This piece is in response to a small twitter exchange with the eminent historian of India William Dalrymple, 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.
On further study, this is not quite right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
‘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.’
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.’
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.
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.
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.
For Greece and Greek Cypriots, Radcliffe’s diarchy proposals were the same old British colonialist hypocrisy – Time 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.
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.
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’.
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.
In her book Fettered Independence: Cyprus 1878-1964, 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.
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’.
Meanwhile, Nancy Crawshaw, in her book, The Cyprus Revolt, 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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Martin Packard says in his book, Getting it Wrong: Fragments from a Cyprus Diary 1964, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Christopher Hitchens says such a loss of memory in Cyprus’ case would be unforgivable.
‘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).’
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 Nakba as well as the Partition of India.
Thus, the Nakba (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).
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).
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.
British-inspired, Turkish-imposed partition had a devastating effect on Cyprus, equivalent to the Nakba 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.
Bibliography
1. Crawshaw, Nancy: The Cyprus Revolt
2. Hitchens, Christopher: Cyprus: Hostage to History
3. Holland, Robert: Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus
4. Novo, Andrew: The EOKA Cause
5. Packard, Martin: Getting it Wrong
6. Soulioti, Stella: Cyprus: Fettered Independence
7. Time: Cyprus: Proposed Constitution
