PLAYING IT DIRTY
S1R,—The set of rather hysterical letters that followed my review of Charles Foley's Island in Revolt bears witness to the potent hatred which the Cyprus Emergency aroused, and which the book so accurately portrays. Foley's charges of torture are riot 'dirty and underhand' but quite explicit; and he nowhere suggests that it was carried out `on a dreadful scale.' Torture is an effective means of obtaining information and if one believes sufficiently fervently in one's cause—as the British authorities obviously did—then its use is rational, if hard to defend on other grounds. For this reason, and because I know Foley to be an honest journalist, and because I know (as anybody who thinks about it for a moment must realise) that to publish the identities of practitioners or victims would be impossible, I do not doubt the accuracy of the reports.
On the broader issue of the behaviour of the British troops in Cyprus, few people, and certainly not Foley, would deny that in general it was admirable. In a letter to the Spectator in October, 1960, he wrote: 'The fact that most of our troops showed an exemplary spirit which could have been bettered by no army' in the world was the more creditable since, behind a mesh of Emergency edicts, the Security Forces enjoyed complete immunity.'
It is disturbing that your correspondent last week can write that the Times of Cyprus 'did us so much damage when we could have been on top.' The colonial mentality is a stubborn old dog that refuses to die quietly.
31 Chippenhain Road, W9
MICHAEL LEA PMAN
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