The Covid-19 pandemic has halted all field and lab work of the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) for the past two months but members say this has given them the time to go back over old cases.
The three members of the committee, Greek Cypriot Leonidas Pantelides, Turkish Cypriot Gülden Plümer Kücük, and the third member (United Nations) Paul-Henri Arni said they have been working via teleconferences, to be ready to resume excavations and laboratory work as soon as conditions allow.
“We had to suspend excavations and laboratory work as of 16th of March. CMP is a bicommunal organisation so when crossing points were closed our bicommunal teams no longer operated on both sides,” Arni said in an interview with the Cyprus News Agency.
“We have a strategy to resume operations on the day after restrictions are lifted and crossing points are open. We have reviewed hundreds of pending cases regarding persons still missing. We are ready to resume field work and laboratory analyses immediately with protective measures for our staff.”
According to the data published on the CMP website, this year five identifications were carried out and two individuals were exhumed by February 29. Last year 42 identifications were carried out and 24 individuals were exhumed.
Out of 1510 Greek Cypriot missing persons, 700 have been identified and returned to their families, while 810 are still missing. Out of 492 Turkish Cypriot missing persons, 274 have been identified and returned to their families, while 218 are still missing.
Pantelides said the lockdown had given the team the chance to focus all their energy into the things that they could still do, regardless of the restrictions.
“We have put our emphasis on investigation and these last two months we were able to review all the cases from older information and try to go into greatest depth in analysing and preparing cases for excavation,” he said.
“We have reviewed hundreds of cases between the two offices. We are able to speak online every day, the two offices, and we have cleared up the backlog.”
Technological upgrades the team had been working on over the past year or so have also been installed.
They have also been developing a platform to synthesise all information that is available from the two offices.
But the inability to carry out excavations has compounded the CMP’s long-term underlying challenge: the race against time to find the bodies of missing before witnesses die and the land use of where the bodies are buried changes.
Kucuk said technology has helped the general investigation process.
“We are strengthening our investigation team not only with human resources but also with drones and other technical means, as GIS and GPS. We are testing all the possible scientific tools that we can, like ground penetrating radars, if it works for us or not,” she said.
“We have seven teams or sometimes eight teams that work on both sides bicommunaly. When we start excavation in one place, we plan to finish it in a month, but sometimes when we start, due to geographical reasons and other reasons we have to continue five months in that area.”
Typical challenges facing excavation teams include the weather and dangerous materials.
“So, these are unexpected difficulties that also make us change the plans, weather conditions we cannot control as rain, or heat during the summer. Also, when we dig at some places, we find asbestos which slows us down, because those who conduct the excavations have to wear special uniforms and special masks.”
The committee is also working on simplifying the flow of information process. This includes having the same telephone number in both offices, so that people can call the same three-digit number.
“We will try to encourage the public and we will try to make it easier for the public to come with more information. But there is already a lot of information in the two offices that has been gathered over the years. What is equally important now, as securing new information, is understanding and analysing well the information that we already have, so that we can have good results,” said Arni.
He noted that their success rate in digging is about one in five or 20 per cent.
“So there is room to improve these results, to improve our efficiency and this depends on the quality of information that we have, securing good information, reliable information and understanding and analysing it correctly, being able to use aerial imagery, maps, so that when we go and dig we actually find something.”
He said that since 2006 about 200 digs failed to uncover remains and these cases are being reviewed.
We have to make sure that the information is utilised in such a way so that we actually find remains. Because we had a lot of cases where we thought we had good information and we were not able to locate remains.”
Asked if excavations will continue to take place in military zones in the northern part of the island, Arni recalled that an agreement was reached in June 2019 with the Turkish army that gives them access to 30 new military areas.
“We have so far excavated seven of them. We found one set of remains and the agreement stands, so that means as soon as restrictions are lifted, we will resume excavations in military areas,” he said.
Asked about their message to the people all over the island, Arni said that they need the help of everyone, particularly the elder generations.
“We also need the help of community leaders/mukhtars on both sides of the divide to help convincing the witnesses of this tragic events who do not want to speak yet. That requires a lot of convincing,” he said
Pantelides emphasised that the CMP are not police investigators and are not looking into the circumstances of death and who is responsible.
“What we do with the information we receive is go and try to find the remains of the person who may be buried there so that we can give the remains to the family so that they can have a dignified burial and closure. We don’t expose any of our witnesses,” he said.
The CMP was established in April 1981 by agreement between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities under the auspices of the United Nations. Over the next two decades, work on both sides focused on conducting investigations to establish the fate of the missing and negotiate a common official list of all those who disappeared.
It took until 2006, however, before the climate was right for the CMP to begin excavations and exhumations on both sides of the island.
