Cyprus - Rule of law vacuum, ethical deficit and contradictions at the core of the Cyprus Question (47 min)

Published on Jan 27, 2013 - Part 2 of the Seminar - "The rule of law vacuum, ethical deficit and contradictions at the core of the Cyprus Question" by Dr Klearchos Kyriakides, Senior lecturer and a non-practising solicitor, School of Law, University of Hertfordshire, England.

The Guardian view on Turkey and the Kurds: putting peace at risk | The Guardian

Protesters in Brussels denounce
attacks on Kurds in Turkey and Iraq  

Friday 31 July 2015 - Turkey has ended its tentative reconciliation with the Kurds. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political ambitions could be the key. | Ankara’s decision to throw away years of negotiations with the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey is both irresponsible and perverse. It seems likely to add to the dangers and uncertainties that the collapse of state authority in Syria and Iraq have brought to the wider region and it could have ominous implications for Turkey’s internal politics. Since the emergence of the modern state after the first world war, the relations between the ethnic Turkish majority and the Kurds, the country’s largest minority, have been the single largest problem faced by the country. Ankara originally tried to solve it by suppression and compulsory assimilation, hoping that in time Kurds would become indistinguishable from the rest of the population. The predictable result was resistance, in the early years in the form of sporadic revolts and, in the late 1970s, in the form of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, an armed separatist movement.

Turkish Cypriot minority (18%) demands

The Turkish Cypriots run a pseudo-state recognized only by Ankara. Discussions are under way to reintegrate them into the international community under a federative structure. These are a few of their basic demands:

• the end of the Republic of Cyprus which it undermined / abandoned
• an autonomous zone/state on stolen Greek Christian land
• an autonomous zone/state with guaranteed Muslim majority
• regognition of its state against international law
• universal veto rights for all federation decisions
• over-representation in state apparatus upto 2.5 times its numerical size
• full exclusive education in Turkish
• half af all hydrocarbons / natural resources
• automatic accession to the EU family
• automatic prestige upgrade and participation in the international community
• eternal presence and say by "Turkey" in Cypriot affairs

Mustafa sihtir!

NATO's confession of its role in the 1974 Cyprus crime

Kurds of Rep of Turkey-North Kurdistan vs. Turkish Cypriots (Eng & Tur)

Turkey's Syrian Kurdish Problem | Jerusalem Post

by Jonathan Spyer, July 4, 2015 - Syrian Kurdish forces this week succeeded in turning back a murderous and determined attempt by the forces of Islamic State to claw back control of areas of northern Syria recently liberated by the Kurds. The cost was high, nevertheless.

Recent Kurdish successes, meanwhile, have raised the specter of a Turkish armed intervention in northern Syria to crush the growing Kurdish autonomous zones along the border.

So where do things stand in the bloody war between the Kurds and the Sunni jihadists over Syria's north? And is there a realistic possibility that Erdogan might intervene?