Missing persons in Cyprus as ethnomartyres

Abstract

The role and significance of mortuary rituals in Greek culture has received much attention by anthropologists in recent years. The case of missing persons in Cyprus enables us to examine social responses to death from a political, symbolic and ethnic perspective where there have been no bodies to attend to. In this paper I examine the highly politicized issue of the missing persons in Cyprus from a particular perspective-the demand of the relatives for the return of the earthly remains. Clearly, there is much debate and speculation in Cyprus and Greece as to whether all the missing persons are dead. This is a highly political and contentious issue. Nevertheless, there seems to be tacit agreement both among the relatives and in government circles that many may well be dead. The official government line is that missing persons are still legally considered missing-assumed-alive, rather than missing-presumed-dead. The reasoning behind this is that such persons cannot be presumed to be dead unless verified through witness accounts of their deaths and/or the retrieval of their remains for scientific identification and proper burial. Between these two positions, the unofficial resignation and fear of missing-presumed-dead, and the official missing-assumed-alive (unless proven to the contrary), a whole climate of expectations, apprehensions, and cultural elaborations have evolved, which this paper explores. I concentrate here on the Greek Cypriot missing persons, although there is also a considerable number of missing Turkish Cypriots. My aim is threefold. First, I explore how an extended mourning for the relatives, in particular the mothers (itself a transfiguration of Cyprus as grieving mother}, has been cast in a manner that seems to permit a resolution only through the recovery of the bodies of the missing. I contrast this with the case of the Argentinian mothers of desaparecidos (the disappeared) after the Dirty War to show that although the two groups have different views on exhumation, they are similar in one basic respect: they both demand an acknowledgment of responsibility either overtly or covertly.