Vers une identification des disparus de 1974 à Chypre

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> Vers une identification des disparus de 1974 à
> Chypre
> Article en anglais de l'AFP sur news.yahoo.com
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061201/lf…
> unmissing_061201165509

After four decades, Cyprus families still await missing
by Ines Bel Aiba
Fri Dec 1, 11:55 AM ET

NICOSIA (AFP) -
Thanks to the examination of skulls and bones, the emotionally-charged issue of the missing in Cyprus may finally be making progress after decades of frustration for many families on this divided island.

For the first time, relatives are expected to receive next year the remains of loved ones who were among the nearly 2,000 Cypriots registered as missing from conflict.

"We hope to have the first remains returned on both sides in early 2007," a UN official told AFP.

"At the moment everything is going according to plan, and we hope to have enough (voluntary aid) pledges to continue our work in 2007."

In the new anthropology lab of the United Nations committee on missing persons (CMP), bones are meticulously lined up on tables covered in immaculate white sheets.

The remains of 49 of the missing are being identified, while hundreds of others await exhumation from mass graves scattered across the Mediterranean island.

The grave sites identified to date account for only between 60 and 80 percent of the missing persons, the CMP says.

According to the United Nations, a total of 1,468 Greek Cypriots and 502 Turkish Cypriots are still listed as missing from intercommunal violence in 1963-64 and from the 1974 Turkish invasion which split the country.

Anthropologists and archaeologists are combining their skills in the grey prefabs which have been erected to form the laboratory in the UN-controlled buffer zone.

The lab partly financed by Greece and Turkey is "the only one of its kind in the world", said Argentine anthropologist Luis Fondebrider.

"It's the first time that two communities which are on opposite sides of a conflict work together within the same structure to identify their loves ones," said Fondebrider.

A team of 12 Greek and Turkish Cypriots, along with two foreign anthropologists and two non-Cypriot archaeologists, work at the centre which launched operations in late August.

But Christophe Girod, the UN representative in the CMP, cautioned that "at least three years will be needed to exhume all the bodies of the missing. As for identification, that could take several years."

Anthropologist Maria Roussou said the missing issue was traumatic for the Cypriots. For decades, "families have been living in the unknown," she said.

Unlike the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north, the Greek Cypriot side refuses to declare its missing as dead, which the north slams as "purely political" but the Greek Cypriots insist is for humanitarian reasons.

"Try to go and tell a mother who is waiting for her son to come back after all these years without telling her how he died," said Nicholas Theodosiou, head of the Greek Cypriots' committee on the missing.

In a sign that the issue -- the only aspect on which the intractable Cyprus problem appears to be making headway -- is still very much alive, a television series inspired by the missing was a big hit in the south earlier this year.

The series, calling "Vassiliki", told the story of a young woman in Turkey searching for her roots.

She discovers from her adoptive father that she was a Greek Cypriot whose life had been saved as a baby by a former officer during the Turkish invasion when her mother was killed.

In the offices of the Turkish Cypriot missing committee, where the walls are plastered with pictures of corpses lying in the streets and portraits of hundreds of victims, Emine Dirmenciglu, 68, speaks calmly of her husband.

When he disappeared back in 1963, she was left alone to raise their three small children.

"I just want to recover the remains of my husband," said the blue-eyed woman. "All I want is to be able to bury him and then I'll have a place where I can visit him."

At the lab, for a positive identification of each skeleton the remains go through a double screening process: first by anthropologists and then through DNA tests.

The anthropologists use yellow files classified as confidential and which are filled in by families of the missing to provide clues as to the identity of the remains.

The information, which is backed up on a computerised data base, tells for instance of how the victim was dressed on the day of his disappearance, his dental records and medical history.

Bone samples are then sent to the DNA laboratory to be compared to blood samples from family members.