Cyprus-Forum.com

[miltiades]

If its going to effect our fundemental rights to live as an independent country we will fight again, we will not capitulate to the GCs and their demands.

VP , Shut up , you dont exist anymore , Turkey has swallowed you up !

[Viewpoint]

If its going to effect our fundemental rights to live as an independent country we will fight again, we will not capitulate to the GCs and their demands.

VP , Shut up , you dont exist anymore , Turkey has swallowed you up !

Wrong again I am alive and well you can try and ignore me but I will not go away.

[miltiades]

If its going to effect our fundemental rights to live as an independent country we will fight again, we will not capitulate to the GCs and their demands.

VP , Shut up , you dont exist anymore , Turkey has swallowed you up !

Wrong again I am alive and well you can try and ignore me but I will not go away.

Tell that to Turkey !

[Piratis]

Look, it says we need to first have a real WORKING democracy!

It does not say, silence some, remove peoples rights by changing the constitution and then pretend it is your democratic right!

You claimed ENOSIS was your right and I just showed you it was not, because you did not try to claim it in legitimate ways and you would not have been able to anyway, hence why you resorted to violence.

How did you show me that Enosis was not our right? The UN resolution clearly defines "integration into an independent State" as a legitimate right.

And I tell you again: Why would we need to silence you? You are just the 18% and even if all of you voted against enosis in a democratic referendum, enosis would still happen because the vast majority of Cypriots would vote in favor of it.

On the contrary it is you and the colonialists who used force to silence the Cypriot people, forcing on us a constitution which not only benefited you and foreign imperialists on our expense, but which also prohibited from us from having enosis, which was our right.

You didn't allow a working democracy and a peaceful and democratic referendum, because the result of this would be union with Greece. So you used force to silence the Cypriot people and deprive them from their right.

The UN resolution clearly defines "integration into an independent State" as a legitimate right.

IF you meet the above conditions, which you don't.

If you claim you have not tried to silence us and "bypass" us on your quest for Enosis, then please explain to me the reason for the Akritas Plan...

We met the conditions perfectly. It is you who didn't allow the conditions where the Cypriot people would be able to decide the destiny of their own island in a free and democratic way, and instead you used force to impose on Cyprus what you wanted.

[Piratis]

:shock:

....... You are just the 18% and even if all of you voted against enosis in a democratic referendum, enosis would still happen because the vast majority of Cypriots would vote in favor of it.

Replace the words enosis with anything and you'll see why TC's have reservations about democracy via one man one vote.

I know its democratic, and I know its the way its in all democratic countries, but given our history does anyone honestly think this would work when you see the above ?

This is why TC's are asking for safeguards in whatever solution is put forward.

Would GC's be asking for the same I wonder if they were 18%, or anything less than 50% for that matter.

Wrong, you can't replace the word enosis with "anything". But you can replace it with anything legitimate which does not violate the human rights of any Cypriot, which is exactly what enosis was in the 50s when you started the conflict in order to refuse from Cyprus its legitimate rights and have gains on our expense.

As far as what GCs would do, you don't need to "wonder". There is a Greek minority in Turkey and they don't have any kind of "safeguards" that can overwrite the will of the Turkish citizens as a whole. And if there is somebody that would need some safeguards the most is indeed the Greek minority of Turkey.

Furthermore it is clear that you use the word "safeguards" to demand gains on our expense that not only are against our human and democratic rights, but have absolutely nothing to do with "safeguarding". Demanding that your 18% should control the 30% of the island, is one such example.

So who are you kidding here? The fact is that you think that you "won the war" and you now expect from us to capitulate and surrender our land, and our human and democratic rights to you. But such thing is not going to happen.

[humanist]

It would be nice if the TC's on here say RIP fr thse 5 men and leave it at that. Any excuse is nothing but racist

[Medman]

Taken from Cyprus Mail 15.8.09- Both sides suffered- end of!

The truth about the hell at Djiaos
By Makarios Droushiotis

FOR A WHOLE week now the public has been blitzed with information and witness testimony about the five National Guardsmen, who were photographed alive after being captured by Turkish soldiers and who went missing ever since. The average Joe has been stumped by this welter of statements, testimonies and interviews by the protagonists. But what really happened back in 1974? What is the real story behind the iconic photograph?

August 1974: talks in Geneva for a political solution on Cyprus break down, following the Turkish invasion of 20 July. The Turkish army launches a two-pronged offensive, advancing from northern Nicosia toward Morphou and Famagusta.

Weakened by the coup and by the first phase of the invasion, and armed with World War II weapons, the National Guard was on the brink of disintegration. The Turkish forces, deploying motorised means and modern tanks, rolled into the plain of Mesaoria and advanced onto Famagusta, meeting virtually no resistance.

The National Guard’s Infantry Battalion 398 was stationed in the area around the Turkish Cypriot village of Djiaos, situated in the plain of Mesaoria. A group of soldiers, headed by reserve sergeant Antonis Korelis received orders to open fire with their antiquated No.4 rifles at an incoming column of tanks that was headed toward Famagusta.

Having fired at the tanks, the soldiers themselves gave away their position and took fire from the Turkish forces. Three or perhaps four of the tanks broke from the column and headed for the hill where the Greek Cypriot soldiers had taken cover. Two of the soldiers managed to escape; the remaining five were surrounded by Turkish forces and forced to surrender.

These are the same five men seen in the famous picture, taken by the Turkish photographer Ergin Konuksever, surrendering with their arms raised above their heads. They are Antonis Korelis, Panayiotis Nicolaou, Christoforos Skordis, Ioannis Papayiannis and Ioannis Hadjikyriacos. The snapshot was to become a symbol of the struggle to determine the fate of missing persons. It was only this past week that the relatives of the five men learned that their remains, found inside a well at Djiaos, were identified using DNA analysis.

The facts

For years the Committee of Missing Persons (CMP) sought to establish the fate of the five National Guardsmen. According to a source at the CMP, both Konuksever and Turkish Brigadier-General Haki Boratas, who was in command of the operation, testified before the CMP some 10 years ago. This was their version of the events: after the five Greek Cypriots were captured by the tank crews, Brigadier-General Boratas was summoned to the spot as the armored division was unable to process prisoners. Boratas decided to hand the prisoners over to Turkish Cypriot fighters of the outlaw organisation known as TMT. The latter, instead of treating the Greek Cypriots as prisoners of war, executed them in cold blood in an act of vengeance.

Between 20 July and 14 August 1974, the village of Djiaos was overrun by Greek Cypriot soldiers and army irregulars. During this period, allegations were made that the Greek Cypriot forces attacked the local inhabitants. Speaking recently on CyBC television, Yiannakis Christodoulou, a comrade of the five captured POWs who had managed to escape and then looked on from a distance of 100m as the five were being rounded up, described the chaos that reigned within the National Guard at the time: “We did so many [bad] things at Djiaos, it was only natural that whoever of us was caught was a goner,” Christodoulou said candidly.

What’s more, a second-lieutenant whom we spoke with (and who for obvious reasons wished to remain anonymous; we have his full name) revealed that, just six hours before the five POWs were gunned down, four Turkish Cypriots had been executed in a similar fashion by Greek Cypriot soldiers.

The photographer

Ergin Konuksever experienced his own personal adventure. He and a colleague, Adem Yavuz of the ANKA news agency, were shadowing the Turkish army and covering the military operations. Not knowing their way around Cyprus, at one point they lost their bearings and ended up behind Greek Cypriot lines. The two photographers had been traveling in a car which was fitted with a Turkish flag to avoid friendly fire. The car was immobilised after taking fire from soldiers of the Greek Cypriot Military Police. The two photographers, who were injured during the gunfire, were captured and taken to a hospital. Adem Yavuz died shortly later and Konuksever, in an interview with Hurriyet newspaper, claimed that he was beaten up by soldiers outside the hospital. Konuksever himself survived, thanks to the treatment he received from a Greek Cypriot doctor by the name of Andreas Demetriades.

On 20 July 2009, Konuksever was in the occupied north on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Turkish invasion. He sought out Demetriades, and the two met up and had a meal together. Their picture was taken, and Konuksever was later interviewed by Sigma news channel. In the interview, Konuksever talked about the five Greek Cypriot POWs. This was before the CMP announced that the remains of the soldiers had been identified.

The pictures

In 1974, Greek Cypriot soldiers had confiscated the cameras and film reels of the two Turkish photographers. Konuksever claims that the confiscated material included pictures of the aftermath of the capture of the five National Guardsmen. He claims to have taken pictures of the five soldiers as they were being buried. Of the dozens of pictures then taken, only the one showing the five being captured was ever published. Some of the soldiers who captured the two Turkish photographers started pillaging the equipment and the photographic material confiscated. Eventually the photographs ended up at Machi newspaper (owned by Nicos Sampson), which ran them in late August. To this day, authorities say they do not know what happened to the rest of the pictures.

The relatives

With the publication of the photographs, which made it possible to identify the five POWs, the soldiers’ relatives gained new hope that they were alive and would return. This, however, was not to be despite a prisoner swap programme.

Testimony that the five soldiers were alive at the time of their capture fed rumors of the existence of a camp somewhere in Famagusta containing some 200 undeclared POWs. Speculation mounted that Glafcos Clerides would intercede to secure their release. One of the tales doing the rounds at the time was that the captured sergeant Korelis had spoken on Turkish radio Bayrak.

Today, the relatives feel that the story of the five, as well as the famous photograph, has been abused for propaganda purposes. They say that no attention was paid to the grief of the kin, who for 35 years were let to wait endlessly for their loved ones to return. “They kept us in the dark, they used us for propaganda. It feels like we were used. That’s the most tragic bit,” remarked Elena, the sister of Christoforos Skordis, in a comment to Phileleftheros newspaper.

In the dock

Once the truth had come out regarding the fate of the five, certain sections of the media began calling for Turkey’s indictment before a war crimes tribunal. Phileleftheros and Simerini pulled out all the stops to have Turkey put “in the dock,” and demanded that “Attila’s” files be opened. Lawyers who handle cases of legal redress for refugees (such as Loucis Loucaides and Christos Klerides) began urging people to take recourse to the European Court of Human Rights. Meanwhile Andreas Angelides, a lawyer and politician, proposed that Turkey be ejected from the Council of Europe, and Kypros Chrysostomides called for recourse to the UN Security Council in order to refer the case to a criminal court.

The stance of the government, AKEL and DISY has been rather low-key. This has outraged certain journalists of the so-called “patriotic front”; in an article published in Imerisia (an Athens-based newspaper), reporter Michalis Ignatiou railed against these “spineless politicians, these clowns.”

The government chose to keep a low profile, knowing full well that the process of identifying missing persons (information, exhumation and identification) is clearly defined by the remit of the CMP. Article 11 of the agreement governing the establishment and function of the CMP states that “the Committee shall not attempt to apportion responsibility for the death of any missing person, or investigate the cause of such deaths.”

The rationale behind this article is that the issue of the missing persons should be treated as a humanitarian issue alone. In this way, people will be encouraged to come forth with information, without the threat of criminal liability hanging over their heads. Moreover, the very raison d’être of the CMP is to heal old wounds, not open fresh ones.

If this agreement were to be breached, it would quite simply signal the end of efforts to determine the fate of missing persons, and we would be back to square one. What’s more, let us suppose that Greek Cypriots started taking legal action; the other side would be sure to follow, and the Turkish Cypriots possess an equally incriminating brief with cases of soldiers as well as women and children who were killed in cold blood. The Cyprus problem would once again be dragged into a never-ending legal quagmire, which would only serve to benefit the lawyers/politicians and those sections of the media that have undertaken a mission to prove that “coexistence is futile.” Once again, also, it is the relatives of the missing persons who would pay the price.

Caption: Doctor Andreas Demetriades (with glasses) with Turkish photographer Ergin Konuksever. The two met in Nicosia a few weeks ago, before the furor over the five National Guardsmen broke out.




Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2009

[Piratis]

Both sides suffered- end of!

Of course! No question about that.

But we can also say:
None would suffer if the Turks/TCs didn't start the conflict (1958) and the war (1974) - end off!

As is almost always the case, when there is a war or a conflict both sides suffer. For example Germany in WWII had among the most casualties from the countries that participated in that war.

So the important thing is not to say that "both sides suffered", that is inevitable when a conflict or a war starts. The important thing is who is the aggressor and who started the conflict and the war.

As I have shown many times in the forum, both the inter-communal conflict and the war of 1974 was started by the Turks/TCs with the aim first to prevent Cypriots from exercising their legitimate rights, and secondly for annihilating most Cypriots from half of Cyprus, a plan they created in the 50s before the conflict, and for which they created a conflict and then a war in order to materialize. (and which they are now try to legalize)

[Viewpoint]

Both sides suffered- end of!

Of course! No question about that.

But we can also say:
None would suffer if the Turks/TCs didn't start the conflict (1958) and the war (1974) - end off!

As is almost always the case, when there is a war or a conflict both sides suffer. For example Germany in WWII had among the most casualties from the countries that participated in that war.

So the important thing is not to say that "both sides suffered", that is inevitable when a conflict or a war starts. The important thing is who is the aggressor and who started the conflict and the war.

As I have shown many times in the forum, both the inter-communal conflict and the war of 1974 was started by the Turks/TCs with the aim first to prevent Cypriots from exercising their legitimate rights, and secondly for annihilating most Cypriots from half of Cyprus, a plan they created in the 50s before the conflict, and for which they created a conflict and then a war in order to materialize. (and which they are now try to legalize)

When did the enosis dream start? 1940ssss???

[Oracle]

Murdered whilst in the custody of Turkish troops!

Turkish war crimes uncovered in mass graves in Cyprus

The Turkish army has been accused of war crimes during its illegal invasion in 1974 of Cyprus, which has provoked Greek Cypriots to prepare law suits to prosecute Turkey for war crimes. Following the discovery of human remains in a mass grave confirmed using DNA evidence to be the bodies of five Greek-Cypriot soldiers who appeared in an "iconic" photograph depicting the ferocious military attack instigated by Turkish troops on the Mediterranean island....


http://www.thelondondailynews.com/turki ... -3248.html