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.
5. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 2: The Axe and the Woods
When the axe came into the woods, the tree said,
’The handle is one of us.’ (Turkish proverb)
’The handle is one of us.’ (Turkish proverb)
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.
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’.
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 Makhi (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Burmaston had surprised the Turkish ship Deniz 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.
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 Cumhurriyet (Republic). 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.
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.
During the civil violence that followed, four crucial things happened – things that go some way to explain the later disasters and miseries of Cyprus:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
1. Most of Cyprus was to be united with Greece in a partial consummation of enosis.
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.
3. The small Greek island of Kastellorizon, off the north coast, was to be ceded to Turkey.
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.
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.
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.
In his memoirs, The Past Has Another Pattern, 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:
‘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. The fact that the Grivas Plan also called for the ouster of Makarios enhanced its attractiveness.
‘These schemes were all upset when Makarios encouraged the Greek Cypriots to attack Turkish Cypriot villages.’ [italics mine]
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.
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.
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.
Read all parts of the serialisation here:
1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.
2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.
3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction.
1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.
2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.
3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction.
