by fi » Mon Aug 01, 2005 2:28 pm
I am quoting below a very small part of the report by United Nations Mediator on Cyprus Galo Plaza (26 March 1965):
"The Turkish-Cypriot Community
71. They claimed that the recent events had proved that the various contractual and actual guarantees provided in the past were insufficient to meet the needs of their community for security. Additional and more effective guarantees must therefore be secured.
72. The additional guarantees, they maintained, could best be obtained by providing a geographical basis for the state of affairs created by the Zurich and London Agreements. In short, they wished to be physically separated from the Greek community. Their first inclination had been to seek this separation through the outright physical partitioning of Cyprus between the Turkish and Greek nations, of which in their opinion the Turkish and Greek communities constituted an extension. However, "considering that this would not be willingly agreed to by Greek and Cypriot-Greeks", they modified this concept to that of creating a federal State over the physical separation of the two communities.
73. Their proposal envisaged a compulsory exchange of population in order to bring about a state of affairs in which each community would occupy a separate part of the island. The dividing line was in fact suggested: to run from the village of Yalia on the north-western coast through the towns of Nicosia in the centre, and Famagusta in the east. The zone lying north of this line was claimed by the Turkish-Cypriot community; it is said to have an area of about 1,084 square miles or 38 per cent of the total area of the Republic. An exchange of about 10,000 Greek families for about the same number of Turkish families was contemplated.
74. Each of the two separate communal areas would enjoy self-government in all matters falling outside federal affairs. Each could have cultural and economic relations directly with Greece or Turkey as the case might be. Each area could also enter into international agreements with Greece or Turkey as the case might be to regulate "relations of neighbourhood such as the provision of a certain special pass system" between that area and Greece or Turkey.
150. It is essential to be clear what this proposal implies. To refer to it simply as "federation" is to oversimplify the matter. What is involved is not merely to establish a federal form of government but also to secure the geographical separation of the two communities. The establishment of a federal regime requires a territorial basis, and this basis does not exist. In an earlier part of this report, I explained the island-wide intermingling in normal times of the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot populations. The events since December 1963 have not basically altered this characteristic; even the enclaves where numbers of Turkish-Cypriots concentrated following the troubles are widely scattered over the island, while thousands of other Turkish-Cypriots have remained in mixed villages.
153. In the first place, the separation of the communities is utterly unacceptable to the majority community of Cyprus and on present indications could not be imposed except by force. The opposition to it is in part political: Greek-Cypriots see in the proposal a first step towards the partitioning of the island, although this is vigorously denied by the Turkish-Cypriot leadership as well as by the Turkish Government. But to my mind the objections raised also on economic, social and moral grounds are in themselves serious obstacles to the proposition. It would seem to require a compulsory movement of the people concerned - many thousands on both sides - contrary to all the enlightened principles of the present time, including those set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moreover, this would be a compulsory movement of a kind that would seem likely to impose severe hardships on the families involved as it would be impossible for all of them, or perhaps even the majority of them, to obtain an exchange of land or occupation suited to their needs or experience; it would entail also an economic and social disruption which would be such as to render neither part of the country viable. Such a state of affairs would constitute a lasting, if not permanent, cause of discontent and unrest.
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