THE Turkish Cypriot leader, Mr Rauf Denktash, said in an interview broadcast by Greek Cypriot television at the weekend that "all" of the 1,619 Greek Cypriots and 203 Turkish Cypriots who went missing during the 1974 conflict were dead.
Some members of both communities, he said, were killed during the coup mounted by the Greek junta against the then president, Archbishop Makarios; others, he admitted, died during the invasion by the Turkish army that followed the coup.
However, he asserted, a significant number of Greek Cypriot prisoners were handed over by the Turkish army to Turkish Cypriot irregulars and killed in revenge by those whose friends and relatives had been murdered.
This revelation created an uproar. On the one hand it prompted a Greek Cypriot government spokesman to suggest charging Mr Denktash with war crimes on the ground that he, as head of his community, ordered or encouraged revenge killings violations of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
The Greek Cypriot press pointed out that his remarks contradicted earlier assertions that all of the missing had been killed either in the coup or in battle a contention disputed by Greek Cypriots who assumed that most were killed by Turkish troops after they occupied the northern third of the island. Some, witnesses say, disappeared after being taken to Turkey following the invasion.
Ms Pauline Green, leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, visiting Cyprus for a joint parliamentary meeting, remarked: "It's interesting that he is saying the killings were carried out by Turkish Cypriots, and not the Turkish army," exonerating Turkey while blaming his own people, thus making inter communal reconciliation impossible.
On the other hand, Mr Denktash's reassertion that some of the several hundred Greek Cypriot missing had been killed during the coup by Greek and Greek Cypriot forces has increased popular pressure on the Cyprus government to admit that this happened and to give a figure for the murdered.
In a hard hitting editorial the Cyprus Mail said the concealment of these deaths in the figure for people who went missing while prisoners of the Turks amounted to "shameful exploitation" aimed at censure of Turkey with no regard for the "prolonged agony" of relatives.
The hulabaloo he created was apparently too much for Mr Denktash who yesterday morning was rushed to hospital with suspected thrombosis and placed in intensive care.
