Quotes by Perry Anderson

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.

Two years later, a Commons Select Committee would conclude: ‘Britain had a legal right to intervene [in the Turkish assault on Cyprus], 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.’

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 on to abide by the treaty, it crossed its arms and gave free passage to the modern Attila, claiming that it was helpless – a nuclear power – to do otherwise.

It only remained for the British... 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 British official in Nicosia. The area gulped down was forty times the size of Gibraltar, and when the final treaties establishing the new state and its constitution were signed, more pages were devoted to British bases in Cyprus than to all its other provisions combined – a juridical unicum.

The upshot [of the violence], clearly planned in advance, was the eviction of Greeks from Turkish areas in Nicosia and other cities, and the seizure of municipal facilities, to create self-contained Turkish enclaves: piecemeal partition, on the ground. Its organisers could be sure of British complaisance. The day before the rampage... the new governor, Labour’s future Lord Caradon, had assured its leaders that the Turkish community would enjoy ‘a specially favoured and specially protected state’ under future British arrangements. A few months later, the colonial secretary was publicly referring to Cyprus as ‘an offshore Turkish island’.

In September 1955, as Cyprus was being discussed at a three-power conference in London, the Turkish secret police planted a bomb at the house where Kemal Ataturk was born in Salonica. At the signal of this ‘Greek provocation’, mobs swarmed through Istanbul looting Greek businesses, burning Orthodox churches, and attacking Greek residents. Although no one in official circles in London doubted that the pogrom was unleashed by the Turkish government, Macmillan – in charge of the talks – pointedly did not complain.

To bring the island [of Cyprus] to heel, London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as his word. The standard repertoire of repression was applied. Makarios was deported. Demonstrations were banned, schools closed, trade-unions outlawed. Communists were locked up, EOKA suspects hanged. Curfews, raids, beatings, executions were the background against which, a year later, Cyprus supplied the air-deck for the Suez expedition.