Turkey, in violation of international conventions, is promoting the Islamization of the territories it occupies in Cyprus, President of the Republic of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides said on Friday, addressing an event on the genocide of the Greeks of Pontus, and stressed that the entire Cypriot people condemn the Turkish cruelty “against our brothers and sisters of the Pontic Hellenism.”
President Christodoulides said in his address that “in Cyprus we have experienced and continue to experience the Turkish policy of altering the religious and cultural identity of our country”, adding that Turkey, in violation of international conventions, is promoting the Islamization of the occupied territories by confiscating churches and other sacred sites and converting them into mosques or using them for other functions.
The President of the Republic pointed out that more than 520 churches and monasteries and all Greek Cypriot cemeteries were looted and desecrated in the occupied territories “in a massive and systematic effort characterized as institutionalized eradication and which aims at the complete disappearance of the Greek Christian cultural identity”.
He also noted that “we are experiencing at the same time the Turkish revisionism, the expansionist policy, the illegal actions in Varosha, the colonization of our homeland”, saying that the “pain and heartbreak of Pontic Greeks is familiar to us, we recognize and share it.”
Moreover, he recalled that the Cypriot House of Representatives, in this context, by a unanimous decision, has established 19 May, the day when Mustafa Kemal landed in Samsun, as a day of honour and remembrance of the genocide of the Pontic Hellenism.
President Christodoulides also added that the Plenary of the Greek Parliament unanimously established on 24 February 1994 the 19th of May as the day of remembrance of the victims of the Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus from 1914 to 1923.
Characterizing as shameful recent statements by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his election speech in Giresun, who said that “the ancestral lands of Giresun had defeated the Pontic gangs”, the President stressed that instead of provoking with such statements, “Mr. Erdogan should apologize for the crimes against humanity committed by his forefathers.”
This, he added, has already been indicated to him since 2006 by the European Parliament, which in its annual report on Turkey’s progress towards accession to the European Union, explicitly states that Turkey should come to terms with its historical past and acknowledge that what happened against Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks of Pontus, initially by the Young Turks and then by the Kemalists, constituted acts of genocide.
At the same time, President Christodoulides said that in 1948, the UN General Assembly passed the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, which entered into force in 1951.
As he explained, this convention recognizes genocide as an international crime in either peacetime or wartime, which is neither justified by military necessity nor by the purposes of war. The commission of genocide, he said, is manifested by the collective and indiscriminate extermination of the members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
In conclusion, President Christodoulides warmly congratulated the Institute of Greek Culture, the Association of Pontic Greeks in Cyprus and the “Nikos Kapetanidis” Association, whose work, he said, ensures that the memories, history and traditions of the Pontic Hellenism remain alive.
Source: Cyprus News Agency