TAŞKENT VICTIMS REMEMBERED CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
A REMEMBRANCE ceremony was held at Taşkent Cemetery last Sunday for more than 80 Turkish Cypriots who were rounded up and killed by Greek Cypriot gunmen in 1974.
The ceremony began with wreaths being laid at the village’s Martyrs’ Monument. There was then a moment of silence and a gun salute, followed by the hoisting of the flags accompanied by the singing of the National Anthem.
In his speech on behalf of the Taşkent Martyrs’ Families Committee, committee member Ahmet Serkanlar said that the Taşkent victims were taken from their homes at gunpoint on August 14, 1974, and were shot en masse one day later.
Martyrs’ Families and Disabled Veterans’ Association president Gürsel Benan stated that the “pain experienced 48 years ago can never and will never be forgotten”.
President Ersin Tatar, who also attended the ceremony, said that “mass murders took place in many areas, such as Taşkent,” and that “these wounds and pain will never be forgotten”.
“The Turkish Cypriots paid a great price and now they have a state with the price they paid,” he said.
“Along with our motherland Turkey, now we also have an important place in the Eastern Mediterranean.”
Mr Tatar emphasised that Turkey’s “guarantee” in Cyprus “will never be given up”.
The slaughter of the men of
Taşkent — formerly known as Tochni — a village located in the Larnaca district of the island, formed part of a 1989 BBC TV documentary called Cyprus: Stranded in Time, fronted by the late Christopher Hitchens.
In the programme he is shown visiting the village to try to find out what happened to its Turkish Cypriot inhabitants.
He asks a Greek Cypriot coffee shop owner called Sotiris to confirm that the Turkish Cypriots of the village were “slaughtered en masse”.
Sotiris replies: ““I don’t know what happened because I didn’t see, but they got them together and kept them inside a school. I don’t know for how long, 24 hours approximately.
“Two big coach es came and took them some place, I don’t know where.”
Asked by Mr Hitchens how people in the village felt about what happened to their Turkish Cypriot neighbours, Sotiris answers: “When
the word was out that the Turks had been killed — though we didn’t know what had happened to them — really, we felt sorry because we had a good life.
“There were some troublemakers, on our side too, of course, but the rest were good people. We worked closely together, us farmers, them herdsmen and all that . . . We had a good life, always.”
Mr Hitchens is also shown speaking to another Greek Cypriot villager called “Mr Zapties” who is “identified by Turks and Greeks” and by himself as a supporter of the “Greek Cypriot fascist
underground, Eoka-B”.
Asked if he remembers what happens, Mr Zapties claims to have no knowledge of the killings, but then shockingly says that the Turkish Cypriot people in the village were “not human beings” and were “living in a zoo”.
After the atrocities and the partition of the island between North and South, the remaining villagers relocated to a former Greek Cypriot village called Vouno, which was renamed as Taşkent, located on the southern-facing slopes of the Five Finger mountains close to the huge TRNC flag.