Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar speak to the media outside the CMP anthropological laboratory in the buffer zone of Nicosia airport, Cyprus July 28, 2023. REUTERS/Yiannis Kourtoglou Acquire license rights
NICOSIA, July 28 (Reuters) – The rival leaders of war-torn Cyprus appealed on Friday for witnesses to help find hundreds of people missing in the violence that has torn the island, saying time press for families to learn the fate of their families. relatives.
Forensic teams operating under United Nations auspices have been working on suspected decades-old mass grave sites on the island since 2006, relying largely on witness information, often given anonymously. The missing are Greek Cypriots victims of the 1974 war and Turkish Cypriots victims of intercommunal clashes dating back to the early 1960s.
But the number of individuals found and identified decreases from year to year. Out of a total of 2,002 people reported missing, 1,204 were exhumed and of these, 1,033 people were identified.
“We encourage people who know about these sites to come and give information, because unless you give information you will not be able to explore other sites,” said Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar.
“We encourage people to get out … before they die,” Tatar said. “A lot of people know.”
In a rare show of unity, he and President Nikos Christodoulides, the Greek Cypriot leader, met Friday in the no-man’s land separating the Cypriot capital Nicosia.
They visited a laboratory where forensic experts from both communities are painstakingly attempting to reconstruct human remains and compare them with DNA samples donated by relatives.
It’s been “so many years that loved ones have been waiting, I’m sure you all understand the pain,” Christodoulides said. “I am here, and with Ersin, to examine all possibilities to have more teams (…) to speed up the process regarding this purely humanitarian issue.”
Friday’s meeting took place on the grounds of an airport complex, abandoned during fighting in 1974 and used since as a base for United Nations peacekeeping operations.
Greek and Turkish Cypriots have lived divided since the Turkish invasion in 1974, sparked by a brief Greek-inspired coup. Sporadic fighting between the two communities dates back to the 1960s, shortly after independence from Britain.
Some 1,510 Greek Cypriots disappeared in 1974, while 492 Turkish Cypriots disappeared between 1963 and 1974.
Reporting by Michele Kambas; Editing by Conor Humphries
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