Resulotion of the National Federation of Cypriots at UK to British Prime Minister
Rt Hon David Cameron MP
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA
13 July 2014
Today, British Cypriots are gathering in Trafalgar Square to mark a tragic milestone. Forty years have now passed since the illegal and brutal Turkish invasion and subsequent military occupation of the northern part of Cyprus and still no resolution to the injustices committed by Turkey on the island has been found. The memories of a divided Berlin are a distant memory, yet the European Union still tolerates a divided capital within its own territory.
Today, we mark four decades of Turkey’s military occupation and colonisation in Cyprus. We mourn forty years of anguish for the relatives of the Cypriot people who went missing during Turkey’s military invasion of the island and who remain unaccounted for to this day because of Turkey’s refusal to co-operate with the authorities which are seeking to determine what happened to them.
Today, we condemn the utter injustice of the island’s continuing division, the ethnic cleansing, the cultural genocide and the religious desecration: these consequences are the pernicious legacy of Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974.
But the tragedy of this island is made even more profound because the will of the United Nations has been defied, with complete impunity, by successive Turkish governments, for forty years, which makes today an anniversary of failure too – the failure of the international community to hold Turkey to account. The United Kingdom bears its own share of responsibility for this failure.
Over the last four decades since Turkey’s invasion, during which more than a third of the island has been subject to illegal occupation, the world has changed enormously and the UK has played a positive role in defending and advancing the principles of justice, democratic values and international law.
The United Kingdom remains a crucial player in relation to Cyprus. Not only does it have historic treaty obligation under the Treaty of Guarantee which it signed in 1959, it also maintains military bases on the island and it is Cyprus’s partner in the European Union, in the Commonwealth and in the United Nations. It is also a strategic ally of Turkey.
As such, we believe that your government must do more to use the leverage it has in order to exert real pressure upon Turkey to persuade that country, which holds the key to a solution in Cyprus, to engage positively and constructively towards a just settlement on the island.
It must be recorded once again that, after forty years:
· Turkey persistently disregards numerous UN and EU resolutions, the decisions of European and international courts in relation to Cyprus and the stance of the international community with impunity;
· stolen properties are exploited by the unlawful regime in the occupied north, while their rightful owners are denied the right to return to these;
· Turkey continues illegally to colonise the areas it occupied in northern Cyprus as part of a deliberate strategy to change the island’s demography;
· cultural and religious sites in the occupied area are being deliberately desecrated and destroyed;
· Turkey refuses to investigate the fate of hundreds of Cypriot men, women and children who disappeared without trace during its military invasion of the island.
The British Cypriot community has today demonstrated its resolve that a solution must at long last be found, and the misery of the Cypriot people brought to an end. We call upon you and your Government to:
· demand that Turkey works sincerely and though real deeds, not empty words, for the reunification of Cyprus as a united, independent, bi-communal, bi-zonal federal state with a single international legal personality, a single sovereignty and a single citizenship;
· remind Turkey of, and pressurise Turkey to fulfil, its obligations to the EU in relation to Cyprus;
· and to act in a more resolute way within the EU and international forums in order to help bring to an end Turkey’s military occupation of Cyprus, and the island’s unlawful and unjust division.
We implore you to act in the interests of a member of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth, showing solidarity and support for a fellow EU partner. Forty years after the invasion of Cyprus, the UK has played a major role in shaping a new world: it is long overdue that Britain acts accordingly on Cyprus and presses Turkey to work for a fair and lasting settlement for the benefit of all Cypriots.
You have the power to make a difference in relation to Cyprus and now is the time to exercise this proactively and constructively.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Droussiotis
President of the National Federation of Cypriots
