Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
On the 1st of August 2018, together with a Turkish Cypriot reader I cross the checkpoint at Ledra Palace to meet a Greek Cypriot reader.
For many years now, he has been helping us quietly and insistently in finding the possible burial sites of "missing" Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots.
All together we go to Tseri to pick up an old man, a dear friend who has also been instrumental in finding various burial sites of `missing` persons. This old man had helped us to find the remains of three Turkish Cypriots taken from Aredhiou from their homes by the Greek Cypriot police of Deftera back in December 1963 and who had gone `missing`… And another Turkish Cypriot `missing` from 1963 who had come from Famagusta to Nicosia and then `disappeared`… He had called me through the help of my Greek Cypriot reader and my Turkish Cypriot reader with whom I am together now and asked me to go to Tseri to show me these burial sites. He had also given me a map, showing the exact location of a well where the three Turkish Cypriots `missing` from Aredhiou had been buried…
I had immediately contacted the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee and we had gone there to show the well and the other burial site.
Upon digging, the excavation team of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee had found the remains of the four `missing` persons from 1963 in Tseri in the places that this old man had shown us… I am grateful for his humanity and his voluntary help to heal the wounds of our country. I have been in the funerals of all these four `missing` persons and grateful to the old man from Tseri for bringing closure to four families…
So on the 1st of August 2018 together with the old man and my readers we go together to look at more possible burial sites, take photos and information about these places. My Greek Cypriot reader has already worked on all of these possible burial sites and also gives me maps to help locate them easily…
On the 8th of August 2018, this time I arrange so we can have investigators from the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee with me so I can show them these possible burial sites together with my old friend from Tseri. Sila Murat and Chris Christophoros from CMP are with me as the investigators of CMP. Again, we go to pick up the old man from Tseri and we start doing the rounds again to show them the possible burial sites and to give detailed information and the maps so they can do further investigations…
First we go outside Tseri, towards Nicosia and from the `Pera Chorio-Nissou` road sign we turn to the left to go to a riverbed…
Both my Greek Cypriot reader, the old man from Tseri, as well as other Greek Cypriot readers have been insisting that some `missing` Turkish Cypriots are buried in this riverbed, in one of the wells. My Greek Cypriot reader had provided me with a map showing the wells and pointing out in which well they might have been buried.
The CMP had come to this area previously but when there was water in the well during their excavations, they had left… Another Greek Cypriot who sent me a note would say `They need to go 30 meters further from where they were digging in the past, to explore the well there…` He had found a witness in one of the villages and I give this information, as well as his phone to Popi Chrysostomou, the Assistant to the Greek Cypriot Member of CMP and they speak on the phone and arrange to go and visit the witness. I also pass on the information to Mine Balman, the Assistant to the Turkish Cypriot Member of CMP.
So who is buried in one of the wells in this riverbed of Almiros?
According to the information we have, five Turkish Cypriots killed as `revenge` might be buried here… A Greek Cypriot from Latsia had played a role in their killing as well as some others… In those days, one of his relatives had been killed in Nicosia by some Turkish Cypriots so he had been very upset and wanted to take `revenge`.
It was the 30th of April 1964 and five elderly Turkish Cypriots were going back from Nicosia to Limassol and Paphos… Mehmet Sinan and his wife Pembe Mehmet Sinan had come to Nicosia since they had been worried because of the intercommunal fighting of December 1963… Their daughter was living in Nicosia and they had come to see her and were on their way back to Paphos… Fezile Ali, another elderly lady had come from Limassol to Nicosia to see her daughter who was going to get engaged… And she too was going back to Limassol. The drivers were Mehmet Ahmet and Kamil Mehmet who had trucks and their job was to carry stuff… There had been a photographer who had wanted to move his house from Paphos to Nicosia and they had carried his furniture to Nicosia and now with the three elderly customers to take back to Limassol and Paphos, they were trying to go back…
They would be stopped at the Latsia makeshift checkpoint and according to our readers would be taken to outside Tseri and killed and buried in a well in the riverbed Almiros…
We roam the area with the old man and the investigators of CMP – they take photographs and coordinates and we move back to Tseri to show some more possible burial sites…
In Tseri we go to a junction and the old man tells the investigators that there are rumours that a Turkish Cypriot had been buried here… There is an olive tree in a field and next to it, an asphalt road… The old man says that there were rumours in the village that in 1964, a `missing` Turkish Cypriot had been buried here…
But he also wants to show the investigators some other suspicious places – further up, there had been a big cavity in a field and he shows this cavity… Then across the dirt track, there are two adjacent fields where there had been two wells and these wells had no water and were open but all of a sudden they had been closed back in 1963-64 so this had created suspicion in the village… He says `There is no solid information about these two wells that were closed abruptly, just suspicions…`
I thank my Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot reader, I thank the old man from Tseri for their humanitarian, voluntary work… And I thank the investigators of CMP, Sila and Chris for coming with us so we could show them these possible burial sites…
If you have any further information about these possible burial sites, you can call me on my CYTA mobile at 99 966518. It only works in the mornings until about 15.00 and when I go to work, my CYTA does not work since the newspaper I work in, YENIDUZEN is outside Nicosia and there is no CYTA line there… So please call me if you have any further information – I do not need to know your name… Don't tell me your name if you don't want to… You can give information anonymously… You can do the same and call CMP if you like…
What's important at this critical period when a huge amount of time was lost, was in fact `wasted`, is to try to share as much as possible what we know about possible burial sites… We owe this to the old men and old women killed viciously with the pretext of `revenge` and thrown in wells and buried in fields… We owe this to young boys who were killed during the war and thrown in a mass grave or in a ditch… They lay there waiting for our humanity to touch them so they can come back to their loved ones so that the paralysed lives of the relatives of `missing persons` can continue, burying their loved ones decently and mourning for them that they have postponed for many decades…
We all have a responsibility to clean up our island of this mess created by others, for their own interests… We all have a responsibility towards the relatives of `missing persons`, whether they are Turkish Cypriot or Greek Cypriot… There is no `Greek Cypriot pain` or `Turkish Cypriot pain` - there is only human pain and we must do everything possible to ease this pain, to close wounds, to give a chance for the wounds to heal, to create an atmosphere of mutual understanding, instead of keeping things under check and control and allowing fear and suspicion to rule this land…
This is the only way forward: By sharing what we know and by doing what we can…
26.1.2019
Photo 1: The five missing Turkish Cypriots who might be buried outside Tseri...
Photo 2: The area outside Tseri where some missing Turkish Cypriots might be buried...
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper in Greek on the 17th of February 2019, Sunday. Similar series of articles were published in Turkish in the YENİDÜZEN newspaper on the 21st and 22nd of January 2019 and here are their links:
http://www.yeniduzen.com/tseri-ve-disinda-olasi-gomu-yerleri-1-13525yy.htm
http://www.yeniduzen.com/tseri-ve-disinda-olasi-gomu-yerleri-2-13529yy.htm
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