PANICOS Neocleous, author of the 2009 book, The Ignored: 1974, which presents 50 interviews with former Greek Cypriot soldiers about their experiences fighting during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, is preparing a new volume of interviews, this time including accounts from Turkish Cypriot and mainland Greek and Turkish participants and their families.
Neocleous says the purpose of his first book was to demonstrate how the Greek government and military “betrayed Cyprus”, as well as to highlight the behaviour of the Turkish military and the United Nations during the war. And more than anything, Neocleous wanted to show how the “Cypriot government ignored its own Greek Cypriot fighters”. But he characterises his current collection as a tool for “sending a message of peace in Cyprus” to the country’s younger generations.
“They are the stories of Greek and Turkish Cypriots,” says Neocleous. “All I meet, the people who suffered [during the invasion], speak of peace. We will try to use this as a message for the young people to work for peace.”
Neocleous has collected nine accounts thus far, but the story of Soyat Kafatar, the sole survivor of an 84-person massacre of Turkish Cypriots in the village of Tochni by EOKA B forces in the summer of 1974, stands out as an example of the book’s purpose. Soyat, his father, and the other males of the village were arrested, bussed to the fields outside Agia Phila, and shot dead. All except Soyat, who survived by virtue of his father’s brains having splattered onto Soyat’s face when he was shot in the head, and the killer skipping over Soyat on the assumption that the detritus in which he was covered was his own.
Soyat played dead until the soldiers left the field to fetch bulldozers to dispose of the freshly-killed corpses. He escaped into the woods and eventually settled in the village of Bouno in the occupied north of the island.
At the end of the interview Neocleous asks Soyat to characterise his feelings toward Greek Cypriots: “Love,” responds Soyat, followed by a resolve to “not blame all Greeks for the evil done”.
Soyat’s story is not the only one in Neocleous’ books that has resulted in forgiveness between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. An account in The Ignored tells how a Turkish Cypriot soldier, Fat’hi Akinci, fired what should have been a fatal bullet into the head of a Greek Cypriot fighter, Yiannis Maratheftis, led to their meeting 35 years later and formed a warm friendship.
Now, schools are inviting Neocleous’ Greek and Turkish Cypriot interviewees to speak to students about peace. They made one presentation in Limassol last December and are scheduled to make a second presentation in the same city next month.
“The majority of young people do not know what happened in Cyprus,” Neocleous asserts. “Many of the pupils are hearing this for the first time, and from those who lived it, from the people who suffered in the war. I want to leave the truth for future generations.”
