[In the following review, Vatikiotis offers a generally favorable assessment of Cyprus, though disputes some of Hitchens's political and historical interpretations.]

On the tenth anniversary of the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, Christopher Hitchens writes about the complexities and consequences of that episode with intense emotion [in Cyprus]. He also writes in anger about the undoing, or at least the partition, of the island republic. On the whole, he writes cogently and convincingly, albeit in parts with some exaggeration and over simplification.

Unlike Nancy Crawshaw's detailed study of “the Cyprus revolt,” published in 1978, Hitchens's book is a political essay, a somewhat personal and polemical tract. It sets out the author's reaction not only to the events on the island since 1955, but also to the policies of Greece, Turkey, Britain, and the United States, especially after 1964. His contention is straightforward: that the Colonels' regime in Athens (1967–74), in collusion with the United States, was determined to overthrow Archbishop Makarios as a prelude to the partition of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey.

A corollary contention of the author is that Britain, one of the three guarantor powers of Cyprus's independence, with a presence on Cyprus in its sovereign bases, deliberately failed to intervene in July-August 1974 (as it had the right and duty to do under the Zurich and London agreements of 1960) in order to forestall the Turkish invasion. Such failure, the author argues, was due to Britain's dependence on American policy; that in turn was formulated and conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom Hitchens bitterly denounces as the source of evil, criticizing him for his disingenuous support of the Greek junta in Athens and for his parallel condoning of the Turkish invasion of the island.

Although Hitchens recognizes the endemic difficulty of ethnic and sectarian differences in Cyprus, he asserts that these did not constitute insurmountable problems for the young republic. They were simply exploited, blatantly and cruelly, by outside powers. He also accepts the weaknesses of the 1960 constitution, but does not quite come to grips with Makarios's lethargic attitude toward its amendment. Nor does he elaborate on Makarios's unwillingness to extend to the Turkish minority the kind of constitutional arrangement, that is, the guarantees, that would have afforded them a greater feeling of security.

Hitchens fails to give full weight to the fact that the constitution in practice consecrated ethnicity and sectarianism; both sides used it in order to promote the interests of their respective communities. In such circumstances the idea of a “Cypriot nation” was difficult to develop or to promote. The idea of an ethnarch—in Greek perceptions, the leader of the genos, i.e., the Greek Orthodox Greek community, but more generally the religious head of the ethnos, or nation, the identity of which is determined by religion, not by territory—as the head of a secular state and government was not an auspicious beginning, given the history of the island, and the historical relationship between Greeks and Turks, Greece and Turkey.

“The urgency of the battle against British rule,” Hitchens writes,

had put the Greek Cypriots in a position where the Orthodox Church, the Greek flag and the intoxicating slogans of Hellenism had shaped their liberation. … From the start, a strong element of vainglory was present; the boastful conviction that enosis [union with Greece] … was still attainable.

This is all true. Hitchens does not consider, however, the very complex and convoluted Greek notion of ethnos and genos to place these statements in proper perspective. Church leaders were always in favor of the genos (Hellenism), but more often than not opposed to the idea of an independent Greek nation-state, or ethnos-kratos. The latter detracted from their prerogative of leadership, and undermined their other interests. As is always the case with the periphery, Greek Cypriots tended to be more nationalistic about enosis than either conditions warranted or reality decreed. Greek politicians on the mainland exploited this trend for their own purposes.

The fact remains that the independent republic of Cyprus that emerged in 1960 was not a secular polity. Its constitution in effect institutionalized the sectarian interests of the two communities, Greeks and Turks, or the two nations. Makarios did not try—and when he did he was unsuccessful—to transform Cyprus into a secular unitary state. He was certainly for an independent Cyprus in which the Greek majority would remain politically dominant over the Turkish minority, but he failed to establish a political system outside religion. He could not, of course, do that since he was himself, at least officially, a man of religion.

Intercommunal strife, therefore, remained endemic. Yet outsiders could not exploit or manipulate it as totally as Hitchens suggests. They did so in the circumstances essentially because the Makarios regime had failed to deal with it. The vision Makarios had of the state of Cyprus was the one he presided over for fourteen years. There had been no alternative vision. The lack of imagination in this connection, alas, led to the tragic invasion and subsequent virtual partition of the island by Turkish forces, whose continued presence on the island ten years later simply has no plausible basis—at least on the surface—other than the support and promotion of the puerile ambitions of Mr. Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader. All the same, what always lurked in the background to undermine further the unitary republican polity was, of course, enosis on the Greek side, and taksim, or partition, on the Turkish side. The recent lesson of Lebanon suggests the price that must be paid for the failure to construct a regime outside, or independently of, religion.

As for the crisis of 1963–64, Hitchens tells us practically nothing about how General Grivas, leader of EOKA, the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, returned to the island. He fails to consider, for example, whether or not there was any connivance on the part of the Centre Union government of the late George Papandreou in the general's return to Cyprus. Moreover, the claim by Andreas Papandreou in 1971 that “Cyprus lies at the heart of the tragic political developments that had led to the death of democracy in Greece” should be subjected to critical scrutiny, and not be accepted at face value. There were other deep causes for the “death of democracy in Greece” in 1967. Hitchens, in short, is too facile with his assertions, or at least with his ready acceptance of the assertions of Greek politicians. By July 1965 Andreas Papandreou himself was very much a bone of contention in the soured relations between his father, the Prime Minister, and the King. By resorting to pejorative epithets such as the “Ex-Nazi Queen Frederika”—what the Greeks refer to as “tambeles”—in place of argument or explanation, Hitchens has succumbed to the average Greek's notion of evidence (“But everybody knows it”); moreover, this detracts from his otherwise knowledgeable analysis of the intricacies of Greek party and personal politics.

On the basis of published statements by Turkish politicians over the last twenty to twenty-five years, as well as other publications emanating from Turkey, it is plausible to infer that Turkey views Cyprus, not to mention the sovereign Greek Aegean islands close to the Turkish littoral, as potentially integral territories of Turkey's strategic space. It is equally plausible to expect that any Turkish government will, at the opportune time, try to “integrate” them into Turkey. To do that, needless to say, would mean risking a war with a NATO ally, Greece, and trampling over every bilateral agreement Turkey has signed since the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. It is in this sense that Hitchens's tract has highlighted the Turkish exploitation of a strategic minority in a weak island republic, its sectarian composition, and its strategic importance to its American superpower patron.

What Hitchens fails to consider, however, is the complex and intense pressures on the United States in the summer of 1974, arising in particular from the crisis in the Middle East, that is, from the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and its aftermath. It is not enough to accuse the Americans of overlooking the details, of being concerned with the “bigger picture,” when they connived in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. A superpower with global strategic concerns is always, for good or ill, influenced by the “bigger picture.” And Cyprus is practically part of the Levant—and, by extension, of the turbulent and continuously erupting Middle East. This is an essential perspective which any student of Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean must always bear in mind. Even if the Americans were prepared to forestall the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the question remains whether they could have done so if the Turks were determined to carry it through. Once again the old conundrum of how far or well the patron can restrain or control the client in the political power game presents itself.

Hitchens is correct in arguing that Cyprus is the symbol of “unresolved Greek and Turkish conflict.” What is less certain is his contention that it is “emblematic of all the difficulties faced by an emerging modern Greece, which seeks to escape from being a Balkan country dependent on America, and to become a respected member of the European community.” The uncertainty is over the question of dependence and independence. Evidence from a similar search by other states in parallel situations in the recent past suggests that the entelechy of such an evolution cannot be guaranteed. Nor is it clear that Greeks, and in particular the present Greek regime, are anxious to become “a respected member of the European community.” The point is arguable.

What is certain, though, is that for the foreseeable future Cyprus will remain divided, its northern part occupied by Turkish forces. Hitchens rightly points to the more ominously permanent aspects of this occupation in his excellent discussion of the ongoing settlement of northern Cyprus by mainland Turks. Given its rapidly increasing population (over 45 million) and the requirements of its economic development, Turkey will also seek to expand its writ over such disputed, or contested, territories as Cyprus and the nearer Aegean islands. A recent trend in Turkish policy, which appears to be part of a wider strategy, may be noted—namely, the extensive economic and commercial activities of Turkey in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Jordan. Coupled to a deliberately closer association, if not identification, with the recent Islamic revival throughout the region, one can reasonably speak of Turkey's desire for a greater role in the Middle East. It is these new developments in Turkish policy which Greece must confront and counter. One should not be surprised if the present regime in Greece were to aim for closer relations with Israel as a counterweight to Turkey's expanded economic and Islamic policy in the Arab Middle East.

The difficulty is that, contrary to Hitchens's expectation, a future unified Cyprus—even with AKEL (the Cyprus Communist Party) in power—will not be secular in politics and law. Archbishop Makarios, the hero of this book, however hard and well he fought to guard the independence of the republic, was unable to make it a secular polity, partly because he could not countenance a political status for the Turkish minority equal to that of the Greek majority. The Turkish minority sought and found a protector in Ankara. The intransigent Makarios was hoist by his own petard, and in the end fell prey to the enemies of that independent republic.

An independent Cyprus, composed of the people of two nations, Greeks and Turks, so disparate in religion and national history, was never really on. That is why, in a way, there was never such an entity before 1960. Once it was formed, however, one must agree with Hitchens that its undoing was callous and disgraceful—not least because it sets a bad precedent for so many other similar parts of the world.