FORMER Turkish Cypriot ‘foreign minister’ Tahsin Ertugruloglu said yesterday the Annan Plan would lead to the end of Turkish history in Cyprus and heralded the start of a ‘No to the Annan Plan’ campaign in the north.
“The Annan Plan means death for the Turkish Cypriots. I don’t mean that the Greek Cypriots will kill us. They don’t need to do that any more. But it will make the Turkish Cypriots second-class citizens on their own island,” he said, vowing to wage political war against the plan.
Ertugruloglu, a Nicosia deputy for the National Unity Party (UBP) of former ‘prime minister’ Dervis Eroglu, said the UN blueprint would simply be used by Greek Cypriots as a stepping-stone to achieving the Hellenisation of the island.
“That is what Makarios was aiming at when he was giving out free one-way tickets to Australia to Turkish Cypriots. He had realised he was not going to win a military conflict,” Ertugruloglu said.
He was also scathing about what the plan seems to offer the Turkish Cypriot community and attacked the notion that it offered them sovereignty.
“The Annan Plan is not bizonal in terms of Turkish and Greek areas. It is bizonal only in terms of north and south. The terminology is misleading in making the Turkish Cypriots think there is going to be a Turkish Cypriot state in the north. We are not being offered a state. We are being offered an autonomous administration that is subject to a central authority,” Ertugruloglu said.
The plan, he added, had been put together without reference to the interests of the Turkish Cypriot community.
“Clerides himself admitted that he, together with Greece, were party to the preparation of the plan,” he said, insisting that the Turkish side had not been involved to the plan’s creation.
The former ‘minister’ insisted the UN were aware of the pitfalls inherent in the plan and had built measures into the blueprint that exposed the its true nature.
“There will be bloodshed. And it is the UN that envisages this happening. In the Annan Plan they give the multi-national force the powers to create road blocks, arrest people etc because they know that what they are going to do it going to lead to chaos,” Ertugruloglu warned.
Ertugruloglu also poured scorn on opinion polls in the Republic suggesting Greek Cypriots would vote ‘no’ in a referendum on the Annan Plan.
“To me it’s very amusing that there are polls in the south saying that people are going to reject the plan. Maybe they think we are stupid. Quite obviously the aim of these publications is to get the Turkish Cypriot man on the street to say to himself, ‘if the Greek Cypriots refuse this there must be something in it for us,’” he said.
He did concede, however, that some Greek Cypriot might reject the plan.
“There may be some Greek Cypriots who oppose the plan. I would liken their view to those of the military junta in Greece in 1974 and Sampson, who were not as patient as Makarios. They wanted enosis tomorrow. The Annan Plan will lead to enosis, but in an extended period of time,” he said.
Asked how he would be conducting his ‘no’ campaign Ertugruloglu said he and his supporters in the UBP would, “go door to door, village to village, coffee shop to coffee shop and explain better than we did before that this is no joke and there is no turning back. You will not have the opportunity later to say ‘oops this is not what we thought we were going to get’.”
Asked about funding for the campaign Ertugruloglu said: “We don’t need any special funding for this. We have our own publications that disprove what others promoting the plan have said. I am not the only one who will do this. There are many of us”.
Ertugruloglu rejected that the Turkish side had been responsible for the breakdown of talks in The Hague almost one year ago, saying: “We never said we would not negotiate the plan. But we did not accept it as the basis for negotiations. The two are quite different,” he said, adding: “Our objections were presented to the world as if we ran away from the negotiating table, when in fact it was the opposite”.
Asked what he thought would happen to the ‘TRNC’ if the Turkish Cypriots rejected the Annan Plan, Ertugruloglu appeared confident that life would continue as before.
“What will happen? Will the Americans, Britain and the EU wage war against us? Will they impose embargoes on us? They already do,” he said, adding: “In this day and age, the international community is supposed to respect the will of the people. The argument that if you respond the way I want you to respond, I’ll respect it, but if you don’t, I’ll punish you, is fundamentally wrong. If that’s the way they will operate, the EU is not the organisation it tries to present itself as. We are prepared to take the risk [of saying ‘no’].”
