Thorns Among the Laurels

By night, British troops assembled at their stations in Cyprus' major towns, and, at the appointed moment, swept into the homes and newspaper offices of Cyprus' leading Communists. Among the more than 150 arrested were the party's boss, a onetime London milkman named Ezekias Papaioannou, and the Communist mayors of two of Cyprus' biggest towns. At the same hour, Governor Sir John Harding announced the outlawing of the Communist Party on Cyprus.

That was not the end but the beginning of another violent week on Britain's strife-torn island colony. Archbishop Makarios III, bearded marshal of Greek-Cypriot agitation for union with Greece, has repeatedly insisted that he would have no part of 1) Communists, 2) bloodshed. Last week his position on both counts was in doubt. After the crackdown on Communists, the archbishop spoke up to "denounce the action of the British government." Said he: "We believe one ideology can be fought only by another . . . not by force."*

Next day the first use of force was not British but Greek-Cypriot. An army jeep was ambushed and its driver slain. British Major Brian Coombe grabbed a Sten gun and fought off the attackers, taking two wounded prisoners and killing one man. The dead terrorist had had a $14,000 price on his head and a distinguished relative: he was a cousin of Archbishop Makarios III.

At his cousin's funeral, His Beatitude did not speak but stood attentively while the Bishop of Citium intoned, "Cyprus crowns its heroic child, who sacrificed his life, with laurel leaves of admiration and myrtle leaves of grief." By British order, the funeral procession was limited to 50 mourners. Cypriots got around that restriction by having a band of "mourners" follow a decoy hearse down Nicosia's main street, thus diverting British police, who sprayed them with tear gas, while hundreds of Cypriots trooped down a back street to the cemetery with the real body.

* He also called the British "barbarians" for searching Greek Orthodox monasteries, where they found one pistol-packing monk.

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