Cyprus: Shadows of War

Turkish F-104G Starfighters criss-crossed the azure Cyprus sky, and ships of the Turkish navy sailed offshore, their guns questing the coast for targets. While mobs in Istanbul and Ankara called for war with Greece and an invasion of Cyprus, Turkish troops streamed toward embarkation ports near Cyprus or ferried westward across the Bosporus to take up positions along the Greek border. In response, long columns of olive-drab Greek tanks clattered across the Thracian plain to confront the Turks. Thus last week Turkey and Greece, uneasy allies in NATO, came to the very brink of war over the long-troubled island of Cyprus. Diplomacy temporarily headed off a major conflict, but the two nations continued glaring at each other down the barrels of their U.S.-made guns.

Cyprus has long been a stinging nettle in Turkish-Greek relations. In the savage fighting that broke out between the island’s 480,000 Greek and 120,000 Turkish Cypriots in December 1963, the two countries nearly came to blows, and Turkey actually bombed and strafed Greek Cypriot positions. In recent months, however, a measure of peace and order finally seemed to descend on the island where Aphrodite, the goddess of love, first set her foot on land. Down came many of the roadblocks that had divided Cyprus into warring camps. Sniping incidents declined, and the two ethnic groups even began to mix with one another on a relatively friendly, if cautious, basis. Earlier this month, as a gesture of good will, the Greek Cypriot government of Archbishop Makarios released from prison Turkish Cypriot Leader Rauf Denktash, who had been captured after he secretly smuggled himself into Cyprus.

Provocative Hawk. This calm was rudely shattered two weeks ago by what began as a routine police action by Greek Cypriots. Fearing that Turkish villages were becoming enclaves through which free passage would eventually be denied, Archbishop Makarios decided to reassert his government’s authority by ordering a resumption of patrols by Greek Cypriot police in two predominantly Turkish villages about 30 miles south of Nicosia. Unfortunately, the direction of the operation was entrusted to the wrong man: Lieut. General George Grivas. While Makarios seems to favor an independent Cyprus with friendly relations with Greece, Grivas, the island’s most fearsome hawk, still holds out for enosis (union) with the mainland and has no patience with the Turkish Cypriots, who want their own self-ruled ethnic cantons.

In a provocative show of force, Grivas rolled up to Ayios Theodores, the larger of the two mud-brick villages, at the head of a regiment-sized column of armored cars and self-propelled artillery. After warning the Turks to submit or else, he sent three successive patrols through the village. When the third one drew fire, Grivas not only opened up on Ayios Theodoros with his vastly superior firepower but also commanded National Guardsmen to overrun the nearby village of Kophinou, whose main offense had been an attempt to replace its Greek name with a Turkish one. In the ensuing three-hour fight, 24 Turkish Cypriots were killed and nine wounded.

Turkish Advantage. Even in normal times, the massacre would have exacerbated relations between Turkey and Greece, since each country has a legal responsibility under the island’s 1960 independence charter to protect its own ethnic groups. Toward that end, Turkey is granted the right to station 650 troops there, and Greece 950—though both countries have in the past seven years illegally infiltrated many times that number. At present, there are about 1,500 Turkish soldiers on Cyprus and roughly 8,000 regular Greek troops. There are also 4,000 United Nations troops whose job is to keep the peace.

In the present period of strained Greco-Turkish relations, the Grivas incident was explosive. Turkey is angry at Greece’s new military rulers for failing to respect the sensibilities of the Turkish minority in Greece by disbanding various Turkish landholding and cultural organizations and for refusing to grant the Turkish air force the right to overfly the Aegean Sea. Coldly assessing the situation, the Turks reckoned that they had the Greeks outgunned (480,000 men under arms and 450 combat aircraft v. Greece’s 158,000 men and 250 warplanes) and that moreover, the Greek junta had almost no international support and would be likely to back down on the Cyprus issue. Because Cyprus is so much nearer to Asia Minor than to Greece, the Turks also felt that their planes could easily hold air superiority over the island.

Thus emboldened, Premier Süleyman Demirel played along with the rising Turkish indignation over Cyprus. In an all-night session of Parliament, he demanded—and got—permission to send troops abroad, which was the next thing to an outright declaration of war. He ordered a full-scale alert and fired off a sharp note to Athens that demanded, among other things, the immediate recall of General Grivas to the mainland and the withdrawal of the illegally infiltrated Greek regulars from the island. He also insisted on guarantees for the free movement of Turkish Cypriots so that they could concentrate for their own protection in enclaves in the northern part of the island, where a large part of them already live.

Junta Fears. Athens was surprisingly conciliatory. Even before receiving the Turkish demands, Greece’s junta, led by Colonel George Papadopoulos, ordered the National Guard to hand over the two attacked villages to the U.N. peace-keeping force and recalled Grivas to Athens. The junta commanded the country’s docile press to play down the gravity of the crisis. Still, no matter how unmindful of Greek public opinion they may be, Greece’s military rulers feared the repercussions of a backdown on such an emotional issue as Cyprus. In a reply to Turkey, the Greek leaders offered to discuss measures for cooling the crisis but refused to commit themselves on the crucial issue of troop withdrawals.

That was not good enough for the Turkish Cabinet. It rejected the Greek reply as “unsatisfactory” and gave the Turkish military the signal to speed up preparations. Antiaircraft batteries suddenly appeared around Ankara, and troops in full battle dress lugged their gear aboard a 37-ship invasion fleet that assembled in the Mediterranean port of Iskenderon, only 40 miles from Cyprus. Greece’s alarmed government and military leaders gathered at King Constantine’s Tatoi Palace near Athens to draft a final appeal to Turkey.

If Turkish troops set foot on Cyprus, warned the Greeks, it would not only mean war with Greece but would inevitably start a slaughter of Turkish Cypriots that no number of Turkish soldiers would be able to prevent. Yet so great was the public pressure in Turkey on Premier Demirel for quick action that the Greeks themselves despaired that the warning could halt the train of events. Athens stopped broadcasting weather bulletins so that the Turkish air force could not use them to plot bombing missions. Reports from Turkey said that the invasion fleet was waiting only for the onset of better weather.

By now, pleas for restraint had cascaded into Athens and Ankara from all over the world. The most effective one arrived in the person of former U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance, 50, who came as the emissary of President Johnson. Jetting into Ankara, he met for 80 minutes with Premier Demirel, impressed on him the urgency of keeping NATO’s Eastern hinge intact, and asked for a chance to save the peace by exploring whether the Greeks would go along with some form of troop withdrawal if the Turks pledged not to invade.

Under Vance’s pleading, Demirel agreed to delay Turkish military measures until the U.S. envoy had an opportunity to sound out the Greek leaders. What Vance learned in Athens obviously pleased the Turks, who announced that they and the Greeks would accept the good office of Italy’s Manlio Brosio, the NATO Secretary-General, as mediator in the dispute. It was a hopeful development, but by no means a permanent one. The situation remained so tense that a handful of men with submachine guns on Cyprus could wipe out the diplomatic achievements in a matter of seconds and plunge Turkey and Greece into war.