Cyprus-Forum.com

[brother]

Moving towards a million illegal Turks in the north

By Sener Levent

The ferryboats are coming from Turkey to Kyrenia on a massive scale.

There are voyages every day.

They come full and go empty.

The empty ones are filled up and come again. The traffic is heavy. Until the end of the year it may be come heavier. It is as if this is the last run, the last chance. Those who come will come and those who will remain will remain.

Those who heard about the agreement signed between Turkey and the regime in the North are running to Cyprus. What is the agreement? All those who come here until January 1, 2005 are lucky. They will get permission to work, to live here and those who have stayed five years will get citizenship as well, if they want.

When was this agreement signed? On July 19, 1999. On October 12, 2004 a protocol was added to the agreement. When will it come into force? On 1 January 2005.

In short it means the following: The right of work and residence is recognised for all the Turkish population which is currently here. Furthermore, all those who will come to the island until January 1, 2005 when this protocol comes into force, will also have this right. Only fulfilling two simple conditions is enough for them.

 

Passport

The first one is those who entered with identity to acquire a passport of the Republic of Turkey within six months after their entrance.

The second, is to get a document in writing from the place where they work. This agreement was allegedly made in order to combat the illegal work force in northern Cyprus. However, it can easily be understood that the real aim is to legalize all the population from Turkey.

This is the meaning of the ferryboat traffic that has intensified in the past few days.

Unfortunately, those who should raise their voices against this are remaining silent. And the worst is that they are presenting it to the community as good news. They are saying that the illegal work force is being prevented.

The process of the destruction of the Turkish Cypriots will actually start after this. Do not be surprised if after ten years they tell us that our population is one million. It will be good if only ten thousand of this million are Turkish Cypriots!

Hostages

It will be very difficult for our citizens, who are condemned to be hostages for at least another twenty years, to remain in the island. They will either emigrate outside the country or settle in Southern Cyprus.

Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots will be living in the South and Turks from Turkey in the North.

This article appeared in yesterday’s Turkish Cypriot daily Afrika newspaper written by its editor-in-chief.

[Bananiot]

"Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots will be living in the South and Turks from Turkey in the North".

A nightmare scenario, isn't it brother? I have seen some figures from the "ministry of economics and tourism" which indicate that from January to November 2004 more than half a million people came to the north. From these, 389 000 came from Turkey. In November alone, 39 318 came from Turkey, a figure that shows an increase of 13.2% from the respective figure of 2003. It appears that the majority of the Turks that come to the island do not return to Turkey but stay in Cyprus. Soon, the north will be inhabited by more people than the south.

In my view this is the penalty we will pay for not accepting the solution offered by the A plan. I know that many will stick to the legal arguments about the illegality of the matter, Papadopoulos is an expert on legalistic issues or to put it better on poking on the legalistic aspects of every political issue, but, imagine how things will be in 15 say years when Turkey will be ready for Europe and the Cyprus issue comes high on the agenda of the UN once again. What sort of an arrangement will be sought when the settlers will be more than a million?

[Othellos]

While I have my doubts as to whether the occupied areas can sustain a population of 1 million (infrastructure, water, accommodation, jobs etc), I can understand Bananiot's concern. I also agree with him that Papadopoulos has an entirely legalistic approah towards the Cyprus problem and its solution. Give any lawyer any agreement text and he or she will easily find several flaws or potential "traps" in it, no matter how well drafted this is. Regardless of how well written they are, agreements become useless when there there is no willinness or even no parties to implement them.

O.

[Alexandros Lordos]

It seems to me that the Turkish "Settler Strategy" is not very different to what the Israelis are doing on the West Bank ... on the one hand, they talk about good will and the desire to end the problem, and on the other hand they proceed with actions (ie illegal settlement) that make a future deadlock almost certain ...

If Turkey is really looking forward to the day when the Cyprus Problem is solved under UN auspices, if it has really renounced its older "No solution is the solution" strategy, then why isn't the inflow of settlers being stopped?

[Bananiot]

That is a valid question. I am afraid the only logical answer I can think of is that Turkey is interpreting our resounding "NO" in the referendum as clear indication that we do not want to govern this island jointly with the Turkish Cypriots. We have not sent any signs since April that we might be willing to rethink about the A plan, given some changes (eg those proposed by AKEL, but forgotten by Christofias in the meantime) and even this week Papadopoulos made mincemeat of the glimmer of hope sent out by Anan when he called for financing the UN office in Nicosia. He showed resounding haste to dampen any impact, to pre empty Anan's move, critisising almost violently the reporters for placing "much importance on a common UN practice".

I wish Turkey would heed the voices of desperation of the moderate TC's and change her policy on Cyprus laying the emphasis on an agreed solution. However, this is not happening and it is very scary and it points to the fact that those who claimed that in April we voted for the partition of the island were basically correct. Also, our side seems to have lost any leverage it had on Turkey's european future since we managed to dissociate Turkey's entry from the Cyprus issue. We are all alone and we have no sympathisers left. The initiatives are with Turkey and the signals we get are not at all promising for the future of this island.

[brother]

The tide has gained pace and i do not think we can stop it any more, we the tc are being pushed or breed out of our homeland, when given the opportunity we defied our leaders and voted for peace to stop this influx of settlers but tassos took us all for a ride, all of you(GC) praised at the time thinking he was going to bring you something better but a few months more you will want to strangle him for letting the one opportunity to reclaim our island slip from our hands, today i start mourning the loss of half our island.

[Bananiot]

If it makes you feel any better brother, I started mourning from April 24!

[Bananiot]

If it makes you feel any better brother, I started mourning from April 24!

[turkcyp]

This kind of stupidity is on the news always both from GC and TC media for the last 10 to 15 years. If it was the case north side's population should have reached to couple of million right now.

But for some reason population increase rate is the same as in GC.

I would not put anything into these news.

Everybody that comes to north is not a settler. I had a topic called "Settlers". Over there you can see how many different kind of mainland Turks comes to north every year from students, to tourists, to illegal workers (which are not settlers by the way), to legal workers (which are not settlers by the way).

There are at the worst case scenario around 60000 settler in the north right now. Remember in order to be considered settler, somebody should obtain TRNC citizenship.

For some reason when media and people like Sener Levent, which likes to always portrait a dooms day scenario, never looks at the statistics of how many extra people become settler by naturalization in north other than birth, but used this stupid number of how many people comes to north from Turkey as if everybody that comes is a settler.

For them everybody that comes from Turkey is a threat. If you let them they would close the borders to Turkey. Thank god that they are the very very minority in TC society. If we let people like Sener Levent rule us, then we should all be citizen of RoC at its current form and accept much much less than what is our right in 1960 constitution.

No offense to any GCs.

[brother]

Yes we should at least have these people come over on passports and prove that they have enough money for their stay, which at the moment all they do is come with an identity card and no money whatsoever, next thing they are working illegally, some resort to crime i.e stealing, robbery etc. is this what we the cypriots want, the answer is 'no', to help our ailing economy we have lots of casinos and 'night clubs' and we know what they are a front for, so we get all the gamblers, perverts and generally the gutter trade directly from turkey as our income,is that the environment we cypriots want to bring our children up in.

Now tell me we are getting the educated people from turkey that would be better, but the people coming at the moment can barely spell there names, and further more my biggest gripe is that we give away lands to them for nothing, so if i go to turkey now as a settler will they give me free lands and a home and citizenship etc. i do not think so.