Cyprus-Forum.com

[Nikitas]

You are confusing peace keeping with campaigns. Cyprus cannot participate in NATO peace keeping because it is not a member. Greece does and has a sizeable contingents in Kossovo and elsewhere.

The Greek army in 1922 made the strategic error to bite more than it could chew. The objective was to destroy the Turkish army and force a capitulation. And that was the cause of its defeat.

The Kurds are in no way friends of the GCs or the Greeks. Where did you see that written? What is undeniable is that one third of the population is not Turkish and they do have national aspirations. They have resisted assimilation policies and have retained their seaparate culture and identity since 1923. I contrasted this with Greece who came out of 1923 with an almost 100 per cent Greek and Christian population which allowed it to proceed with no internal problems to a western orientation, with no attachments to the east.

[runaway]

You are confusing peace keeping with campaigns. Cyprus cannot participate in NATO peace keeping because it is not a member. Greece does and has a sizeable contingents in Kossovo and elsewhere.

The Greek army in 1922 made the strategic error to bite more than it could chew. The objective was to destroy the Turkish army and force a capitulation. And that was the cause of its defeat.

The Kurds are in no way friends of the GCs or the Greeks. Where did you see that written? What is undeniable is that one third of the population is not Turkish and they do have national aspirations. They have resisted assimilation policies and have retained their seaparate culture and identity since 1923. I contrasted this with Greece who came out of 1923 with an almost 100 per cent Greek and Christian population which allowed it to proceed with no internal problems to a western orientation, with no attachments to the east.

I told you. Only DTP supporters have other aspirations. 20 million Kurds have no problems with being Turkish citizens. And before waving the flag of Kurdish nationalism, clean your own garden and give some rights to Turkish minority in Greece.

[Paphitis]

Paphitis,

One thing about the S-300s. The result of the Turkish objections was their installation in Crete. Often I wonder if that was not the point from the start. Their location in Crete gives greater usefulness than their originallly announced location in Paphos. If you draw a 300 km circle in eastern Crete you will see what I mean.

So was the S300 affair a fiasco or a strategic manouver of some genius? Hard to tell.

I agree with you Nikitas. I think it was a major blunder on Turkey's part to object to the deployment in Paphos. I think Turkey would be kicking itself, because the S300 in Crete provides Greece with complete Air Defence Coverage from north to south.



The above picture highlights the arc you refer to Nikitas. The pictures are from the link I posted above.



It is certainly interesting to ponder whether the whole fiasco was indeed a clever strategic maneuver.

[Nikitas]

Runway,

Read yesterday's statement re the Kurdish question by Erdogan. He obviously does not agree with your assessment that all is just fine with the Kurds and wants to solve the problem. Notice he calls it a problem.

As for minority conditions in Greece, you would wish that TCs in northern Cyprus lived as well as the moslems of Thrace.

[Nikitas]

Paphiti,

Those are interesting photos. Now if you put the circle with its center in eastern Crete you see how the presence of S300s cancels out the scenarios of power projection in the space between Crete and Cyprus, a scenario the Turkish armed forces have been working on for years.

[runaway]

As for minority conditions in Greece, you would wish that TCs in northern Cyprus lived as well as the moslems of Thrace.

You are a fucking hypocrite. You talk about TCs and Kurds as a minority but when it comes to Greece, you deny putting a name to the problem. TURKS live in Western Thrace and they have problems.

[Nikitas]

it is not only Turks. The minority includes people of moslem religion who refuse to call themselves Turks, like the Pomaks and moslem Rom who are as numerous as the Turks. The terminology of moslem minority was put into the treaty of Lausanne and it includes all these people. Now go ask a Turk of Rodope how he regards Pomaks and Rom and then come talk about hypocrisy.

[bigOz]

You are a funny guy Big Oz. Your eclectic texts suit your skewed version of reality.

The Turks did not retake lost territory in the war of independence. They brought in Ibrahim of Egypt to do it for them. It was his excesses and the savage depopulation of Morea that led to the Navarino naval action agains tthe combined Turkish and Egyptian fleets. None of the Turkish generals sent from Turkey managed to put down the revolt.

Dodecanese, so wonderfully treated by the Turks, that several islands were burned during the war of independence. Look up the destruction of Kasos, a glorious annal for the Turkish army. And by all accounts, including yours, the islands were populated by Greeks since time immemorial. Presumably they did not want to be a minority and be ruled by Turks anymore. Is that not the point you and VP and others make in here about TCs?

Balkan wars. Actions in Greece were exclusively between the Greek and Ottoman armies and the Ottomans managed to lose them all. Naval actions were exclusively between Greece and the Ottoman navy, as the landlocked states of the Balkans had no navies. Again the Ottoman navy managed to lose them all.

You had better look up some military history texts and see details of the military actions and realise that the Turks, like all people in the world, are fully capable of making some major military blunders. No army is invincible, and no empire lasts forever.

Nikitas, if you wish to address a sensible argument with no quotes and with only feelings/allegations, and telling me I am funny, then you must be the new comedian in this forum!

You made certain claims in your original post and I proved your allegations to be baseless with historic references and facts. Furthermose you continue with baseless arguments - I might just be starting to lose respect for you!
WHO SAID TURKS ARE INVINCIBLE OR THEY ARE NOT CAPABLE OF BLUNDERS?

What fucking exclusive naval actions were between Greece and Turkey? You mean to say between Ottomans and Greeks, don't you? Turkey did not exist at the time...

But let's move on to Thrace!
QUOTE

Turks form an officially unrecognized minority group in Greece, traditionally settled in the northeastern region of Thrace, also known as Greek or Western Thrace to distinguish it from the parts of Thrace which belong to Bulgaria and Turkey. According to [Greek] official sources, they number approximately 50,000, out of the approximately 98,000 members of the only officially recognized minority in Greece, the Muslims of Thrace, recorded in the 1991 census. Today there are almost 120.000 Turkish people living only in Western Thrace (without the Turks in the Dodecanese Islands and Crete). The size of the Muslim minority as a whole, as well as the Turkish-identifying component, may be slightly different according to various NGOs. According to Human Rights Watch, the Muslim minority numbers between 80,000 and 120,000 (1999), as the organization tends to attribute "Turkishness" to the entire minority.

Within the larger definition of the Muslim minority, the Turks of Western Thrace were exempted from the 1922-1923 Exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey and were granted special rights within the framework of Lausanne Treaty, such as education in the Turkish language (which was forbidden by Greece until very recent history).

In 1990 a new electoral law was introduced in Greece, which set a threshold of at least 3% of the nationwide vote for a party to be represented in the parliament. The participation of members of the Muslim minority in the Hellenic Parliament is guaranteed as all political parties have Muslim candidates from Thrace. Moreover, 0.5% of places in Greek universities are reserved for members of the Muslim minority under an affirmative action plan.

Officially however, the Greek government classifies those Turks as just a part of the entire minority. The Turks compose about 50% of the minority. The other 25% are the Pomacs, a local Muslim tribe of Balkan origin while the remaining 15% are Roma. This characterization was mutually accepted by both sides in the Treaty of Lausanne.

According to the Greek government, between 1955 and 1998, approximately 60,000 Greek Muslim individuals, predominantly Turkish, were deprived of their citizenship under Article 19. Of these 60,000, approximately 7,182 lost their citizenship between 1981 and 1997.

I suggest you read http://www.armory.com/~thrace/back.htm below are some passages just to wet your appetite:

QUOTE
Assessing the number of Turks and other minorities in Greece is problematic. The census of 1928 recorded 191,254 Turks while the 1951 census recorded 179,895 Turks of whom virtually all were either Muslim by religion, 92,219, or Orthodox, 86,838. While some live on the Greek islands neighbouring Turkey, most live in Western Thrace. The Pomaks, Muslim Slavs, or a small number of Muslim Greeks, tend to live also in Western Thrace in villages in the southern Rhodope and due to the official reticence to give figures for ethnic minorities, only for religious ones, it is hard to separate them from the Turks.

Much of Western Thrace is restricted area due to reasons of national security. These areas are the border areas with Bulgaria where many Turks and Pomaks live and in these militarized areas large portions of land has been expropriated from Pomaks and Turks. The inhabitants of these areas are severely restricted in their freedom of movement to 30kms radius of their residence. Decree 1366/1938 which forbids foreign nationals to buy land near border areas is still operational and it is claimed that this decree is used against ethnic Turks and Pomaks even though they are Greek citizens.

In the exchange of populations following the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-22 some 60,000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor were allowed, in contravention of the Treaty of Lausanne, to settle in Western Thrace, and under steady administrative and economic pressure from the Greek authorities a gradual migration of Muslims to Turkey ensued. This is particularly noticeable in the previously Muslim province of Ebros where the population now is Greek Orthodox.

From 1977 all the place names in Komotini were changed from Turkish forms to Greek forms and henceforth it was forbidden to use the old names for official purposes, apparently on pain of fine or even imprisonment. Mention of the Turkish name in parenthesis after the Greek name is also forbidden.

Over a long period there have been growing complaints by Muslims, Turks and Pomaks, that: they, unlike Greek Orthodox Christians, cannot buy real estate, except for a few select people who cooperate with the authorities, neither can they negotiate loans or credits; threat building construction for Turkish houses has been withheld for many years resulting in the Turks being forced to live in backward conditions (easily observable by a casual visitor), neither is permission to build or restore mosques forthcoming; Muslims have been particularly affected by expropriation of land for public use without adequate compensation, and the re-allocation of land in Western Thrace which began in 1967 has resulted in their receiving inferior land in exchange; Muslims are virtually excluded from the state bureaucracy and hindered in business matters by difficulties in obtaining business and driving licenses and even subject to punitive levies; despite constitutional guarantees, Turks who leave Greece, even for a temporary period, have been denied re-entry under Article 19 of the Greek Nationality Law.

In the vital field of education the Greek authorities have steadily increased teaching in Greek at the expense of Turkish. From the 1960s onwards religious teachers from the Arab world have progressively been reduced while the employment of teachers from Turkey to Turkish schools in Western Thrace has been stopped. Since 1968 only graduates from a special academy in Thessaloniki [Selanik] can be qualified to teach in Turkish schools. This academy takes much of its intake from Greek secondary schools and, its critics claim, relies on an outdated religious curriculum deliberately to create an incompetent Hellenized education system in Western Thrace isolated from the mainstream of modern Turkish culture. The situation has deteriorated with the authorities introducing an entrance exam for the two Turkish secondary minority schools in Komotini and Xanthi - there are some 300 Turkish primary schools - and a directorate from the government in March 1984 stipulating that graduate examinations from Turkish secondary and high schools have to be in Greek [!]. The implementation of this law in 1985 with, in some cases, merely a few months' notice was extremely hard on the unfortunate students. The result of these measures has been a dramatic decline in secondary school students in Turkish schools from 227 in Xanthi and 305 in Komotini in 1983-4, to 85 and 42, respectively, in 1986-7. Greek history books portray Turks in crude stereotypes and while Turkish pupils are allowed some books from Turkey, there have been inexplicable delays resulting in long outdated textbooks having to be used.

The authorities have also prohibited the use of the adjective "Turkish" in titles denoting associations etc. and the Turkish Teachers Association in Western Thrace was closed by order of Komotini court on 20 March 1986, a decision upheld by the Athens High Court on 28 July 1987.

I also reccommend you take a look at:
http://www.armory.com/~thrace/demokritos.htm

[EPSILON]

As for minority conditions in Greece, you would wish that TCs in northern Cyprus lived as well as the moslems of Thrace.

You are a fucking hypocrite. You talk about TCs and Kurds as a minority but when it comes to Greece, you deny putting a name to the problem. TURKS live in Western Thrace and they have problems.

For the time they have no problem at all, they spy, they support Ankara etc..their problem will start and finish the SAME day Turkey WILL create a serious problem in the Aegean.

[NikosGB23]

As for minority conditions in Greece, you would wish that TCs in northern Cyprus lived as well as the moslems of Thrace.

You are a fucking hypocrite. You talk about TCs and Kurds as a minority but when it comes to Greece, you deny putting a name to the problem. TURKS live in Western Thrace and they have problems.

For the time they have no problem at all, they spy, they support Ankara etc..their problem will start and finish the SAME day Turkey WILL create a serious problem in the Aegean.

Not to mention the way Greeks were treated in Istanbul...ethnic cleansing