António Guterres praised the “extraordinary” bicommunal effort to trace victims of Cyprus’s decades-old conflict, during a visit to Nicosia.
The United Nations Secretary-General toured the Anthropological Laboratory of the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP), housed within the UN Protected Area in the island’s divided capital, where forensic scientists work to identify the remains of those who vanished during the intercommunal violence of the 1960s and the 1974 conflict.
Mr Guterres was accompanied by Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs; Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations; and Khassim Diagne, the Special Representative who heads the UN’s peacekeeping force on the island.
Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot and UN members of the Committee briefed the Secretary-General on its work before he was shown the scientific processes used to identify victims, many of whose families have waited more than half a century for news of their fate.
Mr Guterres said he was deeply moved by the Committee’s bicommunal work, which he said had brought “long-awaited answers” to families who had endured decades of not knowing what became of their loved ones.
The CMP was set up in April 1981 under UN auspices, following an agreement between the two communities and two resolutions of the UN General Assembly calling for such a body. Its programme to exhume, identify and return the remains of the missing became fully operational in 2006, and is funded principally by the European Union.
To date, the remains of 1,075 missing persons from both communities have been identified and handed back to their families for burial. The Committee said it continued to rely on donor support to sustain the project.
