Minister hands title deeds to hundreds of refugees
By Elias Hazou
THE GOVERNMENT yesterday handed 374 title deeds to refugees wanting to build a home on their own plot of land.
At a special ceremony marking the event, Interior Minister Christos Patsalides said this was part of a wider drive to issue more than 6,000 title deeds by the end of the year.
Another 5,200 deeds would be made available in 2008.
Giving plots to refugee families has been a thorny issue for a number of years with delay after delay in separating large tracts of state land into hundreds of separate plots.
Some refugees have been waiting six or seven years after making an application. Part of the problem was due to lack of co-ordination between the different government departments.
Another cause for delay was land that needed to be divided into 700 plots but was pending because the area belongs to Turkish Cypriots.
There has been criticism that the step is a white elephant: real estate prices have soared in recent years, making this a disincentive for people who want to build.
And sceptics have dismissed the move as a vote-mongering ploy by the present administration ahead of February’s general elections.
On a political level, granting title deeds is something of a hot potato: the government has had to debunk accusations that its policy is tantamount to abandoning efforts for reunification, which would see many, but not all, refugees return to their homes in the north.
Addressing this point, Patsalides said yesterday that issuing title deeds “in no way means giving up on the desire to solve the Cyprus problem and allow refugees to return to their ancestral homes.
“Under no circumstances does this policy mean that the state has fulfilled all its obligations toward the thousands of refugees, who will only be fully vindicated through a just and viable settlement,” he added.
And he pledged that, despite any technical obstacles, additional title deeds would be issued within the set timetable.
In a related development, a group calling itself the Refugee Rights Claims Movement is seeking compensation from the Republic for unfair treatment in the wake of the 1974 invasion.
Basing their argument on the principle of the “equitable distribution of burden”, the refugees say that despite the loss of property and income in the wake of the invasion, they were subjected to the same taxing obligations as non-refugees.
They say tax laws in force after the 1974 disaster – when an estimated 40 per cent of Greek Cypriot wealth was lost – did not distinguish between displaced persons and people already living in the south.
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