Following strong representations from Nicosia, a paragraph in a new Greek school history book referring to Cyprus’s struggle for independence in the 1950s as “ultra-conservative and nationalist” will be removed from the curriculum and corrected in future editions, the government said yesterday.

Education Minister Petros Efthymiou, who is on an official visit to China, said instructions would be issued “to restore the historic truth and to honor the Cypriot people’s fight for national independence.”

The modern world history book for final-year secondary school pupils — which has been just printed and will be sent to schools in September — unfavorably compares General Grivas’s EOKA fighters’ struggle with Third World anti-colonial movements “whose priority was not only national independence but social progress as well.”