turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

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The role of the NGOs is to bring people together, so they would see each
other and shift from “imaginary other” to “real other”. When people come
together then they will see “the Other”, which does not necessarily to be good.
Not all Turks and Greeks are good; Greeks and Turks are all kinds of people with
all their pros and cons. Human beings with all their merits and weaknesses.
When they meet each other, they will realise that “the Other” is also a normal
person. According to my rough calculations, 100,000 of people go and stay
in the other country for 10 days across and this mobility is a good way to see
the other side. My maximum expectation as an important step is just to
understand “the Other side” is the normal human being.
ALPER AKYÜZ
BILGI UNIVERSITY NGO CENTER
The real problem is not the lack of communication or lack of dialogue between
Turkey and Greece. The real problem is the content of the communication
and the content of the dialogue. Regarding NGO activities, we face many
problems with bilateral activities such as this gathering here, which is not held
properly thus, which is not healthy at all. In such bilateral activities, there
is always the danger to take sides, especially when participants assume the
role to represent their nations. Such kind of meetings of Greek and Turkish
journalists, Turkish and Greek women, Turkish and Greek local governments,
when two sides really act as if they are sides, this contributes to increase the
negative image of “the Other”. When organising such bilateral meetings, either
the content should be tackled properly or some kind of multilateral context
such as “Mediterranean, Balkan or European context” should be used to create
a constructive and open dialogue between Turkey and Greece.
HERCULES MILLAS
Once we have an identity of “us and Others”, then we have a problem with
participants of such meetings having another philosophy of dealing with what
we call truth. Every individual supposes and believes that he/she knows the
truth. The truth differs from one person to the other every time. However,
once you understand the things are relative, then you start having doubts
about your own ideas. This creates tolerance. Tolerance is not just standing
and just accepting the Others, it’s accepting the we are human. This is a
new stage, when you’re more doubtful of what you’re saying. Then you say:
“Maybe I’m not right!”
When you see people that are very confident, they believe that they posses the
truth; they start imposing their so-called truth. We can observe this happening
with imperialists, amongst friends, in the international arena. “I know what’s
true, so I’m going to impose this on you”. When we reach to this stage on a
personal basis, then we become more tolerant and societies that are more
tolerant, less authoritative, less depressive are societies that can tolerate
the “otherness”, the difference.
We have problems in the Balkans. We have an understanding of “We’re right,
the Others are wrong!” and we have seen this situation everywhere in Balkans
not only between Greece and Turkey. In Turkey, some people are so confident
that they know what’s good for Turkey, so they impose it and this is lack of
democratic attitude. Sometimes the majority - since they are the majority
- ignores the wish of satisfying the minority and this is a violation of human
rights. This attitude that I name as general lack of democracy comes from the
authoritative understanding of people who believe that they posses the truth.
In order to have a constructive dialogue, communication and to overcome the
problems, I think we have to come to a democratic stage. Otherwise, the only
thing we can do is just to negotiate an agreement, negotiate a cease-fire, a
deal; but we won’t solve the deep inside problems and in the next phase, next
crisis, things will start all over again. This is exactly what happened between
Turkey and Greece for the last 3- 4 years. Some desires to solve the problems
and start negotiating. This is not a disastrous approach; however this is not
the point. The real issue is to come to a stage where you respect “the Other
side”, accept “the Other side” with its pros and cons and also stop doubting
about “the Other side”. Self-criticism is a good sign. I’ve met many people
who have doubts about their own rules; still this is difficult change to achieve.
Unfortunately, we do not learn self-criticism in schools and then who’s going to
teach this if the community is lacking this tradition of self-criticism?
Textbooks in the Balkans do not provide the children with multiple
interpretation of the situation. In democratic societies, we have all values
Rebuilding Communication Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe