Cyprus-Forum.com

[MrH]

Source:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/12/14/cyprus-two-different-time-zones/95197044/

Check out the following Map attached of how Cyprus is seen by my journalist buddies from USA Today!

[MrH]

I rest my case! I have made it my life long determination to make certain of the following: One island, Two States, One Greek, One Turkish, a UN Ceasefire Line (Border), and Nicos and Akinci compelled to a table to discuss the DISSOLUTION of the Greek Cypriot Hijacked ROC.

[B25]

Source:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/12/14/cyprus-two-different-time-zones/95197044/

Check out the following Map attached of how Cyprus is seen by my journalist buddies from USA Today!

For a paper that doesn't know that there is no such thing as a 'Cypiot' (and indeed a Turdish Cypiot) state, has no credibility. Keep on wet dreaming MrH, the paper only shows the current situation, nothing de jure about it.

[kurupetos]

I rest my case! I have made it my life long determination to make certain of the following: One island, Two States, One Greek, One Turkish, a UN Ceasefire Line (Border), and Nicos and Akinci compelled to a table to discuss the DISSOLUTION of the Greek Cypriot Hijacked ROC.

Show me where's the US embassy in 'trnc'.

[Oceanside50]

I rest my case! I have made it my life long determination to make certain of the following: One island, Two States, One Greek, One Turkish, a UN Ceasefire Line (Border), and Nicos and Akinci compelled to a table to discuss the DISSOLUTION of the Greek Cypriot Hijacked ROC.

Dream on Mr H, the ROC will keep on rolling while the occupied areas will be freed. With billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, the EU won't allow backward Turkey to stand in the way.

[MrH]

The USA Today is America's most widely read and respected newspaper, keep on dreaming if you think the ROC is Cyprus' only reality. Even Google Maps shows the Border, ceasefire line very visibly! you guys are so blind it's your actual downfall!

[Oceanside50]

Even turkey has not recognized the pseudostate, there was never an official parliamentary vote in the Turk parliament. What are you talking about Mr H?

[MrH]

Never forget my Greek Cypriot compatriots that the line that divides us is only a CEASE FIRE LINE, and Turkey can fire from The mountains of Kyrenia at anytime! Your beautiful south will end up as ugly as your mouth if you think you OWN the EU block of Cyprus. Why do you think Anastasiades poos himself and is Forced to find a "resolution". The problem of Cyprus is not at our end, but at your incomplete end! Try and extract Gas without Turkey's agreement and Turkey will flatten and demolish your side within 4 hours!. Trust me on this.....I know the military installations stationed in Northern Cyprus......of what's there today, Larnaca, Limassol and half of your trodos mountain would need 40 years to be be rebuilt. Be careful what you are doing with the Gas find. Turkey has no problems in creating a flash point and refusing to sign the next cease fire agreement. It'll be your side that will lose. Take this as a warning. Ask your military commander, if Turkey can call him that, how many hours or minutes it will take Turkey's MLRS systems to set your side of fire! The Gas Hydro scenario will be the only way left for you to beg to sign the recognition of the TRNC. What a mess of Cyprus you have made thinking that Turkey will simply stand back and watch.

[repulsewarrior]

We might have been East Bengal Hindus paying a fleeting visit to erstwhile East Pakistan. Or more recently to Bangladesh. The Mediterranean displacement is on a much smaller scale. It is also more recent. Time hasn't deadened the pain. Nor has it killed hope of regaining a lost life. Someone has scrawled "One Cyprus" on a wall in the no man's land between the Greek and Turkish checkposts where my passport is passed through a scanner. I am told young people gather there to dream of the future. They are the few who retain faith in friendship triumphing over enmity in the only capital city in the world to be still divided between rival claimants.

The East Pakistan/Bangladesh analogy surges up as Yiannis, a civil engineer trained in London, drives me to the coastal village in the far north of Cyprus where he lived until he was seventeen. That was in 1974 when Turkey invaded the island and attacked the Greeks who fled south. Yiannis is a quiet soft-spoken man with a melodious baritone voice as he sings one night in a packed restaurant. The songs yearn for a lost Elysium and his choice of words betrays the bitterness simmering within him. The Turkish north, roughly one-third of the island, is "Occupied Cyprus". He now lives in "Free Cyprus". "We grew lemons here," he says, pointing to a row of neat little Turkish bungalows and I can hear again echoes of Hindu bhadralok revisiting ancestral villages in Dhaka or Mymensingh. "These are all illegal constructions," he says. Legitimacy disappeared when the Greeks were driven out. It's too painful for him to take me to what was his house. Turkish usurpers live there now. It is with reluctance that he agrees to my suggestion to stop for lunch in a restaurant in the Turkish enclave.

Yiannis was mayor of his northern Cyprus village for fifteen years. How could that be when he left the village when he was only seventeen? The explanation is that like pretenders to non-existent thrones, refugees elect mayors in exile. They can't discharge any mayoral duties. The phantom office represents continuity. It's a state of mind, an expression of faith. Kostis Palamas, Greece's national poet who wrote the words for the Olympic hymn, said it all. "The house where I was born, even if strangers tread on it, there it stands, haunted, like a soul, inviting and waiting for me." That could have been said of Ananda Niketan, the modest house in Brahmanbaria named after my grandfather. I may have spent a few occasional days there in a long ago childhood but it remains home in a subliminal sense.

Sakis, the tall shaven-headed owner of the restaurant where Yiannis sang, boasts an even more flamboyant lineage. His establishment's name Kathodon means " en route to the way of freedom". His exotic menu of Greek dishes claims to recapture the "flavours of ingloriously lost homeland of Asia Minor". The reference is to May 29, 1453 when Ottoman troops stormed Constantinople, and Emperor Mehmed II entered that holiest of Orthodox holies, the church of St Sophia, in what is now Istanbul. The last Greek emperor, Constantine XI, died in battle. His body was never found. The ancient Byzantine empire ceased to exist. It all happened on a Tuesday which remains a black day for many of my Greek friends even in distant Australia 564 years later.

The Greek memory is much more compelling than that of East Bengalis. There's probably a greater resemblance with Tibetans who have created a virtual world for themselves in exile. I ask Nicos, who succeeded Yiannis as mayor last year, whether he sports a chain of office. He replies with a twinkle, "Not yet, but I'll have one made when I go back!" Nicos is a marine biologist who went to college in Canada. His surname reveals how closely Greek and Turk, enemies though they be, are related. The opening syllable "Hadji" distinguishes him as the descendant of a pilgrim to Jerusalem. The same word among Muslims signifies someone who has visited Mecca or Medina.

Nicos's mayoralty is one of nine municipalities of the mind accounting for 37 per cent of Cyprus. The linking organization in Nicosia, the Occupied Municipalities Committee, recalls another childhood memory. My father took me sometimes to meetings of the East Bengal Dispossessed Landowners Association in a gracious mansion in Ballygunge Circular Road, very near where I now live. Those indulgences in enjoyable nostalgia petered out long ago. The mansion - I believe it belonged to a branch of the Santosh zamindars - gave way to another of the ubiquitous blocks of flats that define Calcutta's incorrigibly middle-class destiny. What survives is the flavour of the singara and sandesh that were served at those gatherings. They mattered far more to a small boy who barely comprehended the substance of what was discussed. Unlike those elderly gentlemen who lived on memory, Yiannis and Nicos and many others like them can drive into the Turkish north and see the bright signs, smart restaurants and resorts that speak of the Ottoman ambitions (a senior Indian official's term) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has ruled Turkey since 2003.

Pretentious monuments to Kemal Atatürk and a massive flag carved into the mountainside testify to Erdogan's grandiose vision. Neglected Roman structures, a derelict Greek cemetery and churches that have been turned into mosques proclaim his ethnic and cultural exclusivity. North Cyprus doesn't pretend to Ottoman catholicity. It's a Muslim dependency that only Turkey recognizes but which Pakistan's Zia ul-Haq and Hussain Muhammad Ershad of Bangladesh tried to promote. The manpower Erdogan has mobilized across the Islamic world lends a certain bustle to his puppet republic. More than 30,000 Turkish troops uphold his authority. His financial largesse accounts for the robust facade we witness in the tourist zone. Northern Cyprus presents a different face to the pedestrian once he has left behind the shop-lined walkways of Ledra Street to venture into the residential area where we go to see Brian, an Irishman who lived for more than 30 years in New York and regards the world as his oyster. His lemon trees are heavy with bright yellow fruit recalling Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons, an evocative autobiographical account of three years on the island in the Fifties. A pet dog flirts with the Turkish neighbour's bitch. But it's a desolate landscape of crumbling plaster and flaking paint beyond Brian's oasis of books and pictures. Many surrounding colonial bungalows are boarded up. In India we associate colonial architecture with grandeur like Warren Hastings's house in Barasat or the commissioner's bungalow in Meerut. Cyprus confirms the lesson of Singapore - the empire rested on legions of humble servants who also had to be housed.

Bengalis and Tibetans aren't the only parallels. Echoing the Israeli diaspora's "Next year in Jerusalem!" toast, Alexis Galanos, president of the Occupied Municipalities Committee, wrote that it was the last year the nine ghost municipalities would be "absent from their land". That was four years ago. Greek Cypriots lack the Jew's aggressive militarism. More pertinently, they don't enjoy Jewry's powerful American patronage. At the same time, they are unwilling to forget the past as East Bengalis have done. Nor are they content with a virtual state like the Tibetans. They expect much from international goodwill. "You're a huge country," says Sakis, "a tiny per cent of Indians can make a difference!" I wish it were so. India is grateful for Cyprus's support over joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the United Nations security council. But Turkey's formidable military and its role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are not easily countered. Nor can its historic ruthlessness be matched. Pleasant and peaceable are the two adjectives that spring to mind about Greek Cypriots. They have a long and lonely road before them.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170225/ ... LDbCtIrKUk

...from Calcutta

[kurupetos]

Never forget my Greek Cypriot compatriots that the line that divides us is only a CEASE FIRE LINE, and Turkey can fire from The mountains of Kyrenia at anytime! Your beautiful south will end up as ugly as your mouth if you think you OWN the EU block of Cyprus. Why do you think Anastasiades poos himself and is Forced to find a "resolution". The problem of Cyprus is not at our end, but at your incomplete end! Try and extract Gas without Turkey's agreement and Turkey will flatten and demolish your side within 4 hours!. Trust me on this.....I know the military installations stationed in Northern Cyprus......of what's there today, Larnaca, Limassol and half of your trodos mountain would need 40 years to be be rebuilt. Be careful what you are doing with the Gas find. Turkey has no problems in creating a flash point and refusing to sign the next cease fire agreement. It'll be your side that will lose. Take this as a warning. Ask your military commander, if Turkey can call him that, how many hours or minutes it will take Turkey's MLRS systems to set your side of fire! The Gas Hydro scenario will be the only way left for you to beg to sign the recognition of the TRNC. What a mess of Cyprus you have made thinking that Turkey will simply stand back and watch.

Do it or fuck off.