The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  This was Grivas’s last campaign. In January 1974 he died underground, and control of actions against Makarios passed back directly to the junta in Athens, now under still more violent leadership. The paroxysm came quickly. In early July, Makarios addressed a public letter to the junta’s nominal president, detailing its successive plots against him. In it, he denounced the regime in Athens as a dictatorship that was fomenting civil war in Cyprus, and demanded the withdrawal of its officers from the National Guard, as a threat to the elected government. Two weeks later, tanks of the National Guard attacked the presidential palace, where—the scene could not have been more suggestive of the gulf between the forces in play—Makarios was receiving some Greek schoolchildren from Cairo. Bombardment began as a little girl was reciting a speech to him. Guards held off the assault long enough for Makarios to escape down a gully at the back of the building, before it went up in flames. On reaching a UN contingent in Paphos, he was airlifted to the British base in Akrotiri and out of the country to Malta.

  Resistance to the coup was crushed within a few days. So completely controlled was it from Athens that the junta had not even prepared a local collaborator to front it, fetching about vainly among different candidates after the event, before eventually resorting to Nikos Sampson, a swaggering gunslinger from EOKA-B with a reputation for reckless brutality dating back to the colonial period. Hastily put together, his regime concentrated on rounding up leftists and loyalists to Makarios in the Greek community, leaving the Turks, who had every reason to fear him, strictly alone. But the coup was undoubtedly a breach of the Treaty of Guarantee, and within forty-eight hours the Turkish premier Ecevit was at the door of Downing Street, flanked by ministers and generals, demanding that Britain join Turkey in taking immediate action to reverse it.

  The meeting that ensued settled the fate of the island. It was a talk among social democrats, Wilson, Callaghan and Ecevit, fellow-members of the Socialist International. Although Britain had not only a core of well-equipped troops, but overwhelming airpower on the island—fighter-bombers capable of shattering forces far more formidable than Sampson and his minders—Wilson and Callaghan refused to lift a finger. The next day, Turkey readied a naval landing. Britain, which could have removed Sampson without difficulty, singly or jointly, had warships off the coast, and could have deterred a unilateral Turkish invasion with equal ease. Again, London did nothing.

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  The result was the catastrophe that shapes Cyprus to this day. In complete command of the skies, Turkish forces seized a bridgehead at Kyrenia, and dropped paratroops further inland. Within three days, the junta had collapsed in Greece and Sampson had quit. After a few weeks’ cease-fire, during which Turkey made clear it had no interest in the Treaty whose violation had been the technical grounds for its invasion, but wanted partition forthwith, its generals unleashed an all-out blitz—tanks, jets, artillery, and warships—on the now restored legal government of Cyprus. In less than seventy-two hours, Turkey seized two-fifths of the island, including its most fertile region, up to a pre-determined ‘Attila Line’ running from Morphou Bay to Famagusta. With occupation came ethnic cleansing. Some 180,000 Cypriots—a third of the Greek community—were expelled from their homes, driven across the Line to the south. About 4,000 lost their lives, another 12,000 were wounded: equivalent to over 300,000 dead and 1,000,000 wounded in Britain. Proportionately as many Turkish Cypriots died too, in reprisals. In due course, some 50,000 made their way in the opposite direction, partly in fear, but principally under pressure from the Turkish regime installed in the north, which needed demographic reinforcements and wanted complete separation of the two communities. Nicosia became a Mediterranean Berlin, divided by barbed wire and barricades, for the duration.

  The brutality of Turkey’s descent on Cyprus, stark enough, was no surprise. On previous occasions, as well as this one, Ankara had repeatedly given advance warning of its intentions. Political responsibility for the disaster lay with those who, rather than preventing, allowed or encouraged it. Primary blame is often put on the United States. There, by the summer of 1974, Nixon was so paralyzed by Watergate—he was driven from office between the first and second Turkish assaults—that American policy was determined by Kissinger alone. Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether the CIA colluded with the junta’s impending coup in Nicosia, and if so, whether its advance knowledge of the putsch was shared with the State Department. What is not in doubt is Kissinger’s view of Makarios, who had paid a lengthy state visit to Moscow in 1971, had imported Czech arms for use against EOKA-B, and under whom Cyprus was one of only four non-Communist countries trading with North Vietnam. Kissinger wanted him out of the way, and with Sampson in place in Nicosia, blocked any condemnation of the coup in the Security Council. Once Ankara had delivered its ultimatum in London, he then connived at the Turkish invasion, coordinating its advance directly with Ankara.

  But though America’s role in the dismemberment of Cyprus is clear-cut, it is Britain that bears the overwhelming responsibility for it. Wilson and Callaghan, typically, would later attempt to shift the blame to Kissinger, pleading that the UK could do nothing without the US. Then as now, crawling to Washington was certainly an instinctive reflex in Labour—had Heath survived as prime minister, such an excuse would have been unlikely. The reality is that Britain had both the means and the obligation to stop the Turkish assault on Cyprus. After first ensuring Turkish hostility to the Greek majority, it had imposed a Treaty of Guarantee on the island, depriving it of true independence, for its own selfish ends, the retention of large military enclaves at its sovereign disposal. Now, when called upon to abide by the Treaty, it crossed its arms and gave free passage to the modern Attila, claiming that it—a nuclear power—was helpless to do otherwise.

  Two years later, a Commons Select Committee would conclude: ‘Britain had a legal right to intervene, she had a moral obligation to intervene, she had the military capacity to intervene. She did not intervene for reasons which the Government refuses to give’.27 The refusal has since, even by its critics, been too conveniently laid at the American door. In an immediate subjective sense, the trail there is direct enough—Callaghan, in reminiscent mood, would say Kissinger had a ‘charm and warmth I could not resist’.28 But much longer, more objective continuities were of greater significance. Labour, which had started the disasters of Cyprus by denying it any decolonization after 1945, had now completed them, abandoning it to trucidation. London was quite prepared to yield Cyprus to Greece in 1915, in exchange for Greek entry into the war on its side. Had it done so, all subsequent suffering might have been avoided. It is enough to compare the fate of Rhodes, still closer to Turkey and with a comparable Turkish minority, which in 1945 peacefully reverted to Greece, because it was an Italian not a British colony. In the modern history of the Empire, the peculiar malignity of the British record in Cyprus stands apart.

  As for Greece, the performance of its rulers, from the hotel in Zurich to the rubble in Nicosia, was irredeemable. Nor was it finished with the fall of the junta. The generals who brought the junta’s rule to an end turned, predictably, to Karamanlis to restore the order to which they were jointly attached. On resuming power, his first act was to scuttle Cyprus once again, refusing it any assistance as the Turkish army launched its blitzkrieg. As in 1959, so in 1974, the only effective weapon would have been a threat to expel American bases and pull out of NATO if the US did not make the call to Ankara that Johnson had shown it could do, with immediate results. Naturally, concerned with his patrons rather than the people of Cyprus, Karamanlis did nothing of the kind. Nor did the second Papandreou, who succeeded him in the eighties, prove capable of better, other than bluster.

  In what was now the Greek remnant of Cyprus, Sampson had handed over to Glafkos Clerides, head of the House of Representatives and next in line to Makarios. A figure of the Right, Clerides sought to retain power in his own hands by moving in the direction Kissinger and Karamanlis wanted—manoeuvring to ke
ep Makarios from returning to Cyprus, and abandoning the principle of a unitary republic in pursuit of a deal based on a geographical federation with his tougher Turkish opposite number, Rauf Denktash. But the best efforts of Washington and Athens could not sustain him against the passionate loyalty of ordinary Greek Cypriots to Makarios, who returned at the end of the year to an overwhelming popular reception. When elections were held, Clerides—his party embraced diehards from EOKA-B—was routed by an alliance of the Left and loyalists to Makarios.

  But though his presidency was as intact as ever, his room for initiative was limited. Tired and dispirited, under unrelenting external pressure, in 1977 Makarios accepted the idea of a bicommunal federal Republic, if with a strong central government enjoying majority consent, in the hope that the Carter administration might induce Turkey to yield some of its gains. Within a few months he was dead. Carter, far from trying to extract concessions from Turkey, laboured might and main to lift the congressional embargo on arms to it, passed out of public anger—there was no equivalent in Britain—at the invasion of Cyprus. Proud of his success in this aim, Carter would list it as one of the major foreign policy achievements of a presidency devoted to the service of human rights.

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  So matters rested, with the passing of the only European leader at Bandung, a last, anomalous survivor of the age of Sukarno and Zhou Enlai. Thirty years later, what has changed? Cyprus remains cut in two, still sliced along the Attila Line. In that sense, nothing. In other respects, much has altered. In the territory left them—58 per cent of the island—Greek Cypriots built, with the courage and energy that can come from disaster, a flourishing advanced economy. What was still an overwhelmingly agricultural society in the sixties was transformed into one in which modern services comprise over 70 per cent of GDP, as high a proportion as anywhere in Europe. Per capita income in this Cyprus—the Republic whose international recognition at the UN was won by Makarios—is equal to that of Greece, and well above that of Portugal, without benefit of handouts from the EU. Long-term unemployment is lower than anywhere else in Europe save Sweden. Tertiary education is more widespread than in Germany, corruption less than in Spain or Italy. Unionization of the labour force is higher than in Finland or Denmark, inequality lower than in Ireland.29 Governments alternate, parties are represented fairly, elections are free of taint. By OECD standards, prosperous, egalitarian and democratic, this Republic has been a remarkable success.

  The remaining 37 per cent of the island remains under occupation by the Turkish army.30 There, Ankara set up a Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983, ostensibly an independent state, in practice a regime that is an offshoot of the mainland. Local parties and politicians compete for office, and their interests and identities do not always coincide with those dominant at any given time in Turkey. But such autonomy is severely limited, since the local state, which provides the bulk of employment, depends entirely on subsidies from Ankara to cover its costs, and the police are under the direct control of the Turkish army. Development has come mostly from construction, the supply of cheap degrees from over-the-counter colleges, and tourism, catering principally to mainlanders. Average incomes are less than half those on the Greek side of the island. Poverty and crime remain widespread.

  Not all of this is indigenous. Having taken two-fifths of the island, inhabited—after invasion and regroupment—by less than a fifth of the population, Turkey had a huge stock of empty houses and farms on its hands, from which their owners had been expelled. To fill them, it shipped in settlers from the mainland. What proportion of the population these now represent is a matter of dispute, in part because they have since been supplemented by temporary workers, often seasonal, and students from the mainland. Official Turkish figures suggest that no more than 25 to 30 per cent out of a total of some 260,000 persons come from the mainland; Greek estimates put the number—there were just under 120,000 Turks on the island in 1974—at over 50 per cent, given that there has also been substantial emigration. Only scrutiny of birth certificates can resolve the issue. What is not in doubt, however, is that the Turkish army maintains 35,000 soldiers in the zone it has occupied since 1974, a much higher ratio of troops to territory than Israel has ever deployed to protect its settlers in the West Bank.

  If the military division of the island has remained static for thirty years, its diplomatic setting has been transformed. In 1990 Cyprus applied for membership in the European Community. Although its application was accepted three years later in principle, in practice no action was taken on it. In Brussels, the prize was enlargement to Eastern Europe, on which all energies were focussed. Cyprus was viewed as at best a distraction, at worst a troubling liability. Turkey, which had applied to join in 1987, and whose suit had been stalled, was bound to be angered at the prospect of Cyprus achieving membership before itself. For Council and Commission alike, Cyprus was the least welcome of candidates for admission to the Union. Good relations with Ankara were of much greater moment.

  There matters stood until Greece, at last helping rather than harming its compatriots, in late 1994 blocked the customs union which Brussels was offering Turkey, to keep it sweet while its application to join the EU remained on hold. By this time, the second Papandreou was nominally back in office, but in advanced stages of personal and political decay. In the all too brief interval between his quietus and a dreary reversion to dynastic government in Athens—where today indistinguishably conformist offspring of the two ruling families alternate once again—there was momentarily room for some exercise of independence in European councils. The foreign minister of the time, Theodore Pangalos, greatly disliked in Brussels for his refusals to truckle, made it clear that the Greek veto would not be lifted until Cyprus was given a date for the start of negotiations for its accession. In March 1995, a reluctant France, presiding over an EU summit at Cannes, brokered the necessary deal: Cyprus was assured an accession process by 1998, and Turkey was granted its customs union.31

  Amid the fanfare over expansion into Eastern Europe, these events were not conspicuous. But their potential for inconvenience did not escape notice in one capital. No sooner had Britain’s ambassador to the UN retired at the end of the year, than he was asked by the Foreign Office to become the United Kingdom’s special representative on Cyprus. Sir David—now Lord—Hannay, who began his career in Iran and Afghanistan, was Britain’s foremost European diplomat, with some thirty years of involvement in EU affairs behind him. His summons came from Jeremy Greenstock, soon to become famous for his services to Blair as ambassador to the UN and special representative in Iraq. The appointment made clear the importance of the mission. ‘The enlargement of the European Union’, writes Hannay in his memoir Cyprus: The Search for a Solution, explaining his brief, ‘was a major objective of British foreign policy and must in no way be delayed or damaged by developments over Cyprus’, not least since Britain was ‘the European country most favourable to Turkey’s European aspirations’.32

  Still more favourable was the United States. From the early nineties onwards, the EU was looking over its shoulder at Washington, which made it clear that, once Eastern Europe was in the bag, the strategic priority was Turkey. As the deadline for negotiations on Cypriot accession came closer, the Clinton administration sprang into action, with pressure on European governments to admit Turkey that even Hannay found ‘heavyhanded’. But manners aside, Britain and the US were at one on the need to ensure that there be no entry of Cyprus into the EU without a settlement of the island palatable to Turkey beforehand, to forestall any complications in Ankara’s own bid for membership. The simplest solution would have been to block Cypriot membership until Turkey received satisfaction, but this was ruled out by a Greek threat to veto enlargement to the East as a whole if Cyprus was not included. That left only one course open: to fix Cyprus itself. In the summer of 1999, the UK and US got a resolution through the G-8 that pointedly ignored the legal government of the Republic of Cyprus, calling on the UN to superintend talks be
tween Greeks and Turks in the island with a view to a settlement.

  This was then rubber-stamped by the Security Council, formally putting Kofi Annan in charge of the process. Naturally—he owed his appointment to Washington—Annan was, as Hannay puts it, ‘aware of the need for the UN to cooperate as closely as possible with the US and the UK in the forthcoming negotiations’.33 In practice, of course, this meant his normal role as a dummy for Anglo-American ventriloquists. Recording the moment, Hannay never bothers to explain by what right the UK and US arrogated to themselves the position of arbiters of the fate of Cyprus; it went without saying. A UN special representative, in the shape of a dim Peruvian functionary, was chosen to front the operation, but it was Hannay and Tom Weston, special coordinator of the State Department on Cyprus, who called the shots. So closely did the trio work together that Hannay would boast that a cigarette paper could not have been slipped between their positions. In command was, inevitably, Hannay himself, by a long way the most senior, self-confident and experienced of the three. Successive ‘Annan Plans’ for Cyprus which materialized over the next four years were essentially his work, details supplied by an obscure scrivener from the crannies of Swiss diplomacy, Didier Pfirter.