turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

If you read Greek history, its continuous historical enemy for centuries is
automatically interpreted as the possible future enemy, as it is the case in
Turkey. This system of paradigm - the system of thought of “national us”
and “national Others” - is the present attitude in textbooks in all levels of
historiography (In all Greek and in Turkish history textbooks without any
exception in all literature, media, art, sport, in symbols and the names). In
two days’ time in Greece, we have 25th of March, the national day of Greece,
where we celebrate the liberation from Turkish rule. We talk about Greece
and how we liberated ourselves. Three months later, the Turkish side will do
the same and will celebrate how they liberated Turkey from Greece. Actually,
I have the impression that the problem we are talking about is not between
Greeks and Turks, but it’s within each country. We have this paradigm, which
reproduce mistrust and fear. Therefore, my first conclusion is that there is the
fear that exists and the second conclusion is all these factors that generate
fear.
If this diagnosis is relatively correct and justified to a certain extent, then we
can avoid some assumptions, which we take for granted that people really
want to change things. Because changing this paradigm - which is part of our
identity- requires changing our concept about history. It’s clear that it’s not an
easy process and a simple thing.
What the nation-state did was to move the criteria of justice from international
arena, from international concepts or humanitarian concepts into the local and
national concepts. We judge things according to our criteria and our criteria
that are not accepted on the other side. I turned on the TV this morning and
watched the news about Iraq. I saw “the South” using the expression “Americans
are invading Iraq” whereas “the North” says “Turkish army is entering Iraq”. At
the moment, America is carrying out this operation by disregarding legitimacy
and the United Nations, but the Turkish army is joining this operation based
on a legitimate defense mentality of national interest. When nations confront
each other, they use their own criteria being so satisfied with their own
understanding and they disregard the understanding of “the Others”. They
don’t even bother how “the Other side” is thinking, they don’t consider the
Others’ motives, fears, their sensitivities.
Therefore, I noticed how strangely we use the words. We talk about justice,
history, problem; but whose problem? We talk about the sovereignty rights; but
Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe
whose rights? Why are we so happy when we have a military victory? What does
it mean for “the Other side”? Unfortunately, we are approaching the problem
from only one angel, one nationalistic angel, “our” angel, which disregards
the existence and sensitiveness of “the Other”. There is also another national
paradigm with information. What “we” write is information and what “we”
read is information; what “the Others” write is “disinformation”.
We need a new cultural approach, a change in the philosophy of looking
at things. We need a new state of mind looking at things from a different
perspective. Of course, this will automatically require a new identity, a new
national identity and that is the most difficult part when people insist on the
identity they are used to.
We have a problem with the fact that, when NGOs getting help from abroad
they are characterised as “agents”. NGOs should be independent; they bring
along their views to the society. It’s not a problem that there are many NGOs
with different views and approaches, negative and positive approaches. This
creates even a bigger dynamic within a society when we have different views
expressed. This will give people opportunity to choose.
As a result of my efforts to understand what’s going on between Turkey and
Greece, I ended up with one important conclusion in years: there are two sets
of “Others” in Greek & Turkish thinking, discourse and literature. It’s “the
Other”: for Greeks “the Other” is Turks, for Turks “the Other” is the Greeks.
There are two types of “the Other”: The first type is the concrete one, the
one you see, the one that comes to “our” country, the one we meet when
we go to Greece and the one we communicate, we know his name and his
profession. The other type is imaginary one, a historical one. We don’t know
him actually, we just know him as a stereotype. The most striking examples are
Ömer Seyfettin, Halide Edip, Yakup Kadri. These authors have written novels
where they created imaginary Greek and the Greeks that they created are 99%
negative. But once they wrote their memories, they wrote about the Greeks
that they actually met and surprisingly, they are almost all positive. This is
striking. This is what we see that repeating all the time in Greek and Turkish
literature, in our daily life. We meet Greeks, they are all nice people. We
have no problem with them, but we know that Greeks are problems to Turkey.
Positive when it’s real, negative when it’s imaginary and stereotype. This
actual positive and negative goes at the same time.
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