By Handan Kazanci
UN Buffer Zone, Cyprus
“Turkish Cypriots are the only community in the world which did not actively search for its missing people,” says Sevgul Uludag, 56, a journalist from Lefkosa on the divided island of Cyprus.
This week will see the 40th anniversary of Turkey’s 1974 month-long military operation to protect the Turkish population in violence-hit Cyprus, which remains partitioned into Greek and Turkish zones.
Inter-communal violence erupted on the Mediterranean island amid a July 15 Greek Cypriot attempt to annex Cyprus with a Greece ruled by a right-wing military junta. Five days later Turkey sent 40,000 troops – Operation Atilla – to the island’s north.
In the years of violence which gripped Cyprus, around 2,000 people disappeared according to the UN-backed Committee on Missing Persons.
Founded in 1981 with the cooperation of Turkey, Greece and the United Nations, the Committee claims that 1,508 Greek Cypriots and 493 Turkish Cypriots went missing during violence between 1963 to1964 and the clashes of 1974.
After digs started in 2006, almost 400 Greek Cypriot and 125 Turkish Cypriot bodies were identified by the Committee. Around 887 sites were excavated and around 910 sets of remains are still being analyzed.
Uludag is the writer of a 2006 book – ‘Oysters With The Missing Pearls’ – which collects the “untold stories” of the survivors from both Turkish and Greek communities.
“Talking about missing people was taboo in Cyprus until I started to write about it,” she tells Anadolu Agency.
However, a delicate process of détente began as Turkey’s current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made a speech in Strasbourg in 2004 promising that steps would be taken to identify missing people in Cyprus.
The following year saw the end of the 30-year rule of Rauf Dentas, Northern Cyprus’ president.
These changes, and Uludag’s report, created an environment where the first, painful steps towards finding the remains of Cyprus’ missing people could begin.
Speaking in the 180 kilometer UN Buffer Zone which still divides the island one of the survivors of the 1974 violence is a Greek Cypriot pilot called Petros Souppouris.
Now 50, Petros was 10 when gunmen come to the village of Palekythrea; he lost his parents, two brothers aged 9 and 4, plus his two-year-old sister. He was wounded by three bullets but survived.
“We were lucky because approximately an hour after the event the Turkish army came. We were lucky because of the Turkish army officer, whom I thank was very good.
“He took us and brought some doctors and then sent someone to bury the old people; we found them four years ago. We found everyone except my brother Yannis; he is still missing. We didn’t find his bones,” Petros says.
Unlike some other conflicts, identifying and prosecuting those responsible is not a primary issue for many Cypriots.
“Personally I never wanted to know who did this,” Petros says. “After so many years I don’t want to know. In the name of having peace I don’t want revenge.”
In 2012 Souppouris, along with a Turkish Cypriot Huseyin Akansoy, was awarded the European Citizen’s Prize for their work in creating reconciliation.
Akansoy, now a 58-year-old biology teacher, was born in the Turkish Cypriot village of Murataga. Around 126 people from the Turkish Cypriot villages of Murataga, Sandallar and Atlilar, were massacred in 1974 and buried in a mass grave in a garbage dump.
“I was captured with another 100 people from our village by our armed neighbors. When I returned 96 days later I couldn’t find anyone from my family,” Akansoy says.
Akansoy lost his mother, two sisters, two brothers and around 30 relatives in the August 15 atrocity.
He remembers his mother’s curly hair and hazel eyes: “She was 36 years old; a typical village woman who dedicated her life to her children.”
“I always felt the absence of a mother in a period when we could have had a beautiful time together. I always felt that pain inside me,” he says.
58-year-old Turkish Cypriot Leyla Kiral lost her husband Ahmet Mustafa during the 1974 violence.
“He was just 25 years old,” she says. “Our marriage started beautifully but didn’t end like that.”
“At the beginning, the dispute was within the Greek population. I remember how the nationalist Greek Cypriot organization EOKA killed Cyprus’s communist party AKEL members.”
After Turkey’s operation on July 20, our Greek Cypriot neighbors from the next village came and captured the men in our village,” says Leyla.
“I remember one of them telling my husband to leave his watch and ring. When I asked ‘why?’ he told me ‘there might be thieves’.”
Her husband was taken to a school first and then with around 86 other people was taken to an unknown location on a bus.
Ahmet’s bones were found four decades later and he was buried last year.
“I don’t forget what I have gone through but I forgive… I turned my anger and revenge into love and sharing,” Leyla says.
Mihalis Yangu Savva, 58, a retired museum officer from Lefkosa remembers very well the 15 July, the date of the coup.
Describing himself as communist Mihalis poses with his hammer and sickle tattoo and recalls the day:
“I was 18 and was serving in the army. I heard my name via megaphone telling me go to the office. I was told I would be staying in a cell because I am a communist.
“I was tortured; as a result I still have to take medicine.”
Mihalis’ 22-year-old brother Kostas went missing after he went out to get help for his ill three-month old baby.
His remains were found 39 years later on December 8, 2013. “What we found were some bones,” Mihalis says, brandishing a picture of a handful of human remains.
“I believe people should be given the chance to live together,” he says.
However, for some survivors the memories of that period are too raw for forgiveness. Ahmet Asir, 59, lost his mother, six siblings and 40 relatives during the violence.
He was a ‘mujahid’, a member of the Turkish Resistance Organization TMT, an armed Turkish Cypriot group which fought the Greek Cypriot EOKA militia during 1974.
Today Asir is the chairman of an association to remember the ‘Martyrs of Murataga, Atlilar and Sandallar’.
“My father and I are alive because he was taken hostage and I was a mujahid,” he says. “If we were in [Murataga] village we would have be killed too.”
Asir remains a strong supporter of the Turkish intervention: “If the Turkish army didn’t carry out an operation on the morning of July 20, there would not be any Turkish Cypriots left on the island,” he says
In April 2004 Asir – unlike most other Turkish Cypriots – voted against a plan by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan which proposed a reunified island. Although Turkish Cyprus voted for the peace deal it was rejected by 76% of Greek Cypriots in a separate ballot.
“I believe Turkish and Greek Cypriots can live side-by-side after all these years but cannot live together,” Asir says.
“Today my mother’s and my siblings’ murderer is free in Europe,” he adds.
As Cyprus tries to move on from its bloody past, one group called ‘Together We Can’ was founded after Uludag’s reports and brought together Turkish and Greek Cypriot families for the first time since the war.
They visited schools in villages on both sides and told their stories: “Our aim was to turn down victimization,” Uludag says.
“There is only human pain; no such thing as Turkish pain or Greek pain.”
TIMELINE
1570 – Start of more than 300 years of Ottoman rule on the island.
1878 –Britain takes over administration of Cyprus.
1925 – Cyprus became a British colony.
1955 – Greek nationalist EOKA group founded.
1960 – British, Greek and Turkish governments sign a treaty to create an independent Cypriot state.
1963 – Fighting starts after Turkish Cypriots rejected proposals to amend the constitution.
1964 – UN sends a peace-keeping force to the island.
1974 – Greek army officers launch a coup in Cyprus.
1974 – Turkey’s Operation Atilla.
1983 – Independent Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus founded.
2003 – Border restrictions eased.
2004 – Greek Cypriot administration becomes an EU member, although Annan Plan is rejected by Greek Cypriot voters.
2014 – U.S.-backed negotiations started between Greek and Turkish Cypriots towards reunification.
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