CYPRUS: Something Like a Miracle

Of all those place names around the world which come to mean not a landscape but a problem, few seemed more bound up in hatreds and hopeless intricacies than Cyprus. But after four years of bombings, murders and repression, after 508 deaths and the near collapse of NATO's Eastern wing, the bloody dispute over the British colony of Cyprus last week suddenly moved toward solution.

"It is something like a miracle," said Cyprus' harried British governor, Sir Hugh Foot, whose nation had stood aside while the other parties to the dispute—Greece and Turkey—finally sat down together. Last week, after 55 hours of hard and friendly bargaining in neutral Zurich, Turkey's Premier Adnan Menderes and Greece's Premier Constantine Karamanlis came down the main stairway of the Dolder Grand Hotel beaming at each other like a couple of old school chums. As they toasted each other in champagne, their staffs put the finishing touches on a 200-page outline constitution for an independent Cypriot republic.

The repercussions of the Cyprus quarrel had grown too dangerous to tolerate for either Turkey or Greece, whose amity is precarious at best, had only been painfully re-created after the killings and mass transfers of their two populations after World War I. The Turks, now threatened on their southern flank by Nasser's annexation of Syria and by Communist infiltration in Iraq, needed friendship with Greece In order to secure their western flank. The Greeks, after winning little sympathy In NATO, had failed to get a strong U.N. resolution on Cyprus last December. This apparently was the turning point: on the familiar cry of colonialism, the Greeks had vainly hoped for support from the Afro-Asian powers. Every day that the Cyprus quarrel dragged on added to the strength of the Communist-lining opposition to Karamanlis within Greece.

The Cat's Cradle. Under these pressures—and under discreet but persistent prodding from the U.S.—both Greece and Turkey agreed to pull in their horns. Menderes abandoned his unrealistic demand that Britain partition Cyprus between its 400,000 Greek and 100,000 Turkish inhabitants. Karamanlis made the greater sacrifice of renouncing the dream of enosis—union of Cyprus with Greece.

If Karamanlis and Menderes have their way, Cyprus will become a U.S.-style republic with a Greek Cypriot President and a Turkish Cypriot Vice President. To protect the Turkish minority, the Vice President would have veto power over decisions involving the Turkish community and over some aspects of foreign relations.