A house of grief and closure
By Stefanos Evripidou
THE COMMITTEE on Missing Persons (CMP) yesterday unveiled a new building set to play a crucial role in the missing person’s saga.
The building called the Family Viewing Facility at the UN Protected Area (old Nicosia airport) will be used for families of missing persons who have been identified to view the remains of their loved ones. It is a house of grief but also of closure for families that have waited up to 44 years to hear the fate of their missing.
The building is divided into two rooms, one a reception area and the other a bare room with long tables covered in white cloth. On the tables, identified remains of the deceased, killed during the inter-ethnic strife of the 1960s and during the Turkish invasion of 1974, will be laid down for the family to see one last time before they are given a proper burial.
The facility was funded by the Unites States Agency for International Development (USAID) and UNDP-Action for Co-operation and Trust. The CMP was established in 1981 with the sole mandate to find the fate of almost 2,000 missing Cypriots.
For decades, the Committee came up short in its efforts to locate the missing until last June when the first positive identifications were made. To date, 379 individuals have been exhumed from different burial sites located across the island, while 84 remains have been identified and returned to their family by a bicommunal team of anthropologists and geneticists.
“The fact that we have reached a point were such facilities are needed is indeed a credit to the hard work and dedication of the people of the CMP and to those who contribute to the reconciliation efforts in Cyprus,” said UNDP-ACT Programme Manager Jaco Cilliers.
He quoted from Nelson Mandela, saying: “Reconciliation is not something that you do at the end of a process, it is something that starts as soon as there is joint understanding of mutual dependence by groups to solve the problem.”
The CMP is made up of a Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot and a third member from the international community. The third member Christophe Girod referred to the new building as “a place where a lot of emotion will unfold”.
CMP Turkish Cypriot member Gulden Plumer Kucuk noted the importance of the humanitarian aspect of the project and said: “This facility is for the families, Turkish and Greek Cypriot families, to come and visit their loved ones after 40 and 30 years.”
She added that Cypriots had a lot of things to learn from the history of Cyprus.
The Greek Cypriot member, Elias Georgiades, summed up the role of the Family Viewing Facility, saying: “The relatives get angry, they complain, they always ask a big why? They demand the truth, the whole truth. Yet, at the end, they always express their gratitude to those who helped, in one or the other way, to reach this stage. They hug and kiss the scientists. And you can feel it, that they thank you, they say it is coming from their heart. It is a very big and genuine thank you.”
In the new building, the families will get a chance to hear how the process of identification took place before seeing the remains of a loved one “whose forced disappearance has determined their lives, in every step and in every aspect, for all these years,” noted Georgiades.
“These are very sacred moments for the relatives. They cry, some of them faint, they look, they stare at the bones, they touch, they kneel in front of the remains, they talk to them loudly, but also silently. They kiss them, they examine them from many angles. Their brain registers tens of images that cannot fade away. Their imagination tries to travel the last days, the last hours, the last moments, of the bone figure in front of them,” he said.
Georgiades thanked the UN, the EU, the British for helping to build the facility, and especially the American Ambassador Roland Schlicher for his personal contribution in getting the funds for the project.
Schlicher emphasised the importance of the CMP’s work, not only for the families of the missing but also for the future of the island. He expressed his respect for the families of those still missing (around 1,900), who remained involved in the process despite the many barriers.
One of the anthropologists working in the scientific teams said the whole process of identifying remains and then showing them to the families was an emotional but necessary process.
“It allows for grief. And you see during the process, sometimes they even recognise certain fractures on the bones as belonging to their loved ones. It’s a moving process,” he said.
Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2008
I don't know about you, but I would rather remember as I last saw that person in the flesh rather then a pile of bones on a table. What do you think?
