Turkey

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are very short of time in this debate. If all Members could end their speech when the sixth minute comes up on the Annunciator, we would be very grateful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to speak. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, on his insightful contribution to the debate. I expected no less, knowing that he traces his roots back to my home county, Tyrone. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, on obtaining this timely debate and hope that, with her more natural authority to speak on these issues, she will be more successful than I have been during the past 28 years in seeking to obtain fairer play, justice and human rights for Turkish Cypriots. That is the issue that I want to address and I declare an interest: I have had a long-term interest in and association with Turkey and northern Cyprus.

How does one even begin to inject reality into the Cyprus situation where, for example, the Greek Cypriot President Christofias, in his most recent verbal aberration, declared that if he could meet President Gul and Prime Minister Erdogan,

“the Cyprus issue could be solved over dinner in a fish restaurant on the Bosphorus”?

Forget the pretension, ignore the insult, because Christofias obviously has little regard for either truth or reality. His mind is so conditioned by his own propaganda that he can easily overlook the Greek Cypriot repudiation of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, their rejection of various agreements since then, most recently the 2004 rejection of the Annan plan, and the fact that he, like his predecessors, is willingly held to ransom by the Greek Orthodox Church.

I wish that I had more time to expand on the negative part played by the Orthodox Church in respect of the rejection of the Annan plan and its relation to the ethnic cleansing that was visited on the Turkish Cypriots between 1963 and 1974. Only a knave or a fool can remain unmoved by the ghettoisation of the minority Turkish Cypriots, by the Akritas plan or by eyewitness accounts of the slaughter that was carried out during the Makarios presidency and by Nikos Sampson and the EOKA-B. I do not have to remind noble Lords that the same democratic deficit, moral deviance and violent hatred still pervade Greek Cypriot attitudes and are still being orchestrated and encouraged today, even on the football field and basketball court.

What angers me, and shames us all, in respect of the propaganda over much of my 28 parliamentary years, has been the willingness of a limited but verbose group of parliamentarians—mainly, but not exclusively, from another place, through an all-party group, lately known as the Friends of Cyprus, now the Cyprus all-party parliamentary group—to work exclusively to give credence to the Greek Cypriot line while effectively excluding any Turkish Cypriot participation, argument or rights. I remind noble Lords that it was I who was verbally and physically attacked when I dared to enter a publicly advertised meeting sponsored by the Friends of Cyprus in the Jubilee Room, where I spoke merely to remind those promoting the sectarian Greek Cypriot line that the history of Cyprus did not just start in 1974.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Order. Interventions in the gap should be a maximum of four minutes.

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

I apologise and I will wind up. I simply implore the Government to take a more enlightened perspective than the politically myopic Chancellor Merkel, who obviously believes that the way to assist in finding a solution for Cyprus is to visit the Greek Cypriots and lecture Turkey from afar. She did not arrive in Cyprus to support the ongoing talks; rather, she went to stick her oar in before they fail. Berlin’s only interest is to keep Cyprus as an anti-Turkish card and I hope that the coalition Government will acknowledge that.