Nasser's life revisited and the Cyprus tragedy

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Aug 27, 2010 at 06:37

Ianus wrote

>Hi, dhimmi no more !

Hi Ianus

this thread is turning out to be more interesting than i expected and may be i need to look more into the life of Nasser and read more of the Egyptian sources more so about the Cyprus tragedy so stay tuned

Notice that the Turkish propagandists are gone and I suspect that their command of history or what history is all about is very limited

>You wrote :> I found this very interesting article about Makarious and Nasser their palns to bomb the Turks and it is from Time magazine and dated 9/4/1964 and I quote" At week's end Turkey grudgingly gave its consent to a Greek request that the troop rotation be postponed Archbishop Makarios flew blithely off to Alexandria to confer with an old friend and ally Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. His reported mission to secure Nasser's permission for Greeks and Russian fighter planes to use Egyptian bases in the event of a Turkish invasion of Cyprus."This is a great quotation, especially if one reads it in the context of President Johnson's letter sent to Turkey two months later , on June 5th 1964 . Johnson warned the Turks that :" [...] a military intervention in Cyprus by Turkey could lead to direct involvement by the Soviet Union. I hope you will understand that your NATO allies have not had a chance to consider whether they have an obligation to protect Turkey against the Soviet Union if Turkey takes a step which results in Soviet intervention without the full consent and understanding of its NATO allies."

This is very interesting but I found a reference to this letter in al-Ahram in late 1964 but I wanted to see what the letter really says before I tell you about it but the word is really out and this is indeed what was most interesting about the life of Nasser. He really had no like for the Turks and he admired Makrious and had empathy for the Greeks in Cyprus and what is most interesting and i hope to read more about it is that he attended some memorial in Cairo some time in the mid 1950's for the victims of the Armenian Genocide as Cairo had a very large Armenian population and I'm sure the turks just did not like it but he did not really care

>The Egyptian-Greek-Russian threat , whether it was a bluff or not is not important here , did work perfectly well. Combined with a warning from America it cooled off the heated Turkish heads and the planned invasion was cancelled . Only after 10 years when the political situation changed after Nasser's death , the defeat of Egypt in the Yom Kipur war and the overthrow of Makarios the Turks were given a chance to invade and grab a large part of Cyprus with no voice raised in the region to threaten them with retaliations for their robbery.

It seems that this threat indeed existed and i suspect that it made the Turks think twice before attacking Cyprus in the 1960's

And what is most amazing about Nasser is that he was able to cope with the threat from islam in Egypt and now not just israel but Europe and the US have to deal with this menace and with the likes of Tariq Ramadan and the so called Shiekh Abdul Rauf of the Ground Zero Mosque

I will be looking forward to the new biography of Nasser and I hope the author will get into such issues

>It seems also there were no such close ties between Anwar El Sadat and Makarios as was the case with Nasser and Makarios.

Sadat was really pathetic as Nasser had to turn to Russia to get money so he can build the high dam and to buy weopons. Sadat believed that if he becomes a lackey of the US then all Egyptian problems will be solved and little did he know

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