The Cyprus Question| A brief Introduction 5 … if the purpose of a settlement of the Cyprus question is to be the preservation rather than the destruction of the state and if it is to foster rather than to militate against the development of a peacefully united people, I cannot help wondering whether the physical division of the minority from the majority should not be considered a desperate step in the wrong direction.” Dr Galo Plaza, Report of the United Nations Mediator on Cyprus to the Secretary-General, UN Security Council S/6253, 26 March 1965. We are all prisoners of knowledge. To know how Cyprus was betrayed, and to have studied the record of that betrayal, is to make oneself unhappy and to spoil, perhaps for ever, one’s pleasure in visiting one of the world’s most enchanting islands. Nothing will ever restore the looted treasures, the bereaved families, the plundered villages and the groves and hillsides scalded with napalm. Nor will anything mitigate the record of the callous and crude politicians who regarded Cyprus as something on which to scribble their inane and conceited designs. But fatalism would be the worst betrayal of all. The acceptance, the legitimisation of what was done–those things must be repudiated. Such a refusal has a value beyond Cyprus, in showing that acquiescence in injustice is not ‘realism’. Once the injustice has been set down and described, and called by its right name, acquiescence in it becomes impossible. That is why one writes about Cyprus in sorrow but more–much more–in anger.” Christopher Hitchens, Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger (London and New York: Verso, 1997). “ “
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