Page 90 - The History of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps 1962–2021

THE HISTORY OF THE ROYAL ARMY VETERINARY CORPS 1962 – 2021
enemy figures from well-camouflaged hide-outs. Grivas enjoyed the support of the majority of the Greek-Cypriot population and information about EOKA and its activities was almost impossible to obtain from them. EOKA also began a campaign of intimidation against the Greek-Cypriot members of the Police Force. This made the British rely heavily on Turkish-Cypriot policemen, who were ostracised by the Greek-Cypriots and could provide little information about them. EOKA were evasive as a result, although by mid-1956 there were seventeen thousand British Servicemen in Cyprus. However, the Operations they mounted against EOKA were not particularly effective. For example, in June 1956 a major operation in the Troodos Mountains only netted a handful of EOKA members. EOKA kept up the pressure on Britain by extending their campaign to the towns of Cyprus, where they attacked British servicemen and their families. The British response was also hampered by the need to commit troops to an Anglo-French operation in the Suez Canal zone in
Egypt.
Diplomacy won when the garrison on Cyprus
was reinforced with troops from Egypt and the British enjoyed a little more success. Grivas was forced into hiding and in January 1957, two EOKA leaders, Drakos and Afxentiou, were killed. Their gangs were soon broken up.
Eventually diplomatic efforts found a compromise. For Britain a compromise was imperative, as Major Rose explains in his article: “Costs were mounting for Britain, and events such as the Suez Crisis in 1956 reduced the success of the counter-insurgency measures. The British Government sought a way out which would relieve the burden of a colony in revolt yet allow retention of its strategic military assets.” And so, in 1959, in Zurich, treaties were drawn-up between Britain, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. Of these, the most important for Britain was the Treaty of Estab-
Map of Cyprus 1963.
lishment which gave Cyprus sovereignty with its own constitution and stipulated the existence of two Sovereign Bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia, along with the retention of around thirty Strategic Assets sites scattered across the island.
The Greek-Cypriots abandoned their demands for Enosis and Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios was permitted to return from exile in the Seychelles. Many of the EOKA fighters were granted amnesty and Cyprus was finally granted her independence on 16th of August 1960 with the Archbishop becoming the first President of the Republic of Cyprus.
Whilst Britain (and therefore NATO) had achieved a cost-effective solution to maintaining a military foothold in the Middle East, inter-com- munal fighting continued between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots.
This situation met Corps members serving in Cyprus in the early 1960s.
By 1963 the British soldier in Cyprus was in a peacekeeping role. Relations between the majority Greek-Cypriot and the minority Turkish-Cypriot communities had deteriorated and there were frequent armed clashes between the two sides, particularly in Nicosia. Forces from Greece, Turkey and Britain were deployed to keep the peace and a ‘Green Line’ was established to keep the two sides apart. As Major Rose continues: “The Green Line drawn through the Island’s capital, Nicosia, was an attempt to partition the two communities and halt the violence. But once again this raised the sensitive subject of partitioning the Island, this time with support from the Turkish mainland. It was an attempt to stifle the continued unrest.”
In March 1964, the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) replaced the existing peacekeepers. Their mandate was to prevent a recurrence of fighting, maintain law and order and promote a return to normality. Soldiers were drawn from a number of nations including Britain to contribute to a battalion of infantry, a reconnais- sance squadron, and helicopter flight plus support services. The UN resolution despatched UNFICYP on an initial three-month tour, later extended to six months and then regularly renewed to the present day.
Picking up on this in his article, Major Rose looked at what happened next to the peace- keepers and finding that although UN efforts undoubtedly reduced the level of bloodshed, the Turkish Cypriots gradually moved into UN protected enclaves and inter-factional fighting continued sporadically until 1974. Then, in response to a Greek led attempt to overthrow
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