Attila cries foul: Turkey’s sudden case of hurt feelings

Opinion 1974rapeturkeyturkish invasion Attila cries foul: Turkey’s sudden case of hurt feelings Εισβολή 6 Id 416863 35 Relevant News Attila cries foul: Turkey’s sudden case of hurt feelings 9 September 2026 A second ordeal for families: pay to save your loved one, then fight the state for it 9 September 2026 The problem is policy, not a lack of trust 9 September 2026 Costas Venizelos 9 September 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Turkey has feelings, apparently. Someone in Nicosia wants to build a memorial, EU-funded, to the women raped during the 1974 invasion, and Ankara is wounded by it. Wounded enough that its Foreign Ministry issued an actual statement, claiming the memorial exists purely “to defame the Turkish Armed Forces.” The statement doesn’t stop there. Greek Cypriots, we’re told, are politicising the issue (imagine that) and “distorting historical events.” The EU, meanwhile, has apparently abandoned neutrality and justice altogether, become a propaganda tool for the Greek Cypriot side, and is busy eroding trust between the two communities. All this, according to Ankara, because someone wants to put up a monument to rape survivors. So: what exactly is being distorted? And how, precisely, does remembering brutalised women threaten anyone’s precious “efforts” toward a solution? Here’s what isn’t up for debate. Rape isn’t propaganda. It’s what happened to more than a thousand people. And if this crime never caught up with the occupying power, that’s not an accident, it’s because it was buried under a taboo so heavy that both the state and the victims themselves went silent. The women who survived it didn’t just carry what the Turkish army did to them. They came home to a society that turned on them too: thrown out of their own houses, abandoned by their own husbands. It took decades to undo that silence. It took campaigns, and it took a handful of survivors brave enough to speak. All of it built toward the European Parliament’s resolution, the culmination of those efforts. But acknowledgment isn’t new, whatever Ankara would like people to believe. Straight after the invasion, in 1974, women who’d been sexually assaulted were given psychological support, with the psychiatrist Takis Evdokas directly involved. The state faced something it had no precedent for, and no easy answers to: pregnant rape victims needed a legal route to abortion, and none existed. So parliament made one. The House of Representatives was summoned in an emergency session, largely under the radar, and amended the Criminal Code. The change was published in the Official Gazette on 15 November 1974, with the Church’s silent blessing, and abortions went ahead in state hospitals and at the British base hospital in Akrotiri. None of this was hidden, either. The rapes were formally documented in the Republic of Cyprus’s case to the European Commission of Human Rights, filed after the invasion. The commission’s report, finalised on 10 July 1976, condemned Turkey outright. Here is some of what it recorded: Dr Hatzikakou, in the handwritten notes he submitted as part of his own testimony, described the following cases that had come to his attention (63 in total): An intellectually disabled girl was raped in her own home by twenty soldiers, one after another. When the victim began screaming, they threw her from a second-floor window. She suffered a spinal injury and was left paralysed. Dr Hatzikakou treated her for the injury himself. One day after Turkish troops arrived in Voni, they rounded up the village’s girls in a house and raped them. A girl in Palaikythro, living with her parents, was dragged outside and raped at gunpoint. In the village of Templos, Turkish soldiers tried to rape a 17-year-old schoolgirl. She fought back. They killed her. A woman from Gypsou told him that 25 girls were being held in Marathovouno as prostitutes. Another woman witnessed several girls being raped by Turkish soldiers. A woman from Voni was raped on three separate occasions by four men, one after another. She became pregnant. This is what was put on record, sixty-three separate accounts, sworn and submitted. And still, it stayed buried: in the victims’ own silence, and in ours. Turkey has never held anyone accountable for any of it. Decades of impunity. And the thing that finally makes Ankara nervous isn’t the rapes. It’s a memorial. Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News A second ordeal for families: pay to save your loved one, then fight the state for it The problem is policy, not a lack of trust EU states seek compromise on new taxes to fund next budget Cyprus records wettest August since 1901 as storms leave dead or missing at sea EU considers restrictions on second homes to tackle housing crisis Two arrested after Nicosia driver rams victims, flees scene Cyprus has EU’s lowest suicide rate, Eurostat says Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.