http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/ ... geNumber=2
I was in the U.N. medical corps in Cyprus from 1970-1975 and can still recall the terror that Turkish airforce jets brought on the civilian populations of Cyprus. We tended to the dead and wounded after the attack on the village of Episkopi where five innocent workers were killed with napalm dropped from the Turkish jets in 1964.
I feel this book does not give an impartial account and history of the problems in Cyprus and does a great disservice to the memory of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots who died on the island. It does not give a true account of the ethnic anatagonisms in Cyprus, as i remember it. The book gives 100% emphasis on the Greeks as the cause of the troubles but omits to mention the terrorist groups brought in from Turkey as far back as 1954 to instigate troubles between the two communities.
It singles out the Greek Cypriot community as committing genocide, when i remember a distinct clash of the Turkish and Greek communities insitgated by nationalist elements in their respective motherlands (Greece and Turkey). Acts of genocide did not take place as described in the book - we oversaw the treatment of wounded and dead from both the turkish and greek communities. Only when the Turkish Army invaded in 1974, did the nationalist elements on the greek side exact revenge on the Turkish civilian population as the Turkish army had been found raping and killing civilians of the Greek community. The inter-communal fighting was not even mentioned once in the book, which is remarkable for a supposed unabridged book about Cyprus.
Also, there are incredibly large amounts of grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes in the text which does not leave a good impression on the author and/or publisher. The mistakes would be excusable, were it not for the fact that the book contains a great number of mistakes in fact and falsifications of events. For example, the author states that the Greek armed forces were in control of 300 tanks at the time of the invasion and that the Turkish contingent were heavily outnumbered. In fact, we were stationed near the Greek base in Nicosia and the Greek Tank corps were quite proud of their 17 tanks of world war 2 vintage. They were the only tanks in Cyprus at any time before the 1974 invasion. This is just one example of how the author gives false information (without any reference or even an index) and tries to steer the reader in believing a totally false account of the events in Cyprus.
I don't know what the author's motives in this misrepresentation are, but some reviews here have suggested that he is under the employ of the Turkish government. Given this totally one-sided diatribe, bearing no resemblance to my own recollection of events, i cannot disagree with this assertion.
A truly awful book which sets out to give excuses for a brutal invasion.
It really is a shame that this book seems to have been written with one aim in mind - to falsify history and give a totally biased version of events in the hope of causing hatred instead of mending bridges between the Greeks and Turks of Cyprus. What a great opportunity lost......
