Just let refugees stay where they are

“WE HAVE been shouting and protesting for 30 years because the Turkish Cypriots have been building on our property. But the legitimate government (of Cyprus) gave us money to build houses on the properties of the Turkish Cypriots. And at the time they lied to us, telling us that they had given us state land. This was what was written on the documents we signed.”

I retained these words, uttered by a frustrated citizen in a television news story about a noisy protest held last Tuesday in Polemidia by hundreds of displaced persons who had built houses on plots given to them by the Spyros Kyprianou government some 30 years ago.

In the same report, a woman, who was visibly angry, said: “We were fooled. They brought us here, gave us land belonging to the Turkish Cypriots and, through a life of hard toil, we built our houses on it, married, brought up our children and now they are telling us to leave and that they will give us a plot somewhere else. In other words, we have to start from the beginning again. We will never leave. We will stay here and if they dare, they can come and kick us out.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by several other protesters. I consider the words of these people very important because they expose, in the most damning way, the absurdity of the policy we followed in the post-1974 years. The policy was centred on the nefarious slogan, ‘All refugees will return to their homes’.

I will not refer to the hypocrisy of the parties in government, which, in view of the elections, are now proceeding with the issuing of title deeds for houses to thousands of refugees. These very same parties lambasted the former president Glafcos Clerides, accusing him of treachery, when, seven or eight years ago, he decided to issue title deeds. I had questioned the wisdom of this move at the time, predicting that one of the consequences would be to create resentment among all refugees who had built houses on Turkish Cypriot land; Tuesday’s protest in Polemidia proved the point. During the Clerides presidency the patriots of AKEL, EDEK and DIKO accused the government of issuing ‘title deeds’ because it had surrendered the right of the refugees to return to their own homes.

The slogan about the “right of all refugees to return to their homes”, with which politicians have been bombarding us for more than 30 years is a myth that has now collapsed, as the words of the refugees mentioned above show. It is blatantly obvious that today, 32 years after the displacement of large sections of the population, almost none of the refugees want to return to their home – I refer to the areas that would be under Turkish Cypriot control in the event of a federal settlement.

There are three main reasons for this. First, in the 32 years that have passed almost half the refugees have died. Second, those who were children in 1974 have now married and settled down in the free areas, where they have their homes and jobs. Third, a large number of them have settled down in the government refugee estates or in Turkish Cypriot properties, as in the case of the protesters in Polemidia.

And the only thing they want is to be able to stay permanently there, in the houses in which they had married, given birth and brought up their children, as the angry woman said on television. I would like to stress this point because, as I had written in a column just after the referendum, this was one of the main reasons why they voted against a settlement and would do so again if they had to. These people are happy where they are today and do not want another change in their life.

That none of our leaders who have been dealing with the Cyprus problem all these years has been willing to take this harsh reality into account is the main factor for our failure to reach a settlement.

Cyprus Mail 19/03/2006