I would like to suggest that David Maddox is using his position of responsibility and power as political editor of the Independent to write/plant articles about Cyprus that are so transparently partisan and partial that they inevitably raise questions about conflict of interest.
I note the Independent’s conflict of interest policy states the following: ‘You should be transparent about any outside political, philosophical, religious or financial interests that might conflict with your journalistic independence or integrity, or could be perceived to do so.’
David Maddox, while he was political editor of the Express, had a similar reputation for persistently planting/writing articles that parroted the line of Turkey and its subordinate regime in northern Cyprus regarding Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974; the subsequent occupation; and declaration in 1983 of a secessionist entity in the north of the island.
He has continued his efforts on behalf of Turkey and the occupation regime since joining the Independent.
Background The entity calling itself ‘The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (‘TRNC’) was declared ‘legally invalid’ by UN Resolution 541 on its proclamation in 1983. The illegality of the regime has repeatedly been confirmed in international law. For example, European Court of Human Rights rulings in 1996 and 1998 described the purported Turkish Cypriot state as Turkey’s ‘subordinate local administration’.
As such, no country in the world, other than Turkey, has recognised the ’TRNC’ as a legitimate ‘state’ and no country in the world – other than Turkey – recognises or treats the leader of that ‘state’ as a ‘president’.
For decades, Turkey has been trying to side-step or overturn international law by demanding recognition/legitimisation of its ‘subordinate administration’ in Cyprus. Turkey claims there is an unfair boycott of the so-called TRNC and alleges Turkish Cypriots are suffering unfair ‘isolation’ from the rest of the world.
Turkey further claims it did not ‘invade’ Cyprus in 1974 and seize 37% of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus; but that it ‘intervened’ to protect the Turkish minority, which, Turkey asserts, was being massacred by Greek Cypriots, after they supposedly carried out a coup to unite the island with Greece.
Of course, Turkey’s narrative on Cyprus is highly contentious – many would say entirely specious – and yet Maddox repeats it verbatim, with minimal to no equivocation or qualification, as if he were repeating the facts of the matter.
‘The “Cyprus problem” refers to the division of the island 50 years ago after Turkish troops intervened in the north in 1974 when a Greek Cypriot military coup attempted to unite the island with Greece and initiated attacks on Turkish Cypriot communities’.
Maddox further asserts, as if he were stating a fact:
‘A number of attempts to reunite the island have failed because they have been vetoed by the Greek Cypriot side.’
Again, the latter is a highly contentious claim, made by Turkey and its occupation regime to suggest that Greek Cypriots are intransigent and the reason there has been no ‘solution’ to Cyprus’s division. Greek Cypriots, the Republic of Cyprus government and most neutral commentators would have a very different view of why Cyprus has been divided since 1974 and why efforts to reunify the island have failed.
More generally, the article of 10 December is of no journalistic merit. It is absurd to assert that the UK prime minister would go to Cyprus and meet with the leader of Turkey’s illegal entity in northern Cyprus. The alleged ‘storm’ created by Starmer, not doing something he could never do, was not reported in any other UK or international newspaper. The ’storm’ was entirely concocted by Maddox to provide succour and backhanded legitimacy to the occupation regime and promote its claims.
Again, it’s hard to discern the journalistic merit of such an article – why Maddox thinks it’s worth devoting time and effort to such a ‘story’. No other national newspaper reported it.
In the article, Maddox largely regurgitates the demand by supporters of Turkey’s occupation regime in Cyprus that direct flights to occupied Cyprus from the UK be initiated and that this is essentially a humanitarian issue concerning the ‘isolation’ of the Turkish Cypriots.
The ‘isolation’ claim is highly contentious. It’s commonly understood by those with knowledge of the Cyprus issue that those who agitate for an end to this alleged isolation by, for example, the initiation of direct flights to the occupied part of Cyprus, do so as a means to achieve de facto recognition of the so-called ‘TRNC’.
The government of the Republic of Cyprus would point out that 70 percent of Turkish Cypriots have taken out Republic of Cyprus passports – entitling them to exercise their rights as EU citizens – and that any ‘isolation’ the Turkish Cypriots suffer is as a result of Turkey’s occupation and the futile efforts by its subordinate administration to seek recognition of the ’TRNC’ rather than honestly pursue reunification of the island.
Nowhere in the 29 May Independent article does Maddox mention – as an impartial and serious journalist would – that the UK government has repeatedly made its position clear on direct flights from the UK to occupied Cyprus, i.e. that they cannot take place because they would be unlawful.
Thus, in response to a petition submitted by campaigners demanding direct flights to northern Cyprus in 2021, the UK government responded:
‘The UK Government has no plans to authorise direct flights between the UK and the north of Cyprus. In accordance with the rest of the international community, the UK does not recognise the self-declared ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ as an independent state. The United Kingdom recognises the Republic of Cyprus as the sovereign authority for the island of Cyprus. As a result, the UK Government cannot negotiate an Air Services Agreement with the administration in the north of Cyprus…
‘The UK High Court also ruled in 2009 (Kibris Türk Hava Yollari v Secretary of State for Transport) that allowing direct flights to Ercan airport in the north of Cyprus would breach our international legal obligations. This is because it would fail to respect the Republic of Cyprus’ rights under the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, including to choose which airports to designate as customs airports. This ruling was endorsed by the Court of Appeal in 2010.’
Maddox’s links to extremist Turkish Cypriot organisations
Now, it could be argued that Maddox is just a bad journalist, i.e. he is ill-informed about Cyprus, doesn’t understand the intricacies and is repeating the Turkish narrative out of ignorance and not deliberately or with malice.
However, I believe Maddox knows exactly what he is doing. Indeed, the evidence suggests he has links to a number of extremist Turkish and Turkish Cypriot organisations in the UK, which in turn have strong connections to Turkey’s occupation regime in Cyprus.
For example, in his article of 29 May in the Independent Maddox extensively quotes Chet/Cetin Ramadan, founder of ‘Freedom and Fairness for northern Cyprus’ (FFNC).
FFNC is a small ultra-nationalist Turkish UK-based lobby group linked to the occupation regime in Cyprus. Its founder, Chet/Cetin Ramadan, has been pictured (see images 1 and 2) and filmed performing the far-right Turkish Grey Wolf salute.
(During Euro 2024, as reported here, UEFA gave Turkish footballer Merit Demirel a two-match ban for making the gesture in celebrating his goal against Austria).
YTC’s content was regarded as so offensive by TikTok that the account was banned on that platform. (See images 3 and 4).
Screenshots from the FFNC ‘X’ feed suggest Maddox has a close relationship with FFNC, has visited occupied Cyprus as a guest of the organisation and made comments indicating his support for FFNC’s narrative on Cyprus. (See images 5, 6 and 7).
Another picture, from July 2023, and published in the Express as part of an articleMaddox wrote parroting the line of the occupation regime, shows Maddox with the occupation regime leader Ersin Tatar, who Maddox, again, seeks to legitimise by repeatedly referring to as ‘president’. (See image 8).
The photograph, it should be noted, is credited to Rikki Williams, co-founder with Chet/Cetin Ramadan of Freedom and Fairness for northern Cyprus.
Williams, described here as a ‘respected Conservative Party and Parliamentary Liaison Consultant’, is extensively quoted in Maddox’s 10 December Independent article.
Williams is mentioned here as Iain Duncan Smith’s agent, while other evidenceshows Williams was until June 2021 parliamentary research assistant to Duncan Smith.
Duncan Smith is a well-known supporter of Turkey’s occupation regime in Cyprus.
In July 2024, he was pictured lending support to Ersin Tatar during a visit to Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus organised by FFNC. (See image 9).
Duncan Smith is prominently mentioned in Maddox’s Independent article on 29 May, as is Jack Straw, who also has strong linksto the Erdogan regime in Turkey.
Straw has previously had his pro-occupation regime views published in the Independent in two opinion pieces, here and here.
Maddox’s motivations
For those who know the intricacies of the Cyprus issue, it’s obvious that Maddox is abusing his position on a prestigious UK newspaper to actively promote the views of Turkey on Cyprus. He has ceded any sense of impartiality or journalistic ethics to produce thinly-disguised propaganda pieces on behalf of Turkey and its subordinate administration in occupied Cyprus.
In pursuit of this, he has developed links to disreputable far-right extremists and is not shy of promulgating their views in his articles not only as if they were the legitimate and representative expression of Turkish Cypriot opinion – which they are not; but also as if they tell the truth about the historical and political reality of the Cyprus issue.
Why Maddox has assumed this role for Turkey and Turkish Cypriot ultra-nationalists is open to speculation. I would note that it’s not unusual for Turkey and the Turkish occupation regime to recruit persons of influence in the UK to promote its views and interests regarding Cyprus. Both Straw and Duncan Smith would fall into this category.
The highly-respected anti-corruption journalist Peter Geoghegan has recently writtenabout Freedom and Fairness for northern Cyprus’ activities in corrupting the British parliamentary process. FFNC does this by offering inducements to British parliamentarians in exchange for lobbying on behalf of Turkey’s occupation regime in Cyprus.
Geoghegan has highlighted the role of DUP MP Sammy Wilson in this impropriety. Geoghegan’s exposé of Wilson resulted in the MP having to apologise to the House of Commons for failing to declare his connections to the ‘TRNC’ when tabling a parliamentary question on its behalf.
Given Maddox’s closeness to Freedom and Fairness for northern Cyprus, it is not unreasonable to assume that Maddox, like Wilson, has an improper relationship to the occupation regime and is similarly being unduly influenced in his professional capacity.
In fact, to not mince words, it is clear that David Maddox is part of a network of journalists and MPs who have essentially been recruited or co-opted by extremist Turkish Cypriot groups with strong links to Turkey’s occupation regime in Cyprus to make propaganda on their behalf. Not only is this a clear breach of the Independent’s code of conduct, but it brings the newspaper into disrepute. I hope something can be done to stop this.
This piece is in response to a small twitter exchange with the eminent historian of India William Dalrymple, which had me pointing out that, at the fag end of British colonial rule in Cyprus, Cyril Radcliffe who had, a decade earlier, devised plans to carve apart India as the sub-continent moved towards independence, was also responsible for being the first to codify British proposals to partition Cyprus in 1956.
On further study, this is not quite right.
In fact, as some in the UK colonial establishment began to seriously consider partitioning Cyprus – parcelling out portions of the island to Turkey and Greece and retaining a chunk for the UK for the purposes of military bases – Radcliffe, who had been appointed Constitutional Commissioner for Cyprus in February 1956, came up with proposals that reflected those in the British ruling elite squeamish about butchering Cyprus.
The background to Radcliffe’s involvement in Cyprus is, of course, the EOKA uprising that broke out in April 1955 and was aimed at ending British rule (which had begun in 1878) and the union of the island with Greece.
To Greek Cypriot demands for self-determination, Britain responded that some parts of the British empire were too strategically important to ever be allowed this kind of freedom.
Initially, EOKA’s campaign was intended to be limited and put on display how serious Greek Cypriots were about ending British colonial rule; but, as often happens with armed insurgencies, the violence escalated and took on a life of its own.
While the departure of the Greek Cypriots from purely political means to achieve their ends somewhat played into the hands of more hardline British imperialists, who could now treat the Cypriot clamour for an end to colonial rule as a security not a political issue, there was still a British recognition that there needed to be some movement to satisfy Greek Cypriot demands (Greek Cypriots constituted 80% of Cyprus’ population) for greater political involvement in running the island.
This is where Radcliffe enters the story. In February 1956, Radcliffe was tasked by the British government to survey the island’s political landscape and come up with a constitution that would square the circle of maintaining British sovereignty while, at the same time, allow for self-government for Cypriots based on liberal democratic principles.
The first interesting point to emerge from this is that less than a decade after what we now regard as one of the great human catastrophes in history – the partitioning of India – in which Radcliffe is somewhat of a villainous figure, in 1956 his reputation was still high enough in British colonial circles for him to be called on when British rule in Cyprus had run into trouble.
It also suggests that Radcliffe, often portrayed as a man tortured by the consequences of his role in the partitioning India, was not averse to becoming involved in another colonial quagmire where partition was high on the agenda.
As with India, Radcliffe had no previous experience of Cyprus and only nine months elapsed from the time of Radcliffe being appointed as Constitutional Commissioner to the release of his report. He visited Cyprus twice, from July to September 1956, always under armed escort, for four weeks in total, where he spent most of his time conferring with the island’s governor, Field Marshall Sir John Harding, and listening to Turkish demands for partition. Greek Cypriot luminaries on the island refused to meet with Radcliffe, in protest at the treatment of Archbishop Makarios, the undisputed political leader of the Greek Cypriot community, who had been deported by Harding to Seychelles in March 1956.
Radcliffe’s report, submitted to the colonial office in late 1956, began inauspiciously, purporting to be impressed with the educational and cultural accomplishments of the Cypriots but bewildered that this hadn’t resulted in political advancement, seemingly oblivious to the distortions colonial repression and manipulation had on political life on the island.
‘The people of Cyprus, I have reminded myself,’ Radcliffe declared, ‘are an adult people enjoying long cultural traditions and an established education system, fully capable of furnishing qualified administrators, lawyers, doctors and men of business. It is a curiosity of their history that their political development has remained comparatively immature.’
Cyprus had, since 1931, following small-scale anti-colonial riots, been run as a tinpot gubernatorial dictatorship, with the constitution and legislature suspended, political parties banned, censorship, petty restrictions on the expression of anti-colonial feeling, deportations, and so on, and it was Radcliffe’s task to end this sorry state of affairs and, hopefully, earn the loyalty of Cypriots, particularly Greek Cypriots, whose attachment to Greece had perennially posed the biggest threat to the colonial status quo.
The constitution Radcliffe envisaged for Cyprus depended, as Robert Holland says, on ‘the old imperial device of dyarchy’ – in which powers devolved to the local population, in the form of a Legislative Assembly, would be balanced (or, in reality, superseded) by those retained by the colonial authorities, in the person of the Governor of the island, who would also have exclusive powers in matters of defence, foreign affairs and internal security.
Having rejected Greek Cypriot demands for a full-blown democratic constitution and self-determination – which would have inevitably led to Enosis – Radcliffe also spurned Turkish and Turkish Cypriot demands for a federation, which everyone understood, if adopted, would be nothing more than the prelude to the Turks’ ultimate aim, partition.
Even if the Turks regarded partition as a compromise – their original aim in the event of a British withdrawal from Cyprus was the annexation of the entire island – Radcliffe saw no merit or justice in sundering the island and instead proposed widespread safeguards for the island’s Turkish minority within a unitary state.
Holland suggests that Radcliffe’s experience of partitioning Punjab and Bengal in 1947, the horrors that accompanied this, had prompted him to agree with Harding that partitioning Cyprus was a ‘confession of failure’ and ‘a counsel of despair’.
In this regard, Radcliffe said in his report that it would be manifestly unjust and undemocratic that the Turkish minority, comprising 18% of the island’s population, ‘be accorded political representation equal to that of the Greek Cypriot community’.
In Radcliffe’s opinion, acceding to the Turkish demand for a federation was not logical. There was ‘no pattern of territorial separation between the two communities and, apart from other objections, federation of communities which does not involve also federation of territories seems to me a very difficult constitutional form’.
Given the fact that Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities were mixed throughout Cyprus with no discernible geographic separation, it was clear to British colonial administrators, like Radcliffe, that Turkish demands for a federation/partition could only come about as a result of civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, widespread ethnic cleansing and a probable war between Greece and Turkey.
Not only did the British balk at the humanitarian consequences of agreeing to Turkey’s partitionist aspirations, but the subsequent convulsions would not only likely make Britain’s position in Cyprus untenable but would also jeopardise the entire southern flank of NATO – a scenario that prompted the Americans to warn the UK at the time against the ‘forcible vivisection’ of the island.
However, Radcliffe’s good sense in rejecting partition for Cyprus was not reflected among Tory party imperialists and the British defence establishment – smarting now over the Suez humiliation and the prospect of Britain being ejected wholesale from the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean – or those in the colonial administration in Cyprus who resented the EOKA uprising and wanted to punish the Greek Cypriots for it. These three centres of power all came to the conclusion that partition would be preferable to Enosis and that even if they couldn’t envisage Britain doing the dirty work of ethnic cleansing, on which partition was predicated, then at least the threat of partition should be used against the Greek Cypriots to frighten them into accepting continuing British sovereignty of the island.
Thus, despite Radcliffe resisting Turkish demands for partition, when presenting his report to the House of Commons, colonial secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd insisted that partition of Cyprus was very much on the agenda and, indeed, that Radcliffe’s proposals for self-government could be interpreted as portending a long-term outcome of ‘double self-determination’.
‘As regards the eventual status of the island,’ the colonial secretary said in the House of Commons on 19 December 1956, ‘Her Majesty's Government have already affirmed their recognition of the principle of self-determination. When the international and strategic situation permits, and provided that self-government is working satisfactorily, Her Majesty's Government will be ready to review the question of the application of self-determination.’
He went on: ‘When the time comes for this review, that is, when these conditions have been fulfilled, it will be the purpose of Her Majesty's Government to ensure that any exercise of self-determination should be effected in such a manner that the Turkish Cypriot community, no less than the Greek Cypriot community, shall, in the special circumstances of Cyprus, be offered freedom to decide for themselves their future status. In other words, Her Majesty's Government recognise that the exercise of self-determination in such a mixed population must include partition among the eventual options.’
Whether Lennox-Boyd was cynically using the threat of partition to coerce Greek Cypriots to stop demanding an end to British rule or if the British really had decided at this point that partition of the island was the best way to protect imperial interests is a moot point.
What is not moot is that Britain in 1956 had the opportunity to explicitly tell Turkey that its ambition of partition was unacceptable and would never be considered while Britain had responsibility for the island. Rather than doing this, the British chose instead to appease Turkey, giving it to believe that partition was a viable solution for Cyprus and one that Britain was prepared to consider.
As for the immediate effect on Radcliffe’s constitutional proposals, Lennox-Boyd’s allusion to partition, even if it was only made to tantalise the Turks and scare the Greeks, proved fatal for their prospects.
For Greece and Greek Cypriots, Radcliffe’s diarchy proposals were the same old British colonialist hypocrisy – Time magazine said Radcliffe’s constitution offered Cyprus ‘a façade of self-government carefully designed to preserve what the British in India used to call their paramountcy’ – and conceit, espousing liberal democracy while at the same time insisting that it be severely curtailed to preclude any challenge to British colonialist rule and sovereignty.
Worse than the prospect of continuing British ‘dictatorship’ in Cyprus was the inevitable suspicion felt by the Greek side, after Lennox-Boyd’s performance in the House of Commons, that Britain would use its remodelled administration of Cyprus to gradually steer the island towards partition.
Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots were more amenable to Radcliffe’s report. Even if Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes couldn’t persuade Lennox-Boyd to ditch Radcliffe’s ‘academic exercise’ and go for immediate partition – Menderes told Lennox-Boyd, no doubt referring to the genocide/ethnic cleansing of Greeks from Anatolia and Asia Minor from 1915-23, 'we have done this sort of thing before, and you will see that it is not as bad as all that’ – the Turkish side was reassured that Britain regarded Radcliffe’s constitutional proposals as a potential stepping stone towards dividing Cyprus and thus ‘logical material for negotiation’.
While the British were furious with the Greek side for rejecting Radcliffe’s proposals for self-government – the Foreign Office referred to the Greek government’s reaction to Radcliffe as 'ungracious and ungenerous and very stupid' – what really did for Radcliffe’s attempt to end the violence on Cyprus wasn’t the stubborn attachment of Athens and, more especially, the Greek Cypriots to immediate self-determination and Enosis – but the drivel and machinations of Lennox-Boyd who, in order to appease Turkey and play to the gallery of diehard imperialists in the Tory party, introduced the spectre of partition.
In her book Fettered Independence: Cyprus 1878-1964, Stella Soulioti, a close ally and confidante of Makarios, suggests that – had Harding not made the stupid decision to deport Makarios and Lennox-Boyd hadn’t sought to clumsily blackmail Greek Cypriots with the threat of partition – Radcliffe’s proposals could well have served as a basis to end the conflict in 1956. Makarios, she says, was not inflexible in pursuing self-determination/Enosis and was prepared to contemplate a constitution that provided for self-government.
In fact, Soulioti says that Christopher Woodhouse, the Conservative politician with a long record of political, military and academic connections to Greece, had advised the Greek ambassador to London at the time, Giorgios Seferis, that Athens should accept Radcliffe’s proposals because they would eventually lead to Enosis; Woodhouse adding that he had consulted Radcliffe about this and that Radcliffe had agreed that this was the case even if he ‘could not say so publicly’.
Meanwhile, Nancy Crawshaw, in her book, The Cyprus Revolt, which is hostile to the Greek pursuit of Enosis, lauds the Radcliffe proposals and praises Radcliffe for his ‘outstanding contribution to the search for a compromise’.
Regardless of the merits of Radcliffe’s constitution and who was responsible for its precipitate demise, it was the last time proposals that aimed at a unitary state were put to Greek Cypriots.
After 1956, violence on the island intensified, with an increasingly fanaticised Turkish side now turning to riots, bombs and bullets in pursuit of partition, an aim for which they didn’t just have support and sponsors in Ankara but also from many in London and in the colonial administration in Nicosia.
Thus, while Britain still had legal sovereignty of the island, all post-Radcliffe proposals aimed at ending the conflict took on a greater tendency towards federation and, thus, partition. This process ended with the so-called Zurich-London agreements (1959-60) – negotiated by the UK, Turkey and Greece and from which Cypriots were excluded.
These agreements, which provided for a highly circumscribed independence and precarious bicommunal constitution for Cyprus, quickly began to unravel and by 1963-4 collapsed in a convulsion of violence as Turkish Cypriots withdrew from government and retreated into armed enclaves from where they hoped to create partition on the ground. Again, Britain – which, as a result of the deal that brought independence to Cyprus, had retained two large sovereign military bases on the island and a role as a Guarantor Power dedicated to ensuring ‘ the independence, territorial integrity, and security of Cyprus’ – had a choice: work towards calming the deteriorating situation in Cyprus or exacerbate it by leaning towards partition.
Martin Packard says in his book, Getting it Wrong: Fragments from a Cyprus Diary 1964, that reconciliation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots was possible in 1964 and that Britain was committed to this at first, only for a sudden change in policy to occur, with the same circles that had argued for partition during the EOKA period gaining the upper hand over those in the British establishment opposed to it.
Britain’s increasing acquiescence to partition coincided with greater US involvement on the island. If the Americans had been skeptical of partition in the 1950s and warned the British colonial authorities against it, by 1964 they saw partition as the optimal solution for the island and, unlike the British, were not squeamish about bringing it about.
America's cynicism, British dereliction, Greece’s stupidity and Turkey’s opportunism converged in 1974 when the partition that had first been mooted by the British in 1956 as a bluff to appease the Turks and terrify the Greek Cypriots came to pass as a result of the Athens junta’s botched coup against the Cyprus government (the junta had by now come around to the idea of the partitioning Cyprus and intended to do so on Greek terms) and Turkey’s two-phased invasion of the island.
To end, and to bring us back to where we started, with Cyril Radcliffe, inextricably tied to Britain’s colonial legacy in India and Cyprus, both of which suffered the same calamity – partition, massacre, lost homelands, unresolved bitterness and pain – it’s worth pointing out how, in fact, while India’s dismemberment has been much written about and is a well-known part of the story of the end of empire, the catastrophe in Cyprus is largely ignored.
Christopher Hitchens says such a loss of memory in Cyprus’ case would be unforgivable.
‘It would mean,’ he says, ‘forgetting about the bad and dangerous precedent set by [Turkey’s] invasion; by a larger power suiting itself by altering geography and demography. It would mean overlooking the aspiration of a European people to make a passage from colonial rule to sovereignty in one generation. And it would mean ignoring an example, afforded by Cyprus, of the way in which small countries and peoples are discounted or disregarded by the superpowers (and, on occasion, by liberal commentators).’
Indeed, if we include in the discussion another British-empire-in-retreat partition, that of Palestine in 1948, we can see that the partition of Cyprus finalised by the Turkish invasion of 1974 bears bitter comparison with the the Nakba as well as the Partition of India.
Thus, the Nakba (1948) saw 700,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.1m in Mandatory Palestine (i.e. 70 percent of the Palestinians) ethnically cleansed, with the number of Palestinians killed 10,000 (i.e. one percent of the Palestinian population).
Indian partition (1947) resulted in 15m people out of a population of 340m (i.e. 4.4 percent of Indians) being made refugees, with 1-2m killed (i.e. 0.3-0.6 percent of Indians).
As for Cyprus, as a result of the Turkish invasion that brought about the partition of the island, 220,000 Cypriots – (180,000 Greek Cypriots and 40,000 Turkish Cypriots) – were, at the behest of the Turkish army and Turkish Cypriot militias, either expelled, in the Greek Cypriot case, or encouraged to move, in the Turkish Cypriot case, i.e. 33 percent of the population of 642,000. Seven thousand Cypriots were killed during partition – 6000 Greek Cypriots and 1000 Turkish Cypriots, i.e. 1.1 percent of the the island’s population.
British-inspired, Turkish-imposed partition had a devastating effect on Cyprus, equivalent to the Nakba and Indian partition in its human consequences, though Cypriots have had to shout louder to tell the story of the outrage done to their country, their voices drowned out by British colonial and Turkish expansionist narratives that put Cyprus’ fate down to a squabble between primeval and perennial ethnic rivals who needed to be separated from each other for their own good.
Bibliography 1. Crawshaw, Nancy: The Cyprus Revolt 2. Hitchens, Christopher: Cyprus: Hostage to History 3. Holland, Robert: Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus 4. Novo, Andrew: The EOKA Cause 5. Packard, Martin: Getting it Wrong 6. Soulioti, Stella: Cyprus: Fettered Independence 7. Time: Cyprus: Proposed Constitution
1453: The Fall of Constantinople, by Steven Runciman (ISBN: 9781107604698). Paperback: £10.99.
I’m not sure if there’s much consolation in being a tragic hero – better to prevail than be transfigured – but tragic heroes is precisely how Steven Runciman describes the Greeks in his essential account of the siege and fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, which has recently been reissued by Canto Classics.
Beleaguered, outnumbered 10 to one, waiting in vain for the Western aid they had been promised for agreeing to church union, the Greek defenders (and a small group of Genoan and Venetian confederates) refused the besieging sultan’s offer to surrender Constantinople or convert to Islam, and chose instead to trust in their own bravery, the righteousness of their cause and divine intervention to preserve one of the last vestiges of Greek liberty.
But after two months of relentless siege and assault, the Turkish warlord, Sultan Mehmet, frustrated by the resistance of the Greeks, ignoring the advice of some of his commanders to lift the siege and avert further humiliation, decided to make one, final overwhelming attack to take the city.
The speeches made by the Greek and Turkish leaders on the eve of the decisive assault reveal what the two sides believed they were fighting for.
The Byzantine emperor Constantine Palaiologos tells his soldiers that a man should always be prepared to die for his faith or country, his family or sovereign; but now, he says, we are being asked to give up our lives for all four; while Mehmet’s words to his forces are in stark contrast to the heroism and dignity of the Greek emperor. Mehmet urges his troops on by reminding them of the three days of looting they will be allowed should they capture the city, and he inspires his commanders not only with the promise of booty, but also by stressing their sacred duty as Muslims to vanquish this famous Christian capital.
And indeed, once Constantinople is taken, the story of the city becomes one of plunder and depredation.
Runciman describes the pillaging of private homes, churches, businesses; the massacres of men, women and children, the ‘rivers of blood running down the streets’; a slaughter that only abated when the Turkish soldiers realised that keeping the Christians alive and selling them as slaves was a better idea, not that this spared the elderly, infirm and infants who could bring no profit, and were consequently killed on the spot.
As commander in chief, Mehmet was entitled to the greatest share of the loot, which he had paraded before him so he could decide precisely what he wanted. Then the sultan selected 1200 Greek children to be sent as slaves, 400 each, to the three most important Muslim rulers of the time, the sultan of Egypt, the king of Tunis and the king of Grenada; while, from the most prominent Byzantine families, Mehmet had his pick of youths, girls and boys, for his personal seraglio, with those resisting a life of sexual slavery being put to death, as Runciman illustrates with the case of the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras and his son and son-in-law:
‘Five days after the fall of the city [Mehmet] gave a banquet. In the course of it, when he was well flushed with wine, someone whispered to him that Notaras’s fourteen-year-old son was a boy of exceptional beauty. The Sultan at once sent a eunuch to the house of the [Grand Duke] to demand that the boy be sent to him for his pleasure. Notaras, whose elder sons had been killed fighting, refused to sacrifice the boy to such a fate. Police were then sent to bring Notaras with his son and his young son-in-law, the son of the Grand Domestic Andronicus Cantacuzenus, into the Sultan’s presence. When Notaras still defied the Sultan, orders were given for him and the two boys to be decapitated on the spot. Notaras merely asked that they should be slain before him, lest the sight of his death should make them waver. When they had both perished he bared his neck to the executioner. The following day, nine other Greek notables were arrested and sent to the scaffold.’
But even if Runciman does not flinch from describing the Turkish capture of Constantinople as being a ‘ghastly story of pillage’ and is not prepared to cover up Mehmet’s ‘savageries’; he is not a crude Orientalist, out to demonise the Turks and Islam and portray Byzantium’s demise in terms of a heroic West versus a barbaric East.
For not only would associating Byzantium with the West be problematic, but it is also clear that, for Runciman, the external agents most responsible for the downfall of Byzantium were not the Turks, but the Franks and Latins, with the disaster of 1453 overshadowed by the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, during which Western Crusaders seized and devastated Constantinople and dismembered and irreparably weakened the Greek empire.
In the third volume of his history of the Crusades, Runciman famously says that ‘there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’, and describes the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 as an act of ‘barbarous brutality’, ‘unparalleled in history’, committed by ‘Frenchmen and Flemings… filled with a lust for destruction’.
Thus, the powerful, wealthy and magnificent city seized and sacked by Crusaders in 1204 (and which the West held until 1261, before Greek restoration), was not the city the Turks captured in 1453, which Runciman describes as dying and melancholy, poverty-stricken and sparsely populated.
For Runciman, the Turkish seizure of Constantinople in 1453 did not destroy Byzantium, it merely provided the coup de grâce to a doomed city.
Indeed, memories of 1204 and experience of repressive Western rule in places like Crete, Cyprus and the Peloponnese, provided evidence to many Greeks that the pursuit of church union with Rome in exchange for military support to fight the Turks was both a religious abomination and politically misguided. Not only was there no difference in terms of brutality between Western and Muslim rule – indeed, many Greeks believed the Franks and Latins to be less civilised than the Turks and Muslims; and not only did the policy of church union overestimate the ability and willingness of the West to aid Byzantium against an assertive and powerful Turkish empire; but there was also a case for maintaining the integrity of the Greek church and Greek culture, avoiding the bitter division bound to follow any attempt to enforce religious subordination to Rome, and accepting a period of Turkish subjugation as the most effective way of preserving the Greek nation and offering the best chance for its long-term revival.
Nevertheless, Runciman’s reluctance to demonise the Turks does, in places, lead him to express an undeservedly generous assessment of their ascent to power and rule, which is matched by an excessive willingness to pin the blame for Byzantium’s tragedy on the West.
Thus, after Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Manzikert (1071), Runciman is keen to stress the ‘orderly and tolerant state’ established in Anatolia and Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks. He describes their government as ‘wise and able’ and argues that ‘the transition of Anatolia from a mainly Christian to a mainly Moslem country was achieved so smoothly that no one troubled to record the details’. Similarly, Runciman praises Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, as a ‘leader of genius’, while his son, Orhan, is described as a ‘great ruler’, whose administration was so reasonable that many of his Christian subjects preferred it to that of the Byzantines. There were no forced conversions, Runciman declares, and apostasy only occurred when Christians followed a natural inclination to join the religion of the ruling class. As for Mehmet, Runciman says, despite his savageries and the destruction in the immediate aftermath of conquest, under his rule, Constantinople was rebuilt and soon became a thriving city of commerce and finance. ‘Long before his death in 1481,’ Runciman writes:
‘Sultan Mehmet could look with pride on the new Constantinople… Since the conquest its population [of Turks, Greeks, Jews and Armenians] had increased fourfold; within a century it would number more than half a million. He had destroyed the old crumbling metropolis of the Byzantine Emperors, and in its place he had created a new and splendid metropolis in which he intended his subjects of all creeds and all races to live together in order, prosperity and peace.’
However, the ‘details’ that Runciman said do not exist to record the Islamisation of Anatolia and Asia Minor are, in fact, painstakingly chronicled by Spyros Vryonis in his The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, in which the author describes a period of savage conquest, a succession of raids and annexations characterised by pillaging, massacre, enslavement and forced conversion of the Byzantine population. Thus the four centuries it took the Turks, from 1071 to 1453, to subjugate Anatolia, Asia Minor and Thrace, did not involve, as Runciman suggests, a ‘smooth’ evolution but was accomplished in a way that amounted to a holocaust for the vanquished.
As for Mehmet’s alleged vision of a tolerant, harmonious empire, this never materialised and could never materialise, given the nature of the Ottoman state, in which religious discrimination and persecution were ingrained. Order was maintained through terror and repression and peace dependent on the whims of the sultan or his pashas or beys who, at any moment, could decide that their Christian subjects, their culture, shrines and very lives, were an affront to Muslim ascendancy and should be suppressed if not extinguished.
Moreover, just as there were Greeks who believed, prior to the fall of Constantinople, ‘better the sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat’*, many others, from the political and intellectual elite, admired the West and believed church union would bring about a rich fusion of Greek and particularly Italian humanist culture. Indeed, something of this fusion occurred in Crete and the Ionian islands, on the periphery of the Greek world, where Turkish rule was delayed or never penetrated, with Venetian sway eventually contributing to a cultural breathing space and even flowering for Greeks that was never possible under the Turks. As Runciman himself acknowledges, the Ottomans’ narrow-mindedness, informed by fear and loathing of their Christian subjects, ensured that Greek learning, art and letters were discouraged and ceased to exist for the duration of the Turkish empire.
* Ironically, this statement is attributed to Lucas Notaras, who, as noted above, was executed for refusing to give up his son to become the sultan’s sexual slave.
Williams is mentioned here as Iain Duncan Smith’s agent, while other evidence shows Williams was until June 2021 parliamentary research assistant to Duncan Smith. 
