Fighting EOKA: the British counter-insurgency campaign on Cyprus, 1955-1959

摘要

Collective violence in modern Cyprus is rooted in the politicization of history and the accident of geography. Competing local attachments to the Island's Hellenic and Ottoman pasts, the former cherished by the Greek majority, the latter reinvigorated by an embattled Turkish minority, crystallized into opposing visions of a permissible future for Cyprus thanks to an external catalyst: British colonial rule. The one thing upon which Cypriots of all backgrounds and opinions could agree was that Britain's political control of their island should end. Here, of course, the geography kicked in. Nestling the coast of Western Asia, Cyprus was pivotal to British imperial and Cold War strategies after 1945. It rendered Middle Eastern clients and enemies more accessible. And it offered an excellent vantage point from which to monitor, and potentially strike, Soviet military bases. Cyprus, then, was more than a classic garrison colony; it was a vital strategic hub. Ironically, Greece andTurkey, the two countries most invested in the Island's future, shared Britain's broad Cold War interests and NATO commitments. Their prescriptions for Cyprus - Enosis (union with the Greek motherland) versus partition and assured minority status for Cypriot Turks - seemed wholly antagonistic. Yet they would be reconciled in a Cyprus settlement hatched in bilateral talks between the Greek and Turkish Foreign Ministers in the backrooms of the United Nations. More temporary fix than permanent solution, this 1959 agreement was encouraged, if not originated, by British negotiators. Macmillan's government, squirming on the hook of another knotty decolonization, were happy to swap colonial administration for a tripartite arrangement whose fairness on paper belied its long-term impracticability.