FOR MORE than 20 years, Pierre Guberan has been working with Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities in a bid to resolve the question of the missing on both sides of the divide.
As he prepares to leave the island, Guberan believes that, complicated as the issue may be, Cypriots can sort it out if concessions are made and petty arguments about trivialities laid aside. For 23 years, Guberan has been involved with the Committee of Missing Persons (CMP), a tripartite committee set up to investigate the fate of the missing. It consists of one Greek Cypriot, one Turkish Cypriot and one member of the UN. In times when no UN member was involved, Guberan acted as their stand in.
Guberan hopes a bicommunal DNA laboratory will be up and running by early spring next and by autumn some families will receive the remains of their loved ones.
However, he recognised that 31 years after the invasion, common sense was also needed in order to bring closure for those people, distressed for years over the disappearance of their loved ones.
He believes that in certain cases and once the CMP has completed its investigative work, people will probably have no option but to accept the notion of “presumed dead”, given the time lapse, the difficulties in locating all the graves and remains of people listed missing, and other obstacles brought about by construction in areas where missing people are believed to have been buried.
He leaves Cyprus at a critical juncture in the humanitarian with “discernible regret”, but says that when duty calls, he has to obey, noting that he has reached retirement age and will have to leave.
Expressing regret at the slow pace of developments in the effort to resolve this issue, he acknowledges that rushing things in Cyprus leads nowhere, given that Cypriots hold “very strong positions” and it is extremely difficult for them to break away from their long-standing views.
On a more personal note, Guberan, an art connoisseur, could not hide his love for the arts and had nothing but praise for the numerous talented artists the island has produced. He says his stay in Cyprus has given him the chance to make good friends from both communities and enjoy the local hospitality and cuisine.
He says that living and working with human suffering warrants a sense of detachment that is essential to help people deal with their pain, since being oversensitive to their suffering could be counter-productive in such a humanitarian task.
Guberan leaves later this month for his home country, Switzerland, to join his family after more than two decades of service here, in close co-operation with the UN and the two communities.
During his tenure in office on the island, he has witnessed what has been described as the most significant development towards the resolution of this humanitarian issue – the decision by the Cyprus government to exhume remains in two cemeteries in the southern government-controlled part of the island and returned identified remains to the families concerned for burial.
His departure comes in the wake of another significant development in the past year – the exhumation of remains in the occupied areas, plans to build an anthropology laboratory to identify through DNA the remains and eventual return of remains to their families.
He said discretion and confidentiality were of paramount importance in his work, pointing out that he had to deal with an additional problem, namely that “too many people tried to use this issue for other purposes and very early it was politicised.”
He believes the issue began back in the 1960s when intercommunal fighting broke out and that “with the 1974 arrival of the Turkish army it took a whole new dimension”, with hundreds of Greek Cypriots listed as missing and an international campaign underway to publicise their cause. “The Turkish army is not the only factor, there are also individuals who are responsible,” he said.
“The CMP does not try to apportion responsibility, we just try to reassure the families, find information and give it to them,” he said, and explained that it has been extremely difficult to get concrete and reliable information which could be corroborated.
He said Cyprus was a small place and everybody knew what had happened, but people were not ready to put their name down and sign a paper and speak out about it. He said the way the CMP operated was probably the best given the situation on the ground, and added that criminal investigation would not be conducive to rapprochement between the two communities.
He said the issue has been used as propaganda against Turkey and pointed to several cases of people coming with unsubstantiated stories of people in Turkish prisons, which at the end of the day “backfired on the Greek Cypriots since proof was not forthcoming”.
But progress was now being made, he said. “Now we are in the process of putting together the procedure for the general programme of the exhumation and identification and it’s a big project. We start building the anthropological laboratory in the buffer zone because we want to do one operation so we centralise everything in the buffer zone.”
The laboratory, he explained, would bring all the work together – a very difficult task because in a number of mass graves, bodies were buried and then displaced for different reasons. Forensic experts are extracting some bones, which are going to a second laboratory, which is the genetic laboratory and there they are going to do the DNA. Then, data has to be matched and reconciled with available information, and later on the family will have to come into the picture and be supported psychologically, medically and socially through expert counselling.
“If things move in the right direction we should start having some families getting the remains of their loved ones I would say sometime in the autumn, but I would not be too sure because it is not easy and it a very complicated process,” he added.
He admitted that not all the graves would be found, and that some families would not receive the remains of their loved ones, appealing for “common sense” to help deal with such a situation.
“Once the CMP investigative work is completed, we must use the presumption that the person is dead rather than try to continue to see the issue across the lines that that person is alive somewhere. It does not make much sense, especially today when we have the means to identify remains and know much more,” he explained.
Guberan has served as Third Member ad interim since January 2000; prior to that he was first Assistant to the Third Member of the CMP who is appointed by the UN Secretary-general, following the recommendation of the President of the ICRC.
The Cypriot government has submitted to the tripartite Committee of Missing Persons (CMP) 1,493 cases of Cypriot and Greek nationals listed as missing, a number that includes women, children, elderly persons and members of the National Guard.
Of the 1,493 cases, the remains of 14 missing persons have been identified by their DNA since the government embarked on its process of exhumation and identification of remains. The CMP now has before it 1,479 cases to investigate.
In addition, there are 50 cases of Greek Cypriots missing since the 1963-64 period, when inter-communal fighting occurred.
The CMP has the files of 500 Turkish Cypriot missing persons from 1963-64 and 1974. (CNA)
