Openings and Outings: An Anthology by David Pryce-Jones

Author:David Pryce-Jones [Pryce-Jones, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Essays, Literary Collections, Travel, Special Interest, Literary
ISBN: 9781641772570
Google: HLuRzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2022-09-15T20:45:50+00:00

A Redundant General and a “Temporary” President

ON THE MORNING I arrived in Athens to meet General Grivas, two Jordanians exploded a bomb in the El Al office off the main square. A small child was killed. Here was a suitable reminder of the realities of terrorism. Ten years have passed since Grivas, under the nom de guerre Dighenis, was himself a terrorist, the leader of the underground organisation EOKA, with a British offer of £100,000 on his head.

The aim of EOKA, and of Grivas in particular, had been Enosis, or the union of Cyprus with Greece. The word still lives in blue paint on the whitewashed walls of Cyprus. Whether Cypriots really want it, or indeed ever believed they would get it, is something else. Where Grivas once used violent means to bring about Enosis, Archbishop Makarios, the Ethnarch and therefore spokesman of the Greek Cypriots, was diplomacy itself, denouncing EOKA terrorism but taking advantage of it. To deport such a man, such a symbol, to the Seychelles Islands was an admission that he was too complex to deal with. The move was as conspicuous as the failure of troops to capture Grivas on an island about the size of two English counties.

When at last agreements at London and Zurich in 1960 ended the EOKA struggle, Archbishop Makarios was seen to gather the whole harvest in his hands: he was suddenly head of an independent sovereign state. And Grivas, no less suddenly, was put on an aeroplane to Athens. A Greek diplomat who accompanied him told me that during this flight Grivas, dressed still in khaki sweater and field-boots, was too bemused to speak.

The new constitution arranged between Archbishop Makarios, the Turkish representatives and the British, proved unworkable – or was laid aside by Archbishop Makarios at the end of 1963. Riots followed. Independence had brought fighting between the island’s Greek and Turkish communities, a death roll of many hundreds, and a United Nations force, today 4,000 strong, to hold the ring.

Grivas returned to Cyprus in June 1964 as clandestinely as he had once arrived to start EOKA. In a broadcast from Nicosia he characteristically announced his presence: “March forward, Greeks!” He had been appointed by the Greek Prime Minister, Papandreou, as commander of the Cyprus National Guard and also of the Greek regular soldiers who had been illegally infiltrated into Cyprus, 8,000 of them, perhaps even more. For three years Grivas disciplined the Cypriot conscripts into something of a military body and he dug fortifications against possible Turkish invasion.

An attack led by Grivas in November 1967 against two Turkish villages, Kophinou and Ayios Theodorou, precipitated precisely such an invasion. More than 20 Turks were killed by Grivas’s men, and subsequent mobilisation was serious enough to cost the mainland Turkish government some 100 million dollars. Invasion was called off at the very last hour only because of Greek concessions, notably the instant recall of Grivas and his soldiers. Since this downfall, Grivas has lived in seclusion in the village of Porto Hieli, writing hard.

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