The New Old World (66 page)

In April 1967, the weak government that had succeeded Papandreou was overthrown by a military junta, installing a fullblown dictatorship of the Right in Greece. AKEL, fearing what might be coming, readied plans to go underground. Grivas, predictably
emboldened, launched an all-out assault on two strategically placed Turkish villages. At this, Turkey mobilized to invade Cyprus, where ten thousand Greek troops were now stationed. With war seemingly imminent between two NATO allies, the US persuaded the junta to back down, and agree to the withdrawal of all Greek forces from the island. Once they were gone, and Grivas with them, communal tensions dropped, and Makarios could reassert his authority. Reelected president with a landslide majority, he lifted road-blocks around Turkish enclaves, and started inter-communal talks with a view to a domestic settlement. A modest economic boom took off.

In this new situation, the ambiguity of Makarios's political identity—champion of union or symbol of independence—was of necessity resolved. Merging Cyprus into Greece under the junta was unthinkable. Enosis was tacitly dropped, and Cypriot linkage with Third and Second World countries strengthened. But popularity at home and prestige abroad could not offset the increasing difficulty of his underlying position. Had it been possible to abjure Enosis when colonial rule ended, and propose genuine independence as an unconditional goal to both communities, Turkish opinion might have been affected. By now, animosities had hardened: the Turkish community was entrenched in defensive enclaves and more tightly policed by Ankara than ever. But if such independence was too late on the Turkish side, it was too early for a still powerful minority on the Greek side, which denounced Makarios for betraying Enosis, and now had formidable backing in Athens. For the colonels, Makarios was not only a traitor to Hellenism, but a stalking-horse for communism. Turkey had always viewed him with cold hostility. Once the colonels were in power, it was Greece that became a deadlier threat.
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In March 1970, as the presidential helicopter took off from the Archbishopric, bearing Makarios to service in a monastery in the mountains, it came under fire from automatics on a roof of the nearby Pancyprian Gymnasium, where he had once gone to school. The machine was riddled with bullets, missing Makarios, but hitting the pilot, who miraculously brought it down without a crash-landing.
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The failure of this first attempt
on his life was followed by a broader range of operations against him. The next year Grivas returned secretly to Cyprus. Soon, all three Metropolitan bishops were calling on Makarios to resign. By 1973, EOKA-B—Grivas's new organization—was setting off bombs across the island, attacking police stations, and preparing snipers to pick off Makarios. In the autumn, another attempt was made to kill him, by mining his route. Hellenism, historically thwarted of a more natural outcome, was starting to destroy itself.

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.

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'.
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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'.
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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 keep 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.

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.
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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.
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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.