The Fig Tree
It all began - or ended depending on how you look at it - with a fig tree.
It is the story of a slain Turkish Cypriot man who helped his family find his body with a fig seed in his stomach that grew into a tree.
The Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) was launched in 1981 by an agreement between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities under the auspices of the United Nations. It has been searching for 2,002 people who disappeared on the divided Mediterranean island between 1963 and 1974.
The dash between those years mark a bloody chapter in the history of the island, to which all agree, but who did what to whom depends on which side of the divide you stand. Only the bodies that give up their mysteries hint at what really went on during that time.
According to the CMP, finding missing persons has become increasingly difficult by the day because witnesses die and the landscape changes - but sometimes miracles do happen. Eighty-seven year old Münür Hergüner, telling his story in the search for his brother who was taken away by Greek authorities and never seen again, detailed one such discovery.
For years, he had searched for his brother in vain. In 2011, one researcher spotted a fig tree growing in an unusual mountainous location, and became curious. When they dug, they found three bodies under the tree. They were killed with dynamite in a cave in the mountain.
"The fig remnants in my brother’s stomach grew into a tree as the sun crept into the cave through the hole punctured by the explosion. They found my brother thanks to that fig tree," Hergüner said.
Eventually the truth breaks out to see the light of day. Last August, a Greek Cypriot newspaper published new documents about the violent years that led to the division of the Mediterranean island some five decades ago, including an instruction on Greek Cypriot security forces ordering the slaughter of the Turkish community.
The executions that Daily Politis' article series titled "Cyprus: Crimes that went unpunished" describes are considered ethnic cleansing by the Turkish Cypriot community. It continues to be considered myth by the majority of the Greek Cypriot community and the anti-Turkish obsessives in the West.
Some conspiracy theorists claim that the reason the West is so strongly on the side of the Greeks in Cyprus is because the island is used as the personal money laundering service of the rich and corrupt. But it is the stories of the bodies that will tell the real tale of the divided island.
The Politis newspaper reported there were many other atrocities committed by the Greek Cypriot side and that had gone unpunished in the following decade. For instance, 126 Turks, most of them women, children and elderly, were killed and buried in mass graves in Muratağa and Sandallar villages on 14 August, 1974.
The report said most of the killers were EOKA militants, but there were also some Greek Cypriot neighbours of the Turkish victims among them.
The newspaper also gave other examples from Greek atrocities, including the raping of Turkish women, the plundering of Turkish villages and horrific murders, such as the death of Muratağa village’s Turkish coffeeshop owner Mustafa Kukudi, who was killed by the quartering of his body on 10 August, 1974.
Politis, which is the second-largest paper on the island, drew the ire of the Greek Cypriot administration because of the newspaper's unpunished crimes series, as well as its reporters, who reportedly received death threats.
The naysayers might just as well curse the fig tree. It's a parable they would recognise. Cursing a barren fig tree is one of the miracles of Jesus in the Gospels. The two New Testament accounts of Mark and Matthew have been interpreted to show Christ's rule over nature - but nature, like the truth, will bear its fruit in its own good time.
Read more: The Cyprus issue >>
posted by Tarkan Deluxe at 12:13 pm
<< Back to Main Page