by Tim Drayton » Mon Dec 17, 2007 11:56 am
Have you read "The Cyprus Conspiracy" by Brendan O'Malley and Ian Craig? This book focuses on explaining the events behind the 1974 Turkish invasion and de-facto partition of the island. Its main thesis is that these events were personally orchestrated by Henry Kissinger, and that the main concern of the Western alliance ever since, to quote the title of chapter ten "A Sham Independence: The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier", has always been to maintain the strategically important British bases and monitoring stations on the island, regardless of the cost to the Cypriot people.
The best books I have ever read on the Cyprus problem have been those by the Turkish Cypriot academic Niyazi Kızılyürek. In case you imagine that his writing promotes the official puppet regime propaganda line, you should realise that he was expelled from the north of Cyprus in the days when Denktash was in charge for refusing to toe the line and he is employed by the University of Cyprus in the RoC. He is also perfectly bilingual in Turkish and Greek, and has written quite a few books in Greek. I believe that an English translation of his book with the Turkish title "Milliyetçilik Kıskacında Kıbrıs" is expected to be published in 2008, and I strongly recommend that you look out for this, although its scope goes way beyond 1963-1974. There are four main chapters in this book. The first looks at the development of modern Greek nationalism. The second looks at how this ideology was transposed to Cyprus and the effect it had on political developments in the Greek Cypriot community as it became acquainted with modernity and developed a sense of national identity. In chapters three and four he does the same for Turkey and then the Turkish Cypriot community. I feel that this is a tremendously evenly balanced book whose main thesis is that the sense of national identity promoted by the respective motherlands on the island tore the two communities apart and led to the tragedy that played itself out in the period you mention.