Germany Contributes €160,000 to Cyprus Committee for Missing Persons

The German government has contributed €160,000 to Cyprus’s Committee on Missing Persons (CMP), raising Germany’s total support for the initiative to €960,000 since 2006.

According to a statement from the CMP, this funding will help advance its mission to identify and return the remains of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots who went missing during the intercommunal conflicts of the 1960s.

The CMP was established in 1981 by Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot leaders with the support of the United Nations.

“Since its inception in 2006, the CMP project in Cyprus, funded by the European Union, has focused on exhuming, identifying, and returning the remains of missing persons to their families,” the statement noted.

The primary aim of the committee’s work is to “end the long-standing uncertainty faced by families who have waited for years to know the fate of their loved ones.”

To date, the bicommunal project has successfully identified and returned the remains of 1,051 individuals from both communities, allowing families to hold dignified burial ceremonies.

In related news, American specialists are expected to arrive in Cyprus next week to assist with locating missing persons. Their research will target four sites: one in the Republic of Cyprus and three in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.