Universal condemnation of Annan plan

Universal condemnation of Annan plan

On 21 November 2002 Lobby for Cyprus held a public meeting to debate the Annan plan for a settlement of the Cyprus issue. The resolution below was passed unanimously.

“We, the undersigned refugee associations and individuals, having considered Kofi Annan’s UN plan for a Cyprus settlement, wish to put on public record that the plan is totally unacceptable and that we reject it outright.

We consider this horrendously complicated document to be nothing more than an attempt to gloss over Turkey’s appalling crimes in Cyprus and to serve as a crutch for Turkey’s accession to the EU. It furthermore attempts to bestow legitimacy and credibility upon an illegal regime that was created out of the invasion and subsequent occupation of 37% of the Republic of Cyprus.
In particular, we find utterly abhorrent the fact that huge numbers of refugees (an estimated 100,000), commercial interests and the church, will have their homes, and properties confiscated through the mechanism of “compensation in lieu of reinstatement”.

It is a travesty of justice, and for all those involved in the drafting of this disastrous plan, to their perpetual shame, that we, the Greek Cypriot refugees, are to be largely dispossessed in order to allegedly achieve the peaceful “re-unification” of Cyprus, whilst at the same time the Turkish colonists will be given title to our lands.

We demand the reinstatement of our properties and the restitution of full and unrestricted benefits of the three freedoms of movement, settlement and ownership.

It makes a nonsense of international law that over 120,000 colonists are, with few exceptions, to be accorded citizenship status of the proposed Turkish Cypriot component state and thereby acquire Cypriot nationality. They are illegal immigrants brought in by a morally bankrupt and internationally unrecognised regime in an attempt to socially engineer a change in the demographic composition of the island. It represents an unacceptable imposition and one, which would not be tolerated by any other national state in Europe, or anywhere else in the world.

The UN, on these points and many others, has produced an unacceptable document that reneges on the fundamental rights of over 100,000 Greek Cypriot refugees, disregards its own UN resolutions and legal opinions of international courts and totally contradicts the principles of the EU. By rewarding international aggression and lawlessness in this way and masking it under the cover of re-unification and reconciliation, the UN is acting as the accomplice of Turkey in its attempts to Turkify the entire island.

The Annan plan is fundamentally flawed and a legal nonsense. It is utterly unacceptable to us and we urge the Republic of Cyprus to reject it and the Cypriot people to vote against, in any future referendum!"