Suchergebnisse

The essay discusses how the "reluctant republic" of Cyprus in 1960 became a successful, liberal democracy and member of the European Union, despite externally instigated political discord, foreign interference, foreign invasion and continuing occupation, economic dislocation, and continuing plots to dismantle it as an independent state. There is no precedent for this in post—World War II Western Europe. This is one of the reasons why it was important to celebrate the recent fiftieth anniversary of the Republic of Cyprus.

Julius Smulkstys was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1930 and came to the United States with his parents as a refugee in 1949. He grew up in Chicago. He received his BA and MA degrees in political science from the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, and completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University–Bloomington in 1963.

In this essay a largely forgotten human rights issue involving the fate of the Greek-in-origin population that inhabited the Turkish islands of Imbros and Tenedos is examined. Exempted from the Greek-Turkish population-exchange agreements concluded following the end of World War I, the Greek population of the two islands was granted specific civic, cultural, and religious rights by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The treaty remains valid to this day. Turkey deliberately violated the rights of this population because of its ethnicity, religion, and language. The author analyzes the methods used by Turkey to ethnically cleanse the two islands and the options available to the former residents of these islands as well as to the governments of Greece and Turkey to resolve the documented violations of the Treaty of Lausanne and of the European Convention on Human Rights.