The families of the executed Greek Cypriots of the village of Assia have demanded the punishment of those responsible for their death during the Turkish invasion against Cyprus in the summer of 1974.
Speaking at a press conference organised by Assia community – during which events were announced that will take place on the 10th and 11th December – community leader of the Turkish occupied village of Assia, Georgios Ioannou, said that Turkey must pay for its crimes and the murderers must be brought to justice.
During the press conference, Greek Cypriots who were arrested by the Turkish army in Assia in 1974 recalled the tragic moments in the hands of the Turkish army. They were arrested along with other civilians who later on were executed in the area of Ornithi, in the Famagusta district.
Ioannou said that from the 84 missing people from Assia, aged 11-84 years, 52 of them, over 50 years old, were driven by the Turkish army to an area with other Greek Cypriots, where 37 of the total 107 prisoners were brought to the area of Ornithi. There, they were executed cold blooded by officers and soldiers of the Turkish army, while their bodies were thrown to two wells. He added that in 2009, the investigation carried out by the Committee of Missing Persons lead to the finding of mass graves in Ornithi and to the burial points of ten more missing persons who disappeared in Assia.
He stressed that this confirmed the rumors that in the mid 1990s, the Turkish occupation army removed the remains from the wells in Ornithi and transferred them to an unknown place in an attempt to conceal one of the most terrible war crimes committed in 1974.
Ioannou said that as a result of this crime only a limited number of remains – mostly fragments of bones – are handed over to the relatives of the missing, who actually hold funerals with almost empty coffins.
“For us this is unacceptable”, he stressed, noting that they should first have exhausted all efforts to identify the new burial site of the missing.
It is unbearable for the relatives, he said, to know that they bury only two bones of their beloved ones while knowing that the rest of their remains is hidden somewhere in an unknown place, by the Turkish army.
Noting that on the death certificate they receive it is written that the cause of death is `unknown`, he said “our beloved ones were murdered cold – blooded. The least we expect is for that fact to be acknowledged whether there are skulls with holes by shots, or whether there are only a few bone fragments belonging to our beloved ones who were captured and executed by the Turkish invaders”.
Those murderers must be brought to justice, he said, noting that “the European Court of Human Rights` decision to refer us, as in the properties issue, to the courts of the occupation power, which is Turkey, is wrong and out of reason.”
He said that the relatives ask the Republic of Cyprus to denounce this decision to the Council of Europe and request the revocation of all decisions that force crime victims to refer to their perpetrators for justice.
A delegation of people from Assia will hold a meeting with Acting President of the Republic and President of the House of Representatives Yiannakis Omirou, whom they will inform about the `unacceptable way` of handling the humanitarian issue of the missing persons and the consequences this has on their families.
As a result of the 1974 invasion, 1,619 Greek Cypriots were listed as missing, most of whom soldiers or reservists, who were captured in the battlefield. Many of those missing were last seen alive in the hands of the Turkish military. A further 41 more cases of Greek Cypriot missing persons have been added. These cases concern the period between 1963-1964, when inter-communal fighting broke out but none of them has been identified yet. The number of Turkish Cypriot missing since 1974 and 1963/64 stood at 503. A total of 1073 remains have been exhumed by the Committee of Missing Persons, 546 of which have been identified with the DNA method (421 Greek Cypriots and 125 Turkish Cypriots).
