1960 – Britain grants independence to Cyprus under power-sharing constitution between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Archbishop Makarios becomes first post- independence president.
Treaty of Guarantee allows Greece, Turkey and Britain to intervene in disputes. Britain has sovereignty of two bases on the island.
1963 – Makarios worries Turks by proposing constitutional changes which would abolish power-sharing agreements.
1964 – Power sharing crumbles amid fighting between paramilitary factions. United Nations sends peacekeeping force to help British troops patrolling the “Green Line” set up to divide the Turkish and Greek Cypriot sectors of Nicosia, the capital.
1967 – Military government seizes power in Greece, relations between Makarios and the generals in Athens are increasingly strained.
1974 – Military government in Greece backs coup against Makarious, seeking to unify Cyprus with Greece.
Makarios flees and five days later Turkish troops land in the north to protect Turkish Cypriot community.
The coup quickly ends and Greece’s military government collapses. Turkish forces occupy one third of the island and it effectively becomes partitioned.
1975 – Turkish Cypriots establish independent administration with Rauf Denktash becoming president.
1980 – UN-sponsored peace talks resume.
1983 – Turkish Cypriots proclaim independence as Turkish republic of Northern Cyprus – but it is only recognised by Turkey.
1985 – No agreement at talks between Denktash and Spyros Kyprianou, the Greek Cypriot president.
1993 – Glafcos Clerides becomes Greek Cypriot president.
1997 – UN-hosted talks between Denktask and Clerides fail.
2002 – Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, presents a comprehensive peace plan involving a federation of two parts, with a rotating presidency.
2003 – Turkish and Greek Cypriots cross “Green Line” for first time in 30 years after Turkish side eases border restrictions.
2004 – In referendums, Turkish Cypriots accept UN power-sharing plan but Greek Cypriots reject it. Cyprus joins the European Union, still partitioned.
2006 – Greek Cypriots endorse ruling coalition in elections, reaffirming opposition to reunification.
2006 – Turkey’s EU entry negotitations break down over Turkey’s continued resistance to opening its ports to traffic from Cyprus.
2007 – Communist party quits Cyprus’ governing coalition.
2008
February – Communist party leader Demetris Christofias wins Cyprus’ presidential election and agrees to immediately reive reunification efforts.
March – Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat, the Turkish Cypriot leader, agree to reopen the symbolic Ledra Street crossing in Nicosia.
April – Ledra Street is opened for first time since 1964.
July – Christofias and Talat agree enter direct peace negotiations on September 3, with a solution to be put to simultaneous referendums.
RHODES, Greece (AFP) — Dozens of families from around the world gathered Saturday on the Greek island of Rhodes to pay tribute to the man who in 1944 saved 40 Jews from being deported to a Nazi concentration camps.
Selahattin Ulkumen, Turkish consul general on the island in 1943, is remembered for his role in saving the Turkish Jews by persuading a German general to release them the day before they were due to be transported to Auschwitz.
Nearly 2,500 Jews from Rhodes and the nearby island of Kos were deported on July 24, 1944. All but 150 perished in the Nazi gas chambers or concentration camps.
However, some months later Ulkumen persuaded the German general on the island to release the 40 Turkish Jews, by reminding him of Turkey’s neutrality.
“I was 13 years old and I can still picture the long discussions in front of us between Selahattin Ulkumen and the German general,” said Sami Modiano, one of the deportees who survived.
Ulkumen’s 64-year-old son, Mehmet, joined the commemoration and was presented with a plaque by the president of the Central Jewish Council of Greece, Moisis Constantinis.
Ulkumen was arrested at the end of 1944 by the Germans after Turkey sided with the Allies. The Turkish consulate on Rhodes was subsequently bombed and his wife, pregnant with Mehmet, and two employees were wounded. His wife died a week after giving birth.
None of the Holocaust survivors ever returned to live on the island.
An attempt to re-establish the Jewish community there in the 1950s by settling families from different Greek regions did not have much success and the island’s Jewish population currently stands at no more than 40, said secretary of the Rhodes Jewish community Carmen Levi.
Concentration camp survivor Stella Levi said she made the journey to her birthplace from her home in New York every year.
This tribute “is a historic moment for the Jews of Rhodes,” she said.
Once dubbed “Little Jerusalem” Rhodes took in several hundred Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century who joined those already on the island.
Between the two world wars, the Jewish population of the island reached about 6,000.
Some 67,000 Greek Jews perished in the Holocaust, 86 percent of the country’s entire Jewish community.
By Christopher Hudson
Last updated at 11:46 PM on 24th July 2008
Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer.
Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.
In his white raincoat, surrounded by his generals, Hitler stood for a long time gazing down at his hero, his cap removed in deference.
Dictator: Napoleon was responsible for thousands of executions
He was said later to have described this moment as ‘one of the proudest of my life’.
The next day, during his official sightseeing tour of Paris, Hitler again visited Napoleon’s tomb to salute him.
Conscious that his hero was known to the world simply as Napoleon, Hitler boasted that he would not need a rank or title on his gravestone. ‘The German people would know who it was if the only word was Adolf.’
Throughout the war, Hitler had sandbags placed around Napoleon’s tomb to guard against bomb damage.
Wooden floorboards were laid across the marble floor of Les Invalides so that they would not be scarred by German jackboots.
Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.
But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France’s greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler’s worst crimes against humanity.
These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon’s greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon’s Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.
A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.
Hitler
Admiration: Hitler had a great respect for Napoleon – and perhaps his killing ways, it has now emerged
During his reign as Emperor, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large groups of people.
There were hit squads and mass deportations. And all this happened 140 years before Hitler and the Holocaust.
Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government’s human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon’s bloodcurdling record for some years.
He accuses him of being a racist and an anti-Semite who persecuted Jews and reintroduced widespread slavery just a few years after it had been abolished by the French government.
The most startling of these findings, the attempted massacre of an entire population over the age of 12 by methods which included gassing them in the holds of ships, relate to the French Caribbean colony of Haiti at the turn of the 19th century.
In Ribbe’s words, Napoleon, then First Consul, was the man who, for the first time in history, ‘asked himself rationally the question how to eliminate, in as short a time as possible, and with a minimum of cost and personnel, a maximum of people described as scientifically inferior’.
Haiti around 1800 was the world’s richest colony, a slave-powered export factory which produced almost two-thirds of the world’s coffee and almost half its sugar.
The black slaves were lashed and beaten to work and forced to wear tin muzzles to prevent them from eating the sugar cane.
If the slaves were fractious, they were roasted over slow fires, or filled with gunpowder and blown to pieces.
When the slaves began to fight for their freedom, under the leadership of a charismatic African military genius called Toussaint L’Ouverture, Napoleon sent 10,000 crack troops under the command of his brother-inlaw, General Leclerc, to crush Toussaint and restore slavery.
In 1802, a vast programme of ethnic cleansing was put in place. Napoleon banned inter-racial marriages and ordered that all white women who’d had any sort of relationship with a black or mulatto (person of mixed race) be shipped to France.
He further commanded the killing of as many blacks in Haiti as possible, to be replaced by new, more docile slaves from Africa.
The French troops were under orders to kill all blacks over the age of 12. However, younger children were also killed – stabbed to death, put in sandbags and dropped into the sea.
The Haitians fought to the death for independence, which they finally declared in 1804.
Prisoners on both sides were regularly tortured and killed, and their heads were mounted on the walls of stockades or on spikes beside the roads.
Non-combatants, too, were raped and slaughtered. According to contemporary accounts, the French used dogs to rip black prisoners to pieces before a crowd at an amphitheatre.
Allegdly on Napoleon’s orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships – more than 100,000 of them, according to records.
The use of these primitive gas chambers was confirmed by contemporaries. Antoine Metral, who in 1825 published his history of the French expedition to Haiti, writes of piles of dead bodies everywhere, stacked in charnel-houses.
Auschwitz victims: Did Hitler learn genocide from Napoleon?
‘We varied the methods of execution,’ wrote Metral. ‘At times, we pulled heads off; sometimes a ball and chain was put at the feet to allow drowning; sometimes they were gassed in the ships by sulphur.
‘When the cover of night was used to hide these outrages, those walking along the river could hear the noisy monotone of dead bodies being dropped into the sea.’
A contemporary historian, who sailed with the punitive expedition, wrote that: ‘We invented another type of ship where victims of both sexes were piled up, one against the other, suffocated by sulphur.’
These were prison ships with gas chambers called etouffiers, or ‘chokers’, which asphyxiated the blacks, causing them terrible suffering.
Even at the time, there were French naval officers who were appalled at this savagery, claiming they would rather have braved a court martial than have forgotten the laws of humanity.
But from the Emperor’s point of view, gassing was a way of cutting costs. Ships continued to transport prisoners out to sea to drown them, but corpses kept being washed up on beaches or tangled in ships’ hulls.
Toussaint, who called himself the Black Napoleon, was kidnapped after accepting an invitation to parlay with a French general and shipped back to France in chains, where he died of pneumonia after being imprisoned in a cold stone vault.
Guadeloupe, an island to the east, suffered a similar fate to Haiti’s.
Once again choosing not to recognise France’s abolition of slavery, Napoleon in 1802 promoted a comrade of his, Antoine Riche-panse, to the rank of General, and sent him with an expeditionary force of 3,000 men to put down a slave revolt on the island.
During his purge, General Richepanse slaughtered any men, women and children he encountered on his route to the capital. Then he worked through a plan of extermination apparently approved by the First Consul.
A military commission was set up to give what followed a veneer of legality. Some 250 ‘rebels’ were shot in Guadeloupe’s Victory Square. Another 500 were herded down to the beach and shot there.
Richepanse and Lacrosse, the former colonial governor now restored to power, thought of piling up the dead in vast mounds to intimidate the islanders, but gave up the plan for fear of starting a disease epidemic.
Instead, using a technique which the French were to copy during the Algerian War, they sent death squads into every part of Guadeloupe to track down farmers who were absent from their homes.
These men were treated as rebels. A bounty was promised for each black man captured, and the rebels were summarily shot or hanged. The ferocity of the repression sparked another uprising, which Lacrosse subdued with the most barbarous methods yet.
‘Being hung is not enough for the crimes they have committed,’ he said. ‘It is necessary to cut them down alive and let them expire on the wheel [prisoners were bound to a cart wheel before having their arms and legs smashed with cudgels].
‘The jails are already full: it is necessary to empty them as quickly as possible.’ In this he was successful, hanging, garotting and burning the rebels and breaking their limbs on the wheel.
Lacrosse developed possibly the most fiendish instrument of slow execution ever created.
The prisoner was thrust into a tiny cage and had a razor-sharp blade suspended between his legs. In front of him was a bottle of water and bread, neither of which he could reach.
He was stood in stirrups, which kept him just above the blade, but if he fell asleep or his legs tired, he was sliced by the blade. Neither fast nor economical, it was pure sadism.
After four months in Guadeloupe, the French lost patience with the islanders, and the ferocity of their repression reached new heights.
Blacks with short hair were shot out of hand, since the expeditionary force considered short hair to be a sign of rebellion. Orders were given that ‘the type of execution should set a terrifying example’.
The soldiers were encouraged ‘to cut open insurgents, to strangle and to burn them’. French officers spoke proudly of creating ‘torture islands’.
In a letter to Napoleon, his brother-in-law Leclerc wrote: ‘It is necessary to destroy all the negroes of the mountain . . . do not leave children over the age of 12.’
Ribbe, in his work in progress, sees continual affinities between Napoleon and Hitler. He argues that many of Napoleon’s actions were later echoed in Nazi Germany, right down to his enthusiasm for slavery reflecting the grim message ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Sets You Free’), which appeared over the gates of Auschwitz.
Napoleon, like Hitler, also used his own army like cannon fodder when the occasion demanded.
His retreat from Moscow in 1812 squandered the lives and courage of 450,000 soldiers of the Grande Armee; many of them were found frozen to death while embracing each other to harvest a last flicker of warmth, in what was one of the bitterest winters in living memory.
Nothing shows more clearly the contempt the Emperor showed for his minions than the bulletin announcing the destruction of his Army.
Napoleon blamed his horses and ended by declaring that his health had never been better.
As theatres for Napoleon’s callousness, Haiti and Guadeloupe were too far away to attract much public notice, let alone condemnation.
Syria was a different matter. In the war between France and the Ottoman Empire (most of it modern-day Turkey), Napoleon led the siege of the ancient walled city of Jaffa, whose harbour he needed as a vital shelter for his fleet.
The city fell on the fourth day, whereupon Napoleon’s troops ran amok through the town, slaughtering Christians, Jews and Muslims indiscriminately.
To escape the slaughter, part of the garrison locked themselves into a large keep.
Napoleon sent his officers, who negotiated their surrender and marched them back to the French camp.
Rations were short, so Napoleon now decided that he had been too magnanimous.
For three days he kept the 4,000 mostly Turkish prisoners with their arms tied behind their back; then the massacre began.
Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 men were slaughtered there and then, either by shooting them or by running them through with bayonets.
Shortly afterwards plague broke out, decimating the troops on both sides. With real courage, Napoleon led his general staff on a tour of the plague-infested hospitals.
It did not deter him from suggesting to the doctors that seriously ill French troops who could not be evacuated should be given a fatal dose of the opiate laudanum. The doctors forced him to back down.
From Jaffa, Napoleon marched to Acre, a city constructed on a peninsula and therefore impregnable, given that there was British control of the seas. Napoleon launched seven major assaults; each one failed. Marching back to Cairo, Napoleon left 2,200 of his troops dead, and 2,300 more seriously ill or wounded.
As far as Napoleon was concerned, these wounded were already dead men. Most of them he left behind, knowing that the Turks would cut off their heads as soon as his army left. They did their best to follow his retreat, crying out not to be abandoned.
They straggled along, their throats parched in the debilitating heat, which reduced their cries to a croak. Injured officers were thrown from their litters and left to die in the dunes.
Soldiers were abandoned in the cornfields, which were still smouldering in the devastation of crops and villages ordered by Napoleon. In all, some 5,000 Frenchmen lost their lives.
If Hitler learned any lessons from Napoleon, one must have been that victory required callousness, not just in the leader but in those around him.
‘Like those working in the Nazi system, the French carrying out Napoleon’s killing did so with little thought to morality,’ Claude Ribbe says today. ‘There was no sense of good or evil: it was just a matter of getting a difficult job done. In the end, the killing methods had to be efficient and cheap.’
So is Napoleon to be feted as a great leader or denounced as a dictator? A poll published in Le Figaro in 2005 found that nearly 40 per cent of Frenchmen regarded Napoleon as ‘a dictator who had used all means to satisfy his thirst for power’.
However, considering what was done in Napoleon’s name in Haiti and Guadeloupe, there is one memorial which deserves to be added.
Next to the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe should be erected the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.
• Le Crime de Napoleon, by Claude Ribbe (Editions Priv & Egrave;).
Bulgaria’s Nationalist “Ataka” (Attack) Party is to leave parliament in protest against the ruling “criminal majority,” MP Desislav Chukolov reported Thursday.
“We do not wish to become accomplices to the government and the laws and decisions it makes,” the party member added in an interview.
“We are not running away but getting closer to the voters. We call on all opposition parties to follow our example and join us in the boycott. We are to start meeting with the people and try to deprive this cabinet of the possibility to rule,” Chukolov said.
On Wednesday opposition political forces in Bulgaria filed the sixth no confidence vote against the governing three-way ruling coalition, comprised of socialists, centrists and the ethnic Turkish party, over its failure in adhering to the rules of the EU and in the absorption of EU funds.
The move came along with a harsh report from the EC over Bulgaria’s progress in the judicial sphere and EU funds absorption.
July 25, 2008 Sofia News Agency
Source: The Journal of Turkish Weekly, 25 July 2008
As the closure case against the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) is moving towards a verdict in the Constitutional Court, the Turkish political agenda has become even more complicated with the arrest of a number of prominent individuals allegedly associated with a coup plot against the government. Although the JDP was able to win a decisive victory in the July 2007 elections following a serious dispute over the election of a new president, Turkish society has become even more polarized during the past year and tension is rising in an alarming manner. The gravity and implications of the crisis had been examined by Bulent Aliriza, the Director of the CSIS Turkey Project. Mark Parris, former Ambassador to Turkey in 1997-2000, who is currently a Visiting Fellows at Brookings Institution, then provided a commentary.
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Mark Parris Ne Diyordu?
ABD’ nin Ankara eski Büyükelçisi Mark Parris’ in Türkiye ile ilgili bir değerlendirmesi özet olarak Türk medyasında yer almıştı. Bugün, Cumhuriyet Gazetesinde yayımlanan ve bu konuda daha detaylı bilgi içeren Ergin YIldızoğlu’ nun köşe yazısını aşağıda gönderiyorum. Yabancı dili ingilizce olanlar, arzu ederlerse, aşağıdaki linkten M.Parris’ in konuşmasını kendi sesinden dinleyebilirler. Saygılar,
Bedii Nezih Oz
ERGİN YILDIZOĞLU
Mark Parris Ne Diyordu?
ABD’nin eski Ankara Büyükelçisi Mark Parris’in, Türkiye’deki siyasi krizle ilgili yorumları geçen hafta medyaya yansıdı. İlgiler daha çok, Parris’in Anayasa Mahkemesi’nin kararına ilişkin adeta bir tarih veren öngörüsü üzerinde odaklandı. Ama Türkiye’den döndükten sonra Stratejik ve Uluslararası Çalışmalar Merkezi’nde (CSIS) yaptığı ilginç konuşmanın içeriği, sanırım, yeterince irdelenmedi. Haberin üzerinden yaklaşık bir hafta geçmiş olmasına karşın konuşmada ilgimi çeken noktaları sizlerle paylaşmak istiyorum.
Mark Parris Türkiye’ye, bir ABD – AB ortak kuruluşu olan Atlantik Konseyi’nden bir heyetin parçası olarak gelmiş. Türkiye’de olup bitenleri anlamak, büyük olasılıkla etkilemek amacıyla gelen bu heyetin diğer üyeleriyle birlikte Türkiye’de yaygın temaslarda bulunmuş. Parris, dönüşünde CSIS’de yaptığı ve basında aktarılan toplantıdaki (kuruluşun web sitesinden dinlemek olanaklı) yaklaşık 20 dakikalık sunuşunda ve izleyen “Soru-Cevap” bölümünde, özellikle üç noktaya yaptığı vurgunun çok önemli olduğunu düşünüyorum: AKP’ye yönelik eleştiriler, “3. Güç” dediği bir yapılanmaya ilişkin saptamalar, Türkiye’de siyasetin içinde askerin rolünün artacağına ilişkin beklenti.
AKP başarılı olamadı
Parris’in AKP’ye, ikinci dönemi bağlamında yönelttiği eleştiriler oldukça kapsamlı. Bunlardan en önemlileri şöyle: AB sürecini canlandıramadı, anayasayı değiştiremedi, varlığından kaygı duyulan İslamcı gündemin/projenin (“agenda” sözcüğünü kullanıyor) keskin yanlarını törpüleyemedi, tüm ülkenin başbakanı olamadı. Nihayet yolsuzluk sorunu AKP grubunu da etkisi altına aldı.
AB sürecinin aksamasının tek sorumlusunun AKP olmadığını, AB’nin değişen tutumunun süreci fiilen öldürdüğünü göz önüne alırsak, Parris’in, aslında AKP’nin kendisinden istenenleri veremediğinden yakındığını düşünebiliriz. Bence daha önemli eleştiriler AKP’nin toplumda birleştirici olamadığına, dolayısıyla bölücü olduğuna, yolsuzluklara bulaştığına ilişkin saptamalarda yatıyor. Böylece Parris, diplomatik bir dille, AKP’nin meşruiyeti üzerine bir soru işareti koyuyor. Dahası, sermaye sınıfı ve Batı yanlısı liberal seçkinlerle AKP arasındaki ilişkinin bozulmasına yaptığı gönderme, AKP’nin Batı yanlısı tutumunun, liberal demokrat olma iddialarının hakikiliğine ilişkin kaygıların bir yansıması olarak görülebilir. Bu saptamalara karşılık konuşmasında sık sık Tayyip Bey’i övmesini, “Yeri doldurulamaz” demesini “Hatalarından öğrenmiyor” saptamasıyla birlikte okuyunca, aklıma efsanevi Kızılderili Şefi Jeronimo’nun “Beyaz adam çatal dillidir” sözleri geldi, ister istemez.
‘3. Güç’e dikkat
Bence, konuşmada çok az yer verilmekle birlikte, Parris’in karşı karşıya olan güçleri sıralarken bir “3. Güç”ten söz etmesi çok önemli. Parris, bugünkü kriz içinde, Tayyip Bey’den yana tutum alan bu “3. Güç”ün sivil güvenlik güçleri, istihbarat örgütleri içinde çok etkin olduğunu ve kendi savcılarına sahip olduğunu söylüyor. Diğer bir deyişle Parris, devlet içinde, şiddet organlarında ve yasama içinde, kaynağı belirsiz (“biz bile bilmiyoruz” demeye getiriyor) karanlık bir güç var diyor. Bu gücün “cemaat” olduğu artık herkesin malumudur. Öyleyse Parris, bu güce işaret ederken “cemaat”in etkisiyle, devletin elindeki şiddet tekelinin parçalanmaya başladığını da söylemiş oluyor. Böylece, Parris, devlet içinde bir “tırmanan darbe” (devleti ele geçirme) olgusuna dikkat çekmiş olmuyor mu?
Askerin siyasi rolü artacak
Bence, Parris’in, askerin siyasi etkisi artacak öngörüsü, AKP’yi destekleyerek akıllarınca “militarizme karşı” mücadele ettiklerini hayal eden şaşkın liberallerin üzerinde şok etkisi yapmalıdır. Tabii duyduklarını anlayacak kadar akılları kaldıysa. Parris son dönemde en “aklıselim” yorumların ordu üst kademesinden geldiğine inanıyor. Parris’e göre, önümüzdeki dönemde, “asker-siyasetçi” olarak nitelediği bir kategorinin sivil siyaset içindeki rolü özellikle, Özkök gibi emekli komutanların aracılığıyla artacak. Yine Parris’e göre ordu üst kademesinin, asker siyasetçilerin, sivil siyaset içindeki etkisinin artmasıysa, AKP’yi geriletmeye çalışanlara karşı mücadele eden güçleri daha da güçlendirecek, onlar için bir nevi koruyucu etken olacak. Bu da “başkalarını” düş kırıklığına uğratacak gibi görünüyor.
Tam bu noktada Parris’in; “Taraflar bir çıkış yolu bulamazlarsa uçuruma birlikte yuvarlanacaklar”, “Ancak görünürde bir taviz verme ya da anlaşma eğilimi yok”. “Birileri bu sorunu çözmeli” yorumu üzerinde düşünmeye başlayabiliriz. Düşünürken benim aklıma, İngiltere dış politikasının önemli düşünce kuruluşu Chatam House’dan Fadi Hakura’nın, bir saptaması geldi “Erdoğan ve AKP’ye ne olursa olsun, Türkiye, ideologların geçmiş dönemdeki kavgalarının biriken küllerinden doğacak yeni bir tarz siyasetin eşiğinde” (17/07/08). Hımm.
July 20, 2008, Washington DC – From early morning, over 45 Turkish Americans braved an Aegean-like sun and 100 degrees to gather in front of the Turkish Embassy and show solidarity with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) on Turkish Cypriot Independence Day.
Organized by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA), with the leadership of President-Elect and local attorney Gunay Evinch and coordinated by Georgetown University Fulbright graduate Sonay Kanber, nine local Turkish American groups participated in a tremendous show of Turkish American unity and solidarity.
About 30 Greek demonstrators, supposedly members of the newly formed, Greek ultranationalist Cyprus Action Network of America (CANA), strolled in at around 2pm, as Metropolitan Police sent them to the other side of the street. The Greek demonstrators replicated decades-old allegations and hatred. Screaming for the removal of Turkish and UNFICYP peacekeepers (there since 1963), CANA was quick to forget the ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred against Turkish Cypriots between 1960 and 1974.
What was clearly abundant at the CANA demonstration was the anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim and, surprisingly, anti-immigrant slurs of Greek demonstrators. Turkish Americans responded, “No Enosis – No Racism!”
Turkish Americans were the first to come, and last to leave, saluting the Turkish Cypriots for their sheer determination, strength, infatigueability, and independence with cheers, dance and song.
Remembering the Victims
We acutely remember that in the 1960s, Cypriot Minister of the Interior Polykarpos Yorgadjis conducted rallies in support of the extermination of Turkish Cypriots, declaring, “There is no place in Cyprus for anyone who is not Greek, who does not think Greek, and who does not constantly feel Greek.” Yorgadjis created the “Akritas Plan” to achieve enosis (joining of Greece and Cyprus) by stripping Turkish Cypriots of all their rights, hamleting them, and then killing them. Finally, in 1963, then-Cypriot president Archbishop Makarios III unilaterally declared the constitution “dead and buried”.
UN peacekeepers, as in the case of Bosnia in the 1990s, were utterly ineffective, and in 1974 the Turkish Republic was forced to intervene under the London-Zurich Accords to stop the ethnic killings and topple the Greek Junta.
Since the proclamation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983, Turkish Cypriots have endorsed the 1992 UN Set of Ideas, 1994 UN Confidence Building Measures, and the 2004 UN Secretary General Kofi Annan Comprehensive Settlement Plan. The Turkish Cypriots voted in favor of the Annan Plan by 70%, while the Greeks voted against it by 80%. Still, the EU accepted a divided island, while the Turkish Cypriots continue to face alienation and embargos. Efforts to ease the isolation of Northern Cyprus have been lead by Turkey and the United States.
In closing remarks, ATAA President-Elect Evinch thanked the Turkish American participants and stated:”Today, while we celebrate the self-determination of Turkish Cypriots, we also honor the victims of Enosis. Throughout northern Cyprus there are mass graves of Turkish Cypriots massacred between 1960-1974. There is a memorial at every mass grave. The memorials bare the names and ages of the victims. They are mostly senior citizens, mothers and children. The truth shall always prevail in the end.”
