Greece, Cyprus, Turkey

In a long article about the history of Cyprus, written with his customary verve, Perry Anderson makes a very good point when he says,

More fundamentally, whatever might be said of the Turkish state – no small subject, certainly – it was the completely independent creation of Kemalism, a nationalist movement that owed nothing to any outside power. The postwar Greek state, by contrast, started out as a British protectorate and continued as an American dependency, culturally and politically incapable of crossing the will of its progenitors.

Perhaps Mustafa Kemal Atatürk has not been given his due by history as an anti-colonial leader. Of course the Turkish War of Independence and the Treaty of Lausanne resulted in the shafting of the Anatolian Greeks and the repression of Turkey’s various other national minorities but it sure made Turkey into an independent country and the creation of a new nation is very often done over the ruins of some other people’s desire for one.

Anderson also says,

It is enough to compare the fate of Rhodes, still closer to Turkey and with a comparable Turkish minority, which in 1945 peacefully reverted to Greece, because it was an Italian not a British colony. In the modern history of the Empire, the peculiar malignity of the British record in Cyprus stands apart.

It peacefully reverted to Greece alright but I wonder if the Turkish minority were happy with that given that there is only a handful of them left today and that they are denied the right to educate their children in Turkish.

Nobody comes too well out of the history of Cyprus but I find it hard to blame the Turkish minority for not being keen to be part of a unified political entity with their Greek neighbours when they consider the fate of the Turkish minority in Greece proper.