Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Who the "ruined" Cyprus?

According to Christopher Hitchens, everyone but the Cypriotes themselves, and those Cypriotes involved in island politics who did make lasting contributions to chaos did so under duress or as a result of Britain's "last colonial effort" (whatever, if excluding Northern Ireland, that may be). Furthermore, Hitchens asserts, a conspiracy of international desires to see Cyprus fragmented and destabilized holds troubled Cyprus in check today.

Hitchens' text is often scored with insightful and lyrical passages, but it has two striking problems. We confront the first problem in the first four pages: the title misleads us. Contrary to the title's claim, this is not a thorough and balanced history from the Ottomans to Kissinger; it does not cover broadly the early conquests and settlements of the island, but instead, is a narrative which relies on some historical background (hence the four pages of honorable Ottoman mention at the beginning). The book focuses primarily on the years of the Greek junta, Britain's duplicitous role as island guarantor, and the intrepidly arrogant memoirs of then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and agonizingly arrogant policies orchestrated by the British Foreign Office and British Foreign Secretary James Callahan.

Such bottle-necking of the b! ook's intended focus was bound to creep in to the author's judgement: Much of the meticulously woven narrative and documentation unravels as the author wields a loaded gavel. Judgements of any accomplishments the two statesmen mentioned above might have made toward real settlements for peace in Cyprus are thus tainted as they play out before us on the page.

The second textual problem is the historically inaccurate premise that Greeks, Turks, and Jews lived side-by-side on the island for millennia without native friction. This borders on the absurd. Historians will see the unbalanced scales and adjust them accordingly. But not all readers will: some will accept this premise without resistance as many have done with a generation of starry-eyed new histories of Bosnia. Good things can be said of Cyprus; but paradise it was not. Nor can it ever be.

The best writing in this book is found in the not-one-but-three prefaces and afterward, all provided by Hitchens, which brings us up-to-date on the recent blood spilled on the Green Zone in the summer of 1997. These four inserts alone summarize the issues and provide us with the quality and concision of writing we expect from the universally admired Hitchens. Everything in the middle is methodically documented, but alas...

There are, as Hitchens acknowledges, those who will accuse him of creating a huge and unlikely conspiricy theory with this book. Yet, to those who care to follow him, there is plenty of confirmation for his conclusions. They make disturbing reading.

The Cyprus problem is not, he states, the result of ancient ethnic rivalries. Indeed, he notes how the old cliche that Greek and Turkish Cypriots have always lived peacefully together is actually true, and that, for example, during the American-backed Greek coup in Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish military occupation of the island in 1974, Greek and Turkish Cypriots sheltered together and helped each other. Rather, Hitchens shows convincingly, the division of the island is the result of foreign power-games, led by the cynical foreign policies of Lyndon Johnson, Nixon and Kissenger, who used Cyprus as a pawn in an international political game without care for or reference to the inhabitants of that island.

Hitchen's book provides a necessary antidote to the increasingly common glib commentators in the media whose lazy research, and ignorance of history, makes them automatically see the Cyprus problem in terms of ethnic rivalries brought on by the Cypriots themselves. As Hitchens shows, in his highly readable account, the people of Cyprus are the least to blame for their 'problem'.