The Cyprus Government announced on Monday that President Glafcos Clerides and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash will meet on Friday to discuss the issue of missing persons. The announcement comes less than a week after Denktash went to Clerides' Nicosia house for dinner, when they made a tentative agreement to meet on the missing persons issue and to treat it as a humanitarian concern.
The last time Clerides and Denktash met on the missing persons issue was in July 1997 when they agreed to exchange information on the whereabouts of the remains of missing persons on both sides. However, the agreement collapsed when the Turkish Cypriot side withdrew six months later.
Government spokesman Michalis Papapetrou said yesterday that Clerides would be meeting with Denktash "in his capacity as leader of the Greek Cypriot community", in the presence of UNFICYP Chief of Mission Zbigniew Wlosowicz, at his residence inside the buffer zone within the UN-controlled Nicosia Airport.
The series of breakthroughs on the Cyprus problem and the missing persons issue came about after a face-to-face meeting between Clerides and Denktash on December 4 under UN auspices where they agreed to resume direct talks. Next week, the two leaders are due to meet for face-to-face negotiations on the Cyprus problem after more than four years and a series of failed proximity talks.
Following the collapse of the July 1997 agreement the government went ahead with its plans to exhume remains from unmarked graves at two Nicosia cemeteries and has since identified several persons from the missing persons list through DNA testing at a special facility in the capital. As a result of this and other initiatives, the original list of 1,629 missing persons has been reduced to below 1,500.
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