How shall we establish `the truth`?…(*)

The opening of the mass grave in Trachonas (Kizilbash) is the result of Spiros Hadjinicolaou not remaining silent about his missing father from Yialloussa… Or Sevilay Berk speaking and telling her story and pressing the authorities in the north, as well as the UN and the Council of Europe for getting back the bones of her parents who went missing from the village Pervolia back in 1964… It is the result of the cry of Maria Georgiadou for justice, our visit to Kythrea (Degirmenlik) and Beykoy in search for information about her missing mother, father, sister and brother… It is the work of Kutlay Erk, who spoke up and demanded to know what happened to his father, taken from the Nicosia General Hospital in December 1963 and who never returned to his family – missing from a hospital bed… Or Petros from Palekythro (Balikesir) who told the story of a massacre in 1974 by three Turkish Cypriots, shooting and killing women and children… Petros was also shot but remained alive to tell the story of what happened. It is the result of hours of painful, tearful, horrible unspoken stories about Maratha, Sandallaris and Aloa (Murataga, Sandallar, Atlilar). Brave people like Huseyin Rustem Akansoy and Mustafa Shadanoglu spoke in pain, remembering details that would make you sick… Details like the rapes, details like the cutting off the heads of small kids…

It is about a place called Assia (Pashakoy) and our long interview with Yiannos Michaelides and Christoforos Skarparis… About the rapes of young girls in Assia… About bus-loads of Greek Cypriot men `disappearing` - going `missing` between Assia and Nicosia… It is about standing up and raising your voice and demanding to know. If they did not speak up and demand to know, if they did not tell their stories and if these stories were not published on both sides of the dividing line, there would be no discussion, no pressure built up on those holding the keys to the mass graves… If they had remained silent and went along with the tide to `just forget about it`, we would not be able to help the process for trying to get to the heart of things. When they had started speaking, the Missing Persons Committee had not been having any meetings for the past two years… Later the UN Secretary General sent a letter and asked the Missing Persons Committee to start to meet. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan had already promised to the European Human Rights Court that he would do his best to solve the `missing persons` issue in Cyprus. So with the pressure of Europe, we came to this point. It shows us that we can affect change in this country if we take the risk to stand up and speak up and tell our story. Without being attached to this or that political force, these were human stories that made a mark on people’s hearts and that’s why some politicians got really upset with the whole series lasting almost six months. Together, we were forming public opinion about the `missing` issue, without their `control`!

In December, together with Amnesty International Turkey and Amnesty International Greece and with the organization of the New Cyprus Association, we did a seminar about `truth and reconciliation` at the Goethe Institute in Nicosia, on the `Green Line` dividing Cyprus. I invited the relatives of the missing whom I had interviewed. It was the first time that relatives of Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot missing persons were in the same room, sitting together… I introduced them to each other and some of them, like Sevilay and Maria embraced each other, seeing that the pain is the same – whether you’re Turkish Cypriot or Greek Cypriot or any other ethnicity, if one of your loved ones is `missing` you feel the same pain. It was touching for me because I wanted them very much to meet and perhaps work together for the solution of this issue… I did a slide show, showing photos and telling stories of six months of interviews published in ALITHIA and YENIDUZEN… Everyone in the room was shocked – many people cried, both men and women. This was the starting point of our journey into the missing links of our history – we had to bring the pieces together in order to be able to see the whole picture. We will continue doing this in different parts of Cyprus this year, hopefully in trying to establish `what is the truth?`

This week INFORCE came to the northern part of Cyprus to Trachonas to begin investigation of a mass grave where Greek Cypriots are thought to be buried.

This is just the beginning of a very difficult and perhaps frustrating process where we must join our efforts as citizens of Cyprus and Europe. We can’t leave things in the hands of just a bunch of politicians. As journalists from both sides of the dividing line, instead of using such occasions to create more hatred and vengeance feelings, we must use it as a step for understanding what happened, the reasons behind what happened, who were the responsible persons giving the orders and who were the ones executing these orders to rape, to mutilate, to kill, to bury… We must push for the `acknowledgment` and `apologizing` for what has happened in the past – this acknowledgment and apologizing must come from those responsible for these murders or those who sat silently and watched, not trying to stop these. Those who had the information, but did not act. Because silence also kills, you know…

As journalists from both sides of the dividing line of this country, we must use the beginning of the opening of the graves to help our communities to come together to understand how they have been used against each other and how those `at the top`, who had big roles to play in such massacres are still in power and running things in this country. We must help our communities to develop together their own model of learning `the truth` and `reconciling` with it. Many communities in the world have had similar painful experiences of trying to find out what was `the truth` and developing their own models of dealing with the murders, the rapes, the mass graves, the murderers… Our communities need a basic feeling of `justice` and this, we can start thinking, discussing and developing together – our own Cypriot model of dealing with our own atrocities and its results…

Many countries like South Africa, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina set up `Truth and Reconciliation Commissions` to first of all collect documentation about the `missing` and the atrocities… They tried to document the murders, the mass graves, the human rights abuses… They tried to take confessions from the murderers. All of these might frighten you a bit since Cyprus is so small and `everyone knows everyone else`. But unless we know `the truth` about who did what and who was responsible for what, we can never `just forget about it` and make as though `nothing happened` because the wounds would be there full of infection that needs to be cleaned up otherwise they might turn into gangrene…

The relatives of the missing persons, the civil society, the NGOs, the journalists, the peace activists, women organizations must be involved in this process… We might start talking about how we shall `establish truth`, how we will go about repairing or addressing damages, how we shall pay respect to victims, how the perpetrators would be punished and how we shall prevent further abuses…. Shall we hold trials in local or international courts? Shall we ban those responsible for atrocities from public or security posts? Shall we build memorials or maybe an Institute of Remembering and Reconciliation? Shall we have a museum to put together the stories of all the crimes committed on this island, together? What sort of reforms shall we need for prevention of such atrocities in the future?

As the graves are being opened, we must move on this path together, not separately… As journalists our task is to bring people together, not separate them… We have all paid too high a price in this conflict, to avoid our responsibilities now…

(*) Article published in ALITHIA newspaper on the 9th of January, 2005.

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