Inside the Cypriot campaign to kick out British bases
Long before a drone struck RAF Akrotiri, opposition to one of Britain’s last colonial outposts was already growing in Cyprus
After a drone hit a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus on Sunday night, the debate in Britain has centred on why the airfield was not better protected. But in Cyprus, anger is focused on why Britain still has military bases there at all.
“We got no sleep last night,” local resident Melanie Steliou told Declassified on Monday, as sirens blared in the background. “My son has not gone to school today because it is next to the base.
“I naturally feel scared, frustrated and mad at what is going on…I’m mad at Keir Starmer for putting Cyprus on the spot,” she said of the prime minister’s announcement the night before that America could use British bases to bomb Iran.
While some UK personnel are being evacuated from Akrotiri, local Cypriots have nowhere else to go. “It’s a sickening example of a colonial mindset,” Steliou said. “The base shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
These are not just idle words. Steliou is a candidate for parliamentary elections being held in Cyprus this May. She is running on a left-wing slate organised by AKEL, the main opposition party, who currently hold 15 out of 56 seats in parliament and want the British bases gone.
If elected, Steliou will become an MP for Limassol, a coastal constituency next to RAF Akrotiri, which sits on Cyprus’ southernmost peninsula. Miles of land around the airbase, including a salt lake, wildlife centre, farms and beach bars, is occupied by Britain and almost completely encircles parts of the constituency.
The UK claims this as a “sovereign base area”, and has another on the east of the island at Dheklia, near the clubbing hotspot of Ayia Napa. Together these 98 square miles amount to three percent of Cyprus, which Britain refused to fully decolonise when it granted independence to the rest of the Mediterranean island in 1960.
‘Spy on the entire region’
For Steliou, the drone strike at Akrotiri came as no surprise. She has warned for years about the risk posed by Britain’s military bases on the island, especially as they allow access to US troops. At the time of writing, it looks like the drone was fired by Hezbollah in Lebanon and hit a hangar housing American U-2 spy planes, which have previously spied on the group.
Speaking to Declassified a month earlier, on 25 January, Steliou pointed out how Hezbollah’s late leader Hassan Nasrallah once warned that “if Cyprus gave facilities to Israel to help bomb Iran, Cyprus would be attacked. So it is a danger for the people here.”
Steliou made the prescient comments as she was about to board a coach with dozens of activists from Cyprus’ largest left-wing youth group, EDON. They hold an annual protest each January on the summit of Mount Troodos, the highest point of Cyprus, where Britain has a spy station that it shares with American intelligence officers.
“The equipment they have on Troodos can spy on the entire region,” she informs the teenagers on the coach as they wind through the mountains from Limassol, while Declassified films the journey. Out of the windows, a giant white golf ball-looking radar dome is ever present, crowning Mount Troodos.
Its capabilities were shrouded in secrecy until 2016, when National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that spies on Troodos could hack into Israeli drone feeds. Back in 2008, British intelligence agency GCHQ regarded Israel as a “real threat to the stability of the region”, and thought the hacking could provide a “tip-off for any potential pre-emptive or retaliatory strike against Iran.”
Geopolitical shifts mean Britain is now much closer to Israel, having signed a military pact together in 2020. Although the text remains classified, intelligence relations with Israel are thought to be close.
An Israeli special forces veteran told Declassified the pact enhanced military intelligence cooperation between the Israeli army surveillance unit 8200 and GCHQ. “This means that Cyprus, through the bases, is complicit in the wars that are taking place in the region,” Steliou tells the coach party. “It puts the citizens themselves at risk.”
‘Can’t tell the world’
Steliou has a unique perspective on the situation. Her mother is English and came to work on the bases as a teacher in the 1960s. She fell in love with a Cypriot, which put her under suspicion from the British military, but their relationship survived.
And so Steliou grew up living next to the bases, including during the first Gulf wars when they were used to attack Iraq. But it has been the genocide in Gaza that galvanised her opposition.
“They’re collaborating with the Israeli military,” she exclaims. “Keir Starmer, when he visited the bases in Cyprus [in 2024], he said ‘although we’re really proud of what you’re doing here, we can’t necessarily tell the world’. Well obviously they can’t tell the rest of the world what they’re doing because he’d have to own up to being complicit in a genocide.”
That complicity consists of hundreds of surveillance flights Britain sent over Gaza from Akrotiri. Officially looking for hostages, no evidence has ever been provided that they helped find any, raising concerns that Israel could have used intelligence from the planes for its general war effort.
US military transport planes were also allowed to pass through Akrotiri enroute to Israel. “It was a great realisation to understand exactly what the British are doing on the bases and to accept this part of my own history,” she says, as the coach pulls into Troodos junction, about half a kilometer from the summit.
There’s a row of cafes and restaurants, including one named after Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest mountain. Coaches have come from most parts of the island, as EDON strives to organise their protest to include members of the Turkish community.
A sea of red, green and white flags spills out into the road, as a drummer prepares to lead the crowd up the hill. Eight young women hold letters that spell “bases out”. Steliou greets AKEL candidates from other constituencies as they begin to march up the snow-lined hill.
Hundreds of protesters chant “Out, out, out! British bases out!” Soon they approach a barbed wire fence and assemble outside RAF Troodos, which prickles with antennas, cameras and radars.
‘Colonialism 101’
EDON’s secretary general, Seviros Koulas, begins to address the crowd: “We do not accept Cyprus as a springboard for war, we do not accept our homeland as part of the war machine that spreads death in our neighbourhood.
“Operations directly linked to the war in Gaza and the massacre of the Palestinian people pass through here. All this is happening while our region is burning. While the Middle East is drowning in blood.
“And some here want to convince us that the deeper we get involved, the ‘safer’ we will be. They are lying. Involvement does not bring security. It brings danger. It makes us a target.”
Koulas, who is standing as an AKEL candidate in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, then tries to deliver a declaration to the British staff inside Troodos. However, none of the UK personnel will come out to collect it, and he is forced to pin it on the gate.
Steliou approaches him, confused by the spectacle. “We are here every year, it’s an annual event,” Koulas confides. “It is the first time they didn’t even send an officer or somebody working in the UK bases to come and take our demands…they just said leave it on the door. This is how they think they own the place.”
“This is colonialism 101,” Steliou reflects.
Far-right threat
With the protest over, the crowd heads back down the mountain to a picnic spot where EDON has organised a small music festival. Steliou catches up with Orestis Matsas, another AKEL candidate, and asks him why he wants to be an MP.
“The rise of the far-right is a reason to support a party that was always against that,” he says, drawing a distinction with AKEL’s traditional left-wing credentials. “The far-right in Cyprus is not anymore an isolated issue,” he stresses, referring to ELAM, a party which is surging in the polls and threatens to overtake AKEL.
ELAM espouses ultranationalist politics, seeking to unify Cyprus with Greece, and has ties to the banned criminal group Golden Dawn. Steliou shares his concerns. “We need more empathy in the world, and less colonialism and less militarism.”
AKEL is also seeking to challenge the governing party, the centre-right Democratic Rally, which won two more seats than them at the last election. The president of Cyprus, Nikos Christodoulides, is a veteran of Democratic Rally, although he is no longer in the party.
He is close to Benjamin Netanyahu – having bought Israeli air defence systems for Cyprus – and Keir Starmer, whose use of Akrotiri the president failed to challenge throughout the Gaza genocide
“Christodoulides is leading a spineless foreign policy that is not serving the interests of our people,” AKEL MP Marina Nicolaou tells Steliou. A month later, the president would accept Starmer’s assurance that the base was not being used to attack Iran, only for it to be struck regardless.
Although Christodoulides has another two years left in office and is responsible for foreign policy, Nicolaou believes the parliamentary elections in May could heap pressure on him to change course. “The stronger AKEL is in parliament, the more pressure it can put on the government.”
For Steliou, the issue goes to the heart of their liberty. “The bases are a remnant of British colonialism. We think we have the Republic of Cyprus and that we are free. As long as you have bases and they are considered British territory, you are not completely free.”