"Something Like a Miracle"

Of all those place names around the world which come to mean not a landscape but a problem, few seemed more bound up in hatreds and hopeless intricacies than Cyprus. But after four years of bombings, murders and repression, after 508 deaths and the near collapse of NATO's Eastern wing, the bloody dispute over the British colony of Cyprus last week suddenly moved toward solution.

"It is something like a miracle," said Cyprus' harried British governor, Sir Hugh Foot, whose nation had stood aside while the other parties to the dispute--Greece and Turkey--finally sat down together. Last week, after 55 hours of hard and friendly bargaining in neutral Zurich, Turkey's Premier Adnan Menderes and Greece's Premier Constantine Karamanlis came down the main stairway of the Dolder Grand Hotel beaming at each other like a couple of old school chums. As they toasted each other in champagne, their staffs put the finishing touches on a 200-page outline constitution for an independent Cypriot republic.

The repercussions of the Cyprus quarrel had grown too dangerous to tolerate for either Turkey or Greece, whose amity is precarious at best, had only been painfully re-created after the killings and mass transfers of their two populations after World War I. The Turks, now threatened on their southern flank by Nasser's annexation of Syria and by Communist infiltration in Iraq, needed friendship with Greece In order to secure their western flank. The Greeks, after winning little sympathy In NATO, had failed to get a strong U.N. resolution on Cyprus last December. This apparently was the turning point: on the familiar cry of colonialism, the Greeks had vainly hoped for support from the Afro-Asian powers. Every day that the Cyprus quarrel dragged on added to the strength of the Communist-lining opposition to Karamanlis within Greece.

The Cat's Cradle. Under these pressures--and under discreet but persistent prodding from the U.S.--both Greece and Turkey agreed to pull in their horns. Menderes abandoned his unrealistic demand that Britain partition Cyprus between its 400,000 Greek and 100,000 Turkish inhabitants. Karamanlis made the greater sacrifice of renouncing the dream of enosis--union of Cyprus with Greece.

If Karamanlis and Menderes have their way, Cyprus will become a U.S.-style republic with a Greek Cypriot President and a Turkish Cypriot Vice President. To protect the Turkish minority, the Vice President would have veto power over decisions involving the Turkish community and over some aspects of foreign relations.

To hedge against Turkey's twin fears of a Communist Cyprus or of Cyprus united to Greece, Menderes and Karamanlis agreed to put a cat's cradle of strings on Cypriot independence. Barred from ever becoming part of Greece, Cyprus would probably become a member of NATO, would be allied to both Greece and Turkey and, besides maintaining its own army, would be garrisoned by a combined Greek-Turkish-Cypriot force. Britain, which has made Cyprus its main military bastion in the eastern Mediterranean, would keep its bases on the island. In securing such guarantees for the Turkish minority, and in introducing Turkish troops on the island for the first time since the Ottoman Turks turned over the island to Disraeli in 1878, Menderes had proven the harder bargainer. In making hard concessions in the interest of peace, at the risk of criticism at home, Karamanlis had shown himself a statesman.

"Only Tactful." As soon as Greek and Turk reached agreement in Zurich, the Foreign Ministers of the two countries flew off to sell it in London. ("It would seem only tactful to inform the British government," purred Greece's Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza.) With equal promptness, Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd summoned to London Dr. Fazil Kuchuk, leader of the Turkish Cypriot community, and swart-bearded Archbishop Makarios, whom the British exiled from Cyprus three years ago on charges of encouraging violence. This week the prelate whom the British press called a terrorist will sit down with Selwyn Lloyd.

Some delicate diplomatic bargaining remained to be done. Would the Cypriot republic be a member of the British Commonwealth, or just part of the sterling bloc? Would Britain have full sovereignty over its Cyprus bases--including the right to launch military action from Cyprus without the consent of the Cypriot government? At stake was whether the British could use the base not only for NATO purposes but as a springboard in Middle East trouble spots, such as Kuwait and Oman, as Britain used it for Suez and Jordan. What would be the citizenship status of the thousands of Greek Cypriots now living in the United Kingdom on British passports, of Cypriot Turks resident in Turkey, and of the Cypriot-born underground leader, Colonel George Grivas (alias Dighenis the Leader) who is now a Greek national?

A Jewel Well Lost. In Cyprus, though Archbishop Makarios declared himself "satisfied" with the agreement, the EOKA underground was still silent, and Greek Cypriots wavered between cautious optimism and fearful skepticism. In Greece left-wingers and their Communist friends called the agreement a "national disaster."

In Britain the possibility of being rid of a nagging issue outweighed the discomfort of seeing the fate of a British colony decided by two other powers, whose prescription was for the British to go.

"Scuttle," roared Lord Beaverbrook's imperialistic Daily Express. "The Ministers are ready to cast away another jewel of the empire." But to the majority of Englishmen, the jewel seemed to be becoming as jinxed as the Hope diamond. Its loss seemed a small price to pay for peace in Cyprus, for the saving of lives of British Tommies, for the renewal of Britain's traditional friendship with Greece and the re-establishment of NATO unity.

"Too good to be true," said the London Daily Mail. "Accept," demanded the News Chronicle. "Thank God," said the Sketch. "Act of courage," said the Times of London. And London's Socialist tabloid, the Daily Mirror, advised Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: GRAB THIS CHANCE!

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