Cyprus
While British soldiers
were still fighting ‘terrorists’ in Malaya a new colonial war was
starting in Kenya (this will be discussed in detail in the next chapter -
The Myth of Mau Mau). At the height of the conflict in Kenya,
another ‘Emergency’ was declared on the island of Cyprus, a British
colony in the Mediterranean. Britain’s interests in Cyprus were mainly
strategic, during the ‘Emergency’ the Suez invasion was launched from
the island and afterwards it became a base area for missiles trained on
Russia. The population, a volatile five to one ratio of Greeks to Turks,
was ripe for British divide and rule tactics.
The Greeks’ political
leader was Archbishop Makarios who was demanding ‘Enosis’ (union with
Greece). They also formed an underground military organisation, known as
EOKA (the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters), led by a
right-wing ex-Greek army colonel called George Grivas, who had colluded
with British forces in Greece at the end of the 2nd World War to crush
the left-wing ELAS forces.
On 25th September 1955, Sir Robert Armitage was replaced as Governor by Field-Marshal Sir John Harding KCB, DSO and MC:
Harding launched at once into a campaign against EOKA, and at the same time began talks with Archbishop Makarios. The strategy was obvious: as EOKA was gradually subdued, Makarios would lose his bargaining power and would have to meet the Government’s terms. Harding took personal charge of Security and welded together the police, whose ranks were being filled with Turkish Cypriots, and the Army, which had now grown to twelve thousand men. The offspring of the marriage was called the ‘Security Forces’, a title which covered everyone from ice-cream peddlers enlisted into the auxiliary police to subalterns from Sandhurst.It was an old routine, pioneered in other colonies. A State of Emergency would be declared: villages and towns curfewed by day, and by night; collective fines would be levied; the public finger-printed, identity cards issued ... Already a Detention of Persons law had been introduced, permitting people to be held without trial, and there was evidence that it was being abused.[30]
The situation quickly
escalated into open conflict, with EOKA using guerrilla warfare against
the British forces. The propaganda war also went into overdrive, with
the British media vilifying the Greek leader, Makarios. In 1956, Peter
Benenson, who afterwards was to initiate Amnesty International, visited
Cyprus and later wrote: ‘Although frequently invited, Archbishop
Makarios refused to condemn the methods used by EOKA ... the British
Government seized on his refusal to make him a figure of execration
throughout Britain, to scoff at his cloth, to mock his crozier and to
“singe his beard”.’ Benenson continued:
In repeated statements in Parliament, Government spokesmen emphasised the particular wickedness of the Archbishop, and the bestial behaviour of EOKA. The same story was retold to every journalist or visitor who visited Cyprus. Within one year this systematic vilification brought forth its harvest. By the summer of 1956 the first protests against violence and torture were to be heard in Cyprus. The Army, 30,000 strong under a Field-Marshal, had been hunting unsuccessfully for a year for an elusive, small-statured, large-moustached guerrilla colonel. All the while they were being told by their Ministers back home and by their commanders in the field, that they were fighting a barbarous enemy under a villainous cleric, painted in the colours of the Anti-Christ. Not unnaturally some of the men came to regard the Cypriots, or the ‘Cyps’, as they were by then called, with contempt.[31]
30: Legacy of Strife - Cyprus from rebellion to civil war,
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964.
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964.
Detainees and Torture
As more and more
detainees were rounded up, reports of ill treatment began to circulate.
Most concerned the interrogation methods that all prisoners were
subjected to. In his book, Legacy of Strife, Charles Foley
outlined the beginning of the process: ‘The start was usually quiet. A
man might be shown a photograph and asked if he recognised it; he might
be asked if he knew a certain person or had some information about EOKA
which was common knowledge. Later questions would take a threatening
turn, or a bundle of folded money might appear from a drawer. If you
refused to answer you might then be taken across the corridor to another
room containing an iron bedstead, to which you would be strapped by the
wrists and ankles.’ Foley then described what could happen next:
Methods of treatment varied widely, depending on the imagination of the operators, who were jocularly known by the foreign Press as ‘HMTs’ [Her Majesty’s Torturers], and there was apparently no time-limit. You might be alternatively maltreated and questioned by relays of men for one hour or four or twenty-four. You might be beaten on the stomach with a flat board, you might have your testicles twisted, you might be half-suffocated with a wet cloth which forced you to drink with every breath you took, you might have a steel band tightened round your head. Techniques were backward for the twentieth century; there were, for instance, no proven reports of treatment by electric shock. No more than six people died under interrogation during the whole Emergency [my emphasis].[32]
The protests by
concerned Cypriots expanded in volume and grew louder, as Peter Benenson
stated: ‘When I first arrived in Cyprus, in October 1956, the entire
Greek Cypriot Bar was inundated with complaints against the authorities.
I have seen a queue of anxious parents at the chambers of the present
Minister of Justice so long that it stretched outside the front door.’
Benenson explained how the British administration ignored their
complaints, or took evasive action:
The authorities insisted that the Greek lawyers were mischievously inventing allegations of violence. To prevent them talking to their arrested clients, they were refused information as to their whereabouts. Independent Greek doctors were denied access to prisons or prison hospitals. Regulations were passed permitting the Government to hold arrested persons administratively in close confinement for 16 days without charge. Letters of enquiry, complaints and protests from Greek barristers went without answer. Another regulation was passed making it impossible for any lawyer to start criminal proceedings against any member of the Security Forces without permission from the Attorney-General.[33]
By 1957, Britain stood
accused before the Council of Europe of 49 specified cases of torture in
Cyprus. But a political deal was struck between Britain and Greece, who
then dropped the charges.
32: Legacy of Strife - Cyprus from rebellion to civil war,
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964.
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964.
Conscript Soldiers Die and Kill
As the conflict
continued, British troops found themselves in an increasingly hostile
environment. Many members of the security forces were killed or injured,
often in street ambushes. Charles Foley describes how the soldiers were
isolated from the Cypriot people and crowded together in bad living
conditions: ‘Most of the troops were living under canvas, plagued by
flies and dust. When it rained, the tents were often found to leak;
bedding was soaked, the electricity system broke down, the fuel for the
stove gave out, and the ground became a swamp. The men were confined to
barracks more or less permanently; if they were allowed out they had to
move in groups of four, armed and in uniform, and they could visit only
the handful of bars officially declared “in bounds”. This frustration
and discomfort sought an outlet. As the troops’ frustrations built up,
soldiers were fed on hate propaganda and the security chiefs excused
anything that smacked of reprisals on the grounds of “intolerable
provocation” ...’ Many of these young soldiers became angry and
aggressive and ‘incidents’ started to occur:
A typical incident occurred at Kathykas, one of three villages which had been searched by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders after one of their men had been killed and another wounded in an ambush. The authorities spoke of ‘slight injuries’ and the Greek mayor of men beaten and bayoneted and a nineteen-year-old wife raped. One Cypriot had been shot dead after stabbing two soldiers who burst into his home in the darkness. A village priest was said to have had his beard set on fire and his head rubbed with mud.[34]
The authorities set up
an ‘Official Investigation’ which was clearly not impartial, because it
justified the ill treatment by reporting that: ‘Not only were the
soldiers searching for the killers of one of their comrades, but the
villagers were uncooperative to the point of serious resistance in one
case.’
Barbara Castle, then
Vice-Chair of the Labour Party, visited Cyprus and went to Kathykas. She
met a number of the people injured by the Argylls and when Castle
returned to Britain she stated that she believed the troops were being
permitted to use unnecessarily rough measures after a shooting, on the
grounds that they were engaged in ‘hot pursuit’:
At once a storm of execration broke over Mrs Castle’s head in the British press, despite a statement from the Governor that ‘when their comrades are killed, troops are naturally angry and roughness can and does take place’. Mr Gaitskell [Labour leader] hurriedly disowned Mrs Castle, remarking on the intolerable provocations to which our forces had been subjected by brutal murders which horrified and disgusted him. With a General Election alarmingly close the Labour leaders could not risk offending public opinion by seeming to take sides against the troops.[35]
Gaitskell’s attack on Castle was in vain, as Labour lost the election anyway.
34: Legacy of Strife - Cyprus from rebellion to civil war,
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964.
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964.
35: Ibid - Legacy of Strife - Cyprus from rebellion to civil war.
Search Results
The Cypriot Question
In July 1958 the Prime
Minster, Harold Macmillan, who had succeed Sir Anthony Eden as the Tory
leader after the Suez debacle, visited Cyprus. His trip included several
meetings with the troops:
One of the Premier’s calls was to Lyssi village, which lay under a ten-day curfew, but he spoke to no one there except soldiers and police, departing with ten copies of The Grenadier, a Guards magazine for Guards. Breaking into verse at one point, the cyclostyled magazine declared:Sergeant Clerk is the Acorn’s clerk
But is prone to get in rages.
If the Wogs give any trouble
He puts them into cages.The cages were the barbed-wire pens where men waited their turn for questioning - another name for them was ‘play-pens’; the Wogs, of course, were the Cypriots. The visitor wrote across a souvenir copy: ‘With best wishes from an old Grenadier - Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister’.[36]
Helen Fullerton gave an alternative view of British soldiers’ actions in her poem Cypriot Question.
On February 1956, in Famagusta, troops had opened fire on a
demonstration of students and school children and 18-year-old Petrakis
Yiallouris was killed by a bullet from a soldiers’ sten-gun. In the poem
a Cypriot mother has an imaginary conversation with the mother of a
British conscript soldier:
In Famagusta, one February morning
The market place and the streets were full
When crowds of children marched protesting
That General Harding had closed their school:
Then the British Army went into action
With baton charges and tear gas drill
And the children’s stones were met with bullets
For the troops had orders to ‘shoot to kill’.Ah, British Mother, had you a boy there?
No blame to him for the evil done
Or that a sorrowing Cypriot couple
Lost that day a beloved son
When at eighteen years, in the cause of freedom
Petrakis Yiallouris met his eclipse
Shot through the heart, by a conscript soldier,
‘Cyprus, Cyprus!’ upon his lips.When the dockers heard it, they struck in anger
And our shops were closed and our streets were still
And we drew around us our little children
Your troops had orders to ‘shoot to kill’;
But they feared Petrakis more dead than living
And they made us bury him out of sight
Fifty miles from the scene of the murder
In lashing rain and by lantern light.Scotland’s hero, brave William Wallace
They slew for the love he bore his land
And they shot James Connolly as he was dying
And made a mighty crown of the felon’s brand;
They make the widow, they make the orphan,
They shoot the children - it’s come to this:
But ah, British Mother, had they a quarrel
Your conscript laddie and our Petrakis?
The military conflict
ended in stalemate, but this was really a victory for EOKA – because a
few hundred guerrillas, with popular support, had remained undefeated
while facing British troops who numbered over 40,000 at the height of
the conflict. However, the bitter course of the struggle - coupled with
the divide and rule tactics used by the British authorities – meant
there was little chance of unity between Greeks and Turks. This left an
‘independent’ Cyprus in a political mess, that became worse after the
Turkish invasion and illegal occupation of Northern Cyprus. Britain’s
rulers, on the other hand, were well satisfied with the outcome, because
they retained two strategic ‘sovereign bases’ on the island - which
during the ‘cold war’ contained nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet
Union.
36: Legacy of Strife - Cyprus from rebellion to civil war,
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964
.
by Charles Foley,
A Penguin Special 1964
.
Beggars (present British empire of wales+scotland+ireland) no chooser to pay
Sorry, Shashi Tharoor, but Britain doesn’t owe India any reparations
As one of a parade of speakers debating the British empire
at the Oxford Union, Shashi Tharoor cannot have expected his short
speech to be viewed more than three million times. Reparations, he told
his audience, ‘are a tool for you to atone for the wrongs that have been
done. Let me say with the greatest possible respect: it’s a bit rich to
oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then
celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.’ Tharoor,
an MP in the opposition Congress party, was lauded by the Indian prime
minister Narendra Modi, who said, ‘What he spoke there reflected the
sentiments of the citizens of India.’ It was an inauspicious omen for
Modi’s visit to Britain later this year, the first by an Indian prime
minister in nearly a decade.
Reparations for war have a long history – the British
liked to impose them at the drop of a hat, for example billing the
Tibetan government Rs. 2.5 million after invading Tibet in 1904.
Compensation for larger and more nebulous crimes is, like many ideas now
floating in the intellectual ether, American in origin. In Martin
Luther King Jr’s 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial, he said the
promise of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ was not being
fulfilled: ‘It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this
promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.’
Ta-Nehisi Coates returned to the theme last year with an influential article in the Atlantic
suggesting the US needed a ‘national reckoning’ over the debts of
slavery. Coates has a point: anyone who passes time in the southern
states of America or in the Caribbean will notice the enduring
consequences of chattel slavery.
Tharoor’s demand that Britain should pay reparations to
India for historic damage rests, though, on insecure foundations. He
observed that India’s share of the world economy dropped from 23 to 4
per cent during the centuries of informal and formal British rule. This
change had more to do with the rapid economic transformation of western
Europe by the Industrial Revolution than it did with adjustments inside
India: a largely agricultural economy could not match an industrialising
one. His claim rests on the ‘drain theory’ — that Britain sucked away
India’s prosperity — proposed by late 19th century
nationalists like the Liberal MP Dadabhai Naoroji. When India gained
independence and the ‘drain’ stopped, there was no sign of the promised
surplus.
Tharoor argued that Britain owed a debt of £1.25 billion
to the Indian government at the end of the second world war for the 2.5
million volunteers who had fought the Axis powers, but it was ‘never
actually paid.’ Not only was this debt honoured, but it formed an
essential part of Jawaharlal Nehru’s early economic planning. The
governor of the Reserve Bank of India later complained that the new
prime minister had run through the sterling balances ‘as if there was no
tomorrow.’
Tharoor concluded his witty and entertaining
speech by saying his concern was not monetary value, but ‘the principle
that reparations are owed’ – saying he would be happy for India to be
paid £1 a year by Britain for the next 200 years. It was here that he
betrayed the essential frivolity of his case. He was appealing not for
the rebalancing of entrenched global financial structures that date to
the 18th century, but for moral
victory. Like a surface-to-air missile, he locked on to the spot where
he knew his well-heeled Oxford Union audience would be most vulnerable:
postcolonial guilt. It did the speaker no harm that his voice is of the
orotund type heard in early television documentaries about the royal
family. Tharoor told an Indian TV anchor that so many of the audience
trooped through the yes lobby in support of his reparations motion that
the ‘swank dinner’ following the debate was delayed.
The irony of the case for compensation is that it would
have made little sense to those who were actually subjects of the
British empire. Indian politicians in the 21st century
sometimes appear to be more anti-imperialist than their predecessors
who risked their lives for independence in the 1930s and 40s. For much
of his public career, Gandhi viewed the empire as a guarantor of his
civil rights. Even after spending eleven years in British jails, Nehru
was happy to toast the King Emperor and to make sure the Union Jack was
not lowered when the Indian tricolor was raised. The Indian National
Congress, the forerunner of Tharoor’s party, was for most of its
existence a collaborationist movement. India’s hereditary princes were
almost without exception imperialists. Only a small number of people in
the 20th century sought the violent
overthrow of British rule in India. Even nationalists who were
infuriated by the structural racism inherent in the empire often saw
empire as a progressive force. British rule in India was an act of
complicity, a joint venture between the elites of the two nations.
Today, all of that historical complexity has been forgotten: an attack
on the empire by a politician is a risk-free way of ensuring cross-party
unity and vigorous applause.
Paying a token reparation of £1 a year would be an
absurdity. It presupposes that the government which might have arisen in
India in the absence of the British would have been preferable to the
one that resulted. Particularly, it supposes that the alternative regime
would have produced comparable stability for the growth of internal
trade. At the start of the 18th century
after the depredations of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the
subcontinent was in a state of bitter, broken conflict. In its wake,
outsiders from Europe were able to pay mercenaries to assert dominance
on their behalf. Looking forward towards the period after independence
in 1947, there is nothing in the conduct of the Congress party during
their long decades in power to suggest they might have used compensation
wisely or well. The 1970s marked a growth rate in India of below 1 per
cent. Nor is there the slightest chance that an expression of British
remorse for long forgotten political choices, which occurred at a
different time and in an entirely different historical context, would
engender any respect in India, a country with no tradition of
contrition. Being an Indian politician means never having to say you’re
sorry.
Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait (Penguin)
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