Despite our efforts,More than 750 of our compatriots are still missing from the dark days of the 1974 Turkish invasion as well as from the 1963-64 period, said Presidential Commissioner Fotis Fotiou.
He expressed the conviction that if Turkey is willing and cooperative it is possible that the issue of the missing persons can be led to its final and correct resolution, assuring that in this direction we are working with all our goodwill and will, as well as the determination to finally end the tragedy of the relatives.
Speaking at a meeting on Tuesday with students, pupils and teaching staff of the Archbishop Makarios III High School in Platy, Mr. Fotiou said that the families of our missing persons are experiencing the daily torment of the uncertainty of the fate of their loved ones and the occupying power must not be allowed to continue this cruel and inhumane treatment of the families.
Fotiou said that while the ICRC's exhumation programme has been in operation for more than 17 years, the fate of more than 750 missing persons remains to be clarified, a figure that represents almost 50% of the cases submitted to the Commission.
He said that the occupying army still does not allow access to its archives, where, he noted, there is certainly all the information on our missing persons and certainly also the information on the very serious case of the deliberate movement of remains from the original burial sites to others that remain unknown to us.
Removal of remains, of course, to conceal the guilt and truth of mass executions of our compatriots who were captured and then executed in cold blood. As a result of this barbaric and inhumane policy, too many families of our missing persons are given only a bone or a few bones for burial. We consider this again to be inhumane and unacceptable, Fotiou said.
He added that there are other serious reasons for not achieving the desired progress in efforts to resolve the tragedy of the missing persons. They are, for example, the long-standing refusal of the occupation troops to allow unhindered searches for exhumations at sites located within the so-called military zones in the occupied territories, the refusal of the occupation forces to indicate the mass graves created by the collections of the dead from the battlefields as well as others. It is tragic that the remains that are being identified are diminishing dangerously from year to year with the risk that the CMP program may not be able to continue its operation, he noted.
He stressed that from our side, despite Turkey's refusal to cooperate and the obstacles and difficulties it keeps raising, we are not complacent nor will we give in to the occupying power's methodologies to close the problem without clarifying the last case of our missing person that is pending.
Source: KYPE
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