The Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: mixing memory and desire

It was TS Eliot who wrote “April is the cruelest month… mixing memory and desire…” in his most famous poem The Wasteland, but it is also what many of our compatriots in Cyprus do on the first day of April each year.

How did it happen? Who is to blame? How will it all end? These questions still haunt Cypriots. The questions appeared in 1957 in the Times of Cyprus, a rival newspaper, trailing the serialisation of Lawrence Durrell’s book, The Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, about the author’s time on the island between 1953 and 1956.

The Times of Cyprus advocated the end of British rule in favour of union with Greece (Enosis). It was edited by a former foreign editor of the Daily Express, Charles Foley, who later wrote a number of books on Cyprus including one called Cyprus: Legacy of Strife. The paper closed down in 1960 when its raison d’etre fell away after Cyprus became independent.

Durrell was an English writer who spoke Greek and taught English at the Pancyprian Gymnasium and later became director of public information during the first year of the emergency in Cyprus, after a Greek Cypriot fighters’ organisation called Eoka began an armed struggle on April 1,1955 led by Colonel George Grivas to unite Cyprus with Greece.

Durrell left Cyprus in a hurry in 1956 and published Bitter Lemons after returning to Britain for a short while before going to live in France. The title and content give a taste of expatriate life in Cyprus in the 1950s and some insight into how it felt to be a philhellene colonial civil servant in charge of propaganda against Cyprus’ union with Greece.

I read Bitter Lemons and Legacy of Strife many years ago. Durrell is not my kind of writer – too self-centred and too expatriate for my taste. As for Foley, he was too naive for one to take what he wrote about Cyprus afterwards seriously. The Turkish Cypriot version of events in the TV series Once Upon a Time in Cyprus that is causing such a stir shows how naive he was.

Bitter Lemons defies genre unless you call writing about life on troubled Mediterranean islands a genre.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a historical novel by Louis de Bernieres about life in Cephalonia during the Italian occupation, is a lot more interesting as is Pascalis island by Barry Unsworth about life as a spy for the sultan on a fictional Ottoman-ruled Greek island.

Both Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Pascalis Island were made into successful films. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus was not, although the television series The Durrells, a fictional take of the Durrell family’s life on Corfu in the 1930s, does feature Lawrence Durrell as the older brother. Perhaps a book about a colonial civil servant during the struggle for enosis in Cyprus does not lend itself to film.

The Greek Cypriots had been clamouring for Enosis ever since Cyprus came under British administration in 1878 pursuant to a secret treaty between Britain and the Ottoman Empire to defend it against Russia. As luck would have it, a few years later in 1914 Britain and Russia became allies in World War I against the German and the Ottoman empires whereupon Britain annexed Cyprus. It became a British colony in 1925 after Turkey ceded it to Britain under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

However, the clamour for union with Greece continued and in 1931 there was a violent pro-Enosis revolt in Nicosia that led to autocratic rule on the island that lasted until independence in 1960. The next two attempts at union with Greece were in 1955 and 1974; the first led to quasi-independence and the second to division. However, the wisdom of hindsight is not helpful and does not provide the answers to the questions posed by The Times of Cyprus in 1957.

The composite answer to the first two questions, how it happened and who was to blame, is that in 1954 a junior minister at the British foreign office called Henry Hopkinson blurted out that some colonies like Cyprus could never expect to gain full independence, whereupon Greece gave Colonel Grivas the green light to start his campaign.

The causes are too complex to go into here, suffice it to say that an ill-judged statement lit the fuse that exploded into the armed struggle for Enosis on April 1, 1955. A more nuanced statement like, for example, self-determination is a right possessed by colonial peoples everywhere and that Britain was in the process of reviewing its strategic needs in the region, might have averted an armed struggle but alas junior Tory ministers at the time were not very clever.

The campaign for self-determination was building a head of steam across the British Empire and would have had to be addressed in Cyprus eventually anyway, but the result would probably have been happier for everyone if it were done without an armed struggle.

The last question posed in the Times of Cyprus advertisement, how will it all end, remains unanswered to this day. Many Cypriots believe it all ended with the division of Cyprus in 1974, and it is now the official policy of the Turkish Cypriot leadership to cut the Gordian knot and negotiate for a two-state solution.

At the risk of becoming an anti two-state bore I am against cutting the Gordian knot for two reasons. First because the Turkish side promised by treaty it would not promote separatist independence in the same way the Greek side promised to not promote enosis. And second because it will not succeed: the US, the EU, the UK and Russia are all against a two-state solution as is probably most of the Middle East and Israel.

Apart from Russia all the other big powers support a federation within the EU. There is no reason not to give it a try since even its default is preferable to what exists at present.

In his book on problems faced by international organisations, the political scientist and international relations expert the late Inis L Claude insightfully observes that in some cases a permanent settlement of a dispute is not possible; the parties are, however, prepared to settle down permanently with their dispute, content with its peaceful perpetuation.

I would rather reach that state of affairs after trying out a federation than not even trying to make a go of it.

Alper Ali Riza is a queen’s counsel in the UK and a retired part-time judge