“Cyprus in Transition: 1960-85”, a volume on Cyprus, edited by John Koumoulides, Professor of History at Ball University, consists of papers given at the University during the academic year 1984-85 as well as essays specially written at the invitation of the editor by distinguished journalists and scholars. It also contains views on the Cyprus problem by persons who had a role to play during the Turkish invasion of 1974.
Nancy Crawshaw provides a cost and detached cool political background to the period since the Republic of Cyprus was born in 1960. It is chronicle of unending frustrations in search of a political settlement.
Peacekeeping in Cyprus is the subject of Field Marshall Lord Carver’s paper; he served briefly in the island in 1964 as Commander of the British Truce Force and was Chief of the British Defence Staff at the time of the Turkish invasion in July 1974. Predictably, Lord Carver concludes that there was little effective military action which could be taken by the British with reasonable prospects of success quite apart, of course, from all the “wider political and military implication”.
Sir David Hunt, who served as High Commissioner in Cyprus, in his excellent essay attributes the island’s present deplorable condition to the Turkish invasion and demolishes any claims of legality of the Turkish unilateral action supposedly based on the Treaty of Guarantee.
He argues forcefully that the Greek – Cypriot demand for the withdrawal of Turkish troops is vital: “a state cannot exercise its sovereignty and its territorial integrity is violated, when part of its territory is under military occupation”, he says.
An overview of US policy towards Cyprus in the last twenty-five years is given by Ellen Laipson, Congressional Research Analyst, while the Greek – Cypriot refugee tragedy is tackled by Roger Zetter in the context of the rehousing programmes. The study focuses also on the implications of the high political profile of the refugees – whose proportion to the total ethnic population was an enormous 40% – a factor which has an important bearing on the Cyprus situation.
Sir Peter Ramsbotham, British High Commissioner in Cyprus from 1969-71, recalls his encounters with Archbishop Makarios, President of the Republic of Cyprus, and paints his portrait as a stateman although he does not pretend to have understood fully his complex character, as he puts it. Makarios’s contribution to preserving a fragile peace in the Eastern Mediterranean for a long period at times is openly acknowledged.
John Groom, Professor of International Relations at the University of Kent, Canterbury, deals with the issue from a diplomatic conflict-solving perspective. Groom says that at the international political level the Cyprus problem is dominated by a triangular relationship between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus and the involved interests of other states. He concentrates on developments since 1974 and the failure to achieve a negotiated settlement. He also ponders over the cluster of questions between Greece and Turkey falling under the rubric of the Aegean. However, who is the executioner and who the victim in the Cyprus equation is hardly discernible in his biased analysis.
There is no doubt in my mind that the best paper in this volume is that of C.M. Woodhouse, who needs no introduction. Woodhouse minces no words in exposing the British point of view. He explicitly accepts that the primary interests of British Governments in Cyprus have always been strategic, and goes on to describe this logic since the island was first occupied in 1878. He finds also no difficulty in expressing the view that in 1974 the possibility of a pre-emptive show of force in Cyprus by the British was readily available and that, if tried, could have saved the day. He finds that no convincing apologies for the British public opinion only becomes interested in Cyprus at times of crisis, when British interests, lives or property are at risk and that the British tended to be more sympathetic to the Turks than to the Greeks. And on the present situation he concludes that British governments and officials have less justification than anyone for regarding it with complacency, since no one bears greater responsibility for bringing it about.
The volume is introduced by Senator Paul Sarbanes, who very lucidly spells out the three dominant factors of the Cyprus equation, namely the strategic location of the island, its imperial domination by a colonial power and the brutal invasion of Cyprus in 1974 by Turkish military forces. Unescapable facts.
Certainly the purpose of this collection of essays is to shed light on a complex problem and invite more informed and meaningful discussion. And the editor’s intention to provide “an objective and comprehensive look at the problem of Cyprus, mainly from the foreign perspective”, cannot be doubted. The trouble is that such is the nature of the Cyprus problem that any attempt to deal with it either with a sense of academic sobriety or journalistic objectivity quite often ends up in a very thinly veiled advocacy of solutions which serve else’s interests but those of the Greek – Cypriots. Sad but true.
CYPRUS IN TRANSITION: 1960 -1985 edited by John Koumoulides,
Triagraph – London 1986