Text book issue a real eye-opener
THE ARTICLE ‘Textbooks which focus on the good, the bad and the ugly’ by Stefanos Evripidou (Cyprus Mail, September 26, 2008) is an eye opener for everyone interested in a just, viable and permanent solution. The cause of conflict in Cyprus has never been the Greekness of the one and Turkishness of the other. Neither had religion anything to do with it until the church became a political movement for uniting the island with “mother Greece”. Leaders in Cyprus should realise that our island, if geopolitically has any value for Western powers, it has vital security value for Turkey which has to protect the Greco-Turkish balance established with the Treaty of Lausanne. The attempt by Greece, using the Greek-Orthodox church as a virile tool, for uniting the island with Greece is “the problem” which has divided the two sides in the island as soon as the British arrived in 1878.
As of that date the tug-of-war between the two sides began, culminating in 1954 with the Greek resort to the UN claiming union with Greece through the application of the right of self-determination “for the people of Cyprus”! This woke up Turkey, whose policy until then was “continuation of the status-quo” in order to maintain the Lausanne balance!
So, the story now used by some people on both sides that the British stirred everything is nonsense. That Britain took advantage of this divide during the 1955-58 EOKA campaign is something else and Turkish Cypriots’ position of self-defence against Enosis quite a different story! Had there been no Enosis policy there would have been no conflict. Enosis is now believed to have been half achieved through EU membership; all that has to be done is to remove the remaining impediments in order to legalise and finalise this membership. And these impediments continue to be the guarantee and Turkish force in the island. Hence the story that the problem is due to occupation and it began in 1974.
As in the 1950 plebiscite, the world has been deceived that “Cypriots” want this that or the other, this time the “Cypriot” government demanding for and an behalf of “the Cypriots” that Cyprus is freed from occupation and of the Guarantors and all will be well. No one is interested to remind the Greek Cypriot side that there was no occupation and no Guarantors during 1954-59 and that the Guarantee system was worked out to prevent a repeat performance of those years by guaranteeing “the partnership on the basis of political equality” of the two sides and their political identities as two equal co-founder partners with two separate democracies etc.
Looking at Greek Cypriot text books and the agitation whipped up by the Church and politicians that these should be “civilised” it is no wonder that 65 per cent of Greek Cypriots between the ages of 18 and 34 do not want to live together with Turkish Cypriots, “the inferior minority,” regarded as “Islamicised Greeks” by people who regard the term “Cypriot” refers to the Hellenes of Cyprus and no one else!
When the 1960 Agreements were made, we had the belief that this Cypriot Partnership would be a bridge of friendship and cooperation between the two motherlands. This was a holy objective. What destroyed it was not reliance on motherlands and being Greeks and Turks of Cyprus, but the attempt by Guarantor Greece, again using the Church, to destroy the Greco-Turkish balance by acquiring the island at the expense of the Turks of Cyprus (who do not exist as far as the History books are concerned) at the expense of Turkey (the barbars who dropped in from the skies all of a sudden and destroyed everything beautiful)!
If reconciliation is the aim, Greek Cypriot youth should be made aware of what happened on the island between 1963 and 1974 and why, while the Greek Cypriot leaders begin a sincere campaign for compensating Turkish Cypriots for what was done to them during 1963-1974 while conceding the right of Turkish Cypriots to be Guaranteed by Turkey, but for which they would have been obliterated from the map of Cyprus long ago!
n Rauf Denktash was leader of the Turkish Cypriot community from 1985 to 2005 and was involved in negotiations to solve the Cyprus problem in various roles from 1972 until 2005
