The Commissioner for the Presidency, Fotis Fotiou, met today, 5 April 2022, at his office with the members of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances who are visiting Cyprus under the terms of their mandate.
Welcoming the members of the Team and their assistants, the Commissioner expressed his hope that the Team's mission will be a success for the benefit of the suffering families of missing persons in Cyprus.
The meeting focused on the problems, difficulties and challenges facing efforts to resolve the issue of missing persons. Fotiou stressed that it is both inhumane and unacceptable that after 48 years there are hundreds of families of missing persons who are searching for answers about the fate of their loved ones. This unacceptable situation causes daily so much pain and suffering to families, which cannot and must not continue. Time is inexorable, he stressed, and parents and siblings pass away with the bitter regret of not knowing the fate of their loved ones.
The international community, Fotiou pointed out, especially the United Nations, is in a position to undertake humanitarian initiatives and actions to resolve the problems and provide the answers that families seek and deserve. The problems, the Commissioner pointed out, are many and complex. The source of the problems is Turkey, which is responsible not only for creating the problem but also for perpetuating it, serving its own political objectives and agendas at the expense of the families.
Turkey has so far failed to take the political and humanitarian decisions that will lead to progress. Turkey, he stressed, is in a position and can help effectively and efficiently to solve the problems because these problems have been created and sustained by its own attitude and intransigence. The Commissioner cited the obstacles posed by the occupying power to searches and exhumations in military zones, its refusal to submit the information available in its military archives, to indicate the mass burial sites created by the Turkish army after the collection of the dead from the battlefields and to implement the 2001 and 2014 ECHR judgments, as well as other judgments concerning individual appeals by families of missing persons.
Particular reference was made by the Commissioner to the major double crime of the destruction of mass graves by the Turkish army and the deliberate removal of the remains to hitherto unknown locations. As a result of this inhumane policy, single or very few small remains are being handed over to families, which causes additional pain and many unanswered questions because it does not allow families to move on from the painful chapter of the loss of their own person.
Extensive reference was also made to the Burial Programme of the Republic of Cyprus in the free areas, as well as to the major issue of the fallen buried in known and unknown places in the occupied areas.
In conclusion, the Commissioner once again expressed the need for the United Nations to undertake humanitarian initiatives and actions to promote the issue of the missing persons. The Republic of Cyprus, he said, is cooperating and intensifying its efforts to provide answers to the last family of Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot missing persons.
(PM/MG/SX)
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