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One of Rasit Pertev’s most enduring childhood memories was the unexplained disappearance of a bus taking 11 Turkish Cypriot auxiliary policemen to their jobs at a British military base. Missing Bus, a documentary about the incident, which was filmed during time off from his day job as a senior government official, has pulled in large audiences across north Cyprus.
A special screening was held at the European parliament in Strasbourg, but, apart from a United Nations-sponsored event, the film has not yet been shown in the Greek Cypriot south.
Mr Pertev wrote the script; his brother, a television film-maker based in Turkey, directed. As the Turkish Cypriot community’s chief negotiator at intercommunal talks until last month and an emerging politician, Mr Pertev is at pains to make clear the documentary is “not a nationalist film”.
“We tried to convey not the terrible event itself but the feelings of that time – how the event was presented in the newspapers, how children – now in their 40s – and wives, some of whom are very old, felt about what happened,” he says.
Mr Pertev was five years old in 1964 when the incident occurred, shortly after the arrival of a United Nations peacekeeping force to help end months of inter-communal violence. His family had been living in a Turkish Cypriot enclave in the port of Larnaca since relations between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities collapsed the previous year.
“It was a traumatic time. Turkish Cypriots were sacked from the civil service, the community suffered economically. Our enclave was surrounded on three sides by Greek Cypriot paramilitary guard-posts, and on the fourth by the sea.” Jobs at the two British bases were a lifeline for the Turkish Cypriot community, he says.
“Two buses left from Larnaca every day, first the police bus, then one for the clerical workers, among them my father. That day the police bus was late, so it was behind the other bus. It just vanished.” It was not until October 2006 that the remains of the passengers were found, stuffed down a well next to an olive grove midway between Larnaca and the Dekelia base.
The discovery was made as a result of a UN-sponsored initiative, supported by both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot governments, to determine the fate of more than 2,400 missing persons from the civil conflict of the 1960s and the Turkish military intervention of 1974.
Mr Pertev says he was shocked by newspaper pictures of the excavation of the well. “As a child I felt there was something almost magical about this red British bus. I wondered where it had gone, whether it would ever come back.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/74699448-9bc6-11dc-8aad-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=bd914be4-974c-11dc-9e08-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
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