Every victim of our many wars deserves remembrance

This country might learn to look into every corner of its past with a clear and steady gaze, and an annual festival of remembrance ought to offer that chance

Here’s a question for the next pub quiz. Which British territory uses, as its official currency, the euro? The past fortnight’s events might hint that the answer lies on the coast of Cyprus, in the sovereign bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. With about 16,000 inhabitants – half of them UK service personnel and their families – these bizarre enclaves consist of much more than a scatter of barracks, airstrips and hangars. Covering 254 sq km, they occupy 3 per cent of the island of Cyprus: two corners of some foreign field that are forever England.

Field, and rock, and shoreline: on which, two weeks ago, 114 stranded and abandoned refugees, largely from Syria but with some Palestinians and Lebanese, landed. They handed the UK Government a problem that encapsulates all its unfinished business in the Middle East – and, we now learn, the eastern Mediterranean as well. Another group, of 67 Kurds, have languished at Dhekelia since 1998: 17 years in a stateless no-man’s-land.

This week, our latest batch of accidental guests protested from behind barbed wire at the prison-like conditions that keep them trapped in limbo. Britain says that they must either apply for asylum in the Republic of Cyprus, under the terms of a 2004 agreement, or else return to their terror‑stricken homelands – surely, a sadistic Foreign Office joke.

Most wish to go, like other refugees, to Germany or Sweden rather than the loudly hostile UK. Meanwhile, with both eyes on the migrant-baiting press rather than the responsibilities bequeathed by a colonial past, the Defence Secretary Michael Fallon prates that he will refuse to allow the Cypriot bases to become “some new route of migration into Britain”. As if the huddled masses in flight from Isis and Assad would spend nights of cold and dread plotting a sea course to these little-known throwbacks.

Twitchy politicians obsess, with a hysterical air, about keeping their back doors firmly shut. No one in power has stooped to explain how those bases came into being, what function they serve, and whether their existence may confer duties as well as rights on an ex-imperial power. Just now, the “why?” question answers itself. Akrotiri has, since September 2014, given a platform to RAF sorties against Isis in Iraq. Any extension of those strikes into Syria would use the same aircraft and runways. Meanwhile, surveillance stations on the bases vacuum up intelligence from across the region. In return for this strategic vantage point, another sort of government – another sort of country – might have decided that a couple of hundred strayed asylum-seekers deserved, at least, safe passage rather than a metal cage. The sort of country, perhaps, that briefly coalesces on November days for the festival of remembrance, only to evaporate into the business-as-usual of amnesia, myopia and insularity.

All nations remember their battles and their dead selectively. Britain is no different – although the victors’ righteousness bestowed by two world wars can sometimes limit its vision as much as this week’s morning fogs. Still, the post-Great War rituals of remembrance took shape in the grief-stricken 1920s with a blessed lack of jingoism, triumphalism or sectarianism. Even the graves in Commonwealth cemeteries have headstones, not crosses. Nothing about our autumnal cult of mourning demands that we crow over victories, lie about failures or demonise an enemy. When asked, many of the four million visitors who last year flocked to visit Paul Cummins and Tom Piper’s sea of ceramic poppies at the Tower of London reported that they had come to recognise the sacrifice, and cherish the memory, of the victims on all sides.

In that case, Britain can remember both its large wars and its little ones without partiality or platitude. The Great War and its aftermath taught us that you can safeguard the dignity and welfare of the combatants without letting the top brass – and their political string-pullers – off the hook. We can scorn the donkeys but still honour the lions. Relatives of the 179 service personnel killed in Iraq on a fraudulent prospectus rightly demand the whole truth from Sir John Chilcot’s delayed inquiry report, not pseudo-patriotic bluster. The same clarity and candour should apply to every other modern war.

Take the case of Cyprus. Seized from the Ottomans in 1914, a crown colony by 1925, the island became, between 1955 and 1959, the scrappy terrain on which British troops fought a losing battle against the guerrillas of EOKA. Since EOKA sought, above all, union with mainland Greece rather than just autonomy, you might argue that no force won this nasty war. On the UK side, 371 died – twice the toll in Iraq. In the usual squalid roster of tit-for-tat reprisals and atrocities that marked Britain’s imperial retreat, both sides broke every rule.

Human rights lawyer Martyn Day told this newspaper in 2012 that Britain might in future face about 600 credible claims for compensation from survivors of torture and maltreatment. Thassos Sophocleous, head of the EOKA veterans’ association, has prepared test cases against the UK Government. The veterans allege that 14 fighters died under interrogation during the Cyprus emergency. Sophocleous himself claims that he was tortured for 16 days in 1956, including floggings with a rope studded with iron shards. Sadie Jones’s fine novel Small Wars gives a searing account of the psychic damage wrought by the trauma on fighters and their families alike. This is the background to the bases that oblivious ministers now treat as a free gift of foreign land that carries with it no obligation.

Thanks to the “Treaty of Establishment” in 1959, Cyprus acquired independence with those British military squatters left on its soil in perpetuity. At the same period, even more vicious conflicts in the imperial twilight left Malaya, Kenya and Egypt – after the Suez debacle of 1956 – not only wounded by shows of UK force but also equipped with bitter memories of casual or systemic cruelty.

Anyone who tells you that Britain withdrew from empire with elegance and grace deserves both a hollow laugh and a history lesson. After one legal settlement that, in 2013, resulted in 5,228 victims of abuse, torture and false imprisonment during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya accepting £19.9m in compensation from the UK Government, 41,000 more now demand redress. Some will have their day in court next year. At the time, the Kenya attorney-general Eric Griffith-Jones said: “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.” He failed. Belatedly, we have heard the howls of the castrated, the raped, the burnt and the flogged.

Self-indulgent guilt trips do no one any good. Instead, this country might learn to look into every corner of its past with a clear and steady gaze. An annual festival of remembrance ought to offer that chance as well as paying tribute to the fallen and to veterans. Who knows? Sometimes the neglected stories that come to light might give cause for pride as well as shame. In her new book For King and Another Country, the historian Shrabani Basu movingly explores the ordeals, and the achievements, of the million-plus Indian troops who fought for the Empire in the First World War. On the Western Front, it was they (in the shape of units of the Meerut and Lahore divisions) who first proved that the “British” forces could attack with flair and courage when they broke through German lines at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915.

About 70,000 Indians died during the Great War; 11 won the Victoria Cross, from Khudadad Khan of the 129th Duke of Connaught’s Own Baluchis at the First Battle of Ypres in October 1914, to Badlu Singh of the Scinde Horse in September 1918 on the River Jordan. Yet when Basu visited the Neuve Chapelle memorial, she stood alone in an empty French field. Routinely, our “remembrance” forgets the colonial contribution to victory in both world wars. At least Basu found a wreath, freshly laid by a British minister. It carried the message: “Our shared future is built on our shared past. We will remember them.” That should go for the places of heartbreak, as well as heroism.

On 12 September, at Uhuru Park in Nairobi, a remarkable ceremony took place. A statue by the sculptor Kevin Oduor was unveiled. It commemorates the Mau Mau rebellion through the twin figures of a warrior and a woman who gives him food, and announces itself as a “Memorial to the victims of torture and ill-treatment during the colonial era”. As the Kenyan historian Muoki Mbunga explains: “The ambiguity of the epigraph is not accidental; inconvenient truths such as who authorised and conducted the torture, who the victims were, and why they were tortured are omitted deliberately.” The British Government itself funded this monument, as part of the deal with survivors in 2013. Evasive it may sound, and well short of a frank apology, but for a state that abused its subjects to acknowledge that abuse in bronze and cash remains a rare event.

If remembrance means anything, it should open our eyes to the horror and the muddle of the past, as much as to its glory. Otherwise, as memories erode and veterans depart, those poppies will fall on stonier ground each year.