Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict

10. Recognition and Emotion: Exhumations of Missing Persons in Cyprus

194 I Paul Sant Cassia teN Recognition and Emotion eXhuMAtioNs of MissiNg persoNs iN CYprus Paul Sant Cassia Introduction in his short story “Conversation with Mother,” italian playwright luigi pirandello returns to Agrigento following his mother’s death. in an imaginary conversation with his mother, she tells him that she feels sorry for him. he assumes this is because of his pain at losing her. she says no. she feels sorrow for him because when she was alive he also existed, as a representation for her. we exist “in other people” as much as “in ourselves.” Now that she is dead, her representation of him has been erased, and his personhood is diminished through that loss. when people dear to us die, we lose not just them but our existence in them, which “made” us individuals , with our social identities that were in their (temporary) safekeeping. Although we can get over the loss of loved ones, because we live in others their death diminishes our “identity” in a fundamental and nonrecuperative way that we do not normally perceive. pirandello alerts us that more may be involved in death and mourning than rituals, emotion, transgressions of the social order, and gender identities. he suggests a link that can help transcend the durkheimian opposition between the individual and the collective. in this chapter i discuss the attempts by one widow of a missing person in Cyprus to recover the remains of her loved ones and give him a proper burial. My aims are threefold. first, i show that although the issue of missing persons in Cyprus recognition and emotion I 195 is highly politicized, relatives have different and conflicting needs than the agendas of the nation-state. Their attempts to recover what was lost are not merely a necessary reaction to simulation on the part of their political representatives; they are essential for psychic stability. second, i show that mourning is more than ritual or emotion and that it encompasses fundamental cognitive, existential, and identity changes, along the lines hinted at by pirandello. finally, i suggest that we should be cautious about either genderizing emotion or viewing it as a resistant margin (e.g., seremetakis 1991). rather, i suggest that every political order requires its own specific representations of suffering. emotion and suffering therefore both subverts and sustains the social order. A Brief History of the Issue Between 1963 and 1974, over 2,000 persons, both greek and turkish Cypriot, disappeared in Cyprus. They disappeared in the course of hostilities between greek and turkish Cypriots and during the 1974 coup backed by greece and the subsequent invasion by turkey. responsibility for the disappearances appears to be straightforward in some cases, more murky in others. only one body (that of a Cypriot u.s. citizen) has been recovered officially from turkish-held areas. There are major differences in the ways that greek and turkish Cypriots regard their missing persons. whereas turkish Cypriots regard their missing as kayipler (as disappeared/ dead/lost), greek Cypriots regard their missing as having suffered an unknown fate—agnoumenoi—as not-(yet)-recovered, as living prisoners at best or, at worst, as concealed bodies requiring proper and suitable burials . They believe that such persons, which number some 1,400 cannot be presumed to be dead unless their bodies are recovered and their cause of death judicially ascertained. until then, these persons have been scripted by the state as legally constituted characters. Their salaries are still being paid into bank accounts; their children receive special scholarships, government posts, and so forth; and their wives have to go through lengthy, complex, and demeaning procedures to remarry. few have done so. greek Cypriots fear that because many of these persons were captured alive by the invading turkish army, they were killed by the former or handed to turkish Cypriot irregulars to dispose of. There is some evidence for this. turkey claims that it returned all the persons its army captured during the invasion and refuses to get involved. turkish Cypriots maintain that greeks killed these men during the coup that provided the pretext for the turkish invasion or during the hostilities attendant upon the invasion. There is also evidence for this, but the majority of the missing seem to have disappeared behind turkish lines. 196 I Paul Sant Cassia turkish Cypriots also claim that 803 of their civilians disappeared between 1963 and 1974. for turkish Cypriots, the problem of the...