Another Country Heard From

Cyprus is a sore subject involving three presumably friendly nations, and two of them have long since made their views noisily plain. Last week came word from the third nation: Turkey.

It has always been the Greek contention that the Turks do not really care about Cyprus, and have only been stirred up by perfidious Albion. Though the Turks deny this, the fact is they have been quiet all along, even though there are 100,000 Turkish Cypriots as well as 400,000 Greek Cypriots involved. Then why their silence? The Turks answer that they had no desire to complicate the issue so long as the British held to their resolution not to leave Cyprus.

Last week Britain's General Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, flew into Ankara for urgent talks with Turkish leaders. "I am here as head of the British army," said General Templer. "If the issue of Cyprus is brought up, I will deal with it in my limited province as a military man." Presumably, however, he was there to acquaint the Turks with an Anthony Eden proposal to give the Cypriots self-rule and the right of self-determination within ten years.

Future at Stake. In interviews with the London Daily Telegraph and CBS, Turkey's Prime Minister Adnan Menderes made his case. "You are aware," he said, "that Greece has worked up this whole tremendous agitation simply to be able to annex an island 40 miles from Turkey and 600 or 700 miles from her own mainland. In doing so the Greek government has not hesitated to imperil the future of NATO, of the Balkan Pact [Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia] and of its own good relations with Britain and Turkey."

Turkey--unlike Greece--has a Middle

Eastern frontier with Russia, and the day may come when Turkey and Britain will want to act in the Middle East, and Greece will not. "The Egyptian government has opened the door to Soviet penetration of the Middle East," Menderes went on. "Why should we consent to place the whole future of Turkey at stake?"

Friendship in Jeopardy. British retreat from Cyprus, said Menderes, would mean "an international disaster," and would upset the whole "delicate balance" of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, under which--after much bloody fighting between Greek and Turk--Turkey formally ceded Cyprus to Britain and ceded many of the offshore islands and Western Thrace to Greece.

"You take Cyprus away from that treaty and the whole edifice comes tumbling down," said one of Menderes' senior aides. "There are all kinds of claims that can be made legitimately upon Greek territory. I have my own little list . . ."

Concluded Menderes: "We cannot stand by and see the island turned over to Greece. We like and honor the Greeks.

But we cannot sustain friendship by giving up what was always Turkish soil."

At week's end, midway through the Templer talks, word out of London was that the Eden government was "shocked" by the toughness of the Turkish position and was now going to eliminate the promise of self-determination (i.e., eventual union with Greece) from the proposals Eden is about to submit to the Cypriots. This was not likely to please the leader of the Greek Cypriots, Archbishop Makarios, who is in exile in the Indian Ocean. Prospects of peace seemed to be receding again.

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