72. Among others, from myself: see ‘Italy in the Present Tense: A Roundtable Discussion with Paul Ginsborg’, Modern Italy, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000, pp. 180ff.
73. For the flavour of this event, see the full set of speeches and reactions in the special issue of Micromega, entitled Il regime non passerà! Piazza Navona, 8 luglio 2008.
III. THE EASTERN QUESTION
CYPRUS
2007
Enlargement, widely regarded as the greatest single achievement of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn, amid the bouquets it regularly hands itself, in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU’s new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its establishment, that neither fits the uplifting narrative of deliverance of the captive nations from communism, nor furthers the strategic aims of Union diplomacy, indeed impedes them. Cyprus is, in truth, an anomaly in the new Europe. Not, however, for reasons Brussels cares to dwell upon. For this is a member-state of the EU a large part of which is under long-standing occupation by a foreign army. Behind tanks and artillery, a population of settlers has been planted relatively more numerous than those on the West Bank, without a flicker of protest from the Council or Commission. From its territory are further subtracted—not leased, but held in eminent domain—military enclaves three times the size of Guantánamo, under the control of a fellow-member of the EU, the United Kingdom.
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The origins of this situation date back over a century, to the era of High Victorian imperialism. In 1878 the island was acquired by Britain from the Ottoman Empire, as a side-payment for Turkish recovery of three Armenian provinces, ceded to Russia, and restored thanks to Disraeli at the Conference of Berlin. Coveted as a naval platform for British power in the Middle East, the new colony had from antiquity been Greek in population and culture, with a Turkish minority introduced after Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century. But in the nineteenth century, distant four hundred miles from Greece, it remained relatively unaffected by the national awakening that produced, first, Greek independence itself, then successive risings against Ottoman rule in Crete and its union with Greece before the First World War. In Cyprus, unrest did not materialize for another half century. Eventually, in 1931 desire for an equivalent Enosis boiled over in a spontaneous island-wide rebellion against British rule that left Government House in flames, and required the descent of bombers, cruisers and marines to quell.1 Thereafter, Britain’s response to this outbreak of feeling was unique in the annals of the empire: a colonial regime that ruled by decree until the day the flag was formally hauled down in Nicosia.
It was not until the post-war period, however, that a national movement really crystallized as an organized force on the island, in a strange mixture of times: post-dated in emergence, pre-dated in form. Pan-Hellenism was in many ways, as Tom Nairn pointed out long ago, ‘the original European model of successful nationalist mobilization’, producing in the Greek Wars of independence the first victorious movement of national liberation after the Congress of Vienna. Yet, he went on, ‘the very priority of Greek nationalism . . . imposed a certain characteristic penalty on it’, conferring on Pan-Hellenic ideology increasingly ‘anachronistic and out-dated’ features by the twentieth century. But it was still quite powerful enough to capture the expression of popular revolt on the island after the Second World War. Once they awoke politically, the mass of the population ‘found the fully-fledged, hypnotic dream of Greek nationalism already there, beckoning to them. It was inevitable that they should answer that call to the heirs of Byzantium, rather than attempt to cultivate a patriotism of their own’.2 Union, not independence, was the natural goal of this self-determination.
Such Hellenism was not, however, an archaic import, out of season in a society that had moved beyond its conditions of origin. Its appeal was irresistible also because it found so powerful a sounding-board in an indigenous institution that was much older than romantic nineteenth-century nationalism. The Orthodox Church in Cyprus was without equivalent on any other Greek island. Autocephalous since the fifth century, its archbishop was equal in rank to the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria or Antioch, and under the Ottomans had always been the acknowledged head of the Greek community. Since the British had made no attempt to offer education on the island—to the end, they ensured it had no university—the school system remained under the control of the Church. Clerical leadership of the national movement, with its inevitable freight of religious conservatism in moral and political life, was thus all but guaranteed in advance.
Not that the hegemony of the Church was complete. From the twenties onwards a strong local Communist movement developed, that was regarded by London as much more dangerous. Mindful of overwhelming majority aspirations, AKEL—as the Cypriot CP was now called—too campaigned for union with Greece when the war came to an end.3 In 1945, it had every reason to do so, since the Communist resistance in Greece had been by far the leading force in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, in a strong position to take power once the country was cleared of it. To avert this danger, military intervention by Britain—on a scale exceeding later Soviet actions in Hungary—installed a conservative regime, complete with the discredited Greek monarchy. The result was a bitter civil war, in which the Left was crushed only after Britain and America, playing the role of Italy and Germany in Spain, weighed into the conflict to ensure the victory of the Right.
So long as the outcome in Greece was in the balance, AKEL could continue to support Enosis without undue strain, at least outwardly. Indeed, in November 1949—a month after the final defeat of the Democratic Army on the mainland—it fired what became the starting-pistol of national liberation in Cyprus, by calling on the United Nations to organize a referendum on ‘the right of self-determination, which means union of Cyprus with Greece’. But this was to be its last moment in the van of the movement. In January 1950, moving swiftly to pre-empt this initiative, the Ethnarchy organized its own plebiscite, held in churches across the island, to which AKEL rallied. The result left little doubt about popular sentiment: 96 per cent of Greek Cypriots—that is, 80 per cent of the population of the island—voted for Enosis.
The Labour government in London, naturally, ignored this expression of the democratic will, its local functionaries dismissing it as ‘meaningless’. But in the shepherd of the referendum, it had met with more than it reckoned. Five months later, Michael Mouskos was elected head of the Church, at the age of thirty-seven, as Archbishop Makarios III. Son of a goatherd, he had gone from a seminary in Cyprus to university in Athens and post-graduate studies in Boston, when he was suddenly recalled to the see of Kitium, and put in charge of the political hub of the Ethnarchy, where he rapidly showed his rhetorical and tactical gifts. The referendum had demonstrated a general will. Over the next four years, Makarios set about organizing it. Conservative peasant associations, right-wing trade-unions and a popular youth organization were built into a powerful mass base for the national struggle, directly under the aegis of the Church. Mobilization at home was accompanied by pressure abroad, in the first place on Athens to take up the issue of self-determination in Cyprus at the UN, but also—departing from the traditions of the Church—rallying support from Arab countries in the region.
None of this made any impression on London. For Britain, Cyprus was a Mediterranean stronghold it had not the slightest intention of relinquishing. Indeed, upgrading its strategic role as soon as British garrisons in the Canal Zone were judged insufficiently secure, the High Command in the Middle East was transferred to the island in 1953. A year later, the colonial secretary—now Conservative—told the Commons that possessions like Cyprus could never expect self-determination. Nor, since London refused to allow any legislative assembly in which the four-fifths of the population in favour of Enosis would enjoy a majority, was there a question even of self-government. The outlook a
t Whitehall remained: we hold what we have. If public justification were needed, Eden would provide one that was crude enough: ‘No Cyprus, no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil, unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as simple as that’.4 Title to the island could dispense with normal sophistries: it was not arguable, a straightforward matter of force majeure.
Faced with an open assertion of indefinite colonial rule, pruned of even constitutional fig leaves, the national cause in Cyprus was inevitably driven to arms. These could be secured from only one source, the mainland. In Athens, a regime of the authoritarian Right was now in power, presiding over a system of vindictive discrimination and persecution that would last another thirty years. When the Church turned for support to Greece, what it found there could only be of one political complexion.5 After four years of trying in vain to arouse international opinion to bring pressure to bear on Britain, in early 1954 Makarios met secretly with a retired colonel of the Greek army, George Grivas, to plan a guerrilla campaign to liberate the island.
Even by the standards of the Greek Right, not fastidious in its choice of men or means, Grivas was a nervi on the extreme wing of counter-revolution. A veteran of the disastrous Greek thrust into Anatolia after the First World War, he had sat out the German occupation during the Second World War, and then, with assistance from the departing Wehrmacht, organized death squads against the Left, before the British landed. But though it was decades since he had been on the island, he came from Cyprus and was committed to Pan-Hellenism in its most blinkered versions. Informally, he was in touch with the Greek General Staff. The Papagos government, newly admitted to NATO, was careful to keep him at arm’s length, but looked the other way as he acquired weapons and logistics for a landing in Cyprus, where he arrived late in 1954.
On 1 April 1955, Grivas set off his first explosives on the island. Over the next four years, his ‘National Organization of Cypriot Fighters’—EOKA—waged a guerrilla war of lethal efficacy, which London never succeeded in stamping out. By the end, Grivas had pinned down some 28,000 British troops with a force of not much more than two hundred men: a feat made possible—his own gifts as a commander were quite limited—only by the breadth of support the national cause enjoyed among the population. Viewed comparatively, as a purely military performance, the EOKA campaign was perhaps the most successful of all anticolonial resistances in the post-war period.
Politically, its impact was much more ambiguous. Grivas’s virulent anti-communism left no room for AKEL in the armed struggle, in which EOKA repeatedly shot down its militants, even as the British proscribed the party and put its leaders into detention camps. Driven underground, AKEL was forced to the margins of the anti-colonial struggle, finding some political shelter only in extending support to Makarios, who ignored it. The main force of the Cypriot Left, which in normal circumstances would have been a central component of the national liberation movement, was thus effectively deleted from it. More was at stake in this than just the immediate fate of Cypriot Communism. With its trade-unions, AKEL was the only mass organization in the country with roots in both Greek and Turkish communities, integrating activists across ethnic lines.
With its exclusion went any chance of inter-communal solidarity against Government House. Cyprus had given birth to a singularly powerful revolt against Britain, combining guerrillas in the mountains and demonstrations in the streets. Led by a pistoleer and a prelate, there was in its mélange of clericalism and militarism a certain resemblance to Irish nationalism, the only other case where the Empire held a European, rather than Asian or African, people in its grip. In pedigree, Hellenism was older than Fenianism, and its goal differed: union, not separation. But this was another epoch, and in substance the constellation of forces in Cyprus was more modern. Makarios, the uncontested political leader of the struggle for self-determination, belonged to the era of Bandung, where he mingled with such as Nehru, U Thant, Ho Chi Minh, rather than De Valera or the Concordat. Reversing the relations between fighters and preachers in Ireland, his church was the less, not the more, regressive factor in the coalition against England—a difference that as time went on would widen. For its part, however ruthlessly effective it was as a clandestine organization, EOKA could not compete with AKEL above ground. The existence of a mass Left that was undislodgeable also set Cyprus apart from Irish experience.
To bring the island to heel, London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state’.6 He was as good as his word. The standard repertoire of repression was applied. Makarios was deported. Demonstrations were banned, schools closed, trade-unions outlawed. Communists were locked up, EOKA suspects hanged. Curfews, raids, beatings, executions were the background against which, a year later, Cyprus supplied the air-deck for the Suez expedition. As one kind of national resistance was being hunted in cellars and hills, another was attacked round the clock from bases a few miles away, British and French aircraft taking off and landing at the rate of one a minute, dropping bombs and paratroops on Egypt.7 Failure to repossess the Canal had no immediate impact on London’s determination to hold on to Cyprus. But with the departure of Eden, British policies began to assume more definitive shape.
From the beginning, colonial rule had used the Turkish minority as a mild counterweight to the Greek majority, without giving it any particular advantages or paying overmuch attention to it. But once demands for Enosis could no longer be ignored, London began to fix its attention on the uses to which the community could be put. It was not large, less than a fifth of the population, but nor was it negligible. Poorer and less educated than the Greek majority, it was also less active. But forty miles across the water lay Turkey itself, not only much larger than Greece, but more unimpeachably conservative, without even a defeated Left in prison or exile. No sooner was the referendum of 1950 on Enosis under way—at the very outset of the troubles in Cyprus—than the British ambassador in Ankara advised the Labour regime in London: ‘The Turkish card is a tricky one, but useful in the pass to which we have come’.8 It would be played, with steadily less scruple or limit, to the end.
Initially, Ankara was slow to respond to British solicitations that it make itself felt on the future of Cyprus. ‘Even when the British did start to press the Cyprus button with the Turks, the effect was not at first to trigger the instantaneous reactions that were hoped for: “curiously vacillating” and “curiously equivocal” were remarks typical of the puzzlement felt on this score in London’, records the leading scholar of the subject, Robert Holland: ‘It remains . . . a notable fact that it was the British who . . . had to screw the Turks up to a pitch of excitement about Cyprus, not the other way round’.9 When the requisite excitement eventually came, London did not flinch from the forms it took. Within a month of EOKA’s appearance in Cyprus, Eden was already minuting that any offer made to tamp down local unrest must have the prior approval of Turkey, which—as the Colonial Office would put it—had to be given ‘a fair crack of the whip’.10
When the whip was cracked, it came steel-tipped. ‘A few riots in Ankara would do us nicely’, had noted an official in the Foreign Office.11 In September 1955, as Cyprus was being discussed in a three-power conference in London, the Turkish secret police planted a bomb at the house where Kemal was born in Salonica. At the signal of this ‘Greek provocation’, mobs swarmed through Istanbul looting Greek businesses, burning Orthodox churches, and attacking Greek residents. Although no one in official circles in London doubted that the pogrom was unleashed by the Menderes government, Macmillan—in charge of the talks—pointedly did not complain.
Internal developments lent a hand to this external lever. Ready enough to kill Communists, Grivas had given EOKA strict instructions not to attack Turks, whom he had no wish
to antagonize, but to target Greek collaborators with the British, above all in the police. Under EOKA pressure, their number rapidly dwindled. To replace them, Harding recruited Turks, and added a Police Mobile Reserve, dipping for the purpose into the lumpen element in the Turkish community, let loose for savagery when the occasion required. In due course, as Holland notes, the whole security machine came to depend, for anything less than large military sweeps, on Turkish auxiliaries. The result was to create a gulf between the two communities of a kind that had never existed before. It widened still further when Ankara, now fully engaged in remote control of the minority, riposted to EOKA by setting up its own armed organization on the island, the TNT—soon killing leftists on its own side—to which the British turned a blind eye.
After Suez, London started to edge towards another way of playing its chosen card, in a larger game. Hints began to be dropped that some kind of partition of Cyprus might be a solution. The Turkish premier Menderes, who had already been promised that Turkey could station troops on the island if Britain were ever forced to concede self-determination, snapped up the suggestion, telling the colonial secretary that ‘we have done this sort of thing before—you will see it is not as bad as all that’:12 words to make any Greek with a memory of 1922–3 tremble. Harding disliked the idea, regarding it as underhand, and even within the Foreign Office a fear was eventually expressed that this might arouse ‘unhappy memories of the Sudetenland’. Nor were US officials at all pleased when the scheme was intimated to Washington, where it was condemned as a ‘forcible vivisection’ of the island. If the objective in London was to keep control of Cyprus by splitting it in two under British suzerainty, the American fear was that this would arouse such anger in Greece that it risked toppling a loyal regime, handing power to the subversive forces still lurking in the country. In Britain, such concerns counted for less. Our man in Ankara, urging the need to ‘cut the Gordian knot and reach a decision now for partition’, had greater weight.13
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