Fighting EOKA: The British Counter–Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955-1959
David French
Abstract
Drawing upon a wide range of unpublished sources, including files from the recently released Foreign and Commonwealth Office ‘migrated archive’, this book is the first fully researched account of the operations of the British security forces on Cyprus in the second half of the 1950s. It shows how between 1955 and 1959 they tried to defeat the Greek Cypriot paramilitary organisation, EOKA, which was fighting to bring about Enosis, that is the union between Cyprus and Greece. By tracing the evolving pattern of EOKA violence and the responses of the police, the British army, the civil administrat ... More
Drawing upon a wide range of unpublished sources, including files from the recently released Foreign and Commonwealth Office ‘migrated archive’, this book is the first fully researched account of the operations of the British security forces on Cyprus in the second half of the 1950s. It shows how between 1955 and 1959 they tried to defeat the Greek Cypriot paramilitary organisation, EOKA, which was fighting to bring about Enosis, that is the union between Cyprus and Greece. By tracing the evolving pattern of EOKA violence and the responses of the police, the British army, the civil administration on the island, and the minority Turkish Cypriot community, the book explains why the British could contain the military threat posed by EOKA, but could not eliminate it. The result was that by the spring of 1959 a political stalemate had descended upon Cyprus, and none of the contending parties had achieved their full objectives. Greek Cypriots had to be content with independence rather than Enosis. Turkish Cypriots, who had hoped to see the island partitioned on ethnic lines, were given only a share of power in the government of the new Republic, and the British, who had hoped to retain sovereignty over the whole of the island, were left in control of just two military enclaves.
Keywords:
counter-insurgency,
Cyprus,
EOKA,
Enosis,
decolonization,
Grivas,
Makarios,
British army
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198729341 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198729341.001.0001 |
