A FEW months ago as I was having a tyre replaced on my bicycle, the repair man – a kindly, gentle character with whom I often chat – drifted into talking about the British; nothing personal about individuals, but a deep disquiet about their role in Cyprus over the decades.
Then he pointed out into the street, the main road through Ayios Dhometios, and said: “I watched the funeral cortege go past this very window, one coffin after another, eight young men, arrested by the British then dumped outside Gonyeli to be slaughtered by the Turks.”
I knew the story, but his personal recollection brought home its shocking impact. It was June 12, 1958, at the height of the EOKA struggle against British colonial rule: 32 Greek Cypriot villagers, picked up outside Skylloura, were being bussed to Nicosia police station; at some stage it was decided they posed no threat, but instead of releasing them immediately, British army personnel drove them several miles further on, to the Turkish village of Gonyeli, from where they were told to walk home. The group had barely set off when they were attacked by Turkish vigilantes. Eight were hacked to death.
Though the massacre was by no means planned and the British intention was ‘merely’ to harass the men by dumping them away from their homes (a fairly common practice among the security forces at the time) the incident has an iconic quality. As do the hangings of young EOKA fighters. As does the suspicion that Britain may have encouraged (or at least not been averse to) the 1954 anti-Greek riots in Istanbul that marked the end of the historic community in the city (“a few riots… would do us nicely” in the words of one Foreign Office official).
The list could go on and on, all coming under the single concept that most stands out in people’s perceptions of the British colonial period: divide and rule – the sense that Britain deliberately whipped up Turkish nationalism as a counterweight to Greek Cypriot aspirations for union with Greece (Enosis).
Britain did indeed encourage Turkey to stand up for its rights in Cyprus as a way of lancing the boil on the island. If the Greeks wanted self-determination, London suggested, they had to recognise the Turks’ own right to the same principle, a policy that failed to deflect the demand for Enosis, while opening up the Turkish appetite for partition. At the same time, the British government was keen for the conflict not to be seen as an anti-colonial struggle, but rather as an international dispute, thus deliberately dragging the motherlands into the fray and sowing the seeds for future conflict that would be harvested in 1974.
Divide and rule was partly policy, partly inevitable consequence of the dynamics of the insurgency. On the ground, the brutal EOKA campaign against the police soon emptied its ranks of Greek Cypriots, leaving only Turks and feeding the perception that the British were pitting the two communities against one another. Relations thus deteriorated, not as a result of innate hostility but by dint of the shift in connection each community had with the colonial administration, especially its security apparatus. They were never to recover.
Let’s face it, colonial powers are rarely loved in their subject countries. They’re loved even less when the subject country has had to fight for its independence – and in Cyprus the EOKA struggle was particularly bitter, with atrocities committed on either side. Inevitably, national mythology is defined by liberation struggles, reinforced by countless anniversaries and enshrined in children’s education. Add to that the fact that independence was not what Greek Cypriots had fought for, that Britain continued (and continues) to be actively involved in the politics of the Cyprus problem, that it retained (and still holds) sovereign rights in huge swathes of territory, and – most importantly – that the post-colonial period saw the country degenerate into vicious inter-communal violence that culminated in the Turkish invasion of 1974, and it’s perhaps surprising that anti-British feelings are not more visceral than they actually are.
That’s why bashing Britain will always be an easy political tool, a button that can be pressed to reactivate a bitter collective memory, a sense that the colonial power was to blame for all the misery that followed, and that somehow its current policies must inevitably be tainted with the same Machiavellian intent. It’s not necessarily true, but it’s guaranteed to work.
