By ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ (GREEK) TÜRKÇE (TURKISH)
We live in the homeland of tragedy. A place drenched in blood that experienced unspeakable horror. Two and a half thousand people were martyred and murdered in 1974 on this beautiful island. About two and a half thousand were captured and about a thousand were transferred to prisons in Turkey for months, while one of the most tragic aspects of this tragedy are the raped women, who are ‘more than can be counted’, because the state’s perception at the time was that we should hide them because they offended us! There were also the 120,000 refugees who were driven out from their homes and properties, from the 34% that is the northern part of the island. There is also the 18% of the population, the Turkish Cypriots, who under the threat of the invading army were transferred to the northern part of the island. That segment of the population experienced intimidation in the decade before the Turkish invasion and also had 300 missing persons from 1963 to 1974. The Greek Cypriot side also had about 42 missing persons during the same period, while from 1974 the Greek Cypriot missing persons numbered about 1510 and the Turkish Cypriots about 492. Considering that the population of the island was no more than 800,000, the scale of the tragedy can be understood. And it is understood by people who, beyond a rudimentary education, have an understanding that life is but a moment in eternity. That is why the people marked by such a tragedy have lost that moment through the loss of their child, their spouse and their sibling and their ancestral homes, which, in essence, are not their property but their whole world.
We are now counting 50 years since then and ‘those at the top’ live in a society eroded by corruption, usurping public wealth or even the properties that ‘lost’ their owners in 1974, by various clever distortions such as “the doctrine of necessity” and smuggling. ‘Those at the bottom’ are constantly slipping into impoverishment through a quagmire created by ‘those at the top’, such as the stock market, the bail-ins and the red loans, while at the same time they are drowning in the pain of their dead and their missing and their lost village…I was reminded of it by a friend the other day, about ‘a shocking article’ I had previously written entitled, ‘no one with a prominent surname’, referring to the truly shocking fact that among the dead and missing in 1974 there is no offspring of a family with a prominent surname. Because all of them had made sure to leave Cyprus before 15 July. Saturday, 20 July, like yesterday, was a day of horror not only for the scale of the evil to come but also for the evil we experienced, people like me who experienced the painful face of fascism with four dead falling on top of me on Monday 15 July from the bullets of the putschists in Larnaca. While we demand from the international community that justice be served for Cyprus, fifty years after the coup d’état, and with the killers known, nobody has seen to it that justice be served for the four in Larnaca, as well as for many others. Catharsis is a chapter that is not at all in the interests of those ‘at the top’ who have made the status quo a business and a potential solution totally undesirable.
You saw them yesterday, all in their suits and with speeches written by their cadres, talking about liberation and vindicating our dead. Do you know how many our dead are? No one knows! Neither how many prisoners there were, nor how many were missing. How many were the tragic raped women, do you know? How many were killed in Tillyria, does anyone know? No one knows! Let’s hope the President or the Parliament demand to find out the numbers. Is it not a shame, half a century later, not to know who gave up their lives for us?
On the other side, at the parade of the ‘winners’, ‘those at the top’ (their own) proclaimed that what was won with blood will not be given back through talks. But ‘those at the bottom’, the brothers and sisters of our beloved Zeki Beşiktepeli, were confessing their love for their village, Melandra in Paphos, as we drank zivania in his memory last Sunday.
I read my friend Sener Levent on Wednesday, who was talking about Ayşe Güneş – daughter of Turkey’s Foreign Minister at the time, Turan Güneş – a professor at the Middle East Technical University for 47 years now. She was 19 years old in 1974, he says. Her father was in Geneva. They sent a message to Güneş from Turkey, he says. “Should Ayşe go on holiday?” And he replied with a cryptogram: “Let Ayşe go on holiday.” As soon as he got this cryptogram, Ecevit gave an order to the general staff: “Operation to begin in the morning.” And the second phase of the invasion began, which was the most fierce. The 69-year-old Ayşe says: “The heroes (of the invasion) are my father Turan Güneş, Bülent Ecevit and of course the Turkish armed forces.” These are what 69-year-old Professor Ayşe feels proud of! What might she be teaching her students about, the greatness of war?
Let’s see what Ploutis Servas writes about the hours that determined the second phase of the Turkish invasion on 14 August 1974 (Cyprus Problem – Responsibilities Volume 3, Athens, 1985, S. Voyatzis & Co. pp. 372,373). “It would be absurd to assume that a timely recourse to the good services of the UN Secretary-General would not have prevented the second Turkish incursion since the dictates of resolution 353 were so specific. The path had already been cleared by previous Security Council interventions, which had begun the day after the coup. After all, why had the decision made at dawn by Bitsios (after Mavros’ desperate phone calls to ‘file a new appeal to the UN’) not been made earlier, since by 10 August it had become clear which way Güneş was heading?” In the end, the Greek side was 4 days late in submitting a relevant appeal. And Servas concludes: “The negligence in the failure to appeal to the Security Council in time is clear. It led straight to the disaster. For this there is no excuse. Nor any forgiveness. This mistake was the last in the final knot of the series of mistakes that had begun, one immediately after the other, after the tremors of the crazy April Fool’s Day of 1955, to reach the dawn of 14 August 1974, which allowed Ankara to extend its military domination over 37% of Cypriot land.”
This is why, dear President Nikos Christodoulides, the olive branch that Archbishop Makarios rightly extended, as you said on 15 July, as the facts attest, was invented to cover the pile of mistakes that led directly to the disaster and to cover our own perpetrators.
