‘The cruellest thing’: the relatives of the Missing and wasted suffering

Amid myriad tragedies that plagued Greek Cypriots after the Turkish invasion of 1974, the lies and false hopes that were meted out to the families of the Missing have left scars of betrayal that in many cases lasted until death.

For decades, hundreds of Greek Cypriots were told that their captured relatives were not dead – they were missing.

They were told to hold on to hope. Their loved ones were alive somewhere and might come back. Don’t give up. That was the message, over and over again.

News articles would appear on occasion – selectively leaked from ‘credible sources’ that suggested a sighting of a missing person, usually in Turkey. A testimony had “emerged” of someone remembering “key information” that would lead to a missing person being found “soon”.

Endless black and white pictures down the years of women holding up posters of their loved ones – a husband, a son, a brother – as they held their regular protests capture their desperation for a shred of information on the whereabouts of their ‘Missing’.

But the fact of the matter is they were dead – and the government knew it.

It was never one government. It was a series of them, one after the other. Political power may have changed hands, but the lies perpetuated were the same.

“They gave people false hope. That was the cruellest thing,” Despina Gregoriou who has set up a committee called Children of the Missing told the Sunday Mail.

The lies prompted hundreds of relatives to live in uncertainty for decades, at least until the early-2000s. Children born to single parents didn’t know whether to believe their father was coming back or not.

Gregoriou’s mother was three months pregnant in 1974, when her husband went missing. Throughout her entire life post-invasion, she waited desperately for him to come back.

They fled after the Turkish invasion and found an unfurnished home to live in. “For the first five years of my life we didn’t even have furniture,” Gregoriou recalls.

“My mum was waiting for my dad to come back so they could choose furniture together.”

He never came. His remains were only identified in 2019.

Even then, her mother refused to believe that was her husband.

“He was tall, he was 1.85m, this can’t be him,” she repeated over and over again as she looked down at his remains.

Gregoriou said even after the funeral, her mother would question whether they should have done their own independent DNA testing to confirm “just in case” it wasn’t actually her husband they had buried.

She held on to the hope she was falsely fed.

Gregoriou contrasts the desperate hopes the Greek Cypriots clung onto with that of the Turkish Cypriots.

“We criticise the north, but [Turkish Cypriot leader at the time] Rauf Denktash was honest. He told Turkish Cypriots not to hold on to hope.”

Denktash blatantly told Turkish Cypriots that if their relatives were Missing, they were most likely dead whether killed in the intercommunal troubles of the 1960s or in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion.

“It was painful at first, but it let them grieve. Our families couldn’t do that,” she says.

And as such, Greek Cypriots spent decades torn between hope and a reality they were unsure of.

Stories of the crippling pain passed from generation to generation have been kept hidden. For years, questioning the government policy on the Missing was condemned as traitorous.

“The people who died trying to fight for this country were the subject of the biggest lie we were ever told.”

Though Denktash may have had his own reasons for wanting to be so brutally honest with the Turkish Cypriots – it allowed him to really hammer home the message that Greek Cypriots were killers – it appears a series of governments in Cyprus too had their own reasons.

The tragic photos of the missing persons, and the relatives’ tearful testimonies were one of strongest propaganda tools the militarily weak Greek Cypriots had as they launched enlightenment programmes abroad on their plight in the aftermath of the invasion. Gregoriou simply attributes it to political ambition.

“People built their political careers on the bones of the Missing,” Gregoriou says.

It was not until the late 1990s that the pressure really started piling up, not only on the government but on the Greek Cypriot Committee for the Relatives of the Missing, who for years perpetuated the number of Greek Cypriot Missing at 1619 – the official figure now stands at 1,510.

Meanwhile, the list of names would not be made public for decades. According to Makarios Drousiotis, investigative journalist and historian who published a book on the lies surrounding the matter in his book ‘1619’, the case of Kostas Mastrappas was one of the key causes that prompted the narrative to begin unravelling.

For years Mastrappas pleaded, like so many others, for information about his son who was numbered amongst the Missing. Twelve-year-old son Zenonas was injured by airplane bomb fragments in Gerolakos in 1974 and was taken to hospital, where he then disappeared.

In a list of names handed over to the UN by the Republic of Cyprus, Zenonas was listed as someone captured in Gerolako by Turkish troops.

Mastrappas lambasted authorities for treating him like an enemy and the hospital management for refusing to assist him in uncovering the truth.

Eventually, an investigation was carried out and it emerged Zenonas had died in the hospital and was buried along with many others in a Nicosia cemetery.

In 1997 the government made its first admission. Government spokesman at the time Michalis Papapetrou was pressed by journalists to explain why even after someone was identified, the number of Missing continued to be 1619.

Drousiotis wrote that Papapetrou conceded the situation with the list of the Missing was problematic. The spokesman called it “a mess” and a “very serious” matter.

The pressure continued to pile on when people started discovering graves of people whose names were also on the missing list.

Way back in 1981, the three-member Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) had been set up under the auspices of the UN, with a Greek Cypriot member, a Turkish Cypriot and a UN appointed Red Cross member, but it was effectively toothless. It was not until 1997, when the government under the presidency of Glafkos Clerides really vowed to hand over the list of the Missing to the UN, which so far the head of the Committee of the Relatives of the Missing – and not to be confused with the CMP – Father Christoforos had refused to share. He was at the forefront of the global ‘enlightenment’ campaign that set the agenda on the Greek Cypriot policy on the Missing.

A fight was made in earnest, with Christoforos even demanding a place on the CMP.

“We weren’t even allowed access to my father’s file until after 2000,” Gregoriou says.

“Who are they to prevent me from having this information?”

But, as Drousiotis’ book highlights, the lists were poor to say the least. The information on the Missing was limited to a few paltry words – except for Christoforos’ son. The CMP could not start looking in earnest for the remains of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Missing on both sides of the divide until 2006.

For Gregoriou, it boils down to two things: a concerted attempt by Greek Cypriots to cover up their own crimes they committed on each other, fuelled by an attempt to profit from their own ambition and government spending on the issue of the Missing.

She reflects on all the time lost for everyone involved. On how many answers people could have had so far. On how much more people could have known.

And now, 50 years after the invasion and 60 years after the events of 1963-64, the CMP is left in a desperate race against time – as those who know where those bodies are buried are now dying.

Koulla Theodorou’s father was also ‘Missing’ but in fact dead. She recalls her grandmother looking out the window to Pendaktylos and ask “where are you now, my son?”

His funeral was in 2017 after his remains were found by the CMPbut just like Gregoriou, the family had lived in hope.

Both Theodorou and Gregoriou share how they grew up faster than they should have, as they became parents to their suffering mothers.

“When I was 12, my mother had severe depression. I had to take her to the psychiatrist, to the clinic, I had to look after her,” says Theodorou.

“I can’t remember her joining me for Christmas. She’d be in bed, in darkness in depression.”

Theodorou says she herself suffered from nightmares for years, haunted by images of Turkish soldiers storming Pendaktylos – and the fate of her father.

She lived in fear she would lose her mother too – but she could see her mother was not fully present. “If that woman knew her husband was dead, she could have had a very different life.”

Every time news would say something about information about the Missing “we all scrambled in front of the TV and we froze. I would start crying, I’d want to puke.”

In the early days in particular, Theodorou said the TV would be bombarding out ‘news’ – effectively false snippets of hope – on a daily basis.

“My mother died at the age of 46, talking to my dad.”

Both Theodorou and Gregoriou say they feel anger over how poorly the sacrifices of their fathers were treated, and how their deaths became nothing but a tool for the personal ambition of politicians.

The CMP officially put the number of Missing at 1,510 Greek Cypriots and 492 Turkish Cypriots. Figures dated August 31 reveal 756 Greek Cypriots of these have since been identified and 295 Turkish Cypriots.

There are still 754 Greek Cypriots and 197 Turkish Cypriots missing.