation and repression, restored dignity and self-respect and allowed future generations of Greeks to live with the knowledge that the depredations endured by their ancestors didn’t go unpunished.</span></span></b></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-77413764848418908052022-01-17T23:16:00.003+00:002022-01-17T23:24:47.916+00:009. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 6: Conclusion<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/w208-h338/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" width="208" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"></a><br /><i><b>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.<br /></b></i></p><p><i><u>9. Cyprus: Hostage to History</u></i><u>, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 6: Conclusion</u><i><b></b></i></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">‘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?”</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">“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!”’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">George Ball, <i>The Past Has Another Pattern</i></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘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.”’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Laurence Stern, <i>The Wrong Horse</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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? </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i>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. </i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Ernest Renan, <i>Qu’est-ce qu’une nation</i> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">(With acknowledgements to Benedict Anderson) </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Obviously, things <i>could</i> 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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">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: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />1. <i>Economics</i>. The Turkish Cypriots, despite their history of <i>political</i> and <i>national</i> privilege as an organized group, were most often <i>economically</i> 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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />2. <i>Culture</i>. 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 <i>The Rise and Fall of the Cyprus Republic</i>, ‘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.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />And as Costa P. Kyrris of the Cyprus Research Centre put it in his estimable book <i>Peaceful Coexistence in Cyprus</i> (1977): </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘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.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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 <i>Linobambakoi</i> 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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />3. <i>Religion</i>. 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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />4. <i>Military forces</i>. 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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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 <i>everything</i>, 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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men? </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your minds </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends, </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Defeat in the plans of your confident generals. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />New prisoners bring news. The evening air unravels </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The friendly scents from fruit trees, creepers and trellised vines. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">In airless rooms, conversations are gently renewed. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">An optimist licking his finger detects a breeze </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">And I begin to ignore the insidious voice </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Which insists in whispers: The chance once lost is life lost </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">For the idea, for the losers and their dead </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Whose memorials will never be honoured or built</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Until they and those they have betrayed are forgotten – </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Not this year, not next year, not in your time. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">From ‘Prison Island’ by James Fenton (<i>The Memory of War: Poems 1968-1982</i>) </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />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.</span></span> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Read all parts of the serialisation here:<br /></div><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 5: Consequences.</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a> <br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><i></i></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-17488881205787014002022-01-10T19:00:00.002+00:002022-01-17T23:23:01.482+00:008. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences<div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/w208-h338/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" width="208" /></a><br /><i><b>In Chapter 5 (Consequences) of his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens describes the political fallout of events in Cyprus of July and August 1974 for the external instigators of Cyprus’s undoing. In Britain and the USA, there were serious parliamentary investigations into the conduct of foreign policy that revealed incompetence, malice and corruption. In Greece, US support for the junta and Washington’s iniquitous role in Cyprus led to a dramatic swing to the left and upsurge in anti-American feeling. In Turkey, the occupation of northern Cyprus and the lack of international repercussions emboldened the military to take a greater and more nefarious role in politics, and also whetted Turkish nationalist appetites for repudiating the Lausanne Treaty and further expanding at Greek expense in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.<br /></b></i><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><b> </b></i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><u>8.<i> Cyprus: Hostage to History</i>, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences</u></span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><u>Washington </u><br />Cyprus provided the occasion for a battle between the United States Congress and the Executive which continues to this day. If, now, an American President feels constrained in what he may do overseas without congressional consent, then it is the unfortunate Cypriots who can take a large share of the credit. <br /><br />One says a large share because although Cyprus was the ostensible occasion for the conflict, it was one which had too long been postponed. By the summer of 1974, many senior senators and Congressmen were fed up with learning, after the fact, that the United States had been responsible for some discreditable foreign imbroglio. There had been the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the endless manifestations of Richard Nixon’s double-dealing over Vietnam. There had been the awful massacre, with American weapons, of insurgent Bangladesh. There had been the engineering of a military coup in Chile. Now there was a near-war in NATO and the other bitter consequences of an obviously rank intimacy with the Greek junta. Congress was, quite simply, tired of being kept in the dark. And the new favourite policy – backing of Turkey – did not look any more appetizing.<br /> <br />On 15 August, as the Turkish army was planting its flag on the partition line and driving tens of thousands of Greek Cypriots into exile in their own country, a delegation of Congressmen called on Kissinger to demand an embargo on arms to Turkey; arms which had been supplied on the strict understanding that they were to be used to defend Turkey against the Soviet Union. The delegation was led by Congress man John Brademas, a Greek American from Indiana. Brademas was not impressed by Kissinger’s argument that the United States was pursuing ‘very active diplomacy’ with the Turkish government. Assurances, so easily offered and so quickly forgotten, and so glibly packaged with a plea that Congress should not ‘tie the hands’ of the Executive, were no longer enough. Laurence Stern of the <i>Washington Post</i>, in his excellent book <i>The Wrong Horse</i>, describes the substance of the meeting at the State Department: <br /><br />‘The Indiana Democrat [Brademas] pronounced Kissinger’s efforts at private diplomacy a failure. He asked why there had been no public protest from the State Department when Makarios was overthrown and nearly murdered, or when the Turks had invaded Cyprus. Why, he went on, were there no public statements of support for Callaghan in his efforts to keep the Turks from leaving the bargaining table at Geneva? Why was the State Department virtually silent during the ensuing military blitz by Turkish troops?’ <br /><br />These were all, except the third, which was too philanthropic towards Callaghan, good questions. And to none of them did Kissinger have a convincing answer. His strategy, in the coming weeks and months, was to refer disparagingly to his critics as ‘the Greek lobby’ – as if they were motivated by purely ethnic concerns and were somehow diminished thereby. This approach had two weaknesses. The first was that the description did not cover Senator Claiborne Pell, Senator Vance Hartke, Congressman Don Fraser or Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal, to name only some of the prominent politicians who supported Brademas’s effort. The second was that Dr Kissinger himself had been a political ally of Spiro Agnew and Thomas Pappas, both of whom had formed a ‘Greek lobby’ on behalf of the junta. <br /><br />The lack of understanding on this point went as far as the White House. When Congressman Brademas called on President Ford shortly after he took office, and again patiently explained his objections to the use of American arms for Turkish expansionism, he was met by the astounding presidential interjection that, ‘After all, it was the Greeks who started this thing.’ It had, indeed, been ‘the Greeks’ who started ‘this thing’. But the Greeks in question were a minority enjoying the support of Nixon, Kissinger and Ford. Brademas, who had opposed the junta, did not feel bound by its legacy. It was becoming apparent that there had been a ‘double tilt’, first in favour of Greece for as long as it was a dictatorship, and then away from Greece and Cyprus and towards Turkey when the Athens government returned to democracy. A democratic regime was now to be punished for the not wholly involuntary crimes of an authoritarian one. This rather crude policy was a counterpart abroad to the administration’s distrust of democracy in foreign policy-making at home. It had the effect of enhancing congressional determination to recover at least some control over America’s overseas commitments. There was almost nothing that Kissinger would not do to prevent this outcome. His implied view, that democracy and an effective foreign policy were somehow incompatible, became less implied and more explicit as the debate gathered momentum. Cyprus may have looked like ‘a flea' to him as it had to his predecessors. But there must have been times, in the ensuing months, when he regretted swatting at it so callously. <br /><br />Kissinger has, throughout his career, regarded the law as a rough guide. His irritation at its exactitude or its codification is notorious. Cyprus was, for him, an unwelcome test case of a precisely worded law – the Foreign Assistance Act. Under the terms of the FAA, which was promulgated in 1961, a nation became 'immediately ineligible for further assistance’ if it used American weapons in ‘substantial violation’ of the act’s restrictions. The FAA also enjoined the President to deny aid to ‘any country which is engaging in or preparing for aggressive military efforts directed against any country receiving assistance under this or any other act’. Cyprus, as the recipient of several American aid programmes, qualified for that protection, just as Turkey qualified for that denial. <br /><br />The high ground of the Foreign Assistance Act was not undermined by either of the two other relevant diplomatic agreements. These were the bilateral agreements of 1947 between the United States and Turkey, which forbade the diversion of American weapons to any other country without the prior consent of the President, and the 1960 London-Zurich agreements which excluded partition in name and in fact. It would be understating the legal position to say that the United States had little choice but to place an embargo on further arms shipments to Turkey. Its own laws required that it do so. <br /><br />For this reason, Kissinger did not enter any legal challenge to his critics. He preferred to shroud himself in the same discredited ‘executive privilege’ which had postponed the resignation of his patron Richard Nixon. He professed ignorance of the law from the first, as on the famous occasion when he was asked, on 19 August 1974, whether the Foreign Assistance Act did not necessitate the termination of aid to Turkey. His reply was: ‘Well, I will have to get a legal opinion on that, which I have not done.’ <br /><br />Turkish troops had been taking village after village in Cyprus for over a month when the self-anointed king of foreign policy gave that reply. Meanwhile, State Department legal officers were set to work, but by September had concluded that there was no lawful basis for continued military aid to Turkey. The finding of the law officers was, however, not acted upon. Instead, Congress was asked to consider Turkey’s special position as a NATO ally with 1,000 miles of border with the Soviet Union. Gone was the insistence on the importance of (junta) Greece as a ‘home port’ for the Sixth Fleet. Now, Turkey was the prize and the most favoured nation. So transparent was the opportunism of this argument that many important Republican votes went to make up the Senate’s resolution, by sixty-four votes to twenty-seven, for an embargo. The administration’s logic was circular. It alleged that Turkey might default on its NATO obligations if it was threatened with Congressional pressure, but it omitted to say that by directing troops, planes and weapons to Cyprus, Turkey had already weakened its NATO commitment. The administration further alleged that political isolation of Turkey was ‘counter productive’, an exhausted neologism and one that, given the stand of Ford and Kissinger, was self-fulfilling. If the Turks knew that the White House and the Defense Department were opposed to congressional sanctions, they had only to wait, as the Greek junta had done, for a change in policy. By the logic of Dr Kissinger, Turkey’s refusal to make any concessions on Cyprus was a <i>vindication</i> of his policy and a rebuke to congressional resolve. His own position in the argument was, however, very far from neutral. And his hypocritical view that Turkey would respond to generosity rather than an embargo was soon disproved. In late 1975 the embargo was partially lifted after a very narrow vote in Congress, and after a series of public and private ‘assurances’ from Ankara about concessions. No concession has been made since. It is fair to conclude, then, that the pride of Turkey was affronted by the embargo experiment, but that its real determination was not tested. Divided between administration ‘realism’ and congressional ‘idealism’, American policy once again achieved the worst of both worlds. <br /><br />Cyprus was to American foreign policy the counterpart, in timing and in character, of Watergate in domestic policy. Like Watergate, it ended in a stalemate, with the principal villains discredited but unpunished. Like Watergate, it gave Congress and the press a brief opportunity to subject policy-making to critical scrutiny. But the sense of outrage generated by the scrutiny was, as in the case of Watergate, not to prove durable. By the time that Presidents Nixon and Ford, and their executor Dr Kissinger, had been replaced, the United States was back to business as usual with Turkey. <br /><br />I do not make the Watergate comparison solely for effect. There was a strong, continuous relationship between the upper reaches of the Nixon team and the Greek junta. Much of this relationship remained uninvestigated, or partially investigated, when the various Watergate committees had completed their formal tasks. The number of unresolved questions was skilfully defined by Senator George McGovern, Nixon’s defrauded opponent in the 1972 presidential election, and chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. On 29 October 1976 he wrote a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The letter, which has lost none of its relevance, came into my possession in 1983. I reproduce it here in full: <br /><br />Dear Mr Chairman, </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and as a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, I have closely followed American foreign policy interests in Greece during the military dictatorship there, during the restoration of democracy after the 1974 Cyprus coup, and in connection with the involvement of our intelligence agencies with Greece during both periods. I write to bring to your attention information concerning Greece and our intelligence agencies which merit, I am convinced, a careful investigation by your committee. Because this information covers events over the past eight years both in Greece and this country, and because many individuals, both Greek and American, are involved, I have summarized the data below: <br /><br />I. <i>Unresolved Questions from Senate Intelligence Investigation</i> <br />The Church Committee’s case study of covert action in Greece, as long as it remains secret, cannot be assessed for its consideration of the involvement of intelligence agencies in the 1967 coup against the democratic government in Greece, in the 1974 coup against President Makarios of Cyprus or in efforts to use CIA facilities or funds for domestic political purposes. Secretary of State Kissinger, former CIA director William Colby and former special CIA counsel Mitchell Rogovin are all quoted by responsible journalists as stating that our covert involvement in Greece was substantial enough to endanger our present (i.e., post-Watergate and post-1974) relations with the democratic government of Greece. <br /><br />II. <i>The Role of Former Vice President Agnew in the 1968 Presidential Campaign Concerning Greece</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mr Agnew offered to testify in summer 1975 before the Church Committee on charges that he changed his position from one of ‘neutrality’ toward the Greek military dictatorship in 1968 to support for the junta. The reason for this change in Agnew’s view has never been investigated. The Greek government ended plans for its own study of whether the military junta’s intelligence arm, KYP, which was closely associated with and financed by the CIA, funneled secret funds back to the United States for use in the 1968 presidential campaign. The Greek government’s decision not to pursue this investigation came at the request of the CIA station chief in Athens. The present suspicion that CIA funds and ‘fronts’ were involved in either the 1968 American election or in the Watergate cover-up should be dispelled by a thorough investigation. <br /><br />III. <i>Efforts Directed Against Elias Demetracopoulos</i><br />Demetracopoulos came to the United States in late 1967 in self-imposed exile from the military dictatorship which had taken over in Athens earlier that year. During the 1967-74 period he waged a continuous battle against the Greek junta and against US policies supporting the dictators. He incurred the animosity of both the Greek and the American governments. In Washington, he was threatened with deportation by Attorney-General John Mitchell, denounced in an anonymous State Department memorandum, his Wall Street employers were visited by FBI agents, the congressional committee before which he testified was visited by a Justice Department agent, and slanderous raw material and disinformation from CIA operatives about Demetracopoulos was given to reporters and freelance writers like Russell Howe and Sarah Trott. In Greece, Demetracopoulos was deprived of his citizenship and refused entry to the country even for a brief visit to attend his father’s funeral. There are also reports that the KYP, aided by CIA, planned to kidnap Demetracopoulos and return him to Greece to end his Washington anti-junta efforts and to interrogate him. These efforts, in so far as they originated in or were aided by US government agencies, deserve a full and careful examination. <br /><br />IV. <i>The Role of Thomas Pappas</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Pappas, who commutes between Boston and Athens, is a prosperous Greek-American businessman with dual nationality who has been a major fund-raiser for both President Nixon and President Ford. Pappas also maintained close ties with the Greek junta during its seven-year reign. Both his Athens and his Washington connections were based on a skilful combination of business and political connections which served Pappas’s considerable investments in Greece as well as his role as a conduit between the two governments. Pappas was the subject of a memorandum presented to a House subcommittee investigating US policies toward the Greek junta. Shortly after this memorandum was submitted by its author, Elias Demetracopoulos, he was threatened with deportation (see III above) by Attorney-General John Mitchell and by President Nixon’s close associate, Murray Chotiner. Pappas was the first person named by President Nixon in the White House tapes as the man to be approached for money to satisfy the demands of Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. Pappas is involved as both a fund-raiser and contributor to the Ford campaign, and he is a member of President Ford’s Finance Committee. He served President Nixon in similar roles. The extensive and longstanding ties of Pappas to the Greek junta, to domestic US policies and the intelligence community, and the use of Greek and US intelligence agencies (which worked together on many matters) to question in turn those who questioned these Pappas roles indicates a need for a thorough investigation of his activities by your committee to the extent it can be established that these activities involved our intelligence agencies. <br /><br />The above summaries outline some of the major areas involving Greece and the intelligence community which deserve a more complete and public examination than was provided in the limited time available to your predecessor committee. <br /><br />Attached you will find material relating to the above points which you may find of interest. <br />I will be happy to furnish additional details on the matters outlined above which I trust are presented in sufficient detail to indicate both the complexity and serious nature of the charges involved. <br /><br />Sincerely, <br />George McGovern<br /> <br />Subsequent correspondence between the two senators, including a letter also in my possession dated 7 June 1977, shows that Senator McGovern was invited to view the Intelligence Committee’s report on Greece and related subjects, but in confidence and without the presence of aides or of aides-memoires. He quite properly declined, preferring to request that the report be made public. The argument against this was, once again, that it would damage and compromise relations with conservative forces in Greece. <br /><br />Later evidence shows that McGovern was asking the right questions. In 1976 the House Intelligence Committee took sworn but off-the-record evidence from Henry Tasca, Nixon’s ambassador to Greece. Tasca confirmed that the Greek junta had indeed made campaign contributions to the Nixon-Agnew election fund. As Seymour Hersh relates in his book, <i>The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House</i>:<br /><br />‘In 1972, Pappas served as a principal Nixon fund-raiser and as a vice president of the finance committee of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. It was not until 1976, however, that the House Intelligence Committee was able to confirm Demetracopoulos’s allegations against Pappas. It received sworn evidence from Henry J. Tasca, a career Foreign Service officer who had been Nixon’s ambassador to Greece, that in 1968 Pappas had served as a conduit for campaign funds from the Greek government to the Nixon campaign. Tasca’s statement was made off the record – at his insistence, according to a committee investigator – and was not published…<br /> <br />‘Tasca’s information about the junta’s campaign contributions to the 1968 Nixon election campaign raises the question whether the CIA, which was financing the Greek intelligence operations at the same time, was aware that some of its funds were being returned to the United States for use in the presidential election. This question was not looked into by the Senate Intelligence Committee during its CIA inquiries in 1975 and 1976. Sources close to the committee have said that its investigation was abruptly cancelled at Kissinger’s direct request. He urged the committee to drop the investigation, one official said, on the ground that relations between the United States and Greece would be “severely harmed”.’<br /><br />Kissinger’s motives were, of course, quite different. ‘Severe harm’ would have been done, rather, to relations between himself and his political masters, as well as to relations between himself and a generally sycophantic press. The fact that Thomas Pappas was the link between the junta and the Nixon camp, the fact that Laurence O’Brien, chairman of the Democratic Party, had called for a public investigation of those links, the fact that it was Laurence O’Brien’s office that the Watergate burglars had ‘targeted’, and the fact that it was Thomas Pappas who was approached by the Nixon White House to pay the burglars’ ‘hush money’ (Pappas having been vice chairman of the finance committee of the Committee to Re-Elect the President) may all be quite unconnected. But those facts are authenticated, and they show how the same gangster principles were at work in the foreign policy of the Nixon White House as were unearthed in its domestic policy. Cyprus was the victim of those who behaved as if the American administration was their private property. <br /><br /><u>Athens </u><br />Dr Kissinger was right about one thing. Disclosures about Cyprus and the junta did continue to jeopardize the restoration of conservative democracy in Athens. <br /><br />The new government of Constantine Karamanlis was anxious to retain and rebuild good relations with the United States, along the lines of the cold-war consensus that had existed in the 1950s and 1960s. But it had also to deal with an aroused public opinion, which was furious at American collusion with the junta and American favouritism towards Turkey. In this rather testing situation, where identification with United States interests had become a heavy political liability, the issue of Cyprus became crucial. <br /><br />In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization. The defeat of Greek armies by Kemal Ataturk in Asia Minor in 1922 led to a purge of the officer corps, widespread distrust of the Establishment, the enforced exile of the royal family, and the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees who formed a new proletariat and contributed to the rise of Marxist and workers’ parties throughout the 1930s. The subjugation of Greece by the Axis powers in 1941, which had been preceded by a local Fascist dictatorship under General Metaxas, led not just to a national resistance but to an internal class war and a serious attempt by the Greek Communist Party to convert the war of liberation into a victory for Josef Stalin. (Stalin turned out not to be interested, having privately ‘swapped’ Greece for Rumania and Bulgaria at pre-Yalta discussions with Winston Churchill.) Throughout the conservative decades that followed, it was on the issue of Cyprus that the semi-legal Leftist parties were able to have an impact beyond their own constituency. Here were Greek-speaking people being sacrificed to British interests and to NATO, and what did the ‘patriotic’ governments propose to do about it? It was this criticism, and others like it, which put Greek conservative politicians like Karamanlis and Averoff on the spot before the London-Zurich agreements of 1960. After the terrible events of 1974 this rhetoric acquired renewed force. The junta had draped itself in the Greek flag, in Greek Orthodoxy, in so-called ‘Hellenic’ values, and yet had sold out Cyprus to the dictates of Henry Kissinger – thereby in effect abandoning it to the Turks. So ran a large current of demotic opinion.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> After Constantine Karamanlis returned to Athens and even before he had won a decisive victory with his hurriedly formed New Democracy party, Greece withdrew from the military, but not the political, wing of NATO. This was in protest at the Turkish occupation of Cyprus which was tolerated, to say the least, by Dr Joseph Luns, NATO’s then Secretary-General, and by most of the members of the alliance. The withdrawal was also intended to appease anti-NATO sentiment among the Greek voters. For Karamanlis, the great anti-Communist statesman of the 1950s and 1960s, this was no small step. But the other half of his balancing act was just as important if rather less public. It consisted of a strenuous effort to restore friendly relations with Washington. The ‘two-track’ policy might well have succeeded if the United States had shown any interest in disciplining Turkey or in reunifying Cyprus. Instead, the Ford-Kissinger administration continued its romance with Ankara. It made an inept attempt, using the primate of the Greek American community. Archbishop Iakovos, to placate Greek-American feeling. But this effort was fruitless except in demonstrating to a wide public that Karamanlis was desperate for concessions. <br /><br />At a meeting in the White House on 7 October 1974, Archbishop Iakovos met Ford and Kissinger and asked them for some sign of Turkish concessions to help, ‘in pacifying my flock’. According to Iakovos, Kissinger replied that the Greek Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, ‘Messrs Mavros and Karamanlis, do not want us to make any announcement before the elections… obviously, they are afraid of being accused as friends of America and then there is fear of losing the elections. I do repeat,’ said Kissinger, ‘that we want to help Greece and particularly Mr Karamanlis because the movement around [Andreas] Papandreou is strong and disturbing. We do not wish at all to see Papandreou governing Greece.’ Archbishop Iakovos, a theological and political conservative, recorded in his memorandum of the meeting that, 'the President was sincere and cordial. I am sorry but I cannot say the same for Mr Kissinger’. The leaking of that memorandum, in Greece and in the USA, came too late to forestall Karamanlis’s election victory in November of that year. But it did give point to the criticisms levelled by Andreas Papandreou that the Greek Right was lukewarm about Cyprus and hypocritical in its criticisms of Kissinger. <br /><br />In a fierce debate on foreign policy in the Greek Parliament on 16 October 1975, George Mavros denounced the Iakovos memorandum, from the Right, as a piece of CIA disinformation. He accused Andreas Papandreou of profiting by the spreading of such falsehoods. Once the document had been confirmed as authentic by the Archbishop and by congressional sources, Mavros was forced to withdraw these accusations against Papandreou and against the man who had furnished the document, Elias Demetracopoulos. He went so far as to say, in an interview with the newspaper <i>Athinaiki</i>, that the Iakovos memorandum was ‘the most important political event in Greece in the last twenty years’. Again, he was guilty of an exaggeration. But the controversy over the memorandum was decisive in making Papandreou, rather than Mavros, the leader of the main opposition in Greece and the axiomatic challenger for the post of Prime Minister. <br /><br />In March 1976 the Ford administration rewarded the patience of its Greek allies by signing a new base agreement with Turkey. The Greek reaction was to insist unsuccessfully on equal treatment with Turkey in matters military – a nervous response which made it clear that Athens cared more about good relations with Washington than it did about Cyprus, but could achieve progress with neither. The arms embargo, meanwhile, was being diluted to the point where it would obviously be repealed soon. In these circumstances, Turkey felt offended rather than hampered. And the Greek government opted to cut its losses, by ceasing to press for the embargo’s continuation. From one perspective, it is hard to blame Karamanlis for doing this. But the obvious realpolitik of his approach only lent weight to Andreas Papandreou’s increasingly successful opposition movement PASOK. The initials stood for Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement, and they symbolized the energetic way in which Papandreou, accused of unpatriotic Leftism in the sixties, had synthesized national feeling with radical political ideas. This, given Papandreou’s long association with Cyprus, was no coincidence. His new party had as one of its chief slogans the demand to ‘open the Cyprus file’. The demand expressed the popular view that there should be a public trial for those responsible for the 1974 disaster, just as there had been of the junta’s torturers. There was probably no actual ‘Cyprus file’, but the responsibility for the coup against Makarios went inconveniently high, and was a continual source of embarrassment to a centre-Right government anxious for the loyalty of its officer corps.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> Hopes were briefly aroused by the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States. The government of Cyprus declared a public holiday (as much for the departure of Henry Kissinger as for the accession of the Georgian). The new President swiftly disappointed his Greek allies – as he was to disappoint all those who reposed their confidence in him. In spite of a campaign promise to the contrary, he asked Congress to repeal the arms embargo on Turkey completely, and by September 1978 he had succeeded in convincing them. The policy worked as smoothly as it did because Carter’s congressional allies attached a $35 million grant aid provision for Greece. They were greatly assisted by a letter from Karamanlis to Carter, which set out in advance what Greece’s conditions were. They were three: no linkage between aid to Greece and progress on Cyprus; a preservation of the military balance in the eastern Mediterranean; peace in the region after repeal of the embargo. As the indefatigable Elias Demetracopoulos wrote to former Senator Frank Moss, ‘these priorities of Karamanlis were thus known to the White House before the crucial House vote. The White House lobbyists used that knowledge of Karamanlis’s real interests in helping to persuade House members that Greece did not really oppose repeal.’<br /><br />The end of the embargo saw the end of any Turkish pretence at concessions on Cyprus. It also put Greece in a somewhat false position vis-a-vis NATO and the United States. The Turkish government, ungrateful for its tacit support for repeal, continued to oppose the readmission of Greece to the NATO command. And this, in turn, made Karamanlis (and his successor George Rallis) more openly dependent on American support. This, too, gave ammunition to Andreas Papandreou. It was all very well to be close to Washington if it led to results. But Cyprus had been abandoned and the military and economic alliance between the United States and Turkey was getting stronger all the time. In November 1981, Papandreou and his party gained an unexpectedly large victory in the Greek elections, putting an end to almost half a century of uninterrupted conservative rule. There can be little doubt that it was the Cyprus issue, in its various dimensions, which made this outcome possible. It was ambitions over Cyprus which helped the junta to power. It was Cyprus which helped to sustain it in power and to guarantee it American support. It was Cyprus which brought the junta down. And it was Cyprus which, by discrediting the Greek Establishment so widely, created the decisive opening to the Left. By 1981 George Mavros, who had been Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister in the first Karamanlis government of 1974, was calling on his centrist supporters to vote for PASOK, which many of them did. <br /><br />Andreas Papandreou, immediately upon taking office, set a more forward position on the Cyprus question. He became the first Greek Prime Minister to pay a visit to the island. He defined its problem as one of invasion and occupation rather than as one of intercommunal relations. He offered Greek financing for a larger United Nations peacekeeping force on condition that the Turkish army left. He virtually declared that Greece would regard any further attack on Cyprus as an attack on itself. These initiatives, combined with greater tension in the Aegean, a rapidly mounting regional arms race, and the unilateral Turkish ‘declaration of independence’ of 15 November 1983, combined to put Cyprus much higher on the international register of concern than it had been since 1974. <br /><br />Many mainland Greeks are now exhausted by the Cyprus issue. It has gone on for too long, and has provided too many occasions for domestic destabilization and external danger. It could yet be the site of another Graeco-Turkish war. It absorbs a great deal of Greek aid. Yet, in spite of all these unwelcome considerations, it is impossible for Greece to ‘’drop’ Cyprus. The island represents the past: Turkish domination: Turkish domination of the Greek world. It represents the present: the worst of the many bad hangovers from the junta period. ln a fashion, also, it represents the future. Cyprus is emblematic of all the difficulties faced by an emerging modern Greece, which seeks to escape from being a Balkan country dependent on America, and to become a respected member of the European community. The greatest obstacle to that evolution is the costly and ancient rivalry with Turkey. The greatest impediment to resolution of that conflict is Cyprus. <br /><br /><u>London </u><br />The aftermath of the Cyprus crisis had an unexpected result in the United Kingdom as well. It led to a brief but glorious moment of open government. For the first time, a Select Committee of the House of Commons acted like an American Congressional Committee and questioned senior members of the Executive and the Legislative branches in public. The Cyprus Select Committee carried out as thorough an investigation as any House of Commons Committee ever had, despite being refused access to the occupied north of the island. <br /><br />The Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, grudgingly appeared before the all-party group on 19 February 1976, and made a spectacular fool of himself. Under questioning from both Conservative and Labour MPs, Mr Callaghan decided on the stonewall tactic of pleading ignorance, a tactic to which his general demeanour lent tone but not credibility. It was, perhaps, less costly to appear stupid than it would have been to admit to knowledge. Still, the Foreign Secretary took his doggedness a little far. I watched, fascinated, his ‘know-nothing’ performance. Flanked by three advisers, Messrs Goodison, Burden and Freeland, Mr Callaghan took up position. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Questioned on whether he still recognized the original Treaty of Guarantee: ‘I do not know the law as clearly as some.’ <br /><br />On whether he had made preparations with the Ministry of Defence before the Turkish invasion: ‘I do not know what you are referring to.’ <br /><br />On anticipating the invasion: ‘Nobody knew where the invasion was likely to come from, whether from Greece or Turkey.’ <br /><br />On reports of Turkish troop movements which he had received at the Geneva talks: ‘Was that right?’ (turning to his aide Mr Goodison). <br /><br />On whether the British forces in the north of Cyprus could have been deployed in a different way: ‘I suppose so. I do not know.’ <br /><br />On whether there were enough British forces to have secured the northern coast: ‘I am not able to comment on that because I just do not know at this stage.’</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> On whether there had been direct discussions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots on bi-zonal federation: ‘I do not remember.’ (Mr Goodison took over.) <br /><br />On whether Archbishop Makarios had accepted the three-point settlement or not: ‘I think you are going beyond my knowledge.’ (Mr Goodison took over.) <br /><br />On whether British citizens had been assured of British government protection in the event of war, and if he understood the relevant clause in the treaty: ‘I am sorry, where is that… I can only repeat this parrot-wise, but I am told this has nothing to do with the Treaty of Guarantee.’ <br /><br />On whether the Turkish government had changed its mind on compensation: (Mr Burden had to answer for him). <br /><br />On whether the Foreign Office in 1974 had advised British residents not to return to their homes: ‘When was this advice given, could you tell me?’ Told that it was in October 1974, by the Consular Emergency Unit of the Foreign Office: ‘What did it say?’ <br /><br />On the status of the refugees within the British ‘sovereign base’ areas: ‘I doubt if I can answer that. Mr Goodison had better try.’ <br /><br />On whether the High Commissioner had a hardship fund: ‘I am afraid I am not aware of that.’ <br /><br />The chairman of the Select Committee asked Callaghan whether he could say if he had any advance intelligence of the 15 July Sampson coup. He replied, ‘No.’ He was then asked, ‘You mean you cannot say?’ He replied, ‘No, there was no advance intelligence.’ Pressed on this point, he gave it as his considered opinion that nobody knew of the impending coup except the Greek junta and its Cypriot mercenaries. This, as we now know, was not the truth.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> After Callaghan’s appalling performance, the committee’s report to the House of Commons only just managed to remain within the confines of parliamentary language. It concluded drily that, ‘the Foreign Secretary’s evidence was confusing… Your committee find it difficult to accept that all three stages of the crisis came as a surprise to the Government.’ This laconic understatement encapsulated one of the deadliest works of criticism ever published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Only by the casting vote of the Labour chairman, Mr Arthur Bottomley, did the members excise the sentence, ‘The Foreign Secretary’s policies are totally negative. His pessimism and lack of ideas or initiatives is profoundly depressing.’ <br /><br />The committee’s conclusion was that: ‘Britain had a legal right to intervene, she had a moral obligation to intervene, she had the military capacity to intervene. She did not intervene for reasons which the Government refuses to give.’ <br /><br />To do nothing <i>is</i> a policy. As Lord Caradon, former Governor of Cyprus and the former British ambassador to the United Nations, put it, ‘All the evil subsequently flowed from that decision, taken under United States influence, to let it run.’ <br /><br />James Callaghan was not as ignorant as he chose to appear. But an affectation of ignorance was a necessity for anyone who had taken Dr Kissinger’s assurances at face value. <br /><br /><u>Ankara </u><br />After the 1960 London-Zurich agreements, which permitted both Greece and Turkey to station military forces on the island, the Turkish liaison officer in Cyprus was Colonel Turgut Sunalp. In this capacity he was involved in designing contingency plans for a Turkish military intervention and in helping the Turkish Cypriot leadership to develop an armed wing.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> In November 1983 Turgut Sunalp was the leader of the inaptly named ‘National Democracy Party’, one of the three tightly controlled political formations which were allowed by the military junta to contest a carefully organized ‘election’. His party enjoyed the open support and patronage of the real rulers of Turkey, the junta which had vetted the contending parties (disqualifying most of them), extended martial law, written a press code forbidding any criticism of military rule, and subjected dissidents to torture, exile and execution. A leading member of this five-man junta was General Necmettin Ersin, who had commanded the Turkish invasion forces in Cyprus in 1974. <br /><br />Shortly before the ‘election’ took place, a letter was smuggled out of a detention camp near Istanbul and published in the Western press. It had been signed by almost all the leaders of the legitimate pre-junta political parties. (Bulent Ecevit, who did not sign it, had already been imprisoned separately for his criticism of military rule.) Among the signatories were Suleyman Demirel, leader of the conservative Justice Party and six times Prime Minister of Turkey since 1965, Denyz Baykal, a leader of the social democratic Republican People’s Party and a former Finance Minister, and Ihsan Caglayangil, a former Justice Party Foreign Minister. Thirteen other former ministers of both parties added their names to the letter. <br /><br />The elections, wrote these veterans, would be a sham. ‘The Turkish people will vote only for the candidates selected by the junta… an insult to the country, to the nation and to the Turkish armed forces.’ The country, they added, ‘has been pushed into a heavier crisis than it was before 12 September 1980’ – the date of the military coup. A telling phrase came towards the end of the letter, when Demirel, Baykal, Caglayangil and their confreres wrote: ‘Turkey is not Pakistan. We are not looking for a Zia ul-Haq.’ <br /><br />A few days after the elections took place (and after the muzzled electorate had taken its revenge on Mr Sunalp’s pro-junta party by relegating it to third place) the junta joined with Mr Rauf Denktash in proclaiming a Turkish separatist state in northern Cyprus. The nominal ‘winner’ of the election, Mr Turgut Ozal, was not informed of the move. The only foreign government to welcome it – even though it stopped short of outright recognition – was the dictatorial regime of General Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan.<br /> <br />This little bouquet of ironies is intended to give some idea of the relationship between the Cyprus imbroglio and the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. When I first visited Turkish- occupied Cyprus, every public office and official building had a photograph of Bulent Ecevit – hero of the 1974 ‘peace operation’ – on the wall. The day after his arrest and imprisonment – for criticizing the political arrogance of the very generals he had uncaged – every picture of Ecevit disappeared. The average, honest Turkish citizen may regard Cyprus as a straightforward case of defending an embattled Turkish minority. But it has always been rather more than that, and Turkey is now suffering the consequences of allowing Cyprus to help incubate an ambitious and chauvinistic military caste. <br /><br />Since Turkey in a sense ‘won’ the 1974 military round, there was no national inquest of the kind that took place in a humiliated Greece, a devastated Cyprus, an embarrassed Britain or a compromised America. It is possible to describe only relatively piecemeal the way in which Cyprus brought the army and the Right back to power.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> In 1970 the Turkish army mounted a coup in Ankara. It did so ostensibly in response to growing discontent in the Kurdish provinces of the country (which do not exist as officially Kurdish, since the Turkish Establishment has a rather callous attitude to non-Cypriot and non-Turkish minorities). The military regime also set itself to halt the Leftward drift among the urban poor, the trade unions and the large number of unemployed and discontented students (many of whom had resorted to ugly Baader-Meinhof types of extremism). The army has had an unusual place in Turkish politics since the time of Ataturk. It has not infrequently acted as a force in favour of democratic rule, replacing and disciplining oligarchs or incompetents who have misused their trust. One such occasion was its move against Adnan Menderes and Fatin Zorlu, hard-liners on Cyprus in the 1950s, who were overthrown and hanged in 1960 for their numerous depredations.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> During the subsequent two decades, however, the army began to lose the image of the ‘people’s militia’ and to become more technological, more stratified and more corrupt. It even set up a holding company named OYAK; a unit trust for officers, financed by a percentage of each officer’s salary. OYAK took shares in Turkish and foreign enterprises, issuing a dividend to each officer and binding the army, in an almost feudal and guild sense, to Turkey’s protection-minded and conservative possessing class. Milo Minderbinder could have done no better. <br /><br />In these circumstances, then, the military regime of 1970-72 was not a success. It was very narrowly based, and resorted increasingly to torture and repression in order to get its way. Failing even in this, it decided rather grudgingly to relinquish power to the political parties. Bulent Ecevit, who had been the most outspoken critic of the ruling junta, won a large following for his courage in doing so and became almost the natural leader of subsequent coalition politics. The army seemed discredited as a power above society and faction. <br /><br />It was Cyprus which restored the military to a point where it could pose, once again, as a champion of Turkey and the nation. The written record of 1974 shows that it was the armed forces which pushed, at every stage, for a policy of force and conquest. It was the Turkish Security Council (Guvenlik Kurulu) and not the cabinet or the parliament, which took the major decisions and which issued the crucial orders. <br /><br />On 15 July, the date of the loannides-Sampson coup in Cyprus, Denyz Baykal and Bulent Ecevit talked with the General Staff at a Security Council meeting. Baykal (today under house arrest on the orders of these same generals) made a speech which canvassed the possibility of intervention. As Mehmet Ali Birand records the occasion: ‘Ecevit posed the key question to the Generals – In how many days would you be ready? The answer was definite – We can begin the operation on Saturday morning.’ The cabinet, meeting on the floor below, was informed of this decision at one o’clock in the morning. There were protests. ‘You are taking decisions upstairs and then announcing them to us. Is this appropriate?’ <br /><br />In subsequent meetings of political and party leaders, even the conservative Demirel was dubious about a full-scale invasion, which he thought might brand Turkey internationally as a bully and an aggressor. He was supported, in this misgiving, by Nihat Erim, another ex-Prime Minister and head of the presidential group appointed to the Turkish Senate. Erim, a venerable jurist who had served in 1960 as a member of the Cyprus Joint Constitutional Committee, saw a trap: ‘The United States might be behind this coup. Even if it is not certain yet, I sense that Washington has a positive attitude towards Sampson.’ <br /><br />Erim spoke, perhaps, more truly than he knew. Turkey was to become the executor for a policy it had not designed. Still, the combined weight of the chauvinist parties, especially Mr Necmettin Erbakan’s National Salvation Party, and the armed forces, was enough to silence or confuse the doubters. Admiral Karacan warned Ecevit that neither of them would survive a failure to act. Mr Muftuoglu of the National Salvation Party went one better when, as a member of the Turkish delegation at the Geneva talks, he threatened to kill himself if withdrawal from the first invasion beach-heads was agreed. <br /><br />His zeal was supererogatory. The Turkish documents show that the first invasion led ineluctably to the second, and that the generals knew it. For a while, Ecevit and Baykal stressed ‘the independence of Cyprus’ as their goal, and talked of ‘geographical federation’. They tried to hold back the Salvationists and the ‘Grey Wolves’ who insisted on immediate taksim (partition) or even on outright conquest of Cyprus. The die was probably cast by General Sancar, Chief of the General Staff, who in a message to the troops on 2 August, while negotiations on the first landing were still in progress, said: ‘The duty of the army in Cyprus is not over yet.’ <br /><br />The rest is history. Ecevit became the victim of the forces he had set in motion. Despite his temporary and hysterical popularity, he was replaced within a few months by a coalition of the Rightist parties which had, in different ways, supported him over Cyprus. They had supported him, it turns out, as the rope supports a hanging man. <br /><br />Restored to the centre of Turkish politics, and garlanded by their easy triumph in Cyprus, the generals began to take a more activist role. Long before they took formal control of the country in 1980, they had begun to administer martial law in several provinces – especially the Kurdish ones – and several cities. They had also placed limits on the ability of civilian politicians to negotiate even a partial Cyprus settlement. Time and again, members of the General Staff announced in ringing tones that the flag of Turkey, once planted, would not be withdrawn one inch. On more than one occasion, this rhetoric destroyed discussions about limited and palliative measures such as the return of Famagusta to its Greek Cypriot inhabitants. <br /><br />Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Turkey continued to be rent apart by religious and factional warfare, in which all kinds of dubious external influences could be guessed at. The figure of Mehmet Ali Agca, would-be assassin of Pope John Paul II, has become symbolic of this period. He was a Fascist, and a gunslinging member of Colonel Turkes’s ‘Grey Wolf paramilitary youth. He was also available for ‘contract’ work in the demi-monde of extortion, narcotics and gun-running. He is the likely culprit in the murder of Adi Ipecki, editor of the distinguished liberal Establishment newspaper <i>Milliyet</i>. He also seems to have had connections with the colder world of Bulgarian intelligence services. <br /><br />This impression, of a collusion between the extreme Right and the extreme Left against the democratic centre, led many people to welcome or at least to excuse the Turkish Military coup of 12 September 1980. Unlike the coup in Greece of 21 April 1967, this was not obviously the work of a clique of greedy and fanatical officers. Rather, it appeared to be the Turkish army exerting itself in defence of ‘national unity’. There was, undoubtedly, a strong initial popular support for such a move. This took some time to wear off, as it became apparent that the army was planning to institute permanent authoritarian rule in a quasi-civilian guise. <br /><br />It became clear early on that the junta was not impartial between the terrorists of Right and Left. The parties of the Left, and their affiliated trade unions and institutes, were simply abolished. Manifestations of Kurdish nationalism were mercilessly suppressed. The first daily newspaper to be closed entirely was <i>Aydinlik</i>, which had been temporarily shut down in 1974 because of its opposition to the invasion of Cyprus, and which had published a series of articles on the links between the extreme Right in Turkey, their counterparts among the Cypriot Turks, and certain groups within the Turkish army. The Turkish Peace Association, a group of veteran diplomats and political figures, attracted international sympathy during its show trial and the subsequent arbitrary imprisonment of its leaders. Among its ‘crimes’ had been attendance at a meeting in Athens where it voted for a resolution concerning the ‘integrity’ of Cyprus. This counted as ‘slandering the Turkish nation’. <br /><br />The Right were dealt with more leniently. Their terror activities ceased. These had, after all, achieved their objective of bringing about a military government, and their cessation allowed the junta to claim credit for the reduction in violence. Turkes’s party ideologue. Dr Oktay Agah Guner, is out on bail despite the fact that he faces capital charges. He has appeared at a number of public seminars designed to justify junta policies. An example had to be made of Colonel Turkes himself, because his involvement in violence had been so notorious. While awaiting his trial (still inconclusive at the time of writing, and in any case more than many of his opponents have had) the colonel wrote to General Kenan Evren, head of the junta, asking plaintively, ‘Why am I in detention while my ideas are in power?’ Turkes might have studied the history of the German SA with some profit, as Ecevit might have studied the history of German Social Democracy. Thugs are dispensable once they have facilitated the seizure of power, and so are ‘reformers’ who vote for war credits. <br /><br />Shortly after the Turkish junta took power, a document from the Turkish General Staff was given to me by a senior military source. It is headed, ‘Turkish Republic. Official’. It is issued by ‘The Directorate of War History of the General Staff’. It is printed by the General Staff and is entitled, ‘Greek-Turkish Relations and the Megali Idea’. It was written before the coup, and gives an unusually revealing insight into the ideas that animated those who carried it out. Its concluding section, which sets out Turkish ambitions in the Aegean, would certainly lend weight to Colonel Turkes’s question. Designed for the instruction of Turkish officers, and classified as highly confidential, its conclusion (here published for the first time) is: <br /><br />‘If a state outside NATO was to attack the Dodecanese, including Samothrace, Mytilene, Chios and Samos, it would be difficult or impossible for Greece to defend these islands. The following facts show that any Greek resistance would be impossible: these islands are situated very far from Greece and the despatch of forces from the mother country for their defence would be very difficult – even more so because one of the conditions of the Treaty of Lausanne is that they remain unfortified. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">'An intervention by a country outside NATO or the occupation of these islands, which are very near Turkey, by another country, may not result in a crisis in so far as Greece is concerned. But from the point of view of a Turkish defence of Anatolia this would create a strategic and tactical diversion and would also cause our economic isolation. <br /><br />‘The Aegean, since it affects the interests and the security of many countries, may become an area of friction. Greece does not have the power or the potential to secure peace in the Aegean. This situation does not accord with the plans and the defensive objectives of NATO, which aims to preserve international peace. It endangers its defence. <br /><br />‘For this reason, NATO should pay attention to the rights and memoranda of Turkey, which is more reliable and not unstable like Greece (which changes its position to promote its own interests). <i>From the point of view of Turkish security, apart from the existing borders, there is need to establish an area of security which would include the nearby islands</i>. [italics mine] <br /><br />‘There is an older example. When the Dodecanese were under Italian occupation, during Mussolini’s aggressive policy towards Turkey, military camps and hospitals were set up in Rhodes and Leros. The most important parts of the islands were fortified and Turkey was being threatened, from very nearby, over many years. <br /><br />‘Turkey today, with a population of 40 million and a large and strong army, faced with the creation of a military iron ring extending from the Aegean to the south and including Cyprus, and faced with the cutting off of the Aegean and the Mediterranean nautical routes, cannot tolerate such a situation. Nor could any other state in a similar position. <br /><br />‘The examination of this obviously harmful Greek position; harmful because of its recent behaviour; and the strong affirmation of Turkish rights in the Aegean, on a solid basis, would solve the strategic problems of the region.’<br /> <br />The Turkish authorities here make it clear that they regard Cyprus and the Aegean as possible if not actual Turkish possessions. They suit their actions to their words by building and maintaining an ‘Army of the Aegean’, heavily equipped and well accoutred with landing craft, in their southern ports. This army and fleet is outside the formal command of NATO. <br /><br />Since 1974, when American military aid to Turkey was $196 million, it has climbed to over $760 million and next year will touch the billion mark. This aid, which helps to confirm the army in power and which spurs Greece into an economically beggaring regional arms race, is helping to aggrandize the Turkish military, helping to consolidate its presence in Cyprus, outweighing the stated wishes of Congress about a Cyprus settlement, and enhancing the risk of an Aegean war. It is also postponing the day when Turks will once again be freely allowed to vote. As was once said of Prussia, Turkey is not a country that has an army, but an army that has a country. The 1974 invasion of Cyprus uncorked the genie, and helped to raise the curtain on this dismal scene. Most Turks remain confident that their government did the right thing in Cyprus. It has taken time to make it clear that a nation oppressing others cannot itself be free. <br /><br /><u>Coda: the Kissinger Version</u> <br />Throughout the second half of this account, the figure of Henry Kissinger has been decisive. It was Kissinger who decided to let the coup against Makarios go ahead, Kissinger who tried to screen the Greek junta from the fatal consequences of that policy, Kissinger who engineered and led the switch to Turkey when both of these expedients failed, and Kissinger who persuaded the British government to renege on its treaty obligations. This may seem to pile too much responsibility on one man. But, in an oblique way, Dr Kissinger himself confirms the analysis. Normally, in his published writings and memoirs, he places himself at the centre of the stage. This is especially so, as Seymour Hersh notes, when there is anything like a success to be claimed. But in his narrative of the Cyprus crisis, Kissinger almost effaces himself. This may well be because, as President Kennedy put it ruefully after the Bay of Pigs, ‘Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.’ <br /><br />We are privileged in having Dr Kissinger’s own affidavit about Cyprus. It appears in his book <i>Years of Upheaval</i>, a work dealing with the years 1972 to 1976. Kissinger begins his passage on the 1974 crisis with one apology and one evasion. The apology comes when he mentions, ‘the vulnerabilities of a divided administration with a President in no position to impose coherence’, as if Cyprus was something that happened to him rather than he to Cyprus. He does not mention the pre-existing support of that administration for the Greek junta, and he treats Watergate, too, as if it was something that befell Nixon rather than something which he originated. Then comes the evasion: ‘I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion, for it stretched into the Ford presidency and its legacy exists unresolved today.’ This is unusually coy. Dr Kissinger discusses Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Angola, Chile and the SALT treaty with great brio and inventiveness in the very same book. Of all these topics it might be said that their ‘legacies’ existed ‘unresolved today’, and of all of them it is superfluous to the point of fatuity to say that they ‘stretched’ into the exiguous Ford presidency. <br /><br />There follows a congested and ignorant summary of Graeco-Turkish relations since the Byzantine epoch. It fails to mention the Greek war of independence but it does say, in a moment of racialist condescension that, after 1920: 'The two nations continued to coexist (if that is the word), the Greeks remembering Turkey’s military predominance, the Turks obsessed by their fear of Greek intellectual subtlety… the Greek-Turkish conflict has belonged to the blood feuds of history.’ <br /><br />This trite and tiring style has its counterpart in Kissinger’s superficial analysis. He blames the entirety of intercommunal strife in Cyprus on Makarios (who is never in this chapter dignified with the title of President) and ends that insultingly brief passage by saying that: I had always taken it for granted that the next intercommunal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention.’ <br /><br />To the extent that this breezy, omniscient statement is true (which it is not, because the 1974 events were not ‘intercommunal’) it is fair to ask what Kissinger thought he was doing when he encouraged a Greek junta policy that was designed to bring about such a crisis. He is not good enough to tell us – the chapter is full of ellipses – but even his omissions are illuminating, as are his flagrant misrepresentations of July 1974: <br /><br />‘Greece was a military dictatorship; hence, all groups critical of our approach to human rights urged us to turn on it as the instigator of the upheaval; failure in Cyprus would, it was hoped, produce the overthrow of the hated Greek Colonels. This view was held passionately not only among traditional opponents of Nixon; it was the dominant conviction in the State Department; the Secretary of Defense moved toward it increasingly as the week progressed. <br /><br />‘To me, the issue was more complicated. I thought it most unlikely that Turkey would tolerate the union of Cyprus with Greece. That Turkey was driving toward a showdown was obvious – at least to me.’<br /> <br />Here we find an almost classic distillation of the Kissinger method. First, there is a daring and tremendous non-sequitur. It was the Greek junta which wanted, or said it wanted, ‘the union of Cyprus with Greece’. Its opponents, in the United States and everywhere else, wanted Cyprus to be <i>independent</i>. Kissinger cannot possibly have been unaware of this. Second, there is the suggestion that Kissinger’s was the only cool head among these ‘passionate’ folk; the only one to appreciate how ‘complicated’ everything was. Third, there is the usual attempt to shift responsibility elsewhere in the bureaucracy (if the Defense and State Departments really did want to be rid of the Greek Colonels, by the way, they had a strange way of showing it). Finally comes the hindsight dressed up as prediction; the Turkish drive ‘toward a showdown’. If Kissinger was so sure about this impending ‘drive’, and he may have been, then it remains to be explained why he worked so hard to allay the fear of it at the time. All that he accomplishes by this passage is the counterfeiting of the intended as the inevitable.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /> Kissinger unintentionally validates this criticism one paragraph later, when he writes, absurdly in view of the foregoing, that: ‘Turkey’s demands left little doubt that it was planning to intervene. Explicit condemnation of the Greek junta by the United States would have turned a likelihood into a certainty.’ This is an abject denial of responsibility, as well as an astounding denial of the facts. It was the <i>refusal</i> of the British and American governments to isolate the junta that freed Turkey, both militarily and some might say morally, to intervene alone. It was not until he had failed to secure such joint condemnation and co-ordination that the crafty Bulent Ecevit gave his generals the signal to invade. <br /> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kissinger, having put both hands on the tar-baby, now uses both feet to try to prise them off. He goes on to recount: <br /><br />‘My view, as I was to explain to a WSAG meeting of July 21 [Washington Special Action Group; a Nixon-inspired committee set up in 1969 to by-pass the cabinet in foreign-policy making] was that the Greek government was unlikely to survive its follies. That made it all the more necessary that the United States not be seen in Greece as the agent of its humiliation. At the same time, we could not without cost resist a Turkish invasion because that would be considered as objectively supporting the Greek junta.’<br /> <br />No great foresight was required to predict an event (the fall of the junta) which in fact took place the following day. Again, one notices the circular Kissinger version appearing as a sort of pedagogic obverse of the truth. The United States was already considered, by 21 July, to be ‘the agent of Greece’s humiliation’. It had been considered as such, by many Greek democrats, for the preceding seven years. What Kissinger does not know, or else cannot admit, is that it was precisely the Cyprus disaster – the coup against Makarios – which most Greeks felt as the humiliation. Having either wilfully or accidentally misunderstood this, but having in any case ignored it, Dr Kissinger’s second falsification is only symmetrical with the first. It was the Greek democrats, not the Greek junta, who implored help to oppose the Turkish landing. By a sleight of hand which uses ‘Greece’ to mean ‘all Greeks’ or, according to taste, ‘the Greek junta’, Dr Kissinger abolishes an important distinction which, in real life, he understood only too well. <br /><br />The same absence of discrimination can be observed in the way Kissinger dodges the issue of the Turkish invasion. By the time of the WSAG meeting which he cites, the first wave of Turks was already ashore. There was almost a full month to go before that army launched its second invasion and occupied the north. The Greek junta fell the day after the WSAG meeting. Even if one admits the doubtful hypothesis that American opposition to the first invasion (academic by 21 July) could be construed as ‘objectively supporting the Greek junta’, how is it possible to argue this in the case of the <i>second</i> invasion? The final touch is added to this reasoning by the fact that Dr Kissinger was already seen, quite correctly, as an ‘objective’ (as well as subjective) supporter of the junta. <br /><br />On the next page, Kissinger remarks with clumsy sarcasm that: ‘On July 22, the junta in Athens was overthrown and replaced by a democratic government under the distinguished conservative leader Constantine Karamanlis. Within days the mood in America changed. The very groups that had castigated us for our reluctance to assault Greece now wanted us to go into all-out opposition to Turkey.’ <br /><br />This is a revealing paragraph, with another self-evident non-sequitur. Had Kissinger mentioned the fact that there were pro-junta and anti-Turkish organizations in the United States, he would have been on safer ground. He does not do so, arguably because such groups had been loyal Nixon allies in the Greek-American community. He implies instead that there was some inconsistency in those Democrats who first opposed the junta and then opposed the Turkish army. Any irony involved here is at Dr Kissinger’s expense, since he himself changed from supporting the Greek junta to supporting the Turkish army and changed, on his own account, during the one night between the WSAG meeting and the final collapse of the Ioannides dictatorship. <br /><br />A close scrutiny of Kissinger’s memoirs confirms what a careful study of the actual events has already shown. There was, indeed, a ‘double tilt’ in United States policy that summer. It was a ‘tilt’ against democracy, against international law and against the principle of non-aggression. It is to the credit of those who opposed it that their chief antagonist has to resort to such lies and half-truths in order to counter their objections. There were many suspicions about Dr Kissinger’s role at the time, and there have been many since. There is unusual importance, therefore, in his giving a testimonial to his own duplicity. <br /><br /><u>Alternatives: Crete and the Hatay </u><br />In one respect, Dr Kissinger and others do have a point. There is a nationalistic element in the Cyprus equation. It is not as strong or as essential as it is represented to be, by those who wish to blame only the victims for their misfortunes. But it is present. Both Turks and Greeks have vivid national memories, and in both cases one national memory contains dire reflections about the other. Even though there were no serious conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots until the present generation, the competing ideas of Hellenism and Turkism are rooted in the events of the past. <br /><br />Very roughly speaking, the Turks fear another Crete and the Greeks fear another Alexandretta. To understand this, it is necessary to remember that most Greek and Turkish triumphs have been at the expense of the other. Even Greece’s finest hour – her wartime resistance in the years when Turkey was neutral – led ultimately to a post-war acquisition of islands which Turkey regarded as her own, or at least as non-Greek. <br /><br /><i>Crete</i>: The long struggle to unite Crete with Greece was considered morally and politically justifiable by the major European powers of the day, which is why in the end it was successful. During the lengthy period of Turkish occupation, many Cretans, like their Cypriot counterparts, had undergone either coercive or submission conversion to Islam. And many Turks had been settled in Crete by the Ottoman authorities. The battle for enosis waged by the Greek majority was very protracted and bitter. The Cretans joined the Greek revolution of 1821, but were brutally put down by Ibrahim Pasha and briefly ceded to Egyptian rule by way of Turkish compensation to Mohammed Ali for his help. Having reverted to Turkish control, the island remained in a state of unrest which culminated in the famous rising of 1866. (It was during this revolt that Abbot Mareses of Arkadion blew up his monastery rather than surrender it, and thus gave the island its motto of ‘Freedom or Death’.) The revolt was one of those, like Ireland in 1916 or Paris in 1871, which fail militarily but succeed in kindling a political idea. Turkey began to talk of ‘modifications’ to its rule, and to waver in the application of force. A later rebellion, in May 1896, led to a brief war between Greece and Turkey and to the end of formal Turkish rule over the island. The European powers intervened with two objectives: to conclude the unstable and unjustifiable Turkish satrapy, and to forestall the union of Crete with Greece. Like Cyprus, Crete became nominally independent, with a predominantly Greek population and a Turkish Muslim minority of about one-ninth. Like Cyprus, its status was officially guaranteed by foreign troops. As in the case of Cyprus, both communities regarded the settlement, in different ways, as provisional. The Turkish Muslims rebelled in 1898, firing on the British contingent at Candia and launching a pogrom against the local Christians. This achieved the opposite effect of the one intended (which was a renewed Turkish intervention), in that it goaded the European powers to demand the final withdrawal of all Turkish troops. This duly took place, and was shortly afterwards followed by an exodus of Muslim Turks to Asia Minor. It would be euphemistic in the extreme to describe this exodus as voluntary. Many Cretans took the opportunity to revenge themselves on their former superiors and conquerors. It was only a matter of time before full enosis with Greece was accomplished, and Crete became Greek in 1913. To this day it remains a stronghold of radical, republican politics and a consistent source of support for Greek leaders who take a tough line with Turkey. <br /><br />The Turkish Cypriot leadership often cites Crete as precisely the precedent it seeks to avoid. It uses Cretan history to give depth and force to its claim that the Greeks want not just the union of Cyprus with ‘Hellenism’ but the removal or destruction of the Turkish minority. It also, privately, invokes the Cretan example in its opposition to the ‘internationalization’ of the Cyprus question. Efforts by the United Nations or any other concert of powers are viewed with suspicion, because they may provide ‘cover’ for a Greek fait accompli. British colonial rule was supported by the Turks because they considered it an insurance against precisely this outcome. The Turkish army’s presence, and the virtual absorption of northern Cyprus by Turkey, is considered an even more durable guarantee. In giving what I think is a fair précis of this attitude, I aim to do no more than explain it. <br /><br /><i>The Hatay</i>: Greeks have many racial and national memories of Turkish rule and Turkish force, but the example that is most pertinent to Cyprus does not directly involve the modern Greek world. Just across the water from Cyprus, in the top right corner of the Mediterranean, lies the port of Alexandretta, known in Turkish as Iskenderun. It is the capital of the province of the Hatay. It was in this port among others that the Turkish invasion force was prepared in 1960, and finally despatched to Cyprus in 1974. <br /><br />Until 1939 Alexandretta and the Hatay were part of Syria. But there was a significant Turkish minority both in the city and in the province, with sixty per cent of the population being either Arabs or Armenians. Under the Franco-Turkish accords of 1921, the Hatay was part of the French mandate in Syria. In one of his very rare flirtations with irredentism, Kemal Ataturk demanded that the province be ceded to Turkey. The Syrians were utterly opposed to such a demand, first because the Turks were a minority and second because Alexandretta was the chief lifeline port for northern Syria and the important city of Aleppo. The Syrians, however, did not enjoy self-government. <br /><br />France was inclined to conciliate Ataturk. It wanted to conclude a military alliance with Turkey against Germany. In 1937, one year after the French announced plans for a qualified independence for Syria, they also proclaimed ‘autonomy’ for the Hatay. The province was to have internal self-government. Turkish would be an official language along with Arabic. Syria would be responsible for its foreign affairs and would be linked with it by a customs and monetary union. Like Cyprus in 1960, the Hatay was to award both sides their second-best aspirations. Like Cyprus, the Hatay did not remain at rest for very long. When the League of Nations sent an election commission to the province, and found that the Turkish voters were in a minority, Ataturk moved troops up to the border in protest. He also organized angry rioting by the minority. The French, still anxious to appease Turkey and having no fellow-feeling for Arab nationalist sentiment, agreed to let Turkish soldiers share in the policing of the Hatay, and made them joint guarantors of its autonomy in July 1938. That was enough. New electoral registers were drawn up in haste and in the following month of August, with Turkish soldiers looking on, an election produced a wafer-thin Turkish majority. Exercising their right of self- determination, the Turks then announced that the Hatay was a fully independent republic. Within a year, on 29 June 1939, they proclaimed its union with Turkey. (Ataturk, who had died on 10 November 1938, might or might not have thought this haste a little blatant.) The Armenians of the Hatay needed little encouragement to leave. Many Arabs did likewise. Syria has never forgiven this sleight of hand by the Turks and the French. Turkey did sign an entente with France in October 1939, but then prudently stayed neutral throughout the Second World War. <br /><br />Many Greek Cypriots see this episode as the classic use by Turkey of a ‘strategic minority’ to advance its own claims and expand its own territory, much as the Germans used the Sudeten minority in Czechoslovakia. They note the progression of demands from ‘autonomy’ to ‘partnership’ to ‘independence’ and finally to annexation. They also note the way in which the international community acquiesced in the process out of a desire to appease Turkey. In the present circumstances, with the Turkish mainland population expanding at an extraordinary rate, and with its strategic position in the Cold War giving Turkey a strong leverage on the West, the Greek Cypriots wonder if they, too, are not marked down for the Alexandretta treatment. It has already happened in the north. Is it intended to stop there? <br /><br />Of these two ‘worst-case’ alternatives (to borrow a handy but inelegant phrase from American political science) it is clear that the Hatay example is the one nearest to contemporary reality. The Turks may justify what they have done by reference to any number of real or exaggerated past fears. Yet the proclamation of a separate Turkish Cypriot state in November 1983 was clearly a move towards full absorption by Turkey. That would be enough in itself to create alarm. But the political groups which, in Turkey and in Turkish Cyprus, had agitated for a declaration of ‘independence’ by Mr Denktash were the same forces which have been pressing for the Turkish army to ‘finish the job’ and take the whole island. <br /><br />The London <i>Financial Times</i> reported from Ankara, on 6 December 1983, that, <br /><br />‘in choosing to allow the declaration of independence by Mr Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader, to go ahead, Turkey’s leaders are pointing to a radically new view, not only of the Cyprus dispute but of Turkey’s overall quarrel with Greece… Turkey now sees southern Cyprus and the Aegean Dodecanese islands as post-Ottoman areas inhabited by Greeks but with unresolved status to some degree, because they continue to generate military and political problems for the Turkish republic’.<br /> <br />The writer of this report (which electrified Athens when it was published) made it clear that the Treaty of Lausanne, which established the existing balance of forces between Greece and Turkey in the eastern Aegean, was considered by the Turkish leadership to be a ‘disappointment’. This means that, semi officially at least, Turkey is not satisfied with its gains in Cyprus. <br /><br />What of the Cretan model? Whereas the Turkish Cypriot authorities maintain that ‘Greeks and Turks cannot live together’ and excludes even people of Greek descent, or Greek Cypriots with British or other passports from its territory, the Republic of Cyprus has made no move to abolish Turkish Cypriot rights. Whatever may have been the mistakes and crimes of the past, the government holds the abandoned property of Turkish Cypriots in trust for them. All Cypriots, according to law, have the right to return to their homes. Even the fact that Greek refugees have been settled provisionally on Turkish property does not alter this legal position. <br /><br />The Turks maintain that the Greeks have never abandoned the <i>Megali Idea</i>, the dream of a reborn Byzantine Empire with its capital in Constantinople. It is logically impossible to refute a suspicion. The fact that there is no political party or movement in Greece which advocates such a policy, and the fact that even Brigadier Ioannides was unable to convince his fellow-dictators to act upon it, does not convince the Turkish critic. <br /><br />Many Greeks believe that Turkey not only covets the Aegean islands closest to its coast, but actually plans to take them by force. The evidence here is suggestive rather than conclusive. Before the abolition of independent political parties in Turkey, there was at least one, the National Action Party, which called for a Greater Turkey extended in all directions, including Cyprus and the Aegean. There have been, as above, many unguarded statements from generals and politicians to the same effect. Documents and books used in the training of Turkish officers make out the Greek claim to the islands to be spurious. It may be that in some remote garrison there is a young Turkish lieutenant who broods on one day becoming the saviour of his country – a Turkish Ioannides. <br /><br />All this tends outside the scope of this book. But Cyprus remains as the symbol of unresolved Greek and Turkish conflict. It symbolizes, for the Greeks, what Andreas Papandreou has called the ‘shrinkage of Hellenism’ – the pushing of Greeks and Greek life out of Asia Minor and Constantinople that took place in living memory. The Greek Cypriots who were evicted from the north of Cyprus, and their fellows who are now forbidden even to visit it, will continue to call their old villages and towns by their original names. They will have a memory more recent than Smyrna in 1922 and more vivid and bitter even than Istanbul in 1955. They will not acknowledge the legitimacy of the occupation, and nor will their children. If there was a time when the Greeks were insensitive to the susceptibilities of the Turks, now the Turks behave as if Greek feelings do not count. Those who have encouraged this development from outside can now glibly refer to it as ‘a lethal cocktail’ (Henry Kissinger, <i>Years of Upheaval</i>). </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div></div>Read all parts of the serialisation here:<br /><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 5: Consequences.</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><i></i></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-27285777390870417482022-01-03T22:02:00.006+00:002022-01-17T23:22:45.979+00:007. 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.<p><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/w208-h338/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" width="208" /></a></b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><b><br />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. </b></i></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">7. <i>Cyprus: Hostage to History</i>, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 4: Attila: Intervention to Invasion/Invasion to Occupation/Occupation to Expulsion/Expulsion to Colonization/Colonization to Annexation.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>These things actually happened. That is the thing to keep your eye on.</i><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">George Orwell</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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 <i>first</i> 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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.)</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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 <i>Washington Post</i> 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.”’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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’.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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… <i>In no respect </i>has the Turkish administration fulfilled its obligation entered into at the third round of intercommunal talks.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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 <i>Halkin Sesi </i>(<i>Voice of the People</i>). At long last, northern Cyprus now <i>was</i> Turkish. But Dr Kuchuk found that it was not all he had hoped:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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 <i>necessitated</i> 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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><u>Afterword</u><br />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).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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 <i>dependence</i> 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. <br /><br /><u>Desecration</u><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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 <i>Olay</i> 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 <i>Perishing Cyprus</i>) is a very painful experience. His prologue is hauntingly recognizable as the work of a fellow-lover and a fellow-sufferer:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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…’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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.’ <br /> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Adds Yasin, </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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? </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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? <br /> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘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.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />As he says in describing the ancient city of Lamboussa, a city with an immense past in the Roman and Byzantine periods: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">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 <i>Halkin Sesi</i>, 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 </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘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.’ [<i>The Times</i>, 20 January 1978] </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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 <i>Halkin Sesi</i> 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’. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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 <i>Aydinlik</i> (<i>Clarity</i>), 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.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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’. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />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. </span></span><br /></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p>
Read all parts of the serialisation here:<br /><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus:Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens, Chapter 5: Consequences </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><i></i></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-31120092959165978962021-12-16T12:57:00.008+00:002022-01-17T23:22:24.673+00:006. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 3: Dragon’s Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.<p><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/w208-h338/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" width="208" /></a></b></i> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i><b>In Chapter 3 (Dragon’s Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta) of his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens shows how the Greek junta, which usurped power in Athens, in 1967, came to see the violent overthrow of Cyprus’ democracy and the division of the island with Turkey as a means to justify its illegitimate rule internally and serve the interests of its main ally, the USA, which had since 1964 decided that the optimum ‘settlement’ for Cyprus was to abolish the Republic of Cyprus and partition the island between NATO allies, Turkey and Greece. What stood in the way of this outcome, Athens, Ankara and Washington believed, was President Makarios. </b></i></span></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><u>6. <i>Cyprus: Hostage to History,</i> by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 3: Dragon’s Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</u></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Something from Cyprus as I may divine… It is a business of some heat</span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">William Shakespeare, <i>Othello</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In 1964 George Papandreou was the Prime Minister of Greece. In June he paid a visit to President Lyndon Johnson in Washington, (where there was an abortive attempt at a summit meeting with Prime Minister Ismet Inonu of Turkey). The visit was not a success. The Acheson Plan for the partition of Cyprus was not acceptable to Greek opinion. Johnson did more than hint that NATO aid might be withdrawn from Greece if it persisted in its obduracy, and that the United States might not defend Greece from a Turkish incursion into the Aegean. The elder Papandreou countered that, ‘in that case, Greece might have to rethink the advisability of belonging to NATO’. Johnson struck a fresh note when he riposted that, ‘maybe Greece should rethink the value of a parliament which could not take the right decision’. This was an astonishing way for the President of the United States to address the Prime Minister of a sovereign allied nation. But it was to be surpassed by the outburst to which LBJ treated Alexander Matsas, the Greek ambassador, a short time afterwards. The ambassador had told the President that, ‘No Greek government could accept such a plan.’ Johnson retorted:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good… If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In order to rub in his point, and the contempt that lay behind it, Johnson added, ‘Don’t forget to tell old Papa-what’s-his-name what I told you – you hear?’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In July 1965 King Constantine of Greece, backed by the traditional Right in the army and in politics, perverted the Greek constitution and dismissed George Papandreou as Premier. It was, yet again, General George Grivas who provided the pivot between these forces by his decisive position in Cyprus. Grivas was hostile to Archbishop Makarios and, as we have seen, very friendly with Washington. He was also much more ‘understanding’ of the Turkish position than his ultra nationalist rhetoric would have suggested. When Andreas Papandreou, in concert with Makarios, rejected the Acheson Plan, Grivas retaliated swiftly. He circulated documents, later established even before a military court as blatant forgeries, which alleged that there was a revolutionary conspiracy within the Greek army, owing its allegiance to Andreas Papandreou. The reactionary Defence Minister Petros Garoufalias, who was later to become an apologist for the real military conspiracy, gave currency to the allegations, which became known, after the name of the fictitious conspiracy, as the ‘Aspida’ affair. It was for seeking the resignation of Garoufalias, and for seeking to uncover his connection with Grivas in Cyprus, that the elder Papandreou came into conflict with King Constantine and was forced from office himself. As the younger Papandreou put it in his book Democracy at Gunpoint, written in exile in 1971, ‘Cyprus lies at the heart of the tragic political developments that have led to the death of democracy in Greece.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />After the King’s unconstitutional putsch, there followed an undignified two years of caretaking and powerbroking, but it proved impossible to sanctify a legitimate pseudo-conservative government in office. But there was, in fact, a conspiracy being prepared in the armed forces. I have interviewed General George Koumanakos, Greece’s most decorated officer, and then of the Military Staff College, who told me how in 1965 he was approached by a senior official of the United States embassy (whose name he gave me). Koumanakos had been a commander of Greek forces in the Korean war, and had many American friends. He was known as a strong anti-Communist. What his visitor wanted to know was, ‘George, why are you not coming in with us?’ Koumanakos suspected that there was a group of officers preparing to take political power, but he did not realize until then why they seemed so sure of themselves.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />New elections were called for 28 May 1967, and Papandreou <i>père et fils</i> campaigned strenuously for a new mandate. They promised to keep the King within constitutional limits, to put the army under genuine civilian control, and to reduce Greek dependence on the favour of the United States.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />They openly challenged the unelected ‘para-state’ that had ruled Greece since the end of the civil war in 1949. The principal institutions of the ‘para-state’ were the Palace, the General Staff, elements of the Church hierarchy and the American embassy. Their ancillaries were the KYP (the Greek subsidiary of the CIA) and the Joint US Military Aid Group Greece (JUSMAGG). The ‘para-state’ had shown its power before, in the 1961 elections, characterized by extensive violence and fraud, which resulted in the return of Constantine Karamanlis and his centre-right National Radical Union (ERE). It had shown its fangs in the murder of the Socialist deputy Gregory Lambrakis in Salonika in 1963, and in the attempts to protect the culprits in that murder. Soon thereafter, even Karamanlis himself had felt the force of the ‘para-state’ when he tangled with the ex-Nazi Queen Frederika, whose relations with the American embassy and with extreme conservative politicians were famously intimate. (There had even been protests from staff at the embassy who had had to spend official time planning for her shopping needs.) In that confrontation, it was Karamanlis who had to abdicate.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />On 21 April 1967, the ‘para-state’ decided that it could no longer coexist with formal democracy, and decided to forestall a Papandreou election victory by seizing power. Historians and analysts have argued since about American complicity in the military coup, but they have argued only about the extent of it. Many authoritative writers assert that the United States was preparing to support a later, more ‘respectable’ coup, commanded by generals rather than by the undistinguished colonels who actually struck on 21 April. The evidence for this opinion is mainly negative – there was ‘surprise’ at senior levels of the State Department and the American embassy, and many senior intelligence operatives claimed to have been caught napping. Evidence for direct American complicity is also somewhat suggestive. Colonel George Papadopoulos, who led the coup had been on the payroll of the CIA since 1952 and acted as the chief liaison officer between the Greek KYP and its senior partner in Langley, Virginia. Moreover, he had used a NATO contingency plan, designed to counter unrest in the event of ; ‘hot’ war in the Balkans, to activate his putsch.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In his book, <i>Prescriptions for Prosperity</i> (1983), Lyndon Johnson’s former friend and confidant Eliot Janeway describes a visit to Athens with Senator Vance Hartke in the autumn of 1966: ‘To our surprise, our visit coincided with the preliminaries for the Greek military putsch, sponsored by the CIA and the DIA (the undercover Defense Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Department of Defense).’ Janeway recounts Johnson’s rage at his disclosure of this in a confidential bulletin. The elephant’s trunk was getting ready to strike.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The dispute about the United States’ complicity in the junta is, in any case, based on a false antithesis. The United States administration had sown the dragon’s teeth that sprang up in the shape of the junta. The administration gave encouragement, training and materials to the anti-constitutional forces before the coup, and it became their patron and protector for seven years afterwards.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Cyprus, and the person of General Grivas, continued to form an important element in the junta’s plan. Grivas had made it known publicly that he considered himself to be under orders from Athens while he commanded the Cyprus National Guard. He might bellow for enosis but he was working for partition all the same. The junta’s own Cyprus strategy confirmed this rather tortuous analysis. It spoke continually of a cleansed and reborn country: ‘a Greece for Christian Greeks’. It inveighed against all weakness and decadence, and it flirted with ideas of a greater (which is to say larger) Greece. But, like all similar Fascist systems, it was fundamentally unpatriotic, and engaged in furtive mortgaging of Greek interests to outsiders. The nationalist trumpetings were for mass consumption only – a task made easier by the forcible monopoly of Greek press and media which the junta now enjoyed.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Papadopoulos, the new strong man, went to a meeting with the Turkish mainland leadership on the border between the two countries at the Evros river. The meeting was intended to consummate a secret Paris meeting held between the Greek Admiral Toumbas and the Turkish minister Ihsan Caglayangil. It would have proclaimed enosis while conceding the basis for partition, and would have made the junta appear ‘statesmanlike’. This grandiose <i>démarche</i> got Papadopoulos nowhere. The Turks knew that extra Greek forces had been secretly placed on Cyprus under previous governments and demanded their withdrawal. Only with this proviso would the Turks agree to the Acheson proposal for a carve-up between the two countries. They sensed an advantage with the untried Greek government and were determined to press it home. Next month, in November 1967, General Grivas launched attacks on two Turkish Cypriot villages – Ayios Theodoros and Kophinou. The Turks once more threatened invasion, and the Greek government had to admit that it, rather than the Cypriot government, was responsible for Grivas’s action. No better excuse could be found for the withdrawal of the 12,000 extra Greek troops from Cyprus, as well as of Grivas himself. With the good offices of Cyrus Vance, this was done. Henceforth, whether a Turkish invasion of the island took place on a good pretext or a bad one, it would be substantially unopposed. And the Turks had another justification for pointing to Greek perfidy.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Among the officers and men withdrawn to Greece that year were many democrats and patriots, who were gradually to be purged from the army altogether. Their replacements (because a small, legal Greek contingent still remained, as did a Turkish one) were to be hand-picked for their fanaticism and their indoctrination. The Acheson Plan, like many United States policies, might look superficially rational even if a bit crude, but those chosen to execute it were anything but rational.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />While the balance was shifting against him in Athens and in other capitals, Archbishop Makarios had been consolidating his position in Cyprus. He had won almost unanimous political support from all the civilian parties. And two international developments had strengthened his position.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The first of these had come in 1965, with the report of the United Nations special mediator in Cyprus, Senor Galo Plaza of Ecuador. In his report to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant, Galo Plaza rejected the idea of partition and affirmed the right of the island to remain united and independent. He also opposed the physical separation of the two communities within the island, and strongly implied that the Turkish leadership was practising a form of self-segregation with partitionist objectives in mind. He called for a charter of rights for the Turkish Cypriots, to be supervised and enforced by the United Nations presence. And he called (rather more vaguely since he had no jurisdiction over the British bases) for the island to be ‘demilitarized’. Most of this was at least acceptable to the majority of the Greek Cypriots (Andreas Papandreou in his <i>Democracy at Gunpoint</i> described Makarios as ‘jubilant’ about it, Robert Stephens in his <i>Cyprus: A Place of Arm</i>s, as less than that). In any event, the Cyprus government officially welcomed the report.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Makarios thought that he had also kept the Turks at bay in the larger context. When President Ismet Inonu had threatened to invade Cyprus, he had been told to refrain in almost intolerably brusque terms by President Johnson. Johnson told Inonu that if he sent his invasion fleet to the island, the United States would not feel obliged to guarantee his country against any Soviet response. Humiliated, Inonu climbed down. From this episode can be dated a Greek Cypriot superstition that somehow the United States would ‘never allow’ a Turkish invasion.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />By 1968, it is probably fair to say that Makarios enjoyed general support in Cyprus for his policy of independence. True, most Greek Cypriots still felt Greek, and celebrated Greek national holidays with feeling as they had done for centuries past. But the economy was doing well out of independence, and a class of specifically Cypriot entrepreneurs was emerging. The reputation of Makarios abroad was high; higher than if he had been a prelate or regional chieftain in Greece itself. At home he was perhaps the only political leader in the world who could genuinely gain ninety per cent of the votes in an unfettered election.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Yet all of these gains were under threat. The Turkish government rejected the Galo Plaza report (again, Ankara announced its rejection before the Turkish Cypriots had said anything) and succeeded finally in securing Plaza’s resignation. There were people in Makarios’s own entourage, notably the Interior Minister, Polycarpos Georgadjis, who disliked the renunciation of enosis which acceptance of the report implied. In Athens the junta was crushing all opposition even from the feeble King Constantine. And, by the end of 1968, Richard Nixon had been elected President of the United States. The Nixon administration and the junta both detested Makarios, and both owed each other favours.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Students of the art of coup-making have had a great deal of field-research experience in the last decade or so. It is now quite well understood that those who wish to replace a popular government by force must proceed carefully. There must be pretexts, there must be uncertainty, there must be a good cause in which the deed is apparently done. Meanwhile there are newspapers to be ‘influenced’ and politicians to be ‘brought over’. There are ugly elements – assassins, smugglers and the like – who are indispensable but who must be, in the argot of the trade, ‘deniable’. There are backers who must be protected; their investment becomes worthless if it is disclosed.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In its campaign to remove Makarios and to achieve ‘enosis by partition’, the Greek junta had several major allies. It did not, however, have them operating in harmony. It enjoyed a monopoly of force in Greece, and a sizeable presence in Cyprus. It had the Greek flag, with which to confuse simple- minded patriots. It had the allegiance of disparate Cypriot forces who felt that Makarios had reneged on enosis, but these were volatile. It had the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot leadership, who officially detested all Greek aspirations but who might hope for something if the seemingly impregnable Makarios were removed. And it had the Americans, who regarded Makarios as a pest, who had not forgiven him his obduracy in 1964, and who had an interest in removing Cyprus from the grasp of a professed ‘neutralist’.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Not all of these forces wanted the same thing for the same reasons, and few of them could be seen to act at the behest of, or even in concert with, western Europe’s most brutal and unpopular government. It was, all the same, a formidable list of enemies for the agile Makarios to confront – whether separately, in sequence or all at once.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />All of these enemies conducted their policy on two levels. The Greek junta had to affect concern for the Greek Cypriots and for ‘Hellenism’. It maintained formally correct relations with the Republic of Cyprus, though it suspected its government (correctly) of sheltering anti-junta Greeks from the mainland. The Turkish government, which was undergoing frequent changes and experiencing painful political upheavals at home, and which was moving towards its own experience of military rule, continued with its long-established policy. That is to say it presented itself internationally as the guarantor of a threatened minority. And it persisted with its long-term advocacy of partition. Under United Nations auspices, both sides on the island paid lip-service to the intercommunal talks; a long-running and patient but generally disappointing exercise conducted by Glafkos Clerides, a senior Greek Cypriot lawyer and parliamentarian, on the one side and Rauf Denktash, of whom more later, on the other. Both men were political conservatives, with British legal backgrounds. Beneath their politesse the basic differences lay unresolved. Progress on the intercommunal front was indeed being made, but it was made, as Galo Plaza had pointed out, because of the decency of the Cypriot people and their long, if not now unbroken, history of village-level friendship.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The United States administration also operated on what Washington jargon nowadays calls a ‘two-track’ system. Although it was not a formal or legal guarantor, America had extensive treaty commitments to Greece and Turkey, and maintained a large embassy in Cyprus. It was also using the British ‘sovereign’ bases, with the tacit approval of Makarios, to overfly the Middle East with U-2 and other aircraft. In theory, its official policy was that of a powerful mediator with friends in all camps. In fact, it was becoming increasingly committed to the Fascist-minded junta in Athens. Here, a peculiar symbiosis emerged. The junta needed, for its own reasons, to do something about Cyprus that would vindicate its claim to have renewed Greek life and Greek pride. And the United States needed to use Cyprus to fortify its position in both Ankara and Athens. In this imperfect relationship, both sides thought that they could exploit the other. It was an understanding that was to have dismal consequences, based as it was on American complicity with the dictators, and the cynicism of the dictators about American aid.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This had severe results for Greece, as is now universally acknowledged. But it had appalling consequences for Cyprus. Beginning in 1970, the Colonels began a sustained campaign against President Makarios. The campaign was supposed to employ violence only as a last resort, after measures of political isolation had been taken. But, the Greek junta being what it was, the campaign was crude and violent from the start.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The first instrument of the Colonels was Polycarpos Georgadjis, the aforementioned Minister of the Interior. He had a record as an EOKA man, and also as a violent and conspiratorial individual. His position as minister, with its police links and secretive possibilities, had made him an over-mighty subject and had led Makarios to dismiss him in 1969. His willingness to accept outside commissions to ‘deal with’ local radicals, and his abuse of power, had made him intolerable as a member of an independent government. Out of office, Georgadjis agreed to work for Colonel Papapostolou, a Greek junta officer, in an early attempt to eliminate Makarios. In a conversation with his successor at the Interior Ministry, Mr Anastasiou, he boasted that, ‘the Americans are behind us’ and thus became the first of many naive conspirators to believe that he enjoyed an actual guarantee of immunity – ‘protection’ – from the most powerful country in the world. The American embassy in Nicosia, which under its ambassador David Popper was officially concerned with maintaining cordial relations, either did not know or did not care about CIA connections with Papapostolou and Georgadjis. At any rate, it warned Makarios of something that only the CIA could have known – the existence of a junta-backed assassination plot. It is no disrespect to Ambassador Popper to say that his warning raised as many questions as it answered. His CIA chief of station, Eric Neff, had close contacts with Georgadjis and with other anti-Makarios and junta agents (a legacy of that ‘underground contact’ established by George Ball). Neff would regale diplomatic circles with his opinion, which was that Makarios was a menace and should ‘go’. In the end it was Neff who went; recalled at the request of the Cyprus government. But before that, the friend and client of the loud American had made his move.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />It was on 8 March 1970, almost a fortnight after Makarios received Popper’s warning, that his helicopter was shot down as it lifted off from the roof of the Presidential Palace. Though the pilot was horribly injured by the shots, the President was able to walk unscathed from the wreck and to set a precedent for many future narrow escapes. Georgadjis was detained while trying to board a flight in some haste, but was not held on condition that he did not try to leave the island. Ten days after the assassination attempt, he went to a night-time rendezvous with Colonel Papapostolou and another Greek officer. The promise to get him out of Cyprus was not kept. Instead, he was shot through the head. The CIA station in Athens overruled all calls for an inquiry. It was the Greek junta which planned both the assassination and, according to eye-witnesses, the silencing of the assassin.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Frustrated in its effort to get its way by a single stroke of murder, the junta began a broader campaign of subversion. It helped General Grivas to return secretly to the island, in violation of the 1967 agreement with Turkey. Grivas set about building a long-term terrorist underground, which he christened EOKA-B. This time, its targets were to be Greek Cypriots, especially Makarios supporters and the Communist and Socialist parties. At the more respectable level, but also with the connivance of Athens, a Co-ordination Committee for the Enosis Struggle (ESEA) was launched. It contained jurists and politicians, and was supported by newspapers receiving subventions from the junta.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />While subversion and terror were being prepared underground, with Greek officers directly arming and training the members of EOKA-B and spreading its message among the young recruits of the National Guard, clumsy attempts were made to overthrow Makarios at the ‘political' level as well. After their narrow escape from exposure in the Georgadjis affair, neither the junta nor its patrons wanted to resort to force if they could avoid it. But Makarios, at the political level, could always out-general them. He easily survived a farcical attempt at an ‘ecclesiastical coup’, when three obscurantist Cypriot bishops (of Kition, Kyrenia and Paphos) made the astonishing discovery that he should resign because he was violating Canon Law. The clerics, all of whom were enosis fanatics closely linked to the Athens dictatorship, affected the belief that religion and politics did not mix. This was more than hypocrisy on their part; it was in conflict with the Church’s long role as spokesman for national aspirations. Makarios could not be beaten in his own synod, and it was the three bishops who ended up defrocked.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Defeated at the medieval, theological level, the junta switched to Cold War tactics in an effort to isolate and overthrow Makarios. In January and February 1972 it protested at his importing arms from Czechoslovakia to equip his police and security forces. Makarios was trying to build up a cadre that would be free of the taint of Athens and impervious to its infiltration. He was confronted by an arrogant letter from the Greek dictator George Papadopoulos, which demanded that he turn over the Czech weapons to the junta-officered National Guard, crack down on the Cypriot Left, and dismiss the Foreign Minister Spiros Kyprianou (now President of the Republic). Even as the letter was being delivered, junta and EOKA-B units were put on stand-by for a coup, in anticipation of Makarios’s refusal of the <i>démarche</i>. Significantly, the Turkish government supported the Greek junta in this exertion of pressure. At a NATO meeting in Lisbon, there had been a confidential meeting between the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers, Panayiotis Pipinelis and Ihsan Caglayangil, where the Turkish minister had given the junta a deadline to come up with a ‘final solution’ to the Cyprus problem.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Again, Makarios managed to outwit his foes by an adroit mixture of concessions and defiance. Spiros Kyprianou resigned without waiting to be sacked, which took some wind out of the junta’s sails. And the Cypriot police made surprise raids on EOKA-B hideouts (many Makarios loyalists were ex-members of the original EOKA, and knew the ropes). Unmistakable preparations for a coup were discovered, which Makarios boldly presented to the American embassy. Ambassador David Popper relayed the concern to Washington and to Athens, and Papadopoulos, caught off balance, was persuaded to stay his hand. But, in the course of his meeting with Makarios’s envoys, Popper uttered a sentence which has never been forgotten by Cypriots. Confronted with the evidence of a coup to be mounted by a foreign government enjoying warm relations with the United States, he said, ‘I am not authorized to tell you anything.’ This raised the inescapable question: if the United States government could get a coup called off, could it not also authorize one?</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The patience, if that is the word, of the Athens junta was becoming exhausted. It wished, if at all possible, to present the coup as a rising by patriotic Cypriots against the ‘Red Priest’, whom it now referred to contemptuously by his baptismal name of ‘Mouskos’. But, with declining support in Cyprus, it had to rely increasingly on its own strength, and that of its backers. In early 1972 Leslie Finer visited Cyprus. He is a commentator with a well-earned reputation for expertise in Greek affairs, and a no less well-earned reputation for political moderation. As the correspondent for the BBC in Athens, he had originated reports and broadcasts considered authoritative and prescient. His report on this occasion, ‘The Colonels’ Bid for Cyprus’, appeared in the <i>New Statesman</i> of 10 March 1972, and deserves to be quoted at some length:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘It is impossible, unless you see it with your own eyes, to imagine the extent to which this secret army of junta officers have penetrated the fabric of public life in Cyprus. Lavishly paid, enjoying all kinds of tax and customs privileges… and handling large sums of money for oiling the machine and winning friends, these mercenaries have firmly planted the flag of the Colonels in Cyprus.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘For the Colonels,’ wrote Finer, ‘Grivas provides the ideal fuse to ignite a conflict which would enable the Athens regime to intervene to “restore order” and finally close their grip on the island.’ He went on:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Is Grivas, then, so unsophisticated that he is unaware of his passive role as a tool of Athens, believing that he is fighting for his beloved enosis cause, yet actually helping towards the hated solution of partition? It would seem impossible. Yet, having collaborated painfully with the man for months over the English edition of his memoirs, I can testify that he is quite capable of that degree of obtuseness.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />George Ball had not then made public the secret agreement between Grivas and the CIA, so Mr Finer had to work from specialist knowledge and induction to write the following crucial sentences:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘It is impossible to grasp what is happening in Cyprus now except on the basis that the Athens regime is paying for its keep by serving long-term American design: the removal of Makarios… It is, in other words, very far from a coincidence that the latest episode in the Cyprus crisis occurs simultaneously with the indecently hasty decision of President Nixon to override the Congress ban on arms shipments to Greece, and the continuing negotiations for a giant home base in the Piraeus for the United States’ Sixth Fleet.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The American design was not, of course, limited to Cyprus. But during the two Nixon administrations, the Greek junta was more and more indulged by Washington. The Johnson administration had at least gone through the motions of disapproval, imposing a selective embargo on the shipment of arms and uttering occasional routine pieties about the eventual return of democracy.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />On one famous occasion, Lyndon Johnson had even interceded to save Andreas Papandreou. In his memoirs, <i>A Life in Our Times</i>, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith tells how he approached LBJ on behalf of numerous American economists who had known Papandreou professionally while he was teaching in the United States. As Galbraith tells the story:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘In the early-morning hours my phone rang once again. It was Nicholas Katzenbach, then Under-secretary of State, calling to read with a greatly audible chuckle a message he had just received from the President: “Call up Ken Galbraith and tell him that I’ve told those Greek bastards to lay off that son-of-a-bitch – whoever he is”.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />To the last, Johnson persisted in pretending not to know how to pronounce a perfectly easy Greek name. And, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>, the same suspicion applies to him as later applied to ambassador David Popper and the Nixon administration. If he could stop ‘those Greek bastards’ he could also start them.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />However close American-Greek relations were under Johnson, with Nixon they became warm, rotten and corrupt. The extent of the intimacy between the junta and Washington has become better understood with the passage of time. It was only in 1983 that Seymour Hersh was able to reveal in his book <i>The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House</i> that the junta had directly contributed money to the Nixon-Agnew election campaign in 1968. Nixon’s ambassador to Athens, Henry Tasca, confirmed the transaction to a House of Representatives Intelligence Committee investigation. But this symbiotic relationship, involving arms sales, political favours and influence peddling, was possible only because of a pre-existing and durable ‘understanding’ between conservative military and political forces in both countries.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />With Nixon, the practices of the junta, whether internal or external, were no further obstacle to American military aid. Vice President Agnew and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, among others, visited Athens and publicly praised the dictatorship. A senior American officer publicly compared the rule of the junta to the age of Pericles. Arms shipments, disguised as the sale of ‘surplus’ hardware, increased by $10 million each year until, on 22 September 1970, the embargo was formally lifted. National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) number 67, which found its way into Seymour Hersh’s hands, explicitly stated that the Nixon administration would take, ‘at face value and accept without reservation’ any assurances about democratic reform that Papadopoulos cared to make. This consummated the advice given a year earlier by Nixon to Henry Tasca: ‘We’ve got to restore military aid; as far as the rest is concerned, make it look as good as you can.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The restoration of American arms sales was closely tied to another decision – the decision to ‘home-port’ the United States’ Sixth Fleet in Greece. The home-porting plan was ‘prematurely’ disclosed, to the press and to Congress, on 21 January 1972. The Pentagon and the State Department both expressed extreme annoyance. But, by September 1972, all formalities had been completed, and United States destroyers were dropping anchor in Phaliron Bay, outside Athens. A carrier task force soon followed. The architect of the home-porting agreement, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the Chief of Naval Operations, had to overcome sustained objections from Greek democrats and their supporters in Congress, led by Congress man Ben Rosenthal of New York. The administration attempted to evade the holding of hearings, but was outmanoeuvred and had to put its case in public. The result was not edifying. In an interview with Thomas Keagy and Yiannis Roubatis, authors of the definitive study of home-porting, Admiral Zumwalt made it clear that he ‘viewed the presence of a military government in Athens as an opportunity rather than a liability’. He also professed to believe that the Greek junta’s promises of a move to democracy, at some future indefinite time, were genuine. Rodger Davies of the State Department (who, as ambassador to Cyprus, was later to be killed during the violence created by the junta’s 1974 coup) took the same line, naive or cynical according to taste. He told Congress that, ‘a continuous, quiet diplomatic dialogue between the government of Greece and its allies is more conducive to the end [of restoring democracy] than open criticism and challenge’. This early exponent of ‘quiet diplomacy’ mistook, in his belief that ‘the only question is one of timing’, the real relationship between the two governments, and the real nature of the dictatorship. By home-porting its fleet under junta auspices, the United States became almost as dependent on the dictators as the dictators already were on the United States. A vested American interest in the survival of the junta had now been created. The description of the state of affairs which now became current – that the United States was ‘in bed’ with the Greek despots – was crude but unhappily accurate.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />As in many similar cases, American leniency with the regime did not have the effect of mellowing, let alone of reforming it. Quite the contrary. Secure in its role as little Greek brother, the junta became markedly worse. In the summer of 1973, units of the Greek navy mutinied against the junta. This revolt, which challenged its claim to be a loyal and reliable defender of the West, caused the dictatorship to lash out even at conservative and monarchist officers whom it suspected of insufficient enthusiasm.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In November 1973 the students of the Athens Polytechnic, joined by numerous young members of the working class and the unemployed, rose against the Papadopoulos regime. Their protest was met with tanks and infantry and resulted in a heavy loss of life. But it put an end to a period of suspended animation in Greek politics. Exile and underground movements were galvanized. So was the hard core of the junta. Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannides, the head of the Greek Military Police (ESA) and a man long identified as the most ruthless member of the Papadopoulos junta, moved to replace his boss on 21 November. (It was Ioannides, it will be recalled, who had proposed the extermination of the Turkish Cypriots to Archbishop Makarios in 1964.) He could be reasonably certain that the American embassy, which occupied the building opposite his headquarters, would not object. For one thing, it had never protested about the torture which was known to go on in ESA’s basements, and which had been verified by the Council of Europe. For another, the Americans had been disappointed by the failure of Papadopoulos, one month earlier, to allow United States aircraft to use Greek airspace to resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur war. For another, numerous members of the Papadopoulos entourage had be come an embarrassment because of their corruption. The United States, as far as can be determined, did not involve itself in the fall of Papadopoulos. But nor did it try to keep him from being replaced. And it established a ‘business-as-usual’ relationship with his successor.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />If Papadopoulos was a Fascist in the Mussolini mould, Ioannides was more like an authentic Nazi. He despised the laxness and corruption of his former associates; he was a sadist and a believer in extreme military cultism; he did not seek the love of his subjects as long as they feared him. He had been formed within a very narrow compass, knowing only Greece and Cyprus and those mainly through his experience in uniform. His genocidal proposal to Makarios was typical of him rather than exceptional. Having put Papadopoulos under house arrest and unleashed his secret police on all manifestations of dissent, Ioannides began to speed up the war on Makarios. Gone was the crafty policy of undermining Cyprus in unspoken concert with Turkey. The new dictator wanted ruthless, rapid results. And he still had the weapons bequeathed to him by his predecessors and by the Pentagon.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Conciliation was, for Ioannides, synonymous with cowardice. He now knew that Makarios was sheltering a number of anti-junta Greeks on Cyprus. He suspected Cypriot Leftists of involving themselves with the Polytechnic revolt. He had a bigoted antipathy to deals with Turkey, though some of his General Staff still felt that an agreement with Ankara was the only risk-free way to a version of enosis. One might say that Ioannides thought any enosis was better than none, and the United States thought that any partition was better than none. That belief in a workable coincidence of interests was to prove not just cynical but lethal. Within a year, it brought disaster to Cyprus and near-disaster to Greece and Turkey.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><u>Kissinger</u><br />To concede to Henry Kissinger an omnipotence in decision making during the year 1974 is tempting but misleading. For one thing, it is to take him at his own valuation, and the valuation of his many admirers. As is customary in the case of ‘great statesmen’, when things go well they claim full credit. And when things do not go well, ineluctable and uncontrolled forces can be blamed. So it was with Kissinger over Cyprus. The Secretary of State, who normally loved to pose in front of the press and the public as a man on top of his brief and at ease with international affairs, preferred in this case to claim that it was all too complicated for him. A few days after the Greek junta threw all pretence aside and attacked the government of Cyprus in strength with tanks and artillery, Dr Kissinger told a press conference that, ‘The information was not lying around in the streets.’ Some years afterwards, he told Time magazine that, ‘If I had ever had twelve hours and been able to pick out an intelligence report, I would have seen that the situation needed attention.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In as much as these and other statements represent a claim by Kissinger to have been taken off guard by the July 1974 coup, they are direct lies.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In the broadest possible sense, he cannot, as National Security Advisor or as Secretary of State have been unaware of United States policy favouring the partition of Cyprus since 1964. In a sense hardly less broad, he cannot, as Secretary of State, have been unaware of American commitments to the Greek junta, or of that junta’s commitment to the removal or overthrow of Makarios. In the specific sense of day-to-day policy, he may have ignored but cannot have forgotten the many warnings that he was given as early as March 1974.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Here, one must be pedantic. The United States administration knew of the impending coup against President Makarios and, at the very least, did nothing to prevent it. To be specific:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />1. On 7 June 1974, the <i>National Intelligence Daily</i>, essential breakfast reading for all senior State Department, Pentagon and national security officials, quoted an American field report dated 3 June which stated that:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Ioannides claimed that Greece is capable of removing Makarios and his key supporters from power in twenty-four hours with little if any blood being shed and without EOKA assistance. The Turks would quietly acquiesce to the removal of Makarios, a key enemy… Ioannides stated that if Makarios decided on some type of extreme provocation against Greece to obtain a tactical advantage, he is not sure whether he should merely pull the Greek troops out of Cyprus and let Makarios fend for himself, or remove Makarios once and for all and have Greece deal directly with Turkey over Cyprus’s future. [This statement and its contents have since been authenticated before Congress by CIA Athens staff serving at the relevant time.]</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />2. It still took until 29 June for Kissinger to respond to this alert. He approved a ‘for-the-record’ cable to the US ambassador, Henry Tasca, instructing him to tell Brigadier Ioannides that America opposed any adventure in Cyprus. ‘The instruction, drily noted the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 1976, was only partially heeded.’ To be exact, ambassador Tasca refused to pass it on. Ioannides had no constitutional standing except as head of the Military Police. Why should a dignified ambassador of a Great Power deal with him? The fact that Ioannides was effective ruler of Greece was not deemed relevant, and might not have been except that the United States had helped to put him there and keep him there. No other admonition to Ioannides is on record.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />3. As the House Select Committee on Intelligence observed in its 1976 report:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Tasca, assured by the CIA station chief that Ioannides would <i>continue</i> to to deal only with CIA, and not sharing the State Department Desk Officer’s alarm, was content to pass a message to the Greek leader indirectly… It is clear, however, that the embassy took no steps to underscore for Ioannides the depth of concern over a Cyprus coup attempt. This episode, the exclusive CIA access to Ioannides, Tasca’s indications that he may not have seen all important messages to and from the CIA station, Ioannides’s suggestions of US acquiescence, and Washington’s well-known coolness to Makarios have led to public speculation that either US officials were inattentive to the reports of the developing crisis or simply allowed it to happen.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />4. Thomas Boyatt, who was then the Cyprus desk officer in the State Department, whose ’alarm’ is the alarm referred to to above, and who had served as a diplomat on the island, warned consistently of a coup and of the inevitable Turkish response to it. He confirmed that the junta was planning an attack on Cyprus. Boyatt recapitulated the long involvement of the junta in plots against Makarios. His pre-coup memoranda were classified as secret and have never been released. After the invasion, he was at first forbidden by Kissinger to testify before Congress, and was finally allowed to do so in order to avoid being cited for contempt. His evidence was taken in ‘Executive Session’, with the room cleared of staff, reporters and visitors.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />5. On 1 July, 1974 three senior officials fo the Greek Foreign Ministry, all of them known be moderate on the Cyprus issue, publicly tended their resignations.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />6. On 3 July President Makarios issued an open letter to General Phaidon Gizikis, the puppet President of Ioannides’ regime. The letter, which sent a shock through western Europe as well as Greece and Cyprus, was extremely audacious and unambiguous. Its decisive paragraph, rounding off a litany of complaints against the junta, read as follows:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘In order to be absolutely clear, I say that the cadres of the military regime of Greece support and direct the activities of the EOKA-B terrorists… It is also known, and an undeniable fact, that the opposition Cyprus press, which supports the criminal activities of EOKA-B and which has its source of financing in Athens, receives guidance from those in charge of the General Staff office and the branch; of the Greek Central Intelligence Agency in Cyprus.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Makarios did not believe in using silky ambivalence unless he really had to. He therefore added that: ‘I have more than once so far felt, and in some cases I have touched, a hand invisibly extending from Athens and seeking to liquidate my human existence.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />He ended his open letter in spirited fashion, calling for the withdrawal of the Greek officers who had been subverting and poisoning the National Guard. Here was the ‘type of extreme provocation’ which Ioannides knew, when he talked to the CIA in Athens, that his own Cyprus policy was inviting and even necessitating.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />All this is to say that Kissinger lied both by <i>suppressio veri</i> and <i>suggestio falsi</i>. The information was not just ‘lying around on the streets’ of Athens and Nicosia, it was also littering the corridors of the State Department. Yet at no stage was the Greek ambassador to Washington summoned, and at no stage did Kissinger display anything but an unpleasant insouciance when presented with warnings. (He told one senior staffer who protested at his callous indifference that: ‘I don’t want any goddamn social science lectures.’) The Greek Cypriot daily <i>Apogevmatini</i> (<i>Afternoon</i>) outdid the mighty Secretary of State in its edition on 5 July. It stated confidently in an editorial that the Greek junta was planning:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘A broad coupist action to take place in the next few days supported by certain military circles in co-operation with units of the National Guard and EOKA-B groups, for the purpose of seizing power. This coupist action has been planned in such a way that it formally releases senior military personnel or Greek army circles from any responsibility…. If the plan succeeds, the government will be taken over by a certain person who has already been chosen and who, in substance, will be the puppet for a transitional period. Naturally, it is understood that the partition of Cyprus will be achieved through the coup plan with the understanding that the Turks have their plans prepared for such a golden opportunity.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Did the Cypriot journalist who penned that editorial really know more than Henry Kissinger – or less?</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The date of 15 July 1974 was the ninth anniversary of the constitutional coup which ousted George Papandreou from the Prime Ministership of Greece – at least in part because he defended Makarios from the extreme Right. The irony was unintended. The junta was in a hurry, and had once again been caught unawares by the Archbishop’s ‘going public’. This had given him time in the past; granted him a stay of execution. On this occasion, it panicked his foes into an earlier strike than they had planned. But, when it came, it was no less ghastly for having been anticipated.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><u>The Coup</u><br />A writer should be careful about using the well-worn metaphor of ‘Greek tragedy’. Many superficial accounts of the Cyprus crisis have used the term ineptly or incorrectly, satisfied with the resonance of the word in any Hellenic context and glad of the opportunity to employ it. The coup in Cyprus was not a ‘classic’ tragedy. It was not the outcome of rash human acts, misunderstood by their authors but monitored by the Fates. It was the result of human design, the consequences of which were perfectly understood by at least some of the actors. But it is true to say that, from the moment the first salvoes were fired at the Presidential Palace, every other ‘tragic’ consequence was more or less assured.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The consequences were not precisely those which the rattled putschists had intended. This was one of those moments in history where the life or death of one individual make all the difference. The junta men banked on their ability to kill Makarios and to offer his cadaver as a symbol of goodwill to Turkey and to the United States. A relatively orderly division of the spoils would then follow, with something for everybody. But, for that to work even on the best prognosis, the executors of the coup would have to be rational. And rational they were not. The luckless footsoldiers of the operation had been told that they were fighting for enosis and, once out of their cages, behaved as if that was their objective. This, in itself, was enough to give the ordinary Turkish Cypriots vivid memories of 1963. But two other developments put events beyond the control of their originators.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The first of these was the least predictable. In spite of everything, including heavy and vicious shelling of the Presidential Palace, Makarios survived. Not only did he survive, he escaped. His supporters put up quite a resistance to cover his flight, while the new junta-controlled Cyprus radio broadcast gloating announcements of his death. With Makarios alive, the junta could not move to its next stage.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The second miscalculation was just as telling. The junta installed, as President, Nicos Sampson. Sampson, a well-known thug and killer; a man devoid of education or culture and, as we have seen, a relentless hater of Turks. His name alone was enough to send a frisson through the Turkish Cypriot quarter, which remembered him from 1963 and which had been frightened since by the lurid and violent tone of his newspapers. The British, too, had no cause to love him. His exploits, even as a ‘freedom-fighter’ in the 1950s, had not been savoury. There was thus no chance that either of the other two guarantor powers would contemplate recognizing such a person in office.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />All the evidence points to Sampson’s having been a last-minute choice. He was, after all, more likely to provoke an angry Turkish invasion than an ‘understanding’ about partition. He lacked polish and had no experience in government. Many other Greek Cypriot Rightists of the more respectable kind were approached (the law of libel forbids direct mention of names; Cyprus still has a British legal system). But Makarios’s open letter had shaken their nerve, and the frenzy of Ioannides was not to their taste. By bringing forward the date of the coup, and by appearing so obviously responsible for it, the junta was forced to find somebody cast more in its own image – someone, in fact, who would be regarded even by quite entrenched conservatives with plain horror. The option of General Grivas was closed to them – he had died of a heart attack a few weeks previously. Sampson was chosen <i>faute de mieux</i> – the bottom of the barrel.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Dr Kissinger, however, treated him with respect and almost with courtesy. Compare, for instance, the different receptions accorded to the two Dimitrious. Nicos Dimitriou was the ambassador of Cyprus to Washington. His brother Dimis became Nicos Sampson’s ‘Foreign Minister’ on the day of the coup. Dr Kissinger received the ambassador on the first day of the Emergency, and insulted him with jokes while failing to offer any condolences on the reported death of his President. In Nicosia, ambassador Rodger Davies received Dimis Dimitriou as ‘Foreign Minister’– the only envoy to do so. In Washington, as day succeeded day, Kissinger’s press spokesman, ambassador Robert Anderson, reflected his employer’s readiness to do business with the new regime, and his refusal to admit what was obvious to everyone else.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />For example, Kissinger’s State Department never agreed that the coup in Cyprus, which had been carried out with tanks and heavy artillery under the command of Greek officers, was an interference by Athens. ‘No. In our view there has been no outside intervention,’ was the official Anderson statement when challenged on this very point. At the same time, most of the governments in western Europe were stating what was clear – that the Greek Colonels had mounted an unpardonable intrusion into the affairs of another state. The death of Grivas meant that not even EOKA-B had a token Cypriot commander.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This hypocrisy on Kissinger’s part was deplorable for three reasons. First, he and the State Department were well aware that the Greek junta was responsible for the coup; and they had also been aware of the planning for it. Even if one takes Dr Kissinger’s tepid cable of 29 June at its face value, it makes an official lie out of his later disclaimers. The cable had, after all, explicitly recognized that Athens was preparing to move against Makarios.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Second, Kissinger could only, by his pretended innocence, have given the badly worried Greek dictators the feeling that they were not alone in the world, and might get away with it. Third, it made it much easier for Turkey to act unilaterally and to claim that the situation gave her no choice but to do so. A concerted move by the Western democracies to isolate the junta would have made such a Turkish attack very hard to justify. And, perhaps for that reason, no such move was ever made. The Turkish card was to be kept in reserve.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u>Collusion</u><br />For the remainder of July and August 1974, the Cypriots yet again had no choice but to let others be the actors in the drama of their own country. There was a brief and heroic resistance to the Sampson coup, in which members of Makarios’s security forces and the militants of the Socialist Party distinguished themselves. The fighting, as Mr Denktash admitted at the time, was confined to the Greek Cypriots: Sampson’s forces left the Turks alone for the time being and many Greek Cypriot dissidents took shelter with their Turkish neighbours in a gratifying moment of fraternity. But the Turkish Cypriots could not be expected to believe that Sampson was their friend; they had to ask what, if he could do this to Greeks, would he do to them? They withdrew, in large numbers, into their enclaves and turned on the Turkish radio.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Here it ought to be stressed that the Greek junta planned to share Cyprus with <i>Turkey</i>. It had never had a policy for the Turkish <i>Cypriots</i>, and its own demented logic had forced it to rely on the most chauvinistic Greeks; the ones least likely to convince Turkish Cypriots, as opposed to Turkish generals, of anything. So, before considering the disastrous course that matters actually took, one ought to remember that there was the possibility for Greeks and Turks to coexist, as Cypriots, in spite of all the years of intrigue and foreign meddling.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In his book <i>The Road to Bellapais</i>, which is generally speaking the most naively pro-Turkish account of the Cyprus problem yet to be published, Professor Pierre Oberling has the following rather striking passage:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Already by 1969, relations between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots had so dramatically improved that when a tornado struck the Turkish Cypriot quarter of Limassol, Makarios inspected the damage and promised the victims that his government would provide them with all that was necessary to rebuild their homes. However, while relations between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots were improving, those between the Greek Cypriot and Greek governments were steadily deteriorating… The junta was determined to achieve enosis; the acquisition of Cyprus would crown its rule with glory and legitimize its continued existence. But Makarios now seemed determined to barter it away for the sake of achieving a rapprochement with the Turkish Cypriots and restoring the unity of his long-divided nation.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This generous observation by Professor Oberling (the acknowledgements of whose book contain only official Turkish sources and not a single Greek) is one that must be borne in mind. In describing the second stage of the 1974 catastrophe, one has to employ the shorthand of ‘Greeks’ and Turks’. But the crisis did not grow out of tension between them, which was slowly waning. It grew out of the policies of those who did not want Cypriot harmony, and who feared that it would lead to Communism. The Greek junta provided all the vindication that Turkish extremists could reasonably have wished. All the enemies of Cypriot independence now saw their chance.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The events of the next few days are somewhat kaleidoscopic. They can best be understood if they are considered capital by capital: Washington, London, Athens, Ankara and Geneva.<br /> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u>Invasion and Evasions</u><br /><i>Washington</i>: Dr Kissinger’s romance with the Sampson junta, and with its Athenian parent, became more difficult to conduct once it was obvious that Makarios had survived. There was undisguised gloom on the fifth floor of the State Department. when it became known that he had escaped and been flown, by British military plane, to Malta and then to London. It also became obvious that Turkey would be anxious to take advantage of the vacuum, even to fill it by invasion. Makarios had very few friends or defenders in Washington, because of his obdurate independence down the years. Moreover, the Greek-American leadership had been wooed by Nixon and (often very willingly) exploited in its patriotism by the ‘Hellenic’ slogans of the junta. There were very few people, in this most crucial capital, who were prepared to intercede for the Archbishop.<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />However, I have the testimony of Elias P. Demetracopoulos, who was at all material times in touch with the State Department and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Demetracopoulos. a distinguished Greek journalist, had warned of the coup in Greece before 1967, and had left Athens after his predictions came true. He established himself in Washington, becoming a major one- man crusade against the dictatorship. He survived several attempts to deport and kidnap him and to blacken his name, with allegations of subversive intent, by a deliberate campaign of disinformation. (In one of the few happy footnotes to this story, a full retraction of all the allegations made against hm by Nixon’s Watergate plumbers and the CIA. See the <i>New York Times</i> of 29 September 1983 and the <i>Washington Post</i> of 20 October 1983.) </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Demetracopoulos, whose sources in his native Greece were good and who had a reputation for shrewd prognostication, got wind of the Cyprus coup in early June 1974. He took his evidence to Senator William Fulbright, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a close friend and defender of Kissinger, and perhaps the most powerful man in Congress at that time. Fulbright agreed to approach Dr Kissinger with a plan to avert the coup. This would serve American interest, he argued with the help of a Demetracopoulos briefing, because it would restore the prestige that had been tarnished by association with the junta. It would also enhance American influence in Cyprus, and might forestall a war in the eastern Mediterranean. Kissinger refused to act, on the peculiar grounds that he could not intervene in Greek internal affairs while the Nixon administration was resisting pressure to link US-Soviet trade to the free emigration of Russian Jewry.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />So, having failed to head off the coup (and having incidentally made further nonsense of Kissinger’s later protestations of surprise at it), Demetracopoulos attempted to minimize its consequences. Again with the co-operation of Senator Fulbright, he sought to have the escaped Makarios invited to Washington as <i>President of Cyprus</i>. At the time, Kissinger and his spokesman Robert Anderson were steadily refusing to say whether or not they recognized the Makarios government. On 18 July, ambassador Anderson was asked directly if the United States was moving to recognize Nicos Sampson, as had been repeatedly reported and as seemed likely. Anderson declined to deny the reports. He was then asked about Makarios’s forthcoming visit to Washington. Was Kissinger seeing Makarios on the following Monday 22 July ‘as a private citizen, as Archbishop, or as President of Cyprus?’ Came the answer, with all the gravity of the State Department, ‘He’s meeting with <i>Archbishop</i> Makarios on Monday.’ At least there was no question of challenging his ecclesiastical authority.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This was precisely the ambiguity against which Demetracopoulos and Fulbright were contending. Having telephoned Kissinger on 17 July (the transcript of the call is retained by Kissinger; a move which is being disputed in the American courts) they arranged for Makarios to be invited, as President of Cyprus, by both the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees. After this, Kissinger could hardly do otherwise than extend the same courtesy. And then came another suggestion, even more audacious. It was made by Demetracopoulos and conveyed personally to Kissinger by Senator Fulbright. How would the Secretary of State react if Makarios were to invite the Sixth Fleet to pay a goodwill visit to the ports of Cyprus? After all the controversy over home-porting the fleet in Athens, how could Kissinger refuse an unsolicited invitation? Such a move, of course, would have the effect of repudiating the Greek junta and obviating the need for a Turkish military invasion.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Kissinger’s reply was not long delayed. He would not hear of the Sixth Fleet going to Cyprus, but he would agree to receive Makarios. He would not say whether or not it would be as President (at the last moment, it was). Interestingly enough, it was never objected that it would be <i>technically</i> difficult to deploy the Sixth Fleet on a goodwill visit. After all the fuss about home-porting and the need for a quick reaction in the Levant, that would have been ridiculous.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />With Makarios alive, and as the Greek junta’s position eroded, there came definite symptoms of a shift towards Turkey on the part of the administration. Once again, there was the peculiar spectacle of intelligence agencies saying that they knew nothing, and of military headquarters saying that they could do nothing. This was not the standard Nixon-Kissinger style. Even when caught in the thickets of Watergate, they had managed quite complex interventions in Chile and Indochina. To act in the case of Cyprus, however, seemed beyond them.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Robert Ellsworth, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, told Demetracopoulos, and others who expressed concern that the Greek attack on Cyprus would be followed by a Turkish one, that Turkey did not have the capacity to invade. She was, he claimed, short of landing craft. This claim is made transparently absurd with hindsight, but it was in fact absurd even at the time. Turkey had been readying an invasion force since before the 15 July coup. John ‘Jack’ Maury, who had been CIA station chief in Athens during the 1967 coup, and who was in 1974 Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, knew of these preparations. Even as far back as 1964, a decade previously, when they issued their stern warning to President Inonu, Lyndon Johnson and his advisers had not doubted the ability of the Turks to invade. A sentence from Johnson’s famous letter of June 1964 looked more significant than it had then:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Your government is required to obtain the United States’ consent in the use of military assistance for purposes other than those for which such assistance was intended… I must tell you in all candor that the United States cannot agree to the use of any United States-supplied military equipment for a Turkish intervention in Cyprus <i>under present circumstances</i>.’ [italics mine]</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In 1964 LBJ had been concerned about the possibility that the Soviet Union would intervene against Turkey. In 1974 there was no such concern. Ankara took care to keep Moscow informed of its intentions. And, given Soviet hostility to the Greek junta and its American backers, there could be scant grounds for their opposing an operation ostensibly designed to thwart their immediate objectives. The opportunity to exploit a fissure within NATO also presented itself. This was one crisis which the Soviet Union was happy to sit out. Or, as a Turkish diplomat in Washington translated the changed situation, ‘We could no longer be scared off by threats of the Soviet bogeyman.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />On 19-20 July, the first Turkish shock troops landed on the northern shore of Cyprus. On 22 July, the day Kissinger met with President Makarios, the Athens junta began to collapse. And when it began to collapse, it collapsed very quickly; disproving in the process seven years of Panglossian American propaganda about its durability and popularity. In his study of a much more impressive structure of rule, Montesquieu wrote in 1734 that, ‘if a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle’. The Greek junta was hated, and was corrupt to the bones. It would have fallen anyway, and probably in a year or two. But Cyprus was at least the proximate cause of its ruin. The Greek dictators, caught in a trap of their own making, expired as cynically as they had ruled. They dumped the entire crisis into the lap of the civilians they had excoriated so long, agreed to the return of Constantine Karamanlis from his exile in Paris, and surrendered power. From the warped perspective of Dr Kissinger, the restoration of democracy to Greece was a nuisance and a distraction. But it did simplify matters. He no longer had to deal with rival clients. The way to agreement with Turkey, so long the Cinderella of his statecraft, now lay open and relatively unimpeded.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i>London</i>: The late Richard Crossman, a distinguished politician and essayist and something of a specialist on British cabinet government, made a small but interesting entry in his <i>Diaries of a Cabinet Minister </i>for 28 July 1967. As Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, he had attended a meeting of the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee of the cabinet:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘We then turned to an astonishing paper on Cyprus, a copy of which I had discovered among the huge mass of bumf which was provided for this meeting of the committee. This paper advised that if on the instructions of the Greek government the Greek army in Cyprus staged a coup against Makarios in order to achieve enosis, we should dissent from it but prevent our troops from getting engaged in any hostilities. Denis Healey and I were the only two people there who had noticed this extraordinary proposal. A Commonwealth country is attacked by a Fascist dictatorship which tries to upset its constitutional government and though we have 15,000 armed men there we stand aside… What made it even more astonishing was that this proposal was part of a huge paper recommending that we should make our presence in Cyprus virtually permanent. I suppose it’s explained by the fact that authority is divided between the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office, but when I asked the Foreign Secretary afterwards he said, “After all, the Cypriots have got a very bad record of voting with the Russians in all UN matters” – as though that settled the issue.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Seven years later, when the predictions implied in that exchange finally came true, the British government (which contained the same senior personnel as had the 1967 one, including Harold Wilson, Denis Healey and James Callaghan) affected complete surprise. They also sought to avoid their obligations under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee; a treaty, be it noted, which the British rather than the Cypriots had insisted upon. Arnold Smith, then Secretary General of the Commonwealth, recalled in his 1981 memoir, <i>Stitches in Time</i>, how the evasion was justified:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘When I heard the news of the coup, I was in Ghana lunching with General Acheampong, and actually had an appointment to fly overnight to Cyprus for a working lunch with Makarios the next day. Instead, I flew back to London and at once urged the British government to press a resolution in the UN Security Council calling for the immediate resignation of Sampson and restoration of Makarios, with a swift deadline for the UN peacekeeping forces already on the island to act in support. No UN peacekeeping operation could have been easier. The Soviet Union was opposed to the Greek junta, the US Sixth Fleet was nearby; the British also had bases on the island. The junta would have fallen, to the joy of the Greek people; the Turks would have been placated, Cyprus would have been restored to peace, and the West would have gained some credit. The British told me they would not act in the Security Council unless Kissinger agreed in advance. Instead, they hesitated while Kissinger sent his envoy to talk with the Greek Colonels and the Turkish government. The opportunity was lost, for within five days the Turkish army invaded Cyprus. The Greek junta fell, Sampson resigned – and Makarios was eventually restored – but at the fearful cost of dividing Cyprus far more deeply than before.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />These two quotations from senior participants more or less sum up the British role in the betrayal of Cyprus. Ever since they had surrendered sovereignty over the island in 1960, the British had sought to pass on the responsibility to the United States. A declining imperial power which had, until a few years previously, insisted that Cyprus was its exclusive preserve, now sought to dispose of it by any means.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Three days after the Sampson coup, the Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit flew to London. He was joined there by Joseph Sisco, Kissinger’s luckless understrapper in a ‘shuttle diplomacy’ which the great man did not wish, for reasons of his own, to embark upon himself. Under-secretary Sisco discovered what Ecevit and Arnold Smith had already found – that the British government was not prepared to meet its obligations as a guarantor power. This, as has since been established, was because Kissinger had told them to leave it to him. (I shall not easily forget how James Callaghan, then Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, told me that his guiding policy was the belief in Kissinger’s ability to bring about peace.)</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Bulent Ecevit had two motives in flying to London. The first was the need to demonstrate that Turkey had exhausted every option short of war. The second was to contain his eager and anxious General Staff who, once authorized, might slip the leash of civilian authority altogether. He succeeded in the first much better than the second. But, with Greece exposed as an aggressor and Britain studiously copying the Kissinger line of ‘see no evil’, he got his green light.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i>Athens</i>: The scene in Greece’s capital, meanwhile, was one of appalling squalor and chaos. In Washington a State Department official, who learned from a Greek diplomat of the escape of Makarios, had remarked on the telephone, ‘How inconvenient.’ He could afford to be laconic. At the headquarters of the junta, there was something more closely resembling hysteria. The Greek embassy in London later supplied me with the transcript of a telephone conversation between Brigadier Ioannides and Nicos Sampson. It took place the day after the coup in Nicosia.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Ioannides: I see that the old s- - - has escaped. Where could he be now?<br />Sampson: On the mountains, heading towards Kykkos [site of he monastic headquarters of the Cypriot Orthodox Church]. I hope to have him arrested within two or three hours.<br />Ioannides: Nicky, I want his head.You shall bring it to me yourself, OK Nicky?</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />After this Mafia chat, the two defenders of the West got off the line. Within twenty-four hours, their subordinates were in touch again. The nervous Cypriots at one end of the telephone had to confess that ‘the old s—’ was still at large. They needed perhaps one day to finish him. ‘You haven’t got a day!’ shrieked the voice from Athens, ‘we’re under great pressure from outside.’ The Greek word employed for ‘outside’ was <i>apexo</i>, which means ‘abroad’.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />There is no absolutely watertight proof that Brigadier Ioannides had guarantees from <i>apexo</i>. We are, after all, recounting the behaviour of a near-madman. But it is certain that he <i>thought</i> that he had such guarantees. There was, too, some method in his madness. American policy, as Professor Theodore Couloumbis has so elegantly put it, was concerned that Greece and Turkey not wage an intra-NATO war. American policy, on the other hand, did nothing to prevent and something to facilitate a Greek military move on Cyprus. Ergo, as the professor writes:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘A war could have been excluded with certainty only through a prearrangement of Greeks (the junta) and Turks to eliminate Makarios and to partition Cyprus. If such an agreement did not exist (and there is no contrary evidence to date), then one can speculate that Ioannides was somehow led to ‘assume’ that the Turks would not have reacted to his anti-Makarios putsch, and that he naively went along with such a presumption.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />That is to put it mildly, but firmly. Brigadier Ioannides has stated many times, through his trial lawyers and through other conduits, that he held such an ‘assumption’. Since such testimony tends to incriminate him more rather than less (he is currently serving a life sentence for his many crimes), it may at least be placed in evidence. It also explains his extreme anxiety that the Sampson coup be a ‘success’, at least in the sense that it physically destroyed Makarios. Without the head of ‘the old s—’, the usefulness of the gallant Ioannides was at an end.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />For a brief moment, like the namesake of his deputy Sampson, Ioannides considered bringing the roof down with him. Realizing that the Turks were not going to co-operate in his fiasco, and seeing that the Kissinger faction was in the process of shifting its allegiance to the ascendant power, he ordered a general, kamikaze attack on Turkey. At this, like Prussian Junkers belatedly disdainful of an Austrian corporal, the Greek senior officers baulked. Fighting unarmed civilians was one thing. Fighting the Turks in a losing cause was another. Moreover, Joseph Sisco had been in town, seeking to dampen the enthusiasm his chief had helped to encourage. His mission had been an abject failure, in that it had been launched after rather than before the coup. But it had the effect of opening an escape route for the less committedly ideological military men. They took it with tremendous gratitude.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />It hardly needs to be added that the Cyprus junta fell on the same day as the Greek one. How could it have been otherwise? It does need to be added, however, (because the obvious is so often overlooked) that Brigadier Ioannides resigned only temporarily. Disgusted with the near-mutinous cowardice of his Chiefs of Staff, and contemptuous of the civilian rule which they proposed as a means of saving their own skins, he stamped out of their councils. He was sure that the resulting disorder would bring him back, and he did make one or two attempts to return. But they were fruitless, because without American backing Ioannides was a stringless marionette. Greek democracy was thereby partially restored, but at the cost of a bloodbath in Cyprus.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />A democratic Greece did not mean a Greece that had lost all sense of commitment to Cyprus. Shortly after Constantine Karamanlis had returned to Athens, and during the volatile period when, because of the fear of a Ioannides counter-coup, he had to sleep in a different place every night, he telephoned Evangelos Averoff. Averoff, his Defence Minister, (and today the leader of the opposition in parliament) had been the conservative politician closest to the junta but had always refused to endorse it. It was at his initiative that Karamanlis had been recalled to rescue the situation. The telephone call was a serious one. Did Averoff believe, asked Karamanlis, that Cyprus could still be saved? To be exact, did he believe that if the two of them embarked for the island from Crete, and announced in advance that they were doing so, the Turks would bomb the ship? It emerged, as Averoff was later to tell the Greek parliament, that Karamanlis was prepared to risk their lives to go, with Cretan troops, to save what could be saved from the junta’s folly. Averoff advised against the move, because of Turkey’s command of the air and her ingrained suspicion of Greek motives. But the very notion illustrated the intensity of feeling, even among conservative Greeks, for the island and the people that had been so callously expended. That concern, among others, has been vital in the political radicalization that has taken place in Greece since 1974.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i>Ankara</i>: In his book <i>Thirty Hot Days in Cyprus</i>, which describes the Turkish view of the Cyprus crisis, the Establishment journalist Mehmet Ali Birand describes a conversation between Bulent Ecevit and his naval commander-in-chief. The Turkish invasion fleet had put to sea from the ports of Alexandretta and Mersin, as it had done on previous occasions, such as 1967. At a special meeting, the General Staff had shown Ecevit contingency plans for invading Cyprus. There was one for every month of the year, allowing for changes in weather, and there were two alternative bridgehead sites at Famagusta and Kyrenia. Unlike in the past, there was a power vacuum in Greece and disorder among the Greek Cypriots. Most crucially, there was the fact that Washington no longer had any pressing reason to oppose an invasion. This was the moment for which the Turkish General Staff had been planning, and waiting, for years. Would Bulent Ecevit, the poet manqué and social democrat, who had quarrelled with their domestic political ambitions in the past, hesitate to implement the plan? As Birand tells it, four days after the Sampson coup Ecevit’s naval commander, Admiral Karacan, said to him: ‘Mr Prime Minister, if we turn back from Cyprus as before I won’t be able to remain naval commander-in-chief – and you won’t be able to remain Prime Minister.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This remark, and its implications, more or less encapsulate the Turkish position. The state of affairs in Ankara was far less complicated than it was in any of the other capitals concerned. For the previous decade and a half, Turkish military preponderance had been offset by political and diplomatic weakness. Now, these constraints were dissolved. Moreover Ecevit, as leader of a centre-left party, depended on the indulgence of his conservative coalition partners, and of the generals who had surrendered power to him only some two years previously. The outcome was never in doubt, although among some of the more seasoned elder statesmen there was concern that Turkey might isolate herself internationally. But, once the first invasion was ordered, the generals knew that a second, decisive invasion would have to follow.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Joseph Sisco might just as well have stayed in Washington. His visit to Ankara, which took place between 19 and 20 July, was utterly fruitless. His efforts to implore restraint were lame, and he was not empowered even to hint of any United States disapproval of, let alone retaliation for, an invasion. Back in Athens, Mr Sisco found that his employer Dr Kissinger had left him with no leverage there either. All he could do was bleat that if Greece showed restraint, then Turkey might be induced to do the same. There were three objections to this double bluff. One: Turkey had already begun, on 20 July, to bombard Cyprus and to land formations of parachutists. Two: the Greek junta was collapsing in a welter of mania. Three: because American policy was so wanting in skill, in principle and in synchronization, nobody any longer trusted the good offices of Kissinger’s emissaries. He had managed to offend or alarm all participant nations in the dispute – even a few timorous British spokesmen felt safe enough to say in private that they regretted his alternating energy and indifference. The question became – what could he salvage? The answer was – at least an understanding with the Turks. The site of the understanding was to be Geneva.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In preparing for such an outcome Mr Ecevit was, it must be said, very scrupulous. ‘His’ forces landed in Cyprus with the ostensible justification of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. Article Four of the said treaty provides that, ‘In so far as common or concerted action may not prove possible, each of the three Guaranteeing Powers reserves the right to take action with the sole aim of re-establishing the state of affairs created by the present treaty.’ This permission for unilateral action (inserted, significantly, at Turkish insistence in 1960) is, however, governed by another article which states that if the Republic of Cyprus can no longer ensure, ‘the maintenance of its independence, territorial integrity and security, as well as respect for its Constitution’, the three guarantors must consult together ‘with respect to the representations or measures necessary to secure observance’. It might be argued that Turkey was free under Article Four, given that the Greek junta had subverted Makarios and that Britain had opted to abstain. What cannot be argued is that Turkey had as its objective the larger aim – independence and territorial integrity – which the treaty expressly stipulates. Geneva, where so many essays in international understanding and so many efforts against international piracy have come to grief, was to be the setting for this distinction to be made plain.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><i>Geneva</i>: There were two Geneva conferences, both of them foredoomed. The first, which took place at the request of the United Nations Security Council, involved only the foreign ministers of Greece, Turkey and Great Britain, respectively Mr George Mavros, Mr Turan Gunes, and Mr James Callaghan. It took place between 25 and 30 July 1974, during a very questionable ‘ceasefire’ on the island. It determined that the ceasefire should be observed, that negotiations should be carried on, and that both Greek and Turkish forces should desist from bullying or occupying the territory of, respectively, Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Finally, it determined on another meeting, at which Greek and Turkish Cypriot representatives should also be present. The second meeting was set for 8 August. The Turkish army employed the intervening week by shipping in heavy reinforcements to its salient on the north coast of the island, and by favourably adjusting the edges of that salient. By the time of the second Geneva conference, then, a certain amount of Turkish ‘fact-creating’ had already been accomplished.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Geneva II took place under the permanent threat of another Turkish advance. The United States government, which was not formally represented at the conference but which exerted the largest influence on all the governments which were represented there, made its own position known at a critical stage. On 13 August 1974 Dr Kissinger conveyed to the deadlocked participants the following message: ‘We recognize that the position of the Turkish community requires considerable improvement and protection. We have supported a greater degree of autonomy for them. The parties are negotiating on one or more Turkish autonomous areas.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />There followed some pieties about the inadvisability of military action by any party. But note the rapidity and the significance of the change of tone. Until one month previously, the Nixon administration had been a close ally of the Greek junta and of the EOKA-B bandits. It had refused to condemn the Sampson coup, which was carried out by the most extreme, anti-Turkish elements. It had declined to charge the Greek junta with engineering it. A similarly bold statement about Turkish Cypriot rights, made on the day of the Sampson coup, could have contributed to the junta’s isolation and could even have allowed for the concerted international action called for by the Commonwealth and Arnold Smith. Instead, the United States chose to invoke Turkish rights only when Turkey, not Greece, had become the aggressor. Washington also made clear, as the British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan reported to Geneva, that it would not oppose Turkish military action with any sanctions, and that it would not view with favour any British or Greek opposition to it. No Turkish government could have been expected to ignore this change in policy and style, or to miss the opportunity which it presented. On the morning after the Kissinger statement, the Turkish army burst out of its northern salient and began, effectively unopposed, to set about the occupation of all of northern Cyprus. The Acheson Plan was to be achieved after a fashion, but not under the conditions or by the instruments which Acheson had envisaged. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />It was during the Geneva Conference that Thomas Boyatt (then Director of Cypriot Affairs, State Department) wrote a memorandum which was later classified as secret by Kissinger. A crucial extract reads: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Then on 18 July the CIA station [in Athens] with the concurrence of ambassador Tasca reported that “The Greek military are now solidly behind strongman Brigadier General Ioannides’’ “what Ioannides has achieved for Greece on the island is parity with the Turks”; and “any Turkish invasion of the island would unite all the Greek nationals behind Ioannides”. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘How wrong can you be? Within days, the Greek army had thrown out Ioannides and brought in civilians; the Turkish army had conquered northern Cyprus and the remains of the Greek army were thrown out; Greek nationals put Ioannides in jail and united behind a civilian government.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />At the time of the Geneva Conference, no less than at other times previous to it, the position of the Turkish Cypriot community did indeed ‘require improvement’. So did that of the Greek Cypriot population, which was not mentioned in the Kissinger memorandum. The position of both began to require urgent improvement within twenty-four hours. Until 14 August 1974, Cyprus had known every kind of medieval war, including siege and investment and crusade. It had also experienced conquest, colonization and exploitation. In living memory it had undergone guerrilla war, subversion and near-civil war. It was now to see twentieth-century war – the real thing. <br /></span></span></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p>
Read all parts of the serialisation here:<br /><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences</a><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><i></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-18322687838431010992021-12-04T13:43:00.008+00:002022-01-17T23:21:47.146+00:005. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods<p><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/w208-h338/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" width="208" /></a><br /></b></i><i><b>In Chapter 2 (The Axe and the Woods) of his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens discusses how, following independence and the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960, intercommunal relations on the island became strained and how these strains were encouraged and exacerbated by foreign actors. Particularly calamitous for Cyprus was the introduction of the USA (replacing an increasingly indifferent and cynical UK) to the island’s affairs. Perceived American Cold War priorities imagined bringing the island into NATO’s orbit, removing it as a source of dispute between Greece and Turkey, and determining that the best way to do this was to split Cyprus between Athens and Ankara. In pursuit of this policy of partition – expressed in the Acheson plan(s) – Washington set about fuelling violence on the island and overthrowing its democratic order.<br /></b></i></p><p><u>5. <i>Cyprus: Hostage to History</i>, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods</u><br /></p><div style="text-align: right;"><i>When the axe came into the woods, the tree said, <br />’The handle is one of us.’ (Turkish proverb)<br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Cyprus problem involves questions of nationality, of intercommunal relations, of strategy and of geopolitics. There are, on the island, utterly conflicting interpretations of nationhood, independence and freedom. The Cold War is fought quite energetically in Cyprus, which has three NATO armies on its soil (one of them regarded by the majority of the population as an aggressor rather than as a defender) as well as the world’s largest percentage of Communist voters (thirty-three per cent of the Greek Cypriots regularly cast their ballots for AKEL, the pro-Moscow party). And the geographic location of the island, anchored so near the shores of Syria, Israel, Egypt and Lebanon, has placed it in regional contention as well. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Definitions, like simplifications, are dangerous but necessary. In the post-1960 period the Cyprus problem can be defined as the exploitation by outside powers of intercommunal differences that were genuine in themselves. The purpose of the exploitation was to suborn the independence of the island. This theory has its difficulties, but it can be demonstrated as superior to the vastly more simplistic model of ‘Greek versus Turk’. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Of course, most of the local combatants engaged in the struggles of the 1960s imagined themselves to be fighting for their respective motherlands and heroic traditions. The urgency of the battle against British rule had put the Greek Cypriots in a position where the Orthodox Church, the Greek flag and the intoxicating slogans of Hellenism had shaped their liberation. And had they not defeated both the British and the Turks? From the start, a strong element of vainglory was present; the boastful conviction that enosis (explicitly ruled out, along with taksim by the 1960 agreements) was still attainable. Two prominent spokesmen for this view were Polycarpos Georgadjis, Makarios’s Minister of the Interior, and Nicos Sampson, the publisher of the sensational newspaper <i>Makhi</i> (Combat). Both men had been prisoners of the British, and senior members of EOKA. Both were staunch chauvinists, who regarded the Cypriot Left as treasonous for its tepidity about the armed struggle and its relative internationalism. Both were unscrupulous and conspiratorial, strongly marked by mythic ideas about violence and gunplay. For them, and for a number of others, the EOKA struggle was unfinished and the EOKA ranks were not disbanded. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />On the Turkish side, also, there was much undigested political and national resentment. The leadership regarded the 1960 agreements as at best a draw. The guerrillas of TMT kept their weapons and maintained their discipline. They detested the idea of Greek majority rule, which amounted in their eyes to rule by former subjects, and they found the idea of an Archbishop as President especially uncongenial. On the political level, Vice President Kuchuk and his associates were determined to interpret their large share of constitutional power very strictly and literally. They could do this in the confidence that Turkey was ready to support them and lay only a few miles away. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Nationalism is often strongest at its periphery. History has shown that Corsicans can feel more passionately French than Parisians, that Austrians can be more German than Berliners, that inhabitants of Ulster and the Falklands are more ostentatious with the Union Jack than are Londoners. In the modern history of Greece and Turkey, two of the most extreme nationalist politicians have been Cypriots. General George Grivas, born in Trikomo, made various unsuccessful and unpleasant forays into mainland extremist politics (leading a campaign of atrocity during the Greek civil war) before returning to Cyprus to command EOKA in 1955. He ended his days as the abject instrument of a Greek military junta whose true objectives, if we are to be charitable, may have been obscure to him. Colonel Alparslan Turkes, founder and leader of the Turkish National Action Party, was born in the village of Lefka and got into trouble during the Second World War for his pro-Nazi activities. He still nurtures the dream of a Greater Turkey, to be carved largely out of the Soviet Union (and China!) and in the 1970s his party’s 'Grey Wolf’ youth commandos were held responsible for thousands of murders and bombings in Turkey itself. He, too, helped bring a military dictatorship to power and found that its objectives were more cynical than his own. He, too, pressed for Cyprus to become the exclusive property of his own ‘motherland’, and he kept close links with TMT. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In the figures of these two febrile and narrow-minded men, one can discern the fanatical and violent mentalities which, apparently diametrically opposed to one another, have actually colluded in maiming Cyprus and in destabilizing democratic life and institutions in Greece and Turkey. These politicians and their followers would have been damaging enough in any situation which involved or demanded intercommunal tolerance. But, as well as acting as destroyers of Graeco-Turkish harmony they also lent themselves, as proxies, to external forces which sought the subversion of Cypriot independence. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />All this, to the zealots of the 1960s, lay in the future. But the prostitution of nationalism was to start early on both sides. It was also to take valuable lives from the respective communities which it purported to defend – ‘the axe in the woods’. Even before the British withdrawal, EOKA had turned its guns on democrats and Leftists who opposed its tactics and its xenophobia. In like manner, TMT slew numerous Turkish Cypriots who favoured Graeco-Turkish co-operation. An especial target in both cases was the Pan-Cyprian Workers Federation (PEO), an island-wide trade-union movement which, then as now, was intimately connected with the Communist Party. To the credit of PEO, whatever may be its political rigidity, it has always striven for a non-sectarian policy. Andreas Ziartides, its Secretary General, was the target of several EOKA attentats. Ahmet Sadi, director ot its Turkish office, was forced to leave the island in 1958 after an assassination attempt by TMT. Others, like Fazil Onder, Ahmet Yahya and Ahmet Ibrahim, were not so fortunate. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />After 1960, as both sides circled around each other like scorpions in a bottle, it became even more imperative for the sectarian terrorists to crush independent or internationalist feeling. In the early years at least, Greek Cypriot Fascists did not shoot Greeks (they were to make up for this later). An atmosphere of euphoria, reinforced by a little moral blackmail, was enough to convince most Greeks that unity was paramount after the qualified triumph over Britain. On the Turkish side, however, life was extremely tense. On the very eve of independence, the British minesweeper HMS <i>Burmaston</i> had surprised the Turkish ship <i>Deniz</i> as it prepared to unload a cargo of illegal weapons in northern Cyprus. Other Turkish craft had been detained in suspicious circumstances, but the Deniz case is important because the vessel was caught before it could throw its contraband overboard, and because the incident shows how sincere were at least some Turkish elements about the new ‘partnership state’. It also had the deplorable effect of convincing the EOKA veterans that they were right to prepare for a ‘second round’ with the Turks. Which, in turn, made the Turks nervous and intolerant. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Perhaps the worst and most portentous atrocity of this period was committed in April 1962, when two Turkish Cypriot editors raised their voices publicly against TMT and its separatist plans. Ayhan Hikmet and Ahmet Gurkan were the publishers of the weekly <i>Cumhurriyet</i> (<i>Republic</i>). They printed consistent criticism of the extremist Turkish leadership and even went so far as to threaten the publication of details about those who were planning racialist incitement and violence. Both Hikmet and Gurkan were murdered on 23 April, just before the edition in question could go to press. Emin Dirvana, the Turkish ambassador to Nicosia who had grown to dislike the Denktash faction and who later criticized it in print, denounced the murderers and, on his own initiative, attended the funeral of the victims. He was shortly afterwards recalled to Ankara. None of this is to make light of the fear felt by many Turkish Cypriots when real intercommunal fighting broke out just before Christmas 1963. Eye-witness accounts of this period are scant and murky, partly because few of the participants in the violence have very much to boast about. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The prelude to the 1963-4 disturbances had been, in a sense, inscribed in the provisions of the 1960 constitution. As its critics had anticipated, that constitution proved inoperable and, since they had had such a minimal role in drafting it, few Cypriots felt it to be sacred. The Turkish Cypriots had carried their separatism (with the constraints on dissent noted above) to the furthest extent. They had insisted on the separate municipalities, on the quota system in the public service, and on vetoing financial and budgetary legislation. None the less, when President Makarios proposed his thirteen revisions of the constitution in 1963, it was the Turkish government in Ankara which rejected them before Vice President Kuchuk could respond. The thirteen points would have decided the allocation of jobs and the weight of parliamentary votes in stricter proportion to population. As compensation, Dr Kuchuk’s Vice Presidential position would have been enhanced. But, in essence, the minority veto would have been broken – and the Turks were not willing to surrender that privilege. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />During the civil violence that followed, four crucial things happened – things that go some way to explain the later disasters and miseries of Cyprus: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />1. The Greek irregulars often failed to make any distinction between Turkish mainland soldiers (who were present in the fighting), Turkish Cypriot guerrillas and Turkish civilians. It is true that some detachments did not indulge in pogroms or reprisals against civilians. It is also true that some of the fiercest engagements took place in suburbs of Nicosia such as Omorphita, from which Greeks had been expelled by Turks during British rule. It remains the case that disgusting acts of arson, sadism and vengeance were committed, unpunished. Nicos Sampson’s group was especially culpable. The hateful practice of hostage-taking made its appearance on both sides. Various excuses have been offered (‘The Turks put guns in the mosques’) but they are mostly spurious or shamefaced. The Turkish Cypriots were made to feel threatened as Turks. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />2. The Turkish forces, both local and imported, attempted to establish permanent positions. These strongholds were not, as might have been expected, mainly in areas where Turkish civilians lived. They were in positions, like those at the crusader castle of St Hilarion, which commanded crucial roads or communications (St Hilarion dominates the main road from Nicosia to the northern port of Kyrenia). A partially successful effort was made to establish a Turkish enclave on the northern coast around Mansoura and Kokkina. Here again, the concern was not so much with the Turkish Cypriot population, very thin in that part of Cyprus, as with the idea of opening a salient within easy reach of mainland Turkey. Later intercommunal fighting was to follow the same pattern, with Turkish arms securing critical positions within the legal territory of the republic, and Greek arms doing to Turkish civilians what they could not or dared not do to Turkish soldiers. In these rather squalid encounters, the outlines of the later partition began to be discernible. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />3. Outside powers took the opportunity to intervene. Once granted, this opportunity soon became a habit. Turkish jets flew low over Nicosia on Christmas Day 1963 (and what sort of minority, inquired the Greek Cypriots, who had no air force, was that?) The Turkish army contingent engaged directly with Greek guerrillas near Ganili. Greek mainland contingents took their own part in the fighting elsewhere. British troops left their bases to take up position along a ‘Green Line’ in Nicosia. As usual, the justification for all outside interventions was ‘keeping the peace’. But a precedent had been founded, which all of Cyprus was later to regret. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />4. The British were finally and definitely replaced, as the main outside arbiter, by the United States. As George Ball, Under-secretary of State and President Johnson’s mediator, put it: ‘The British wanted above all to divest themselves of responsibility for Cyprus.’ Henceforth, it was to be in Washington rather than London that the major external decisions were taken. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />As 1964 wore on, those precedents were built upon. General Grivas returned to the island to help organize a National Guard. Turkish ‘volunteers’ were landed through the Kokkina enclave mentioned above. British troops were replaced by a mixed United Nations force, which helped to demarcate other Turkish enclaves, dominated by TMT, inside the city of Nicosia and elsewhere. The Makarios government attempted to prevent strategic materials from reaching these enclaves: a policy which was often interpreted callously at lower levels and resulted in the denial of building materials and other essentials. The Turkish mainland government retaliated by taking the deplorable step of making its own Greek minority a hostage. The remaining Greek population of Istanbul, to the number of some 8,000, was expelled and its property confiscated. To its credit, the Greek government did not retaliate against the Turks of western Thrace. More fighting broke out in the summer as the Greek Cypriots attempted to close down the Turkish military enclave at Kokkina, and Turkish planes replied by showering neighbouring villages with high explosive and napalm. President Inonu of Turkey mobilized for a full-scale invasion.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> On the wider international front, the picture also darkened appreciably. President Johnson, concerned about the ill effects of the crisis on the NATO alliance, despatched the former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, to report on the island and its future. Mr Acheson came Up with a plan quite quickly. Its essential points, which involved the dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus, have been the basis for American policy ever since, so they should be summarized briefly:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />1. Most of Cyprus was to be united with Greece in a partial consummation of enosis. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />2. An area of the northern coast was to be awarded to Turkey as a military base and a political canton. Other Turkish cantons were to be autonomous within the Greek area, including one in the capital of Nicosia. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />3. The small Greek island of Kastellorizon, off the north coast, was to be ceded to Turkey. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />American policy was guided here by two principles, both of which remained dominant even when the plan had been rejected. First was the fear, often expressed by the less polished elements in the Johnson administration, that Cyprus might become, ‘the Cuba of the Mediterranean’, with Makarios as its ‘cassocked Castro’. Of course, Cyprus is an island and Makarios had a beard. In few other respects was the analogy a good one. But it was true that the island had a strong Communist implantation, and that its foreign policy conformed to the Non-Aligned Movement established at Bandung, Indonesia.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <br />Acheson is unlikely to have been very much influenced, even so, by this kind of vulgar demonology. He had a more pressing reason for trying to bring the island within the orbit of NATO. It was, from his point of view, the most businesslike way of appeasing both Greece and Turkey. By giving them both a slice of Cyprus, a quarrel within NATO could be averted and the threat from radical elements in both countries could be contained. The pleasure of neutralizing Makarios and his radical supporters would be considerable but incidental. Not for the first or the only time, American foreign policy-makers cared more about the ‘big picture’ than the details. Not for the first or the only time, they regarded the actual inhabitants of the island as a distraction from other, more lofty, imperatives. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />It was in 1964 that Greek extremism and Turkish intransigence began, semi-consciously, to act in concert and to be recognized by the United States for their ability to do so. Archbishop Makarios rejected the Acheson Plan, which neither Athens nor Ankara had yet done outright. In this, he was staunchly supported by a majority of Greek Cypriots. From this rejection may be dated the official American opinion that he was a dangerous nuisance. George Ball had undisclosed contacts with General Grivas, who agreed to support the ideas of modified enosis, the inclusion of Cyprus in NATO and the strategic sop to Turkey. Grivas’s record of extreme anti-Communism, which dated back to his command of a Fascist group during the Greek civil war, may have facilitated this rapprochement. Let George Ball tell the story in his own words. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In his memoirs, <i>The Past Has Another Pattern</i>, he details his hatred, personal and political, for Archbishop Makarios. He also devotes several passages to a show of his own solicitude for the welfare of the Turkish Cypriots. Then, in describing his efforts to implement the Acheson Plan, Ball writes: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Meanwhile, our intelligence had reported the growing antipathy between Makarios and General George Grivas, the famous leader of EOKA. Though Grivas was, of course, a passionate advocate of enosis, he might, I thought, be easier to work with than Makarios, so we established an underground contact with Socrates Iliades, who was Grivas’s lieutenant and director of the defense of Cyprus. Meanwhile, Grivas returned to Cyprus with a plan for enosis that provided protection for the Turkish Cypriots living on the island and compensation for those wishing to leave. <i>The fact that the Grivas Plan also called for the ouster of Makarios enhanced its attractiveness.</i> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘These schemes were all upset when Makarios encouraged the Greek Cypriots to attack Turkish Cypriot villages.’ [italics mine] </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This is an extraordinary series of admissions for an American statesman to make. He boasts of contacts with armed irregulars operating against a sovereign state, and does not conceal that his intention was the ‘ouster’ of a popularly chosen President. He does this, moreover, in the name of protecting the Turkish minority. Yet his favoured instrument was the man who, that very year, was bombarding Turkish Cypriot villages. Mr Ball’s final sentence is simply an untruth; it was Grivas – not Makarios – who ordered and launched the attacks – attacks which could only defeat his own purposes as well as the purposes of Mr Ball. Nevertheless, Grivas had to convince his followers that they were fighting for ‘Hellenism’ instead of the backstairs deal that was being readied. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The Turkish government, meanwhile, also pursued a policy which was blinded by ideology and propaganda and which could have been designed to bring about what it purported to avoid. Having persecuted and expelled the Greeks of Istanbul, it began to harass the Dodecanese and Aegean islands which lay off its coast. There were threats of retaliatory annexation if Greece ‘went too far’ in Cyprus. Mitylene airport was buzzed regularly by Turkish military jets, and local Greek fishermen found themselves the object of unwelcome attention from Turkish patrol boats. The declared intent of this policy was to force Athens to lean on Makarios; to press him to lower his guard and to modify his independence. But Makarios was not, as the Turks were officially committed to believing, a creature of the Greek government. Still, he was within reach of Greek pressure. When that pressure was finally exerted, it was not of the kind that the Turks would have publicly admitted to wanting. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In making known his criticism of the Acheson Plan, Andreas Papandreou (then a minister, later to become the first Socialist Prime Minister of Greece) was speaking only as an individual but influential member of his father’s party – the Centre Union. But he made a prescient point. The plan, he said, could be imposed on Cyprus only ‘by the force of Greek arms’. Greece was prepared to consider the plan officially, but public opinion and the parliament were sure to support Makarios if he held out for independence from NATO. It followed, then, that either the Acheson plan or Greek democracy had to be changed. I almost wrote that it followed ‘as the night the day’. That, in fact, would be too precise as well as too familiar a reference to what actually did happen. At least in part because of the need to ‘solve’ the Cyprus problem – when the ‘problem’ was its independence – Greek democracy was extinguished for seven years. Only since the night of dictatorship (1967-74) was lifted has it become possible to discover what was arranged in the dark, and by whom. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Read all parts of the serialisation here:<br /><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a></span></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span> </span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences</a><br /></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span></div></div><div style="text-align: right;"><i></i></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-39407498903711649442021-11-27T23:48:00.011+00:002022-01-17T23:21:29.943+00:004. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?<p></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/w208-h338/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" width="208" /></a> <i><b><br />In Chapter 1 (Hammer or Anvil?) of his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens provides a brief history of Cyprus, the vicissitudes and multiple foreign overlords who have plagued the island, yet were never been able to alter its overwhelmingly Greek character, and explains the origins and legitimacy of the two ideas that came to dominate the modern politics of Cyprus: the Greek Cypriot clamour for Enosis, i.e. union with Greece, and the Turkish Cypriot retort, which started off as an insistence that, if British rule ended on the island, then Cyprus, in its entirety, should be ‘returned’ to its previous ‘owner’, i.e. Turkey, before the minority settled on agitating for partition (</b></i><i><b><i><b>taksim)</b></i>.</b></i></p><p><i><b> </b></i></p><p><u>4. <i>Cyprus: Hostage to History</i>, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil? </u><br /></p><div style="text-align: right;"><i>The kingdom has from all time had a variety of masters.</i><br /><i>It would be tedious to relate all its vicissitudes.</i><br /><i>Giralamo Dandini (Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a History of Cyprus, 1596)</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">When the Turkish army stormed into Cyprus in the summer of 1974, it put an end to the only period of independence and self-government, however qualified, that the island had ever enjoyed. There had been almost no time in the preceding millennia when Cyprus could really be described as having been autonomous, and no ruler since 1191 had spoken Greek – the language of the overwhelming majority – until independence in 1960. None the less, historians and scholars have had little problem in identifying a Cypriot identity. For centuries, the national genius lay in adaptation, in the business of surviving the next wave of conquerors and usurpers. One can hear the Cypriots muttering, as Byzantium succeeds Rome and Venice replaces the Franks, that, ‘this, too, will pass’. That is not to say that their history is one of unbroken servitude or, worse, servility. They took such advantage as they could of interregna, of divisions among their masters, and of weaknesses in the structure or polity of neighbouring states. But these revenges and upsurges were essentially those of a small people. The Cypriots were, above all, conditioned by geography. Their favourable position, within such easy reach of Syria, Turkey and Egypt, has often been more of a curse than a boon – a problem that persists up to the present day. But the complexity and variety of Cypriot history cannot efface, any more than could its numerous owners and rulers, one striking fact. The island has been, since the Bronze Age, unmistakably Greek. It is possible to write this simple sentence, so fraught by later controversy, with some confidence. During the second millennium before Christ, Cyprus was settled by Achaean Greeks. Earlier arrivals, from Syria, Cilicia and Anatolia, were of uncertain provenance and were in any case superseded, over time, by this one. Previous traces, of interest to the archaeologist, are suggestive of Minoan, Mycenaen, Syrian, Hittite and other influences. But, even where they are conclusive, they are episodic and incomplete. The records of antiquity, whether inscribed on ceramic, mosaic or funerary objects, confirm the Hellenic character of the island from that time forward. <br /><br />One says Hellenic rather than Helladic, because Cyprus could not concern itself directly or consistently with the happenings on what we might now call the Greek mainland. A certain ‘Greekness’ infused the island all the same – the cult of Aphrodite had its headquarters in Cyprus (as well as its links to the Astarte cult in the Near East) and the Cypriot poet Stasinos is claimed as the son-in-law of Homer. Since it was the judgement of Paris which precipitated the Trojan war, it can fairly be said that Cypriot mythology is indissoluble from the Greek. These things may not seem to bear very heavily on the twentieth century and its less glamorous feuds, but the shaping of a national consciousness depends on continuity, and the Cypriot line of descent, passionately affirmed up to the present, can be attested by disinterested research. Although it served in many ways as a Levantine melting-pot and entrepot, although Phoenician influence is marked, and although the Cypriot dialect is distinctive even to this day, the Greek stamp was set on the island when recorded history began. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />A glance at the map shows the tempting and vulnerable position of Cyprus. In the remaining years before Christ it was counted as a part of the empire of Alexander, the Hellenistic state of Egypt Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Roman Empire. Under that empire it was for some time counted as a province of Syria. In the interstices of these dynastic and imperial shifts, in which it was treated as a chattel, Cyprus managed on more than one occasion to generate the leadership and energy needed for revolt. It took part in the Ionian rebellion against Persia, but was so severely punished for its impudence that it found itself contributing ships to the Persian fleet at the later battle of Salamis. Under King Evagoras there was a breathing space in which temporary unity among the Cypriot city kingdoms was the unstable guarantee of independence. The slaying of Evagoras, the return of the Persian satraps, the triumph of Alexander and the rapid posthumous deliquescence of his empire, all robbed the Cypriots of the ability to be masters in their own house. There is a certain apposite irony in the fact that the most famous Cypriot of antiquity, Zeno of Kition, was born in this period. His foundation of the Stoic school of philosophy must have seemed the only fitting world view. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />As recently as the nineteenth century, Cyprus was considered as a possible national home for the Jews (Theodor Herzl bargained earnestly for it with the British cabinet) and as a part of Greater Syria (the emblem of the Syrian ‘National Socialist’ party makes Cyprus the star in its crescent). Cyprus was also, briefly but importantly, one of the last staging posts of the British Empire and was described by a minister of the British crown, as late as 1954, as a colony which could ‘never’ expect its independence. So it is scarcely irrelevant, in considering the modern Cypriot case, to keep in mind how deeply rooted is its history of subordination. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Two critical points emerge from the later section of that past. First, Cyprus was the only part of Europe to be a part of a modern European empire. It was held as a colony, not so much for its own sake as to guarantee other colonial dispensations in Egypt, Palestine and India. But it was also governed as a colony itself. This aspect of British policy has been insufficiently stressed – it was anomalous from the beginning, but after 1945 it became simply absurd. The continuation of such a misguided and reactionary programme necessitated a second policy, no less calamitous. Turkey, whose undistinguished stewardship of the island (1571-1878) had been terminated by Britain in the first place, had to be encouraged to view Cyprus as a lost possession. There was justice in this only to the extent that the Turkish Sultan had been somewhat cheated by Disraeli in the first instance. (Gladstone described the 1878 Cyprus Convention [which embodied spurious guarantees for the Sultan against Tsarist oppression] as ‘an act of duplicity not surpassed and rarely equalled in the annals of nations’). But the Anglo-Turkish entente, which was to emerge during the 1950s, was in reality a double negative; a manoeuvre between two countries both of which had used the island without troubling to gain the consent of its inhabitants. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This book is not a history of Cyprus. It is an attempt to explain the forces which brought about the current disastrous situation there. The easiest way in which to do this is to examine the island – the anvil – from three points of view: the Greek, the Turkish and the Anglo-American. The perspective in which both sides now view the problem will then become clearer, as I hope will the context in which ancient rivalries have been exploited for much more modern purposes. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><u>Cyprus and Enosis</u> <br />To most people, the fact that islands like Crete and Rhodes are Greek is a fact almost of nature. It is often forgotten that the emergence of modern Greece has been a long, costly and bloody process. The method of nation-building has a name – enosis. As the Greek word for ‘union’, it is most famous as the slogan under which the Greek Cypriots fought the British occupier. But it has a longer history. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />After the Turkish Sultan acknowledged Greek independence in 1830, which it took him nine years of exceedingly cruel and savage fighting to do, the emergent kingdom consisted only of central Greece and the Peloponnese and Cycladic islands. The Treaties of Adrianople and London left Thessaly, Attica, parts of Crete, the Ionian islands, all of Macedonia and Thrace and Samos and the Dodecanese out of account or, as Greek nationalists put it, ‘unredeemed’. Cyprus was an unimaginable distance away, although it had supported the 1821 Greek revolution with money and volunteers and although the Turkish authorities had, by way of example, hanged the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of the island in public. (His two surviving nephews escaped the island and became lieutenant-generals in the Greek war of independence.) Not all of the remaining Greek-speaking territories, however, were under Ottoman control. The Ionian islands had been British-ruled since 1815, and in 1858 William Ewart Gladstone visited them and recommended they be ceded, along with their devotedly Hellenic inhabitants, to Greece. Most of Thessaly became Greek in 1881. Crete, after a battle which deserves the overworked designation ‘epic’, managed to remove the Turks in 1898 and finally became part of Greece in 1913 as a result of Turkish and Bulgarian defeats in the Balkan wars, which brought much of Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace under Greek control. In the meantime, Italy seized Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1912. They were not to accomplish enosis until after the Second World War, and then only because Turkey had been compromised by her wartime neutrality, while Greece had sacrificed heavily for the Allied cause.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> In this gradual, painful process of accretion, Cyprus was excluded. Turkey, Britain and Greece had interests there, though the Greek interest was emotional rather than strategic. As Britain had its Philhellenes, so Greece had its Anglophiles. The British gift of the Ionian islands was considered noble and altruistic, while its later stewardship over Cyprus was thought preferable to Turkish suzerainty and – on the available precedents – a likely prelude to eventual enosis. This helps to explain why it took the Greek Cypriots so long to revolt against British colonial rule.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> There were, in point of fact, three separate and well documented occasions on which the British flirted with the enosis idea. The first, and in Cypriot memory the most indelible, was in 1907. Winston Churchill visited the island as Colonial Secretary and received the customary delegation beseeching union with Greece. He responded: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">‘I think it only natural that the Cypriot people, who are of Greek descent, should regard their incorporation with what may be called their mother country as an ideal to be earnestly, devoutly and fervently cherished. Such a feeling is an example of the patriotic devotion which so nobly characterizes the Greek nation… I say that the views which have been put forward are views which His Majesty’s Government do not refuse to regard with respect.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />This pregnant observation was more widely quoted (by Greeks) than its codicil, which reads, ‘The opinion held by the Muslim population of the island, that the British occupation of Cyprus should not lead to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire… is one which His Majesty’s Government are equally bound to regard with respect.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> ‘Equally bound.’ This was not the last time that the Cypriot majority was to be told that some grand prior commitment impeded its right (inalienable, of course, in principle) to self-determination. Seven years later, the British and Ottoman empires were at war, and nobody sought with greater energy ‘the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire’ than Winston Churchill. In pursuit of that objective the British cabinet, in the person of Sir Edward Grey, offered Cyprus to Greece on 16 October 1915. If the Greek government of the day had not been headed by a timorous and rather pro-German monarch in the shape of King Constantine I – who was married to the sister of the Kaiser – the offer (which involved a Greek pledge to help Serbia as its quid pro quo) might well have been accepted. By the time that the republican Eleftherios Venizelos had become Prime Minisiter in 1917, Greece was already committed to the Allies in any case and the offer, now otiose, was not repeated. But the Cypriots could hardly be blamed for construing it as an implicit admission that their claims were justifiable, if not justified. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Once Turkey had been defeated (and while Greece was distracted elsewhere by its disastrous and opportunistic Asia Minor campaign of 1919-22) British rule on the island reverted to a routine of classic colonial stupor. A book published in 1918 by Captain C.W.J. Orr and entitled <i>Cyprus under British Rule </i>gives an impression of dull-witted administration that is undoubtedly harsher than its gallant and decent author can have intended.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The most obvious injustice imposed on Cyprus was the annual payment of the Tribute; a large sum exacted by the British Treasury in order to pay the debts of the Sultan of Turkey under the provisions of the 1878 Cyprus Convention. It could be doubted, as Captain Orr politely put it:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Whether the British government has been justified in making the payment due to the Porte under the Cyprus Convention a charge on the Cyprus revenues, or whether, after assuming by treaty with Turkey the responsibility for administering the island – <i>an arrangement to which the inhabitants of Cyprus were in no way a party</i> – there was any justification for the British government making this payment a charge on the island revenues.’[italics mine] </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The Tribute, which was not paid during British hostilities with Turkey during the First World War, was actually reimposed in 1923, on the preposterous grounds that Cyprus, as a successor of the Ottoman Empire, had to shoulder her share of the Ottoman debt. Thus, while new nations were being conceived and created at Versailles, Cyprus remained a possession as it had done for centuries past. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">The British are proud of their record of varying unwanted domination with enlightened government. In the person of Sir Ronald Storrs, Governor of Cyprus between 1926 and 1932, this variation is manifest in its most irritating form. Sir Ronald’s memoir, <i>Orientations</i>, which records his friendship with Lawrence of Arabia, and other demonstrations of his breadth of mind, contains the following luminous sentence: ‘The Greekness of the Cypriots is, in my opinion, indisputable. A man is of the race which he passionately feels himself to be.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Sir Ronald did, in fact, secure the abolition of the Tribute, which was replaced by a levy on Cyprus towards the cost of imperial defence. But when, in 1931, large-scale pro-enosis agitation broke out on the island, all ideas of enlightenment and tolerance were abandoned. The display of the Greek flag was forbidden. All political parties were banned. Ten important communal leaders, including the Bishops of Kition and Kyrenia, were deported from the island for life. Two thousand Cypriots were jailed. A huge collective fine was imposed to pay for damage done by the rioters, which included the burning of Government House. The press was censored even more severely than before. In fact, all the dreary arsenal of colonial rule was deployed. At the time, Greece was in a politically exhausted condition and although there were protests and, from Venizelos, a prophetic suggestion that Britain grant partial independence rather than enosis, it was felt that all dissent from that quarter could be ignored. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />There were to be two further occasions on which the British authorities gave implicit recognition to the validity of the enosis demand. In late 1940, when Britain and Greece were the only two countries in Europe still resisting Fascism, and while the Greek army was still triumphantly repulsing Mussolini’s invasion, there was a renewed enthusiasm among Cypriots for the Hellenic cause. Sir Michael Palairet, the British ambassador in Athens, recommended that the island be ceded to Greece on simple grounds of cementing Anglo-Greek solidarity. He was seconded in this by Edward Warner and Pierson Dixon of the Middle East department of the Foreign Office. These men proposed that Cyprus be swapped for permanent naval facilities at Suda Bay in Crete. Pro-Turkish officials in the Foreign Office overruled the idea. They did so in the vain hope that a postponement of Greek claims in Cyprus and the Dodecanese islands would help bring about a pro-British policy in Turkey. Turkey got its way here, as it had in Syria before the war and for the same reasons. But it remained, until February 1945, obstinately neutral and often neutral with a pro-Axis inclination. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Later in the war, after the capture of Athens and the invasion of Crete by overwhelming Nazi forces, the Greek government in exile inquired tactfully whether it might be permitted to station itself in Cyprus. Here, it said, was the only free part of the Greek world. Would it not be appropriate to raise the flag of resistance there, rather than in Cairo where the British had suggested they base themselves? The reply contained all the imagination of the colonial bureaucrat. Such a step, the Greeks were informed, might offend His Majesty’s loyal Muslim subjects. Yet again, the interests of eighteen per cent of the Cypriot population were given precedence over those of the majority (though neither faction was actually subjected to the bother of being asked its opinion). The Greek government duly took up its exile in Egypt, while the British did have the grace to lift the ban on the Greek flag in Cyprus. In fact, they issued recruiting posters coloured in the Hellenic blue and white, urging young Cypriots to volunteer and ‘Fight for Greece and Freedom’. Many thousands did so, forming a Cyprus Regiment in the British army. But the volunteers did not forget that Sir Michael Palairet had, only two years before, been instructed to discourage their enlistment in the army of Greece. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />August 1945 was the last occasion on which the enosis card was played in purely British circles. The Greek Regent, Archbishop Damaskinos, was to pay a visit to London in September with his private secretary, the poet George Seferis. Sir Reginald Leeper, the British ambassador in Athens, devised a plan for making the visit coincide with an announcement of enosis. He was assisted in this by Philip Noel-Baker and by C.M. Woodhouse, the distinguished British Conservative politician and historian who had acted as liaison officer with the wartime Greek resistance. In a private but not confidential letter to me, C.M. Woodhouse describes how the project was defeated: ‘[Foreign Secretary Ernest] Bevin and the Foreign Office were favourably disposed, but the Colonial Office and the Chiefs of Staff strongly objected. I need not list their reasons, which are obvious. Bevin had been in office only for a few weeks, and he did not feel confident enough to force it through the cabinet. So that was that.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Thus Britain missed the chance to requite Greece for its extraordinary wartime valour. The chance to meet Cypriot demands for self-determination at the same time was, obviously, missed as well. From then on, Cyprus was ruled to be a matter in which Greece had no right even to be consulted. In late 1953, after Greece had begun to recover from the racking civil war, Field Marshal Papagos, the Prime Minister, met Sir Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, and again raised the question. Eden refused even to discuss it. The Greek Foreign Minister, Stephan Stephanopoulos, told Robert Stephens of the <i>Observer</i> that, ‘Papagos came back and said to me in an outraged voice: “He told me never – not even <i>we shall see!”’</i></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Greece resolved to raise the matter at the United Nations, but by that time the Greek Cypriots had decided to take a hand in making their own future. Preparations were already being made for a guerrilla war of liberation, which was launched with a fusillade of bomb explosions all over Cyprus on 1 April 1955. The explosions were the work of <i>Ethniki Organosis Kypriou Agoniston</i>: the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, who became famous under the acronym of EOKA. With that fusillade, some would say that the modern history of Cyprus had begun. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />None of this is to argue that enosis is today a good solution for Cyprus, or even that it would have been the best (or only) solution in the past. That is still a matter of heated dispute among the Greek Cypriots, as it was in April 1955. The leader of the enosis campaign that year was the notorious Colonel, later General George Grivas, who features a good deal in this chronicle. He and his policy were opposed by the Communist leadership on the island – which made Cyprus unique in fighting an anti-colonial battle in part against the Communist Party. Later, Cypriot Marxists were to debate, and some of them were to regret, that decision. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The official position of the Republic of Cyprus today is that enosis is neither feasible nor desirable. None the less, the Greek heritage of the island is undeniable. And it is important to realize that, historically, enosis was not the romantic and irrational idea it has so often been made out to be. As a national aspiration, however simplistic, it conformed perfectly well with the emergence of modern Greece and with the desire of Greek Cypriots, who were a small force in themselves, to have an ally in their attempt to escape from the British Empire. It may have been unrealistic, and its exponents were often fanatics and chauvinists. In the end, a foolhardy pursuit of enosis, encouraged by forces outside Cyprus who had quite other plans for the island and its people, brought about the catastrophe of 1974. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Enosis had many ambiguities and ironies. The greatest one was the reaction it created among the Cypriot Turks, and the opportunity it gave to that other great factor in the Cyprus equation – Turkey itself. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><u>Cyprus and <i>Taksim</i></u><i> </i><br />There are two decisive facts about the eighteen per cent of Cypriots who are not Greek. The first is that they are a minority. The second is that they are Turkish. This statement of the obvious may be more illuminating than it seems at first glance. As a minority with a different language, religion and tradition, Turkish Cypriots should obviously command the sympathy bestowed on any comparable group. A country can often be judged by how it treats its minority citizens and many modern and ‘advanced’ societies fail to pass this elementary test with any credit. The experience of European Fascism has imbued civilized people with a special sensitivity to the position of racial and national minorities, and a special horror at their persecution or subjugation. There is no reason why the government of the Republic of Cyprus should be exempt from this standard, and the Turkish Cypriot leadership has always sought strenuously to portray Archbishop Makarios and his supporters and successors as bent on the liquidation of their people. The behaviour of General Grivas and Nicos Sampson, the two best-known Greek Cypriot ultra-Rightists, has made this claim both more and less credible. Archbishop Makarios himself told Orianna Fallaci in an interview in 1976 that he had been visited, during the 1964 intercommunal fighting, by Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannides, accompanied by Nicos Sampson, who had been a leading member of EOKA. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘He wanted to see me secretly to suggest to me a project that would have settled forever the problem of Cyprus. He entered, he kissed my hand very respectfully, then, “Your Beatitude, here is my project. To attack the Turkish Cypriots suddenly, everywhere on the island, and eliminate them to the last one.” I was astonished, speechless. Then I told him that I could not agree with him; I told him that I couldn’t even conceive of killing so many innocents. He [Ioannides] kissed my hand again and went away very angry.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Nine years later, Dr Henry Kissinger would recognize Ioannides as the ruler of Greece. And, eight months after that, while making noises about the need to improve the position of the Turkish Cypriots, Kissinger would be the only outside leader to flirt with the idea of recognizing Nicos Sampson as President of Cyprus. But that is not the point here. Archbishop Makarios, who confirmed the story to me in an interview in 1977, was saying in effect that, if you remember what these two men did to their fellow-Greeks, their attitude to the Turks can be imagined. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />All this needs to be said. I have visited the mass graves of Alloa and Maratha and Sandallaris, three little villages just outside the city of Famagusta, where hundreds of Turkish Cypriot civilian corpses were dug up like refuse in the ghastly summer of 1974. And I have toured the burned-out ruin of Omorphita, a Turkish Cypriot suburb that was devastated by Nicos Sampson’s gang of terrorists in 1963. I have no difficulty in sympathizing with Turkish Cypriot fears, and I do not believe that they have been manufactured out of thin air. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />So, why is it relevant that this minority is Turkish? It is relevant because Cyprus used to be ruled by Turkey, because Turkey never abandoned its claim on Cyprus as a possession, because Cyprus is only forty miles from Turkey and because the Turkish leadership, in Cyprus and in Ankara, has always opposed majority rule in the island. It is relevant because, until 1960, it was the Greek Cypriots who were the oppressed minority, disenfranchised and coerced by the vastly superior powers of Britain and Turkey combined. In the geographical setting of the eastern Mediterranean, the Greek Cypriots remain a tiny minority when compared to their Anatolian neighbour, and the Turkish Cypriots appear as a geographically separated section of a majority group. It is this ‘double minority’ aspect of the problem which, as in the cases of Northern Ireland and Palestine, makes Cyprus such a thorny and difficult case. When both sides feel themselves to be isolated and outnumbered in the face of the other, it is not difficult for racialists and irredentists to gain influence among them. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The Turkish Cypriots may have presented themselves to the outside world as another case of an endangered minority. But in Cypriot politics they have always been admirably candid. Here, for example, is the editorial written by their leader, Dr Fazil Kuchuk, in his newspaper <i>Halkin Sesi</i> (Voice of the People) on 17 August 1954 – before the Greek Cypriot revolt against Britain had even begun: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Cyprus, let it be remembered, was, until 1878, a part of the Turkish Empire. In 1878 the island was ceded to Great Britain as a security against Russian threat. Great Britain took over Cyprus on the undertaking that she would hand her back to Turkey as soon as this threat was abated or receded. From 1878 until 1914 Great Britain ruled the island on trust for Turkey, but when in 1914 Turkey joined forces with the Axis, Cyprus was annexed to the British Empire. There is no need to look into the legality or the legal effects of this annexation. Let us grant that it was legal and correct from all points of view. Nevertheless, having regard to the close association of the two countries (Britain-Turkey), the ever-increasing Soviet threat to humanity and world security and the moral side of the question, it should be abundantly clear to all intelligent men that Great Britain cannot consider the handing over of the government to any nation except with the full consent and approval of its former owner – Turkey. Turkey was the undisputed owner of this “house” just before Great Britain took it over on trust. If world events have ended that “trust” during 1914-18, subsequent world events have certainly revived it from all moral points of view. The position of world affairs today as far as they concern Great Britain and Turkey are the same as they were in 1878. There is the Russian pressure on Turkey coupled with the bonds of friendship and alliance between Turkey and Britain. The cause of ceding Cyprus to Britain is still continuing; the time to consider handing back Cyprus to its former owner therefore may not have arrived. But if Great Britain is going to consider this enosis question at all or is going to quit the island she has a legal as well as a moral duty to call Turkey and hand Cyprus back to Turkey, and ask the Turkish government to deal with the enosis problem which the tolerant and ill-advised British administration has fostered in the island. From a legal as well as moral point of view, Turkey, as the initial owner of the island just before the British occupation, has a first option to Cyprus. The matter does not end there. From a worldwide political point of view as well as from geographical and strategical points of view Cyprus must be handed to Turkey if Great Britain is going to quit. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">‘This has been the attitude of the Turkish government. They have never taken the Greek campaign for enosis seriously because they believed that Great Britain’s decision not to quit the island was an unassailable answer to the whole question; but they have made it emphatically clear that if Great Britain ever considers leaving Cyprus then the Turkish government has a great interest in the ownership of the island. The Turkish youth in Turkey, in fact, has grown up with the idea that as soon as Great Britain leaves the island the island will automatically be taken over by the Turks. It must be clear to all concerned that Turkey cannot tolerate seeing one of her former islands, lying as it does only forty miles from her shores, handed over to a weak neighbour thousands [sic] of miles away, which is politically as well as financially on the verge of bankruptcy.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Dr Kuchuk later became the first Vice President of the Republic of Cyprus, but there is no reason to think that he ever altered his opinion since he took the same line, in conversation, until his death in January 1984. His 1954 editorial contains all the essentials of the Turkish position – a colonial attitude to the Greeks and a purely strategic attitude to the island. A few days after he penned the lines quoted above, Kuchuk sent a telegram to the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, saying that his community, ‘vehemently reject enosis, self-government or a plebiscite’. This fairly exhaustive repudiation was music to the ears of the British colonial authorities, who took the same line. The Greek Cypriot majority were left with no alternative to the status quo except revolt. So, while every other country in the region – Egypt, Lebanon, Syria – was experiencing the pangs of anti- or post-colonialism, Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot leadership alone supported the status quo. Turkey did so by joining the doomed Baghdad Pact; its proxies in Cyprus by stepping forward to assist a British occupation that, after the Suez disaster of 1956, became obsolete as well as unjustifiable. Rauf Denktash, who was to succeed Dr Kuchuk as Turkish Cypriot leader, and who now heads the Turkish protectorate in northern Cyprus, conceded in his book <i>Five Minutes to Midnight</i> that he and his associates had ‘supported colonial rule because we were unaware of changing world conditions’. But, even if Mr Denktash meant to profit from his mistake by admitting this, the damage had already been done. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Turkey as a country remained quiet about Cyprus after being on the losing side in the First World War. Kemal Ataturk was able to be generous towards Greece after inflicting such condign punishment on it in Asia Minor in 1922. For a brief period, he and Eleftherios Venizelos almost agreed to drop rival nationalist claims. But, in retrospect, Turkey’s attitude to Cyprus seems to have been one of a resentment awaiting an opportunity. The resentment was supplied by the British, who under Disraeli had cheated the Sultan out of the island in the first place. The opportunity was also supplied by the British, who found that they needed Turkish intervention as a counter weight to Greek demands some eighty years later. <br />It is an article of faith among Greek Cypriots that the British used ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics and were careless of their long term communal effects. This widely held view, for which there was a good deal of evidence in any case, received an important confirmation as recently as 1982. C.M. Woodhouse wrote in his memoirs Something Ventured about the political situation on the island in 1954. It should be borne in mind that Woodhouse was an active and successful intelligence agent in the 1950s, and a man well connected in the British Conservative aristocracy. Doing down his own side would not come naturally to him. He wrote:</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">‘Harold Macmillan [then Foreign Secretary] was urging us to stir up the Turks in order to neutralize the Greek agitation. I wrote a minute in opposition to this tactic. I also asked the Prime Minister’s private secretary if I could see Churchill on the subject, but he absolutely refused even to pass on the suggestion, which he clearly regarded as impertinent. I did not think it right to make use of the family connection to see him privately.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In a letter to me dated 10 September 1983, Woodhouse wrote: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />“The minute of mine to which you refer was simply a manuscript note appended, with others, to the text of Macmillan’s paper. It would therefore only be publicly available if and when Macmillan’s own paper becomes available, which would not be until next year or the year after under the thirty-year rule. But even then departments have, as you know, the right to withhold particularly sensitive papers from the open files in the Public Record Office, and in this case I imagine they would do so.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In an interview with the Turkish daily paper <i>Tercuman</i>, published on 30 July 1983, former Turkish Foreign Minister Melih Esenbel recalled the same period and confirmed that his government saw the British strategy as one leading to taksim – the Turkish word for partition. Fie said that after Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister in 1956 he held secret talks with his Turkish counterpart Adnan Menderes. The subject of the talks was a ploy, made by the British Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, to invoke partition as a foil against enosis. Esenbel told his interviewer: </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">‘These secret talks were put in minutes. During these talks Macmillan gave some kind of assurance to our Prime Minister. According to this, the period of autonomy was reduced to seven years and the Turkish and Greek Cypriot representatives were to be on the Governor’s administration. But to placate Greece they were given ‘advisory’ duty. Before, it was described as “co-operation”. And when Macmillan also gave his assurance that after these seven years the right of self-determination will be used within the framework of Lennox-Boyd’s statement and thus the road to taksim too would be opened, we assumed a positive stance.’</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />As in the case of the Suez invasion, Britain was posing as the mediator between two warring parties in order to advance the cause of one of them. As in the case of Suez, it takes time for these things to come out. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />It has often been debated whether Britain ‘stirred up the Turks’ or whether the Turks would, in any case, have mobilized themselves against Greek Cypriot nationalism. The distinction blurs under examination. What can be shown is that Britain, which refused to discuss the future of Cyprus with Greece because it was a strictly ‘internal matter’, consciously and without any such scruples drew mainland Turkey into Cypriot affairs. She also made every effort, as she had done in India and Palestine, to employ intercommunal differences as a means of control. Turkey’s hesitation and isolation, the products of two unsatisfactory world-war performances, were definitively over come by this seduction. It will, I hope, not be thought too schematic to list some examples which illustrate what Harold Macmillan meant by his sordid but clever stratagem. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />1. In 1955, Dr Fazil Kuchuk was allowed to organize, with the declared help of a Turkish national named Hikmet Bil, a political party with the striking name of the ‘Cyprus is Turkish Party’. This was at a time when all Greek parties were banned, and Britain claimed exclusive sovereignty over the island. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />2. Later in the same year, at the London conference on Cyprus sponsored by Harold Macmillan, Fatin Zorlu, the Turkish Foreign Minister, insisted that if the British left the island should revert to Turkey. In his memoir, <i>Full Circle</i>, Sir Anthony Eden wrote of this demand that, ‘It was as well, as I wrote in a telegram at the time, that they [the Turks] should speak out.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />3. At the same conference, Harold Macmillan publicly assured Zorlu that, ‘We do not accept the principle of self-determination as one of universal application.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />4. In September 1955, at the close of the London conference, there occurred a tremendous anti-Greek pogrom in the Turkish cities of Istanbul and Izmir. The riots ‘followed’ a dynamite explosion in the Turkish consulate at Salonika, but erupted almost at the exact moment it took place. There was a definite pattern of organization to the riots, noticed at the time by prominent British conservative journalists such as Noel Barber of the <i>Daily Mail</i>. Armenians and Jews were attacked as well as Greeks, and some $300 million-worth of damage done. The Greek presence in Istanbul has never been restored. At their trial in Ankara in 1960, the then Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his Foreign Secretary Fatin Zorlu were accused and convicted of having fomented the riots in order to impress the British government with Turkish intransigence. No official British comment on the events was made at the time, though Greek Cypriots noticed that their demonstrations were put down with British armed force whether they were peaceful or not. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />5. Though the Turkish Cypriot terrorist group Volkan was founded in 1955, and carried out many lethal attacks on civilians, very few members of it were ever tried, let alone punished by the British crown. In contrast, numerous supporters of the Greek Cypriot EOKA were hanged and hundreds more imprisoned. The British trained an exclusively Turkish mobile reserve to combat EOKA and employed many more Turks in the police and auxiliary forces. Members of these echelons were involved with Volkan, which later changed its name to the Turkish Defence Force or TMT. In a celebrated case in 1958, a Turk, Sergeant Tuna, was convicted of possessing bombs and ammunition by a British court. The good sergeant, unlike his Greek counterparts, was allowed bail in his own recognizance and left immediately for Turkey. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />6. In 1956 Alan Lennox-Boyd told the House of Commons that a Greek Cypriot demand for union with Greece would be met by a British-sponsored plebiscite for Turks only. If the Turkish Cypriots voted to join Turkey, the island would be partitioned. Thus, by demanding the whole of Cyprus, the Turks could be assured of getting at least half of it. Whereupon Dr Kuchuk demanded that the island be divided along the 35th parallel. The British interest in helping to stimulate this demand is too obvious to need underlining. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘Divide and Rule’, of course, has come to translate historically as ‘Divide and Quit’. The British say that leaving (or partition) is the last thing they will do – and then it is the last thing they do. Subsequent quarrels among the inhabitants can be taken as evidence that they just do not get on without British guidance. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Imperial favouritism towards the Turks did not ‘work’, in the sense that it did not succeed in crushing the Greek Cypriot rebellion. Nor did any policy succeed in this impossible objective. But it did succeed in damaging intercommunal relations very severely and perhaps permanently. It is important to remember that before 1955 there was no history of internal viciousness in Cyprus. The island had been aptly described as ‘an ethnographical fruit cake in which the Greek and Turkish currants were mixed up in every town and village and almost in every street’. In spite of <i>political</i> clashes over the future of Cyprus, the Cypriots never had to endure the bitter, venomous, protracted hostility that was the experience of religious and national struggle in Crete and other islands warring on the Ottomans. Even during the First World War, with Britain and Greece on one side and Turkey on the other, there was no analogous hostility between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. It was only when Turks put on British uniforms to oppose a popular movement that they were shot at by Greeks. And even after that, it took some time before people resorted to the final obscenity of killing people just because they were Greek or Turkish. In his book <i>Years of Upheaval</i>, which attempts to postpone discussion of his own role in the Cyprus catastrophe to a later volume, Dr Henry Kissinger gives a misleading and self-serving account of the historical background. He speaks of ‘primeval hatred of Greeks and Turks’, ‘atavistic bitternesses’ and ‘a lethal cocktail’. In doing so, he perpetuates a fairly widespread and common place view of the island’s troubles; a fatalistic view of the incompatibility of the communities that insults both of them. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Sir Hugh Foot, now Lord Caradon, the last British Governor of the island and the one least inclined to play the bully or the manipulator, still gives the game away in some respects in his memoirs. In discussing the 1958 plan for limited self-government, which represented a retreat from the earlier policy of British cum Turkish colonial rule, he writes, in <i>A Start in Freedom:</i> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />‘I knew of course that the Turks, <i>who were to be approached first</i>, would strongly dislike some aspects of the policy, and I wrote to the Deputy Governor on 7 January from London to say that everything would depend on whether the British government would stand up to the Turks. But I thought that our absolute assurance that no final decision on the future of the island would be made without Turkish approval might outweigh their objections. <i>They were in fact being given an absolute veto on long-term policy</i>.’ [italics mine] </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Having thus confirmed Melih Esenbel’s account above, Sir Hugh adds, with the sort of British fair-mindedness that tends to drive one wild: ‘Much more difficult to persuade Archbishop Makarios and the Greeks, it seemed to me. But the return of the Archbishop to Cyprus, the ending of the Emergency, the promise of self-government might be sufficient to sway them.’ </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Archbishop Makarios, who had emerged as the spiritual and temporal leader of the Greek Cypriots, was then in Athens, having been deported and held without trial in the Seychelles islands before his release. In other words, if the Greek Cypriot majority would accept a Turkish ‘absolute veto on long-term policy’, they could be allowed the return of their chosen religious and political leader, the end of Emergency rule by foreign soldiers (though not the departure of those soldiers) and ‘the promise of self-government’ – which meanwhile looked rather qualified by the Turkish ‘veto’. But Britain held the force majeure, and it was made clear to the Cypriots that they could choose only between this and a worse offer.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />It took a while for the Turkish leadership to realize the bargain it was getting. Sir Hugh records the riots instigated from Ankara and the rough diplomacy exerted from the same quarter, noting that, ‘Turkish intransigence was such that no conceivable proposal we put to them would be acceptable – short of partition.’ But the British had failed to find any Greek Cypriot collaborators worthy of the name, and had been impressed by Aneurin Bevan’s question in the House of Commons – did they want a base in Cyprus or Cyprus as a base? Having opted for the former, and having lost their hegemony in Iraq, Jordan and Egypt, they were anxious to be off. The Turks were persuaded to settle on the basis of what became known as the London-Zurich agreements. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />The 1960 Cyprus constitution (based on those agreements), and the associated Treaty of Guarantee, were unique in two major respects. The agreements were devised by three conservative governments in London, Athens and Ankara – none of them destined to last for very long. The Cypriots were simply presented with the results and told brusquely that if they did not accept they would be faced with partition. Actually, the constitution itself, whether by accident or design, contained the seeds of partition within it. It continued the old Ottoman and British colonial practice of creating separate categories of citizenship – now designated as Greek and Turkish instead of the traditional ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’. Separate municipalities were provided for. Greek and Turkish voters were to have separate elections. Civil service and police posts were to be shared in a ratio of seventy per cent Greek and thirty per cent Turkish; almost doubling the Turkish presence. In the army, in fact, the ratio was fixed at sixty-forty. The seventy-thirty ratio also obtained in the House of Representatives and the cabinet. The Vice Presidency of the Republic, reserved for a Turk, carried with it the right of veto. Turkey also won the right to station troops on the island, as did Greece. The Treaty of Guarantee gave the governments in Ankara, Athens and London the right to intervene in Cyprus either together or (in a clause inserted at the instigation of Turkey) alone. A ‘separate majority’ provision on matters concerning tax and electoral law gave the Turkish Cypriot minority an additional right of veto in the House of Representatives. In that House, separate majorities of Greek and Turkish members were required to modify fiscal, electoral or municipal laws. This meant that a bill supported by thirty-five Greek and seven Turkish members could in theory be defeated by eight Turkish votes. Those of us who today look kindly on measures of ‘affirmative action’ and ‘positive discrimination’ for minorities do so in order to compensate for past injustices. It is not obvious for which past discriminations the Turkish minority was being compensated. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Meanwhile, ninety-nine square miles of Cyprus were removed from the territory of the Republic and placed under British authority. To this day, the Cypriot government has no jurisdiction over these bases or the uses to which they are put. No other democratic country has ever imposed or accepted conditions of that kind. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cyprus, then, got a form of independence long overdue. But it was compelled to concede more than one-third of its legislative and administrative machinery, not to a minority, but to an eighteen per cent minority which, supported by a foreign country, had opposed that independence all along. It was an unpromising start. During the London negotiations, Archbishop Makarios raised thirteen objections to the agreements and presented them to the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. Makarios was told to ‘take it or leave it’, with the clear implication that ‘leaving it’ meant partition and his own destruction. He took it. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Many, if not most, commentators on the unhappy years that lay ahead have stressed Greek and Turkish atavism, sectarianism, intransigence and intolerance. The word ‘Byzantine’ gets hurled around a good deal. Such observations fail to account for two things. One is that, even at the hour of their independence, the Cypriots were treated as objects rather than subjects in their own country and their own deliberations. The second is that a legacy of intercommunal tension and distrust had been created by outside powers, and then built into an imposed constitution. Most culpable in this were the British, whose crass and occasionally capricious policy had led to the bloodshed and discord in the first place. There are enough villains in the story without inventing new ones; this was not an occasion when Anglo-Saxon phlegm and fair-mindedness were seen to their best advantage. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Cyprus got its independence unnecessarily late, and under very trying and onerous conditions. Archbishop Makarios was right when he said that the agreement had created a state but not a nation. The fragility of its institutions and its alliances, internal and external, might have been overcome with time. But time, for various reasons, was something that Cyprus was not to be allowed. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Read all parts of the serialisation here:<br /><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a><br /><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences</a></span></span></span></span><u><br /></u></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span><p></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-89708464895555218612021-11-19T11:41:00.011+00:002022-01-17T23:21:15.269+00:003. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction<p></p><div><p></p></div><p></p><p></p><div><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s320/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" /></a> <b></b></p><div><b><b><i> </i></b></b></div><div><b><b><i>In the Introduction to his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens describes what characterised Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, which was the desire to carve out a piece of Cyprus devoid of its majority Greek population and any sign of its enduring civilisational presence. Such a dramatic change in the demography and culture of the island could only be achieved by overwhelming violence – murder, deportation, rape, pillage, colonisation. Later, in the Yugoslav wars this process became known as ethnic cleansing and its depredations – reminiscent of what Turkey did in Cyprus – was perhaps why Hitchens was such a determined opponent of the practices of Serbian and Croatian nationalism at the time. <br /></i></b></b></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div></b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: left;"><u style="font-family: inherit;">3. <i>Cyprus: Hostage to History</i>, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction.</u></div></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i> </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting (Milan Kundera).</i></div></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a sense in which all of us are prisoners of knowledge. Most people who think at all about the island of Cyprus will rely on two well-imprinted ideas of it. The first is that of an insular paradise; the birthplace of Aphrodite; the perfect beaches and mountains; the olive groves; the gentle people and the wine-dark sea. The second is that of a ‘problem’ too long on the international agenda; of an issue somehow incorrigible and insoluble but capable of indefinite relegation. In some accounts, the quaintness and the antiquity of the first impression reinforce the intractability of the second. Cyprus becomes a curiosity – melancholy perhaps, but tolerable to outsiders and lacking in urgency. Meanwhile, there is still the vineyard and the siesta; the cool interiors and the village raconteur to delight and distract the visitor. The Victorian Bishop Heber, writing of another island, gave us the fatuous stock phrase, ‘Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.’ In Cyprus, this duality was expressed most vividly by Lawrence Durrell in his beautiful but patronizing memoir <i>Bitter Lemons</i>. </span><br /></div></span></div></span></div><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a fashion, I envy those who can continue to see Cyprus in this way. But I am the captive of a certain limited knowledge of the place. The eastern Mediterranean affords few better evenings than the one provided by the dusk in Nicosia, the capital. The Pentadactylos mountains, so named for the five-knuckled and fist-like peak which distinguishes the range, turn from a deep purple to a stark black outline against the sun. To the newcomer, the sight is a stirring one. But to many of my friends, the mountains at that hour take on the look of a high and forbidding wall. Beyond the peaks are their old homes and villages, and the charm of the sunset is dissolved into an impression of claustrophobia. <br /><br />By day, if one takes the promenade down the busiest shopping street in town, there comes a point where the advertisements, the bars and the inducements simply run out. There is no point, for most people, in proceeding further. They retrace their steps, and find another turning with more promise. But if you walk the extra few hundred yards, you find yourself in one of the modern world’s political slums. A tangle of barbed wire, a zariba of cement-filled oil drums, a row of charred and abandoned shops and houses. Only the weeds and nettles justify the designation ‘Green Line’. This line, which in many places follows the old Venetian wall enclosing Nicosia, marks the furthest point of the Turkish advance in 1974. Soldiers in fatigues warn against the taking of photographs. The red crescent flag of Turkey confronts the blue and white of Greece and the green, yellow and white of Cyprus. Late at night, leaving a taverna, you can hear the Turkish soldiers shouting their bravado across the line. It is usually bluff, but nobody who remembers their arrival will ever quite learn to laugh it off. Continue to walk along the line, in daylight, and there are reminders at every turn. Here, almost concealed behind the Archbishopric, is the Museum of National Struggle. Entering, one finds the memorabilia of a five-year guerrilla war against the British crown – symbolized most acutely by the replica gallows and gibbet that made the United Kingdom famous in so many of her former possessions. A few streets away, on the road back to the city centre and so low down on the wall that you miss it if you are not looking, is set the memorial to Doros Loizou, one of the many Greek Cypriots murdered by the Greek junta in its effort to annex the island in 1974. Proceed in the same direction and you come eventually to the Ledra Palace Hotel, once counted among the most spacious and graceful in the Levant. Its battered but still splendid shape now houses the soldiers of the United Nations: Swedes, Quebecois, Finns, Austrians. A parched no man’s land, perhaps half a mile wide at this point, separates the two barricades. No Cypriot, Greek or Turkish, may cross this line. The Venetian wall bulges outwards near this spot and the Turkish flag, complete with armed Turkish guard, commands the roundabout where the national telephone exchange sits, and the road where the National Museum and the National Theatre lie. Drivers and pedestrians seem never to look up at the only Turks they are allowed to see. A desolate Armenian cemetery and a burned-out bookshop complete the picture. But all of these details, smudges on the Cypriot panorama, require a slight detour which nobody much cares to make. The roads which lead to them do not lead anywhere else. You do not have to see them, but I always do. <br /><br />Once having acquired these spectacles, enabling (or compelling) one to see both aspects of the island, it is impossible to take them off again. A visit to the marvellous mosaics of Paphos, which offer a pictorial history of the discovery of wine and a skilfully worked rendering of the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, is full of pitfalls. One has to recall the Turkish shells that fell on the mosaic floor and the heartrending labour involved in remaking the pattern so that newcomers would not see the difference. In the exquisite village of Peristerona, which boasts an ancient painted church and a fine but now locked and deserted mosque, there is an ugly litter of improvised new buildings. This is not a result of the lust for vulgar development that so disfigures the rest of the Mediterranean. It is the hastily erected shelter for refugees from nearby Greek villages. They have been evicted from their homes and orchards, but at midday or evening they can still see the outlines of their old dwellings against the sky, and there is some comfort, as well as some pain, in the proximity. The invisible but still palpable line of division runs here, too. There is no village or town, however far from that line, which does not pay an indemnity to it with improvised refugee housing, and with memories. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />It is in conversation with Cypriots themselves, however, that the even more serious wounds inflicted on Cyprus become apparent. The most casual inquiry – such as, ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Do you have a family?’ – can be enough to induce a torrent of grievance or of grief. Sometimes, depending on the nationality of the listener, the litany may be historic – usually beginning with the many broken promises of the British colonial administration. If, like myself, the listener actually is British, this recitation is accompanied by denials of any but warm feelings towards the other island race, and the denial is made good by the inflexible refusal to allow the foreigner to pay for his own drink. The largest overseas Cypriot community is in London, and most families have a relative there. But the relationship between the two countries, though friendly, has been one of disappointment. ‘Britain promised us… The British gave their word…’ – I can do it from memory now and, worse, I know that the complaint is substantially justified. <br />At least such discussion is political; and to that extent, detached and objective. The hard listening comes if your companions are from the Karpass peninsula, from Bellapaix, from Famagusta, from Lapithos, from Morphou or from Kyrenia. With eyes half closed they can tell you of their lost homes, their orchards, their farms and their animals. After ten years of expulsion and eviction it is dawning on even the most naive and trusting of them that this separation may be forever. Attachment to land and property, and sense of place, is very deep-rooted in Cyprus. The wrenching out of those roots has been unusually painful. A Cypriot may bid adieu to his old village and set off, as many have done, to seek prosperity in America, in England, in the Gulf or the Levant. But the village or the town remains his or hers, and is often reflected in the patronymic (Zodiates, Paphitis and so on). In the end, this says, there can be a homecoming. But there is a difference between being an exile and being a refugee, and this difference is sinking in. It is the estrangement of one-third of the island, the alienation of it in perpetuity by an invader, that is shocking and unbearable. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Some have even harsher stories to relate. I have heard women describe the rape inflicted by the Turkish army, and describe it as if it were yesterday. Virginity is still highly prized in Cyprus, and the loss of it before marriage, let alone the loss of it to an uncaring invading soldier, is a disaster beyond words or remedy. I have a vivid memory of watching the filmed interviews with rape victims which were accepted as part of the archive of evidence by members of the European Commission for Human Rights during their 1976 investigation. The young women had serious difficulty in looking into the camera, but they told their stories with a certain stoic resignation, as if they had nothing more to lose. The term they employed for the violation itself was the Greek word katestrepse in its passive verbal form – as in, ‘then he ruined me’ or ‘then they ruined me again’. Ever since, I have avoided that stale journalistic usage, ‘the rape of Cyprus’. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Worse than the nostalgia for home, or the shame of desecration, is the moment when Cypriots say that one of their own is ‘among the missing’. At this, a sort of pool of silence forms around the speaker. Just under two thousand Greek Cypriots are still unaccounted for since the 1974 events, and that is a horrifying number out of a total population of less than 650,000. Many of them, no doubt, perished in battle and were never found. Still others, we must assume, were mutilated beyond recognition or torn apart by scavenging animals. But the fact remains that many were photographed and identified while held prisoner by the Turkish army, and have never been seen again. I have traced one or two of these cases myself, and the trail goes cold some time after the shutter closed on that familiar, modern picture of the young men sitting in the sun, on the bare ground, hands behind their heads, under armed guard. The surviving relatives remain prisoners of that memory, of that photograph, for the rest of their lives. Even in an island less reverent about family ties, the length of the sentence would be unimaginably long. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />The injuries done to Cyprus are rendered more poignant (or, according to some Anglo-American sources, less so) by the fact that it is an outwardly modern and European society. Its efficiency, its canny use of tourist resources and its good communications give it a special standing in the Levant. Many battle-weary correspondents and businessmen employ it as a sort of recreational decompression-chamber after the exigencies of the Egyptian telephone system or the carnage of Beirut. It has a free press, a functioning party system, a simple visa requirement and a prosperous facade. It is not disfigured by any gross extremes of wealth or poverty, though there is a certain ostentation among the new-rich class of hotel owners and tourist operators. English is a lingua franca. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Yet the geography of the island has ensured that it cannot become a mere tourist and ‘offshore’ haven. If you take your skis up to the mountain resort of Troodos, you will not be able to avoid seeing the golf-ball-shaped monitoring station which sits on the top of Mount Olympus and sucks at the airwaves of the Middle East. If you drive from Nicosia to Paphos, or take the other direction and head for Ayia Napa or the Paralimni coast (just south of that strangest of sights, the deserted modern city of Famagusta guarded by Turkish troops), you will have to pass through the British base areas. They cover a total of ninety-nine square miles, under a remarkable treaty which the Cyprus government does not have the right to alter or terminate. From these bases, spy planes with British and American markings overfly the neighbouring countries. Within the purlieus of these ‘Sovereign Base Areas’, a mock-heroic attempt has been made to re-create the deadly atmosphere of Aldershot or Camberley. Rows of suburban married quarters are in evidence, ranged along streets named after Nelson and Drake and Montgomery. Sprinklers play on trimmed lawns. Polo and cricket and the Church of England are available. And a radio station brings the atmosphere of the English Sunday morning to Cyprus, with record requests, quiz shows and news of engagements and weddings. These chintzy reminders of the former colonial mastery are not much resented in themselves. Perhaps paradoxically, the Cypriots most resent the failure of Britain to assert itself in 1974. But that is for a later chapter. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Conversation with Greek Cypriots, any one in three of whom may turn out to be a refugee in his own country, takes on an even more sombre note when they ask, ‘And have you visited the other side?’ Everywhere can be seen restaurants, bars, hotels and taxi firms which are named after old businesses in the north. The ‘Tree of Idleness’ cafe, beloved of Lawrence Durrell in Bellapaix, is now re-established by its old owner on a hill overlooking Nicosia. Then there is everything from Famagusta Apartments to Kyrenia Car Hire. Official road signs still give the direction and mileage of these lost locations. As I said, those roads do not lead anywhere. But for the foreign journalist or diplomat they do converge on the checkpoint at the old Ledra Palace Hotel. Here, after an encounter with an Ottoman- type officialdom, it is possible to negotiate permission to visit the Turkish-held sector, known since November 1983 as the Turkish State of North Kibris. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />In a decade or so, if things go on as they are, it may well be possible for a visitor ignorant of history to arrive and to imagine that there have always been two states on the island. So thorough has been the eradication of Greekness in the north that, if one were not the prisoner of one’s knowledge, one could relax very agreeably. This is the most beautiful part of Cyprus and the Turkish Cypriots are every bit as courteous and hospitable as their Greek fellows. But their ‘state’ is built upon an awful negation. Every now and then, usually in the old quarter of Turkish Nicosia, one can see the outline of a Greek sign, imperfectly painted over. Otherwise, every street and place name has been changed and, unlike the situation in the Republic, there are no bilingual signs. Kyrenia has become Girne. Famagusta is Gazi Magusa. Lapithos is Lapta. The currency has been changed to permit only Turkish mainland money to circulate. Even the clocks have been put back one hour, so that the north of Cyprus beats time, literally as well as metaphorically, with Anatolia. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />To cross the line is to enter a looking-glass world. The 1974 invasion is known as the ‘peace operation’. Cyprus is called, even in English-language official documents, ‘Kibris’. Busts of Kemal Ataturk adorn every village square. Monuments to the valour of the Turkish army are everywhere, as are more palpable reminders in the shape of thousands of Turkish soldiers. They are marked off from the indigenous population not only by their uniforms and their fatigues, but by the cast of their features, which is unmistakably Anatolian. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />In the whole atmosphere of the place there is something of protesting too much. The square-jawed Ataturk busts are, perhaps, a little too numerous and obtrusive to be a sign of real confidence. The clumsy denials of the Hellenic heritage of the island –symbolized by the conversion of churches into mosques and the neglect and pillage of antiquities – shows the same mixture of the superiority and the inferiority complex which is characteristic of Turkish and Turkish Cypriot claims.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Again, the visitor can be spared much of this. A visit to Bellapaix (whose name remains unaltered except by one consonant) is on every traveller’s agenda. The splendid abbey still stands, overlooking the glacis of the Kyrenia range as it descends to the sea. The architectural core of the village thus remains intact, and the little lanes go sloping away from the square as before. In the area just up the hill, mainland Turks and other foreigners compete for newly built villas and a vicarious share in Durrell’s long-dissipated ‘atmosphere’. When I first saw Bellapaix, it was still Greek. The Turkish army held it under occupation and was suggesting to the inhabitants in numerous ways that they might be happier elsewhere. Certainly they were made to feel unhappy where they were. They needed permission to visit the town, to till their fields, to post letters or to receive visitors. It was only with extreme difficulty that I was allowed to talk to them unsupervised. When attrition failed, the stubborn remainder were simply expelled. Now, the inhabitants are Turkish villagers: Cypriots from the south. I paid a call on them some years later, with a colleague who knew them well and who had, since her last visit, made a special trip to their old home. The Bellapaix Turks hail in the main from Mari, a dusty and undistinguished hamlet off the Limassol road. My friend brought them photographs of the village, which they had not seen for several years, since the ‘population exchange’ of 1974-5. The effect when she produced the pictures in the coffee-shop was extraordinary. Men ran to fetch relatives and friends; a circle formed in less time than it takes to set down. The snapshots were passed around endlessly – ‘Look, some one’s put a new window in old Mehmet’s house’ – ‘There’s a lick of paint on the old store.’ The mukhtur of the village treated us to coffee and drinks; our efforts to share the bill were (as always in Cyprus) regarded as just this side of a grave insult. We eventually had to leave, because of the curfew that falls along the border just after dusk. But we were pressed to stay until the very last moment. These people, living in a village which is coveted above all others by tourists and outsiders, were actually nostalgic for the shabby but homely Mari. Yet an effort of the conscious memory is required to remember a time before partition and separation. The children born in Bellapaix will be brought up without knowledge of Greek Cypriots, but will hear endless official propaganda abut their mendacity and cruelty. Only a few miles away, the Greek Cypriot children of the Mari district will hear tales of the Turkish invasion and of the <i>dies irae </i>of 1974. And the talking classes of the advanced countries will assume, as they were intended to, that ‘the Turks and the Greeks can’t get on together’. In order to criticize this trite and cynical view, which is the psychological counterpart of partition, one has to wage a battle against amnesia. This, in turn, means viewing the history of Cyprus not as a random series of local and atavistic disturbances, but as a protracted, uneven and still incomplete movement for self-determination (or, to put it in a more old-fashioned way, for freedom). </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />At certain times of day, and at particular bends in the road or curves of the shore, Cyprus is still so lovely that it takes you by the throat. But, when I try to explain the disaster of 1974 to some indifferent politician or smug diplomat, I find myself getting obscurely irritated when they say, as if to palliate the situation, that, ‘Of course it’s such a shame – and such a beautiful island too.’ I have stood on Othello’s tower in Famagusta, and climbed to the peak of St Hilarion, and loafed in Kyrenia harbour, and traced the coast of the Karpass peninsula and the hills and coves around Pyrgos. I have drunk the soup after the midnight service of Greek Cypriot Easter, and celebrated Bayram with the Turks. I cut out and kept Sir Harry Luke’s 1908 tribute to the island when I first read it: </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />‘The peculiar charm possessed by the remnants of the Latin East, that East which knew the rule of Crusading lords and the magnificence of Frankish merchant princes, is of a rare and subtle kind, the offspring of oriental nature and medieval Western art. It lies, if the attempt to define so elusive a thing may be allowed, in Gothic architecture blending with Saracenic beneath a Mediterranean sky, in the courts of ruined castles overgrown with deep green cypresses, in date palms rearing their stately crowns above some abbey’s traceried cloisters, in emblazoned flamboyant man sions of golden sandstone warmed and illumined, as they could never be in the West, by the glow of an Eastern sun.’</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Rereading that passage now, I find it overwritten and sentimental. I am condemned to see all those aspects of Cyprus through the prism of their desecration. They have been spoiled for me and – more crucially – ruined for the Cypriots. Othello’s tower is within sight of the empty waste of the city of Varosha. St Hilarion is in a military zone. Pyrgos can be reached only by skirting a fortified enclave and passing through a napalmed village. The Karpass has been subjected to a clearance and repopulated by colonists. And I am also doomed to the knowledge that Sir Harry Luke, like so many colonial chroniclers of his time, loved the country and tolerated the people. To the end of his days, he despised any manifestations of political turbulence among the Cypriots, and regarded the island as a fiefdom of Great Britain. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Even from this perspective, I have still had the privilege of coming to know and to love another people. I believe that I can be objective about the politics of Cyprus, but I most certainly cannot be indifferent or dispassionate. I have tried to preserve this distinction in the following pages, where I argue that the Cypriots are not, as many believe, the chief authors of their own misfortunes. I believe that I may tell a truer story if I admit at once to a sense of outrage which Durrell and his emulators have been spared. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div><b>Read all parts of the serialisation here:</b></div><div><b><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a></b></div><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a></span></b></span></p><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a></span></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 1, Hammer or Anvil?</a></b></span></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequence</a>s<br /></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span> <br /></span></span></div></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-42622186199581190902021-11-11T18:31:00.015+00:002022-01-17T23:20:54.042+00:002. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s320/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b><div><b><i>In this the second part of the serialisation of Christopher Hitchens’ Cyprus: Hostage to History, I’m posting the Preface to the original edition of the book, which appeared in 1984. Even now, almost 40 years after publication of this work and 50 years after the events it describes, Hitchens’ take on Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus still has the ability to take the breath away for its lucidity, truth and anger at the injustice that befell and continues to befall the island.</i></b></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div></b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: left;"><u style="font-family: inherit;">2. <i>Cyprus: Hostage to History</i>, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</u></div></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><div><br /></div><div>Ten years ago, the Republic of Cyprus was attacked by one member of NATO and invaded and partitioned by another. Since 1948, and the period of armed truce which that year inaugurated in Europe, no member of either opposing alliance had actually sought to change the boundaries of an existing state. The Soviet Union had sent its troops into Hungary and Czechoslovakia and retained political control over Poland and the other Warsaw Pact nations by its understood readiness to use force. But those nations retain their integrity as countries, whatever political indignities they may endure. The Western powers, also, have agreed to respect existing European borders even when, as in the case of Ireland, one party regards the demarcation as historically unjust. </div></span><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Only in one case has a member of either post-war bloc succeeded in redrawing the map. Turkey, by its invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and its subsequent occupation of the northern third of the island, has finally (if not legally or morally) created a new political entity. It has done so in the face of much Western criticism, but also with considerable Western assistance. It is commonplace to say that the resulting situation is a threat to peace in the eastern Mediterranean. It is equally commonplace to hear that it has </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>brought </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">peace, of a kind, to Cyprus. Both of these opinions, or impressions, miss the point. The first statement would make the island a mere intersection on the graph of differences between Greece and Turkey. The second is an unoriginal echo of Tacitus’s </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>‘Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem apellant' </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">– ‘They make a desert, and they call it peace.’ Tacitus, through the reported speech of Calgacus, was at least attempting to be ironic. </span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5ZTey1XtN60OYd5Qbswx1mE7YaWj7aZRNRIkjl9AL9aFeku1fnZG_RXj-9shv9v8RKxPOV0e4AWohct7DgFUiPXZlBzdyns4J_Gh6rc-82RUH7oBBtRSQjFbNyzQCgdnc_avlI0rZUx8/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="753" data-original-width="426" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5ZTey1XtN60OYd5Qbswx1mE7YaWj7aZRNRIkjl9AL9aFeku1fnZG_RXj-9shv9v8RKxPOV0e4AWohct7DgFUiPXZlBzdyns4J_Gh6rc-82RUH7oBBtRSQjFbNyzQCgdnc_avlI0rZUx8/w378-h640/HostagetoHistoryMap.jpg" width="378" /></a></span></div><p></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">These two pseudo-realist interpretations have to compete in popularity with a third, which might be called the liberal or </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>bien-pensant </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">view. It is most pithily summarized by Ms Nancy Crawshaw, at the conclusion of her voluminous but not exhaustive book </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>The Cyprus Revolt. </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Ms Crawshaw, who reported Cyprus for the </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>Guardian </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">in the 1950s and 1960s, ends her narrative like this: ‘In Cyprus itself the Turkish invasion marked the climax of the struggle for union with Greece which had begun more than one hundred years earlier. The Greek Cypriots had paid dearly in the cause of </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>enosis: </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">in terms of human suffering the cost to both communities was beyond calculation.’ </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Here, pseudo-realism is replaced by pseudo-humanitarianism. We are all (it goes without saying) sorry for the victim. But it is, we very much regret to say, the victim’s </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>fault. </i></span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All these consoling explanations make it easier for those responsible to excuse themselves and for the rest of the world to forget about Cyprus. But such a loss of memory would be unpardonable. It would mean forgetting about the bad and dangerous precedent that has been set by invasion; by a larger power suiting itself by altering geography and demography. It would mean overlooking the aspiration of a European people to make a passage from colonial rule to sovereignty in one generation. And it would mean ignoring an important example, afforded by Cyprus, of the way in which small countries and peoples are discounted or disregarded by the superpowers (and, on occasion, by liberal commentators).</span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">The argument of this book is that the Turkish invasion was </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>not </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">‘the climax of the struggle for union with Greece’, but the outcome of a careless and arrogant series of policies over which Cypriots had little or no control. The conventional picture, of a dogged and narrow battle of Greek against Turk, has become, with further and better knowledge, simplistic and deceptive. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Only four years after they had painfully achieved independence, the Cypriots became the victims of a superpower design for partition. This partition reflected only the strategic requirements of outside powers, and did not conform to any local needs. The economy of Cyprus, with its distribution of water resources and agriculture, makes partition an absurdity. So does, or did, the distribution of population. And there is certainly no room for two machineries of state, unless at least one of them is imposed by another country. The imposition of partition </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>necessitated </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the setting of Greek against Turk, and Greek against Greek. As I will show, strenuous efforts were made in that direction. They maximized all the possible disadvantages, and led to dire results for Greece and Turkey as well as for Cyprus. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If one were to attempt a series of conjectures on Cyprus, they might read something like this: </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">1. Cyprus is, by population and by heritage, overwhelmingly Greek. But it has never been part of Greece. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">2. Cyprus has a Turkish minority, but was ruled by Turkey for three centuries. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">3. The proportion of Greeks to Turks in Cyprus is four to one, approximately the </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>inverse </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of the proportion of mainland Greeks to mainland Turks. The distance between Cyprus and Greece is more than ten times the distance between Cyprus and Turkey. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">4. Cyprus is the involuntary host to three NATO armies, none of which has been sufficient to protect it from aggression. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">5. The Cypriots are the only Europeans to have undergone colonial rule, guerrilla war, civil war and modern technological war, on their own soil, since 1945. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">6. Cyprus is the last real test of British post-imperial policy; a test that has so far resulted in a succession of failures. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">7. Cyprus was the site, and the occasion, of perhaps the greatest failure of American foreign policy in post-war Europe. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">8. Cyprus was critical in the alternation of military and democratic rule in both Greece and Turkey. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What follows is not designed to make the Cyprus drama appear any simpler. But it is designed to challenge the obfuscations which, by purporting to make it simple, have, often deliberately, made it impossible to understand. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The axis of the-book is the summer of 1974; the months of July and August, during which Cyprus was dismembered as an independent republic. I describe how the policies of four countries – Britain, Greece, Turkey and the United States – contributed to the 1974 catastrophe. I then describe how that catastrophe affected, in their turn, those four states. It will be for the reader to judge whether, in the light of what follows, it is fair to blame the current plight of Cyprus on the shortcomings of its inhabitants. </span></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Washington, D.C. January 1984 </span></i></span></p><div>Read all parts of the serialisation here:</div><div><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a></div></div></div><div><div><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a></span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a></span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens, Chapter 1, Hammer or Anvil?</a></span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank"><br />9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p></div></div><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><b><br /></b></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-58007061034188418802021-11-05T21:31:00.011+00:002022-01-17T23:19:51.709+00:001. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: why it remains relevant <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s1234/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRzLK-yaUb_EV5nNwX8VXGPXm8XNKEI_DdbzCV5WXOJGJcDW55ByA85h_oDJ9SvhTbek0Gw-IH2CW0eAHAWGtGlIrfxVjYfo66784TnjR660H6iTUO4QSud2UondQcJwlqHORO1ARXsDY/s320/61RLLaQlFTL.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>One of the most distressing aspects of Turkey’s invasion and occupation of Cyprus is the prevalence of the narrative that suggests that the depredations that were inflicted on the Greek population of the island in 1974 were somehow deserved. </i></b></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>The Greek Cypriots, the story goes, driven by a fanatical Greek nationalism and an in-built diachronic enmity towards the hapless Turkish minority, who they oppressed and mistreated, got their final comeuppance in 1974 after engineering a coup to fulfil their dream of union with Greece, a union that would have resulted in the elimination of the Turkish Cypriots and which, naturally, prompted Turkey to invade to protect its ethnic kin. </i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>This is not only a caricature of what happened in Cyprus – it doesn’t take much (colonialist and racist) thinking to blame the island’s problems on primitive ethnic tensions and, even worse, on its victims – it also happens to coincide with the tale the three countries most responsible for Cyprus’ partition, Britain, America and, especially, Turkey, want to tell to conceal their nefarious roles in the island’s fate. </i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>(A version of this narrative can be seen in <a href="https://youtu.be/yB1xwOfHYsM" target="_blank">Jonathan Dimbleby’s </a></i><a href="https://youtu.be/yB1xwOfHYsM" target="_blank">This Week</a><i><a href="https://youtu.be/yB1xwOfHYsM" target="_blank"> report for Thames TV</a> on the second phase of Turkey’s invasion, which began on 14 August 1974. A better </i>This Week<i> documentary was made in 1976 [see <a href="https://youtu.be/3YcbVFAPg_o" target="_blank">here</a>], which describes the ethnic cleansing and colonisation of Turkish-occupied Cyprus – with scenes from the village of Yialousa – before allowing Turkish Cypriots to make their wild claims of mistreatment between 1963 and 1974). </i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Having visited Cyprus for years before the Athens’ junta’s coup and the Turkish invasion and producing numerous articles, particularly for the </i>New Statesman<i> and the </i>New Left Review<i>, Christopher Hitchens was already dismissing the ‘intractable ethnic conflict’ narrative deployed to justify partition and denouncing the real source of instability and conflict on the island, i.e. the machinations of external powers in Cyprus, whose aim was the destruction of the Republic of Cyprus, removing, one way or another, its democratically elected president, Archbishop Makarios, and imposing partition. </i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Challenging the ‘Cypriots-had-it-coming’ and the ‘Turkish Cypriots needed protecting’ alibis that accompanied Turkey’s invasion of the island and have excused the occupation ever since, is why, according to Hitchens, he wrote </i><u>Cyprus: Hostage to History</u><i>. The first edition came out in 1984 and the second edition in 1989. </i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Although Perry Anderson in his superb essay, </i><u><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2008/04/divisions-of-cyprus-by-perry-anderson.html" target="_blank">The Divisions of Cyprus</a></u><i>, has produced a compelling account of Cyprus’ downfall, which lays the primary blame on British colonial and post-colonial policy, Hitchens’ account of the role of America and in particular the malevolent secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who Hitchens regards, for numerous global misdemeanours, as a war criminal, remains the most convincing explanation of the calamities that befell Cyprus. </i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><u>Cyprus: Hostage to History</u><i> has been out of print for a long time and used copies are rare and expensive. Thus, as a public service, I will be reprinting the book, chapter by chapter, in the following weeks. </i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>The first part is from the </i><u>Preface to the Second Edition</u><i>. </i></b></span><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><u>1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</u></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">In January 1986, the National Gallery of Art in Washington held a special showing of Titian’s extraordinary painting <i>The Flaying of Marsyas</i>. Those who know the picture, which is seven feet in height and full of detail, will know that its centerpiece is a patient creature, suspended upside down and pinioned while a cruel knife does its worst. Accompanying the exhibit was a short monograph by Sydney J. Freedberg, Chief Curator of the National Gallery, who put forward a new and persuasive theory of the painting’s provenance. </span></div><div><br /></div><div>According to Freedberg, the theme of the painting (a flaying), the date of the painting (shortly before Titian’s death in 1576), certain details in the action (a Phrygian cap, symbolizing Turkey in antiquity) and the place where the painting was executed (Venice) make it clear that Titian’s subject was Cyprus. In 1571 the Venetian empire suffered one of its greatest humiliations with the fall of the Cypriot city of Famagusta to the Turks. The Venetian commander of the besieged garrison, Marcantonio Bragadin, had surrendered to the Turkish general Lala Mustafa under a safe-conduct. But no sooner had he done so than he was put to death with revolting sadism, which culminated in his being flayed alive and his skin stuffed with straw as a trophy of conquest. This episode, which has been described by writers as various as Lawrence Durrell and John Julius Norwich, was a terrible shock in its time. It was also, from the Venetian point of view, very poignant. If Bragadin had held out a little longer, he might have been rescued after the shattering of the Turkish fleet at Lepanto. </div><div><br /></div><div>As Freedberg puts it: ‘If our assumptions are correct the idea of the Marsyas was born out of the tragedy of Famagusta and the torture of Bragadin, but it was developed in the aftermath of exaltation over Lepanto… Since it was unthinkable in Titian’s aesthetic that it could be depicted as a historical occurrence, it had to be represented by analogue, and the flaying of Marsyas was ready to hand.’ </div><div><br /></div><div>The allegory, it occurred to me as I stood in front of the picture, could be extended. If one took the figure of Marsyas as Cyprus, it was only too easy to sustain the image of a defenseless island being hacked about by callous invaders and conquerors. And, if one bore in mind Titian’s ambivalence about the relationship of timing to deliverance, the awful history of the island’s wrong turns and missed opportunities came all too easily into focus. </div><div><br /></div><div>I wrote this book in a fit of bad temper in order to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1974 invasion of Cyprus. The elapse of another five years has done nothing to sweeten the memory. There seems every chance that Cyprus will join that roster of post-colonial partitions – Ireland, Palestine, the Indian sub-continent – which set so dispiriting a precedent. My concern in 1984 was to make it clear that Cyprus, like Marsyas, was the victim of imperial caprice and cynicism rather than of its own undoubted internal deficiencies as a state and as a society. Since the appearance of the book, I have been the recipient of a large number of thoughtful and useful letters. I have also been invited to test my argument in a number of public and private exchanges. Finally, the grudging flow of official disclosure has borne the odd document and revelation downstream. What follows is my update upon the original text, which here appears as I first wrote it. My emendations follow the order of the chapter and subject headings. </div><div><br /></div><div>First, I owe something of an apology to Lawrence Durrell. I described his celebrated book <i>Bitter Lemons</i> as ‘colonial’ in style, and I don’t resign my position. But in an interview with the <i>Aegean Review</i> in the fall of 1987, Mr Durrell said the following to a small audience that I would like to enlarge. Speaking of British policy, he said: ‘But I’ve been progressively disgusted with our double- facedness in politics over situations like the Greek situation. Remember I’ve worked as an official in Cyprus on that disgusting situation which was entirely engineered by us, do you see?’ </div><div><br /></div><div>That Mr Durrell was speaking truly in this respect is confirmed by a series of recent disclosures. Two of these appear in prepared and recorded interviews, broadcast by Granada Television in Britain in June 1984 under the title <i>Cyprus: Britain’s Grim Legacy</i>. The first interview was with Orhan Eralp of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, who recalled that very early in the Cypriot revolt against colonial rule: ‘Michael Stewart, who was then I think charge d’affaires of the British Embassy at the time, called on me at the Foreign Ministry and he pointed out the fact that this question of Cyprus was getting out of hand, the big movement for enosis, the union with Greece, what was Turkey going to do about it?… I think the British government hoped that the Turks would take an interest in this to form a sort of balance.’ </div><div><br /></div><div>Stewart was not acting in a merely improvised fashion. Turkey might very well have given up all claims to Cyprus under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and might even have considered repatriating Cypriot Turks by emigration, but the Colonial Office knew the value of divide and rule even then. In a minute dated 21 May 1929, A. J. Dawe, principal clerk of the Cyprus department of the Colonial Office, observed that ‘the presence of the Turkish community is an asset from a political stand point.’ Updated to the realities of the 1950s, this meant that Britain would treat Cyprus as an ‘internal matter’ if the issue was raised by Greece, the United Nations or the United States. But it would always view with favor – and even solicit – a Turkish intrusion, because this would counterbalance the demands of the anti-colonial majority. </div><div><br /></div><div>Elsewhere in the same transmitted series of interviews came an astonishing confirmation of something long suspected. On 7 June 1958 a bomb exploded at the Information Office of the Turkish Consulate in Nicosia. Turkish Cypriots promptly burned out a neighboring district of Greek shops and homes, in what was to be the first Greek-Turkish physical confrontation on the island. British soldiers seized the chance to intervene, in the name of law and order, to keep the two sides apart. A curfew was imposed, and Greek guerrillas blamed for the bomb as they were for everything else. But here is the testimony of Rauf Denktash, given with a smile in 1984: ‘Later on, a friend of mine, whose name will still be kept a secret, was to confess to me that he had put this little bomb in that doorway in order to create an atmosphere of tension so that people would know that Turkish Cypriots mattered.’ </div><div><br /></div><div>This casual confession, on the part of the self-proclaimed President of the Turkish State of North Cyprus, created anguish among Turkish Cypriots. One of them, Kutlu Adali, said in the newspaper Ortam that for years official propaganda had laid this ignition of intercommunal violence at the door of the Greeks, and yet ‘after this bomb incident many innocent Turks and Greek Cypriots died, many persons were wounded and crippled and thus for the first time the separation of Turks and Greeks by barbed wire was secured and the non-solution extending to our own days was created.’ </div><div><br /></div><div>Bear in mind that the Turkish claim is that peaceful coexistence is impossible because of intercommunal hatred. See also the analogue of this provocation in the case of Istanbul as cited on pages 45-6. </div><div><br /></div><div>The counterpart and consequence of ‘divide and rule’ during the colonial period was, naturally enough, partition when that period came to an end. In early 1964, the British government decided, as so often, to invite the United States to shoulder responsibility. In a State Department document headed <i>Secret – Limited Distribution</i> and dated 25 January 1964, I found the minutes of a fateful discussion on Cyprus, attended by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, among others. Let me quote the crucial paragraphs: </div><div><br /></div><div>‘Acting Secretary [George] Ball opened the meeting with a summation of his discussion this morning with Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore. He noted that the Ambassador had referred to the failure of the London talks on Cyprus to get off the ground, the lack of a responsible attitude on the part of Greek and Turkish forces on Cyprus, etc. The Ambassador had then stated that for predominantly political reasons the British could no longer assume responsibility for the maintenance of law and order on Cyprus without outside assistance if fighting broke out. </div><div><br /></div><div>‘Acting Secretary Ball continued his summation by stating that the UK had proposed the introduction into Cyprus of an allied force composed of contingents from several NATO nations including the US. The force would move into Cyprus at the invitation of [Cypriot President] Makarios and with the prior agreement of the Governments of Greece and Turkey. However, we now have a report that Makarios has rejected the proposal which probably was raised with him by the Greeks. If an allied force were introduced into Cyprus without Makarios’ agreement, he would refer the matter to the UN. <i>Accordingly, the problem is one of how to force Makarios to agree to the introduction of peace-keeping forces.</i>’ [italics mine]</div><div><br /></div><div>We next encounter George Ball in the reminiscences of Lieutenant Commander Martin Packard, a Greek-speaking Fleet Intelligence Officer who was sent by the British to Cyprus in 1963. His mission was to be a village-level liaison between Greek and Turkish civilians, a mission in which he had considerable success and earned himself numerous commendations. Packard’s assumption was that British policy favored the maintenance of a unitary state in conformity with British treaty obligations and with the wishes of the large majority. He was shocked, when flying George Ball around the island in February 1964, to be told: ‘You’ve got it wrong son. There’s only one solutionjto this island and that’s partition.’ Thus the views of an American proconsul, formed from a helicopter on his first visit. Packard has since written (in The Manchester Guardian of 2 April 1988): </div><div><br /></div><div>‘At the time of my own involvement the maintenance of the Sovereign Base Areas and other military facilities was deemed of paramount importance by the British and American governments, and their advisors certainly thought that this aim would more easily be achieved in a divided Cyprus than in a cohesive unitary state.’ </div><div><br /></div><div>In fact, not content with thwarting Packard’s attempts at grass-roots conciliation, the Ball faction directed aid to those forces in Cyprus who, for chauvinist reasons, had an interest in fomenting intercommunal violence. An unchallenged <i>Washington Post</i> report of 4 August 1977 confirms what I have established from confidential sources – that the Central Intelligence Agency was channeling funds to the Greek Cypriot extremist and Turk-hater Polycarpos Georgadjis, so that he might conduct what was euphemistically called ‘anti- Communist warfare’. These new findings amplify my discussion of Mr Ball’s role on pages 58-9. </div><div><br /></div><div>Advancing through the years of the Greek junta to the coup and the invasion of 1974, there is little to add. An exhaustive inquiry by the Greek Parliament and numerous independent investigations have made it clear beyond doubt that an attack on Cyprus was long meditated and well planned by the junta’s high command, and that only those who absolutely refused to see this could maintain even the semblance of ignorance. An accidentally interesting example of the required denial, or cognitive dissonance, is given by Field Marshal Lord Carver, former Chief of Defence Staff, in his 1986 contribution to the collection <i>Cyprus in Transition</i>: ‘In spite of the implication in Christopher Hitchens’s book Cyprus that the British government knew in advance that a coup against Makarios, instigated by the Greek government of Colonels, was imminent, no such evidence was available to the British Ministry of Defence or to Air Marshal Aiken, the commander of the British forces in the base areas. I very much doubt if it was available either to the Foreign Office.’ As the reader of pages 91-2 of the ensuing will discover, I made no such ‘implication’. Rather, I stated directly that the British government knew of the Greek junta’s expansionist design on the island and had decided in advance that, whenever this design might be activated, Britain would not oppose it. Describing the chaos that resulted from the actual coup in July 1974, the good Field Marshal innocently records a couple of pages later on that he and Aiken, having found Makarios still alive, had decided to get him off the island. </div><div><br /></div><div>‘If the British government disapproved of this, the aircraft could always return. I was unable to get any ruling from the Foreign Office, as ministers were busy discussing all the implications and <i>were not over-keen on receiving Makarios in London</i>.’ [italics mine]</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, why on earth was that? The Field Marshal, in a rather unsoldierly way, seems determined to create a mystery where none exists. So was Foreign Secretary Callaghan, as described on pages 136-8. </div><div><br /></div><div>Turkish ambitions on Cyprus, conventionally expressed in terms of the need to protect the minority on the island, have since 1984 been laid out with slightly less hypocrisy. There was no talk of the Turkish minority in 1941, when Turkey offered to abandon its pro-Axis neutrality in favor of Britain in return for the Dodecanese islands, including Rhodes, and Cyprus. (Similar ambitions were also made plain to the Axis powers.) And there was no talk of the Turkish minority when I met Professor Mumtaz Soysal, constitutional advisor to Rauf Denktash, in Istanbul in March of 1988. In the presence of witnesses, he told me that the Turkish military presence in Cyprus was a matter of the protection of southern Turkey – a strategic question, not a humanitarian one. Innumerable other examples, some of them given in the ensuing chapters, show that Turkey has always viewed Cyprus as a target of opportunity, and has not always troubled to pretend otherwise. The pretense is barely necessary in any case, since the Anglo-American alliance has only intermittently put its preference for partition in phrases that suggest a concern for minority rights. Auden’s acid lines on the partition of India are truer to the case: </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission. </i></div><div><i>Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition. </i></div><div><i>Between two peoples fanatically at odds, </i></div><div><i>With their different diets and incompatible gods</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>The poem ends with the administrator’s return to the colonial metropole, ‘where he quickly forged the case, as a good lawyer must.’ I hope that this little book is a partial antidote to some at least of the many forgeries that are current about this latest partition, which necessitated the incitement of fanaticism rather than the conciliation of it. Poor Marsyas may have lost a wager with Apollo, but at least he never had to hear that the flaying was all his fault, or all for his own good. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Washington, D.C. </i></div><div><i>November 1988</i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Read all parts of the serialisation here:</div><div><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/1-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.</a></div><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/2-cyprus-hostage-to-history-preface-to.html" target="_blank">2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.</a></span></span></p><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/3-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction. </a></span></span><div><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/11/4-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 1, Hammer or Anvil?</a></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/5-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods. </a></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/12/6-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 3: Dragon's Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.</a></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/7-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">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. </a></span></span> </span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/8-cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences</a></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2022/01/cyprus-hostage-to-history-by.html" target="_blank">9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion. </a></span></span> <br /> </span></span></span></span><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-23335742069133218072021-10-25T20:42:00.006+01:002021-10-27T23:53:01.284+01:00Sign of the Pagan: Sirk, feminism and tyranny<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='449' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwflE7VRhaWO8wC3NSnSdmSdSn1REU1Q-6U7KP36PRSrjz7wSek7Z_RZqaBuhfbPebdEhEnA_KngvAR68u7Xg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: small;"><b>When one thinks of Douglas Sirk, the German-born film director who fled Nazi Germany for the USA in 1937, it is usually his 1940s film noirs –<i> Lured</i>; <i>Sleep, My Love</i>; <i>Shockproof</i> – and even more so his 1950s melodramas <i>– Magnificent Obsession</i>; <i>All that Heaven Allows</i>; <i>Imitation of Life</i>; <i>The Tarnished Angels</i>, dismissed at the time as ‘women’s films’ but, to more discerning critics, hailed as masterpieces for their dissection of American bourgeois life and studies of female and racial hypocrisy and repression – we have in mind.<br /><br />It’s strange, therefore, to see Sirk's name associated with a film like<i> Sign of the Pagan</i>, a sword and sandal epic that purports to tell the story of the threat to the divided Roman empire – with the Western part led by Valentinian III in Rome and the Eastern part by Theodosius II in Constantinople – posed by the barbarian Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun. <br /><br />The film takes the line that both these competing emperors are too self-absorbed, caught up in petty palace politics and the luxuries and fripperies of being emperor, to recognise the dangers the barbarian warlord poses to the existence of civilisation. <br /><br />Civilisation in this case is identified in the film as Christianity, which has by now – the mid-5th century – been established as the state religion in both parts of the empire, but is reviled by Attila for its message of peace and love. <br /><br />The film also posits that if Valentinian and Theodosius are too weak and short-sighted to confront the dangers of Attila, then the more robust Markianos, the stout Roman soldier, has the answers.<br /><br />Markianos’ commitment to fighting Attila and devotion to a pacifist religion confuses Attila, who begins to doubt his venture to conquer the Roman world and destroy Christianity. Prophecies of his own doom also unbalance his mind.<br /><br />And it is perhaps Attila’s descent into madness, which is of Shakespearean proportions, that provides us with Sirk’s interest in the story. We also note that Attila’s ultimate betrayal and killing are carried out by two women – it is his brow beaten daughter Kubra that betrays her father to the Roman enemy and it is the Huns’ brutalised concubine, Ildico – and not Markianos, as you’d expect – who delivers the final blow of the knife that ends the life of the savage tyrant. The fact that it is women who are given the role and satisfaction of bringing down tyranny perhaps points us to Sirk’s overtly feminist films to be made in the near future and alerts us to his interest in making this otherwise uninspiring historical drama.</b></span></span><br /></div><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-26858963094441633642021-10-14T21:03:00.004+01:002021-10-14T21:26:07.435+01:00Breaking the Cyprus impasse: ideas to avert disaster<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQKQc8VXFmRFkezTFIedcAkOjsDKqCpprxwoQQrPDmGkW14ee9ptKZnUSmyQOIGmpu8dsGmmxnLcwjMx6ttJpx4M3Hmm8zJUJw-PI2rKJ0agvIhcKn-ccF3W1JUjv98ZThOgDicZARmG0/s1171/image1170x530cropped.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="1171" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQKQc8VXFmRFkezTFIedcAkOjsDKqCpprxwoQQrPDmGkW14ee9ptKZnUSmyQOIGmpu8dsGmmxnLcwjMx6ttJpx4M3Hmm8zJUJw-PI2rKJ0agvIhcKn-ccF3W1JUjv98ZThOgDicZARmG0/w400-h181/image1170x530cropped.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Since 1974 a lack of imagination has been one of the cardinal features and failings of the way Greek Cypriot politicians have confronted the Turkish occupation of Cyprus. <br /><br />For decades, presidents, foreign ministers, chief negotiators, party leaders and stalwarts have devoutly followed the shibboleth that UN mediation efforts are the only means to finding a ‘solution’ to the so-called ‘Cyprus problem’. Time and again, this has involved engaging in exactly the same process. The UN secretary general appoints a special adviser to the island. He or she scuttles between the free and Turkish-occupied halves of Nicosia, meeting in the free areas the president of Cyprus in his capacity as leader of the Greek Cypriot community and in the occupied areas gabbing with the leader of the occupation regime in his capacity as leader of the Turkish minority on the island. The aim is to find enough common ground to convene an international conference. This is usually held in some luxury Swiss resort and involves the entire political leadership of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities decamping to the Alps along with representatives of the island’s so-called three ‘guarantor powers’, the UK, Turkey and Greece, with the hope that intense talks and banging of heads under UN auspices will bring the desired result. After 47 years, it never has.<br /><br />Now, Turkey under the rule of the Islamo-nationalist strongman Recip Tayyip Erdogan, harbouring fantasies of revived Turkish hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean and even further afield, has decided that the UN process no longer serves Turkey’s purpose in Cyprus, which is the establishment of a confederation of two independent states on the island. Thus, Ankara has put forward preconditions for negotiations that it knows the Greek Cypriot side can never accept and to all intents and purposes has made the UN process redundant.<br /><br />By doing this, the Turkish side wants to create the space and time to develop further ‘facts on the ground’ – opening up Varosha to Turkish colonisation, importing more Turkish colonists into the occupied areas generally and suppressing those Turkish Cypriot voices that would prefer reunification of the island to creeping annexation by Turkey, with all that implies for the demise of the secular/Kemalist nature of Turkish Cypriot social and political life.<br /><br />In pursuit of homogenising and straightjacketing Turkish Cypriot identity and opinion, the Erdogan regime has gone so far as to threaten and intimidate dissenting Turkish Cypriot politicians and literally bribing the ‘electorate’ of the occupation regime, 30 to 50 percent of whom are Turkish colonists and hold sway in ‘elections’, into choosing (in last year’s illegal ‘presidential’ elections in the occupied areas) the repulsive extremist and Ankara-lackey Ersin Tatar over the more moderate Mustafa Akinci.<br /><br />So, what has the Greek Cypriot response been to the consolidation of Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus and the demise of UN mediation efforts? <br /><br />Addicted to the UN process, they have reacted by repeating ad nauseam that they are the only way to achieve a Cyprus settlement, and by lobbying the international community – as if it has nothing better to do – to press Turkey to reverse course. <br /><br />These efforts are so forlorn as to be ridiculous. The EU has made it clear – under German leadership – that it values ties to Turkey far more than it values the well-being of a member-state; while the Biden administration is pre-occupied with other issues, such as the future of Taliban Afghanistan, where it requires the input of Turkey, to go out on a limb for the sake of Cyprus.<br /><br />What, then, should Cypriot leaders do to prevent the Turkish occupation from becoming irreversible?<br /><br />There are many things it could do. Previously, in relation to the opening and colonisation of Varosha <a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.com/2021/08/passports-withdrawn-from-occupation.html" target="_blank">I have suggested</a> that criminal procedures could be initiated against occupation regime officials for violating any number of Republic of Cyprus laws. <br /><br />Another idea that should be considered is to sidestep the UN process, and do away with the the malign input of the guarantor powers, especially Turkey, by establishing a constitutional convention. This would involve Greek and Turkish Cypriot political leaders who believe in reunification – i.e. all the mainstream Greek Cypriot political parties and those in the centre and on the left of Turkish Cypriot politics, the 49 percent who voted for Akinci – meeting to thrash out a Cyprus settlement, which they would then present to the international community as the will of the majority of Cypriots.<br /><br />Of course, it would take a great leap of faith and courage from Turkish Cypriot progressives to defy Turkey and participate in such a convention; but the alternative is what they all say would be a disaster, the annihilation by Turkey of the Turkish Cypriot community and the annexation of occupied Cyprus to Turkey. <br /><br />Inevitably, Turkey would reject any deal Greek and Turkish Cypriots come up with; but then at least, in such circumstances, Turkey's nefarious role in Cyprus would be exposed. No one would be able to pretend the 'Cyprus issue' is intercommunal. The root cause of the island’s division and unhappiness – Turkey's occupation – would be indisputable, clear for all to see and addressed as such.</span></b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-24225433580162227672021-10-06T13:26:00.003+01:002021-10-25T20:50:20.052+01:00‘For the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl’… or the insults that caused the Greco-Persian wars<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHK2rI0Dht7VYBs1Mfl9grgutQ4tliETtNCh2a4RaRjMzM1gixPRXTknbA3iogbc9AyybuGLx1aCDqvgL2RXK5SxjBRLSK_6rC02nkC6WQqwskvA0kHOsoLrENpc4_fD2bOh6FvKHZ6lk/s1600/HelenParisK6.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHK2rI0Dht7VYBs1Mfl9grgutQ4tliETtNCh2a4RaRjMzM1gixPRXTknbA3iogbc9AyybuGLx1aCDqvgL2RXK5SxjBRLSK_6rC02nkC6WQqwskvA0kHOsoLrENpc4_fD2bOh6FvKHZ6lk/s320/HelenParisK6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>In a <a href="http://hellenicantidote.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/insult-wrath-and-retribution-in.html" target="_blank">previous post</a>, I mentioned that the mechanism of revenge is a key concept helping us understand the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian war and Greek culture generally. Conflicts and enmities often began as a result of perceived insults, affronts to honour, which could only be redeemed or expiated through vengeance.<br />
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In fact, if we read Herodotus, we can see how, for the Greek mind, this mechanism of revenge didn’t just apply to recent events, but could stretch far back into history, and even into myth.<br />
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Thus, Herodotus begins his <i>Histories</i> by stating his intention to reveal the aetiology of the wars between Greece and Persia in the fifth century BC and suggesting that they were the culmination of a series of insults and reprisals between Europeans and Asiatics going back centuries and, indeed, into the mists of time.<br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="https://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=FFFFFF&IS2=1&npa=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=helleantid-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0199535663" style="display: none !important; height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>
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Herodotus says that the ‘feud’ between Greece and Persia, or Europe and Asia, was initiated by the Phoenicians. These quintessential Mediterranean traders had come on their ships to Argos, hawking goods from Egypt and Assyria, and at the end of their mission, having sold most of their wares, they kidnapped a number of Greek women, including Io (daughter of the Argive king, Inachus) who had come to the beach to make purchases.<br />
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Responding to this outrage, Greeks sailed to Phoenician Tyre and abducted King Agenor’s daughter, Europa, taking her to Crete with them. Now, whereas Herodotus asserts that this kidnapping of Europa could be regarded as legitimate retaliation for Io’s abduction, the next offense in this cycle – the kidnapping by Greeks of Medea, the daughter of the king of Colchis – amounted to an unjustified and disproportionate escalation of this Greek-Asian vendetta, particularly when Colchian pleas to return Medea or at least compensate the king for his humiliation were rejected by the Greeks (on the grounds that Io had not been returned and no compensation paid for her abduction).<br />
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Thus, in the next generation, Paris, the Trojan prince, as revenge for Greek outrages against Tyre and Colchis, seized Helen, queen of Sparta, and carried her off to Asia. When the Greeks demanded her return and the payment of reparations for the insult Paris had committed, the Trojans said that since Medea had not been returned to her native land and no reparations offered for her kidnap, then the Greeks would receive none for the abduction of Helen. <br />
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The events that followed Helen’s kidnap and the refusal of the Trojans to give her up, i.e. the Greek invasion and sacking of Troy, informed, according to Herodotus, abiding Persian hostility towards the Greeks. Not only, for the Persians, did Greek ire at the abduction of Helen amount to a gross over-reaction – more often than not, according to the Persians, these ‘abducted’ women willingly went with their ‘kidnappers’ – but by crossing with an army from Europe into Asia, the Greeks had turned a ridiculous dispute over a woman into an unforgivable violation of the symbolic boundary separating the Greek (and European) from the Persian (and Asian) worlds; the Persians regarding Asia as inherently their domain. <br />
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Or, as Herodotus’ puts it:<br />
</b></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>
‘The Asiatics, when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam. Henceforth they [the Persians] ever looked upon the Greeks as their open enemies. For Asia, with all the various tribes of barbarians that inhabit it, is regarded by the Persians as their own; but Europe and the Greek race they look on as distinct and separate.’</b></span></blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131350423957068204.post-3183167195209876652021-09-29T20:39:00.002+01:002021-09-29T20:45:27.739+01:00Franco-Hellenic defence pact: rectifying a 100-year-old strategic mistake <p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVH930Et9ZAIRQX-Gh5HVNI3_wH-1VL8fRb3Sk4mef1dnmZabUgLf87dM6wlNSl2mdTSEM-gQmBZOXhHvB8GXn__l2GyrEF1cgxeKHEzZ3Zo4q-moxkGri6r9mgSYQYRTE4f1P7MegZ24/s900/macron-mitsotakis-paris-sept21-credit-pm-press-office.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="900" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVH930Et9ZAIRQX-Gh5HVNI3_wH-1VL8fRb3Sk4mef1dnmZabUgLf87dM6wlNSl2mdTSEM-gQmBZOXhHvB8GXn__l2GyrEF1cgxeKHEzZ3Zo4q-moxkGri6r9mgSYQYRTE4f1P7MegZ24/w400-h266/macron-mitsotakis-paris-sept21-credit-pm-press-office.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">France, smarting from being snubbed and humiliated by the signing of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS" target="_blank">the AUKUS pact,</a> which dealt a $66bn blow to France’s defence industries and undermined French ambitions in the Indo-Pacific theatre, showed its geo-strategic aspirations in the Eastern Mediterranean this week with the signing of a wide-ranging defence deal with Greece.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">The deal complements the agreement inked earlier this year for Greece to buy 24 French-made Dessault Rafale fighter jets and envisages not only the sale of three Belharra FDI-type frigates to Greece – with the option of a fourth – but also amounts to a mutual assistance pact, with both countries pledging to come to each other’s aid in the event of attack by a third country.</span></b></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><b>‘The Parties shall provide each other with assistance and contribution, with all appropriate means at their disposal, and if necessary by the use of armed force, if they jointly find that an armed attack is taking place against the territory of one of the two, in accordance with Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.’</b></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b><b>The agreement is aimed at curtailing Turkish ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean. Turkey’s Blue Homeland doctrine explicitly challenges Greek sovereignty and imagines Turkish hegemony in the Aegean and expanded sway in the Levant, which France with its long-term interests there, considers its sphere of influence.</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b><b>Both France and Greece touted the deal as a sign of growing European defence autonomy and co-operation – a step towards an EU defence union; though it’s hard to claim this while other significant European countries, such as Spain, Italy and particularly Germany – with deep economic, defence and geo-strategic ties to Ankara – have repeatedly sided with Turkey as Greece (and Cyprus) brought Turkey’s aggressive threats to Greek sovereignty to the EU level in anticipation of solidarity (and sanctions) only to receive the coldest of shoulders.</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b><b>Still, the deal does indicate how both Greece and France regard NATO as increasingly unreliable. The 70-year-old military alliance is being narrowly used by the USA to confront Russia – which countries such as Greece and France do not regard as a significant threat; while Greece has also found it increasingly deficient in curtailing the persistent belligerence it faces from Turkey, also a NATO member. </b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b><b>Ironically, the Franco-Hellenic deal comes 100 years after France, having initially given reluctant approval to the Treaty of Sevres (1920), which allowed for Greece to liberate Ionia and Eastern Thrace from the collapsing Ottoman empire, ended up supporting Turkish nationalists as they sought to prevent the division of Anatolia between Greece, Armenia, Italy and France.</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b><b>France always jealous and suspicious of British imperial ambitions in the Near East, and concerned that Greece, under the patronage of Britain, would emerge as too powerful in the Eastern Mediterranean, having first handed over Cilicia to the Turks – along with all the weaponry the French army had been using to control the area – decided, in a series of cynical and treacherous moves, to abandon altogether the Allied cause in Turkey.</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b><b>French diplomatic support and the provision of materiel to the Turks proved fatal for Greek hopes in Ionia and Eastern Thrace and has crystalised, 100 years later, with the re-emergence of vaulting Turkish ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean. In these circumstances, the French are now backing the Greek horse, showing how it can often take decades for faulty strategic decisions to come back to haunt you.</b></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com