CYPRUS: THREE DIMENSIONAL PROBLEM:
Hottelet, Richard C.
helping to precipitate the ghastly 1971 massacre in and the pertinent Congressional committees to conduct which 35 inmates and eight guards died. their hearings. Once...
...UNFIUnited States...
...Without the Truman Doctrine, Greece and Turks' pent up frustration of 1964-which, incidentally, Turkey might well have succumbed...
...When the Geneva negotiations did that the US Sixth Fleet would intervene, if necessary, not give Turkey the political solution it sought, a loose to stop it...
...It is a circum- experiences of the past few years should put Congress stance that is likely to produce a Rockefeller of less on guard against presumptions about the most obviousfitful ideology, and maybe even a Rockefeller of earlier or the most famous...
...had been on each other's nerves over the exploitation United States commitment in the Greco-Turkish area of newly discovered oilfields in the Aegean Sea...
...It has strongly endorsed Archbishop Greeks would be counter-productive...
...made one thing abundantly clear: UN peace forces do not Excluded from the Geneva Conference, it would like to solve problems...
...Once ensconsed in the Vice Presidency, however, This is not to say that the confirmation hearings should Nelson Rockefeller at age 66 will have gone about as be perfunctory...
...They broke out key, was the price the U.S...
...into a Greek-Turkish crisis...
...But, as Nelson Nelson Rockefeller should be confirmed, and with no Rockefeller has on occasion demonstrated himself, good more delay than it takes for him to ready his records politics is often the art of the oblique...
...and Britain had tried to persuade the Turks Cyprus had been quiet for years, as regards Greeks and not to go too far, arguing that concessions could still be Turks...
...Anglo-American leverage is Commonweal: 469 limited...
...Secis older and broader...
...border into Jordan to support them, the United States But in 1967, the UN Emergency Force in the Middle saw the fragile chance of political settlement in the East was swept away at Nasser's command...
...If a Cyprus story...
...vide Kashmir and the Middle East...
...liberal sensitivities...
...His plate mopped up he stirs himself to rise, To bleed a thank you, lurch on down the walk...
...This constitution, providing elaborate replaced on Cyprus by the moderate Glafkos Clerides...
...WashingUNFICYP found itself elbowed aside by a Turkish ton together with Israel, decided as a last resort openly army landing on Cyprus...
...It is, however, inseparable from the backis more intractable than the conflict between Jew and ground of friction between Greek and Turk, which Arab in the Middle East...
...There is no denying that fact...
...Greece is prepared Makarios as the legitimate President of Cyprus, while to swallow a great deal...
...The ring, of course, the intervention of fate...
...Another argument which Ankara disre- offend Turkey yet to hold open doors to the new governgarded was that inflicting too deep a humiliation on the ment in Athens...
...In a way, ingrained for a longer time, it to home...
...President Truman, in March 1947, ondly, the man who replaced Makarios, Nicos Sampson, enunciated the doctrine that the U.S...
...Again in June 1964, after new and in- CYP was pushed aside as the Turks enlarged the terricreased violence, Turkey prepared to send a force to tory they controlled and roughly expelled the Greek Cyprus-only to be told by President Lyndon Johnson Cypriot population...
...saw the impossibility of restraining the Turks cerned with the local problem...
...Both by the President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, at changes were welcomed in Ankara...
...His head illumined by the back porch light, His clothes the color of dusk on rainy days, He sits on the wide wood stairs in the mizzling haze In the winter-time of my old river town...
...airborne contingents 6 September 1974: 468 which would have gone into Amman-ostensibly to of EOKA-B in the tradition of the late Gen...
...The hearings could, in fact, help point up one of flation, which is rapidly becoming an overriding concern...
...Fourthly, the Greece...
...Some years be- a life or death showdown with King Hussein of Jordan, fore, the UN had been enlisted in similar, neater fashion, and when an armored force from Syria crossed the to man a clear frontier line between Israel and Egypt...
...NATO needs Turkey almost as much as Turkey discord in them both...
...It would not Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...It might even be welcomed on dig deeply into the details of the Rockefeller fortune...
...the great national urgencies: the need for a more equitIn any case, the nation has been through enough travail...
...Nelson Rockefeller should be probed as far politically as his years will realistically allow-bar- searchingly as any unknown quantity would be...
...when it gave the island independence, is intimately con- The U.S...
...for partition...
...Its purpose would be to ing force...
...UNFICYP, the of Cyprus...
...Above them than to treat the Cyprus question as a local affair, re- both is the NATO factor, the strategic considerations solvable by some quick stroke of pen or sword, or which flow from Greece and Turkey's membership in otherwise to be wrapped up and put away for calmer the western alliance...
...Too much would put the new Britain has tipped its hat to him and Washington has government under patriotic pressure-not from the right, looked the other way, ready to accept him too if he which is bankrupt, but from the left...
...able distribution of wealth...
...Since of the crisis was to enlarge UNFICYP and agree to make Cyprus is 80 percent Greek and the Turkish army's it a buffer around the zone of Turkish control on Cyprus...
...6 September 1974: 470...
...Assuming, probably correctly, of the operation...
...sidelines-each clearly unacceptable...
...at hand...
...would help Greece was a red cloth to the Turkish bull-characterized by and Turkey defend themselves against open or covert Ankara as a thug and murderer in earlier violence against Soviet aggression...
...performance so far has not earned it military laurels, The new function has now been overtaken by events, tothis could open a new and fateful chapter of the Cyprus gether with the original mandate of 1964...
...The tension between turkampf fought in song and story, in open war and the Greek and Turkish communities on Cyprus is closest private blood...
...Inevitably there will be obTo fight the Rockefeller nomination would be to renew jections that this makes Nelson Rockefeller a pawn of an agony without any guarantee of getting somone bet- sorts in an issue entirely separate from that of the matter ter...
...Britain, together with and concentrated, at first, on persuading the Greeks not Greece and Turkey, is a guarantor power of the pain- to indulge in the folly of attacking Turkey...
...legal safeguards for the distinct life of the Turkish com- In Athens, the colonels were out and constitutional govmunity on the predominantly Greek island, was set aside ernment restored under Constantine Caramanlis...
...tive points as Turkey's control of and Moscow's never Ten years ago, when the first effort at solution came extinguished lust for the Bosporus and the Dardanelles...
...In 1974 that nightmare threatened to become reality...
...The soldiers from Germany were not that EOKA-B worked hand in glove with the Greek allowed to overfly France but had to be flown around officers who had run the Cyprus National Guard since Europe to the only land base available for the final 1964, Makarios asked Athens to order them home...
...eastern third of the island...
...enosis (union with Greece), led by the guerrilla gangs Ankara would not listen...
...essential dispute found it impossible...
...He found it-with its Turkish vetoes clear that they made no difference to a Turkish governin matters of taxes, defense and foreign affairs, as well ment which was determined not to allow Cyprus to as the ethnic proportions prescribed for the army, police return even to the status quo of 1960...
...preserve Cyprus as a sovereign, nonaligned state with RICHARD C. HOTTELET NATO forces withdrawn, a bone of contention between (Richard C. Hottelet, a previous contributor, is United Greece and Turkey and a perennial source of domestic Nations correspondent for CBS News...
...Later, in order to had been aggravated in almost exactly the same way in spread and more widely to institutionalize the American 1967-could not tolerate a new defeat...
...Each time the UN had helped to intervene on Hussein's side...
...have been able, even had it wanted, to keep the Turkish Great Britain, which held Cyprus from 1878 to 1959, army from landing on Cyprus...
...Thirdly, although Sampson imwar in Greece and had been pressing Turkey to turn mediately disavowed enosis, Turkey assumed that he over not only a base on the Bosporus but also the eastern would give the enosis movement new impetus, especially provinces of Kars and Ardahan...
...Experience has The Soviet Union, meanwhile, follows events closely...
...Gambling on this likelihood, his In this context, it is to be hoped that Congress will nomination is acceptable...
...Whatever might have regime in Athens replied by overthrowing Makarios...
...been the risk of this intervention, the fact that it was Several things combined to turn this Greek quarrel possible may in the end have made it unnecessary...
...Nothing could be more wrong began long before the fall of Byzantium...
...helping to precipitate the ghastly 1971 massacre in and the pertinent Congressional committees to conduct which 35 inmates and eight guards died...
...des, who is by far the best the Turks will find to deal Makarios, for his part, is waiting in London for whatwith, could be swept away by Ankara's intransigence and ever may come...
...was willing to pay to avert of the Kyrenia beachhead to cut off the entire norththe nightmare of a NATO war...
...So far, Moscow has tried not to needs NATO...
...On Cyprus, Cleri- brought stability but very much doubting that he could...
...Does anything live in him to call him back From the iron bench, the damp newspaper blanket, From the empty dejected railway station stench, The plate of charity, the bitter lack...
...The U.S...
...London and Washington are now trying to bring settlement is not found, UNFICYP would find itself the the parties to the negotiating table, where a certain international guarantor of the Turkish fait accompli, or measure of compromise might lead to a modus vivendi caught in a guerilla war, or simply floundering on the and avert the worst...
...Turkey had been ready to intervene at once but was On the island, the Turkish army took little notice of dissuaded by what Dean Acheson later called "the most calls for cease fire by the UN Security Council or by vigorous representations from the government of the the Geneva Conference of the Guarantor Powers...
...The Israeli air force to provide ten years of breathing space but the states- was only minutes away but the U.S...
...00000000000000 JOANNE CHILDERS THE TRAMP c.1936 (Lines written on hearing my son ask, "What's A Tramp...
...Intercommunal fighting flared up beyond the nothing less than federation as the new political structure capacity of Britain or NATO to control...
...Hussein prevailed...
...The warning, which bitterly antagonized Tur- capitalize on their strategic advantage...
...This was long before the colonels seized power bi-communal federation, the Turks moved ruthlessly to in Greece...
...What torment or what self-indulgent pity Has brought him here in a sway-backed chill box-car, Through snowy fields, through grey mist tressel-high, To the lit back-porch of yet another city...
...NATO would have no part of status quo sovereignty...
...Britain, drained by since a success of that sort would greatly strengthen World War II, could not continue its traditional role in the Athens regime of Brigadier Ioannides...
...Cyprus is a part of the age-old struggle between Turk One reason is that-as far as Cyprus is concernedand Greek, burdened with the rancid heritage of a Kul- the problem is three dimensional...
...unstuck, a United Nations force (UNFICYP) was de- It affects the balance of power in the Eastern Meditervised to do what heavy water or graphite do in a nuclear ranean-not so much through the sovereign British bases reactor: to separate the radioactive components of the on Cyprus itself as through bases and other facilities in pile and keep them from coming together in a critical Greece and Turkey of interest to the United States...
...00*00000900000 CYPRUS rMASK-DIMENSZONAL PROBLEM If the tragedy of Cyprus hammers home one lesson men who should have used the opportunity to settle the it is this: time alone does not heal...
...Moscow had been supporting a civil the Turkish community...
...The Turks deand civil service-an insuperable barrier to efficient clared that they intended to keep• a military presence on government...
...They see the authority of the UN Security Council-in which only buy time for settlement...
...The hope was that a reduction in the level of Those who incline to think that the United States violence, the onset of what could be accepted as normal- coddled the successive military regimes of Greece simply ity, would develop from day to day a habit of peaceful in order to satisfy some geopolitical appetite of the interaction between the Greek majority and the Turkish Pentagon may reflect on the events of September 1970...
...It was inside the Greek camp that proponents of achieved for the Turkish community through negotiation...
...The push, the Greek island of Rhodes...
...However, it was soon the end of 1963...
...The ethnic Turks saw their existence in the island as protection for their kinsmen and to accept danger...
...He marks the gate with chalk for other souls Conversant with wet pavement and the skies...
...Firstly, Athens and Ankara Syria withdrew the tanks...
...Grivas, evacuate American citizens-had to be drawn from the intensified their violent protest against Makarios' policy United States and Germany...
...grounds that Rockefeller's unique financial background More stands to be learned here than some choice family makes him a valuable resource in the fight against in- secrets...
...This last touches on such sensitimes and cooler tempers...
...In 1947, Middle East in danger of being swept away...
...replaced by men who would wage guerrilla war against One response of the world community at the outset the Turkish community and the Turkish army...
...If governments do not use Moscow has a loud voice and a definitive veto-imposed that time it can become an explosive rather than a healon the Cyprus negotiations...
...In a few days, fully contrived constitution with which Cyprus became the high point of crisis seemed over...
...The Greeks see federation as a euphemism UN force, was dispatched to keep the lid on...
...minority inside the framework of a single state, a sov- When the radical Palestinian guerrilla groups forced ereign member of the United Nations...
...The government responsibility, both countries were brought into the North of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit was weak...
...Sampson had been a sovereign state...
Vol. 100 • September 1974 • No. 20
