Unless this small Turkish Community - forming a part of the Turkish race which has been the terrible enemy of Hellenism - is expelled from Cyprus, the duty of the heroes of EOKA can never be considered as terminated.
Source: Cyprus The Tale of An Island, A.H.Rizvi, p. 42
"Following the Greek Cypriot premeditated onslaught of 21 December, 1963, the Turkish Sectors all over Cyprus were completely besieged by Greeks; all telephonic, telegraphic and postal communications between these sectors were cut off and the Turkish Cypriot Community's contact with each other and with the outside world was thus prevented."
"Greek Cypriot armed elements broke into hundreds of Turkish homes and fired at the unarmed occupants with automatic weapons killing at random many Turks, including women, children and elderly persons (51 Turks were killed and 82 wounded). They also carried away as hostages more than 700 Turks, including women and children, whom they forced to walk bare-footed and in night-dresses across rough fields and river beds."
"A Turkish woman was seriously wounded and her four-month old baby was riddled with bullets from an automatic weapon fired by a Greek Cypriot mobile patrol which had ambushed the car in which the mother and her baby were travelling to the Turkish region. The baby died in her mother's arms. This wanton murder of a four-month-old baby, which shocked foreign observers as much as the Turkish Community, was not committed by irresponsible persons, but by members of the Greek Cypriot security forces. According to the mother's statement the Greek police patrol had chased their car and deliberately fired upon it."
Peter Moorhead reporting from the village of Skyloura, Cyprus.
Date : 1 January, 1964.
IL GIARNO (Italy)
THEY ARE TURK-HUNTING, THEY WANT TO EXTERMINATE THEM.
Discussions start in London; in Cyprus terror continues. Right now we are witnessing the exodus of Turks from the villages. Thousands of people abandoning homes, land, herds; Greek Cypriot terrorism is relentless. This time, the rhetoric of the Hellenes and the bust of Plato do not suffice to cover up barbaric and ferocious behaviors.
Article by Giorgo Bocca, Correspondent of Il Giorno
Date: 14 January 1964
DAILY HERALD (London)
AN APPALLING SIGHT
And when I came across the Turkish homes they were an appalling sight. Apart from the walls, they just did not exist. I doubt if a napalm bomb attack could have created more devastation. I counted 40 blackened brick and concrete shells that had once been homes. Each house had been deliberately fired by petrol. Under red tile roofs which had caved in, I found a twisted mass of bed springs, children's conts and cribs, and ankle deep grey ashes of what had once been chairs, tables and wardrobes.
In the neighbouring village of Ayios Vassilios, a mile away, I counted 16 wrecked and burned out homes. They were all Turkish Cypriot homes. From this village more than 100 Turkish Cypriots had also vanished.In neither village did I find a scrap of damage to any Greek Cypriot house.
Date: 1 January, 1964.
DAILY TELEGRAPH (London)
GRAVES OF 12 SHOT TURKISH CYPRIOTS FOUND IN CYPRUS VILLAGE
Silent crowds gathered tonight outside the Red Crescent hospital in the Turkish Sector of Nicosia, as the bodies of 9 Turkish Cypriots found crudely buried outside the village of Ayios Vassilios, 13 miles away, were brought to the hospital under the escort of the Parachute Regiment. Three more bodies, including one of a woman, were discovered nearby but could not be removed. Turkish Cypriots guarded by paratroops are still trying to locate the bodies of 20 more believed to have been buried on the same site.
Michael Moran:
An ex-EOKA thug, Sampson was briefly made President of Cyprus after the 1974 Greek coup which temporarily overthrew Makarios. He acquired ‘heroic’ status during the outbreak of intercommunal violence in December, 1963, when, as a commander of Greek ‘irregulars’, he devised the ingenious plan of using a bulldozer with raised excavator to lead an attack on the Turks. Sampson died in 2001 but even in the 1990s he still had a following among Greek Cypriots. Speaking at a ceremony held by the ‘Dighenis Association’ to celebrate the Greek and Greek Cypriot ‘national days’, Sampson declared himself adamantly against the idea of creating a federal Cyprus with the Turks. ‘We have to expel the Turks from this country’, he said in 1993. ‘I do not believe in lost territories. I do not give anyone the right to give away Hellenic lands. Cyprus was Hellenic and will remain Hellenic.’ (As reported in the Greek Cypriot newspaper Tharros, 29 March 1993). Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric, firmly rooted in the megali idea and related fantasies, still has the power to move significant numbers of people in the south of the island.
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