Freedom and Fairness for Northern Cyprus welcomes the statements made this week by Erato Kozaku-Markoulli, former Foreign Minister of the Greek Cypriot administration, and Yorgos Koukoumas, Member of Parliament, on the killing of Turkish Cypriots in August 1974.

Mrs Kozaku-Markoulli, marking the killings at Atlılar, Muratağa, Sandallar and Taşkent, wrote that no Greek Cypriot has ever been punished for the killing of Turkish Cypriots, and called for acceptance of the truth and mutual apology. She described them as “unpunished crimes, unspoken truths, unhealed wounds, unending pain”, and warned that “as long as we hide crimes in wells of silence… the gulf will widen, peace will not be built, and the vision of a common homeland will leave us forever.”

Mr Koukoumas described the killings as among the darkest pages in the island’s history, carried out by Greek Cypriot far-right elements, and noted that the great majority of those responsible have never been punished. He stated that no person of basic dignity, whatever their position on the Cyprus problem, “can ignore questions such as how Turkish Cypriot children came to be found in wells in their masses, and how their bones are being uncovered today.”

These are not easy words to say publicly in the South, and the two have said them without qualification. That is worth acknowledging.

What was done

At Muratağa, Sandallar and Atlılar in August 1974, Greek Cypriot forces and paramilitaries killed 126 Turkish Cypriots. Almost all were women, children and the elderly; the men of the villages had already been taken away. The oldest victim was ninety-five years old. The youngest was sixteen days old. The dead were buried in pits. The grave at Atlılar was uncovered on 20 August 1974. The grave at Muratağa-Sandallar was found on 2 September 1974, after a shepherd noticed a human hand protruding from the ground.

At Taşkent, eighty-four men and boys were separated from their families, taken away and shot. The men of neighbouring Terazi were seized in the same operation. The women and children who survived later rebuilt their lives in the North, in a village they named after the one taken from them.

Fifty-two years have passed. No prosecution has been brought. No inquiry has been held. The perpetrators of these killings, those who ordered them and those who carried them out, have lived out their lives without answering for what they did. Where they remain alive, they should be identified and brought before a court. Where they do not, the record should be established in full and placed on the public account of the Greek Cypriot administration.

What else requires recognition

These killings did not occur in isolation, and recognition confined to August 1974 would be recognition of the exception rather than the pattern.

The events of December 1963 and the months that followed, known to Turkish Cypriots as Bloody Christmas, saw Turkish Cypriot neighbourhoods and villages attacked, homes destroyed and families killed in their own houses. Some 8,150 Turkish Cypriot homes and 97 mosques were destroyed. Tens of thousands were displaced. These attacks have never been formally acknowledged by the Greek Cypriot administration.

The killings of Turkish Cypriots during the EOKA campaign of the 1950s, when Turkish Cypriot civilians, police officers and public servants were targeted, remain similarly unaddressed.

So too does the enclave period between 1963 and 1974, during which Turkish Cypriots were confined to roughly three per cent of the island under blockade, subject to repeated attack, with killings and disappearances continuing throughout.

And beyond the villages named above, Turkish Cypriots were killed in numerous other locations across the island in 1974, in incidents documented at the time by the international press.

Each of these is well documented. Each has been recorded by contemporaneous reporting, by international observers, and by the testimony of those who survived. What is absent is not evidence but acknowledgement.

Our position

Freedom and Fairness for Northern Cyprus calls on the Greek Cypriot administration to formally identify and acknowledge the crimes committed against Turkish Cypriots across all four periods: the EOKA campaign of the 1950s, the events of December 1963 and their aftermath, the enclave years of 1963 to 1974, and the killings of 1974. We further call for the identification and prosecution of surviving perpetrators.

Two politicians have now said publicly what their administration has never said officially. The distance between those two positions is the measure of the work outstanding.