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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
An excellent overview of recent Cypriot history, 14 April 1999
By A Customer
This is a book about international political intregue which reads almost like a spy-cum-action thriller. It is not fiction, however. To paraphrase Orwell, these things actually happened. There are, as Hitchens acknowledges, those who will accuse him of creating a huge and unlikely conspiricy theory with this book. Yet, to those who care to follow him, there is plenty of confirmation for his conclusions. They make disturbing reading. The Cyprus problem is not, he states, the result of ancient ethnic rivalries. Indeed, he notes how the old cliche that Greek and Turkish Cypriots have always lived peacefully together is actually true, and that, for example, during the American-backed Greek coup in Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish military occupation of the island in 1974, Greek and Turkish Cypriots sheltered together and helped each other. Rather, Hitchens shows convincingly, the division of the island is the result of foreign power-games, led by the cynical foreign policies of Lyndon Johnson, Nixon and Kissenger, who used Cyprus as a pawn in an international political game without care for or reference to the inhabitants of that island. Hitchen's book provides a necessary antidote to the increasingly common glib commentators in the media whose lazy research, and ignorance of history, makes them automatically see the Cyprus problem in terms of ethnic rivalries brought on by the Cypriots themselves. As Hitchens shows, in his highly readable account, the people of Cyprus are the least to blame for their 'problem'.
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