The fire from outside

Desmond Stewart

An hour and a half after the first Cyprus ceasefire on July 22 I found myself sprawled face downwards in a copse of eucalyptus. My car was not the only vehicle, its petrol-tank a potential bomb, parked in the fragile shade. A white ambulance had careered to a halt before us. Children, women, two ambulance attendants joined my three passengers — exhausted soldiers from Kyrenia — to form a picture which revived boyhood memories of refugees cowering on French roads from German Stukas. But the picture is a twentieth-century palimpsest on whichlater artists of destruction have imposed variations. In that instant sharpening effected by danger my thoughts flashed to Vietnam and Cambodia. There, in the affluent decades, planes from the same factories had made my undignified posture part of daily action. I recalled more recently the bland tones of the BBC: "Israeli aircraft have again been in action over South Lebanon." But though these minutes of fearful illumination will, for their uncustomary quality, outlast other memories of the Cyprus crisis, an image to outlast even them struck my retina when the iron hawks momentarily flew off and we stood up and dusted our trousers. All around, between isolated, bombed-out factories, a dour prairie of stubble was on fire. But the effulgence was as brief as it was bright. As I switched on the ignition and prepared to drive like hell into the city, the fire collapsed. This fire perhaps epitomised the island's hatreds, sudden and shallow. When towards curfew I reached my own village of Myrtou, having traversed a Nicosia as abandoned of life as the Marie Celeste, my neighbour's wife showed me a three-foot length of something the colour of poisoned salmon bedded in the soil behind her house. Its plastic bore instructions in English about keeping the napalm (for such it surely was) at a temperature not exceeding 65 degrees. The day had been excessively hot but the fire that had ravaged Cyprus had come from outside. It is a truism that when the newspapers write about something you know, they get it wrong. To me, who had lived in Cyprus five years, the most important misstatement was also the commonest — that there was an eternal, unbridgeable hatred between Greek and Turkish Cypriot. In a superior working of this thesis one distinguished journalist recalled the execution of an archbishop, spiritual ancestor of Markarios III, by the Ottomans. It is not my intention here to argue from history, either invoking the sixteenth-century Greek priests who asked the Sultan to protect them from Latin feudalists or pointing out that the English have killed the Scottish equivalents of ethnarchs without arousing any unbridgeable hatred between north and south of our plural island. But my personal experience has convinced me that, left alone, the islanders could live in a balance as amiable as our own clash of Celt and Saxon, the difference of temperament merely providing an enrichment of the general culture. Admittedly from both sides, in sermon and hhutbah, in the school texts approved by Athens and Ankara, everything has been done to make of The Other a bogy. Admittedly the generation which worked side by side, smoking hubblebubbles in the same cafés, is now elderly or middle-aged. Admittedly few Greeks speak Turkish and fewer Turks have Greek friends. But even among the Turkish youth of 1974 the grouse was not that they had no slice of the island to themselves but that they were not yet fully included in Cypriot prosperity. Even so, on the coat-tails of this prosperity, young Turks

were increasingly working in Greek factories, on Greek building sites and in Greek restaur ants; in their own zones new restaurants and businesses were opening. They wanted integration with security, not apartheid. A personal experience earlier this year showed how the implanted suspicion could melt. Myrtou is an all-Greek village, centred on a monastery. My neighbours, than whom none could be better, were preparing their house for the marriage of a daughter as beautiful as an early Hellenic ho,. A Turkish friend, unable to work on his building site because ot ban weather, was painting our house. Androula's mother, who does for us when we are there and waters the garden when we are not, asked with

some suspicion: "Is he — Hasan — Turkikos?"

She had no dislike of Moslems as such. Each August for four years an Egyptian friend had left his wife and children in Cairo to spend a month in Myrtou. Abbas became a favourite With the village and every Sunday went with them to the sea, his Koran swinging from his chest along with their crosses.

"Yes, he's a Turk."

A sniff ...

But later that morning I found both of them gossiping in Greek and at lunch Hasan said: "After I finish this evening, if it's OK by you, I want to go and do some distempering for her." He came back with an invitation to Androula's wedding. On the night long trestles groaned with food; Androula's brother, on

leave from the National Guard, pressed beer on everyone. The bride danced, stately and ar

chaic, while all the guests took turns to pin pound notes, or envelopes with money, on Androula's dress. Hassan, in a smart peacock blue suit, pinned his two pounds. There was no barrier, nothing but a sense of welcome. Immediately after the Sampson coup many Greek Cypriots took refuge from Eoka B in the Turkish enclaves.

After an independent Cyprus joined the United Nations, each of its three outside guar antors had its private interest. Britain wished to retain the undisturbed use of its two sovereign bases as well as its radar station on Mount

Olympus. The Greek colonels, aware of their

unpopularity, exploited that chauvinistic nostalgia, which argues that ownership of land in biblical or homeric times justified its recapture today, to advocate a Greater Greece. At one now ruined Greek camp a vast wall map showed the Greek archipelago with an en larged Cyprus, all bunched together in a geographic squeeze. The Turks, hobbling repeatedly from weak civilian government to military intervention, were tempted to forget Atatiirk's repudiation of former provinces and to find in 'Kibris' a rallying point for the dissident young.

Errors by each of the three guarantors helped to turn self-interest into tragedy. The British sinned negatively: too little concern was shown in bolstering the government of a friendly commonwealth state; when the coup took' place, Mr Callaghan's demand for the replacement, not withdrawal, of the Greek officers, the use of words like 'restraint,' hinted a passivity of which Turkey was to take advantage. The Greek and Turkish guarantors sinned more positively. The Greeks infiltrated far more than the stipulated number of mainland officers; worse, they used their military dominance on the island to encourage the small Eoka faction which in pursuit of a suicidal policy used murderous means. Greek Cypriots feel the same kind of attachment to Greece as our old dominions feel towards Britain; but this no more requires physical union of Cyprus with Greece than the rule of Canada by Great Britain. On their side the Turks encouraged physical separation. They excluded Greeks from their ghettos and inside them allowed less expression of political opinion than in the rest of the island. It is less certain that Raouf Denktash expressed the Turkish consensus than it is that Markarios speaks for most Greeks.

This is not to exonerate the Cypriots from a callous indifference to Turkish suffering. Oil their way to the Kyrenia beaches new-rich. Nicosians drove their Jaguars past the ravaged Turkish houses of Skylloura whence in earlier troubles a number of Turks were taken out to be shot, their hands tied behind their backs. A mile from my own village one half of DhiorioSlS a ragged Pompeii; the Turks there, fearful of their Christian neighbours, decamped by night, leaving their window frames to be plundered for the timber.

But if Cypriot empathy for Turks was shallow, an equally shallow hatred awaited fire from outside. That the eventual use of intercommunal hatred formed part of a CIA programme was a widespread belief. Those who held it included Dr Vassos Lisarides, the distinguished physician who advised Makarios, edited a daily newspaper, and acted as parliamentary representative of the socialist party, EDEK. But I equally heard it argued by hoteliers and dentists Afte Watergate, it is hard to say of any CIA scheme that it is unimaginable; after the publication of Mr Miles Copeland's The Game of Nations it is equally hard to argue that such a scheme would remain hidden from its victims.

According to the proponents of this theory — which has now gained the support of that respected newspaper Le Monde — Cyprus seemed, to. those using think-tanks, the ideal base for the protection of American interests in the Middle East. But Britain had shown that It was not available to the US over the years, and most particularly during the October War. On the insistence of Makarios, the British emphasised their exclusive control of the basis — Britain, after all, had its own interests in the Middle East and these would be ruined if Akrotiri or Dhekelia were used by Israel's foremost ally.

How to change this situation? According to those who blame the Cyprus tragedy on the CIA, the Americans decided to work for the only feasible coup against Makarios, one sponsored by the followers of Grivas; they did so indirectly, through the junta in Athens. An Eoka B coup, demanding union of Cyprus with Greece, would prompt a Turkish invasion and swift division of the island. This the Americans were alleged to welcome. The Turkish third of the island would become de facto a part of one NATO ally, while the Greek two thirds would become a fiefdom of the junta. "But," I protested, the first time I heard the argument, "the notion of double enosis is absurd. For the Greeks, it would spell ruin. They would have to forsake rich lands and cities in the north and east. For the Turks it would be as bad, since their ancestral lands are scattered like measle-spots all over the island." "True," my friend agreed. "But what makes you think that the CIA care tuppence for what Greeks want, or Turks? The programme foresees that any Turkish intervention will spark oft mutual atrocities; the programme inaeea demands them. The fear they engender will drive the Turks into dependence on the Turkish army and the Greeks (even those who detest the colonels) into an equal dependence on Athens. Since each enclave would feel menaced by the other, neither would deny the Americans the naval or aerial facilities they need."

A Greek politician returning from exile has already said that Cyprus will prove Dr Kissinger's Watergate. He is not reported to have given any evidence and incriminating papers are yet to be unearthed. But forewarned of the

theory I watched the twelve days following the coup with more than half an ear cocked for Possible evidence. Was it significant that when Nikos Sampson gave his first press conference — which to other observers seemed grotesque — the Voice of America gave the new president adjectives which the reader of Time recognises as glow-words: 'Tough-looking, tough-speaking .. .'? Two friends, each employed at one of the listening bases connected with the CIA and bequeathed to Makarios by colonial Britain, had a shared impression: 'In the 1960s, on the two occasions when there was trouble before, our Americans were panicky and wanted to get us and themselves to Beirut quickly. This time they were strangely calm; they seemed unsurprised." But does this do more than confirm what has been widely stated, that the CIA had three weeks' notice of the coup? That they did not inform Makarios, despite having normal diplomatic relations with Nicosia, was probably normal CIA practice with a disapproved-of neutralist.

But the last two decades have shown that the CIA is only less hydra-headed than the shapers of American policy. One head plots what another would oppose. While Dr Kissinger (to Whom Makarios was the Castro of the Mediterranean) was preparing to recognise Sampson, there seems to have been pro forma pressure on Turkey, not to invade. Later, at the Geneva conference, to which the US was not a Party, Dr Kissinger embarrassed his British allies by stating American policy in terms Which supported the Turks. The caution in the divided counsels probably issues from the State Department. Its observers know that the colonels were unlikely to survive a Cyprus fiasco, while the present Turkish government is of a different stamp to its NATO-minded

forerunners. Ecevit is an independent-minded intellectual with a weak political base; he needed a military success to quieten his restive generals and his Islamic-minded coalition partners.

The future seems certain to be far from any .think-tank optimum. Cyprus may be divided into two ruined halves; the border between Greek and Turk may become as contentious as that between Israel, whose indifference to the UN seems shared by the Turks, and the Arabs. (Like the Palestinians, the Greek Cypriot majority have been worsted by modern technology.) But for the Americans few gains are apparent. In Greece they were bound to suffer some unpopularity for their long support of the colonels; support of the Turks could lose them their bases. In Turkey, their position is unlikely to be greatly strengthened; Ecevit's supporters are largely on the left. As for the Cypriots, a bleak future is offset by one frail 'unless': unless Ecevit now reveals humanity and imagination. If by some miraculous use of discipline and the chivalrous side of Islam the translator of T. S. Eliot and Pound cannot merely arrest all military severities, but positively entice Greeks back into the Turkish-controlled area and there treat them well, then the Turks may stay and prosper in the Greek portion of the island. But if theTurks behave like the phasms of Greek fantasy, there will be a population exchange and an evil frontier will bisect Aphrodite's island. To call it a Green Line will be an insult to the colour shared traditionally by Islam and hope.

Desmond Stewart has lived in the Eastern Mediterranean for the past twenty years, the last five of them mainly in Cyprus. His new book, Herzl, a biography, is to be published this autumn.