Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig
I.B. Tauris, London, 1999, £19.95
O’Malley and Craig are two senior British journalists and they have written a very interesting account of the post-WW2 machinations of America and Britain – initially Britain but, post Suez, chiefly America, as senior partner – to keep the people of Cyprus internally divided (Turks against Greeks) and thus incapable of challenging the presence of the British and American military and intelligence bases on the island. Having read nothing about Cyprus for over 20 years – and forgotten that – almost all of this was a revelation to me.
Alternatively: this is a case study of the use of a non-existent ‘Soviet threat’ by the US/UK to manipulate Cypriot internal affairs.
Alternatively: this is a classic example of the multi-faceted nature of political conspiracies. The book’s title is a serious misnomer: there are many overlapping and competing conspiracies described in this book.
Much of the book is in fields about which I know nothing. Where the authors do touch on areas about which I do know something, there are some dumb mistakes. The Fluency Committee was not set up in Whitehall to examine the evidence that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent (p.148); Colin Wallace has not ‘admitted putting out anti-Wilson material in an operation known as Clockwork Orange’ (p.149). Do such minor errors matter? I doubt it in this case. The book is solidly documented and the evidence the authors have assembled, mostly from published material, is impressive.
As for the future, the authors comment on p.229 (neatly summarising their thesis):
‘…..the evil genie of interethnic hatred cannot be put back in the bottle that easily. Unleashed with prompting by Eden in the 1950s, encouraged by US-British moves to block reintegration in the 1960s, and solidified by the [Turkish] invasion that the American implicitly encouraged in 1974, it continues to this day.’
Ethnic cleansing in Europe in the post-war era didn’t begin in Yugoslavia, it began on Cyprus; and Britain and America were very largely responsible for it.