Government donates €252,000 to CMP

The Republic of Cyprus has donated a total of €252,000 to the Committee on Missing Persons in 2022, with the latest tranche of €175,000 being handed over on Monday at a meeting between the presidential commissioner on humanitarian affairs Photis Photiou and the head of office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Jakhongir Khaydarov.

Another €77,000 was approved by cabinet a few weeks ago at a meeting, where Photiou said that recently published images of missing already seem to be included in the list of missing from the 1974 invasion.

The meeting on Monday was attended by the Greek Cypriot spokesman for the CMP Leonidas Pantelides, officers of the UNDP, and other officers of the CMP.

The contribution is part of the support scheme of the government to resolve the humanitarian issue of missing Greek Cypriots, Greeks and Turkish Cypriots, for the benefit of their bereaved families.

Excavations of identified mass graves began in 2006, and since then Cyprus has donated approximately €3.5 million to the CMP since 2005.

This amount does not include other support measures of the CMP programme, which are financed directly by the Republic of Cyprus and relate to research and excavations.

So far, the remains of 1,027 missing persons from both communities have been identified and returned to their families for proper burial.

The Committee on Missing Persons was established upon agreement between the leaders of the two communities, with the scope of exhuming, identifying and returning to their relatives the remains of 492 Turkish Cypriots and 1,510 Greek Cypriots, who went missing during the intercommunal fighting of 1963-1964 and in 1974.