Liberating Cyprus like all other Greek islands and territories after centuries of being oppressed under foreign rulers (British, Turks etc) was the right of the Cypriot people. Just because a minority of Muslims was formed in Cyprus during the Ottoman rule this didn't mean that Cypriots didn't have the right for freedom. Most other Greek islands and territories had Muslim minorities as well. But just like Cyprus, the vast majority of the population was still Greek for 1000s of years, which is why it made perfect sense for those islands and mainland territories to be liberated and be part of a free Greek State. Rhodes for example, which also has a Turkish minority, was liberated from Italian rule in 1947 and naturally it united with the rest of Greece.
Now of course we can not expect from the Turks to understand our rights. For them we are the slaves whom they conquered, and we have no right to democratically determine the destiny of our own island.
Their mentality has not changed since 1821:
During the Greek War of Independence in 1821, the Ottoman authorities feared that Greek Cypriots would rebel again. Archbishop Kyprianos, a powerful leader who worked to improve the education of Greek Cypriot children, was accused of plotting against the government. Kyprianos, his bishops, and hundreds of priests and important laymen were arrested and summarily hanged or decapitated on July 9, 1821.
If the Cypriot people had been allowed their freedom from back then, there wouldn't be any need for enosis (union) since Cyprus would be part of the initial Greek state.
The UN resolution for decolonization clearly defines "free association with an independent State,
integration into an independent State, or independence as the three
legitimate options of full self-government."
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpi/decolonizat ... ration.htm
Being integrated to the rest of the Greek state was not any less legitimate than independence. The Cypriot people should have been allowed to choose in a democratic way which of the legitimate options they wanted for their own island. Then there wouldn't be the need for any armed struggle or any EOKA. Given the option we might have even chosen a
real independence. (unlike the one they gave us)
Since our legitimate options were denied by the foreign Imperialists we were forced to revolt against them. This revolution was against the British Colonialists, and not against the Muslim/Turkish minority. The Muslim minority was not targeted or attacked. Who was attacked were the British Colonialists and those Cypriots who collaborated with them. We have several other minorities in Cyprus, just like there are Muslim and other minorities in the rest of Greece, and we have no problem with them being in Cyprus.
The responsibility for the begging of the inter-communal conflict lies solely on the TCs and those who armed them and used them as their pawns, turning them against GCs in order to deny from Cypriots their freedom and in this way maintain troops and control over our island.
It is the TCs who in 1958 committed the first massacre and burned the homes and shops of innocent people for the
sole reason that they were GCs. These is a
fact. Now Bir is trying to circumvent this fact with
imaginary stories about things that never happened anywhere except from the sick minds of those who imagined them in order to excuse their crimes. They imagined that GCs would supposedly attack them, and they used their own imaginary story as an excuse to commit massacres and burn the homes and shops of innocent people, starting in this way the inter-communal conflict.
