Cyprus: Island of Hate

Aphrodite, goddess of love, is said to have first set foot on solid ground at Cyprus, but obviously she has not visited her favorite island in recent years. Last week hate again ruled Cyprus as an eruption of the old feud between Turk and Greek caused an estimated 200 casualties. Absent diplomats were hurriedly recalled to their posts in Ankara, Athens and London. Fortunately, neither Greece, Turkey nor Britain wanted the trouble to continue. Nor did bearded Archbishop Makarios, President of Cyprus, or his Turkish Cypriot Vice President, Dr. Fazil Kuchuk.

Rooftop Sniping. The trouble began when Makarios sent Kuchuk 13 proposals for amending the Cyprus constitution, which gave independence to Cyprus in 1960 after four years of bloody guerrilla war between Greek Cypriot guerrillas and British troops. The constitution was a complicated document, carefully drawn to safeguard the rights of the tiny nation's 100,000 Turkish Cypriots as well as the 500,000 Greek Cypriot majority. The Turkish community got veto power over the most important legislation and was promised 30% of all government appointments. To enforce the constitution, Greece was allowed to send 850 troops to Cyprus, and Turkey 650. Britain, also a guarantor of the constitution, kept some 10,000 troops at two bases on the island.

Makarios complained that the system of checks and balances made the administrative machinery cumbersome and inefficient. This threw Turkish Cypriots into a panic, since they well knew that the announced goal of Makarios and the Greek Cypriots is enosis, that is, eventual union with Greece. Somebody started shooting, and fighting spread rapidly along the frontier between the Greek and Turkish sectors of the capital city of Nicosia. Rooftop snipers traded shots, and teen-age terrorists slugged it out in the suburb of Traphonas, which has a mixed population.

Negotiations & Bullets. As tension mounted, schoolchildren of both communities began building street barricades. Makarios and Kuchuk drove in armored cars to police headquarters and agreed to issue joint appeals for calm. The appeal went out in Greek, but there was a delay in the Turkish transmission because no Turkish Cypriot announcer dared go near the radio station in a Greek-dominated district of Nicosia.

Restoring order was especially difficult because the island's 3,000 police, racially divided, often ended up fighting one another, and Cyprus has virtually no army. The original plan to create a 2,000-man army, 60% Greek and 40% Turkish, miscarried when Makarios and Kuchuk could not agree whether the army should be fully integrated or composed of racial units.

On the morning before Christmas, Nicosia woke to the chattering of machine guns and the crack of rifles. The Greek Cypriot police were fighting it out with Turkish Cypriot civilians. In the northern section of Nicosia, 10,000 Turkish Cypriots were without water and rapidly running out of food. In his official home in one of the bastions of the city's old Venetian wall, Dr. Kuchuk held hazardous cease-fire meetings while bullets poured into his house from two sides.