Heroes at Odds

In their stubborn four-year fight against Britain, Greek Cypriots had two respected chiefs. For military leadership they looked to daring, irascible George Grivas, the Greek army colonel who led their guerrilla bands. For political and spiritual guidance they relied on black-bearded Archbishop Makarios, head of Cyprus' Greek Orthodox Church and ethnarch of Cyprus' Greeks. Last week, with establishment of an independent Cypriot Republic only five months away, Cyprus' two heroes were at daggers drawn.

The trouble started when Grivas, now a lieutenant general and back in restless retirement in Athens, began to rumble that prospective Cypriot President Makarios was making "too many concessions to Britain and the Turks." In reply, Makarios expelled from his Cyprus Reconstruction Front Fotis Papafotis, 26, former underground leader who lost a hand fighting the British. Papafotis, Makarios charged, was involved with a Grivas-backed group who were plotting the murder of Makarios and 50 of his supporters. As proof, the Archbishop exhibited an intercepted "assassination list" and a letter he said Grivas had written to Papafotis, urging replacement of Makarios with the more pliable Bishop Kyprianos of Kyrenia.

From Athens, Grivas promptly denounced Makarios' charges as "a fairy tale," challenged him to come to Greece for a public debate of their differences. Makarios, too cagey to be lured into an encounter where" he would, in effect, be standing public trial with Grivas as his prosecutor, promptly refused. At that, Bishop Kyprianos came out in public support of Grivas. Worse yet, Kyprianos raked up once again the old, emotion-charged issue of enosis--union of Cyprus and Greece--and urged Cypriots to denounce the settlement with Britain as "a national tragedy."

Under this unseemly quarrel lay a bold plan of maneuver: Grivas, who dreams of himself as a kind of Greek De Gaulle, hopes to use Greek passions over Cyprus as a lever with which to overturn the Athens government of Premier Constantine Karamanlis. Last week, driven to plain talk, Makarios publicly said as much. "From the moment Grivas decided to enter Greek politics," declared the Archbishop, "he did not see the Cyprus question with a clear eye." But plainly worried that Cyprus' hard-won independence settlement might be endangered by Grivas' demagoguery, Makarios also began seriously considering a closed-door meeting with the fiery general to seek a truce. His only hesitation: the danger that by so doing, he might focus public attention on Grivas, thereby help to raise the unpredictable old soldier to the level of a real political threat in Greece.

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