Piratis wrote:
Egypt is not the same case at all. What you are talking about is a war, not struggle for decolonization. The equaivalent would be if Cyprus had a population of 60 million people and an army of proportional size to this population, and we military took back the British bases. That would be a totally different thing.
So I repeat: It would be not difficult at all for the British to divide the population based on religious and linguistic differences, even if independence was the aim. They would simply offer to the TCs gains on the expense of the majority of the population, and the TCs would gladly accept these gains and side with the colonialists. And in that case the result would be even worst for us, since not only there would be division anyway, but the balance of power will worst for us since we wouldn't have Greece on our side.
Could some other minority in some other country act in a different way? Maybe. But this is the TCs we are talking about. The people who are always happy to accept privileges and gains on the expense of the rest of the population.
Egypt didn't take Suez back through military means. Don't forget that Egypt was actually more like defeated on the military field during Suez War. If there was a significant portion of population around the Suez Canal supporting its control by the Brits, things might be different today.
As I said many times, Brits would certainly try to divide the Cypriot population, the one way or another. But instead of accepting the division in the way they wanted, we could at least try to fight against it. I believe there were good chances for winning big parts of TCs for the goal of an independence, provided that their participation in power in the new state would be secured. TCs are normal people and no different than them.
Similarly an even bigger part of the Greek community in Asia Minor fled before the population exchange.
What didn't happen to the Turks that remained in Greece is that they didn't become "casualties" and all the other exaggerations that TCs use to excuse their crimes in Cyprus. Compared to how Turkey treated the Greeks under her control (in Turkey and north Cyprus) the Turks in Greece were in a far far better position, and they would have been in an even better one if Turkey was not so aggressive against the Greek populations (Greece did not respond in kind to the Turkish aggression).
Also, the TCs in Cyprus today are less than what they were in 1960 or 1974. If Cyprus was united with Greece without any conflict between GCs and TCs, then not only TCs would not become "casualties" but on the contrary their population would be more than what it is today.
How does the treatment of Greeks in Turkey make the bad treatment of Muslims in Greece any better? Even if we assumed that the greek state oppressed its Muslim population just for the sake of taking revenge (and it's not like that, there are much more serious reasons than this), doesn't this mean that something like that could happen to TCs as well in case of Enosis? That they would have to suffer from oppression, whenever Turkey oppressed its greek population, something which wouldn't depend on them and on which they could have no influence? How do you expect the TCs accepting that?
