A Clerical Delay

Archbishop Makarios, the bearded President of Cyprus, is a man with a strong sense of the dramatic. Last week, after Presidential Envoy Cyrus Vance had skillfully tied the strings on a settlement between the Turks and Greeks that averted the threat of war over the island, Makarios suddenly balked and threatened to undo the whole package.

The switch caught everyone by sur prise. Makarios had raised no insurmountable objections to the agreement during his two meetings with Vance earlier in the week. Vance was so confident that matters had been settled that he had been preparing in Athens for his return flight to the U.S. When he got word of the snag, he immediately jetted back to Nicosia for a four-hour meeting with Makarios, then went off to the U.S. embassy for a few hours of sleep while Makarios huddled with his Cabinet nearly all night. The next morning the two men met again.

Clipping the Hawk. Before the snag, Vance had won a settlement under which the Greeks promised to remove within two months the 8,000 or so troops that they have illegally infiltrated into Cyprus during the past seven years, leaving only the 950 that they are entitled to station there under the island's 1960 independence accords. They also agreed to disband the 11,000-man Greek Cypriot National Guard, to pay damages to the Turkish Cypriot villagers of Ayios Theodores and Kophinou for the Nov. 15 attack by Greek General George Grivas and his Guards men, and to keep Old Hawk Grivas off the island. For their part, the Turks agreed to withdraw from the island the 1,500 troops in excess of the 650 legal limit for Turkish forces and to cancel plans for an invasion of Cyprus. The United Nations was also to increase its peacekeeping force on the island.

Makarios objected to the disbanding of the Greek Cypriot National Guard, his main instrument of power, so long as the Turks were allowed to keep 650 men stationed on Cyprus and the Greeks 950. If the Guard must go, maintained Makarios, so must the foreign troops. He also felt that the sovereignty of Cyprus would be jeopardized by any broadening of U.N. jurisdiction on the island beyond the U.N.'s present duty to maintain the peace with 4,000 troops.

Volatile & Unpredictable. The other capitals nervously watched Nicosia. In Athens, the Greek junta, though unhappy about disbanding the Guard, which was commanded by Greek army officers and was a strong Greek tie to the island, announced that it had reached agreement with Turkey without waiting for Makarios to make up his mind. In Ankara, the government of Premier Siileyman Demirel became impatient at the delay. The Turks, whose navy maneuvered earlier in the week off the Cyprus coast, kept their armed forces in a high state of preparedness, ready to invade Cyprus and strike across the Thracian plain at Greece.

Everyone hoped that Makarios could be persuaded to come around and that a renewal--or heightening--of the crisis could be avoided. But diplomats who remembered Makarios' stubborn and willful behavior toward the British during Cyprus' negotiations for independence were cautious. At week's end the best efforts of the peacemakers were in the hands of a very volatile and unpredictable cleric.

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