Hellenic Electronic Center

The Annan Plan and the attempted Genocide of the Greek Cypriots

In November 2002 the disgraced United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan sought to put and end to the longstanding problem of the illegal Turkish invasion and occupation of Cyprus in the most politically expedient manner that was open to him in order to simplify Turkey's attempt to become a member of the European Union. To achieve this objective Annan put control of the solution in the hands of Britain and America, Turkey's most fervent supports who in their own self interest and through his indifference to his responsibilities acquiesced to all of Turkeys demands irrespective of weather or not they were compatible with the ethical principles that the United Nations and the European Union were based on. The solution which they conceived over the following two years was known as the so-called “Annan plan”.

The 2002-2004 "Annan plan" was at its core a framework for the creation of an apartheid state in Cyprus by annihilating the Greek Cypriot presence from the north thus ensuring that it always remained under Turkish control. The plan bore no similarity whatsoever to the Swiss constitution that it claimed to be based on.

Whereas the Swiss Confederation consists of 23 cantons which reflect the traditional distribution of languages as stated in Article 70 paragraph 2 of the constitution, the two constituent states that Kofi Annan intended to create in Cyprus failed to reflect the traditional distribution of languages in Cyprus in any way.

Ninety percent of the land and property in the proposed “Turkish Cypriot Constituent State” is legally owned by Greek Cypriots but was put under Turkish control, including over 150,000 illegal Turkish colonists brought to Cyprus by Turkey in violation of Article 49 the Geneva Convention and who now outnumber the Turkish Cypriots by two to one and would have been given full Cypriot citizenship by Kofi Annan thus Turkifying the originally Greek north.

According to the 1963 Census over 96% of Greek Cypriots lived in villages with a Greek Cypriot majority population in the territory which is now part of the occupied areas Republic of Cyprus, while 66% of Turkish Cypriots lived in villages with a Turkish Cypriot majority in the same territory. If the system of Swiss cantons was adhered to in the Annan plan then 15 Turkish Cypriot cantons would have needed to have been created in the areas which the Turkish Cypriots formed the majority and the rest of the land should have been placed under the control of the Greek Cypriots in order for the traditional distribution of languages to be reflected.

Not only did the Annan plan not reflect or seek to restore the distribution of languages before the two Turkish invasions of Cyprus in 1974 which saw the ethnic cleansing 200,000 Greek Cypriots, but contrary to Annan’s claim that the Greek Cypriots were to be given “a right to return”, the Greek Cypriots were in fact to be discouraged from wanting to return and physically prevented from actually returning to their homes in the north should they have wanted to do so by a series of racist population quotas and illegal restrictions and curtailments of their basic human and democratic rights, including their freedom of settlement, their right to property and their right to vote, which would not have detrimentally affected the Turkish Cypriots that wanted to return to the south since they were a small minority.

The Annan plan only allowed the Greek Cypriots to claim a maximum of 1/3 of their land or property to be returned to them and a minimum of one donum or skalla in area, assuming that it was originally used, or failing that had been built by the claimants as dwelling place before the Turkish invasions and was not already occupied or had been structurally altered by the Turks. No business property or land owned by institutions (including the Church which was the islands biggest private land owner) was to be returned at all and instead of Turkey being made to pay compensation to the Greek Cypriots, the Greek Cypriots were to have been made to pay compensation to themselves out of their own money through taxes levied one them by the so-called “Greek Cypriot Constituent State” for their own compensation. While the Turkish colonists and Turkish Cypriots were to be given full title of the property they illegally occupied without having to pay the Greek Cypriots for it, and were also to been given huge sums of foreign aid to exploit this properly and build the economy in the north, no cash whatsoever was to be given by anyone to compensate the Greek Cypriot property owners. Not only did the Greek Cypriots have to compensate themselves but they were also to be denied the right to appeal thease measures to the European Court of Human Rights by the constitution. On top of this Greek Cypriots were to be banned from buying or selling any property in the north, despite the fact that other EU citizens were free to do this, and at the same time the Greek Cypriots were expected to provide long term loans at extremely low rates of interest to the Turkish colonists and Turkish Cypriots so that they could easily buy any property in the north they illegally occupied, with all the proceeds going soley to the so-called "Turkish Cypriot Constituent State”. Any of these measures if put into force by acceptance of the plan would have violated European Union law and deliberately discriminated against the Greek Cypriots alone.

The Annan plan also limited the number of Greek Cypriots who could return to the so-called “Turkish Cypriot Constituent State” to 6% of the population of any one village rising to 18% only after nearly two decades should the Turks consent to it. This remember is in territory where the Greek Cypriots would have made up over 90% of the population had no restrictions been imposed and had they all chosen to return. These quotas would have made it impossible for the vast majority Greek Cypriots to return to any village, which originally had a predominantly Greek Cypriot population even if it was now completely uninhabited. Even if the Greek Cypriots could return it would have been impossible for them to have set up Greek speaking schools and to educate their children in their mother tongue since they were to be restricted to a minute fraction of the population. Furthermore the so-called constitution of the so-called “Turkish Cypriot Constituent State” forbade anyone one who did not speak Turkish as their mother language to be given the right to vote in elections for the Constituent State assembly. This coupled with the fact that 150,000 illegal Turkish colonists were to be given citizenship whereas the few returning Greek Cypriots were to be denied so-called citizenship of the “Turkish Cypriot Constituent State” should they have considered living under the harsh conditions of life which were to have been inflicted on them, shows that the clear intention of the Annan plan was to permanently Turkify the north of Cyprus and therefore is tantamount to the cultural and physical genocide of the Greek Cypriots and is a clear violation of Articles 2c, 2d and 2e of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” due to its violation of the Greek Cypriots property rights thus preventing them from living in the north, the population quotas which when reached would have prevented Greek Cypriots being born in the north, and forcing Greek Cypriots to be educated as Turks and speak Turkish. As revealed by Caire Palley in her book “An International Relations Debacle” all of these genocidal measures formed the fundamental demands of the Turkish side and were devised by the Turkish Cypriot leaders Mehmet Ali Talat and Rauf Denktash in collusion with Alvaro De Soto, David Hannay, Richard Holbrooke, Alfred Moses and Tom Weston and had the approval of Kofi Annan himself whose tenure as UN Secretary General is a litany of fraud and corruption.

Furthermore the Annan plan was designed to be completely unworkable as well as being unviable. The Turkish minority, including the 150,000 illegal colonists of non-Cypriot origin were to be treated as if they made-up, up to half the population and were to be given the same number of places in the judiciary, and the board of governors of the central bank as the Greek Cypriots, with foreigners given the single casting vote, in violation of the EU’s laws against discrimination, since the Greek Cypriot majority would have been deliberately discriminated against. Not only that but the Turks were to be disproportionately given half the seats in the upper house of parliament, with Greek Cypriots living in the so-called “Turkish Cypriot Constituent State” being denied to the right to vote or stand as candidates because their mother language was not Turkish, and in the lower house the Turks were to be given 25% of the seats when at no time in Cyprus history had the Turkish speaking minority made up more than 18% of the population, and once again the Greek Cypriots living in the so-called “Turkish Cypriot Constituent State” would have had no right to vote. If this disproportionality and disenfranchisement was not enough to make the system unworkable the Turks were also given the de-facto right of veto in these institutions, since all legislation had to gain the support of the members elected by the “Turkish Cypriot Constituent State” in both houses in order to be passed. All the Turks had to do to bring down the government was to walk out of parliament or not vote, in a repetition of what they did in 1963 when they rebelled and began a campaign of terror across the whole island. On top of this the undesirable rotating presidency was made unworkable through the blanket veto rights that were to be given to the Turks so that decision-making would be practically impossible without the consent of Turkey. Together with the permanent presence of Turkish troops, which would never be removed from Cyprus soil, and a presidency which was only symbolic, Cyprus was to have been striped of all the vestiges of an independent sovereign state and made into a protectorate of its enemies.

Whereas the leaders of the Greek Cypriot majority and the Turkish Cypriot minority had agreed to a federal system of government in the Makarios-Denktash High-Level Agreement of February 1977 the Annan plan provided no system of federal hierarchy whatsoever. It was not even confederal like the Swiss constitution which the Annan plan claimed to be based on, which the Greek Cypriots never consented to in first place, but Cyprus was to be partitioned into two no more than symbolically linked, virtually independent states, with the people kept apart by a monstrous all pervasive system of apartheid.

It is no wonder that this plan was so overwhelmingly rejected by the Greek Cypriots. It was a plan designed to satisfy Turkey and simplify its EU course, by totally capitulating to illegal aggression and brutal ethnic cleansing and was completely unacceptable. Britain would never have accepted such a solution for the Falkland Islands, where the occupying Argentineans would have been allowed to colonise the islands and keep their troops permanently stationed there and then take control the islands through a constitution that gave the Argentineans the right to veto all decisions in the government, put the legal and banking system in the hands of foreigners, denied the Falkland islanders their rights to their property, weather to reside in it or to buy or sell it to anyone of their choice, and took the islands sovereignty and independence away from them, and Turkey would never accept such a system as a solution to its own Kurdish problem either, so why should Cyprus.

President Papadopoulos rejection of the Annan plan was completely justified and his stance was the same stance taken by Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when it was proposed to share the Falklands with Argentina in 1982. Margaret Thatcher said the Falklands do not belong to Argentina but to the Falkland islanders themselves.

The Annan plan was always destined to be overwhelmingly rejected by the majority of the Cypriot people because it rewarded the aggressor and punished their innocent victims whose annihilation it would have brought about.

Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos should be praised and congratulated for his stance, which was to uphold the principles of human rights, justice and democracy whereas the ambition of Kofi Annan the most fruaduelent and corrupt Secretary General the UN has ever known, and the Turkish Cypriots and their allies, was to overturn these.