In July 2026, the Council of Ministers finally scrapped the income test that had been standing between the parents and spouses of missing persons and the home care they needed. It’s the right call. It’s also decades late. These families should have had this support from the first years after the invasion, not fifty-two years on. The state should have been standing beside them from the start. It wasn’t.
Deputy Minister of Social Welfare Tina Pavlou announced the change after a session of the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees, and revealed something else alongside it: a proposal to hand responsibility for everyone affected by 1974 to a single body, her own Deputy Ministry. Good. About time. When one organisation owns an issue, it gets handled. When responsibility is scattered across half a dozen desks, things fall through the cracks, and for fifty years, that’s exactly what’s happened.
The Committee also picked up a subject that spent decades buried: the rapes committed by Turkish forces during the invasion. It took years of pushing from various quarters just to drag it into daylight. This isn’t a footnote. It’s a war crime, and it should have been front and centre the moment the invasion ended. Someone should have gone after the occupying power for it. An interstate complaint did go to the Council of Europe. And then, nothing. No follow-through. Turkey never faced a reckoning.
Here’s the part that matters most: the Deputy Minister admitted, in plain terms, that the state failed these people’s mental health for half a century. Not just failed to help. Actively left many of them isolated, cut off, on their own.
The good news, such as it is, is that something is finally going to be done to bring these people out of that isolation. Late is still better than never, and as she put it herself, it’s never too late. At the very least, there will now be moves that go some way towards making it up to them. Fifty-two years after the fact.
The state owes these people. It needs to pay up, and it needs to start now. There’s no more room for delay. Fifty-two years and counting.
