Turkish Cypriot man who got his property back is a lesson for the Republic

The interior ministry has admitted it does not have a reliable database of the Turkish Cypriot properties they administrate

By Efi Xanthou

On July 13 the House of Representatives approved the government’s decision to award €345,000 to Orhan Huseyin Dervish in compensation for loss of use of his property in Limassol.

Mr Dervish is a Turkish Cypriot that was never awarded his Cypriot identity, since his family left the island before 1960 when we became an independent state. He holds an American citizenship and a little over 10 years ago he contacted the Guardian of Turkish Cypriot properties (the interior minister), asking for his property to be returned to him, since he discovered that, without his consent, it was being administered by the said authority.

The then minister of interior refused even though Mr Dervish had left the island before 1974 and it has been well established that Turkish Cypriots who left the island before the invasion, and who are not taking advantage of Greek Cypriot property in the occupied areas, have every right to their property.

I am not in a position to know what (and who) influenced the specific decision, and I am not sure whether it was the outgoing minister Neoklis Sylikiotis or the late Socrates Hasikos who made this decision, since I only know when the lawsuit was filed, but the issue would have been resolved there and then if it had been different. No compensation would have been demanded and no discussion in parliament would have been necessary.

Mr Dervish filed a lawsuit against the Republic of Cyprus in 2013 at the Limassol district court against the attorney general and the interior minister. He demanded the return of a percentage of the properties he co-owned in the Ayia Triada and Camicedit neighbourhoods of Limassol, since the properties were co-owned by him and two other relatives who are residing in the occupied areas. Ten years later the court ruled that his properties had been wrongly handed over to the Republic’s Guardian of Turkish Cypriot properties post 1974. The court ordered that Dervish be paid €310,000 plus legal interest at two per cent per annum from June 22, 2022 until payment, as well as legal costs totalling just over €20,000. In total, the parliament has approved €345,000 from the annual budget to be awarded to this individual.

When the proposal was presented to the House refugee committee, the attorney-general’s office was very clear that the property that is to be returned did not fall under the purview of the legal framework that regulates the administration of Turkish Cypriot properties abandoned in and after 1974. I wonder if the minister that had made that wrong decision in 2013 or thereabouts had taken into account the council of the then attorney-general and what that advice had been. I guess since it’s not their personal account that will be paying the €345,000, whoever is responsible for this wrong decision will not feel any repercussions.

So, the MPs wanted to know how many other properties could potentially be demanded back from their Turkish Cypriot owners that fell under the same category as Mr Dervish, namely those that belonged to Turkish Cypriots who demonstrably did not receive any Greek Cypriot property in the north nor were ever citizens. Both the earlier case that concerns the ‘Mackenzie Estate’ in Larnaca that was finalised in 2016, as well as this new case, have definitely made it plain that individuals who fall under this category are entitled to reacquire their land and receive compensation from the Republic.

Just to remind readers, the Larnaca district court ruled in 2016 that the ‘Mackenzie Estate’ had been built on illegally as its legal owner, Mr Fikret Ali Riza, had moved to the United Kingdom in 1951 and never claimed Cypriot citizenship. Riza’s son Reymond, born in England in 1955, took legal action demanding the property be returned and damages be paid.

So what was the answer of the responsible interior ministry? Not a very clear one. The initial decisions as to which properties were to be put under the administration of the guardian of Turkish Cypriot properties were made in the few years after the invasion, amongst the chaos and the immediate need to house one-third of the population that had been internally replaced. They admitted that they still do not have a reliable electronic database of the properties they administrate, nor a list of current users, and that their painstaking efforts towards fixing this will take at least until 2027, when they will have received the necessary software and hopefully upload all the data from their paper archives. They also admitted that a big portion of this information remains in the archives of the District Offices, making this task even more complicated.

I have been appointed as the representative of the Cyprus Greens-Citizens Cooperation in the advisory committee of the guardian of Turkish Cypriot properties, and I am ashamed that my country, a European Union member state, an independent state since 1960, has officially stated to the House of Representatives that it does not have a clear picture of whether the Turkish Cypriot properties that it is supposedly administrating on behalf of its Turkish Cypriot citizens should truly have fallen under its purview.

I really hope that this highly unorthodox situation will be rectified as quickly as possible and that a task force is immediately created to tackle this unorthodox situation.

In April, the Cyprus Mail reported that there are 150 similar cases before the courts from Turkish Cypriots claiming back their property, with another 100 requests being made to the guardian of Turkish Cypriot properties (the interior minister).

If these numbers are true, then only a task force given access to the data kept both by the district authorities and by the Land Registry will be able to create a true and double checked data base! If we want to be fair and abide by the law of our land, out government can do nothing less.

Efi Xanthou is a political scientist and the Coordinator of the Interior Committee for the Cyprus Greens-Citizens Cooperation, [email protected]