On the Cyprus Problem or Issue unfortunately EU is not acting as per her founding principles.
Part II (items 61 to 144) of EU Constitution, agreed on December 2000 at Nice Summit, titled as “Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union” is basically consisted of “Dignity, Freedoms, Equality, Solidarity, Citizen’s Rights and Justice”.
As far as I lived and observed since late fifties, EU’s Justice always inclined towards the Greek side only. They even could not manage to act unbiased on the Cyprus Problem.
Among the existing 25, which I even do not take into consideration the Greek Cyprus and Greece, the British Government only tried very hard to treat both sides equal, the same.
The Turkish Cypriots are bored with the ongoing negotiations in Cyprus and that they cannot hold contacts with EU organs or high ranking European officials. Accordingly now trying to turn their axis towards the Middle East Countries and member countries of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
As a result of this change in foreign politics, the Speaker of the TRNC Parliament was received in Iran “on the basis of two states” only a month ago. Similar receipts, talks, relations and meetings will take place after July 1, definitely on the same level or even above.
July 1 seems like a very important date in Cyprus Issue and probably will be a turn point on the Cyprus’s Political History.
Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots are pushing to finish negotiations on Cypriot reunification by July 1 when Greek Cyprus is set to take over the EU Presidency amid growing speculation that the United Nations will propose continued talks after the date.
Turkish Cypriots believe that the negotiations during the six-month EU presidency of Greek Cyprus would be “meaningless,” since Greek Cyprus’s President Mr. Demetris Christofias would be preoccupied with EU matters.
It is obvious that if one side chooses not to turn up to the talks anymore, it would mean the collapse of the negotiations and will lead to an end definitely.
On the other hand, the Secretary General and the UN should acknowledge the fact that federations have collapsed in the world as in ex-Yugoslavia and that insisting on federation in spite of the Greek Cypriot administration’s objections against federation model, would not yield any result.
Turkish Cypriots are not willing to sit down for the n.th round of negotiations which may last for a further 44 years with no results. I even forgot the number of the rounds since June 24, 1968, the date when the very first official negotiations held in Beirut, Lebanon by Rauf R. Denktaş and Glafkos Clerides both the presidents of the Communal Chambers of Turkish and Greek Cypriots respectively.
The UN should work on new strategies and disregard the Greek Cypriot Administration’s conditions or state of affairs.
The Turkish Cypriot side has been continuing the negotiations with the aim of achieving a just agreement despite the fact that the Greek Cypriot side has not been displaying the same good will. After 44 years of negotiations the Turkish Cypriot people now get tired to follow the resultless negotiations and wants to see their future henceforth.
It is the time and the biggest chance ever existed now for the EU to treat both sides of the island, Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots equally without any discrimination.
If not, the Turkish Cypriots and the northern soil of the island, which was assumed to be the part of the European Union by “Protocol 10”, will slide away like live fish in a wet hand from EU.
Ata ATUN
ata.atun@atun.com
http://www.ataatun.com
June 1, 2012
I am very much depressed by the sales of the mortgaged lands having homes built on.
The idea of selling homes of innocent people to collect the debts of a third party or a
construction company sounds very wrong to me.
I simply cannot accept it.
The point I cannot accept is the grasping of the houses along with the mortgaged land.
The houses weren’t mortgaged but because they were built on the land and had no chance to escape, they were also confiscated and sold by a public auction.
They reminded me the slaves of the medieval.
They were sold publicly because of their skin color or race and had no other offence, like the homes on the mortgaged land. The houses had no offence except being built on a mortgaged land.
The problem is that the land was mortgaged without the consent of the home owners.
When they found out that the land was mortgaged it was too late then.
Actually when the land was mortgaged, there were no houses, roads, electricity, water and other facilities on. It was mortgaged as an arable field to the value of at least one tenth of a building site.
After the homes were built on and the roads made and the infrastructure constructed for electricity, water, telephone and gas the land value flew off up to the crest.
I think it is unfair to buy the land only from the public auction and claim the houses, roads, and infrastructure built on without paying them. The buyer should pay the cost of the houses, roads
and infrastructure as well to claim the full ownership of the land.
I strongly believe that we should support our British citizens, who actually are facing losing their homes because of a mortgaged land without their consent or knowledge.
For ages our British citizens were and are always loyal to our community and supported us under any condition.
They are not wicked, unfaithful and malignant people.
On the contrary they are honest people whom we can trust at all times.
They are also very good consumers as they spend all of their personal income over here.
From time to time they collect money with in their community and buy the most wanted or missing apparatus for our hospitals or almshouses.
To these people, our government did not even give a permission to perform a silent demonstration
with candles, to let know us the problems they are facing with.
Their intention was to enlighten the government officials and to request the support of the
Turkish Cypriots on their problems.
So my full support is with you our dear English citizens and English people who chose to live over
here with us.
You are on the soil of your friends. I shall try my best to convey your problems to our officials either directly or by my articles.
Ata ATUN
ata.atun@atun.com
http://www.ataatun.com
May 3, 2012
Polycarpos Yorgadjis, a man who ran his ministry as if he were still in EOKA and who attracted to himself attributions of the most intricate plotting, used the constitutional breakdown over tax collection as an excuse for getting Makarios’s authority for building up a “secret army” of ex-EOKA men. There were also other freelance gangs of armed irregulars on the Greek side.
On Nov. 30, 1963, President Makarios wrote to Vice President Dr. Fazıl Küçük proposing 13 amendments to the constitution which, he said, would “remove obstacles to the smooth functioning and devel-opment of the state.” He did so apparently with the knowledge and encouragement of the British high commissioner, Sir Arthur Clarke, whether personally or officially is not clear: The full story of this re-mains obscure. Taken together, the amendments would have had the effect of resolving all outstanding issues in the Greek favor.
• The president and vice president would lose the right of veto.
• The necessity for separate majorities of Greek and Turkish members for the passage of certain laws, including taxes, to be can-celled.
• No separate municipalities.
• The ratio in the public services and in the army and police would be the same as the ratio of population.
• The Public Service Commission would be smaller and take deci-sions by a simple majority.
• The separate Greek Communal Chamber would be abolished.
• The administration of justice would be unified so that a Greek could not demand to be tried by a Greek judge and a Turk by a Turkish judge.
It must be said in favor of these proposals that they streamlined the administration and removed many of the features that laid stress on whether a Cypriot citizen was Greek or Turkish.
But from the Turkish Cypriot point of view they removed almost all the props to their claim to be the “co-founders” of the republic and demoted them to the status of a minority. In the view of Greek Cypriot constitutional lawyer Polyvios Polyviou, who is a sharp critic of the 1960 constitution, the course followed by the archbishop was “a grievous error” which “could not but have appeared to the Turkish Cypriots as a dangerous development that might change the internal balance of power and be taken internationally as a sign that the bi-communal nature of the state was giving way to unitary and majority principles.” In Polyviou’s opinion it would have been much better to have tried to change things gradually; a view shared at the time by the Greek gov-ernment which, not having been warned in advance, told Makarios that if he had asked their advice it would have been against.
The archbishop’s proposals were hastily rejected by the vice president, Dr. Küçük, and by the government of Turkey, as one of the guarantors of the RoC. The atmosphere after the presentation of the 13 proposals was very tense, with the Turkish Cypriots interpreting the move as a preparation to slide into enosis. On Dec. 21, 1963 a street brawl in a Turkish quarter in Nicosia between a Turkish Cypriot crowd and Yorgadjis’ plainclothes special constables was followed immediately by a major Greek Cypriot attack by the various paramilitary forces against the Turks in Tahtakala region at Nicosia and in Larnaca. At first an attempt to calm the situation was made jointly by the President Makarios and the vice president Küçük and by other leaders, but it had clearly gotten out of hand and in any case the ex-EOKA element was strong in the security forces.
Although the TMT organized the defense of the Turkish minority and there were a number of acts of retaliation directed at the Greek Cypriots, there is no doubt that the main victims of the numerous in-cidents that took place during the next few months were Turkish Cy-priots. Seven hundred Turkish Cypriot hostages, including women and children, were seized in the northern suburbs of Nicosia. During the first half of 1964, fighting continued to flare up between neighboring villages. One hundred ninety-one Turkish Cypriots and 133 Greeks were known to have been killed while it was claimed 209 Turks and 41 Greeks remained missing and could also be presumed dead.
There was much looting and destruction of Turkish villages. Some 20,000 refugees fled from them, many of them taking refuge in Kyrenia and Hamitköy (Hamid Mandres) of Nicosia. Twenty-four wholly Turkish villages and Turkish houses in 72 mixed villages were abandoned. Houses were demolished by the Greeks with the intention of destroying the hopes of Turkish Cypriots returning one day. Food, clothing, medical supplies and monetary aid to the immigrants were organized immediately by Turkey, one of the guarantors of the RoC, and shipped in. Most of the evacuation seems to have been after planned Greek assaults, with the people leaving clothing, furniture, food, machinery and hopes behind. But in some cases orders were received for the people to immigrate safely to Turkish Cypriot areas before any expected Greek Cypriot assaults took place. The partition of the island inevitably started after these Greek assaults.
(b) Taxes: Since a majority vote of Turkish deputies in the House was needed to pass tax legislation, Turkish Cypriots sought to use this as leverage to force compliance over the 70:30 ratio, over legislation for separate municipalities and a more generous approach towards the grant of subsidies to the Turkish Communal Chamber.
As a result the colonial income tax law expired whereupon Makarios ordered that existing taxes should continue to be collected. In December 1961 the government at last came out with its own pro-posals, but whereas the Greeks wanted a permanent law, the Turks wanted it to be renewable annually, which would enable them to use their bargaining power each session. Since there was again deadlock, the personal income tax was abandoned by the House and the Greek Cypriots enacted it instead through the Greek Communal Chamber.
(c) The Cypriot army: The minister of defense, who was a Turkish Cypriot, proposed an army of five battalions, each composed of three companies. At the battalion level they should be mixed, but at the company level the units should be from one community or the other. The majority of the Cabinet decided that on the contrary the units should be mixed at every level. On this issue the vice president used his power of final veto. The president therefore decided not to have an army at all.
(d) Separate municipalities: Existing colonial laws had to be extended eight times while Greeks and Turks conducted a dialogue of the deaf about whether fresh legislation should establish separate municipalities as the constitution required and the Turks de-manded. In December 1962 the Greek majority rejected further continuation of the status quo. The Turkish Cypriot Communal Chamber then purported to confirm the position of the Turkish municipalities while the Council of Ministers fell back on a pre-1959 colonial law to replace all the existing elected municipalities by appointed development boards. The president offered Turkish Cypriots compensation safeguards but made it quite clear that he had no intention of implementing the provisions of the constitution which he regarded as opening the way to partition.
(e) The status of the vice president: Dr. Fazil Küçük complained that since he had an absolute veto over foreign policy, he should be told what that policy was about. Spyros Kyprianou, the foreign minister, was not, he said, showing him the papers. He objected strongly to Makarios adopting on his own a policy of non-alignment and going to the Belgrade non-aligned summit without his approval.
The record of the first three years of the new republic could not therefore be described as an unqualified success. The necessary re-straint on both sides if such a delicate mechanism of checks and bal-ances is to work or, alternatively, if by informal arrangements it is to be short-circuited, was absent. Already by the end of 1961 the Turkish language press was calling for an intervention by Turkey, Greece and Britain and the resignation of Archbishop Makarios over the income tax issue.
The question of whether President Makarios ever meant the 1960 constitution to work or whether from the outset his acceptance of it was a maneuver first to obtain independence and then to clear the ground for union with Greece is still highly controversial. As an archbishop he was predisposed to see the whole island as Hellenic. In both his capacities he took part throughout the remainder of his career in what is called “verbal republicanism,” namely the celebration of anni-versaries of heroic deaths during the war against the Britis with many references to his own fidelity to the cause for which they had died, specifically the cause of enosis. But to what extent and at what periods this sentiment was purely verbal it is rather difficult to say .
Certainly there are many Greek Cypriots who think that Makarios did for a time support the constitution until he concluded that, unless amended, it was unworkable. Turkish Cypriots rather naturally call attention to a confidential document called the Akritas Plan, which was later published in the Greek press. (Patris Newspaper, Feb. 7, 1967).
This, which is generally thought to have been circulated in great secrecy by Polycarpos Yorgadjis, the minister of the interior, lays down a scenario according to which the “negative elements” in the constitu-tion should be stressed in public while lavish use should be made of such internationally acceptable concepts as “self-determination” and “minority rights” to describe the case for amending it. By this means Cyprus would win control over her own institutions and thus effectively nullify the Treaty of Guarantee since the constitution it was to guar-antee would by then be no more.
The Turkish Cypriots had made some preparation for a break-down since they were determined that independence should not mean, as Rauf Denktaş put it, “a change of colonial masters for the worse.” But many of the Turkish Cypriot political leaders counted on the con-stitution to settle down. They were encouraged in this by the first Tur-kish ambassador to Nicosia, Emin Dirvana, who was a philhellene and who tended to discount the warnings of Denktaş, the president of the Turkish Communal Chamber of the era, who claimed through intelli-gence sources to know better. According to Denktaş, who was political adviser to the Turkish Defense Organization (TMT), most of that organ-ization had been stood down and there were only 40 active members in it when the fighting started.
A first reaction to this document must be that for a nation of 556,000, this was a very elaborate and very rigid constitution. It runs to 199 articles and of these the 48 “basic” ones were to remain unalterable in perpetuity.
The remainder could in practice only be altered by mutual agreement of the two communities. Drafted with the help of a Swiss constitutional adviser, the constitution was of the consociational variety which gives the preservation of the ethnic balance higher priority than majority rule.
Moreover the constitution, thus heavily freighted, was screwed into the international system by the accompanying treaties. Under the Treaty of Guarantee with Britain, Greece and Turkey, the Republic of Cyprus undertakes to uphold its own independence and its own con-stitution; not to participate in any political or economic union with any state whatsoever; and to prohibit any domestic action likely to promote union with another state or partition. In return Britain, Greece and Turkey recognize and guarantee not only the independence, integrity and security of Cyprus but also “the state of affairs established by the Basic Articles of its Constitution.” They also will ban activity favoring “Enosis or Taksim” (union or division). In the event of a breach of the provisions of the treaty, the three guarantors “will consult together” about “measures necessary to ensure observance.” Then follows the most critical wording of the treaty, currently cited to support the Tur-kish position. If, says, Article IV, concerted action should not be possi-ble, “each of the three guaranteeing powers reserves the right to take action with the sole aim of re-establishing the state of affairs created by this present Treaty.”
The Treaty of Alliance, which was between Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, thus not including Britain, was intended to reinforce the ra-tionale of the whole series of arrangements: that Greco-Turkish friend-ship was in the last resort worth more than the strict arithmetic and practical convenience of Cypriot politics. A committee of the three for-eign ministers was “the supreme political body” of the alliance. Under its authority there should be a tripartite headquarters established on the island, with military contingents of 950 Greeks and 650 Turks to provide for the defense of the new republic and to train the new Cypriot army
The extent to which this complex of arrangements, redolent of old-fashioned diplomacy, was legally valid in the light of the United Nations Charter has been the subject of much debate among international lawyers. The question was whether a constitution so rigid and unalterable was compatible with the equal sovereignty which was rec-ognized in the charter and whether its unchangeable nature could va-lidly be enforced under a treaty which permitted any one of the signa-tories individually to take action.
It is a complex argument which has not been resolved.
Certainly Professor Ernst Forsthoff, the German who was the first president of the Supreme Constitutional Court, was to say [in 1963]: “I consider it wrong to regard Cyprus under the present agreement and constitution as an independent state.” The guarantees, he added, “include also a right of actual intervention — there can be no guarantee without the right of intervention.” Clearly the signatories, it may be presumed, thought they were signing valid documents. Archbishop Makarios subsequently claimed that the settlement was imposed on him by force majeure and that he did not feel morally bound by it.
Archbishop Makarios was elected the first president of Cyprus by the Greek voters in December 1959 and Dr. Fazil Küçük the first vice president by the Turks. The archbishop had critics both on the right from supporters of Grivas — who left the island for a hero’s welcome in Athens and the rank of a retired general — and on the left because the settlement had been brought under the aegis of NATO. He moved swiftly to consolidate his position — by appointing EOKA people to key posi-tions, most notably Polycarpos Yorgadjis as minister of the interior, and by launching a vigorous foreign policy of friendship with the non-aligned powers which served to disarm the potential opposition of the communists in AKEL who were given five unopposed members in the first House. But the same process of satisfying the political needs of the Greek Cypriot community straightaway led to a series of conflicts with the Turks, in which the feelings of the two communities about the constitution were made plain.
The Greek Cypriots’ feeling was that the constitutional privileges accorded the Turkish community were preposterous; the Turkish Cy-priots’ that these were the bare minimum, to be exercised to the last ounce.
The disputes concerned:
(a) The 70:30 ratio in the public service: The Turkish Cypriots required that the proportion should be attained within five months of independence as had in fact been stipulated in a pre-independence agreement between the president-elect and the vice president-elect.
The Greek Cypriots in the Public Service Commission argued that they could not draw from 18 percent of the population which was poorly qualified suitable candidates to fill 30 percent of the jobs overnight. After three years the Greek Cypriots published figures to show that real progress had been made in all grades towards the objective. But the subject rankled and aroused resentment in both communities. At the end of 1963 there were 2,000 appeals outstanding in the Supreme Constitutional Court about public appointments.
