A Way Out in Cyprus
ALAN, RAY
THE CHRONIC REVOLT A Way Out in Cyprus By Ray Alan Nicosia As the battle for Cyprus is transferred once more from back alley to conference room, the guilty men are again assuming...
...Relations between the OrthodoxChristian Greeks and the SunniMoslem Turks were certainly no worse than those between, say, British Protestants and Irish Catholics in a city like Liverpool...
...Dodecanese Christians could be given the option of moving to Cyprus or to other Greek islands...
...The Turkish government, blunt and soldierly, says simply: "We can't stand by and let the Cypriot Turks be massacred...
...Since there is a limit to the amount of theological reasoning the average voter can digest, political argument inevitably creeps in...
...But the Greek and Turkish Cypriote are closely integrated, and no natural partition line exists...
...By January 1956...
...As the power that usually has to carry out the repairs, as well as pay the bill, whenever anything goes wrong inside NATO, the United States has a material as well as a moral vested interest in exerting its influence now in favor of a durable settlement...
...As for the Turks of Cyprus, they are mostly descendants of Turkish soldiers and officials who settled on the island when it was part of the Ottoman empire...
...Partition is the only solution...
...Rather gratefully, at first, Whitehall cut Turkey into the game...
...As recently as 11 or 12 years ago they took little overt interest in the Anglo-Greek argument over Enosis...
...In 1949 he was elected archbishop, and two years later he invited a retired colonel of the Greek Army, Cyprus-born George Grivas, to form a Christian youth movement...
...He and his friends spurned the offer of a constitution as an AngloCommunist plot to separate the Cypriots forever from their Greek mother...
...Archbishop Makarios is immensely effective as the priestly victim of injustice, the harassed President of a tiny republic saddled by brutal outsiders with an unworkable constitution...
...As was inevitable...
...and the small Turkish minority was to be outrageously over-represented in parliament, the civil service and the Army...
...It was under the cover of Grivas' Christian Youth Union that the "elite" killers and saboteurs of EOKA—the Cyprus underground army—were recruited and trained...
...Bishops are elected by popular vote in Cyprus, and from their ranks a further ballot selects the archbishop...
...Turkish policemen greatly outnumbered Greek...
...EOKA killed a Turkish cop and the Turks stormed through the streets of Nicosia beating up every Greek in sight...
...British or French settlers in former colonial territories in Africa...
...The British Labor government's constitutional offer would not have cleared the way immediately for Enosis, but, step by step, self-determination would have come, and an independent Cyprus would ultimately have been free to make its own arrangements...
...Makarios...
...For the Turkish government, like so many Near Eastern governments before it, had discovered the value of xenophobic nationalism as a means of diverting economic and political discontent...
...Antagonism between the two communities flared up dangerously when the British administration, in response to EOKA terrorism, began recruiting large numbers of Turkish special police...
...A Turkish-Cypriot notable...
...Britain's long-standing friendship with Greece, even the self-respect of the government's defense advisers —for the Tories' need to retain Cyprus was explained to the world as a strategic necessity, despite the island's extreme vulnerability and the fact that no sane general would consent to bottle up important forces there...
...But the Turkish government's appetite grew with feeding: before long it was exercising a virtual veto over Cyprus affairs and even advocating the partition of the little island...
...THE CHRONIC REVOLT A Way Out in Cyprus By Ray Alan Nicosia As the battle for Cyprus is transferred once more from back alley to conference room, the guilty men are again assuming their virtuous Sunday-morning expressions—and preparing to sow another crop of dragons' teeth...
...Kuchuk...
...Conservative protosaurs had only recently become reconciled to the "loss" of India and were rattling their scales in protest against the "scuttle" from Egypt...
...Its concern is understandable...
...Early reports from the conference now being held in London, however, indicate that the attempt is being made...
...Kuchuk suddenly found himself an international figure...
...Nothing could be more irresponsible than to try to shore up the sagging status quo...
...To appease their frustrated nationalism...
...The five main towns were to have separate Greek and Turkish municipalities...
...Recrimination about the past, Winston Churchill once said, is a useful means of enforcing effective action in the present...
...If, as one must reluctantly conclude, the extremists in both camps have by now been so successful that some form of apartheid is inevitable, it would be cheaper and more sensible to resettle the Turks of Cyprus on the Turkish mainland or in the Dodecanese...
...The Conservative government, which in due course succeeded Labor in Whitehall, seemed to consider the Cyprus problem neither a national nor an international issue but simply an exercise in the internal politics of the Tory party...
...The Cypriots might then be allowed to pass under Greek rule...
...Unfortunately, rational discussion of the British offer was made difficult by electoral ferment within the Cyprus Church, an autocephalous branch of the Greek Orthodox Church...
...Bigger population transfers have occurred between Greece and Turkey in the past...
...then Bishop of Kitium, emerged as a demagogic spellbinder committed to an Enosis-or-nothing line...
...massacre is a subject the Turks know something about...
...Archbishop Makarios first distinguished himself politically by campaigning against the constitution offered Cyprus by the British Labor government in the late 1940s...
...The operation would be expensive and replete with human misery...
...Partition can only be implemented by uprooting nearly a quarter of the island's population—Turks into the proposed Turkish enclave, and Greeks out...
...The Cyprus constitution is dead," says Dr...
...The Turks were not then eager to make trouble over the island: They were far too worried about Stalin's aggressive demands for territorial concessions, and concerned to secure Western support...
...Fazil Kuchuk, began publishing manifestoes declaring that under Greek rule his people would be "first oppressed, then exterminated...
...In those days, the Greek-speaking Cypriots—who make up 80 per cent of the total population, which was 450,000 in 1946, and 580.000 in 1960— were more or less equally divided into a Right-wing Church party which advocated immediate Union with Greece (Enosis) and a Communist-led Left-wing movement which was conspicuously unenthusiastic about Enosis (the Greek regime was then at war with its own Leftists...
...The only possible outcome would be a fresh explosion of violence within a year or two, followed in all probability by clashes between the Greek and Turkish armed forces...
...When, as a result of the Zurich and London agreements of 1959, Cyprus at last won independence— but not self-determination—it found itself, as a result of Turkish pressure, afflicted with a constitution out of Alice in Wonderland...
...So long as their basic rights are respected, they have no better claim to extravagant constitutional privileges than, say...
...This was nonsense, of course—the Turks of Greek Thrace have for years enjoyed a greater degree of civil liberty than the Turks of Turkey—but an ability to talk nonsense plausibly is a political asset in other countries besides Cyprus...
...Let us, to this end, recriminate awhile...
...The Turks are again lobbying for partition...
...The real alternative to a permanent settlement of the Cyprus problem on these lines is neither the status quo nor partition...
...It would scar the Near East with yet another artificial Palestine-type frontier—a perennial source of friction and bloodshed...
...The Turkish Prime Minister, the late Adnan Menderes, permitted (some responsible sources say "inspired") ugly anti-Christian riots and murders in Istanbul and subsidized a "Cyprusis-Turkish" movement...
...Whitehall had ordered Cyprus authorities to prepare the evacuation of certain sensitive installations...
...is back at the old stand, purveying Pax britannica by the (armored) carload...
...Sir Anthony Eden's government announced that Cyprus could "never" be granted self-determination...
...During the war scare touched off by Stalin's Berlin blockade...
...The British Conservative government—smiling sadly, turning the other cheek, and loudly abstaining from asking "What did we tell you...
...All was to be sacrificed on the altar of Conservative unity: the basic human rights of the Cypriots...
...To his own amazement...
...Typical of this whole approach was Eden's expulsion of Archbishop Makarios, as a sop to apoplectic Tories, after King Hussein of Jordan expelled the British General Glubb...
...It is— whatever face-saving temporary arrangement may be made—a sullen quarrel, of volcanic uncertainty, between NATO's two Eastern Mediterranean members, with an eruption of violence whenever a Greek or Turkish government has a domestic crisis to run away from...
...Greece would almost certainly be willing to cede to Turkey three or four of (from a Turkish viewpoint) the more awkwardlysituated Dodecanese islands as the price of Enosis...
...It is no longer possible for the Turkish community to live side by side with the Greeks...
Vol. 47 • January 1964 • No. 2
