The Haggling & the Hopes

To the 15 NATO ambassadors in Paris one day last week went a brusque message: "Emergency." Within the hour, the ambassadors gathered around a big green conference table in the Palais de Chaillot. NATO Secretary-General Paul-Henri Spaak put it to them bluntly. "At stake," said he, "is the very reputation of NATO itself."

For weeks, in private chats, in special sessions, owlish, bustling Paul-Henri Spaak has been sounding out three squabbling NATO partners--Britain, Greece and Turkey--begging them to settle their agonizing, paralyzing quarrel over Cyprus, which has all but broken up NATO's defenses in the Eastern Mediterranean. He was not even able to get the participants to agree to sit down together at a conference table.

At every turn, Spaak, 59-year-old former Socialist Premier of Belgium, met with suspicion, delay and doubletalk. "If the general public could sit in on these talks," declared one who had sat in, "they would be appalled at the haggling." "Barring war," declared Greek Foreign Minister Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza, Greek-Turkish relations "could hardly be worse.'

The Haggling. Unless everybody gave a little, Spaak felt, NATO might find itself buried in the fresh graves being dug every day in Cyprus.

The Greeks were even hinting at dropping out of NATO. Yet Athens popped up with a surprise concession. Bearded Archbishop Makarios, temporal and spiritual leader of the Greek Cypriots, dropped his old demand for enosis (union of Cyprus with Greece). He would be willing, he said, to settle for independence for the island after a period of internal self-government.

In London, Makarios is almost as bad a word as Nasser. The British, who exiled him to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean in 1956, do not trust his word. What was to prevent the Greek Cypriots, once they got independence, from deciding, for instance, to unite with Greece?

Publicly at least, the British were stubbornly insistent on going ahead with what they called a seven-year adventure in partnership--even though it is a queer partnership when the Greeks refuse to be a partner. Partnership would divide the Greek Cypriot majority and the Turkish Cypriot minority on Cyprus into separate legislative councils, and would bring the Athens and Ankara governments into a kind of tridominium rule with Britain. This, the Greeks argued with good cause, would merely freeze the hatreds of the island for the next seven years.

The Turks were in no mood to yield anything. They had never voiced much concern for the 100,000 Turkish Cypriots on the island, until the British brought them into the dispute in 1955 as a convenient counterweight to the Greeks. Asked to choose between Greece and Turkey as allies, the British plainly prefer the Turks. Greece is only a NATO ally; the Turks are also Britain's strongest ally in the Baghdad Pact and the Middle East. Only a fortnight ago British Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd referred to Cyprus (which is 520 miles from Greece and only 43 miles from Turkey's southern coast) as Turkey's "offshore island"--a remark that colonial officialdom has been trying to live down ever since. The British have thus given the Turks a virtual veto over any settlement, arousing Greek fears that the British and Turks were "ganging up" on them.

Yet optimistic Paul-Henri Spaak thought he saw in all this the ingredients of a compromise. First he wanted the conference to discuss a live-and-let-live agreement to restore peace to the island. Then it could discuss the broad outlines of a final political solution.

The Hope. If the Greeks allowed the British to keep military bases on Cyprus and built in sufficient guarantees for the Turkish minority, the British might yet see independence as the best way out of a bad tangle. If the Turks got sufficient assurances that Cyprus ("the dagger at our heart") would never be used as a base against them, they might be persuaded to accept Cyprus' independence, however reluctantly. For the British, remembering the experience of Palestine, have long since dropped the idea, still demanded by Turkey, of partitioning the island.

Neither Britain nor Turkey was prepared to agree now to any loophole that would allow the Greek Cypriot majority on Cyprus eventually to unite with Greece. But what is to keep an independent state from doing as it chooses--such as uniting with Greece? The NATO negotiations had a precedent close at hand. When the four occupation powers granted independence to Austria in 1955, they forbade the neutralized state to unite again with Germany or to link itself with either East or West. An independent, self-governing Cyprus that similarly pledged itself to join neither Greece nor Turkey might prove to be a happier Cyprus than the one that lived last week under what British Governor Sir Hugh Foot called "the curse of violence."

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