The New Old World (65 page)

For the British, this had always been the worst of all conceivable scenarios. Grivas could be respected, as a staunchly right-wing foe who one day might even make—so Julian Amery thought—a good dictator of Greece. But Makarios, the origin of all their troubles, was anathema to London. Handing the island over to him would be the ultimate defeat. For the Americans, on the other hand, still worried at the possible impact of a too blatant division of Cyprus on a Greek political scene where popular feelings on the issue ran high, independence had for some time been viewed as one way out of a potentially dangerous conflict between allies. But it would have to be tightly controlled. When the UN met to debate Cyprus three months later, the US ensured that a Greek resolution calling for self-determination of the island was once again scuppered—this time thanks to a resolution moved at its behest by the dictatorship in Iran—and that instead direct talks
would be held between Turkey and Greece, to hammer out a deal between them. In short order, Karamanlis and Menderes reached one at a hotel in Zurich.

The outcome was predictable. Turkey was not just the bigger military power, and on the closest terms with the colonial proprietor of the island. More fundamentally, whatever might be said of the Turkish state—no small subject, certainly—it was the completely independent creation of Kemalism, a nationalist movement that owed nothing to any outside power. The post-war Greek state, by contrast, started out life as a British protectorate and continued as an American dependency, culturally and politically incapable of crossing the will of its progenitors. Greek Cypriots were often to charge its political class with betrayal, but the spinelessness of so many of its ministers and diplomats was structural: there was no inner core of autonomy to betray. Menderes had no difficulty imposing terms on an interlocutor who retreated to his bedroom as details of the agreement were fastened down.

To avoid Enosis, Cyprus would be given a neutered independence: a Constitution stationing troops from Ankara and Athens on its soil, a foreign head of the Supreme Court, a Turkish vice-president with powers to veto all legislation, separate voting blocs for Greeks and Turks in a House of Representatives and municipal administrations, 30 per cent of the civil service, and 40 per cent of any armed force, composed of Turks, plus a requirement that all taxes be approved by a vote of Turks as well as Greeks.
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Rounding off this package was a secret annexe, in the form of a ‘gentleman's agreement'—here American supervisors, hovering nearby, made themselves felt—committing the future Republic of Cyprus in advance to join NATO and to ban AKEL. Last and most important of all, a Treaty of Guarantee between Britain, Turkey and Greece would allow any of these powers to intervene in the island, if it held there had been a breach of the settlement under it—in effect, a variant of the Platt amendment that authorized the United States to intervene in Cuba when it so decided after 1901.

It only remained for the British, who kept out of Zurich, to name their price for putting the seal of the proprietor on a transaction
so satisfactory to them. What London required were sovereign military enclaves on Cyprus—little ‘Gibraltars', as Macmillan put it. There was less euphemism on the ground. ‘We should open our mouths wide', wrote the key official in Nicosia.
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The area gulped down was forty times the size of Gibraltar, and when the final Treaty of Guarantee establishing the new state and its constitution was signed, more pages were devoted to British bases in Cyprus than to all its other provisions combined—a juridical unicum.

Presented with a diktat which Karamanlis told him was unnegotiable, Makarios had to submit, taking office in 1960 as president of the new Republic. Independence had been granted, but as Holland writes: ‘In Cyprus “freedom” as most people understood it had not been won; self-determination, however partisanly defined, was not applied'.
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Far from ending the griefs of Cyprus under colonial rule, what the Treaty guaranteed was worse suffering to come. The Constitution of Zurich, designed to serve diplomatic imperatives rather than practical needs, let alone principles of equity, rapidly proved unworkable. Separate municipal administrations raised explosive issues of how to demarcate them, which even the British had not wanted to touch. Lack of progress in drawing their boundaries prompted Turkish veto of the budget, threatening more general paralysis. No agreement could be reached on forming an inter-communal army, leaving the field to the formation of irregulars on both sides.

By the end of 1963 the authors of Zurich were removed from the scene. Two years earlier Menderes had been hanged, among other things for instigating the pogrom of 1955. That summer, Karamanlis fell amid uproar over the murder of the Left MP Lambrakis by his police. Makarios, who had accepted their arrangements under duress, never regarding these as permanent, now moved to revise them. In late November he sent a set of proposals to his Turkish vice-president, Kutchuk, intended to create a more conventional democracy in Cyprus, with a unified administration and majority rule. Three weeks later, amid high tension, communal fighting broke out in Nicosia. This time it was not planned by either side, but after initial random incidents, Greeks inflicted more casualties than Turks, before a cease-fire
was effected. All Turkish representatives in the state withdrew from their posts, and Turkish inhabitants increasingly regrouped in consolidated enclaves with strong lines of defence. British troops policed a truce in Nicosia, but clashes persisted through February, the balance of attacks lying on the Greek side. By March a UN force had arrived to secure each community from further violence.

Makarios left no memoirs, and it is unlikely archives will shed much light on his thinking in this or later phases of his career. What is clear is that he had two courses open to him after the diktat of Zurich. He could escape from it either by continuing to pursue the goal for which he and the overwhelming majority of his compatriots had struggled, union with Greece; or by building a truly independent state in Cyprus, neither beholden to the Guarantor powers nor crippled by the impediments they had bequeathed. Once Makarios became president, he left both open. Cyprus did not join NATO, as stipulated in the gentleman's agreement, nor was AKEL banned—provisions which would have followed automatically had Cyprus been united with Greece, but which he was able to block on taking office. As head of state, his first trip abroad was to Nasser in Egypt, followed by attendance at the Non-Aligned Conference hosted by Tito, and a visit to Nehru in India. In this role he had the profile of a Third World leader, at the antipodes of the pickled Cold War politics of Restoration Greece.

At the same time, he appointed a cabinet dominated by stalwarts of EOKA, and made it clear to his electors—he had won a two-thirds majority of votes in the Greek community—that Cyprus remained entitled to the self-determination, of a free choice of union with the motherland, that had been so flagrantly denied it. Enosis might be deferred, but it was not renounced. Makarios was a charismatic leader, of great dignity and subtlety, and often spellbinding eloquence. But he could not ignore the sentiments of those from whom he drew his authority, who knew they had been cheated of their wishes, and saw no reason why they should give them up on foreign instructions. In moving to revise the mock Constitution, he was acting as they wanted him to. But in doing so, he miscalculated Turkish reactions in a way common to the Greek community. Knowing only too well that it was Britain that had manipulated Turkish fears and solicited Ankara's intervention in the first place, Greeks found it difficult to see that, however artificial the origin, the outcome was the intractable reality of a community that felt itself both entitled as
of right to a disproportionate share of power on the island, and continually living on its nerves as if under imminent siege.

Prudentially, Makarios should have gone out of his way to try to win over Turkish opinion after independence, by generous economic and cultural measures in favour of it.
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Yet it must be doubted if even these would have been of much avail. The cold fact was that Zurich had inflated the Turkish position in the state far beyond what a minority of its size could in normal circumstances have claimed. No matter what sweeteners Makarios might have offered, any constitutional alterations were, virtually by definition, bound to reduce this, and so long as the Turkish community had Ankara at its back, there was no chance of their acceptance. Tension over such changes was in any case over-determined by two further features of the situation for which Makarios bore his share of responsibility.

So long as Enosis was a goal to which the Greek population was attached, and to which he himself remained half or more committed, there was little incentive for the Turks to regard the independence of Cyprus as any basis for positive loyalty to a common state, as opposed to a mere negative shield against what would be worse. At the same time, the failure to agree on a small Cypriot army, as technically envisaged at Zurich—the Turks insisted it be ethnically separated, the Greeks that it be integrated—put Makarios, as head of state, at the mercy of guns he could not control. Grivas had been obliged to return to Greece, under the terms of the 1960 settlement. But EOKA, which had driven the British out, could hardly be denied positions in the government, and Grivas's lieutenants now commanded ministries, from which they could cover or direct irregulars formed in its image. Having no wish to multiply his adversaries in an independence struggle, Grivas himself had forbidden attacks on Turks. But as the British came to depend more and more, Black-and-Tan-style, on Turkish auxiliaries for repression, these inevitably came into the line of fire. After the British had gone, the same calculus of restraint no longer applied for EOKA. The obstacles were now irregulars on the other side, the Turkish militias fostered from Ankara. Out of this combustible material came the clashes of December 1963, Greek aggression predominating, which Makarios failed to prevent, and failed to punish.

On the surface, Makarios could seem to have emerged from the breakdown of the Zurich arrangements in a stronger position. The UN force had brought a precarious peace. Turkey's threats to invade Cyprus were quashed by a brusque telephone call from Johnson. American schemes for ‘double Enosis', dividing the island into portions to be allocated to Greece and Turkey, got nowhere.
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In late 1965, the UN General Assembly formally called on all states to ‘respect the sovereignty, unity, independence and territorial integrity of Cyprus'—the high point of Makarios's efforts to secure the international position of the Republic, free from interference by outside powers. Embarrassed to vote openly against the resolution, as too brazen an indication of their intentions, Britain and America made their displeasure clear by abstaining, along with their numerous clientele. Taken at face value—formally, the resolution obtains to this day—it was a diplomatic triumph for Makarios.

Other developments were less propitious. As ethnic clashes were subsiding in early 1964, the British furthered the concentration of the Turkish population in fortified enclaves, by sabotaging the reintegration of refugees into mixed villages. Relaying them, Americans were henceforward deeply engaged in imperial meddling on the island. Already, during colonial rule, the US had secured from Britain a series of intelligence facilities in Cyprus—tracking stations and the like—for Middle Eastern surveillance, that went unmentioned in the Treaty of Guarantee. By the early sixties, a Labour regime was back in power in London, and the British bases and listening-posts were for most practical purposes at the disposal of the overlord, as they remain today. The strategic value of Cyprus, less as an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier', in an earlier phrase, than as an all-purpose U-2, shot up after Washington placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Moscow retaliated by dispatching R-12s to Cuba, bringing on the Missile Crisis.

In this setting, it was vital to have a reliable
locum
in Cyprus. Visiting Washington, Makarios was told by Kennedy that he
should form his own party, on the right, to check the alarming popularity of AKEL, and should desist from unnecessarily correct relations with the USSR. After the archbishop politely declined, saying he did not want to divide his flock, he became a marked man. Politically, in fact, he had little choice. At home he needed tacit Communist support to counter-balance the zealots of Pan-Hellenism; abroad he needed the diplomatic support of the Soviet bloc in the UN to counter Anglo-American attempts to reimpose schemes for partition, cleared with Turkey. Johnson had blocked a Turkish invasion, but Makarios was under no illusion that this was out of any mercy for Cyprus: Washington's concern was still about the political impact of a landing on Greece, wanting no hostilities between two NATO allies. So far as Makarios himself was concerned, in American eyes he was little better than ‘Castro in a cassock'. In due course George Ball, the proconsul dispatched to sort out the situation, would remark, ‘That son of a bitch will have to be killed before anything happens in Cyprus'.
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In the summer of 1964, the State Department told Athens in no uncertain terms that it must deal with Makarios. There, the premier was now George Papandreou, patriarch of the other dynasty with which Greece continues to be afflicted to this day, who had set British troops on his countrymen in 1944. Hastening to agree that Cyprus must be brought under NATO control if it was not to be ‘transformed into another Cuba', he sent Grivas back to Cyprus, with the
placet
of Washington and London, as the man best able to replace Makarios.
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There, Grivas took charge of the National Guard that had been created in the spring, expanding it with forces brought from the mainland, and openly announcing ‘There is only one army in Cyprus—the Greek army'.
²⁴
Quite willing to accept double Enosis, so long as the portion acceding to Turkey was small, his immediate aim was to undermine Makarios's authority by building a force loyal to himself, capable of dominating the larger part that would accede to Greece.