CYPRUS: Bitter Breakdown

GREECE REJECTS CYPRUS TALKS, Said the headlines. All of NATO Secretary-General Paul-Henri Spaak's tireless efforts (TIME, Nov. 3) to gather a conference to settle the three-year-old Cyprus dispute between Britain, Greece and Turkey fell apart last week. The Greek government, which dares not show itself more conciliatory than Cyprus' bearded Archbishop Makarios, said no.

The British, delighted to put the blame squarely on Athens, leaked a blizzard of inspired "inside information" to prove that all the NATO powers, and Spaak himself, were fed up with the Greeks.

But the other half of the matter was that though the British had made some procedural concessions, they were plainly not going to budge on anything basic. "We came to the conclusion," announced Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis, "that the conference as conceived by Britain and Turkey would not lead to any positive results."

The British had always complained that they could not negotiate with the exiled Makarios, "because he kept upping his demands." But when Makarios finally dropped his biggest demand, enosis (union with Greece), the British decided that they had Makarios and the Greeks "on the run," and seemed contented to leave things on Cyprus as they are.

The Day's Temperature. To leave things as they are is to leave Cyprus stalked by terror, rent by hatred, and engulfed by fear. In the past month six British civilians, nine British soldiers, 13 Greek Cypriots and three Turk Cypriot policemen have been killed—one a day since Britain, over Greek objections, began enforcing its "partnership" plan, dividing Greek and Turkish Cypriots in separate legislatures.

Arms are so much a part of the scenery, violence so much an accepted condition, that the news is chronicled in Nicosia's newspapers like the day's temperature readings: the British sergeant's 17-year-old son shot in the back of the head by Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists; the trusting, 62-year-old British importer killed by gunfire as he stepped into his car; the three terrorists blown up by their own crude bomb; the pencil bomb that went off last week in a British airman's kit bag just before it was to be put aboard an R.A.F. jet Comet bound for Britain. The British have stationed 37,000 troops on Cyprus, which is smaller than Los Angeles County. In the eternal check against sabotage they go so far as to unscrew the caps of toothpaste tubes and sniff face powder.

Across the unhappy island, barbed-wire barricades cocoon key buildings, seal Greek and Turkish Cypriots into separate quarters. British Tommies man machine guns on the minarets of Turkish mosques. Cyprus' nightly lullaby is the baying of search dogs. When the sirens signal curfew, the island's economy is paralyzed (loss per day: about $120,000 of Cyprus' gross daily income of $290,000). Factories are closed for lack of labor and materials. But no sooner does the curfew lift than terrorists kill another victim.