The Greek government has donated €50,000 to the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP), bringing the sum of its total donations to €475,000 since 2006.

According to the CMP, the funds will “contribute to the committee’s goal of identifying and returning the remains of missing individuals, bringing to an end the uncertainty which has affected the families for so many years”.

The CMP was first established in 1981 and became operational in 2006, setting out to locate and identify a total of 2,002 people who went missing during Cyprus’ intercommunal conflicts.

As of September 30 this year, it has exhumed 1,707 bodies and identified the remains of 1,057 people from the official list, as well as 216 others.

Of those identified, 296 were Turkish Cypriots and 761 were Greek Cypriots.

So far this year, the remains of 17 people have been found, with six of them having been identified. Five of those were Greek Cypriots and the other was a Turkish Cypriot.

The CMP operates with donations, with nation states and international organisations frequently donating to it.

Former CMP third member Paul-Henri Arni said last year that Cyprus has the “second-best results in the world” in its search for missing persons.

There are 42 countries in the world in which there are missing persons from conflict or political violence, and Henri said in most of those, the success rate for finding their remains is below 20 per cent.

“Some are at zero per cent, some at one per cent. Georgia is at 16 per cent. Argentina, a very cold case, is at 20 per cent”, he said.

The highest rate of missing persons found is in the former Yugoslavia, with 75 per cent of missing persons now having been located, though Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Human Rights Minister Sevlid Hurtic said in September that a total of 7,580 people who went missing in the country between 1992 and 1995 during the Bosnian war are still missing.

“Still, 7,580 people are missing. The majority of the most difficult cases occur because the perpetrators attempted to destroy evidence. Time has passed, and the deaths of witnesses and close relatives have complicated our work,” he said.