Bananiot wrote:Kimon, do you really believe that EOKA could pose a serious problem to Britain? Operating in a small island with hardly any suitable place for guerrilla warfare EOKA was always a sitting duck for the Brits. Probably they were a blessing in disguise too and the Brits knew it. They even got Denktash to lend a helping hand to Yiorgadzis when he was arrested. By all accounts EOKA was totally finished by 1959, having gone through 1958 attacking and murdering GC's, especially in the Famagusta district. The Brits got what they wanted at the end, a foothold on the island which they wanted to secure prior to 1955 before EOKA started knocking on an open door. The only thing EOKA managed was to get Turkey seriously involved in the Cyprus issue.
Sorry Bananiot but I can not follow your reasoning.
1. If an empire is able to defeat its enemy it neither negotiates nor compromises nor lets him go. If the Brits had half the chance they would have arrested Grivas, put him into a gage and humiliated him to death showing him around like a baboon. And then they would dictate their terms having deprived Makarios from his only negotiating “weapon” which was EOKA. They would not had let him come out from his hideout as a national hero and being praised internationally as someone who, leading just 200 poorly armed and poorly trained guerrillas humiliated the Mighty British Empire and it’s army.
2. The Brits had realised in 1957 that they were not getting anywhere militarily. That is why they forced Harding to resign and replaced him with Fut. If I am not wrong after the arrival of Fut the British military operations were reduced considerably and you certainly remember that even EOKA sympathisers and collaborators who had been imprisoned during previous years were let free. So I can not see EOKA being totally finished.
3. If I understood well you are saying that all the Brits wanted to achieve, even before 1955, was to secure “a foot hold on Cyprus” (meaning the bases?) and you are suggesting (?) that they trapped the GCs into starting the EOKA straggle in order to achieve that? But the WHOLE of the island was their foot hold in the East Med. And you are saying that wanting to reduce their presence on just the bases, they provoked war, blood shed, tremendous costs to send and maintain a whole army on the island, created further turbulence in the Middle East and further risks against their own interests and NATO interests in the region at a time when the Soviets were already setting foot in the Arab countries and were steering and supporting “anti colonial” straggles wherever they could? Hardly. If the British had decided before 1955 to reduce their presence on the island to just the bases, they would have done something very simple and easy. They would had offered to Greece Enosis of Cyprus with it on the condition that Britain would maintain the sovereign bases for as long as it wanted. Do you think such a proposal would be rejected by any Greek politician or the majority of the Greek Cypriots? The presence of the BB on the island would mean nothing more than the presence of the NATO bases in several parts of Greece such as Crete, Attica, Aktion etc. Even the Americans and the whole of NATO would have supported such a solution with all their might.
3. You are saying that the EOKA straggle brought Turkey into the game. Wrong. Turkey was brought into the game when England proposed a trilateral conference and the idiots Karamanlis and Makarios accepted it. Till that time Turkey had no saying and no entitlement to interfere.
