Introduction
The long-term consequence of the Cyprus conflict, referred to by the international community as the Cyprus Problem, has for the past 44 years taken precedence over womenâs rights and gender equality on the island. The Cyprus Problem refers to the inter-ethnic conflict that led to the islandâs division since 1974. In relation to the feminist literature on anti-war and peace activism, Cyprus is a site in which women are involved in a peace process in a âfrozen conflictâ.1 This book examines three womenâs organizations that have been working within the bicommunal peace movement in Cyprus. The organizationsâ roles have included: mobilizing to create awareness for peace during significant periods in Cypriot history, such as the opening of the Green Line in 2003 when Turkey began allowing border crossings in the oldest divided city in the world (Nicosia); the final Annan Plan of 2004; and womenâs groupsâ campaigns in 2014 to demand that women be included in the working groups on both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot peace negotiating teams. The research centralizes womenâs civil society organizations and their multilayered methods of protest, as well as the ways in which multigenerational women have sought to make their voices heard during peace negotiations. Womenâs groups have organized to fight against the continuing absence of rule of law and human rights that has resulted in the island becoming a base for trafficking women for forced sexual exploitation and violence throughout Europe and the Middle East.
To explore womenâs activism on the island, I chose to focus on three of the longstanding groups: Hands Across the Divide (HAD); the Gender Advisory Team (GAT) and the Mediterranean Institute for Gender Studies (MIGS). The central research questions for this study are: (1) How have womenâs groups organized for peace? (2) What have been their key issues and organizing strategies? (3) What have been their organizing successes and challenges?
HAD was established in 2001, with its mission being to bring women from both the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities to work together on bicommunal activities to promote peace. The women are comprised of academics, grassroots activists and journalists committed to bringing womenâs issues and participation to the forefront of peacebuilding. In 2011, Hands Across the Divide (HAD) registered as an NGO in the Republic of Cyprus, thus making it the first bicommunal organization to do so. HAD was the first bicommunal womenâs organization in Cyprus, which is significant because it includes both Greek and Turkish Cypriot women who share a vision of a peaceful, non-divided, non-militarized, non-patriarchal Cyprus.
In 2009, a Gender Advisory Team (GAT) was formed by a small group of women, including members of Hands Across the Divide (HAD), with the hope was that gender equality would be integrated into the peace negotiations. GATâs overarching mission is to mainstream gender equality in the peace process, by ensuring womenâs active participation in all phases of the process and by gender-proofing the content and basis of future peace agreements. The organizationâs aim has been to identify ways in which gender considerations can be integrated into the Cyprus peace process at the macro level. GAT includes women activists, members of NGOs, academics, researchers, parliamentarians, gender focal points and others, from both Cypriot communities. GAT has engaged with the UN Secretary-Generalâs (SG) Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus on issues related to gender and citizenship, property, governance and the economy. GAT has also worked with HAD and MIGS to lobby for change in the public discourse regarding the inequalities women experience in Cyprus.
Under the auspices of the University of Nicosia, MIGS was founded in 2000 as a research centre and institute that works to promote womenâs rights in Cyprus. The organization has been actively involved, both as a coordinating institution and as a partner with the University of Nicosia (formerly Intercollege), in the administration and implementation of programming. MIGS is a small group of feminists whose mission is to address womenâs rights and to work against the discrimination of women in the sectors of education, civil society, peace negotiations and global initiatives. Unlike HAD and GAT, whose members work on a volunteer basis, MIGS is funded completely by the European Union, and each of its members is paid for the work conducted with a broad network of scholars and researchers who have expertise in gender-related areas and who focus on the Mediterranean region and the European Union.
Through telling the story of these three womenâs groups, my research is both thought-provoking and challenging because I bring to the forefront the following: the ways in which these specific womenâs groups women mobilized for the participation and inclusion of womenâs perspectives at the peace negotiating table; and the difference between peacebuilding and official negotiations that serves as a reminder of the complexity of the Cyprus Problem. The interviews conducted with the members of each group were 15 in total some of the interviewees were also dual members, which is common among civil society organizations on the island, and even more so in womenâs groups. The members are essentially part of an elite cluster involving the same women, usually due to limitations in geography, but also because of limited interest in island-wide bicommunal organizing.
In this study, I will also centralize United Nations Resolution 13252 in the context of Cyprus to shed light on how the womenâs organizations have supported the resolution or the demands of the resolution (i.e. demand for a role at the negotiation table in the peace process before the resolution or afterwards). I will also identify how the three womenâs organizations are funded. If the womenâs organization has received funding, I investigate the national and international donorsâ agendas and how activists have responded to the Cyprus Problem in order to understand cooperation within anti-war and peace organizing. Throughout the research on Cyprus, I am concerned with understanding why the women in the case studies have chosen to participate in grassroots programmes, particularly in bicommunal work, and how these organizations have emerged and developed, as well as how they have declined, succeeded or failed. An analysis of each group documents and provides access to information on member dynamics, participation at early stages of membersâ decision-strategies within the groups, and the institutionalization of protests/campaigns. My qualitative research applies a transnational feminist lens to inform the data collection and analysis by troubling the connections between how gender is created, what is being produced and reproduced on the margins, and who speaks for whom and under what conditions. Historical constructions of women as needing male protection from âenemyâ assault are part of the military narrative in Cyprus, which positions the army as a privileged body within the society. The nation, constructed on the basis of ethnicity and âthe purity of bloodâ, has seen these aspects become part of the political DNA, and this narrative has been passed on from generation to generation. Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) maintain that womenâs involvement in the processes of war and national struggles allows them to take the forms of reproducers of members of ethnic groups and of participants in both the ideological and ethnic collectives and the transmission of their culture. As such, multiple identities and differences are rejected by the nation state that works to meet the needs of the status quo in order to run smoothly. In the case of Cyprus, this has resulted in established alternative spaces in and around a landscape which is heavily militarized by Turkish, Greek and UN troops on the island.
Reconciliation is a fragmentary process and a journey that happens over a period of time. In the case of Cyprus, reconciliation remains an ongoing and often convoluted process. The word reconciliation in Greek is symphiliosi (to find common ground), and in Turkish, uzlaĆmak (to meet in the middle; mediation). Each translation represents a sense of commonality but also distance. It is within these two subtle differences that womenâs activism in Cyprus occurs through a complex fusion of ethnic division, occupation, militarism, nationalism and patriarchy. The womenâs movement works within a highly militarized state on the island of Cyprus, and is multilayered. Its activism seems to reclaim and legitimize womenâs roles in both the public and private spaces of society. The womenâs movement itself has been a slow and difficult process, and it has been heavily reliant on organizing at the grassroots level and within the safety net of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Mine Kanol, a feminist activist and educator, explained the complexities of being a feminist in a Turkish Cypriot community in the north:
There are two sides. It was a big struggle in my home when I was reading about feminism, and I told my parents off a lot about their patriarchal structures within the family, but it wasnât really working and they were defensive. Now I feel like, for us [feminists], once you become more aware you want to change things very quickly. It is really frustrating, but I find, for me, the more quickly the less results. I am taking my activism a little slower now whenever I hear my parents or immediate family or friends who are sexist or say a gay joke and I donât like it. I try not to be aggressive and [I] talk to them another time when it is not such a heated discussion. [It is] hard to change older people and it is such a lost cause, and that is why I care about education and why we need really good teachers and [to] start at an early age, and [why] this generation is killing me. I am demotivated because I cannot find the right way to go. [Feminists] cannot depend on one womenâs organization. There needs to be a network [whether] national or international. You cannot do it alone. (M. Kanol, interview, March 2014)
Indeed, womenâs organizing is carved out from womenâs communities that are fragmented within the divided communities themselves.
Politics of Location
The case of Cyprus, women, and conflict is an epistemological endeavour that I have been personally, intellectually and methodologically driven to pursue. My experience as a woman of the Greek Cypriot diaspora and as an immigrant and Canadian, as well as an EU citizen, and my interest in the impact of war on gender and women are a result of the Turkish military invasion of 1974. The term âinvasionâ is used predominately by the Greek Cypriot population and some Turkish Cypriots to explain the events of 20 July 1974, following the Cypriot coup dâĂ©tat on 15 July 1974, while the dominant term for Turkish Cypriots and Turks is âinterventionâ. For this study, I use the term âoccupationâ to highlight how my own familyâs narrative has influenced my understanding of and relationship with Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. My familyâs participation in changing the course of Cyprus history, or at the very least in playing a part in both anti-colonial and nationalist movements on the island, has also played a major role in my choice to use a transnational feminist lens on Cyprus. As Todorova (2007) affirms âI see the power of feminist politics that are now democratized, globalized and self-criticalâ (p. 209). This further empowers me to address my own politics of location in terms of the way I am perceived within the political and social fabric of Cypriot society (both in the âTurkish Republic of Northern Cyprusâ and the Cyprus Republic) is based on a family legacy entrenched in the Cypriot imagery of historical events that would eventually lead to my parents fleeing the country in 1975 and being unable to return for a decade.
The âTurkish Republic of Northern Cyprusâ, known to those living on the island as âthe northâ or the âTRNCâ, was created after the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974. The terminology of ânorthâ to identify the âTRNCâ is politically sensitive because of its illegal recognition as a de facto state. With the exception of Turkey, the âTRNCâ is not recognized by the international community as a country. The population is made up of 150,000 to 160,000 Turkish immigrants who came at the request of the government of Turkey, and who are regarded as âillegal settlersâ by the Republic of Cyprus. The Cyprus Republic represents the south of the island, is legally recognized by the international community, and is an EU member state.
My family background, particularly the stories of my grandmother, has driven me to investigate how gender and the spaces that people negotiate, both within their own families and communities, are impacted by the consequences of such struggles, specifically for women. From the beginning, I was thus very sensitive to the need for creating an environment in which all of the participants in this book would be able to speak in a way that would be true to themselves, and also for providing a safe space for them, knowing that each has been touched by the war itself and that deep wounds still remain. My desire has not been to understand or document my own relationship to the Cyprus Problem or its cause, per se, but to provide a platform to engage in the way war and displacement are interconnected with how womenâs activism is both enabled and constrained in a divided country.
Research Focus
While the âF-wordâ (feminism) is not often used proudly by women and men for that matter, a few fierce women continue to be actively engaged in the fight for gender equality in Cyprus. Josie Christodoulou, a member of MIGS, explained:
Women in Cyprus did their best to organize in solidarity as a movement, but they did not have one voice. I see the women[âs] political organizations will not act towards womenâs rights on gender equality if these subjects clash with the ideology of their political group. And for me this is an issue, a huge issue. If womenâs political organizations put the political interests in front of themes like domestic violence and womenâs rights, then this is not female movement. There are all these cases of killing women, raping girls, there are victims of physical abuse. Every day there are victims of abuse and nobody tells us this [due to underreported cases]. (J. Christodoulou, interview, April 2015)
Tegiye Birey, a Turkish Cypriot and former GAT member, explained in her own words her impression of a Cypriot womenâs movement:
[The] womenâs movement in Cyprus was [the start of a] change. As I said, we are not located in the similar social structure â you are always the minority as a [Turkish Cypriot and] discrimination, I think, this instinct makes you think differently and forced to see things differently [in terms of] structures and positions. I think when women are working in civil society, their different perspective of things start[s] from a different point of view. If you have individual interests [as a result of] patriarchy and if you need to push things you just advocate for equality more than the others. Look at the council members [in the north, and] we have the feminist friends as well, which is great. Positions of power [and] even the way of meetings change. We need to arrange a time that they can attend and [still do their] work and child care. Minor revolutions make a difference. Not sure at the int...