4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?


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 (taksim).

 

4. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 1: Hammer or Anvil?

The kingdom has from all time had a variety of masters.
It would be tedious to relate all its vicissitudes.
Giralamo Dandini (Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a History of Cyprus, 1596)
 
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.

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. 

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. 

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.  

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. 

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. 

Cyprus and Enosis
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. 

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.


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.


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: 
 
‘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.’

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.’


‘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. 

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 Cyprus under British Rule gives an impression of dull-witted administration that is undoubtedly harsher than its gallant and decent author can have intended.

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:

‘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 – an arrangement to which the inhabitants of Cyprus were in no way a party – there was any justification for the British government making this payment a charge on the island revenues.’[italics mine] 

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.

 
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, Orientations, 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.’ 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.’ 

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 Observer that, ‘Papagos came back and said to me in an outraged voice: “He told me never – not even we shall see!”’
 
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 Ethniki Organosis Kypriou Agoniston: 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Cyprus and Taksim
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. 

‘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.’ 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 Halkin Sesi (Voice of the People) on 17 August 1954 – before the Greek Cypriot revolt against Britain had even begun: 

‘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. 
 
‘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.’ 

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 Five Minutes to Midnight 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. 

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.
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:
 
‘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.’ 

In a letter to me dated 10 September 1983, Woodhouse wrote: 

“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.’

In an interview with the Turkish daily paper Tercuman, 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: 
 
‘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.’

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. 

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. 

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. 

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, Full Circle, 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.’ 

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.’ 

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 Daily Mail. 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. 

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. 

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. 

‘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. 

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 political 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 Years of Upheaval, 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. 

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 A Start in Freedom: 

‘I knew of course that the Turks, who were to be approached first, 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. They were in fact being given an absolute veto on long-term policy.’ [italics mine] 

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.’ 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 
 
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. 

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. 

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. 
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