Over €2.7 mln donated to Committee on Missing Persons

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The Committee on Missing Persons received €2,775,000 in donations from three contributors, the European Union, Germany and the Turkish Cypriot community.

The EU, which is by far CMP’s largest donor, has donated €2.6 mln in 2022.

Brussels has contributed €33.3 mln to the Committee since the beginning of its exhumation operations in 2006.

Respectively, Germany donated €100,000 in 2022, which brings its total contribution to the work of the CMP to €800,000 since 2006.

The Turkish Cypriot community donated €75,000, which adds up to a total of €508,000.

According to an announcement by the CMP, these funds will support the Committee’s Project on the Exhumation, Identification and Return of Remains in Cyprus.

Its goal is to identify and return the remains of missing individuals and end the uncertainty that has affected the families for so many years.

And 1,023 missing from both Cypriot communities have been identified and returned to their families for dignified burials.

The CMP relies on donor support to implement its bi-communal project.

Over the past 16 years, the remains of more than half of the 2,002 (492 Turkish Cypriots and 1,510 Greek Cypriots) who went missing in Cyprus have been located, exhumed, identified, and returned.

However, 58 years after the inter-communal conflict of 1963-1964 and 48 years since the 1974 Turkish invasion, time is running out to locate the remaining missing persons.

CMP was established in April 1981 by agreement between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities under the auspices of the United Nations.

Over the next two decades, work on both sides focused on conducting investigations to establish the fate of the missing and negotiate a common official list of all those who disappeared.

It wasn’t until 2006; the climate was ripe for CMP to begin excavations and exhumations on both sides of the divide.

To provide the required expertise, archaeologists and anthropologists from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) were brought in to coordinate and train a bi-communal team of Cypriot scientists involved in exhumations and anthropological analysis.

An anthropological laboratory was set up in the UN compound in Nicosia.