Working to recover remains in Cyprus

March 29, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

SOTIRA, Cyprus

The bones of Pvt. Christofis Anastasi lay in a small coffin in the back of an army jeep. His aged mother sobbed. His father, white-haired and clothed in black, gazed at the coffin and spoke in a whisper.

“I’ve waited 36 years to bury you,” he said.

Yet, mournful though it was, the tableau that unfolded in this village in Cyprus on a hazy Sunday in early March represented a glimmer of hope on a Mediterranean island that was cut in half in a 1974 coup and war and remains incapable of reuniting itself.

The man being buried was 20 when he was killed in action with Greek Cypriot forces on the first day of the Turkish invasion. His parents might never have gotten to bury Christofis but for an unusual partnership of forensic experts drawn from the island’s Greek and Turkish communities.

These 40 mostly young men and women are digging up and identifying islanders on both sides of the divide — soldiers and civilians who vanished decades ago in violence whose memory still haunts Cyprus and makes intercommunal cooperation a rarity.

The missing, about 2,000 in all, are from both communities, Greek and Turkish. Most vanished in 1974, a tumultuous year in which supporters of union with Greece staged a coup and Turkish forces invaded the north of Cyprus in response, resulting in lasting division of the island.

Then, in 2003, came a thaw. The two sides opened gates in the U.N. buffer zone dividing the island, allowing thousands from each side to visit the other. .

Highly praised by the Argentine experts who helped train it, the committee’s searchers have recovered 630 sets of remains, have returned those of 217 individuals to their families, and are still working to identify the rest while doggedly looking for more.