Forty years ago this week, on 16 July 1974, still a young reporter, I was sent late at night to the Luqa aerodrome (the side entrance, where Lufthansa Technik was until recently).
We were not told exactly why we were there. Suddenly, a stream of black cars whisked by, and we were told Cypriot Archbishop Makarios had come to Malta as a guest of Prime Minister Mintoff.
That was strange, as earlier Makarios had been reported as dead. A victim of a coup against him.
Later it turned out he had escaped through a secret exit from his palace and sought refuge at a United Nations camp in Paphos.
From there, the next day, he was whisked away by an RAF helicopter to the British base in Akrotiri and brought to Malta, where he was personally greeted by Prime Minister Mintoff, before going on to London.
There were, of course, tons of irony on every side. Makarios himself was no lover of the British: on the contrary, he was opposed to the British and wanted independence for his country. And as for Dom Mintoff… .
As a result of those eventful days, today Cyprus is the last divided country in Europe, with tens of thousands of displaced people and even more mourning their dead from 40 years ago.
On 20 July, Turkish seaborne and airborne troops landed unilaterally and without warning in the north of the island, their first goal being to open up a corridor to the Turkish-Cypriot enclave north of Nicosia.
On 14 August, following the collapse of talks in Geneva, the Turks launched the second phase of their invasion, leading to a seizure of one-third of the island and a de facto partition.
In the end, it was estimated that 3,000 had been killed and more than 2,100 were ‘missing’ and 200,000 Greek Cypriots and 40,000 Turkish-Cypriots were displaced from their homes.
A Green Line cuts through Nicosia, entire cities like Famagusta lie completely abandoned. And the last time there was a slim chance of re-unification, around the time Cyprus and Malta joined the EU, the Greek-Cypriots voted against.
North Cyprus or Turkish Cyprus is a non-state, recognised only by Turkey. Few airlines, mostly British charter flights, go there. The standard of living is far inferior to that of Greek Cyprus, even though this had its well-known financial crisis.
Who was to blame? The Greek Cypriots of course blame the Turks, but as I have shown chronologically, the whole thing began with a coup in the Greek part.
The fighting among the Greek Cypriots had long been simmering between supporters of Archbishop Makarios, who had come round to the principle of an independent Cypriot state and the right-wing factions (EOKA – B) still holding fast to the old principle of union with Greece.
It was the latter, pushed and abetted by the dictatorship in Athens, who launched the coup against the archbishop on 15 July 1974.
Equally, or perhaps more, to blame were the British. As in so many other cases in the Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th centuries, their policy was made on the hoof, and mainly focused on exclusively British interests. A similar case can be made as regards British policy regarding Malta, but that requires a whole volume.
As the thuggish EOKA regime tightened its grip on Cyprus, and the island looked on the brink of Enosis (union with Greece), the British still did not believe Turkey would react. Twice already Turkey had been on the brink but drew back.
Even now, Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit tried to convince the British government to act jointly on the basis of their shared guarantor status.
When the first Turkish invasion took place, frantic diplomacy on the part of the British led to a fragile ceasefire on 30 July. But there were also touches of pure farce. When the news of the Turkish aggression arrived early in the morning of 15 July, the car sent to collect new Foreign Secretary James Callaghan at his home for an urgent meeting with Prime Minister Harold Wilson failed to arrive. Callaghan had to wave down a passing milkman doing his round and persuade him to drive straight to Downing Street.
After a while, Callaghan succeeded in convening talks with the various parties in Geneva. It was a forbidding experience, and, in fact, the last time that the British tried to do something so central in the Mediterranean. The Geneva talks turned out to be a comedy of errors. The Turks, whose foreign minister periodically went missing in Geneva, were no longer interested in a negotiated settlement but more interested in finishing off what they had begun.
Obviously, this being the Mediterranean, the story goes far back. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Greek ethnic area extended deep into what we today call Turkey and which was then called Asia Minor, having previously extended to Constantinople itself before it was called Istanbul.
Again, it was the rabid, fundamentalist, Greek ideas of enlargement that pushed them to attack the Turks in Asia Minor, but wily Kemal Ataturk held his forces back and then unleashed them with such force that they drove back the Greeks literally to the sea. With them went anything Greek that remained, especially women and children, forced to long and cruel marches just as the Armenians had been. It was a massacre; it was genocide on a scale today largely unimaginable.
There is a link between Malta and Cyprus that goes beyond the arrival of Makarios 40 years ago. Actually, the link goes beyond the British influence. Few realise that Cyprus was taken by the Turks just two years after the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, as if it served as a substitute for not having conquered Malta.
When the British took over Malta after the French, that was the start of the British adventure in the Med. Governor Tom Maitland became, at the same time, the British commander of the Ionian Islands. Many times after that, Malta and Cyprus or Malta and Greece were like two scales of the same balance. For instance, in World War II, the British agonised over whether they should abandon Malta to defend Greece or vice-versa.
(I am indebted for much of the material in this article to an extraordinary book, Blue-Water Empire, by Robert Holland that I am reading to review).
Some weeks ago, I was approached by the Turkish embassy in Malta to go on a free visit to North Cyprus where they are celebrating something like the 40th anniversary of liberation. I declined. What happened 40 years ago is no occasion for celebration but more for a sober reflection on the pain that mindless political ideals can bring about, and on how situations like this, once set up, can hardly be retracted.
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