observer wrote:Kifeas wrote:observer wrote:
(Partial)
In November 1963 (not 1974 as you seem to believe) Makarios submitted his 13 points to change the Constitution, removing (as seen through TC eyes) constitutional safeguards and being a large step on the way to enosis. One month later, GCs launched a premeditated attack on TC communities. The evidence for this is fairly conclusive from a number of sources, and is generally accepted by independent authorities. This brought the UN to Cyprus in early 1964, and sporadic intercommunal violence occured afterwards, gradually reducing, but leaving many TCs in embargoed camps and enclaves. This included vengeance killings by some GCs and some TCs, I don't know anyone who denies it.
You may have been born then, but most of your "facts" above, are not the real facts! Whatever I marked in red is nothing else than distortions or lies, and I ask you to prove it from independed sources as you claimed.
As background, ypu might care to read this:
http://www.cyprus-conflict.net/www.cypr ... p%203.htmlRichard Patrick is a Canadian professor who served as a UN officer in Cyprus in the 1960s
This paragraph is especially relevant:
As early as 1962, Polycarpos Georgadjis, the Minister of the Interior, had warned the officers of his underground army that in the following year President Makarios would propose amendments to the constitution which would be so unacceptable to the Turk-Cypriots that TMT would start fighting. When the amendments were proposed, there was general dismay among many of the leaders of this Greek-Cypriot force that Turk-Cypriots did not rise to the bait. As a result, elements of the Greek-Cypriot police and a number of armed Greek-Cypriot irregulars were attempting to goad TMT into action in December 1963. Had the incident of 21 December not occurred, there can be no doubt that a similar Incident if would have been precipitated by Christmas.
One effort to "prove" the TCs were in revolt was the explosion of the Markos Drakos statue, now known from a number of sources to have been ordered by Polycarpos Georgadjis.
There is also the recent revelation: In (
16 Apr 08) "Politis" newspaper a former EOKA member and now a retired teacher sheds more light on the events. He recalls that in November 1963, officers of ELDYK and the Cypriot army, recruited all 120 male students of the Cyprus Teachers' Academy (bar one who was thought to be leftist) and were told that they would be trained in the use of arms because on December 25 there will follow an attack on the Turkish Cypriots that would result in the annihilation of all the Turkish Cypriots so that enosis would be declared. "Not even one Turkish cat will remain alive" they were told.
Then there is the view of the British High Commission at the time:
On 12th January 1964 the British High Commission in Nicosia wrote to London (telegram no. 162) "The Greek (Cypriot) police are led by extremists who provoked the fighting and deliberately engaged in atrocities. They have recruited into their ranks as "special constables" gun-happy young thugs. ....... Makarios assured Sir Arthur Clark that there will be no attack. His assurance is as worthless as previous assurances have proved."
You can google foreign newspaper reports of the period. Outside Greece, all that I have read seem to be in no doubt that GCs launched a premeditated attack in December 1963.
Add to this the disarming before the event of TC policemen, and the warnings given to TC friends by GCs (which you will probably not accept as independent) and you come up with a fairly conclusive picture of a premeditated attack in my opinion.
Observer, if I were to quote the opinions of book authors on the 1963 /64 events, I could have found many such ones confirming a somewhat different case! Instead, I will only provide you with the views of someone present in Cyprus at the time, someone who was in the best position of all (more so than Mr. Richard Patrick who as a matter of fact was not in Cyprus) to have known the facts. This is Field Marshal Michael Carver, the man in charge of the British troops based in Cyprus at the time, and who later in January 1964 took the role of the first peacekeeping force between the two communities, until formal UN troops arrived in Cyprus in March 1964. Michael Carver reported the events of December 1963 as follows:
"There are undoubted indications that the Greeks did not plan to bring matters to a head until June 1964 and there are strong suspicions that the Turks knew this, and decided to force the issue before the Greeks were ready."
Now, I do not know what indications Marshal Carver had to claim that the GCs had plans for after June 1964, however he was pretty much in the position to have assessed that it was in fact the Turks that forced the issue upon the Greeks in December 1963, on the assumption that this was done in order to catch the Greeks unprepared. His assessment was on something that had already occurred (and not a hypothesis on something that had not yet occurred,) and was based on the abundance of intelligence that he was in the best of positions to have had as a British commander in Cyprus, when he was reporting the events right after they occurred in December 1963.
As for what kind of plans the Greek Cypriot leadership had, we do not need the views of one Greek Cypriot as to how he understood the situation then! The (whatever) GC plans that existed, were all later been disclosed in their plainest form in the Akritas plan, the cornerstone text of the Turkish propaganda against the GC community! I suggest you read the Akritas plan again, and tell us here from where someone may possibly extract the idea that the GCs were premeditating to launch an attack against the TC community -and not the opposite; if -as it was stated in the Akritas plan itself, one of the main objectives of the GC leadership was
“to create the impression (to the international community) that the co-existence of the two communities was possible” in Cyprus! How on earth those from the GC leadership that drafted the Akritas plan were planning and aiming to create the impression that the co-existence of the two communities was possible, and at the same time were planning (or premeditating) to launch attacks against the TC community, as you have claimed above? Can you possibly answer this fundamental question?
:D:D:D
