SIR,—II is no doubt true, as you remark in your
issue of September 16, that 'the British Government has got into a pretty mess over Cyprus,' if by British Government the Labour Government which assumed office in 1945 is primarily meant, for to abolish the teaching of English in schools in Cyprus was an act of utter folly provocative of very much that has happened since, including the recent burning of the British Institute in Nicosia.
Historically the modern kingdom of Greece has no claim whatever to Cyprus. It is quite untrue in fact that modern Greece is the motherland of the Cypriots. At the time of the British occupation in 1878 there were in Cyprus only about 20,000 Greek-speaking Cypriots, who had been, during Turkish rule (since AD 1571), administered by an Archbishop who in that period was called an 'Ethnarch.'
We in 1878 abolished all that, and separated Church and State, so that, in fact, he is no longer an 'Ethnarch,' and it is this deprivation of civil status which in fact is the cause of this so-called enosis campaign, not love of Greece at all, as is pretended, still less a desire to be governed by Athenian politicians.
Greece on the other hand presses what is called 'self-determination' because she knows perfectly well that to a very large extent the Greek-speaking voters would in fact be con- trolled by the Orthodox Hierarchy as the Cyprus Government explained in a pamphlet not long ago.
The great increase in the Greek-speaking population of Cyprus since 1878 is due very largely to the fact that when, after the Greek invasion of Asia Minor, some thousands were expelled by the Turks, a large number of them preferred the security and peace of British rule in Cyprus at that time, to the vicissitudes of life in the Balkans or modern Greece. It is thus nonsense to pretend that all these people want to be governed by Athens. The fact is that the display of Hellenistic sym- pathies by Labour politicians and newspapers merely fans the flames of political uprising and is due partly to clerical ambitions, but mostly now to Communist influences and hostility to Great Britain and NATO.—Yours faithfully,
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