Turkish Cypriots celebrated the 17th anniversary of their unilateral declaration of independence Wednesday, while in the south of this divided island, there was a mass demonstration and a work stoppage in protest.
During celebrations in the north, Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash said his people would not back down from their claim of sovereignty for the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC).
Referring to international efforts to reunify the island, Denktash said: "They are trying to take away our state. Today is the day to tell them that we will not let them achieve this."
He reiterated that a Cyprus settlement could only be reached after the recognition of the TRNC, which is currently only acknowledged by Turkey.
"The way to peace does not go through solution proposals full of lies, but through (the recognition of) our state," Denktash said in an apparent reference to a set of proposals by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week.
Denktash and Turkey rejected Annan's settlement model, which envisaged the island's reunification as a single state with a single government.
Turkish State Minister Sukru Sina Gurel, who is in charge of Cyprus affairs, said at the ceremony that Turkey would continue political and financial support for the TRNC.
Denktash and Turkey maintain that the island should be reunified within a two-state confederation between the TRNC and Greek Cyprus, while the international community and the Greek Cypriots favor a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation.
The TRNC was declared in 1983, nine years after the partition of Cyprus into a Turkish Cypriot north and a Greek Cypriot south.
The division was the result of Turkey's invasion of the northern third of the island in response to an Athens-engineered military coup seeking to unite Cyprus with Greece.
Even before Turkey's intervention, Cyprus was plagued by ethnic clashes between its Turkish and Greek communities, which resulted in the minority Turkish Cypriots' expulsion from the then joint government and led to the deployment of a UN peace-keeping force in the island in 1964.
The internationally-recognized south came to a standstill Wednesday as Greek Cypriots held a five-minute silent protest to mark the anniversary of the declaration of an independent Turkish Cypriot state.
Sirens blared at 10 AM (0800 GMT) to mark the popular protest against the breakaway state, as more than 30.000 civil servants and thousands of private employees observed the officially sanctioned silent protest.
Several thousand high school students staged a peaceful mass demonstration at UN-controlled Ledra Palace checkpoint in Nicosia which separates the north and south of the island.
Meanwhile in the Qatari capital Doha, the foreign and defense minister for the breakaway north told AFP: "The TRNC exists and will continue to exist, no matter who recognizes it or doesn't recognize it."
Tahsin Ertugruloglu said Turkish Cyprios had lobbied in vain yet again before the summit of the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference for fellow Muslim recognition of its 17-year-old declaration of statehood.
"The bottom line is that our patience is endless. We are not going to give up on our state," the defiant Turkish-Cypriot official told AFP in the Qatari capital on the anniversary of the 1983 declaration – NICOSIA (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
