Bosnia Helps Cyprus

From the BBC:
"How Bosnia is helping identify Cypriots murdered 50 years ago"

In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of Cypriots disappeared. Now, there is a renewed effort to find out what happened to them - mass graves are being dug up and a laboratory in Sarajevo is helping to identify the bodies.  Forty years ago, Maria Georgiadis  lost her whole family - her mother, her father, her sister and her brother. But she has never been able to lay their bodies to rest. Georgiadis, a Greek Cypriot, was 28 years old at the time and was living in the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, with her husband and two young children.  The rest of her family lived 10km away in Kythrea, but in August 1974 after a Greek-inspired coup and intervention by Turkish troops, their village became part of a Turkish-Cypriot enclave.  For two months, she tried to find out what had happened to her relatives. Eventually her fears were confirmed when she saw their names listed in a local newspaper - they had all been killed. Chrystala, Andreas, Melitsa  and Christy were four of 2,001 Greek and Turkish Cypriots who went missing in the early 1960s and 1970s - like hundreds of others, their bodies still haven't been found.  "It's as though something is missing. For a long time I was waiting for a knock on the door, for them to come in. Now I just want them to be in one place, where I can go and place some flowers," says Georgiadis.  Today, aged 69, with children and grandchildren of her own, she wants a proper funeral and a grave to visit where she can light a candle. For years, the issue of the missing in Cyprus was mired in politics, and with little communication between Greek and Turkish Cypriots it wasn't until 2007 that they could even agree on an official list of who had disappeared. 

Since then the UN-backed Committee of Missing Persons (CMP) - made up of a representative from both communities as well as UN representative Paul-Henri Arni, has been leading the search for burial sites and organising the excavation, exhumation and identification of bodies. Since 2007, 571 bodies have been found, identified and returned to their families. That means the relatives of a further 1,430 missing Cypriots still wait for news.  " The CMP recently decided to tap into the expertise developed at a laboratory in Sarajevo. The centre in Bosnia Herzegovina specialises in extracting DNA from bone samples and matching them with genetic material from living relatives.

Run by the International Committee for Missing Persons (ICMP), this laboratory was set up in 1996 after the war in the former Yugoslavia left 40,000 people missing.   The ICMP helped to identify almost 30,000 of them using DNA techniques, and since then has shared expertise with scientists in conflict zones and places hit by natural disasters around the world.  Now, as bodies are exhumed in Cyprus, bone samples are sent to Sarajevo for DNA matching.  In the conflicts in both countries, killers dumped bodies in mass graves, and then to try to hide their crimes, moved them, sometimes several times, to different sites. Remains were mixed up and the only way to reassemble the broken bodies so they could be identified was to use DNA.  The CMP in Cyprus has family counsellors to support relatives over the years as they wait for news - each time a potential burial site is discovered, hopes are raised. Georgiadis has been to five excavations. "Every time… my heart was beating in my breast and I was asking will it be now? But nothing. Still I hope that before I die I will be able to bury them. "I have told my children, "If they are found after I die, please put their remains with me.'"   In January this year a mass grave was uncovered at a Cypriot stone quarry in Pareklissia near Limassol - families lined the hills above the site, hoping to see the bones of the men and teenage boys who had been abducted, taken from a bus and killed 40 years earlier.  So far, 35 bodies have been recovered from this site and partial remains sent to the Sarajevo laboratory for analysis.  In Cyprus, the CMP arranged immunity from prosecution for those who come forward with information about where the bodies of the missing are hidden.  But evidence is hard to come by. In some cases those involved in the killings are still alive and many people are afraid to talk.   As the decades pass, the physical landscape changes too, and it becomes harder and harder to locate hidden graves as memories fade and new building alters and sometimes obscures completely, burial sites. One woman on the island, Sevgul Uludag, is credited by both the Greek and Turkish communities as having had a vital role, over the past 12 years, in finding the missing.  An investigative journalist with a popular blog, she carries two mobile phones - one for Turkish Cypriots and the other for Greek Cypriots to call her, anonymously, with information. Uludag receives thousands of calls a year about possible burial sites - she alerts the CMP and investigations begin. She has helped locate hundreds of bodies.  But this voluntary, unpaid work has put her at risk and she's had death threats from people who carried out the killings and those trying to protect them.

History of the Cypriot Crisis:
• 1960 - independence from British Rule leads to power sharing between Greek Cypriot majority and Turkish Cypriot minority
• 1963 and 1964 - inter-communal violence erupts
• 1974 - Cypriot President, Archbishop Makarios, deposed in a coup backed by Greece's military junta - Turkey sends troops to the island
• UN estimates that 165,000 Greek Cypriots fled or were expelled from the north, and 45,000 Turkish Cypriots from the south - 2001 officially people recorded missing
• 1975 - Turkish Cypriots announce establishment of their own state in the north, recognised only by Turkey
• 2007 - The Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus begins excavations and exhumations of graves - 571 people identified by August 2014


^ I have been to both Cyprus and Bosnia and out of the two places I found the people of Bosnia to be more friendly and helpful, It seems like they (the Bosnians) are continuing that helpfulness outside of their own country and aiding Cyprus identify their dead. ^


http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28145649