turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

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identify the good and the bad. Strategic presentation of reliable information,
so that it is politically usable for the ends desired, is often noted as the major
strength of human rights organisations.
In addition, monitoring the governments to keep them accountable to their
previously stated policies and principles is another important strategy that civil
society actors employ in relation to governments.
HERCULES MILLAS
We are too tight to accept some problems between Greece and Turkey,
everything is not running smooth and let’s face we have some problems. I
think the main problem and tension between Greeks and Turks is mistrust
and lack of confidence. This creates a number of harmful and undesired
attitudes. It’s not really correct to say we have lack of communication. Rarely
any other nations in Balkans and in the world have had more communication
than Turks and Greeks have had throughout the history. They lived together
under the same state for hundreds of years and after. Therefore, they have had
communication, they are very near; they have many things in common, same
traditions, same food and music.
We say we don’t have dialogue. No, that is not true; we have dialogue
amongst government officials and international fora. We discuss sometimes
with the help of intermediaries, thus we have dialogue. Some people believe
that dialogue is slow but it will solve the all problems automatically in time;
however we saw in Cyprus issue where dialogue is in place but there is no
solution at all. I think it’s not the dialogue to solve our problem. When we
express ourselves we say only very little; we state that political problems
do exist, such as Cyprus problem, regime problem, minority problem.
However, we never say why political problems really exist and why we don’t
solve them. This is the real question.
Let’s take the minority problem, it is mainly a human rights problem and
we cannot solve this problem. We still have intimidation and traditions. We
still have the desire not to accept identities. Not all those problems require
explanation, because this stubborn attitude not to solve simple problems has
nothing to do with national interest, nothing to do with balance of powers.
On the other hand, we have some sort of problems supposed to be directly
connected to national interests. If we take the case of Cyprus, I still believe
that we have a problem of democracy and human rights. For example, first the
Greeks were deprived from their rights and separated their nation and then
the Turks were persecuted, they were killed and deprived of their rights in
their community. We see problems that cannot be easily explained by security
measures or national interest and this is much more complex phenomenon.
I believe behind of all this, there is a lack of confidence and fear creating
this tension and does not let parties solve their problems. So-called conflict
resolution measures or confidence building measures, which are relatively
modern concepts of trying to solve problems, are very useful. We are here
in such a process; we need all these psycho-analytic processes trying to
understand what’s going on amongst us.
There is a term introduced as a source of problems: “history of the nations”.
I am not satisfied with that explanation. Because there is no such thing like
history, there is only one thing that exists - historiographia (historiography).
We don’t have a direct access to the history, we only talk about the history,
the moment we start talking about history is actually the interpretation of
history.
We have two set of histories: the Greek history and the Turkish history. I can
easily demonstrate that those histories are completely different.
THE GREEKS USE ONE HISTORY AND TURKS USE ANOTHER HISTORY.
If one day they happen to sit and discuss their problems each has their own
agenda, each has their own interpretation; then we have a deadlock and
they start a fight. This history is imaginary according to some text books, it’s
not discovered but it’s invented, it’s created. It has a lot to do with national
identity of each nation-state. When modern Turkey was established as a nationstate,
they created a faculty called “dil- tarih - coğrafya fakültesi” (faculty
of language-history-geography) and accordingly “tarih yazımı” (history writing)
developed in Turkey. The same thing happened in Greece with historians writing
history. They created a framework where “our” identity as well as “their”
national identity can be accommodated. This is how we were all brought up
with. Within this historical framework naturally we have created and we are
reproducing everyday the “us” and “the Other”. For Turks, “the Other” is the
Greeks and for the Greeks “the Other” is the Turks.
Rebuilding Communication Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe