To obstruct the investigations on the issue of Cyprus missing accused Turkey Athens and Nicosia during the discussion at the UN Security Council for the implementation of the resolution 2474. Ankara’s spokesman responded to the objections, referring to unfounded charges, and reversed that the issue should not be politicized, citing missing Turkish Cypriot side.
The meeting took place on Thursday (15.5.2025) for Resolution 2474 of 2019, which concerns missing armed conflict.
The Greek Permanent Representative, Ambassador Evangelos Sekeris, She described the resolution as a “milestone” to protect the missing and stressed Greece’s support in her work Investigative Committee for the missing in Cyprus. Praised the contribution of UN and his Red Cross, noting the need to strengthen international pressure to reveal the truth.
For its part, the permanent representative of Cyprus, ambassador Maria Michael said over 2,000 people disappeared during the Turkish invasion of 1974. The ambassador accused her Turkey That she refuses to work with the Investigative Committee for the missing (CMP), as he said, “she refuses to access military records and landfills, preventing her work.”
According to Ms. Michael, the CMP, created under the auspices of the UN in 1981, “to date, has exhumed, identified and returned the remains of 1,054 people, but the project is far from completion.” “There can be no reconciliation without accountability,” he said and appealed to the Council to support the implementation of the resolution 2474 as a moral check and a prerequisite for peace.
Turkey talks about misinformation
However, the Turk permanent representative Ahmet Yildiz He warned that the issue of the missing “cannot be examined or tackled without taking into account the historical conditions that led to this tragedy.” He stressed that it is a “humanitarian issue that affects both sides, Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots’, emphasizing that “it should not be politicized, nor presented as a matter concerning the Greek Cypriots exclusively”. In his position he pointed out that a large number of Turkish Cypriots were ignored from 1963 to 1974.
The ambassador spoke of Cyprus’s “unfounded accusations” and a “selective and unilateral interpretation of history”. He argued that “the Turkish Cypriot side, one of the two sides in the CMP, was excluded from the Security Council meeting despite its request to participate”. She described her “exclusion” as “unfair and unacceptable”.
Ahmet Yildiz reiterated the positions of Ankara, saying that the Cyprus It didn’t started in 1974 but a decade earlier when, as Turkey claims, Turkish Cypriots were “expelled by the institutions of the Republic of Cyprus in 1963”. He referred to “atrocities against the Turkish Cypriots” who – as he said – are documented in the UN archives, and reminded that the development of the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus in 1964 recognizes the seriousness of the crisis of that period.
Ambassador Sekeris responded by noting that the Republic of Cyprus is a UN Member State and called on all members of the Council to use its constitutional name, while UN official Mohammed Kiari closed the meeting by underlining the humanitarian dimension and the need for humanitarian dimension.