Get Real! wrote:My goodness! What have I done to deserve all this?
The Deniz incident is well known and documented because the British were involved. Here's another account of it...
In this connection an incident occurred in October 1959, which strained to the limits the efforts of Makarios and Kutchuk to retain intercommunal goodwill—the interception by a British naval patrol of a Turkish motorboat, the Deniz, off the Karpass peninsular carrying large quantities of arms and ammunition. The Deniz incident and the dramatic failure of Kutchuk’s appeal for the Turkish Cypriots to cooperate in a subsequent arms collection, confirmed that TMT were in control in the Turkish community and that the Turks intended to arm, rather than disarm, for security.http://www.cyprus-conflict.net/municipa ... rkides.htm
First a sad statement and then a revealing name..baaaaaaa!!
Among all the political difficulties arising from Cyprus's awkward constitutional structure, none was more important than how the municipalities of Nicosia, Limmasol, Famagusta, Paphos, and Kyrenia would be governed. Here is where much of the dispute about power sharing took place, and the municipalities---both an example of how Cypriots could live together, and an equally vivid example of how they choose not to---became the locus of discontent by all parties. In understanding the breakdown of the constitutional order in 1960-63, no issue of governance is more significant.
No scholar has done more to explain this issue than Diana Markides, a British researcher associated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic. Below is a summary article produced for the Journal of Mediterranean Studies.
Here is something else she wrote which is even more interesting.
The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern
Mediterranean 1850-1960 Robert Holland and Diana Markides (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 252 pages
Robert Holland’s 1998 book, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus 1954-1959 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press), explained the intricacies of Cypriot resistance to British rule that
led to violence and eventual British withdrawal from the island in 1960. Now he
and Diana Markides situate British Cyprus within its context of the other British
territories in the Mediterranean with The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for
Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850-1960.
The “Hellenes” refers to the Greeks and Greek irredentists seeking to fulfill the
aspirations of the “Meghali Idhea”, or Great Idea. The mission of the Great Idea
was the redemption of the majority of Greeks still remaining outside the frontiers of
the new independent state of Greece after the Greek Revolution of 1821. The
“struggle for mastery” refers to the native resistance in these territories to Ottoman
or British rule with the end goal of union with Greece (enosis), and the grappling
for power that occurred at various times between the British, Greeks, Ottomans,
and within these groups themselves. Throughout these struggles, Britain sought
to balance her own desire for hegemony in the Mediterranean with the need to
preserve the integrity of peace in Europe and the Middle East. This proved to be
a difficult task as Britain fought to avoid the impression of defeat in giving over her
possessions to decolonization and independence or cession to Greece.
The British and the Hellenes discusses specifically the Ionian Islands, Crete, the
Dodecanese, and Cyprus. One would like to read more about Malta, and even
Gibraltar, in a study of Britain in the Mediterranean. But the authors explain up
front that their study focuses on “those islands with Greek-majority populations
where Great Britain played a leading role in climaxes leading either to union with
Greece, or—in the case of Cyprus—to a rather different ‘solution’”. Indeed each
case ended differently, depending upon the strength of irredentist motivations
among the native inhabitants and Greek leaders in Athens, as well as on evolving
relationships with Britain. Where the Ionian Islands joined with Greece under
British patronage in 1864, Cretan enosis “succeeded in the teeth of growing British
hostility” in 1913. The Cretan experience further “fed into the movement for
Cypriot enosis”, which erupted in violence and independence from Britain, but not
union with Greece, in 1960. The “Dodecanese Experience”, entangled with British
post-war strategy in Palestine and India, resulted in cession to Greece in 1948.
By comparing and connecting the irredentist ambitions of Greek nationalists to
British rule in these four different cases, Holland and Markides make a much-
needed contribution to the scholarship on British Empire as well as the modern
Mediterranean. Although dense with facts, and potentially confusing with its back-
and-forth looks between the territories, the book nevertheless flows well
chronologically and proves an interesting and valuable tool for understanding this
complex region. Particularly exciting, for those of us who look forward to such
things, are the sixteen historic black and white photographs, three maps, and
beautiful cover illustration—a circa 1850 watercolor of the Old Fortress of Corfu.
Beyond the illustrations, Holland and Markides provide a very readable, concise
text that surely will become a classic in the study of the British Empire and the
Mediterranean.
A competition to see who can come up with the most irrelevant to the issue piece? Ok, my turn...
