Cyprus-Forum.com

[Viewpoint]

The fact of the matter Piratis is this: as you can see from every post by VP,and he is truly the representative of the average TC,most TCs are not prepared to put their future in the noble notions of democracy and human rights...They need real and tangible protection,at least to start with,to come to the democracy party...If you keep ignoring this,and reduce everything to a refusal to grant you your democratic and human rights,totally wiping out the events of 1955-74,we will not find a solution...Or rather the status quo will be the permanent solution...In which case all Cypriots will lose forever their most fundamental human right: to live in peace and harmony in their country of birth,their homeland..Because partition will set in concrete the bitterness and emnity between the two communities...Are you prepared to sacrifice this for the sake of sticking to your principles of democracy and human rights as you, and only you, define them???Democracy could easily turn into tyranny of the majority,and human rights might not be worth the paper they are written on in some places...This is the fear of the average TC...If you refuse to acknowledge it as legitimate ,given our past,then you have no right to expect the TCs to trust you...I hope you can see my point,coming from someone who personally believes that he is in no danger from any GC except perhaps the odd fanatical lunatic,who might believe that any good TC is a dead TC... Sad

[Piratis]

Thanks for giving me the chance to post my reply again:

Welcome back Bir

The voice of the reason is the one which always supports universal principles such as human rights and democracy. If such principles were allowed in Cyprus then there wouldn't be any problems to begin with, neither any EOKA or TMT would exist. The Cypriot people would be able to peacefully and democratically decide about their own island. The day that the Cyprus Problem will be solved will be the day that those universal principles are allowed to Cyprus.

Specific foreigners didn't want to allow these universal principles to prevail in Cyprus because they wanted to continue having control over Cyprus instead of allowing this control to the Cypriot people. It is a fact that those foreigners did use some extremist groups within Cypriots in order to destabilize Cyprus and created problems (TMT - EOKA B). It is also a fact that those foreigners continue to spend a lot of money today in their effort to have an outcome that would continue to serve their interests instead of the interests of the Cypriot people.

Sorry Bir, but it is naive to say that there are no traitors. You can find such traitors in our past and you can find them in our present as well. The way those foreigners channel their funds change, the recipients change, but what is always constant is the willingness by some minorities within the Cypriot society to accept that money and promote the interests of those foreigners instead of the interests of the Cypriot people.

Human rights (which includes the right for property) and democracy are the bare minimum of what a result should have in order to be classified as a solution. It is deplorable of how easily some people in here brush away these most basic human rights. If they are not traitors then the only other thing they can be is stupid.

Thanks for the welcome,Piratis..It is good to be back..

Nice to have you back Bir. We might disagree on some things but I know that we share the same underlying principles.

The voice of reason I am talking about is he one which whispers "when there are historical emnity,conflict,bitterness and mistrust between people,it is essential to address those isues first,before you can find a compromise solution to your problem"!!!

Enmity, conflict etc were not things that were created out of thin air Bir. Those things were created due to a cause. A solution is the one which addresses the cause of the problem. If the source of the problem is not removed then not only the problems we currently have can not be solved but new ones will probably be created.

Full democracy and human rights are admirable notions,but what is the use of pushing them if there is little chance of success,at this stage of our developping cooperation and maturity???

The use is that they are the bare minimum requirements for a permanent solution. What is the point of changing one problematic status to another, possibly even worst, status?

If a solution is not feasible today does this means that we should create more problems instead?

Given our sorry past,there is no way we will go from where we are to a full political democracy in our lifetime..So what is the next best thing? What is realistically achievable???Those are the questions people like Bananiot keep raising. They do not deserve to be branded traitors for stating the obvious...There is a big difference between a traitor and a true patriot,one who would tell you your wrongs without fear or favour,in order to advance the just cause of his people...It is easy to close your eyes and ears to the realities,historical goings on,and parrot your love for your country...Much more difficult to criticise your people in order to warn them of further calamity...People who choose the second part should not be demonised.They should be respected,admired and appreciated...

I don't know what is the next best thing after human rights Bir. Animal rights maybe? For me Human rights are the bare minimum and every human being on the plant has right for them. Nobody has the right to tell us that we can not even have our human rights and therefore we have to choose some "next best thing".

I also want to let you know that democracy is something we already have. Turkey illegally occupies 1/3rd of our land, violates our human rights, but democracy is something she didn't manage to take from us.

Also, while Turkey can illegally occupy 1/3rd of our country, our rights over the occupied territory are fully recognized. This is why we can resort to the ECHR, ECJ etc and win those cases.

With what you call "the next best thing", not only we would give up the democracy we have, but we would also give up our Human rights.

Nobody reasonable would consider such thing as a step in the right direction. It is a step backward, that not only removes from us our democratic rights and legalizes the human rights violations against us, not only it officially divides Cyprus into "Greek" and "Turkish", but also creates a fertile ground for even more enmity, conflicts and problems. That is not the kind of environment I want to raise my children.

As a community we made a lot of compromises Bir. We accepted that Cyprus will not be united with Greece, although we had every right for this. We can accept for the TCs to have more rights than any other equivalently sized ethnic group in any other country (their language as an official language, guaranteed proportional representation at all levels, veto power for the change of constitution, internal autonomy over areas where they are historically the majority etc.) But asking from us to even give up our human and democratic rights is going way too far, so far that the result of such arrangement can not possibly be called a "solution".

The fact of the matter Piratis is this: as you can see from every post by VP,and he is truly the representative of the average TC,most TCs are not prepared to put their future in the noble notions of democracy and human rights...They need real and tangible protection,at least to start with,to come to the democracy party...

If you keep ignoring this,and reduce everything to a refusal to grant you your democratic and human rights,totally wiping out the events of 1955-74,we will not find a solution...Or rather the status quo will be the permanent solution...In which case all Cypriots will lose forever their most fundamental human right: to live in peace and harmony in their country of birth,their homeland..Because partition will set in concrete the bitterness and emnity between the two communities...Are you prepared to sacrifice this for the sake of sticking to your principles of democracy and human rights as you, and only you, define them???Democracy could easily turn into tyranny of the majority,and human rights might not be worth the paper they are written on in some places...This is the fear of the average TC...If you refuse to acknowledge it as legitimate ,given our past,then you have no right to expect the TCs to trust you...I hope you can see my point,coming from someone who personally believes that he is in no danger from any GC except perhaps the odd fanatical lunatic,who might believe that any good TC is a dead TC...

We need protection more than TCs do, and still we do not demand that our protection should come at the expense of the human rights of TCs. Turkey keeps using the TCs on the island as an excuse to serve her own interests on the expense of our rights. We could also say that the ethnic cleansing and human rights violations against the TCs were required for our protection, and claim that the "solution" would require the removal of the TCs from Cyprus, similar to the way that the German minority was removed from Czechoslovakia after WWII in order to remove from Germany the excuse of invading that country again with the excuse of "protecting" their minority. But we do not have such kind of demands because we do not believe that ethnic cleansing and human rights violations can be part of anything which is called a "solution".

VP and his kind are trying to excuse their usual aim for partition, an aim which was created before the conflict between the two communities. Their demands have nothing to do with their "protection" and everything to do with legalizing partition and having gains on our expense. This fact can be seen most easily in the Turkish demands for the land distribution. The 18% of TCs demanding close to 30% of land and 50% of the coast line of Cyprus. How can such demands have anything to do with their "protection"? Only somebody who is very naive would believe such lame excuses.

I didn't define neither Human Rights nor Democracy. The Human Rights, which are universal for all humans, are defined by the UN:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

And a good definition of democracy can be found in the website of the US government (which I didn't write either):

All democracies are systems in which citizens freely make political decisions by majority rule. But rule by the majority is not necessarily democratic: No one, for example, would call a system fair or just that permitted 51 percent of the population to oppress the remaining 49 percent in the name of the majority. In a democratic society, majority rule must be coupled with guarantees of individual human rights that, in turn, serve to protect the rights of minorities--whether ethnic, religious, or political, or simply the losers in the debate over a piece of controversial legislation. The rights of minorities do not depend upon the goodwill of the majority and cannot be eliminated by majority vote. The rights of minorities are protected because democratic laws and institutions protect the rights of all citizens.

http://usinfo.org/mirror/usinfo.state.g ... hatdm2.htm

So democracy is not just majority rule. Majority rule is one of the required elements of all democracies, but it is not the only one. Democracy also comes with "individual human rights that, in turn, serve to protect the rights of minorities".

And of course what I support is a true democracy, not regimes like those in Turkey. Your claim that democracy can turn into tyranny and therefore we should not allow democracy, is equivalent to killing an innocent person, depriving him of his right for life, with the excuse that he could turn into a mass murderer. You can't deprive the basic rights of people with such hypothetical assumptions Bir!!

Furthermore I have no problem with adopting additional measures that would be truly aimed to guarantee that the TCs will get the 100% of their human rights and as a community they will get their fair proportional share at all levels. Such measures can be things like Turkish as an official language of Cyprus, Islam to be treated by the government at the same level as Christianity, TCs to be guaranteed proportional representation at all levels, TCs to have veto power over changes in the constitution etc. And if you think that the GCs in an EU Cyprus are so evil that will try to brake all those fair and just things by force, then I wouldn't mind an international force in Cyprus that will guarantee that Cyprus remains demilitarized and that all aspects of our constitution are observed.

The 18% of TCs taking 30% of land and 50% of coastline, or violating the basic human rights of GCs by depriving us from our property rights and discriminating against us by reducing the effect of our votes, are not things that "protect" the TCs, but unfair gains of TCs on our expense, something that can only result in more hate and conflicts.

Furthermore what TCs demand now is equivalent of legitimizing partition and officially splitting Cyprus into "Greek" and "Turkish" parts. How is such de jure partition any better than the de facto partition we have today?

[YFred]

Piratis, you are wasting your time. We didn't read your reply first time, what makes you think we will read it second time?

[Piratis]

Piratis, you are wasting your time. We didn't read your reply first time, what makes you think we will read it second time?

Ask VP who keeps posting the same thing in many threads.

And I am not wasting my time because what I wrote was a reply to Bir, not to you.

[Viewpoint]

The title of the thread came out wrong thats why is was duplicated sorry for the confusion.

[B25]

Piratis, you are wasting your time. We didn't read your reply first time, what makes you think we will read it second time?

File Pirati, this is one time when I have to agree with Yfred. You are totally wasting your time with Bir. Your excellent post was shot donw and rubbished when he said :

"The fact of the matter Piratis is this: as you can see from every post by VP,and he is truly the representative of the average TC,most TCs are not prepared to put their future in the noble notions of democracy and human rights...They need real and tangible protection,at least to start with,to come to the democracy party...

If you keep ignoring this,and reduce everything to a refusal to grant you your democratic and human rights,totally wiping out the events of 1955-74,we will not find a solution...Or rather the status quo will be the permanent solution...In which case all Cypriots will lose forever their most fundamental human right:"

Can't you see he is just the same as them, he expects you to give up your, our human and democratic rights to appease them and then throws the events of 55-74 in the mix. what happened to moving on they keep talking about?

And if, as he says VP is representative, then we need a F great wall to keep them out, sorry, buy VP is poison and I don't even want to think I have such a neighbour.

So Yfred was right in this case, your posts are wasted on them, they don't want to hear the truth.

[Oracle]

Are VP and Birkibrisli playing "good cop, bad cop" with us?

Because to me, they both sound lacking in foresight; entrenched in some false idea of a "past" which they brandish to seal their gains from GCs and win yet more.

They callously disregard the Human Rights of GCs.

[Piratis]

B25, Bir is not the same as VP. Unfortunately he lost the ability to see objectively recently.

I excuse him because I believe his aim is to get any kind of "solution" that would stop TCs from being swallowed by Turkey. I also believe him when he says that he would personally accept a true democracy with human rights for all. So he is nothing like VP.

What he does not understand is that the price he is asking from us to pay in order to save his community is way too high. Human rights and democracy are extremely valuable things and we are not going to sacrifice what is most important to save TCs from their self-destruction.

He also accepts the excuses of people like VP and he thinks that we can have a bad "solution" right now, and that this bad "solution" can help to improve the climate between Cypriots (it will actually worsen it) and that after some time it will become possible to change to something better. Probably he missed what VP (the average TC) keeps saying: "If you didn't like it you shouldn't have signed it".

[Expatkiwi]

What he does not understand is that the price he is asking from us to pay in order to save his community is way too high. Human rights and democracy are extremely valuable things and we are not going to sacrifice what is most important to save TCs from their self-destruction.

Ironic comment, Piratis. That's exactly the expressed view from the other side. The TC's think the price that the GC side demands is way too high. Someone once said that the art of diplomacy is to leave both sides equally dissatisfied. Maybe both side should strive for such 'mutual dissatisfaction" if the impasse is to be broken.

[Viewpoint]

Piratis, you are wasting your time. We didn't read your reply first time, what makes you think we will read it second time?

File Pirati, this is one time when I have to agree with Yfred. You are totally wasting your time with Bir. Your excellent post was shot donw and rubbished when he said :

"The fact of the matter Piratis is this: as you can see from every post by VP,and he is truly the representative of the average TC,most TCs are not prepared to put their future in the noble notions of democracy and human rights...They need real and tangible protection,at least to start with,to come to the democracy party...

If you keep ignoring this,and reduce everything to a refusal to grant you your democratic and human rights,totally wiping out the events of 1955-74,we will not find a solution...Or rather the status quo will be the permanent solution...In which case all Cypriots will lose forever their most fundamental human right:"

Can't you see he is just the same as them, he expects you to give up your, our human and democratic rights to appease them and then throws the events of 55-74 in the mix. what happened to moving on they keep talking about?

And if, as he says VP is representative, then we need a F great wall to keep them out, sorry, buy VP is poison and I don't even want to think I have such a neighbour.

So Yfred was right in this case, your posts are wasted on them, they don't want to hear the truth.

Its not the human rights and deocracy we are afraid of but the people that will administer them...when will you get that into your thick skull. And feel free to build that wall whenever you wish this will fall in line and prove to the EU and the world exactly the GC mindset bringing recognition to the TRNC within 24 hours..