Sevgul Uludag
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Giannakis had come home for just a few days on leave from the army in order to support his family and share their pain… It was right after the coup in Cyprus in July 1974 – his brother Athanasis had been killed in the coup – Athanasis Georgiou was stationed at the presidetial palace, he had been a policeman, from the guard of Makarios… Athanasis had only been 26 years old when he had been killed during the coup, on the 15th of July 1974 – the family was devastated. They were a family from Amargeti, once a mixed village until 1958… They had been a family with ten kids – five girls and five boys… Now one of them, Athanasis was gone…
When the leave of Giannakis was over and he was about to go back to his unit at the Tekke in Larnaka, his mother called all his sisters to come and kiss him and say goodbye…
`You never know what might happen` she had said, this woman with a mother's heart… `This is war and you never know what might happen so kiss him goodbye…` She had just lost a son and was probably deep down was very afraid of losing another, Giannakis…
All five of his sisters would kiss him and say goodbye… He would go back to the Tekke but sometime after, he would phone his mother…
`Mom, they have transferred us to Palekythro… Now I am right across the Turks!`
It had been the 12th of August 1974 and that would be the last call he would make to his family…
That would be the last time he would speak with his mother…
On the 14th of August 1974, when the second round of the war would begin, his unit would be woken up with an alarm at five o'clock and they would all take their defence positions… After that no one would see him – there had been only one witness from his unit who had testified that this had been the last time he had seen him and no one else would come forward with any sort of information…
From Palekythro they would get orders to take defence positions all the way to Mia Milia – at some point they would get orders to go to Aglandja and no one has told the family the exact number of `missing` from this unit of around 100 Greek Cypriot soldiers… Some of them `missing`, some of them killed, some of them arrested and taken to the elementary school of Palekythro. Some of them taken to Turkey as prisoners of war and later returned to Cyprus. Doesn't anyone remember anything or saw anything? Or is it like many other cases where some who had seen their friends killed would keep quiet letting the family to believe that they are `missing`? What had happened at Palekythro that no one remembers anything and it's like amnesia that cost so much pain to this family…
His mother would wait for any sort of news from her son – when she was about to die, she would not die – she would wait and wait and only when they would give her a photo of her `missing` son Giannakis, she would finally give up and rest forever…
His father would grow old and still wait for any news… He would die last year at the age of 96, without hearing anything about his son…
Perhaps the remains of Giannakis is in the laboratory of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee, in a box, waiting for DNA identification or perhaps in an unknown grave still waiting to be discovered and exhumed – we do not know that… All we know is that even if remains are found, the identification process is taking so long that mothers and fathers are dying without ever having a chance to find out about the truth of what had happened to their dear loved ones… They leave this earth with their untreated traumas…
Last week another relative of `missing` Ismail Mustafa Balci from Agios Andronikoudhis called me… Havva is devastated… Her father had gone `missing` on the 2nd of January 1964 and she and her sisters have been waiting for any news about their father… Her father had gone to buy petrol at a petrol station in Trikomo together with two from his village and have gone `missing`.
Last week Havva would call me and complain:
`My sister had cancer… She died two weeks ago… Perhaps I will die too without finding where my father's remains are… We have been waiting for fifty years… Still nothing…`
And yet in Cyprus things proceed slowly, without any rush…
Fifty years for Havva and forty years for the family of Giannakis…
Fifty long years without a father and forty long years without a son whose place no one else can fill… Only sorrow can fill their places, only sadness and life becomes paralysed with this endless waiting that turns into torture. And yet, no one really cares even about the treatment of these harsh traumas in all these years…
A boy who had remained alive from Maratha, hiding from the killers, Shafak Nihat, had found the mass graves of Maratha-Sandallaris while playing at the rubbish damp… He had seen a small hand sticking out from the rubbish and had discovered that this had been the mass grave where the women and children – many of his classmates – had been killed and buried. He never got any treatment for this horrible trauma he had gone through – first in hiding he had the shock of his life as the gangs of EOKA-B came in the house searching for him and his family, his heartbeats too loud he had thought, perhaps they would hear it and kill him… No, they did not hear his heartbeats and he narrowly escaped death only to discover the mass graves of Maratha-Sandallaris and be present when they were being opened.
He is an elementary school teacher now…
`I never feel nausea when children would vomit… I lost those feelings` he says… But our societies at large don't give much thought about what sort of suffering he or others like him have gone through…
Cyprus has been a war zone – there has only been a cease-fire and none of the traumas people went through in 1958, 1963-64 or 1974 have ever been treated on a systematic basis.
I remember a member who used to come to sit with my mother in the library and talk with her… He was always shaking all over… He had been ordered to kill some Greek Cypriots and his commander had told him not to waste any bullets but to do it with a wire by choking them… He couldn't do it… He had been punished… His commander would come and demonstrate how to kill in a stream some Greek Cypriot soldiers to his unit… From then on he had lost it – the shaking and the shivers would never stop and would mark his whole life… He would find some consolation by speaking to the librarian which was my mother and my mother would tell me these stories later…
I travel with a friend whose father had been killed and whose mother had been separated from her for many years… Her mother had been gang raped and barely escaped to go and live elsewhere… She would forever be afraid, having so many locks and bolts on her doors… She would forever be scarred and yet our societies would not think too much about what sort of suffering she must have gone through, as well as her children.
Having a `missing` father, once the son had told me that his treatment of his children would have been different if he did not have his father `missing`. He would not want to leave his children out of his sight, even if they went out for a few hours, he would be dead worried - `I can't help it` he had told me, `I simply can't…`
Cyprus has too many traumas at least from the conflict of the past 50 years… None of them have ever been systematically treated… You may think you can bury these traumas underground but one day they burst and then it might bring even more dramatic damage… No matter how deep you bury the traumas, they are bound to find a way out and get you…
I wish our communities lived without pretence and with enough courage and humanity to first accept without denying that we have deep traumas so that treatment of wounds that affect many generations can at least begin…
27.6.2014
Photo: Giannakis Georgiou
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 20th of July 2014, Sunday.
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