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Chrystalla Pateva remembers the day 33 years ago when she last saw her father.

“It was August 23,” she said, writing the day down and underlining it on a piece of paper. “On August 23, 1974, the Turks came to our village and took 83 people. They put them in trucks and drove them away. My father, George, was among them, and my father-in-law, Christos Mias, and my sister’s husband, Andreas Diazkou. We never saw any of them again.”

In all, there are 1,468 Greek Cypriots still officially listed as missing on Cyprus, from the 1974 invasion resulting in the occupation and Turkish military control of the northern area of the Republic of Cyprus. The Turkish side claims 502 Turkish Cypriots are missing, and from which others disappeared even earlier, after inter-communal violence first broke out at the end of 1963.

Now, thanks to a project involving scientists from both sides of the island’s enduring divide, some of the mysteries of the missing may be solved. In a laboratory set in the middle of the UN buffer zone that runs between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot sides, anthropologists have been piecing together the remains of around 250 people recovered from mass graves since exhumations began last September.

“It’s tough work,” said Istenc Surec, a scientist, examining some recently exhumed bone fragments. “But people have been waiting years for news of their loved ones. I’m happy to do this work if it will help them.”

Bulldozed into trenches or often thrown down wells, the bodies come from both sides of the divided island. The scientists, who work for the UN-backed Committee for Missing Persons, are trying to match DNA from the skeletons they have exhumed with DNA samples taken from the families of the missing. The process requires a professional detachment hard to acquire on an island where few are untouched by the violence, the population in 1974 was just 500,000.

“I was working on some remains from an area where I knew some of my own relatives had disappeared,” said Theodora Eleftheriou, a scientist. “There was a moment when I realized that the remains I was handling were those of my own cousin.”

Ironically, moments like those have helped the affected scientists bridge the ethnic divide.

“We are first of all professionals,” Eleftheriou said, “but second we are friends, the Turkish and Greek Cypriots here. Since this project began, I’ve found that we are a lot like each other, with the same habits and likes and dislikes, the same reactions to things. That has also been a very important part of all this.”

Surec agreed. “We have worked together here, at the same time as putting these bones, these lives back together,” she said. “Some of us had never met people from the other side before, so we have discovered something else important here, too.”

The Committee, run jointly by a Turkish Cypriot, a Greek Cypriot and a UN appointee, is one of the few functioning projects crossing the divide. Set up in 1981, the Committee was able to start exhumations only last year, after decades of wrangling.

“It’s recognized now that this is a humanitarian issue, not a political one,” said Christophe Girod, the UN representative on the committee. “Returning the remains will hopefully help in reconciling the two communities.”

Until now, what they have shared is aching grief. “I know both sides did their worst back then,” said Pateva. “I also know that it doesn’t matter what your nation or religion is, the feeling of those who have missing loved ones is the same everywhere, pain.”

“It’s hard to describe what it is like to wake up every morning asking yourself, Where is my father? Is he alive or dead?” said Zorba, the Turkish Cypriot whose father and brother disappeared. “My mother never gave up believing my father would return one day, although she, too, now is dead. I never wanted revenge, though. We just want the remains back so that we can bury our dead and pray at their graves on special days.”

In late June or early July, the Committee plans to start releasing results of the DNA identifications and returning remains to families.

“This will be a traumatic time for the families,” said a Turkish Cypriot psychologist, Ziliha Uluboy. “Some may not want to know, or may still not believe this is the end of their hopes. Others will want to know how their relatives were killed.”

“I think most just want to be able to put flowers on the graves of their loved ones,” said Elias Georgiades, the Greek Cypriot representative on the Committee. “We can now help these people and we have a duty to do so, a duty to the missing, and to each other.”

Related Links >
http://www.missing-cy.org/home.html

http://www.missing-cy.org/news/22U98.html

http://www.hri.org/Cyprus/Cyprus_Problem/missing.html

http://www.mfa.gov.cy/mfa/mfa.nsf/DOCCyQuest