Cyprus hostage to history book pdf free download

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Northern Cyprus Economy Competitiveness Report — Nicosia: Turkish Cypriot Chamber of Commerce. Google Scholar. Drousiotis, Makarios. Nicosia: Alfadi Publications. Gokcekus, O. North Cyprus Corruption Perception Report — Auden's acid lines on the partition of India are truer to the case:. Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission.

Between two peoples fanatically at odds, With their different diets and incompatible gods. The poem ends with the administrator's return to the colonial metropole, 'where he quickly forged the case, as a good lawyer must. 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.

Washington, D. Since , 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. Only in one case has a member of either post-war bloc succeeded in redrawing the map. Turkey, by its invasion of Cyprus in and its subsequent occupation of the northern third of the island, has finally if not legally or morally created a new political entity.

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 brought 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 ' Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem apellant' - 'They make a desert, and they call it peace. The Turkish part is the shaded area in the north of the island Below: the partition line as established by the Turkish army in 1 These two pseudo-realist interpretations have to compete in popularity with a third, which might be called the liberal or bien-pensant view.

It is most pithily summarized by Ms Nancy Crawshaw, at the conclusion of her voluminous but not exhaustive book The Cyprus Revolt. Ms Crawshaw, who reported Cyprus for the Guardian in the s and s, 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 enosis: in terms of human suffering the cost to both communities was beyond calculation. We are all it goes without saying sorry for the victim. But it is, we very much regret to say, the victim's fault. 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.

The argument of this book is that the Turkish invasion was not '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.

The economy of Cyprus, with its distribution of water resources and agriculture, makes partition an absurdity. 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 necessitated 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. If one were to attempt a series of conjectures on Cyprus, they might read something like this: 1. Cyprus is, by population and by heritage, overwhelmingly Greek. But it has never been part of Greece.

Cyprus has a Turkish minority, but was ruled by Turkey for three centuries. The distance between Cyprus and Greece is more than ten times the distance between Cyprus and Turkey. Cyprus is the involuntary host to three NATO armies, none of which has been sufficient to protect it from aggression. The Cypriots are the only Europeans to have undergone colonial rule, guerrilla war, civil war and modern technological war, on their own soil, since Cyprus is the last real test of British post-imperial policy; a test that has so far resulted in a succession of failures.

Cyprus was the site, and the occasion, of perhaps the greatest failure of American foreign policy in post-war Europe.

Cyprus was critical in the alternation of military and democratic rule in both Greece and Turkey. 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. The axis of the. I describe how the policies of four countries - Britain, Greece, Turkey and the United States - contributed to the catastrophe.

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.

In almost a decade of engagement with Cyprus, both as a country and as a 'problem', I have incurred a lifetime of debt. My thanks are due to the late, first President of the Republic, His Beatitude Archbishop Makarios III, and to the Turkish Cypriot leader Mr Rauf Denktash, for their hospitality and for the generosity with which they gave up their time to my questioning.

Cyprus is fortunate in having an outspoken press and many talented commentators, enthusiasts and authorities. Polyvios Polyviou is a lawyer's lawyer. Stella Soulioti is a scholar's scholar.

The difficult political conditions in today's Turkey make it necessary to thank many others without giving their names. In London, where much of the institutional memory of the Cyprus question is still to be found, I benefited from the experience of Lord Caradon, Sir David Hunt, the Hon.

In Washington D. Iatrides, Theodore Couloumbis and John Koumoulides. Nicholas X. Rizopoulos, an exacting critic and the director of the Lehrman Institute in New York City, was kind enough to make me an associate of the institute and to include me in several round tables where I could test the ideas of this book against superior firepower.

Seymour Hersh gave me encouragement and guidance. Kenneth Egan, of the Hellenic American Development Alliance, was an unfailing friend and guided my faltering steps through modern technology. Demetracopoulos, whose encyclo- 1 nedic knowledge of Greece, of Capitol Hill and of other areas. For reasons which I am afraid that n :nc book makes all too clear, few official Americans to whom I -po e were willing to be quoted. It is conventional to say that none of the above-mentioned bears any responsibility for what follows.

Errors and omissions are mine alone. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera. 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. 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 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 arc their old homes and villages , and the charm of the sunset is dissolved i nto an impression of claustrophobia.

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 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 U nited 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 murde red by the Greek j unta in its effort to annex the island in Proceed i n the same direction and you come eventually to the Lcdra Palace Hotel, once counted among the most spacious and graceful i n the Levant.

Its battered but still splendid shape n o w houses the soldiers of the United Nations: Swedes, Quebecois, Finns, Austrians. 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.

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. 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 tow n , however far from that line , which docs not pay an indemnity to it with improvised refugee housing, and with memories. 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?

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. 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.

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. 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 G reek word katestrepse in its passive verbal form - as i n , 'then he ruined me' or 'then they ruined me again'.

Ever since, I have avoided that stale j ournalistic usage , 'the rape of Cyprus'. 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 events, and that is a horrifying number out of a total population of less than , 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 tics , the length of the sentence would be unimaginably long. The inju ries done to Cyprus are rendered more poignant or, according to some Anglo-American sources , less so by the fact that it is a n outwardly modern and European society.

Its efficiency , its canny use of tourist resources and its good communications give it a special standing i n the Levant. English is a lingua franca. 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 B ritish a n d 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 But that is for a later chapter.

Conversation with Greek Cypriots , any one in three of w ho m may turn out to be a refugee in his own country , takes on a n even more sombre note when they ask , 'And have you visited the other side? The Tree of Idleness' cafe , beloved of Lawrence D u rrell in Bellapaix, is now re-established by its old owner on a hill overlooking Nicosia.

Official road signs still give the direction and mileage of these lost locations. As I sai d , those roads do not lead anywhere. 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 bet! To cross the line is to enter a looking-glass world.

The 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 un mistakably Anatolian.

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. Again , the visitor can be spared much of this. A v1s1t 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 i n numerous ways that they might b e happier elsewhere.

Certainly they were made to feel unhappy where they were. They n eeded permission to visit the town , to till their fields, to post l etters 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 fri e nd brought them photographs of the village , which they had not seen for several years, since the 'population exchange' of 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 dow n.

We eventually had to leave , because of the curfew that fal ls along the border j ust 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. 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 dies irae of 1 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'. 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.

Especially during the Cold War, the Community the name of the EU before was obliged to be careful in order not to push Turkey away from Europe or the West in general, which would have undesirable consequences.

The December opinion of the European Commission on the Turkish application stated resolutely that the evaluation of the political aspects of the application would be incomplete if it did not take into account the negative effects of the disagreements between Turkey and Greece and also the situation in Cyprus. Therefore, although Turkey desired to keep the resolution of the Cyprus issue separate from the question of its accession to the EU, the road towards the amelioration of Turkish-EU relations passed via Athens and Nicosia Suvarierol, In the minds of many Turks, Greece was the only obstacle to the accession of their country into the Com- munity although Turkey was not eligible yet for the membership during the s and s Georgiades, These attitudes of the European leaders as a whole caused alienation of the Turkish citizens from the process of EU negotiations and gave them the impression that they will never be a part of the EU.

Thus, there is no need for compromise in the Cyprus issue. The Cyprus issue and accession of Turkey to the EU were discussed more than ever when the Republic of Cyprus applied for full membership to the EU in the name of the whole island.

According to Helsinki summit decisions in December , the resolution of the Cyprus issue was a precondition for neither Cyprus nor Turkey to access the EU.

Nev- ertheless, Ankara was still expected to play an active role in bringing about a settlement in Cyprus as all concerned parties perceive it as having a key part in achieving the resolution of this imbroglio. The Greek membership was already a handicap for Turkey in the negotiations and a new obstacle would make things worse. Therefore, Turkey tried to convince the inter- national community that the application was against the international law principles on the basis of Article and 8 of the constitution of the Republic of Cyprus.

Article was to prevent any possibility of giving Turkey or Greece a more favorable economic position on the island, which would amount to an economic enosis and Article 8, was to underline that the Republic of Cyprus cannot be a member of an international organization unless both Turkey and Greece are a member of it too. International law expert Maurice H. Mendelson concluded that Greek Cypriot administration had no right to apply for a membership to the EU nor could it become a member as long as Turkey remained outside of the EU Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Therefore, the efforts of the Turkish government came to nothing.

It was also obvious that Turkey was not obeying the rules of the European Court of Human Rights either by not respecting the property rights of the Greek Cypriots in the Northern part. Prior to the Helsinki summit, the EU strategy was to pressure Turkey by highlighting that Turkish-EU relations could be improved if, among other conditions,Turkey contributed to a resolution of the Cyprus question that would reunite the island and lead to the accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the EU.

However, this policy made Turkey feel alienated by the EU, therefore complicating matters further in Cyprus. However, Turkish politicians were wary about including the Cyprus issue in their EU accession process due to the domestic political concerns.

Nonetheless, the policy of the EU towards the Cyprus issue did not change much even after the Helsinki summit. Although Turkey was opposed to the membership of the Repub- lic of Cyprus without any settlement solution, in the President of the European Com- mission, Romano Prodi, made it clear in his visit to the Republic of Cyprus that they would be among the first wave of EU members irrespective of a political settlement. As a result of all these decisions, the EU increasingly became an actor in the Cyprus dispute.

It became an actor which was characterized as potentially being able to catalyze a peaceful solution on the island but not for benefits of Turkey.

It was predicted that whether or not it was unified, the Republic of Cyprus eventually would become a member of the EU because any other option would endanger the entire enlargement project. Greece repeated its threat of vetoing the accession of Central and East- ern European states in the event that Cyprus was excluded from the first wave of enlarge- ment Suvarierol, Greece also always referred to the EU as a community of values, which means a candidate country could become a member only if it fulfills these value requirements.

The exclusion of the Republic of Cyprus, therefore, could not be accepted just because of the settling issue on the island. The Republic of Cyprus had fulfilled the values that the EU required and anything else should not have mattered. The Cyprus Review 18 2 : 75— Richter, Heinz. British Intervention in Greece. London: Merlin Press. Trimikliniotis, Nikos, and Umut Bozkurt eds.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Panicos Demetriades 1 Email author 1. University of Leicester Leicester UK. Personalised recommendations.