A young soldier, the son of a family friend, called his mother with excitement. He told her that he would be travelling to Nicosia to help transport to Limassol the remains of a missing person from 1974 for the funeral.
A few days later, when his mother asked him about the ceremony, the speeches, the tears, he quietly replied that only one person had attended: the middle-aged nephew of the deceased younger brother of the missing man.
We are living in a time when we have not only lost the missing but are also losing their relatives. Their parents are gone, the missing have become orphans, just as half of Cyprus has been orphaned by indifference. And if the most urgent issue for our political parties continues to be yet another monument or another tree-planting ceremony, then they are out of touch both with their voters and with the reality around them.
As we learn from the news, for those who bother to listen, the children of the missing are trying to organise themselves so as to seek justice. Many of them were never helped at all. They never received psychological support. There are reports, if not outright scandals, concerning the classified files. Many mistakes were made, and much money disappeared. If politicians truly wish to deal with this matter seriously, they have much to correct and many to comfort: refugees, victims of sexual violence, the wounded, mothers, and perhaps even those beloved ones who watch from somewhere, or who wait in mass graves that will never be opened.
The heart of the problem, and the reason for this article, is the decision to create a monument at the European Parliament in honour of the victims and the missing of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, a decision approved by the plenary session after a proposal by DISY and EPP MEP Michalis Hadjipantela. A solo initiative that tells half the story (...)
Once again, we managed to deceive foreigners who supposedly understand the Cyprus issue so well as -at a time when the goal of negotiations is reunification and reconciliation- to accept the idea that a monument concerning only half of Cyprus would somehow be a wonderful gesture.
But let us not dare to speak of the victims of the other side. Half of us will say vaguely, "we did things too," and the other half will insist that "we were the greater victims because we were more numerous." And this is exactly the point our politicians should be confronting.
This is the greatest crime after 1974. Those who labelled the issue as "humanitarian" and then exploited thousands of families are the same people who benefited politically from it and continue to do so in 2025.
human pain is one, not devided.
Hüseyin Akansoy and Petros Souppouris, two symbolic figures of the dark era between 1963 and 1974, received the European Citizen’s Prize in 2012. In their letter to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, they wrote that the erection of a monument only for the Greek Cypriot victims is historically and morally inconceivable. They urged that this mistake be corrected so that all the victims of the Cypriot tragedy may be honoured.
Roberta Metsola, the EPP, and Cyprus decision-makers, at last, please, listen to the victims!