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Sketch map of Dhekelia Military Cemetery – north is to the right

Maintenance Military graves are provided with headstones and maintained by the Commonwealth War
Graves Commission under contract from the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Cell (JCCC),1-2 part of

the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency at the Ministry of Defence.

Burials policy3 Initially all service personnel or their dependants dying in the British military community
in Cyprus from 1960 onwards would have been buried here. From 1963 it became the policy, for British

deaths in Northern Europe, that relatives were given the option of flying their dead home (repatriation)

at public expense or having two relatives flown out to attend the burial overseas. This did not become an
option in Cyprus until 1967, when the British minister responsible, Merlyn Rees, announced that this

policy was to be extended beyond Northern Europe, but only to countries where it was practicable and
safe. This followed a campaign by a determined mother who fought for her son to be repatriated after he

had died in Aden in 1964. Since 1991 in particular, most serving personnel or their dependants dying in
Cyprus were repatriated for burial or cremation in the UK at public expense, though the option remained

of burial in Dhekelia until 2003.

It was in March 2003, at the end of the second Gulf War, that it was made official policy to repatriate all
dead service personnel. Since then, service personnel who die in the course of operations or their duties

abroad are repatriated at the expense of the Ministry of Defence, the office responsible being the JCCC.

Only the occasional stillborn child or entitled British civilian (either retired military or a relative of
someone already interred in the cemetery) has been buried in Dhekelia since then.

Infants and children This cemetery is perhaps the most poignant and moving of British military

cemeteries in Cyprus, for visitors will inevitably be struck by the high number of graves of infants and
young children. Many rows are between half and three quarters full of burials where the age at death is

less than five years and is often only measured in days. Occasionally no age is given on the headstone
(which usually indicates a stillborn child). Some 500 of the 1,080 burials are of infants or children, many

from the early 1960s. This has given rise to much speculation as to the cause of their death over the years,
and a controversy that has only recently been answered officially, though lack of public awareness of the

official findings causes the speculation to rumble on locally.

1 Ministry of Defence - Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre https://www.gov.uk/joint-casualty-and-compassionate-
centre-jccc
2 Summers, Julie (2010), British and Commonwealth War Cemeteries (Oxford: Shire Publications)

3 Ministry of Defence - Commemoration: war graves https://www.gov.uk/support-for-war-veterans#commemoration-war-
graves

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