Cyprus trouble
Desmond Stewart
The Cyprus Revolt: An Account of the Struggle for Union with Greece Nancy Crawshaw (Allen & Unwin £12.50) Since this expensive book must have involved its author in much typing, it is fair to say what can be said in its favour first. Miss Crawshaw, who long covered Greek and Cypriot affairs for the Manchester Guardian, has here given an accurate blow-by-blow account of what went wrong in one of our late Empire's smaller but more sensitive possessions: Unswayed by any discernible liking for Greeks, disdaining to write in a way that could convey some otthe poetry as well as the complexities of her subject, she covers with flat detail the years between 1940 and 1960 to pass briefly over the debacle of 1974 which found your reviewer prostrate under a eucalyptus tree as, some hours after their cease-fire, Turkish planes bombarded a factory and an ambulance on the Famagusta to Nicosia highway. The book will assuredly become the standard work for those whom such riveting topics as the career of Lord Caradon attract for doctoral theses. One can no more imagine another writer bothering to chronicle the parliamentary debates and minor atrocities of this epoch than one can conceive a non-specialist reader enduring more than ten consecutive pages.
For Miss Crawshaw's book resembles a photograph so underdeveloped as to tire the eye. The grey Grauniad style has largely lost its alleviation, the proliferating misprint, product of a British disease which in the liberal daily now seems terminal, although I appreciated the notion (p. 49) of Greeks peeling' bells to celebrate a plebiscite. But surely, after their Tolkien triumphs, Allen & Unwin could afford to retain some orientalising hack to advise, in a volume which takes the Turks more than seriously, that if you don't swallow the Latin orthography of Atatiirk entire — which means giving him and Inonii their umlauts— it is abSurd to print Celal (sic) Bayer: the Turkish C being pronounced as an English J. The despatch of 'the Callaghan settlers' to northern Cyprus in January 1975— without any compensating concessions for the Greeks — is recounted with as little passion as if, in another context, an author were to treat Eichmann's projects simply as trainschedules.
The Cyprus Revolt revived in me the prejudice, shared with the writers of the original Spectator, that in literary matters the Greeks and Romans did almost everything better than we of the last days. If Sallust could have handled this minor but sanguinary theme, he would have used fifty, not Miss Crawshaw's four hundred, pages to compose an ironical drama set in a haunted and resonant landscape and involving a cast which, as well as some notable imperialists, included the immaculate and Byzantine Makarios and Grivas, half IRA killer, half Hellenic Quixote. Miss Crawshaw blames the debacle of 1974, first on the Cypriots for pursuing Enosis, then on the British for not introducing selfgovernment sooner. Yet the appeal of Enosis is nowhere made comprehensible.
This appeal derived less from the persistence of a unified Hellenic culture — Christian Greeks had repudiated much of their ancestral legacy — than from the crisis of identity forced on the middle-eastern peoples by the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire. For all their sloth the Sultans had a nobler vision of society — the co-existence of many millets under one roof-tree — than the nationalists who replaced them. But western liberals who used nationalism to destroy the Ottoman plurality (whether in patronising Bulgarian and Arab secession or in accepting the Herzlian Zionism which re-interpreted Judaism in terms of the western nationstate) are unfair to blame Cypriots for feeling Greek. Miss Crawshaw repeats in politer terms the arguments one heard ad nauseam from Ancient Brits (until their houses, like mine, were re-looted by the Callaghan settlers): the Cypriots are not racially Greek; the Greek language only arrived in the ninth century BC. (Most Cypriot Turks are either Islamised Greeks or offshoots from the mixed stock of southern Anatolia.) Nationalism has rarely depended on objective factors; it has usually worked the most strongly on those whose claims to belong to the nation in' question are most in doubt. Austrians from the Slav fringe were more obstreporously German than were Prussians; Napoleon, whose arms brought France the wrong kind of gloire, was half-Italian. If you reject the imperial concept, if you substitute the head-counting of emotional electorates for the monarchic authority which depends upon God, or in the Ottoman case, the Islamic law, then those Cypriots who advocated Enosis were logical. Four-fifths of the population prayed in Greek, if they were religious, or used Greek translations of Marxist clichés if they were not. Atatiirk was equally logical in largely refusing attempts to regain Ottoman territory after he had terminated the Sultan-Caliphate. The one sad exception — the deal with France whereby Turkey incorporated Syrian Alexandretta as the province of Hatay — undermined the Turkish argument over Cyprus, that minorities should have equal status with majorities. The expulsion of the Armenians and the Turkification of the Arabs of Hatay warned the Cypriots of what could be their ultimate fate.
An Index addict,. I hunted in vain for Herzl who, at the beginning of the century, suggested that Greeks should migrate to Athens or Crete, Moslems to Anatolia, while a German-speaking, blacktie-wearing Judenstuat was installed on Aphrodite's island. Kissinger is another absentee. Yet most Greeks link that Machiavellian buffoon with the island's ruin. Miss Crawshaw does recount how in 1964 the Acheson Plan first proposed Double Enosis. Under this scheme for securing Cyprus as a reliable NATO base, Greece' would have incorporated most of the island while being required to cede the islet of Kastellorizon to Turkey, who would also have gained a naval base in Cyprus and two smallish cantons. Most Greeks believe that when, nine years later, Makarios refused to allow American aircraft helping Israel to use Cyprus bases, Kissinger connived with Eoka B so as to precipate a crisis which would end in the island's partition. The irony of the tragedy in European terms is that if Enosis had been accepted in the 1950s, an EEC including Greece would soon have had in Cyprus its easternmost extension.
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