Turkey proceeded with a new donation of $100,000 to the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP), in order to financially support the effort of exhuming and identifying persons reported missing during the Turkish invasion of 1974.
Turkey has made six donations so far exceeding €399,000. Cyprus has donated about €1.7 million in 11 donations, the last of which was in December 2010. The USA have donated about €352,000, Greece has donated around €200,000 while the UK has contributed about €163,000. The biggest donor so far has been the EU with about €6.6 million in three separate donations.
Until now the remains of more than 800 individuals have been exhumed and 300 missing persons (239 Greek Cypriots and 61 Turkish Cypriots) have been identified, the CMP said.
A total of 502 Turkish Cypriots and 1,493 Greek Cypriots were officially reported as missing to the CMP, which was established in 1981 and began its activities in 2004.
The Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot leaders had agreed in 1997 to cooperate in order to identify as many remains of missing individuals as possible in order to ease the pain and uncertainty of so many families for so many years.
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