Cyprus-Forum.com

[stuballstu]

Actually, Turkey's intervention was illegal if you read the relevant article:

ARTICLE IV
In the event of a breach of the provisions of the present Treaty, Greece, Turkey and the United
Kingdom undertake to consult together with respect to the representations or measure necessary to
ensure observance of those provisions.
In so far as common or concerted action may not prove possible, each of the three guaranteeing
Powers reserves the right to take action with the sole aim of reestablishing the state of affairs created by
the present Treaty.

Intervention was only accorded to the guarantors if they exercised 'the sole aim of re-establishing the state of affairs created by the present treaty'. It is in fact, their duty as those that intervened to ensure that the 1960 constitution is re-instated. Furthermore if you read article II:

Alexis

What i said was Turkey use this treaty to legalise there invasion of Cyprus. My personal view is that they were right to intervene. At this moment Turkey has to say that restoration to the 1960 constitution is not possible, at this point does that make Turkey's intervention now an invasion? there is no provision in the Treaty that the 1960 constitution can not be restored if so what happens then. Who says it couldn't? Turkey, TC's GC's.Who wanted it to be. That may have been their legal obligation but what if GC's didnt want it and TC's didnt want it were Turkish troops just expected to leave? Back when Turkey first invaded there was a lot of open wounds which are now not as open as they were 32 years ago. TC's did not want the Turkish army to leave as they didnt want ENOSIS. GC's didnt want the Turkish army to come in the first place and certainly dont want them on Cyprus now. Saddly Turkish forces will be on Cyprus for a while yet and even under any political settlement they will have a presence on Cyprus or they will not agree to it. The reasons for the Turkish army being here maybe different to the reasons that they first landed on Cyprus.

This was of course violated by both Greece and Turkey in the years 1960-1974, but that is another matter. Turkey's intervention, if it were to be in line with the treaty, should not have resulted in the partition of the island. Whichever way you look at it, Turkey's intervention was in complete violation of the treaty of guarantee. Of course you can argue that by the time she intervened the treaty had been violated by perhaps everyone (maybe not UK, although given recent evidence this is now debatable), but this is not the point, the intervention was illegal and this is why the TRNC was not given recognition and UN resolutions passed requesting that Turkey withdraw her troops.

Alexis my opinion is that the intervention itself may be legal but the fact that the Turkish troops are still here IMHO may not be so legal. However there is no doubt that Turkey has a legal arguement to stay in Cyprus. It is different peoples perception of the same law and none of those perceptions may be right or wrong. Thank God i never choose law as a subject at University. I have already given my opinion on Britains involvement on the Cyprus issue.

IMO TRNC will never be given recognition. The way things are going it may turn into a federal state but never being a state on its own.

Sure, I have thought of that, and am glad it did not happen. Does this mean GCs should be grateful to Turkey? Perhaps TCs should be grateful to EOKA for not killing all of them? Perhaps if the GCs had really meant to eliminate TCs from the island, there wouldn't be any left by 1974, given their assault began in December 1963, have you ever thought of that? Doesn;t justify what they did do though does it

No i am not saying that you should be grateful to Turkey i was pointing out that it could have been worse. Turkey could have taken a bigger hammer to the Cyprus chestnut. With fighting between GC and TC extremists going on am i not right in saying that GC's being the majority poplulation backed by Greece and gathering momentum that it was always going to come to an ugly head? With the research i have done TC's got as much help from their GC friends and vise versa during the times of intercommunal fighting. Thankfully there are some questions that we will never know the answers to.

PS: I am not trying to be deliberately provocative. I am simply trying to show the flip side of this increasingly rusty coin we call the Cyprus Problem. In reality things are never as the extremist would like us to believe. The extremist GCs would like you to believe that GCs/EOKA did nothing to the TCs in the 1960s, the extremist TC would like you to believe that Turkey's intervention was entirely justifiable in 1974. What should we really believe though?

Alexis i do not view your post as provacative at all. Your last sentence sums up the various opinions on the subject. As i said to Piratis in an earlier post there are 3 sides to every story Side A, Side B and the truth.

[growuptcs]

hi stuballstu

It would of been an intervention if they restored order 2 years topps after the invasion. Since it took much longer than that, you have to categorize it as an invasion since they never restored order for everyone in our country for which they came for. If I don't let my kids out of the house ever, you can say that they're safe from drug dealers and trouble. But that only makes me above the law only in my home. Can I hold your kids in my home and say they're safe as well but you can't see them till they're 32 years old? And after you see them, they still come home with me.
Pirates only interprets the situation and his thoughts about the issue.Mostly all of the time hes legally right and sensible. But whatever truth your looking for, theres still no excuse to why your still fighting for a TRNC. In Turkey you can have one, in Cyprus it'll never exist if we're all looking for peace.

[andri_cy]

stuballstu wrote:

Did it say on your classroom walls "A Good Turk is a Dead Turk"? It didnt on mine so please dont tell me that some GC's havn't been brought up in an environment which is not discriminitory against other races.

I dont know who fed you that bullshit on rye, but our classrooms never said "A Good Turk is a Dead Turk". So please check out what you say before you say it, because I dont believe you were there and all you know is what you are told. Sad really

Andri

A GC friend told me this. When i next see him i will find out the name of the school he went to and in what year then maybe it can be verified. Fortunately i dont believe everything i am told which is not that sad. As i am not GC i did no attend school in Cyprus. I am not saying that this appeared on every school wall, however he definately said that it was on his.

Tell me then were/are GC schoolchildren brought up to hate Turks?

Stu, even if your GC's classroom had that on the wall you cant generalize that and tell us that basically we all did. You dont know Piratis, but you did insinuate that HIS classroom did. Maybe your GC friend was brought up that way but that cant be said for all of us. It is like saying all bitish people are arses cause the Oram's bought GC land. I am sure you dont like that.

Were we taught to hate Turks? I dont think so. When I went to school we were taught the evnts that occured pre and 1974. That included the part that the GReek Junta played. We were taught the truth. I am sure that a lot of people might have been taught or trained to dislike Turks and now they are grown ups and still cant decide for themselves. I know that I dont hate anybody cause life is too short and I am not going to waste my time hating. I am sure that the people that had their mothers and grand mothers raped and their parents killed and their houses burnt down with their relatives in them, hate the Turks-its part of the whole war scene. Do you blame them?

[Alexis]

Alexis

What i said was Turkey use this treaty to legalise there invasion of Cyprus. My personal view is that they were right to intervene. At this moment Turkey has to say that restoration to the 1960 constitution is not possible, at this point does that make Turkey's intervention now an invasion?

Hi stuballstu,

Turkey's intervention became an invasion the second her army began killing innocent civilians and fighting the legitimate GC forces to force partition. At this point her intervention was as illegal as the 1974 coup backed by Greece.
You cannot have it both ways, you cannot claim that Turkey's intervention was legal when she made no attempts to restore the constitutional order.

there is no provision in the Treaty that the 1960 constitution can not be restored if so what happens then. Who says it couldn't? Turkey, TC's GC's.Who wanted it to be. That may have been their legal obligation but what if GC's didnt want it and TC's didnt want it were Turkish troops just expected to leave?

Perhaps no-one wanted the 1960 constitution to be restored, certainly no-one 100% acted as if they did. So if Turkey or for that matter Greece decide that the constitution cannot be restored, they then have no legal right to be there, and yes, they would just be expected to leave under the terms of the treaty. The truth is that Turkey made no attempts to restore anything.

Back when Turkey first invaded there was a lot of open wounds which are now not as open as they were 32 years ago. TC's did not want the Turkish army to leave as they didnt want ENOSIS. GC's didnt want the Turkish army to come in the first place and certainly dont want them on Cyprus now. Saddly Turkish forces will be on Cyprus for a while yet and even under any political settlement they will have a presence on Cyprus or they will not agree to it. The reasons for the Turkish army being here maybe different to the reasons that they first landed on Cyprus.

To be honest with you, reasons don't come into play when it comes to the legality of Turkey's intervention. Turkey was judged by her actions in 1974 by the entire world and adjudged to have violated the treaty of guarantee, it is simply for this reason that requests for her to withdraw her troops have been made time and time again by the international community. The state of affairs simply cannot stand, and Turkey has finally acknowledged this.

Alexis my opinion is that the intervention itself may be legal but the fact that the Turkish troops are still here IMHO may not be so legal. However there is no doubt that Turkey has a legal arguement to stay in Cyprus. It is different peoples perception of the same law and none of those perceptions may be right or wrong. Thank God i never choose law as a subject at University. I have already given my opinion on Britains involvement on the Cyprus issue.

Sure, you are entitled to your opinion, but to be honest Turkey does not have a legal argument to keep the troops she does on Cyprus. Anyone reading the treaty of guarantee would have to come to the conclusion that Turkey's intervention was illegal and that furthermore her actions since that time are in direct violation of this treaty. You cannot seriously tell me that you have read the following:

http://teaching.law.cornell.edu/faculty ... rantee.pdf

and come to a reasonable conclusion that Turkey's intervention, or for that matter Greece's, was legal? Say Greece (post Junta) had seen off Turkey in 1974 and annexed Cyprus, would you regard Greece's intervention as legal? She could certainly claim that her second intervention, to fight the Turkish Army was in response to Turkish attrocities against GCs. I would definitely not. What Turkey did was the exact analogy to this. To back all this up, the international community decided, within weeks of the intervention that it was illegal.
Regarding Britain, I say that she was the one state that probably did not violate the treaty, simply because she did very little. Given recent evidence, however, there is a suggestion that perhaps her operatives were working towards partition to keep Turkey sweet in exchange for positioning of nuclear weapons in her territory within range of Moscow. This of course is not something anybody knows for sure due to the nature of the documentation.

No i am not saying that you should be grateful to Turkey i was pointing out that it could have been worse. Turkey could have taken a bigger hammer to the Cyprus chestnut. With fighting between GC and TC extremists going on am i not right in saying that GC's being the majority poplulation backed by Greece and gathering momentum that it was always going to come to an ugly head? With the research i have done TC's got as much help from their GC friends and vise versa during the times of intercommunal fighting. Thankfully there are some questions that we will never know the answers to.

Ok, I kinda know you didn't mean that, and I undertand what you actually meant, it definitely could have been much worse. Your assumption about fighting between extremists turning ugly is not 100% supported by the evidence. A detailed look at the events of 1974 (which I admit are not set in concrete anywhere) shows that, very little fighting happened prior to the Turkish intervention. In addition, the Junta in Greece actually crumbled before the Turkish intervention, and it was in this time of uncertainty that Turkey decided to act, knowing full well that Greece would find it difficult to mobilise. Some restraint by Turkey, or perhaps an intervention with clear aims of restoring the constitution, such as targetting the coupists rather than simply all GCs would have been far more productive in resolving the situation with as little bloodshed as possible. In the short time between Turkey's two interventions there was definitely a window where she had the opportunity to negotiate with anti-coupist elements of the GC administration and implement plans to restore the constitution to the pre-1963 state, this she completely failed to do. Obviously when dealing with coupists of the likes of Samson was going to be difficult, but Turkey's actual acts were no better than the coupists at the end of the day.

Alexis i do not view your post as provacative at all. Your last sentence sums up the various opinions on the subject. As i said to Piratis in an earlier post there are 3 sides to every story Side A, Side B and the truth.

I hope my follow-up wasn;t too provocative either, despite the tone.

[stuballstu]

Stu, even if your GC's classroom had that on the wall you cant generalize that and tell us that basically we all did. You dont know Piratis, but you did insinuate that HIS classroom did. Maybe your GC friend was brought up that way but that cant be said for all of us. It is like saying all bitish people are arses cause the Oram's bought GC land. I am sure you dont like that.

Were we taught to hate Turks? I dont think so. When I went to school we were taught the evnts that occured pre and 1974. That included the part that the GReek Junta played. We were taught the truth. I am sure that a lot of people might have been taught or trained to dislike Turks and now they are grown ups and still cant decide for themselves. I know that I dont hate anybody cause life is too short and I am not going to waste my time hating. I am sure that the people that had their mothers and grand mothers raped and their parents killed and their houses burnt down with their relatives in them, hate the Turks-its part of the whole war scene. Do you blame them?

Andri

I didn't want to evade replying to your post but thought it was best to wait until i spoke to my GC friend before i did so. Just to clarify the matter on the sign " A Good Turk is a Dead Turk" he tells me he was of school age when his father had it on the wall of their home. He can't remember this being on his school but says he heard it was on the walls of some schools but can not confirm or deny this as fact. He was brought up to hate Turks but met a couple of Turkish Cypriots at Uni in London and has remained friends with them ever since.

I'm happy to acknowledge the error, clear up the mis understanding which i apologise unreservedly for.

Stu, even if your GC's classroom had that on the wall you cant generalize that and tell us that basically we all did. You dont know Piratis, but you did insinuate that HIS classroom did.

It was a meant as a direct question to Piratis which i see he has failed to answer. No dis respect to Piratis, he previously mis quoted me and when this has been pointed out to him, he refuses not only to acknowledge this but argues that he is right. It doesnt take to much to apologise for a mis understanding................see above! Maybe thats whats wrong with Cyprus to apologise is an admission of guilt.

Whilst i am prepared to accept that not all GC's hate Turks there is a huge proportion who do. I can understand that they may feel agrieved at having watched family members be raped, killed houses torched down this also happened to TC's before 1974 all be it on a smaller scale. Of course 2 wrongs dont make a right. There aer victims on all sides but some cant look at it that way and only see themselves as victims. What a lot of GC's can't accept is that they gave Turkey a reason/excuse to send the military to Cyprus with their ideology of Enosis. What i find with a lot of GC's on this and many other boards is that they confuse Turkey with Turkish Cypriots and think of them as one. They are not they are different the same as Greek Cypriots and Greek they are different.

[stuballstu]

Alexis

I'm glad to see someone else post with some sense, reason and the ability to enter into dialogue. Maybe if there were more people like you and a limited few from this board then the Cyprus problem has a chance. Maybe another generation has to go by before the hatred is diluted, although it will never go away.