turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

CIVIL SOCIETY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME
NGO SUPPORT TEAM
In the light of the Turkey’s harmonisation process, in 2002, the European
Commission has come up with a comprehensive programme designed to
strengthen NGOs in Turkey so that they can contribute to the development
of participatory democracy and formation of new partnerships model. This
specific programme was called “Civil Society Development Programme”. An
NGO Support Team has been established in Ankara in November 2002 to conduct
two components of the programme: “Local Civic Initiatives” and “Turkish-
Greek Civic Dialogue”.
The overall objective of the programme is to promote citizens’ initiatives all
over Turkey, to improve capacity of grassroots NGOs in Turkey and to encourage
cooperation and partnerships between Turkish and European NGOs with a
particular emphasis on Greek NGOs, civic initiatives, universities, schools,
media, Chamber of Industries and Trades, municipalities. The Local Civic
Initiatives projects targeted establishing and strengthening of communication,
cooperation and networking within NGO community through capacity
building programmes, needs assessment process, collection of NGO database,
publications on NGO sector.
With regard to Turkish-Greek Civic Dialogue; it’s evident that two countries
have started effective dialogue following the “rapprochement” between two
foreign ministers on the political level and more significantly on the social level
following the 99 earthquake in Turkey. The latter witnessed the exemplary
cooperation between two civil societies and quickly led to the public acceptance
of cooperation on other levels such as between municipalities and in the areas
of arts and performance. Still, cooperation among Greek and Turkish civil
societies has remained sporadic and almost ad hoc, spurred more from personal
relations and efforts rather than cooperation based on mutual interest. The
cooperation among NGOs in Turkey and Greece has been largely dominated
by those who had previous experience of cooperation and more significantly
an open willingness and involvement in Greek-Turkish “friendship” dealing
Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe
with issues history, music, culture and to a lesser degree tourism. However,
there has been little cooperation in other areas of common interest such as
environment, cultural heritage, gender or EU accession process. Therefore,
the lack of knowledge about NGOs working on similar issues and the lack of
networks, esp. on local levels became our main target to be achieved. We
aimed to open a door to diversify areas of cooperation and organisations and
individuals who have not been inclined to such cooperation.
MAJOR ACTIVITIES OF THE
NGO SUPPORT TEAM FOR
TURKISH-GREEK CIVIC DIALOGUE
.................................................................................................... Rana Birden Güneş
NGO Support Team
Web site in three languages created alternative
resources, database of Greek and Turkish NGOs
Newsletters in electronic format distributed to
approx 1000 Turkish,
Greek, Cypriot and other international contacts.
Technical Assistance to the micro-projects funded
by European Commission Delegation to Turkey as
well as Macro Projects implemented by AEGEE-
Ankara, European Center for Common
Ground and Winpeace.
Three workshops organised in both countries
(2 in İstanbul and 1 in Athens)
with 80 participants from
different field of civic
initiatives.
Introduction
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