Cyprus 1957-1963: From Colonial Conflict to Constitutional Crisis

"Diana Markides is amazing. She chooses to look at something nobody else bothered to look at. It’s right there in the title, Cyprus 1957- 1963: From colonial conflict to constitutional crisis, the key role of the municipal issue. The kind of title that puts you to sleep. But this one’s different. This one’s amazing. Because if you go to the Web or an encyclopaedia and you ask what the ‘Cyprus Problem’ was it’ll probably say, ‘in 1974 the Turkish air force and army invaded Cyprus and ever since then the country has been partitioned along the ‘green line’’. Now anyone worth their salt will say no, it wasn’t in 1974, the beginning was in 1963, because that was when Cyprus failed as a new autonomous constitutional state. The British had to come back in and sort out the pieces. But Markides’ book ends in 1963, and introduces a completely new chapter. She’s placing the beginning of the conflict where it belongs in 1957, because if you really get into the nitty gritty of what went on behind the scenes you will see that it was the manipulation of the British and American governments that created the nucleus of what we call the ‘Cyprus Problem’. The British and Americans wanted their strategic base close to the Middle East, and Markides knows that. That’s the real story and so she goes on to write about the ‘municipal issue’, which is a terribly boring way of referencing the fact that they were going to divide every single city in Cyprus physically between Greek and Turkish Cypriotes, and that they only managed to pull this off in one city, Nicosia. the capital. But they had plans, the British had plans, and they nearly published them but were afraid of rioting. This changes the whole game in terms of Cyprus. Markides found one of these plans in the National Archive in London and what it means is that the British were willing to defend their military bases by full ethnic partition. Because if they had left the Cypriotes alone the Cypriotes would have got on just fine and as soon as they’d had a successful democratic country they would have just politely but firmly evicted the British… Exactly. It’s the classic strategy and you see it in almost all of the five cities we examine. But here is a Cypriote scholar of enormous talent walking through these steps with the utmost care, and it’s beautiful work. If only people knew more about what her book was actually saying we would perhaps have a very different view of what’s happening in Cyprus today."