Cyprus-Forum.com

[erolz3]

So are you complaining that the foreign Imperialists allowed fair and just changes to happen and they didn't help you to maintain the ill received gains you extracted on our expense earlier on?

I am pointing out the reality to you that your community gained massivley relative to ours, despite LEGALITY, despite its illegal use of ethnic violence against the TC community because that was what was expident to those powers percieved self interest.

Those world powers did this no more out of a sense of 'correcting previous injustices' than their allowance of the actions by Turkey in 74 was based on 'correcting previous injustices'.

The reality is that they (imperialist foreign powers) simply allowed you to steal TC legal valid rights in 65 because it suited their self interests. Just as it suited their self interests to do little or nothing to stop Turkish action in 74 then or since.

As long as you insist that the LEGAL valid rights of the TC community granted under the 1960's AGREEMENTS were unfair such that they justifed the removal of them through the use of illegal ethnic violence regardless of legality then all you do is allow for TC to claim that their removal was unfair such they they justifed the imposed division of Cyprus in 74 by Turkey regardless of any legality. In addition you show up your oft shouted claims for 'legality before all else' as the empty rehtoric that it is. What you clearly mean is legality be dammed if we unilateraly decide that legality to be 'unfair' and legality before all else when such a call benefits you.

No solution can be found if you deny that what is legaly ours is to be ignored removed simply because you deem it 'unfair' whilst demanding that what is legaly yours is returned on the basis that it is legaly yours.

As to the whole 'rights of self determination of peoples' we have been round and round this so many times it hurts.
There are over a hundred posts of mine on this 'argument' alone and still you do not 'get it'.

The simple reality is that the right to self determination rests with a concept of 'peoples' and it is the fundamental human right from which all other indivdual rights derive. Without it all indivdual rights are undermined. Which 'people' a given indivdual belongs too and thus through which their rights to self determination are expressed is not divisable. You can not have 'dual peopleship' in the way you can have dual nationality, as far as the expression of your right to self determination goes. If you define yourself as part of the Greek people, as you did with enosis, then you can not at the same time claim to be expressing the views of a unitary cypriot people. By definition you are saying that GC are an indivisable part of the Greek people. It was in doing this that you by default then made TC not part of a single unitary people you denied existed, but some 'other' people to you as part of the Greek people.

This defining yourself as part of the Greek people and by extension making TC part of some 'other' people is the basis for the compromise agreements of 1960.

None of this matter to you however Piratis, because for you in your heart and soul, you KNOW Cyprus is Greek and that anything that limits the fullest expresion of Greeks in Cyprus and their desires is 'invalid' because anything in Cyprus that is not Greek is also by your defintion also not truely Cypriot. It is invalid in your heart to such a degree that the illegal use of ethinc based violence is not only justifed over legality but required by the true Cypriots, namely Greek Cypriots.

[boulio]

at best it was to weeken t/c politically to make changes to the constituion.The t/c make it out that was a extermination plan.

[Kikapu]

The simple reality is that the right to self determination rests with a concept of 'peoples' and it is the fundamental human right from which all other indivdual rights derive. Without it all indivdual rights are undermined. Which 'people' a given indivdual belongs too and thus through which their rights to self determination are expressed is not divisable. You can not have 'dual peopleship' in the way you can have dual nationality, as far as the expression of your right to self determination goes.

I understand in what you are saying above in people wanting their own self determination if we are talking about, say Scotland, Wales, all the states in former Yugoslavia Federation and all the Soviet satellite states and so on, but how can that be the same for the TCs in Cyprus, when we lived all over the island in a Unitary state without any particular region being ONLY Turkish Cypriot, to want to separate from the rest of the island in the search of "self determination". I know this is what the north wants to do now, now that they believe they do have their own state to seek "self determination" , but before 1974, how could the TCs gained self determination without first having had large amount of their land being in one place on the island.??? Surely this was not going to be possible, was it.??

[Get Real!]

I must resist posting - I must resist posting - oh sod it.

That's better!

[Get Real!]

Withdrawing from government, for any reason, is an entirely non violent peaceful and legal means of protest.

But we’re not talking about a single session during which TC ministers walked out of parliament in protest over an issue, but a total abandonment never to return, and subsequent TC declaration that the constitution was “null & void”!

Unilateraly changing the consitution, in violation of the terms of the existing consitution, and explictly saying that TC may only 'safely' return to their valid and legal positions under the consitution if they accept this arbitary removal of the rights as a fait acompli was not and is not legal. Yet this is what the GC adminstration did in 1965, as documented by the UN.

I'm glad you finally threw in a date to show that this was THREE WHOLE YEARS after the TC ministers abandoned the RoC! What made the TC ministers think that they could come and go as they pleased?

That the foreign imperialist powers of the time not only did nothing to stop this but actively rewarded those who did this with continued 'recognition' because that was what they percived was in their own best self interest at the time only highlights the reality of the limits of 'international law' when put against the self interest of 'foreign imperalist powers'.

This is based on the TC miscalculation that by abandoning their posts the RoC constitution would be dissolved, but of course had they read the 59 agreements they would’ve found no such foolish loophole! In fact I doubt ANY country’s constitution contains such a silly self distracting clause! (ie: upon the departure of a certain number of ministers walking out!)

[Piratis]

So are you complaining that the foreign Imperialists allowed fair and just changes to happen and they didn't help you to maintain the ill received gains you extracted on our expense earlier on?

I am pointing out the reality to you that your community gained massivley relative to ours, despite LEGALITY, despite its illegal use of ethnic violence against the TC community because that was what was expident to those powers percieved self interest.

Those world powers did this no more out of a sense of 'correcting previous injustices' than their allowance of the actions by Turkey in 74 was based on 'correcting previous injustices'.

The reality is that they (imperialist foreign powers) simply allowed you to steal TC legal valid rights in 65 because it suited their self interests. Just as it suited their self interests to do little or nothing to stop Turkish action in 74 then or since.

As long as you insist that the LEGAL valid rights of the TC community granted under the 1960's AGREEMENTS were unfair such that they justifed the removal of them through the use of illegal ethnic violence regardless of legality then all you do is allow for TC to claim that their removal was unfair such they they justifed the imposed division of Cyprus in 74 by Turkey regardless of any legality. In addition you show up your oft shouted claims for 'legality before all else' as the empty rehtoric that it is. What you clearly mean is legality be dammed if we unilateraly decide that legality to be 'unfair' and legality before all else when such a call benefits you.

No solution can be found if you deny that what is legaly ours is to be ignored removed simply because you deem it 'unfair' whilst demanding that what is legaly yours is returned on the basis that it is legaly yours.

As to the whole 'rights of self determination of peoples' we have been round and round this so many times it hurts.
There are over a hundred posts of mine on this 'argument' alone and still you do not 'get it'.

The simple reality is that the right to self determination rests with a concept of 'peoples' and it is the fundamental human right from which all other indivdual rights derive. Without it all indivdual rights are undermined. Which 'people' a given indivdual belongs too and thus through which their rights to self determination are expressed is not divisable. You can not have 'dual peopleship' in the way you can have dual nationality, as far as the expression of your right to self determination goes. If you define yourself as part of the Greek people, as you did with enosis, then you can not at the same time claim to be expressing the views of a unitary cypriot people. By definition you are saying that GC are an indivisable part of the Greek people. It was in doing this that you by default then made TC not part of a single unitary people you denied existed, but some 'other' people to you as part of the Greek people.

This defining yourself as part of the Greek people and by extension making TC part of some 'other' people is the basis for the compromise agreements of 1960.

I already gave answers to everything in my earlier post you choose to ignore, so I will not go in to too much detail here since I don't want to repeat myself too much.

In the 50s you collaborated with foreign imperialists, attacked us, threatened us with annihilating us from half of our island and as a reward the foreign Imperialists granted to you unfair and disproportional gains on our expense. In 1963 you simply lost those unfair gains. This was not any "gain" for us, but just a the negation of the previous injustice against us.

You say that you losing those ill received gains was something "illegal". Show me the court case you won about this to prove it. Show me even a single UN resolution that condemns Republic of Cyprus. Just like you managed to legalize unfair gains on our expense in 1960, we managed to restore justice in 100% legal way. You played with the system to have unfair gains, and we played with the system too, not to gain anything unfair on your expense - as you had done, but simply to restore justice.

You were separate people since the time you first invaded our island and you choose to come here. During Ottoman rule the population of Cyprus was divided between Christians/Greeks and Muslims/Turks (the newcomers). So don't tell me that we "made" you separate in the 50s with our struggle for enosis. You were separate right from the very begging and at no point you assimilated with the rest of the population of this island. You choose to be an ethnic minority among a majority of Greeks, and if you don't like this fact you can blame it on your ancestors, not us. Your ethnic minority is no different than any other ethnic minority in any other country.

Your idea that ethnic minorities have the right to ethnically cleanse others and steal their lands whenever they don't agree with the majority is obviously a load of bullshit. I don't need to say more on this, since there are UN resolutions and several court cases that prove this.

[Piratis]

None of this matter to you however Piratis, because for you in your heart and soul, you KNOW Cyprus is Greek and that anything that limits the fullest expresion of Greeks in Cyprus and their desires is 'invalid' because anything in Cyprus that is not Greek is also by your defintion also not truely Cypriot. It is invalid in your heart to such a degree that the illegal use of ethinc based violence is not only justifed over legality but required by the true Cypriots, namely Greek Cypriots.

"Cyprus is Greek" is just a label, and I do not care about labels. Anybody can see the history, the culture and the population of this island and decide for himself if Cyprus is Greek or not, or to what degree Cyprus is Greek.

Each Cypriot can identify himself as he wants, but beyond that the vote of each Cypriot should count exactly the same, and we should be free to decide the destiny of our island in a democratic way. This included the right to unite our own island with Greece, EU, China, or whomever else we democratically choose to.

Cypriot people are not just GCs, but also all the minorities of the island who are equal Cypriots as well (Armenians, Maronites, Latins and all others). We have been Cypriots for long before you come to this island, but we are more than willing to accept you as equal Cypriots. It is up to you if you want to become Cypriot or if you want to remain foreign and separate as it was the case when you first came here and for the 300+ years of the Ottoman rule.

Here I have to remind you that you are the only ethnic minority on this island which collaborates with foreign Imperialists and tries to have gains on the expense of the rest of the Cypriot people. All the other Cypriot minorities respect the majority and they receive respect in return.

[Piratis]

The simple reality is that the right to self determination rests with a concept of 'peoples' and it is the fundamental human right from which all other indivdual rights derive. Without it all indivdual rights are undermined. Which 'people' a given indivdual belongs too and thus through which their rights to self determination are expressed is not divisable. You can not have 'dual peopleship' in the way you can have dual nationality, as far as the expression of your right to self determination goes.

I understand in what you are saying above in people wanting their own self determination if we are talking about, say Scotland, Wales, all the states in former Yugoslavia Federation and all the Soviet satellite states and so on, but how can that be the same for the TCs in Cyprus, when we lived all over the island in a Unitary state without any particular region being ONLY Turkish Cypriot, to want to separate from the rest of the island in the search of "self determination". I know this is what the north wants to do now, now that they believe they do have their own state to seek "self determination" , but before 1974, how could the TCs gained self determination without first having had large amount of their land being in one place on the island.??? Surely this was not going to be possible, was it.??

This is why Denktash said the following in 1964:

"We wish to establish a federal administration in Cyprus. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to move a portion of the Turks from one place to another place and to concentrate our people in certain parts of the island"

[B25]

Piratis Amen, na'se kala file.

[erolz3]

I understand in what you are saying above in people wanting their own self determination if we are talking about, say Scotland, Wales, all the states in former Yugoslavia Federation and all the Soviet satellite states and so on, but how can that be the same for the TCs in Cyprus, when we lived all over the island in a Unitary state without any particular region being ONLY Turkish Cypriot, to want to separate from the rest of the island in the search of "self determination". I know this is what the north wants to do now, now that they believe they do have their own state to seek "self determination" , but before 1974, how could the TCs gained self determination without first having had large amount of their land being in one place on the island.??? Surely this was not going to be possible, was it.??

A groups status as a people with a seperate right to self determination is not dependent solely on them having a single contigous numerical dominace within a given area. Nor does a speperate right to self determination give a peoples the right to a state of their own. What it does grant is a right to have an effective say in the decisions that shape their lives, or in other words a right to rule themselves and not be ruled by others.

The reality in Cyprus was that neither group could exercises the fullest extent of their desires without impacting the rights of the other Group, and lack of a single geographic area in cyprus where TC were situated was part of the reason for this but far from the only one. This is exactly why the compromise agreements of the 60's was based as it was and not as some would have you believe as a 'reward' for TC fulfilling the aims of foreign imperalist powers.

However the GC leadership at the time and many GC today still believe that the TC had no rights as a people to any degree of self determination as a seperate people from GC who chose define themselves not as CYpriots but as part of the Greek people. They believed and believe that GC ALONE acting as either part of the Greek people or just as GC people had the sole right to determine the future of all Cypriots without having to pay any regard for those in Cyprus they consider 'other' than Greek, because either there were more of them or because they had been their longer.

This belief that TC as a communnity have no right to control their own future or have an effective say in it in Cyprus, even when they are explicitly defined as 'seperate' as a people from the GC community by that very same community and that ONLY GC have such rights as a group of people is at the core of the CYprus problem then and still is today. It iwhy today we are still discussing 'history' and issues like enosis, because it remains the same fundamental rift between us as cypriots.

Even today for me personally it remains the 'acid test' for settlement proposals re governance. For me the one single question I ask myself re any proposal on governance is would such a system have allowed the TC community as a community to effectively legaly resist the imposition of enosis on it in Cyprus against its communal will or not. If it would have then it is an acceptable proposal to me and if it would not have it is an unacceptable one. This is not because I today fear having enosis imposed on me but because it is the litmus test of the core issue in this regard. I care nothing of the details as to how this achived or not, only if it is or not.