The elections for the Turkish-speaking Cypriot leadership on 11 October 2020 (previously scheduled on 26 April 2020) in the occupied area of Cyprus do not have any legitimacy under current circumstances and this situation has also reached a dimension that affects all Cypriots and the future of Cyprus Problem.
Today, Turkish-speaking Cypriots compose a very small portion of the population living in the occupied areas as a result of the Turkish occupation and the “bloodless genocide” that they have been facing since then.
As we all know, Turkey violates the Geneva Convention and commits a war crime by sending Turkish settlers from Anatolia to the occupied areas since 1974 in order to colonize the island. Today, according to the “official” numbers of the pseudo-state (TRNC), its so-called “citizens” who have the right to elect and be elected in the elections held in the occupied area are predominantly the illegal settlers who came to the island from Turkey following the 1974 invasion.
In 14 March 2019, Kudret Özersay, the so-called Deputy Prime Minister of the pseudo-state, declared the number of “citizens” of the TRNC as 351 thousand, underlining that 61 thousand of them are living abroad. And again, we know from the official statment by the head of the Statistical and Research Department of the pseudo-state that the number of the Turkish-speaking Cypriots (including the children of mixed marriages) are 120 thousand with only 1.3 birth rate.
These “official” statements show us that today, the Turkish-speaking Cypriots are only the 35% of the people who have the right to elect and be elected in the elections held in the occupied area. And the actual ratio is so much smaller, since the vast majority of the 61 thousand of the “citizens” that are living abroad are Turkish-speaking Cypriots. And again, we would like to clarify that these numbers are only the so-called “citizens” not the “population”. The population of the occupied territories exceeded the number of a million a long time ago.
As Union of Cypriots, we are calling for an end to the seizure of the political will of the Turkish-speaking Cypriots and asking the world, notably the United Nations, to not recognize the so-called president of the pseudo-state in the occupied area as a “leader” who represents the Turkish-speaking Cypriots in the international arena.
Our demand is clear:
We do not care about who will have the right to participate in fake elections for the positions of the pseudo-state. However, the person who represents the Turkish-speaking Cypriots in the United Nations and the international arena has to be elected by his/her community. Therefore, the elections for the leadership of the Turkish-speaking Cypriots should be held in the free area of the Republic of Cyprus or in the areas under the control of the United Nations with the participation of only Turkish-speaking Cypriots.
This demand is a human rights movement and a call for international law to be enforced.
Lastly, we would like to underline that this subject is vitally important to “all” Cypriots. If the Greek-speaking Cypriot leadership does not utter a word to this tragedy, due to a dream of gaining political advantage in the future from the situation, they are helping intentionally or unintentionally to the game that will bring the “aftermath” of all Cypriots.
Today, the small island of Cyprus is moving rapidly towards becoming an island inhabited by millions of illegal settlers and a few hundred thousand Cypriots. In this environment, as Union of Cypriots, we will continue to remind both Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking Cypriots that the only insurance of the continuity of their existence on their homeland is the existence of each other. ###