CYPRUS: The Warring Partners

Through three years of shooting, bombing and burning, terrorists have knocked off British servicemen and fellow Cypriots indifferently. But the wives and children of British troops have generally felt free to go shopping or to sun themselves without fear.

One afternoon last week Margaret Cut-liffe, 18, daughter of a sergeant in Britain’s 29th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, went shopping with her mother and a friend for her first evening dress—to be worn at her first dance. As the three women emerged from a shop on Famagusta’s Hermes Street, the dress triumphantly in hand, Margaret screamed. Two black-trousered youths bore down on them, poured a packet of bullets into the backs of Margaret’s mother and her companion. Mrs. Cutliffe, mother of five (the youngest 15 months), slumped to the sidewalk dead. Her friend, the wife of a sergeant in the same regiment, was seriously injured.

Setting out on a house-to-house search for the murderers, British troops rounded up more than 1,000 males between the ages of 15 and 30, herded them into a barbed-wire compound, where they were made to sit beneath a searchlight’s glare, hands clasped on their heads. The British were angry and rough, and admitted it. In the roundup, at least 150 Greek Cypriots were injured, and three persons died.

The Archbishop’s Plan. It was a bitter beginning for Britain’s hapless “adventure in partnership,” the plan to freeze the status of Cyprus for seven years, during which the Turkish and Greek governments would be drawn into running the island’s day-to-day affairs in a kind of tridominium. The Greeks were dead set against any plan to get Turkey into the act. As the deadline for the plan’s start approached,

Archbishop Makarios, the bearded Greek Orthodox Ethnarch whom the British expelled from Cyprus for encouraging Greek Cypriot violence, came up with an unexpected proposal: he dropped his old demand for enosis (union of Cyprus with Greece), and asked only for independence for the island.

The British, heartily suspicious of Makarios, thought his proposal too vaguely worded, and just “another Makarios trick,” decided to go ahead with “partnership” despite Greek protests. Only Turkey said “Howdy, podner.” Its special representative reported for duty to British Governor Sir Hugh Foot. But to soften passions, the Turks appointed as their adviser to Foot not someone from Ankara—who might have been welcomed at the airport with bombs—but the Turkish consul general in Nicosia, who was already there. Shrugged 55-year-old Burhan Ishin, a husky onetime Turkish national soccer star and longtime diplomat: “After all, I can only die once.”

Agonizing Quarrel. Greece sent no representative at all; Greek Cypriots shuttered their shops in protest, their schoolchildren paraded in the streets shouting

“Death to the plan.” From Athens, Makarios dispatched an inflammatory statement: “I call upon the Greek Cypriot people to oppose vigorously the enforcement of the new British plan and to fight it as one man.” The Greek EOKA terrorists who shot down Mrs. Cutliffe had apparently got the message.

With the “partners” on Cyprus sharply at odds, and Greece muttering about quitting NATO, Paul-Henri Spaak, NATO’s Secretary-General, flew to Athens, offered a proposal: a conference of all parties in a new attempt to solve the agonizing quarrel. Accepting, Greece for the first time in three bitter years showed itself willing to sit down with Turkey though denying it is any of Turkey’s business.