Heat & Haggling

The Greeks have a good case in Cyprus (TIME, Jan. 9), but they are not content to leave it at that. Day and night last week, as they have been doing for months, the official Athens radio and the excitable Greek press piled on faggots of falsity and fancy to feed the fire of the Cyprus problem.

"The British run torture centers in Cyprus where they beat their prisoners, inject them with truth serums, extract their teeth and fingernails," cried Athens' Voice of the Fatherland radio, beamed to turbulent Cyprus. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, said one newspaper, is "the accomplice of the most shameful international crime of our age." When a policeman was killed trying to keep order on the island, Athens beamed back its own version: "Agents of the foreign dynasty [Britain] provoked the riots and killed the policeman in order to provoke further rioting."

Beneath Contempt. Faced with such incendiary propaganda, the British Government announced in the House of Commons that it was considering jamming Athens broadcasts to the island crown colony. Immediately there was an outcry from Britain's Labor Opposition. Never in Lord Haw-Haw's noisiest days had the British jammed the Nazi radio; Winston Churchill preferred to treat Goebbels' propaganda as beneath contempt. But, argued the Tories last week, the circumstance is different when Greek incites fellow Greek to terrorism. And Britain, which in a desperate hour sent what troops it could spare to Greece to fight off the Nazis, dislikes being told now by NATO partner Greece that its rule on Cyprus is like Dachau and Auschwitz. Even some responsible Greeks, apparently including Premier Karamanlis himself, were fearful that their propagandists were going too far. But Greece was in the midst of an election campaign, and moderation was not the mood of the moment.

Behind the ugly heat of radioed words, and the rounding up of youthful Cypriot firebrands, Britain's soldier-diplomat, Sir John Harding, continued negotiations with Cypriot Archbishop Makarios, spiritual shepherd and temporal leader (Ethnarch) of the Greek Cypriots. Begrudgingly, the British found themselves treating him like a head of state.

Talking Details. London's latest proposal, couched in enough roundabouts and negatives to make the eyeballs twirl, said in effect that Britain is not unwilling to negotiate some form of "self-determination" for Cyprus if the islanders "sincerely cooperate" in arranging a gradual change to self-government. Makarios replied with a letter to Sir John that he would accept this as "a basis for continuing our joint efforts toward a solution." It would be difficult not to: the British proposal is practically the same as Makarios offered them four months ago (and the British then refused).

On this basis Harding and Makarios began talking details. The British insist that whatever the form of self-government, they must retain control of Cyprus' defense, foreign policy and internal security, i.e., police, and they demand tight guarantees that the island's 94,000 Turks will live as equals with its 410,000 Greeks. Makarios balked at first over leaving the police in British hands, later in the week seemed willing to concede the point.

Each side has cautiously proclaimed that they are near agreement, but the question is whether the archbishop will sign so long as he sees the possibility of getting more concessions by not signing. Against the useful advantages of this technique is the growing realization, by both Sir John Harding (15 of whose men have been killed during his brief stay on Cyprus) and Archbishop Makarios, that if they do not reach a settlement soon, they will lose control of the situation to the advocates of violence.

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