Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436
Readers continue to call and speak, breaking the zones of silence created by leaderships of this island throughout the years, consolidated by the behaviour of authorities in both sides, cemented by examples of attempts of silencing people in the past half century…
The zones of silence created in this country are so thick that sometimes you would think they are impenetrable but still there are enough people with hearts of courage and humanity to filter through and to shine the light towards the path of truth… There have been enough readers from both sides to attempt to tell the truth, to speak about things unspeakable, to show places of mass murders, to take a step towards a path that can only lead us to our common future together on this island… Because it is the zones of silence that will always keep us apart, that will help the partition to consolidate, that will keep the suspicion cunningly eating away the hearts of our communities. Seeds of suspicion, half-truths and a cloud of mistrust will always keep our communities apart if surrounded by these zones of silence… Only when we speak up, these clouds will start to clear and the truth would come out to the open…
A reader calls to tell me the story of a shooting range… In the 1960s there had been a private shooting range he says, somewhere in Cyprus… There had been a person who was not supposed to be there on a certain night but he happened to be there and he saw a bulldozer burying some people within the area of the shooting range… My reader does not know if the people were executed on that spot or if they were already executed and were only taken there to be buried.
The man who was not supposed to be at the shooting range on the night of the burial told this to one of his friends and it is how my reader found out…
Years later, a house would be built within the land of this shooting range but my reader thinks perhaps if we investigate the yard and the surrounding land, we might find a trace of this possible burial site…
My reader believes that the people supposedly buried in this shooting range might be some `missing` Turkish Cypriots…
We would have to investigate whether this story has some truth in it or not…
A few months ago, with some Turkish Cypriots, I had gone to Limassol – they wanted to show me some possible burial sites… One of them had been another, secret shooting range next to the Turkish Cypriot mahalla of `Ay Antoni` as they called it. This shooting range had an entrance from inside the river – we would try to find it… The whole area had been renovated by the municipality and we saw roughly where the entrance to the secret shooting range might have been… My Turkish Cypriot readers showed me another building where prisoners were kept and questioned back in the 60s… Some `missing` Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot might have been buried in the shooting range and perhaps in the place of interrogation and prison. In the yard of the headquarters there had been a well for filthy water and there were some witnesses who had said that they might have buried some people in that well used as sewage… The building had changed and a huge garage
of some sort had been built in its stead but surely the well would be there… We could not enter the garage since it was closed but we took photos and decided to continue our investigations with Turkish Cypriots of Limassol who might know more details… There had been some `missing` Turkish Cypriots from Limassol who were `silenced` by people from their own community and one of them was rumoured to be buried somewhere here… In the zones of silence created in those years, it was quite easy to `label` someone as a `traitor` - even envy among persons or a rift would be enough to `label` someone that might even lead all the way up to his death. In the late 1950s there had been a teacher who had built a new house in my mother's village Knodhara and he was engaged and was getting ready to be married. An influential person from the village was envious of the good looks and the new two-storey house that the young teacher had built, this influential person
was also in love with the girl that the teacher would marry. He would start a rumour that the teacher who had been the leader of the underground organization around this area and who had been given the task of keeping the guns belonging to the underground organization hidden, buried somewhere had sold those guns in order to build a brand new, two storey house! The influential person would even report this to the headquarters and finally the teacher would be executed because of these lies… After his execution a simple shepherd would contact the authorities of the underground organization in this area and say `What shall we do with the guns, now that the teacher is dead? I had hidden the guns together with him…` And thus, the truth would come out that the teacher was innocent and killed for nothing, just simple envy… But few people would know the actual truth, hidden under the clouds of silence – it was so simple and easy to `label` people and
even get them killed in those years…
Perhaps the most vital thing to do is to create an atmosphere for breaking these zones of silence – my readers have been doing that and we are dismantling mountains of lies through their efforts… If the leadership of this island in both sides of the partition line are serious about building a culture of peace, the first thing that they must do is to help their communities to speak up, to talk about the truth of what happened in the past, to encourage this in education and to lead their communities towards a safer ground where there would be no zones of silence… We cannot build a common future over zones of silence… Unless we face the truth together, unless we try to find out what happened in the past together, any future on this island would be shaky and easy to bring down with simple manipulations… Lies and rumours survive under clouds of suspicion – it is only the truth that will all make us free from being used and manipulated…
11.1.2014
Photo: Turkish Cypriot neighbourhood of Agios Andonios in Limassol...
(*) Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 26th of January 2014, Sunday.
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