The Third Man

When Yugoslavia's President Tito and Egypt's President Nasser last met at Tito's hideaway on the Adriatic isle of Brioni in 1956, the third man present was India's neutral-in-arms, Jawaharlal Nehru. Last week, when Tito and Nasser moved their talks (TIME, July 14) to Brioni for fun, games and communiques, another third man unexpectedly turned up. The visitor: Greece's busy Foreign Minister, 48-year-old Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza.

Because Greece's leftists had rolled up 25% of the vote in last May's elections, putting new pressure on Premier Constantine Karamanlis' pro-Western government to turn neutralist, and because Greece is bitter at its NATO allies over the Cyprus dispute, the suspicion spread that Greece might be heading off into a neutralists' no man's land. But both Premier Karamanlis and Foreign Minister Averoff insisted otherwise. The Turks described the Greek meeting with Tito and Nasser as attempted blackmail. The Greeks replied that they were merely conferring with a next-door neighbor and Balkan Pact ally (Yugoslavia) and a Mediterranean trading partner (Egypt, where 100,000 Greeks live). The Greeks were undoubtedly looking around for new friends, but this was hardly proof that they were running out on old ones.

During Averoff's two-day visit, Cyprus was discussed--but Greece, after all, already has Tito's and Nasser's support. The Egyptians recently played host to Archbishop Makarios, the exiled ethnarch of Cyprus: anybody feuding with the Turks and angry at the British can count on Nasser's blessing.

When it came to the final huffing and puffing communique on the Tito-Nasser meeting, Cyprus was not mentioned. Tito and Nasser called for a summit conference and an end to nuclear tests (with an unexpected demand in advance that France be forbidden to test atomic weapons in the Sahara Desert). Their communique further deplored the "tendency for bringing influence and domination to bear over other countries by interfering in their internal affairs and with various forms of pressure." To any innocent outsider, such a criticism might seem to apply to Russia's campaign against Yugoslavia and Hungary, or to Nasser's pressure on Lebanon, or perhaps even to Iraq, but the two dictators gave two other examples instead: alleged Western pressure in Lebanon and Indonesia.

Nasser was still in Yugoslavia, on holiday with wife and children, when the coup in Iraq took place. Did he expect it at that moment? Or, having supplied the fuel, had he left it to others to decide when the match was lit? After all, to establish innocence by geographical separation, he could also prove that he was away in Soviet Russia when the Lebanese revolt began in May.

On Cyprus, the undeclared truce that has been in force since Britain announced its plan for a tridominium came to an end in the bloodiest week yet of vengeful bombings, shootings and riots. The death toll: twelve Greek Cypriots, ten Turkish Cypriots and two British soldiers. Harassed British Governor Sir Hugh Foot persuaded the leaders of both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities to join him in an unprecedented appeal for calm.

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