The Turkish government on Wednesday donated US$100,000 to the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP).

The donation was formally handed over to the CMP’s Turkish Cypriot member Hakki Muftuzade by Turkish ambassador in Nicosia Ali Murat Basceri, who said that the issue of missing persons has “directly affected the lives of many people on the island”.

“We can feel this deep wound within ourselves. We experience it. We see it,” he said, before adding that he has “many friends” whose relatives went missing during “the tragic events which took place between 1963 and 1974”.

“The Republic of Turkey feels responsible both as a guarantor and for the survival of the Turkish Cypriots, and attaches great importance to the CMP,” he said.

Muftuzade, meanwhile, described the Turkish government’s donation as “very meaningful”, and pointed out that Turkey donates money to the CMP every year.

He added that the contribution will be “very important for the committee’s work”

In addition, he lamented that “some politicians on the Greek Cypriot side are making great efforts to politicise this work” but said that the CMP’s aim is “to contribute to the efforts to establish trust between the two communities”.

Ali Murat Basceri hands the donation cheque to Hakki Muftuzade

The CMP was first established in 1981 and became operational in 2006, setting out to locate and identify a total of 2,002 people who went missing during Cyprus’ intercommunal conflicts.

As of September 30 this year, it has exhumed 1,707 bodies and identified the remains of 1,057 people from the official list, as well as 216 others.

Of those identified, 296 were Turkish Cypriots and 761 were Greek Cypriots.

So far this year, the remains of 17 people have been found, with six of them having been identified. Five of those were Greek Cypriots and the other was a Turkish Cypriot.

The CMP operates with donations, with nation states and international organisations frequently donating to it.

Former CMP third member Paul-Henri Arni said last year that Cyprus has the “second-best results in the world” in its search for missing persons.

There are 42 countries in the world in which there are missing persons from conflict or political violence, and Henri said in most of those, the success rate for finding their remains is below 20 per cent.

“Some are at zero per cent, some at one per cent. Georgia is at 16 per cent. Argentina, a very cold case, is at 20 per cent”, he said.