Word: greeks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ethnic groups. Toward that end, Turkey is granted the right to station 650 troops there, and Greece 950-though both countries have in the past seven years illegally infiltrated many times that number. At present, there are about 1,500 Turkish soldiers on Cyprus and roughly 8,000 regular Greek troops. There are also 4,000 United Nations troops whose job is to keep the peace...
...military rulers for failing to respect the sensibilities of the Turkish minority in Greece by disbanding various Turkish landholding and cultural organizations and for refusing to grant the Turkish air force the right to overfly the Aegean Sea. Coldly assessing the situation, the Turks reckoned that they had the Greeks outgunned (480,000 men under arms and 450 combat aircraft v. Greece's 158,000 men and 250 warplanes) and that moreover, the Greek junta had almost no international support and would be likely to back down on the Cyprus issue. Because Cyprus is so much nearer to Asia...
...send troops abroad, which was the next thing to an outright declaration of war. He ordered a full-scale alert and fired off a sharp note to Athens that demanded, among other things, the immediate recall of General Grivas to the mainland and the withdrawal of the illegally infiltrated Greek regulars from the island. He also insisted on guarantees for the free movement of Turkish Cypriots so that they could concentrate for their own protection in enclaves in the northern part of the island, where a large part of them already live...
...Colonel George Papadopoulos, ordered the National Guard to hand over the two attacked villages to the U.N. peace-keeping force and recalled Grivas to Athens. The junta commanded the country's docile press to play down the gravity of the crisis. Still, no matter how unmindful of Greek public opinion they may be, Greece's military rulers feared the repercussions of a backdown on such an emotional issue as Cyprus. In a reply to Turkey, the Greek leaders offered to discuss measures for cooling the crisis but refused to commit themselves on the crucial issue of troop withdrawals...
That was not good enough for the Turkish Cabinet. It rejected the Greek reply as "unsatisfactory" and gave the Turkish military the signal to speed up preparations. Antiaircraft batteries suddenly appeared around Ankara, and troops in full battle dress lugged their gear aboard a 37-ship invasion fleet that assembled in the Mediterranean port of Iskenderon, only 40 miles from Cyprus. Greece's alarmed government and military leaders gathered at King Constantine's Tatoi Palace near Athens to draft a final appeal to Turkey...