In March 1964 Packard uncovered details of the murder of two isolated Turkish Cypriot families in the area north of Morphou. He was unable to get the local police to investigate these crimes:
The gendarmerie at Myrtou declined to take an interest, just as they had over the killing at Kolya Chiflik: crimes against Turkish Cypriots were no longer regarded by them as being within their area of competence.
He therefore took the matter far higher, and reports having the following discussion with Tassos Papadopoulos about the matter:
At Tassos Papadopoulos’ request, I attended a meeting with him and two other ministers. He said: “We’re grateful to you for bringing this matter directly to us rather than letting it be handled through JFHQ. The President is deeply upset. We thought we were sufficiently in control for these incidents to have ended and we are shocked to find that we were wrong. We want you to understand the difficulty in which we now find ourselves. We have got ourselves into a position from which we are unable to do what should be done. You know and we know who’s responsible for an appalling crime. They ought to be brought to justice, but that isn’t going to happen.”
Papadopoulos said that since Christmas the situation had been, to say the least, ‘anomalous’. “We needed to revise the constitution so as to allow a normal democratic working of the state. We were encouraged in this by Arthur Clark, which we took to mean that we had British backing. The Turks were arming to oppose the revision by force. We created a force to defend ourselves against an armed Turkish reaction. There was provocation, followed by violence. Makarios and Kutchuk agreed that normal order must be re-established, but that wasn’t achieved. In legal terms, we now regard the paramilitary Turkish Cypriot leadership and TMT as being in insurrection against the state.”
“As you know, we are now committed to a policy of re-engagement and a new approach to communal relations. Privately the President has accepted that it will be better to agree together on a movement by the Turkish Cypriots out of mixed areas where there is friction into areas where they will feel more secure. You have a part to play in that because we need objective assessments and a channel of communication that we can trust.
“We agreed after Christmas with Duncan Sandys and Peter Young on ways to avoid further bloodshed, but these have been exploited by Kutchuk and the Denktash people to start a process of partition, using the ‘Green Line’ and British troops as cover. It’s intensely galling for our police that they cannot now enter some areas controlled by the Turks without running the risk of serious armed clashes.
“At Christmas, groups emerged which wanted to fight for the Greek cause, and particularly for our right not to be blocked from enosis. These fighters have acquired the status of heroes and a position stronger than we have as politicians. We’ve tried to incorporate all of these fighting groups into what will become a National Guard, but some units and some individuals are still determined to pursue their own agenda, irrespective of national policy. This has created a very dangerous situation for us.2
“Now let us discuss what happened at Liveras and Kolya Chiflik. This was entirely against our wishes and very damaging to our aims. Properly those who did it should be arrested and tried for murder. But we’re talking about men who a lot of our people, particularly the right wing, regard as heroes. Trying to bring them to public trial now could lead to civil war and a much worse situation than we already have.
“The only alternative we can see is for a secret drumhead court-martial with powers of capital punishment. This is how it would have been dealt with during the EOKA struggle. But now all of us here, whether or not we used to be part of EOKA, are politicians, with hopes to lead the country in the future. No politician could survive who was found to have been involved in the summary execution of someone who could later be presented to half the nation as a hero. So we find ourselves trapped by circumstances that are deeply repugnant to us.”
I said: “You have a heavily armed police force that’s already been involved in plenty of shooting against Turkish Cypriots. Can’t they handle it?”
I was told: “No they can’t, or won’t, and you surely know why.”
Later that evening, Tassos Papadopoulos took me to dinner at Lemonias and we talked more about the problems of controlling violence and how deeply it was rooted in some elements of Greek society. I told him that since I first went there, I had been aware in Greece of the rifts created by the civil war. I repeated to him what Dom Mintoff had told me about Ben Bella’s difficulty in dealing with political violence after the Algerians’ underground war against the French, and of my understanding that the violence inherent in an anti-colonial struggle could not easily or rapidly be expunged from the new nation that emerged. In particular I talked about the way that western intelligence agencies, which saw the eastern Mediterranean as a special battleground in their Cold War against the supposed threats of communism, were encouraging nationalist factions to use violence against the left.
I told him about an incident in 1963 when I had visited Athens as an official observer for NATO exercises and, as Intelligence Adviser to COMEDSOUEAST, had been looked after for one day by resident US intelligence agencies. To demonstrate one facet of their undercover mission, I had been taken to a training camp in the north of the city where American instructors were indoctrinating Greek gendarmes in modern methods of interrogation, torture and killing. They were teaching that communists were sub-human, that they had forfeited their civil rights and that they should be exterminated like vermin. The pupils were being schooled in the use of extreme violence against communists as a weapon against the spread of left-wing dogma. I was shown some pigs with KKE (Communist Party of Greece) emblems on their backs and told with some pride by the instructor that his trainees would be told to kill these as viciously as possible, visualising them as ‘commies who had raped their sisters’.
I said that, from what Nicos Sampson and others had told me, there appeared to be a deep involvement by Greek intelligence agencies in the encouragement of violent action against Turkish Cypriot militants and I asked to what degree this was cover for action against the Cypriot left.
Rather than respond directly, Papadopoulos asked me what impression I had gained of the left in Cyprus. I said that left-wingers I had met seemed to be first of all nationalists and anti-colonialists, like left-wingers that I knew in Malta and militant socialists in the UK. But that was not how they were being portrayed by NATO. They clearly were much more committed than the right to the creation of a multi-ethnic society, and consequently more helpful to the process of communal re-engagement. Obviously, also, they were a prime target for subversion and disinformation by western intelligence agencies, and particularly by the Greek and Turkish Cypriot surrogates of those agencies.
I realised that the party expressed general allegiance to Moscow, but I had not yet met a communist in Cyprus who had seemed other than primarily a Cypriot. It obviously simplified things for NATO to label them as dangerous men who were threatening the stability of the Mediterranean. I suppose that a left-leaning Cyprus would be just as intolerable for the establishment in Athens as it would be for Ankara and for the British and Americans.
I was asked to keep entirely private what I was to be told. It was explained that political polarisation meant huge problems for the President and for other moderate leaders (among whose number the speaker clearly felt himself to be included): it forced them into a constant balancing act. Then there was a reversion to what had happened at Liveras. I was told that the only solution they could see was to accept a return to Cyprus by Grivas and give him the job of clearing up the whole problem of uncontrolled violence from Greek Cypriot extremism.
Girvas, he said, was a disciplinarian par excellence. He would without any compunction court-martial and execute anyone who was betraying what he saw as the cause of Hellenism. The problems were that he was now so fanatically anti-leftist as to be frequently irrational on political issues and that it was doubtful how loyal he would be to Makarios. Nevertheless they were confident that if Grivas was brought back, Makarios and the moderates would be able to control him and that he would not pose a threat to the process of inter-communal re-engagement.
He said that Georgadjis therefore had been authorised to arrange for Grivas to return covertly to Cyprus.3
The significance for me of what had happened at Liveras and Kolya Chiflik was not just that isolated and unprotected Turkish Cypriots had been murdered without provocation at a time when there was a significant peacekeeping presence in the immediate area: that could have been the act of a homicidal maniac triggered by something other than ethnic prejudice. More disturbing was that no mechanism existed that would undertake to investigate and act upon the crime, that there was no element of the police force that felt it had responsibility for the Turkish Cypriots, even when urged by Makarios to act without discrimination. In the eyes of many of the police, the Turkish Cypriots had at Christmas become non-people, excluded from any recourse to the process of justice or of the safeguarding of their human rights. Only now were we beginning to get an acceptance from some gendarmerie units that the future was likely to depend on their regaining the trust of the Turkish Cypriots. Where this concept had been adopted, there had been very rapid progress towards inter-communal re-engagement.
By the time I had confirmation of what had happened at Liveras, it was already twenty days after the killings. I discussed the position with Kutchuk, told him of Makarios’ distress and got his agreement that the event was entirely contrary to the general trend in the area and ought to be treated as a one-of aberration. Kutchuk appeared determined that the Turkish Cypriots should not abandon Ayia Irini. In general he had been strongly supportive of the patrol’s efforts and of the process, urged by Tassos Papadopoulos, to establish through me an unofficial, wholly private and conciliatory back-channel to the President. I took it to be because of this that the Turkish press, which could have been expected to use the incident in the most inflammatory manner possible, carried only a minor report that the family had disappeared.
FOOTNOTES
1 Similar difficulty was faced in other states, such as Algeria, where independence, or liberation from foreign occupation or dictatorship, followed an armed struggle and where post-independence leadership, needing to implement centrist policies, found itself in conflict with former militants who felt their struggle had been betrayed.
2 Alternatively, the story given me could have been designed to put a more flattering spin on a fait accompli, in which the return of Grivas had been imposed by Athens with CIA encouragement.
