Looking for Paradise Lost

"A month ago this island was a paradise. Now we have lost it. The island of Aphrodite is now the island of the devil." These bitter words of Peter Stylianakis, a retired civil servant, could have come from any other Greek on Cyprus. With the guns stilled and Turkish troops in control of more than one-third of the island, the once dominant Greek community had a chance last week to assess the damage caused by four weeks of war. The picture could not have been grimmer, and in their fear and frustration the island's Greeks lashed out at the U.S., which they blamed for their troubles. A group of demonstrators stormed the American embassy in Nicosia and burned the Stars and Stripes. In the confusion, terrorists fired automatic weapons into the building, killing Ambassador Rodger Davies (see box page 29).

"Everything is in an absolute shambles," said Stellios Garanis, head of the Cyprus Employers Federation. Approximately one-third of the Greek population--about 180,000 people--had fled their homes in terror of the advancing Turks and congregated in makeshift refugee camps in the Greek-controlled part of the island south of a line extending from Lefka through Nicosia to Famagusta. Twenty thousand Cypriot Turks --about one-sixth of the native Turkish population--sought similar haven with the Turkish army in the northern sector. Most refugees, both Greek and Turk, had left their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs; their children were sleeping on the ground, without bedding or blankets in the cool (60DEG) nights. Sanitation was primitive: for much of the week only six chemical toilets were available to one group of 7,000 refugees.

Hampered Efforts. On much of the island, food was even more of a problem than shelter. Most food stocks happened to be stored in the Turkish-occupied area, and the Turks adamantly refused to open them to the Greeks. The Turkish military commanders severely hampered efforts of the International Red Cross and United Nations troops to give outside supplies to Greeks still behind Turkish lines. "We have personal pledges of cooperation from Turkish Premier [Buelent] Ecevit," fumed one relief official. "But the Turkish military on the island just doesn't give a sweet goddam." The Turks also said no to many Greek farmers who wanted to go through the lines to water and feed the livestock they had left behind.

Both Greeks and Turks feared for the safety of those who had remained in their homes during the fighting but were now trapped in territory controlled by the other side. At Aloa, the Turks showed newsmen a mass grave that held the remains, so they said, of 57 Turkish Cypriots who had been murdered by Greek extremists. They uncovered only five corpses however. The Greeks countered with their own accusations of rape and murder. According to U.N. officials, both sides were exaggerating their tales of atrocity.

With Ankara in clear command of all the territory it apparently wanted, the wheels of diplomacy, which had been stopped by the Aug. 14 breakdown of the Geneva talks, once again began turning. Cyprus President Glafkos Clerides, the Greek leader, flew to Athens to consult with Premier Constantino Caramanlis, while Clerides' opposite number on the Turkish side, Rauf Denktas, returned from Ankara after similar consultations with Premier Ecevit. The U.S. and Britain, meanwhile, were feverishly working behind the scenes to persuade Athens and Ankara to come to some kind of agreement.

At week's end, the British-American effort suffered a severe setback when Greece renounced any further participation in the Geneva talks and backed a Soviet proposal that would shift the negotiations to an 18-nation conference consisting of the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council and the countries involved. "The Russian proposal makes the most sense to us," said a Greek foreign ministry official. "If it is not accepted by the other parties, our next step will be to take the issue directly to the U.N. General Assembly." Greek Cypriot Leader Clerides was more adamant:

"There's no point in going to Geneva merely to sign what has been taken by force. For us, guerrilla warfare is a necessity."

All parties privately agreed that the 1960 constitution that had set up the independent republic was dead and that the Turks, by their military might, had won their goal: geographic independence for the Turkish minority. Under a plan proposed by Washington and London--and acceptable to Ankara--a federal government would be responsible for defense, foreign affairs and finance, but in all other matters the two communities would govern themselves in autonomous regions divided into northern and southern sectors.

Where should the line be drawn? Everything hinges on the answer to that question. At the prompting of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ecevit has promised "reasonable" concessions and says that he is willing to give up some of the ground won by his troops. The issue is complicated by the fact that the Turkish-held territory contains something like 70% of the island's wealth-producing farms, factories and tourist facilities, most of which are owned by Greeks, not to mention the island's only deepwater port, Famagusta.

Consummate Skill. The dilemma of Caramanlis is one of exquisite ironies. It was the arrogance of his predecessors, the Greek military dictatorship that had masterminded the overthrow of Archbishop Makarios as a move toward unification of Greece and Cyprus, that led to the Turkish invasion of the island July 20 and the fall of the inept junta in Athens. Now, if Caramanlis gives in totally to the Turks, his new government may in its turn collapse and the military--or a much less likely dictatorship of the left--may once again come back.

So far Caramanlis has shown consummate skill in unbalancing his foes. To forestall another military coup he dispatched most of the country's troops far away from the capital on the unassailable grounds that they were needed to protect the frontiers against the Turks. Last week, in a follow-up move that showed his confidence, he sacked the country's ten leading generals and replaced them with men of his own choice. He also purged former Strongman Brigadier General Dimitrios Ioannides, who had led the dreaded military police under the junta and who was widely blamed for planning the move against Makarios. Partially to thwart the left and the left's leading figure, Andreas Papandreou, 55, he pulled Greece out of NATO and pointedly hinted that he might close American bases in Greece. Both steps are long-sought goals of the left. "It was uncanny, I must say," said Papandreou, apparently not certain whether to be happy that his own aim was being met or unhappy that he had been deprived of an issue.

For lack of a better scapegoat, the U.S. became the target of Greek hatred, and long-smoldering Greek anti-Americanism came into the open. Most Greeks believe that the U.S. favored Turkey in the early days of the crisis, tacitly approving Turkish intervention. In retaliation, American cars were burned and American tourists abused, their cameras sometimes being snatched away and smashed on the ground. Athens' Constitution Square was the scene of occasionally violent anti-American demonstrations, and a mob of 15,000 had to be forcefully prevented from storming the U.S. airbase on Crete. The murder of Ambassador Davies seemed to have a sobering effect, however, and Caramanlis deplored "this sad event," promising to suppress acts of violence and anarchism in Greece itself with "merciless severity." To show that it was not blaming Greek-Cypriot authorities for the murder, Washington immediately dispatched William R. Crawford, who was Ambassador to Yemen, to take Davies' place.

Though they plead innocent to any bias toward either Turkey or Greece, even Washington officials admit in retrospect to some blunders in the Cyprus affair. Others credit them with even more. The first mistake was not taking sufficiently seriously reports in May that the Athens dictatorship was going to move against Makarios. The State Department sent a warning to Ioannides while Kissinger and former President Nixon were in Moscow in June, and it thought that the message had been taken to heart and the anti-Makarios movement dropped. Washington claims to have been as surprised as Makarios by the July 15 coup.

Washington's second error was to appear to accept Makarios' successor, Terrorist Nikos Sampson. With his long record of violence against Turkish Cypriots, Sampson was clearly unacceptable to them and to Ankara. "In the context of Sampson," says Britain's former Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home, "the Turkish invasion was inevitable from the beginning." The third error was for Washington, in the days following the coup, to state publicly that the Turks on Cyprus deserved greater autonomy, a statement that, although true, looked to Turkey like an invitation to invasion. State Department officials now privately admit that the statement should have carried a warning against the use of force. Once the Turks had decided on intervention, however, there was nothing Washington could do to stop them without using force itself. "Nothing anyone could have said or done before the invasion--short of a total Greek capitulation--would have stopped the Turks from going in," says Douglas-Home.

Little to Gain. In fact, both Washington and London have only limited power in the matter now, and the issue really rests with Athens and, more important, with Ankara. Turkey is not concerned only about the Turkish minority on Cyprus. It also fears that the island, which lies only 44 miles off its shores, might some day be used as a base against it by a hostile Greek regime. Together with the other Greek islands fringing Turkey's shores, an armed Cyprus, it believes, could cut off major access lanes to the Aegean Sea and the open water of the Mediterranean. With the Greeks claiming waters around the offshore islands, explains Haluk Ulman, an Ecevit foreign affairs adviser, "we felt we couldn't breathe, even in our own waters." At the same time that it settles the Cyprus problem, Ankara would like to guarantee a permanent demilitarization of the offshore islands, leaving them under Greek control but without Greek guns.

That may be one concession too many for Caramanlis. The Greeks, knowing that they have little to gain and still something to lose, are in no hurry to go back to Geneva to negotiate. Though some move toward talks may come within days, the British expect no real negotiations for several weeks, an interval that will allow passions to cool and, it is hoped, reason to return.

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