Cyprus, an island republic in the northeast section of the Mediterranean Sea, has a recorded history of 4000 years, most of them fraught with tension and conflict, conquest and rebellion. Its rulers have included the Greeks, Ptolemies, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks, Venetians, Turks (1571-1878) and the British who set it up as a British Crown Colony in 1925. Greek Cypriot demands for union with Greece led to guerilla warfare, and a four-year state of emergency from 1955 to 1959. In 1960 Cyprus was granted independence, with Britain retaining sovereignty over two large military bases. Fighting between the Greeks and Turks continued all through the 1960s, with UN peacekeeping troops sent in 1964. A Turkish invasion in 1974 led to occupation of over a third of the island, with displacement of over 160,000 Greek Cypriots. In 1983 the Turkish-controlled northern sector declared itself the independent Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The result: since the separation, the island has been divided into two sectors. Almost all of the Turkish-speaking Muslims, approximately 18% of the total population of 742,000 people, live in the north, while the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, about 78% of the population, live on the rest of the island (and 4% other religions). There is little contact between the two communities and much animosity and distrust.
Against this background it is easy to understand the significance of a seminar on conflict resolution held in Israel last year (1998) for 30 young leaders from Cyprus - half of them from the Greek side and half from the Turkish side - drawn from a wide range of political parties, youth groups, civil society organizations and students associations on both sides. "For practically all of them," says Amos Davidowitz, who coordinated the seminar for NISPED, "it was the first time they had met with people outside their own community."
This unique two-part seminar was conducted by NISPED - The Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development - Negev College, in conjunction with MASHAV - the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Center for International Cooperation.
As Soteroula Kyriacou, an advertising agency client service executive from Nicosia, said, "This was an extraordinary and wonderful experience. It was the first time for all of us that we were able to sit down together and tackle the 'hot' issues confronting our country - from the political issue of federation to the economic one of whether or not to join the European Union. It was also the first time those of us from both communities were able to work together on joint proposals and projects."
Added Thanasis Tsokkos, owner of a small zipper factory, who is vice-president of NEDSY (Nicosia Youth of the Democratic Rally) where Kyriacou is also active: "Here at these seminars we discovered that one of our basic problems is the need to do everything in our power to find ways to communicate with each other. Since the separation in 1974, we have seen the rise in Cyprus of an entire generation living in two completely separate communities, which have never been able to have dealings with one another, never been able to build and develop the relationships which we now know are at the core of resolving conflict in all areas."
The seminar was also unique in that it consisted of two sessions, held four months apart. The first session ran from the 4th of August to the 23rd (1998). "It included," explained Davidowitz, "a course of studies dealing with conflict resolution, interpersonal attitudes and planning and preparation of bi-communal projects. There were 30 participants. Half were Turkish Cypriots and half were Greek Cypriots. Most were between the ages of 20 to 30, with a few a bit older. They represented different political parties, labor unions, small businesses and NGOs.
"In December of that year, between the 18th and the 28th, we brought them back for an evaluation session. (Israel is about 250 km or an hour's airplane ride from Cyprus.) The participants were familiar with the projects designed at the first session and had been involved in trying to implement them. Thus, there was follow-up and continuity. At the second session participants reported on what had been accomplished, what had yet to be achieved and what obstacles they had encountered in implementing their projects."
At the first session, the group worked on several projects, exploring options and procedures, all with an eye to opening avenues of communication, tolerance and understanding, as well as learning the organizational techniques involved in preparing bi-communal projects.
One project was to be a joint petition protesting the construction of a nuclear reactor in the region. Although this project was not implemented for various reasons, it nevertheless served as a good exercise on how to organize a bi-communal activity and, equally important, how to network with other bodies."
The second project involved making and distributing T-shirts with the logo PEACE on them. Fifty T-shirts were to be made by the Turkish Cypriots with the word PEACE spelled in Turkish and 50 to be made by the Greek Cypriots with the word written in Greek. At the second session, the Turkish representatives reported that they had finished making their shirts, but the Greek Cypriots had yet to complete theirs. In planning the project both sides agreed that, upon completion, a joint ceremony would be held at the border where they would stand, wearing their T-shirts and posing for a joint picture.
Erbay Akansoy, a Turkish Cypriot who is studying political science at the Eastern Mediterranean University and came as a representative of CTO, a political party, explained the significance of this project. "We feel that this ceremony and the joint picture will have an impact on our younger generation who do not realize that peace in Turkish and peace in Greek is the same thing. Having young people come and see us wearing these T-shirts will give them the message that peace is a joint endeavor. Hopefully, it will encourage some of them to ask what they, too, can do to help. It will also give them hope for the future. We don't want our young people to lose hope. If they do, then everything is lost. Here we have learned that there is hope and this is another message we want to transmit."
Akansoy described the impact the seminar had had on him. "The first session was both educational and enlightening. Essentially it was a general introduction to conflict resolution that included showing how people react when trying to resolve problems. At that session we learned about the importance of being easygoing and relaxed with each other, something many of us had never thought about. Most of us have a tendency to think that people with differing opinions and a different mind set are always seeing those who disagree with them in a negative light and saying or, at least, thinking bad things about them. In truth, we learned they are really just thinking what is good for Cyprus."
In noting how much he had gained from seeing the role and importance of the debating process as a tool in conflict resolution, Akansoy stressed that he, himself, had learned to speak more openly and to improve the way he communicates with others. "And most of this was achieved," he explained, "via the planning of projects, even a relatively simple one such as the one built around making T-shirts."
The third project involved having representatives from both sides take photographs of people and places in and around Nicosia - which is a city divided between the Greek and the Turkish communities with a wall in its center. Entitled "Our Nicosia" - a selection of the photographs would be enlarged, made up into an exhibition and perhaps be entered in a photo-contest as well. Androuila Theocharous, a Greek Cypriot who works as a blood bank technician and is a leader of EDOM, the Youth Organization of the Communist Party, participated in this project, "going," as she reported, "to different sites and taking pictures. We then brought the photographs backhere for the second session where, together, we decided which ones to blow up, for exhibit and to enter in the contest." Asked the importance of the project, she answered quickly and simply, "to show us how much we all share."
The test of any program is the degree to which participants absorb and integrate the material. "In our discussions where the group raised innovative ideas," said Davidowitz, "we saw how well the group had grasped the techniques involved in organizing meaningful bi-communal activities. Take, for example, the idea of joint package tours for tourists which they proposed, a program by which visitors could visit sites on both sides of the island within the framework of one tour. Visually putting information about these tours on the Internet, the participants were aware that joint tourism is still a ways off, but they all saw it as a promising beginning in their search for peaceful coexistence."
At the second session the group had been divided into small groups, each one concentrating on proposals in either the political, economic or educational sphere. The educational group, for example, concluded that it was necessary to remove all chauvinistic and nationalistic elements from textbooks in both communities. "Again," stated Davidowitz, "this reflected the ability of the participants to agree on plans for the future - which was one of our main goals."
Consensus, however, was not always easy to achieve. Yet, as Androuila Theocharous said, We did learn to agree to disagree. And, in many cases, there was no disagreement at all. All of us, for example, are aware of the need to strive for the basic rights of freedom, including freedom of movement."
Her views were expressed, albeit in a somewhat different way, by Mehmet Hamanci, a Turkish Cypriot who is studying international affairs at Eastern Mediterranean University and is a leader of the Communal Liberation Party. "This is the first time," he said, "that I have had contact with anyone from the Greek community - and I learned so much about them, about the way they think. Exploring why it is so difficult for us to work together, I discovered that one reason may be the fact that we often fail to recognize and appreciate the other's ethnic identity. Yet we are all living on the same island. We have much in common. We come from the same culture, from a history that goes back thousands of years. And only when we learn to talk with each other will there be progress in reaching a viable solution to our political problems. These meetings enforced my conviction that we must work to develop ways of meeting and talking together, of getting to know and understand each other."
Most beneficial for Hamanci was the way the participants were exposed to the tools of mediation, to the rules of democracy and to the importance of listening and trying to understand what the other person is saying. "I feel," he said, "that I, myself, have now learned to appreciate and respect the opinions of others, even when I cannot agree with them."
The basic philosophy and goals of MASHAV and NISPED were reflected at the seminar. There was MASHAV, with over 40 years of dedicated commitment to sharing Israel's expertise with both developing and developed countries, and NISPED (established in 1997 as an integral part of the Negev College), with its commitment to the people-to-people peace process as a vital, confidence-building parallel to the political process and its emphasis in the need to link the furtherance of sustainable human development to the process of conflict resolution. Davidowitz, who is also a leader of the Youth Institute - a body seeking to develop a young leadership cadre committed to a community-based approach to peace making - contributed this perspective as well.
A fourth project was a program for school-teachers, a contest in which secondary-school students were to be requested to write essays on the topic "My Family: We All Laugh in the Same Language," while pupils in the primary schools would submit drawings on the same theme. This project has already been implemented by the Turkish Cypriot schools.
Interviewed near the end of the second session, Davidowitz highlighted some of the achievements of the seminar. "The seminar did succeed in getting participants to discuss issues that, for many, were new ideas," he felt. Second, it gave them the tools for civil discourse. Third, since one of our objectives was to have the participants reach consensus, we were gratified that they were able to find so wide a range of agreement - even on issues which were and are very sensitive ones.
Participants also felt they had made a significant breakthrough in changing attitudes and in learning how to work and act together. As Erbay Akansoy said, "At the second session, when we discussed what we had done in the four months between the two meetings, we realized that, taking everything into consideration, we had brought some light to our situation. More important, however, even than the projects was the way we learned to really analyze what people mean. When someone says 'bizonal' or 'bicommunal federation,' what do he or she really mean? Are we all talking about the same thing?
"We also learned that when people are angry, they put their feelings and emotions before their thoughts - and this helps no-one. We learned that we must put our thoughts before our emotions."
Even more exciting for Akansoy were what he described as the "illuminating lectures and presentations" describing conflicts in other parts of the world. "We began to see our problems in context as one of many global conflicts."
Concurring with him were Kyriacou and Tsokkos, who agreed that, now, they too see their own problems from a much broader perspective. "This was an opportunity," they said, "to see and learn about the problems of others, as well as about ours and to realize that we can all learn from other global experiences."