The Cyprus Emergency

The Cyprus Emergency (2010) – Nick Van Der Bijl
Pen & Sword | ISBN: 9781848842229
Condition: As New | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Cyprus. An island of glorious sunshine, ancient ruins, turquoise waters and a history complicated enough to make the average European border dispute look like a disagreement over a garden fence. Today it attracts holidaymakers in search of beaches, inexpensive wine and the comforting possibility of returning home with a tan. But during the 1950s, Cyprus was the setting for a bitter colonial conflict involving British soldiers, Greek Cypriot nationalists, Turkish Cypriot communities and an imperial government discovering, somewhat belatedly, that not everybody appreciated being governed from London.

In The Cyprus Emergency, military historian Nick Van Der Bijl examines the violent struggle that gripped the island between 1955 and 1959, when Britain found itself fighting an increasingly difficult counter-insurgency campaign against EOKA, the Greek Cypriot nationalist organisation seeking to end British colonial rule and achieve union with Greece.

For Britain, Cyprus was strategically important, particularly as its imperial possessions elsewhere in the Middle East were becoming increasingly troublesome to maintain. Unfortunately, the inhabitants had developed political ambitions of their own, and these did not necessarily involve continuing to provide convenient military facilities for a declining empire.

The conflict brought together guerrilla warfare, assassinations, bomb attacks, intelligence operations, curfews, detention camps and extensive security measures. British forces faced the formidable task of combating an underground organisation operating within a civilian population, where distinguishing insurgents from ordinary citizens was often considerably harder than military training manuals suggested.

Van Der Bijl explores the military and political dimensions of the Emergency, examining the activities of British security forces, the tactics employed by EOKA and the wider tensions that made Cyprus such a difficult problem for successive governments.

The struggle was further complicated by tensions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, whose competing national aspirations ensured that even agreement on removing British colonial authority would not necessarily produce a peaceful settlement. As history would subsequently demonstrate, achieving independence and resolving the underlying disputes were two entirely different undertakings.

The book offers a fascinating examination of Britain’s late-colonial military experience, when an army accustomed to conventional warfare increasingly found itself confronting nationalist movements whose objectives could not be defeated simply by deploying more troops and issuing sterner instructions.

There is something grimly ironic about the term Emergency, a conveniently temporary-sounding description for conflicts involving death, imprisonment, political upheaval and the gradual dismantling of an imperial system. It suggests a brief administrative inconvenience rather than a fundamental struggle over sovereignty and national identity.

Published in 2010 by Pen & Sword, this volume will appeal to readers interested in British military history, colonial counter-insurgency, the Cold War Mediterranean and the complicated origins of modern Cyprus.

This As New copy, offered by Crappy Old Books, is an excellent addition to any collection of twentieth-century military or imperial history.

A compelling account of a turbulent chapter in Britain’s retreat from empire, when strategic calculations collided with nationalism, political violence and the inconvenient insistence of local populations upon determining their own future.

Because maintaining an empire is expensive, losing one is embarrassing, and persuading everyone involved that the resulting settlement is satisfactory can take considerably longer than expected.

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