ONCE again, the issue of the missing has come to the forefront of public attention. Sadly, it is not to congratulate the quiet progress made by the Committee for Missing Persons in exhuming remains of missing persons from both communities and moving towards identification and final closure for relatives who have lived in uncertainty for decades. Rather, the news has been dominated by lurid allegations that Greek Cypriot missing were used in chemical and biological weapons tests in Turkey after 1974.
The allegations were drawn from a leaked report by the US-based International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA), and presented as authoritative. Yet when questioned, the head of the Association admitted the allegations were unconfirmed and that he had no concrete evidence to back them, saying only that they came from “a variety of human sources within Turkey”, but refusing to be more specific.
ISSA has lobbied heavily in favour of Milosevic’s Serbia during the Balkan wars, speaking of the “so-called Srebrenica massacres” and the western “propaganda hoax” that perpetrated against the Serbs. Its president is a visiting lecturer at Intercollege in Nicosia.
None of this automatically invalidates the Association’s research, but surely it should encourage us to show a modicum of caution. Sadly, we seem more concerned in grabbing anything that puts Turkey in a bad light and running, irrespective of its credibility and with no thought of the pain that we continue to inflict on the families of the missing, whose suffering has been subjected to relentless political exploitation for more than 30 years.
At a time when some people are working hard towards a final closure on this desperate humanitarian issue, it is sad that we are rushing to embrace allegations that seem unlikely, to say the least.
Law reform not a moment too soon
AT LAST political parties have agreed to amend the constitutional provision on the right to privacy to allow the use of telephone and internet records as evidence in court.
No doubt, the very public pressure from the police, who complained their hands were tied in the battle against murderers, drug dealers and paedophiles, was instrumental, as was the European directive adopted in the wake of the July 7 London attacks, instructing member states to retain telecommunications records for a minimum of two years to help security forces in their efforts against terrorism.
The proposal had actually been on the table since 1999. And while we welcome the decision to go ahead with the amendment, one cannot help wondering how many crimes might have been prevented, how many perpetrators brought to justice, in the intervening seven years, had it been adopted from back then..
