Cyprus, Iran and the long 20th century

A war is being fought around an island-colony we half-remember

British soldiers erect barbed wire barricades as children watch in a Cypriot mountain village during operations against the EOKA insurgency in 1956. Photo by Bert Hardy/Getty Images

Spring in Cyprus: as the Iran war continues to metastasise, migration season will mean that the jets, drones, and ordnance currently thickening the skies are joined by larks, warblers, herons, and hoopoes on their way north, into Europe. On 1 March, a Sahed-type drone struck the British military base at RAF Akrotiri, on the southern coast of the Republic of Cyprus. It was the first direct military strike the island had suffered since its partition in 1974, when, following an attempted coup by the Greek military junta, Turkey invaded and seized its northernmost third. The strike caused widespread consternation among Cypriots, many of whom felt the continued British presence had made them a target in a conflict that was not their own. By 3 March, Greece, France, and the UK had all committed warships to the Mediterranean, with the ostensible aim of defending the island. By 8 March, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands had sent both frigates and troops, and Turkey had deployed F-16 fighter jets to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, following Greece’s deployment of its own F-16s to the south. Within ten days of an attack that caused zero casualties and only superficial damage to an aircraft hangar, Cyprus and its surrounding waters were host to the largest European naval build up in years, joining a robust US presence that includes several destroyers and the aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.

The US and Israeli war on Iran cannot be separated from time and history; events on a small, pivotal island in the Mediterranean cannot be separated from imperialism, in both its modern and historic guises. Akrotiri is one of two sovereign base areas (SBAs) on Cyprus, along with Dhekelia in the east. These are not leased bases; they are British overseas territories, remnants of empire. When Cyprus became independent in 1960, Britain insisted on the arrangement. Having lost its base in Egypt following the 1956 Suez Crisis, the contracting empire wanted to retain, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, a “cockpit” overlooking the Middle East. In the 21st century, Akrotiri and Dhekelia have been among the UK’s main forward military hubs for the region. Most recently, they have been used jointly by the US and the UK for surveillance flights over Gaza, for strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, and for ongoing operations against Isis. The drone strike on Akrotiri occurred just after Keir Starmer reversed an earlier decision not to allow US forces to use British bases for “defensive operations” related to the Iran war.

Cyprus has always been in the middle of things: it sits 40 miles south of Turkey, 230 north of Egypt, and roughly 100 west of the Levant. On a clear day, you can stand on its pointed-finger Karpaz peninsula and see the coast of Syria. Though relatively small (only 140 miles long), the island has been prized for its resources and strategic location since the days of the Phoenicians. Crusader knights built sprawling, Escher-esque castles atop its mountains, Venetians fortified its ports and ringed its cities with massive walls, and from 1571 the Ottomans collected their taxes from its villages.

I grew up in North Cyprus, the son of EFL teachers, and it was strange, watching from the UK, as the island has been thrust back into the news. What I heard most from Cypriots, both friends and strangers, was frustration at British ignorance of its own former colony – even though hundreds of thousands of them holiday there every year. On BBC Breakfast, David Lammy, the former foreign secretary, incorrectly claimed that Cyprus was “part of NATO”, though this may not have been quite the mistake many claimed – practically speaking, the presence of the SBAs means that it is a sort of honorary member. Indeed, the British have maintained a presence on the island in some form since 1878, when the Ottoman Empire leased Cyprus to Britain following its defeat in the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Britain governed it as a protectorate, but annexed the island in 1914 after the Ottomans sided with Germany. In 1925, it became a crown colony.

From the start, Britain’s administration of Cyprus was hubristic. Tabitha Morgan, author of Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of The British in Cyprus, writes that Malcolm Stevenson, who served first as High Commissioner and then Governor of Cyprus, oversaw the construction of several expensive, ostentatious neoclassical buildings, “ridiculously inappropriate for a colony as impoverished as Cyprus”. Stevenson was described by his contemporaries as “very incompetent”, a man who “failed entirely to address the alarming economic and social problems confronting Cyprus in the aftermath of the First World War”. Fighting between Greece and Turkey continued for four years after the November 1918 armistice and contributed to a sense of uncertainty over the island’s future. Cyprus, which has changed hands many times over the centuries, has always had a mixed population, of which Greeks form the majority and Turks the minority, but still includes Mennonites, Kurds, Catholics, and Armenians. The Greek Cypriot desire for enosis, union with Greece, was shut down by the British early on, and a telling 1920 headline in the Times alluded to Richard the Lionheart’s capture of the island in 1191, during the Third Crusade: “Cyprus Remains British, King Richard’s Conquest Retained.”

This desire both for the island to be rid of its colonial governors and for it to join Greece would, by 1955, birth EOKA, the Greek Cypriot paramilitary group that bombed British positions, and who feature in Lawrence Durrell’s famous account of his time on the island, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. “Parcels of steel plates began dropping from heaven onto paving stones, while pieces of solid air compressed themselves against the window frames making them jingle,” he wrote of their campaign’s opening salvo. Though this insurgency eventually forced the British Empire into retreat and was the major contributor to independence in 1960, the Turkish minority feared that enosis would leave them stranded in a Greek state, and by the late 1950s their own paramilitary, the TMT, had emerged in answer to EOKA. Independence, brokered by Britain, Greece, and Turkey, produced the Republic of Cyprus, with a constitution designed to balance the two communities. Britain retained the sovereign base areas at Akrotiri and Dhekelia. It was an uneasy compromise. Within three years, constitutional deadlock and street violence had shattered the arrangement; Turkish Cypriots withdrew into enclaves, and a UN peacekeeping force arrived in 1964, where it remains.

A decade later the crisis reached its breaking point. In July 1974, a coup backed by the fascist Greek military junta attempted, finally, to force enosis. Turkey promptly invaded, citing its rights as a guarantor power. Turkish forces took control of the northern third of the island; Greek Cypriots fled south, Turkish Cypriots north. A UN buffer zone, the so-called Green Line, cut through the capital and across the island. Half a century later, that line still holds: Cyprus is still divided between the Republic of Cyprus, an EU member state, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a pariah state recognised only by Turkey. Christopher Hitchens, whose first wife, Eleni, was a Greek Cypriot, and who took a deep interest in Cyprus throughout his career, lamented that the island seemed forever a “hostage to history”. Eight centuries of foreign domination had finally ended, only for a unified independence to be cruelly stripped away after less than two decades, Cyprus once again “the victim of imperial caprice and cynicism, rather than its own undoubted deficiencies as a state and as a society”.

To walk the divided capital (Lefkosia or Lefkoşa, depending on which side of the Green Line you find yourself) is to witness the long-term effects of such capriciousness. Streets terminate abruptly in sandbags and watchtowers; houses, long abandoned, stand chained and empty and dilapidated. A British-Cypriot man I know once said to me, “When you cut a city down the middle, its centre becomes the edge.” It’s true: the further you walk into the old town, the more it feels like a frontier. This is a 20th-century conflict that hasn’t so much festered as been forgotten – but has, nevertheless, persisted. Although some progress has been achieved (you can now cross the border at various points), the brute fact of partition remains. This status quo benefits those powers, especially the UK and the US, whose tactics have always been to divide and rule, and whose strategic interest in the island is served by the SBAs and by a disunited population whose security is both threatened and protected by its guarantors.

When Cyprus returned to the headlines last week, and the 1974 partition was once again discussed, the British line across social media was, variously, that Cypriots had “allowed” the existence of the SBAs. The reality is that Britain, although in retreat in 1960, was still a vastly more powerful country, and the SBAs were imposed as a non-negotiable condition of independence. Relevant here is the 2019 ICJ advisory ruling on the UK’s separation of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius – deemed illegal under international law because colonial powers cannot legitimately cede territory if it violates the rights of a colonised people, especially if they do so under pressure from a more powerful nation.

Likewise came the suggestion that, without the SBAs, Turkey would itself have annexed the whole of the island at the time of its invasion – this even though Britain, as a guarantor power, had the legal right (some would say the responsibility) to intervene, but did not do so. Whether you are sympathetic to the idea that it did not want to risk a wider war in the Mediterranean largely depends on whether you lost loved ones in the conflict, or had your home placed permanently beyond your reach. Or, indeed, whether or not you believe that the US did not explicitly desire this outcome. Hitchens directs us to the reminisces of Fleet Intelligence Office Martin Packard, sent by the British to be a liaison between Greek and Turkish communities. In this role he assumed that British policy “favoured the maintenance of a unitary state in conformity with British treaty obligations”. He was disabused of this notion when he encountered US diplomat George Ball, who apparently told him “You’ve got it wrong, son. There’s only one solution to this island and that’s partition.”

Whatever your view, Britain’s non-intervention in 1974, either during the Greek coup or the subsequent Turkish invasion, made its position clear: the bases were there to serve the British interest, and the lives of its former subjects would always be a secondary concern. Though it can appear otherwise in peacetime, Cypriots – either Turkish or Greek – have relatively little say in some their island’s destiny, while it remains a staging post and landing strip for European and American concerns in the Middle East. And since the drone strike on Akrotiri, this fact has once again become painfully apparent. Protests have been staged at the continued presence of the military bases. But to the UK, Turkey, and Greece, each attempting to navigate a path through regional rivalries and strategic imperatives, Cypriots’ concerns about such quibbling things as their consent to wars of aggression are easily overlooked. In light of further drones launched at Akrotiri (all intercepted), it’s worth pointing out the obvious: the gateway to the Middle East swings open both ways. The old infrastructures of empire may have allowed for the continued, convenient reach of the old European imperial powers. But it is via these leylines that new conflicts will inevitably reverberate.

Pity the 20th century, the long 20th century – 26 years past its expiry date and its assumptions and frameworks still frequently resurrected, if only to confirm their demise. The joint US and Israeli strikes against Iran and Lebanon have ushered in another bout of global chaos, and with it another opportunity to be reminded that the old world is no more. Since 28 February, Mark Carney has worried that the post-war “global architecture is breaking down;” Ursula von der Leyen has announced that “the old order is dead”; and Politico’s Alexander Burns has declared that Trump is “Burying the Twentieth Century.” This may be true, in a sense, but the continued popularity of last-rites rhetoric has always suggested to me a credulity toward grand narratives, and therefore an implicit demand they be adhered to. Which 20th century must we all agree happened, now that we must all agree it’s over?

One version that appears to be slipping away from the British public describes how we ruled over specific people in specific places, as opposed to some fuzzy collage of imperial subjects who lived in mostly anonymous foreign lands. Little psychic or narrative space is taken up these days by, say, the British administration of Botswana, Malawi, Bahrain, or Brunei, even though it was only 50 years ago that the last of them gained their independence. There’s an obvious advantage to this amnesia: to forget specific power is to forget specific responsibility. It’s an effective abdication, until the world turns, and the old infrastructures creak back into relevance, and we’re left wondering how we got into this mess in the first place. Far from marking some final, definitive break with the 20th century’s post-war condition, the US and Israel’s reckless new militarism is reactivating old, semi-dormant 20th century conflicts. Britain forgets the specifics of its former empire at its own peril. We have much in common with Akrotiri and Dhekelia: stranded in obligations and expectations we established decades ago that we can no longer fulfil. The war in Iran threatens regional instability, and Cyprus may yet become a symbol of our inability to foresee how its tendrils could reach us. We have long forced others to live with the consequences of our hubris; as a result, we might, once again, suffer them ourselves.

[Further reading: Don’t let Britain decline]