Bitter Hatred on the Island of Love

Determined to get by force what it could not get at the Geneva negotiating table, Turkey last week again broke the unsteady Cyprus truce. With as much ease as a surgeon wielding a scalpel across the dusky Cypriot plain, Turkish forces supported by tanks, jets and ar tillery moved out of their previously held strongpoints around Kyrenia and Nicosia and within 40 hours crossed to the other side of the island at Famagusta, neatly taking control of the northeastern third of the island in what well may be a permanent division line between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities. "Now is the time to settle the Cyprus problem once and for all, and that's what we are doing," pronounced Turkish Foreign Minister Turan Guenes, (see box). "Let public opinion embrace the Greeks and cuss us out. We don't care."

Frustrated by its inability to aid the ethnic Greeks on the distant island against Turkey's blatant aggression, the new democratic government of Premier Constantino Caramanlis angrily denounced its NATO allies, particularly the U.S., for not intervening. In a move that may permanently weaken the West in the eastern Mediterranean (see following story), Athens summarily pulled its forces out of the NATO alliance. "NATO is dispensable," Caramanlis, 67, said in a grand De Gaulle-like gesture of independence. "It used us, but when we needed it, it closed its eyes."

The newest Turkish violation of the cease-fire on Cyprus began at dawn Wednesday, less than an hour after the breakdown of peace talks in Geneva. Guenes telephoned Premier Buelent Ecevit in Ankara to report that Greece would not accede to Turkish demands that the island be partitioned into Greek and Turkish Cypriot zones, and that the talks were fruitless. Almost immediately Radio Ankara signaled the code words: "TYK in Force," meaning start the assault. Within minutes, Turkish jets were over Famagusta and Nicosia, making passes in Nicosia's International Airport area and dive-bombing the southwestern part of the city, where the headquarters of the Greek Cypriot National Guard, the civil police and the government radio station are clustered together. Dense clouds of black smoke billowed all over Nicosia, with the loud explosions of Turkish bombs being punctuated by the ineffective bang-bang of Greek Cypriot antiaircraft guns.

Withering Barrage. On the ground, Turk tanks rolled out of the Turkish section of the city they had occupied since the July 20 invasion and thrust toward the suburb of Mia Milea, astride the road to Famagusta 35 miles to the east. A withering barrage of mortar and artillery fire preceded the tanks, and the native Greek forces, outgunned and outmanned, were unable to slow their advance. By early afternoon, the Turks were almost halfway to Famagusta, the island's principal port, its third largest (pop. 43,600) city and the center of its usually booming tourist industry. By Thursday evening, they had reached the old part of the city and rescued 12,000 of the island's Turks, who had been hiding from Greek Cypriots behind the walls of the medieval fortress.

"The new part of the city, which is inhabited mainly by Greeks, was deserted, smoking and broken," reported TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin, who came in after the Turks. "From the wall we saw a column of twelve Turkish tanks mopping up the last resistance. A charred Greek school was pummeled by Turkish machine-gun fire. Scouts roamed the wide, tree-shaded boulevard picking out sharpshooters. Turkish soldiers who had strayed from their bases were looting abandoned houses."

Finally on Friday, its goals achieved, Ankara called a unilateral truce and said that it was willing to go back to the Geneva negotiations this week. Greece refused, insisting that it would not negotiate at "the point of a gun," particularly since the Turks continued to break the cease-fire in small skirmishes. Throughout the fighting, the over 4,000-man United Nations peace-keeping force had been able to do nothing to implement a cease-fire demand issued by the Security Council, and the Turks were not scrupulous about protecting U.N. neutrality. During the fighting, three of the blue-helmeted soldiers had been killed, another 23 wounded.

Other casualties were impossible to reckon amid the confusion. The island's main psychiatric hospital, with its barracks-like buildings, was hit by Turkish jets for the second time in 27 days, and 28 more patients were wounded; 30 had been killed in the first attack. Most Nicosians who had a choice had fled the city earlier in the week when the Geneva talks appeared doomed, seeking refuge in the villages to the south and in the Troodos Mountains. Those few who had remained in the city, which once had a Greek population of 80,000, rushed to get out when they heard the first air strike, leaving the Greek section of Nicosia nearly deserted. The Red Cross reported that as many as 200,000 Greek Cypriots throughout the island had become refugees.

The Turkish aim seemed to be, as Ankara claimed, not control of the whole island but of a third of it, roughly following a nearly 70-mile line from Lefka and Nicosia to Famagusta. With this "fact," as the Turks called it, accomplished, they felt that a settlement could be worked out giving the Turkish Cypriots their own geographical area in an island federation. Now the 116,000 Turkish Cypriots are interspersed in enclaves scattered among the 523,000 Greeks, who have discriminated against them and cut them off from sharing in the island's general prosperity. The Turkish area could either be the top third of the island, the Turks reasoned, or it could be divided into several separated, Swiss-style cantons. However it was figured, or measured, they said, the Turkish Cypriots would have to have their own third.

Flat Refusal. The Greeks have always opposed partition because they consider Cyprus part of Greece culturally, if not politically, and have hoped for eventual union. Confronted with the Turkish military presence on the island, they might conceivably have acceded, however, had the Turks not demanded so much territory. Since the Turks make up only 18% of the island's population, the Greeks believe that Ankara should have asked for no more than a fifth. Athens, however, was not even allowed to consider seriously the plan at Geneva or to come up with counterproposals. When Greek Foreign Minister George Mavros asked for 36 hours to consult with his government, Guenes flatly refused, and the talks broke down without accomplishing anything during six days of negotiating.

Britain, which had occupied the island from 1878 to 1960 and along with Greece and Turkey is a co-guarantor of Cyprus' independence, had led the negotiations and was as stunned--and bitter--as Athens at the Turkish intransigence and arrogance. British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan said that "what happened was totally unnecessary, and that's not only my view but also that of the U.S. Government, as the Turks have been told. I cannot believe that peace in the eastern Mediterranean depends on 36 hours."

The ability of the Turks to do what they wanted on the island despite international condemnation was, in fact, never seriously questioned. Cyprus is only 44 miles off the Turkish coast, mere minutes from Turkish airbases, and it is easily supplied from Turkish ports. The Greek mainland, by contrast, is 525 miles away; a Greek counterinvasion almost certainly would have been thwarted by Turkish air support and the 40,000 Turkish troops already deployed on the island. The only Greek alternative would have been to attack Turkey on the mainland through Thrace. This, however, would have been even more disastrous for the Greeks. Not only does the Turkish army have almost three tunes as many men, but the leadership and morale of the Greek army have also been crippled by seven years of a dictatorship that had purged most of the country's best officers.

Despite the unfavorable odds, the Caramanlis regime for a time considered war. More reservists were called up, and tanks rumbled through the streets of Athens on their way to the Turkish border. "If we have to choose between national humiliation and war, the choice is easy," boasted Foreign Minister Mavros before he left for the abortive Geneva talks. For Caramanlis, however, the choice was not so easy, and in a radio and TV address to his nation, he reluctantly admitted that "armed confrontation was impossible due to distance as well as to the known accomplished fact [of the Turkish presence]." In Ankara, the Turks had prepared for a Greek attack, though they--and foreign military observers--considered it would be a suicidal move. "We knew that any dog pushed into a corner would bark and bite," said one Turkish official with chatty insouciance. "Now we see that Greece was not really pushed into a corner."

If the Greeks wanted to bite anyone--anyone besides Turkey, that is--it was the U.S., which, in Athens' view, had betrayed it in its most desperate hour. The decision to withdraw Greek military forces from NATO, a move specifically directed against Washington as the leader of the alliance, was immensely and immediately popular in Greece, and served as something of a diversion to Greek humiliation at the hands of Turkey. Almost everywhere throughout the country a virulent anti-American mood was evident. Several hundred people demonstrated against the U.S. in downtown Athens, police were called in to guard the American embassy, and hundreds of youths marched on the U.S. consulate in Salonica. An estimated 15,000 people greeted Andreas Papandreou, one of the country's leading leftists and a vocal anti-American, when he arrived at Athens airport after a seven-year exile. "Death to Kissinger!" the crowd shouted.

U.S. Gesture. Besides feeling that the U.S. was siding with the Turks, the Greeks were bitter over what they consider longtime American support of the corrupt military dictatorship that preceded Caramanlis. The whole imbroglio with Turkey could have been avoided, the Greeks believed, if Washington had vetoed the attempt by the Athens dictatorship to overthrow the Nicosia government and bring Cyprus into the Greek orbit, a switch Ankara obviously could not allow.

Whatever the Greeks thought about U.S. intentions, Washington claimed neutrality in the Greek-Turkish dispute. It was "pure baloney" to say otherwise, said Robert McCloskey, an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The U.S. threatened to cut off arms aid to both sides if they went to war. Kissinger himself talked with Caramanlis and Ecevit by telephone and urged the Turks not to use further force. He later offered his offices as mediator, either in Nicosia or Washington. In a gesture to placate Greece, the U.S. pulled out Ambassador Henry J. Tasca, who was far too closely identified with the hated dictatorship during his five-year tour, and sent in Jack B. Kubisch, a skilled veteran diplomat who was serving as an Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. At the same time, President Ford invited Caramanlis to Washington, an invitation the Premier turned down as untimely. Privately, Washington officials felt aggrieved by the Greek attitude. There was, they claimed, little the U.S. could do to stop the Turks, short of using the might of the Sixth Fleet.

Washington hopes that the Greeks will eventually rejoin NATO and reconcile themselves to geographic partition and loose federation of the two communities--perhaps the most sensible solution after all for the island that once gave birth, or so mythology would have it, to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Whatever Athens decides, however, the turmoil on Cyprus is far from over. The Greek Cypriots, with their large majority, are not likely to allow the Turks to retain exclusive control of the important port of Famagusta and a third of the island without a fight. The Greeks waged guerrilla warfare for four years against the British before achieving independence for Cyprus. They vow to be as determined against the Turks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.