Kikapu wrote:Kifeas wrote:[stuballstu, I am afraid that it is you that posts inaccuracies in this case. The 1960 agreements we negotiated only by Greece, Turkey and Britain, but the two communities have not taken part in those negotiations. It is also true that Makarios and the GC leadership, once they saw the whole package, they did not want to sign it, and in the end they had to be blackmailed by the British in accepting them, which threatened them with imitate partition on the basis of the McMillan plan that they had previously devised with Turkey. May we see your source which verify what you have suggested above?
Kifeas and Piratis,
You have both over time claimed that the 1960 Constitution was forced on the Cypriots by others. If that's the case, why is the 1960 Constitution is still in effect today. Laws do not support any contract signed by any individual or party, if it's done under threat, and against ones free will. Why hasn't the government of Cyprus before and even today, take their case to the UN and to the International Court to basicly "ANNUL" the 1960 agreements. Let the ROC produce their evidence and have the Constitution re-written by the Cypriots themselves. What's the delay.??
Kikabu, you are surprising me sometimes with the questions you are raising. I.e. if you look at the history of Cyprus after 1960, the conflicts between the two communities on constitutional issues, the Makarios 13 point amendment proposals, the eruption of intercommunal violence, the official withdrawal of the TC community from the RoC and the pronouncement of its existence by them as null and dead, the threats by Turkey for an invasion, the taking up of the whole issue by the GC side to the UN SC, the issuing of UN resolutions in this respect, calling for negotiations between the two communities for a political solution and agreement on their constitutional disagreements, and the actual contacting of such negotiations from 1968 until 1974 (before the invasion) for this very purpose; don't they all boil down to what you have raised in your above post?
One more thing. If it was the desire of the majority to join Greece in the form of "Enosis", as their "majority rights", then it is also the "minority rights" to try and prevent it at any cost, if joining meant, they would become an "isolated society" within their own country.
Yes, I agree with this. The TC community had every right to defend and safeguard its interests, and objecting Enosis with legitimate means was a perfectly justified cause. The pursuit for partition however, was not a legitimate counter alternative /cause, because it was not based on any pre-existing legitimising grounds. There was no part of Cyprus that could be regarded as an area historically belonging to the TC, or that it was inhabited exclusively by the TC community. The population of the two communities was intermixed in all parts and corners of Cyprus, since the time of the TC community’s appearance in Cyprus. Partition, especially in the way the TCs and mainly Turkey envisioned and planed it, would have required massive violations of people’s actual human rights on the ground, and not mere theoretical or hypothetical violations of the community's cultural rights, should Cyprus would have become part of Greece with Enosis. The effects of Enosis on the TCs (and the GCs) would have been political and hypothetically cultural, even though this is disputable. The effects of Partition on the GCs (and the TCs) would have been primarily on the level of their massive human rights violations, i.e. displacement, uprooting, refugees, property losses, destruction of entire communities social environment and structure, etc.
The TCs had the right to obstruct enosis, using their above fears as a justification, but they could strive for cultural and political autonomy in the areas in which they inhabited by majority, plus to safeguard with agreements the safeguarding of their cultural rights in all the rest of Cyprus, should the enosis demand of the GCs would have materialised.
However, the 1960 constitution did not merely prohibit enosis or partition (nothing wrong with it,) it went many steps further and established an 18% minority into an indirect equal co-partner with the 82% majority, thus violating the human and political rights of the majority. If an TC individual has 2 times more probability of taking a government job or a political post in his country, while a GC has less than 1 probability to do the same, then obviously this is not an issue of protecting a minority, but a gross discrimination on the basis of "ethnicity". If for every single law or decision that would be passed in the parliament, separate majorities (50%+1) from each community sub-group of MPs is required -instead of a weighted minimum participating ratio (as I suggested in a previous post,) then such a state cannot function and will remain a victim to the whatever ethnically based antagonisms between the nationalists of the two sides. The same goes with the vetoes of the vice president on every single issue, instead of a number of selected high importance issues. The same goes with the fact that a TC did not have the right to ever become the president of his country, another gross violation of a citizens natural right in his own country.
