A Little Help for President Anastasiadis
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
An anonymous Cypriot
The President of the Republic of Cyprus Mr. Nikos Anastasiadis in his effort to avoid being blamed for the failure of the Cyprus talks often puts himself in a corner, from which it is difficult to escape.
Yet all he has to do is to point to his interlocutors that the root of the problem is in Turkey as for over 60 years the ruling elite of that country has been of the opinion that “even if a Turkish Cypriot minority did not exist on that island Turkey would have to invent it”. Rauf Denktash said it in the 1950s and Turkish PM Davutoglu has repeated it in his recent book “Strategic depth”. Besides that the President needs to remind everyone that the Turkish idea of democracy, be it the secular Attaturk legacy or the recent Islamic variety under President Erdogan, has nothing to do with the European Union’s acquis communautaire, about which Turkey has recently been expressing interest.
The definition is simple and belongs to Winston Churchill: “democracy is knowing that the knock on the door at 5’ o’clock in the morning is from the milkman and not the policeman!”. Contrast this with Erdogan’s statement that “democracy is like a streetcar; you get on it until your destination and then you get off”. So, what to Europe is a way to preserve a civil society and solve all problems as they arise (through somewhat volatile confrontations occasionally), to Turkey is a way to achieve an end, and to be discarded thereafter (keeping perhaps the voting part, so as not to be accused of the worse). Turkey has occupied since 1974 the northern 38 % of Cyprus by military force spreading death and disaster all over, and has led to the emigration and hardship of Turkish Cypriots that would supposedly protect.
The latter have been emigrating by the thousands from Cyprus (their population has shrunk from over 120.000 in 1974, the year of the Turkish invasion) to less than 85.000 today). At the same time Turkey has forced on the occupied part of Cyprus as many as 300,000 illegal settlers from Turkey, to say nothing of all forms of lawlessness that permeate this land under occupation (e.g. casinos, banned in Turkey, flourish in occupied Cyprus and are run by gangs that do not hesitate to open fire on rivals, as seen a year ago in public!).
The acquis communautaire can be summed up into one phrase: “rule of law”. The countries of the EU and their citizens abide by it, while in Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey (and occupied Cyprus by extension) the law is what the President decides, ordering courts and their officials to persecute this or that group of society (recent example the Turkish professors who have been fired from their jobs because they signed a protest letter calling for a stop to the killing of Kurdish in SE Turkey in the name of “fighting terrorism”).
Turkey has for the third year in a row the distinction of having more journalists in jail than any other country in the world! As president Erdogan told protesting Turkish Cypriots who three years ago demanded en masse the withdrawal of the Turkish Army of occupation from Cyprus “I am paying for your keep, so shut up”! Rule of law and democracy are exactly about the right of the people to free speech and other basic freedoms, not the right of any official to tell them to shut up or put them in jail for expressing opinions that he finds offensive. This is all that President Anastasiadis needs to remind anyone who pressures him or tries to put him on the defensive. The recent words of wisdom of Israel’s former president Shimon Peres ring truer than ever “Turkey’s policy of zero problems with her neighbors has ended up as a policy with zero friends and neighbors.
A solution of the Cyprus problem will help not just Cyprus but also the whole of the greater [Middle East] region. However, if Turkey does not show real political will, free of policies that bind Cyprus under her hegemony, no solution of the problem can be achieved..