Correspondence

...If Karagozlu does not know of this background, he is only trying to deceive himself...

...In the meanwhile, as he wrote, "after this bomb incident many innocent Turks and Greek Cypriots died, many persons were wounded and crippled, and thus for the first time the separation of Turks and Greeks by barbed wire was secured and the nonsolution extending to our own days was created...

...The 2004 Annan plan, which called for the return of Turkish Cypriot property and a phased withdrawal of Turkish troops, gave Cypriots an opportunity for reconciliation...

...have failed to condemn the appalling behavior of the Greek Cypriots...

...On Christmas Eve many Turkish Cypriot people were brutally attacked and murdered in their suburban homes...

...and the E.U...

...Putting expediency before principle, the U.N...

...UGUR KARAGOZLU Office of the London Representative Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus London CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS RESPONDS:Ugur Karagozlu should write his propaganda letters to magazines whose readers cannot distinguish between lies and half-truths, or perhaps confine himself to the sphere in which the bravest Turks like Orhan Pamuk are deemed to be enemies of the state...

...Commenting on this outrageous admission, which was delivered with a complacent smile, one Turkish Cypriot columnist, Kutlu Adali, wrote in the Nicosia newspaper Ortam that he wondered if Denktash wanted to make any other confessions while he was about it...

...I did not seek to exculpate Greek or Greek Cypriot chauvinists, who were responsible for the original coup in 1974, among many other things...

...Though it was endorsed by the international community as a fair basis for settlement, the Greek Cypriots rejected it...

...The truth, however, is that just over three years after the British "left them to themselves," the Greek Cypriots launched a genocidal attack on their Turkish counterparts...

...However, and as he well knows, there had been no intercommunal mayhem in Cyprus until June 7, 1958—towards the close of British rule—when a bomb was left outside the Information Office of the Turkish consulate in Nicosia...

...This is usually dismissed as "intercommunal fighting" but was carried out according to a premeditated Greek Cypriot scheme called the "Arkitas Plan," as was reported in American and British newspapers...

...In 1984, the Turkish proxy Rauf Denktash (self-proclaimed first "president" of the unrecognized semi-colony that Karagozlu claims to represent) made the following statement on British television: "Later on, a friend of mine, whose name will still be kept a secret, was to confess to me that he had put this little bomb in that doorway in order to create an atmosphere of tension...

...If he does know of it, then he is trying to deceive his readers...

...On February 17, 1964, the Washington Post reported that "Greek Cypriot fanatics appear bent on a policy of genocide...

...He makes a pathetic spectacle of himself in either case...

...If this were true, the 1974 Turkish intervention would be unjustifiable, and one should sympathize with Greek Cypriot complaints about breaches of their human rights...

...The resulting shock led some Turkish Cypriots, inspired and led by extremists from the mainland, to burn and loot a neighboring Greek quarter and thus to inaugurate a very low point of mutual sectarianism...

...Instead, the Greeks were given jurisdiction over all of Cyprus, while the Turkish Cypriots were frozen out of almost every international organization...

...5) is based on the lie that, as he claims, "history shows virtually no example of fratricide between Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks when left to themselves...

...For example, on December 31, 1963, the Guardian wrote, "It is nonsense to claim, as the Greek Cypriots do, that all casualties were caused by fighting between armed men of both sides...

...After these attacks, Turkish Cypriots became refugees in their own land...

...When Britain did nothing, Turkey intervened and established a safe haven in the north, where we live to this day...