By Peggy Simpson
Sevgul Uludag acts almost as a one-woman truth and reconciliation commission in Cyprus in her pursuit of ugly realities about thousands of sectarian murders nearly half a century ago.
Uludag, 49, winner of a 2008 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women in Media Foundation, says she builds “bridges of hope and understanding” between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. She encourages them to share what they know about the past, to shatter the shell of silence that keeps secret the fate of people still labeled “missing” due to political pressure. In many cases, this information leads to locating individual burial sites; in some cases, it helps locate mass graves.
Uludag’s first stories about the missing were published in 2002, in Yeniduzen and Alithia newspapers, based on accounts of the first five people who had agreed to talk to her. This enraged the Turkish Cypriot government.
“Politicians were upset with me. They went on radio and TV and criticized me for opening old wounds. I got a lot of death threats from the killers who didn’t want the graves to be opened…They feared there might be some prosecutions against them.” In April 2003, the daily newspaper Volkan, the mouthpiece of the Turkish nationalist movement, called upon gangs of goons to silence her – “to cut out her tongue.”
Uludag not only refused to back off, she set up a hot line to take tips about gravesites and about the killers. She got hundreds of calls. And she expanded her search for the missing, especially after checkpoints were opened in 2003 which allowed travel without permission between the Turkish controlled north and the officially recognized republic of Cyprus, breaking a barrier of nearly four decades. Soon after, she did stories about the missing from both sides and published them together.
About 500 Turkish Cypriots went missing from 1963 to 1974, and about 1,500 Greek Cypriots were missing after 1974. “It was a big shock for the Greek Cypriots to find out that Turkish Cypriots were missing. They had thought that only Greek Cypriots were missing…For Turkish Cypriots, it was a big shock, too, to find out that so many Greek Cypriots suffered and that the violence came from Turkish Cypriots as well,” she said. The secrecy had fueled paranoia and mistruths.
The truth was hard to take. But once her stories began to reveal the unpleasant truths, and more people began speaking out, “it was like an earthquake. Everybody started talking about the missing.” Uludag’s articles continue to prompt more people to come forward. For the last two years, she has published this information in a series in Yeniduzen newspaper called “Cyprus: the Untold Stories.”
Uludag grew up in the Turkish Cypriot community, very near the border dividing Cyprus. Her parents lived there before the island was divided and had friends from both ethnic groups. After the civil war, her father resisted pressure to join Turkish Cypriot nationalist organizations, knowing they opposed not just Greek Cypriots but those on the Turkish Cypriot side who disagreed with them.
“My father refused to belong to them. [He thought] tomorrow you might say ‘I have to kill my brother’...He was like a conscientious objector. He was put in prison, was persecuted when he got out and never could find a job. If he found a job during the day, at night the owner would come and say ‘sorry, they would burn my place down if I hired you’….So he died very young of a heart attack, unemployed.”
The militants continued to haunt her mother, following her when she left home to shop or work – and making sure she knew it. Friends and relatives stayed away. “People were afraid to come to our house,” she said.
As a result, Uludag grew up as somewhat of a loner. She says her parents are her role models. She saw them live up to their ideals, despite brutal pressure to do otherwise. This helped shape her into a formidable force, a pioneering journalist who bucked the politicians in power and took the consequences that resulted, including government intimidation and retaliation.
Uludag said she didn’t set out to rock the boat. But from her first job in 1980, she sought to write about the “undercurrents” that underlay “the official agenda” of the government. She wrote about young people in the military – and their problems with drugs. The regime was not pleased. Military officials began showing up at her office, saying they would get her fired if she didn’t stop writing such incendiary stories.
Fine, she said. They lived up to their threat, and she lost her job. As a result, Uludag began her career as a freelancer, writing for magazines and working as an off-premises researcher and editor for newspapers. It was difficult, she said. So was the government attempt to isolate her.
For Uludag, the worst years were when the government-controlled newspaper repeatedly put her photo in articles where elected officials were egging on radicals to assault her as unpatriotic, someone who was harming the country and should be silenced. The military also regularly parked a car in front of her house and harassed people who dared to go see her.
Uludag says that “it is the conditions that create courage.” She adds that “I don’t think courage is something you acquire by education – to go get a Ph.D. in courage.”
“At a certain time, you find your life being at risk but despite this, you have to continue what you are doing,” she said.
While continuing to write and report, by 1991 Uludag had begun acquiring new skills as a conflict resolution specialist and became a trainer in the 1990s. The conflict-resolution insights probably underpinned her ability to be an honest broker in “the missing” saga, able to listen to both sides and to bring people together with disparate views.
By 2001, in addition to freelancing, conflict resolution training and work with women-and-peace groups, Uludag helped found a nonprofit called Hands Across the Divide to bring together Cypriot women from both northern and southern parts of the island. She also founded an internet magazine, Hamamboculeri (“Cockroaches” in Turkish) in 2001.
And she began to educate herself about “the missing.” She found that a long-time friend had a missing father. She’d never known that. She persuaded him to talk to her and to help her connect with other Turkish Cypriots who also had missing relatives. By 2002, she had launched her series of award-winning stories about missing people in newspapers published in both parts of the island.
As her articles made her a known writer, Uludag began to do lectures on the missing, speaking to people in towns and villages in both parts of the island, encouraging people to speak up and tell their untold stories. Uludag has written five books and will publish another this fall. She normally works at least 13-14 hours a day.
“We’ve broken a lot of taboos,” she said. “The readers spoke up to say these things. [But] people are still very, very afraid. [The murderer] is maybe their neighbor or their relative. Sometimes sons spoke to me about their fathers, without their fathers knowing – and the father was guilty of rape and murder.”
Uludag sees the need for a real truth and reconciliation commission, but it would have to emerge from the grass roots in both parts of Cyprus, not top down from the politicians. “And if it is going to look at the truth, it is ugly,” she said. “It is unspeakable what they did to one another. This should come out. It is impossible to build a future by hiding this ugly truth.”
Peggy Simpson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.