Turkey’s defence ministry on Friday released a video in which it decried the “bloody legacy” of Greek Cypriot paramilitary group Eoka, two days after the 52nd anniversary of the Greek military junta-backed coup on the island and three days before the anniversary of the subsequent Turkish invasion.

“We continue to remind the world of the inhumane massacres committed by the Greek Cypriot terrorist organisation Eoka against the Turkish Cypriots … We have not forgotten and will never forget the bloody legacy of Eoka, nor those who supported these atrocities. We will never allow them to be forgotten,” the ministry said.

The video begins with the names of villages and towns in which Turkish Cypriots were killed – Kofinou, Ayios Theodoros, Limassol, Paphos and Larnaca – displayed in blood red, spliced against imagery, before the words “they attacked all the Turkish villages” appear.

It then interviews Ismail Bozkurt, who was born in Ayios Theodoros and who witnessed violence both there and in Kofinou and joined Turkish Cypriot paramilitary group TMT, and went on to serve as the north’s ‘culture minister’ in Dervish Eroglu’s first administration between 1985 and 1986.

“That was the period when civilians were massacred the most. I mean, we have a problem called ‘losses’. You set out on the road, they take you there, and then, you are gone,” he said.

Next to feature in the video is Eoka fighter Neoptolemos Leftis, who was an associate of George Grivas, and who was accused and acquitted of the murder of United States ambassador in Cyprus Rodger Davies in 1974.

The video displays a televised interview he gave in 2022, in which he said, “we gave an order: for every one of ours which they killed, we were to kill ten of theirs, and that is what happened”.

“It is for that reason that they come and asked me about 68 Turks [who were killed] now,” he said.

TMT fighter Metin Aybars said, “they killed Turks every day … they killed on the roads, they killed in the fields, they attacked villages, it went on like this for a long time”.

“The population in 103 of our villages declined. People took shelter in critical regions right among the Greek Cypriots so that they could be stronger together, but then we realised that we were confined to just three per cent of Cyprus, and the rest was all Greek Cypriots,” he said.

The final person to feature in the video was a woman named Zahide Tekant, who was described as an “eyewitness”.

“The Greek Cypriots attacked us too, they forced us to leave our homes, and even as we were fleeing, our neighbours shot at us with rifles. Some of the people fleeing with us were killed. Some were able to escape, some died,” she said.

She added that “the Greek Cypriots captured our houses, they plundered our homes”, and that “we had a very tough time – we left our home because of the Greek Cypriots”.