skipper wrote:
Oh please most of our missing are from 1963-64 and these are civilians who were targetted just for being TCs like my cousins father and brother who went missing from a hospital of all places. GC's have never lifted a finger to investigate and prosecute the people involved yet they demand the world takes action for their missing and then have the gaul to appoint the blame on Turkish soilders from 74, what a joke.
You make False accusations
Upon leaving Cyprus, Martin Packard prepared a report, which he handed to his superiors, in which he accused the Greek Cypriots of slaughtering 27 Turkish Cypriots in the Nicosia General Hospital.
His accusations appeared on April 2, 1988 in the ‘Guardian’ newspaper through his friend at the time Chief Editor of the paper Peter Preston, who, in 1964, was also working in Cyprus.
On February 10, 1994 Channel 4 Television showed a documentary called ‘Secret History – Dead or Alive’ which in a way addressed the drama of the 1,619 missing Greek Cypriots since the brutal Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974.
Martin Packard made an unexpected appearance to say that in 1963/64 he had prepared a report in which he included that: "The largest single element of these missing people were the Turkish Cypriot patients at the General Hospital. Nothing had been heard of any of them. It was assumed that they were being held in custody somewhere. The outcome of my investigation suggested that they had all of them been killed in the General Hospital. They had been removed at night, the bodies from there had been taken out to outlying farms up in the region of Skilloura and out there they had been dismembered and passed through farm dicing machines and they had then been seeded into the ploughed land."
I found these accusations too horrific to be true. Immediately, I wrote to the then Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Heathcoat-Amory and demanded to be allowed to view Packard’s report.
As he spoke about this report having definitely not been released, I found Mr Packard’s liberty to disclose such damning secret information, with no evidence at all to substantiate it, extraordinarily questionable.
Five-year fight
I raised the issue that he either had breached the Official Secrets Act as he spoke from knowledge of a report still retained or he spoke in his capacity of a British conciliator with the Department’s permission. Whatever the case, we had a right to see the evidence of what he was so freely accusing us.
My fight with the Foreign Office and other government departments lasted five years (1994-1999) until he was finally ‘ordered’ to close the matter by withdrawing the accusations.
Peter Preston, with an article in the ‘Guardian’ (which was equally guilty and responsible for printing unsubstantiated allegations), on May 3, 1999, wrote that Martin Packard revisited the island and found out that he was given wrong information, no evidence at all, and that in fact no Turkish Cypriot had been harmed.
I wrote an article in Simerini on May 18, 1999 and another one was written by Charalambos Charalambides on May 19, 1999, finally revealing the truth.
Packard was wrong and had no evidence whatsoever for those horrific allegations against us.
The damage, however, to the Greek side was immeasurable. The Turks had used Packard’s allegations to the full and in all international forums, as admitted by Peter Preston.
Packard was obliged to write to Kofi Annan withdrawing the allegations and restoring the truth, which is that no Turkish Cypriot had been killed.
They were all protected under Makarios’s orders.
And that was the result of Packard’s role in Cyprus in 1964 which had nothing to do with petty conflicts over….sheep between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots.
†Finally: "The programme assesses the evidence that pro-American elements on the island in 1964 actively conspired to foment inter-communal strife in order to justify the effective partition of the island - a situation that came to pass in 1974", is stated on the BBC 4’s website.
This is totally wrong.
The British documents reveal exactly the opposite. I find it extraordinary after such a broadcast to reach such a ridiculous assumption!
It was not the so called pro-American elements on the island in 1964 who actively conspired to foment inter-communal strife in order to justify the effective partition of the island, but the very British intelligence men - the ‘spy ring’ - as they chose to name them under direct orders of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.
They were the ones who were aided on the island by their pro-British elements within both communities who in their own way assisted the British and Turkish partitionist policy to gain ground.
This was an assistance they enjoy to this very day with disastrous results for our national cause.
http://www.greece.org/cyprus/Treason3.htm
Fanoulla Argyrou
Researcher/author
London 24.1.2006.
for once be frank to urself about having butchered innocent TCs. u need to clean ur bloody hands and soul.
