End of Umbrellaism

In August 1915, Lieut. John Harding led a platoon against the Turks at Gallipoli, where British forces, too little and too late, were defeated. This week Harding, now a field marshal and retiring chief of the Imperial General Staff, returned to the eastern Mediterranean to repair the damage done in Cyprus by too little diplomacy too late. Sir John's appointment as governor of Cyprus, the headquarters of Britain's Middle East armed forces, was notice that Britain meant to crack down on violence stirred up in the name of enosis (union) with Greece.

"Fighting John" Harding, as tough in action as he is amiable in appearance, helped Montgomery chase Rommel across North Africa, helped Alexander take Italy, more recently presided in London over Britain's crackdown on the Communists in Malaya and the Mau Mau in Kenya. That a soldier of his rank and record should be dispatched to little Cyprus alarmed some Greeks and aroused many to anger. The official Radio Athens, reflecting the continuing Greek irritation over the U.S. vote against U.N. debate of the Cyprus matter, reacted with an anti-American twist: "For every Cypriot [Harding] kills or imprisons, free Greece will hold neither Eden nor Harding responsible, but Mr. Dulles, unless he repents at the last minute and stays the hand of Harding." Greek Foreign Minister Stephanos Stephanopoulos charged that Britain had "declared war on the people of Cyprus."

Troublemakers. It was not Harding who fired first, however, but Greek Orthodox Archbishop Myriarthefs Makarios, spiritual leader of the island's 410,000 Greek Cypriots and temporal leader of the enosis movement. Makarios ordered a "systematic campaign of passive resistance aimed at achieving national freedom." Besides the grave, soft-spoken archbishop and his church are two other groups more openly committed to violence in support of enosis -- an underground terrorist gang called E.O.K.A. and the Cyprus Communist Party, whose 18,000-member Pancypriot Labor Federation has a hammer lock on the island's labor force, and whose membership includes the mayors of the second, third and fourth largest towns on the island. Communists obviously espouse the cause for troublemaking reasons alone, for if Cyprus really did fall to Greece, the Reds would be outlawed, just as they now are in Greece. In London last week, the Colonial Office charged Makarios with "enlisting Communist support," but the archbishop disavowed Communist or terrorist associations, suavely insisted that he opposed all violence.

Main Phase to Come. Violence there was, however, although nothing like the havoc-wreaking anti-Greek violence in Turkey last month (see NEWS IN PICTURES). On the day that Sir John's predecessor, Sir Robert Armitage, boarded ship for a new post (governor of Nyasaland), demonstrations broke out in six cities.

Angry crowds gathered at the dockside as Armitage murmured to an aide his last words on Cypriot soil ("I do hope George remembered my umbrella") and departed. The smaller, non-Communist Cyprus Confederation of Workers joined the Communist union and paralyzed the island with a 24-hour strike. Idle workers stoned British troops in Limassol and tried to mass in Nicosia's square, but the Tommies and police fixed bayonets, swung clubs, fired tear gas, arrested 209 demonstrators, and generally let it be known that with the coming of Fighting John Harding, Cyprus' era of tolerant umbrellaism was over.

Vowed Archbishop Makarios in return: "The main phase of the struggle will be fought here on the island."

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