The British Army in Cyprus prove colonialism is bad

 By Eleni Kyprianou

While journalist Carol Malone exalted the merits of empire, the British Army confessed to war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Proving the effects of British colonialism are still being felt globally, even in an EU member state.

We’ve been bearing witness to the destruction of the Palestinian people since the Nakba in 1948, but never more so than people posting and live-streaming the war crimes committed against them in the name of colonialism and the expansionist dream of a “Greater Israel”.

Earlier in May, Netanyahu declared his plans to “seize all of Gaza”, much to the delight of Louis Theroux’s latest interviewee in The Settlers, Daniella Weiss, who openly boasted about her achievements as a settler-coloniser.

In March 2022, as Russia launched yet another attack on Ukraine, Malone wrote in The Express, “There's nothing that can stem our tears over the slaughter of innocents and the bloody destruction of this lionhearted country.”

Yet this week, Carol Malone declared on GB News that “not everything about colonisation waswrong”. Forgetting that the Ukrainian people she so vehemently defended three years ago are victims of Russian colonialism.

Perhaps she was specifically extolling the virtues of the British Empire. Perhaps she thinks building railways, formal education and modern policing was about spreading ideas and not facilitating and enabling the core principle of colonialism. Theft.

It exists only because it steals land, resources, lives and identity.

The only way to plunder other countries is by gunpoint.

While GB News’ detractors, commentators, journalists and politicians vitriol of “island of strangers” and about “Luton High Street not looking like England anymore”, Britain - who control 3% of Cyprus due to its army bases at Dekalia and Akrotiri - not only watched, but actively participated when a foreign aggressor, Turkey, claimed 36% of the sovereign state of Cyprus for a Turkish-speaking minority to create a militarised ethnostate that is only recognised by the country that colonised it.

Cyprus experienced GB News, Reform Party and the EDL’s worst nightmare at the hands of the British Army.

BBC’s Panorama recently reported on the conduct of the Special Forces during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, an SAS veteran who served in Afghanistan recalls, "They handcuffed a young boy and shot him”.

Barbarism with impunity, enabled by colonisers, means their presence in foreign territories has been a threat to a nation’s sovereignty and security since the sun rose on the empire. But it’s not just when they wore red jackets and wielded blunderbuses, nor during the “war on terror”. It’s left its bloody fingerprints all over the British Empire.

On 27 May 1964, the Cypriot authorities caught Senior Aircraftman with the RAF, Keith Marley, with the RAF, as he was transporting arms from Kokkina - a self-militarised Turkish enclave in Morphou Bay that became a no-go zone to the Greek-speaking majority - to the 20,000 members of the terrorist group Turkish Resistance Organisation (TMT), who were embedded within Turkish-speaking Cypriot civilian populations all over the island.

He confessed to gun-running at least five times and that others were involved, including members of UNFICYP, such as Swedish peacekeepers, who were also caught. 

Marley’s actions led to a 4-day siege of Kokkina by the Cypriot National Guard in an attempt to stop the illegal import of automatic weapons and mortars destined for the hands of dissidents threatening national security. The siege ended with the Turkish Air Force dropping napalm bombs on Greek-speaking villages, killing scores of civilians.

Turkey’s threats against Cyprus started in the 1940s, when militants started terrorising the Turkish-speaking community to sow the seeds of apartheid on the island. In 1950, the Nihat Erim plan was drawn to divide Cyprus along the 35th parallel, claiming the northern half for Turkey.

The British, who administered the country at time, fuelled this objective by hiring Turkish-speaking Cypriots as police during the Cyprus Emergency in 1955, as Greek-speaking Cypriots couldn’t be trusted as Cypriot resistence group, EOKA, formed and rose to prominence, calling for independence from Britain for the long-term goal of enosis, unification with Greece.

A move that cemented a division that was exploited by barrister and politician, Rauf Denktash, who confessed during a British TV interview that he was behind several false flag attacks on Cypriots in the 50s, further igniting the inter-communal violence that led to TMT forcing Turkish-speaking Cypriots into enclaves by gunpoint.

This complicity with terrorists by the army and collaboration with aggressors by the government has led to a 51-year illegal occupation, as ruled by 16 of 17 ECHR judges, 250,000 refugees and 1,100 missing people. 

Neither the British government nor the EU has acted to stop this occupation or settler-colonialism that has reduced the Turkish-speaking Cypriots in the occupied territories to third-class citizens in their own country, now making up just 6% of the population. 

Every micro decision and action taken by a coloniser and the army that carries out its orders with impunity has macro effects still felt today.

The schools, the railways and the sanitation could not make up for the change in demographics, the loss of identity, the bloodshed and the indignity of being colonised.

An indignity at the hands of the henchmen of the coloniser, the army.

Everything colonisation has done is wrong. We’re witnessing it now in real-time in Palestine,

Ukraine and Cyprus, but we talk about it like it was a rose-tinted bygone era we should be grateful for.