A FATHER who lost his baby during the 1974 hostilities is claiming he has evidence that his son is alive somewhere.
According to daily Simerini, refugee Kyriacos Kyriacou received the information from a Maronite lady who used to visit the north. She told him that, shortly after the invasion, she saw a Turkish Cypriot woman cradling an infant.
This struck the Maronite lady as strange, as the Turkish Cypriot woman had no children. She asked the woman where she found the baby, and she said that her husband, a Turkish officer, brought her the infant from the village of Trakhoni.
This was the same area where Kyriacou hailed from.
The infant, born just a few months before the war, would be 33 today.
Kyriacou’s story comes in the wake of reports that another five-year-old Greek Cypriot child who was injured in 1974 ended up in Adana, Turkey.
Politis quoted a Turkish corporal who had served in Cyprus in 1974. He told how the little boy was treated at a makeshift hospital in Dikomo, where he was responsible for the wounded.
Commenting on the Simerini report, Foreign Minister George Lillikas said each new case should be thoroughly investigated before arriving at conclusions, so as not to give relatives false hope.
And opposition leader Nicos Anastassiades called the missing persons issue “a festering wound”.
Others took a more militant view. Greens chairman George Perdikis claimed the issue was political as well as humanitarian. He said the Greek Cypriot side committed a grave mistake in 1976 by agreeing to treat the missing as an exclusively humanitarian issue, while all the while Turkey has failed to provide information on the fate of these persons.
In May 2001, the European Court of Human Rights found Ankara guilty of violating the rights of the relatives of missing persons because of its refusal to inform them of their fate, thus violating Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
Last February, the Belgian government said it would be contributing 250,000 euros to the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP), to enable it to extend its project on the exhumation, identification and return of remains of missing persons to their relatives.
After the 1974 Turkish invasion, 1,493 Greek Cypriots were officially reported as missing to the CMP, but following a number of identifications in the past several years, that number now stands at 1,468.
The Turkish Cypriot community has declared 502 persons as still unaccounted for from the 1963-64 intercommunal clashes through to the 1974 fighting.
Late last year the remains of 11 Turkish Cypriot police officers from Dhekelia were exhumed from a multiple grave in Oroklini. They had been killed in an ambush by Greek Cypriot colleagues.
According to reports at the time, an indication as to the grave’s whereabouts was given by the Turkish Cypriot side with a map, suggesting that the north held this information but was not disclosing it.
And on the Greek Cypriot side, a family are suing the Republic for failing to inform them that their loved one had been killed in action and was not a missing person, as they had been led to believe for 32 years.
Critics were quick to point out that the missing persons issue has been exploited by both sides equally for propaganda reasons.
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