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Newspapers to publish list of Cypriot missing

* A Turkish member of the Missing Persons Committee in Cyprus says providing information on the fate of missing Cypriots is a humanitarian duty

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ANKARA - Turkish Daily News

A tripartite committee of Turkish and Greek Cypriots and the United Nations, in an attempt to discover the fate of people who disappeared in the course of intercommunal conflict on the island prior to and during the Turkish intervention there, is to publish a list of the Cypriot missing in local newspapers.

A list of names of all those missing, together with the telephone numbers and addresses of the committee's offices on both the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot side of the divided island, will be published the Anatolia news agency said.

Approximately 2,000 Turkish and Greek Cypriots are believed to have died on the island prior to and during the 1974 Turkish intervention. Turkish Cypriots say their loss stands at 500 with the majority of those from the 1963 to 1974 period, while Greek Cypriots argue that around 1,500 of their number have been missing since 1974 when Turkey sent its troops to the island to stop attacks against Turkish Cypriots following a Greek Cypriot coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece in 1963.

Hundreds of Greek Cypriots also died during clashes between coup supporters and opponent groups prior to the 1974 operation. Turkish Cypriots say these people should not be considered as part of the list of Greek Cypriot missing persons.

The Autonomous Missing Persons Committee decided to publish the list in the Cypriot dailies following its latest meeting at Ledra Palace in the United Nations-controlled Green Line border in Nicosia earlier this week.

Rustem Tatar, the Turkish term president of the committee, said they hoped people who saw the list in the newspapers would call the telephone numbers given. "Thus they will fulfill a humanitarian duty," Anatolia quoted him as saying.

The tripartite committee was relaunched in September after a four-year break and intensified its work following a letter from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that urged both sides to settle the issue.

Recently it asked for expert help to identify the missing persons. In a statement following the conclusion of a round of meetings underway since August, the committee said it had requested a DNA expert from the British forensic organization INFORCE attend Cyprus so inquiries at certain graveyards could commence.

The Greek Cypriots had handed over to the Turkish Cypriot side information regarding the location of a total of 22 graveyards, four of which are in the north. Some 201 people are believed to be buried in these graveyards. However, no graves have yet to be exhumed due to the remaining unresolved problems.
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