Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
Readers call, readers write, readers come and see me… Information flows for me to follow up, to check, to dust 40 or 50 year old `cold cases` of `missing persons` and other untold stories… It boils back to sleepless nights, speaking on the phone with other readers from the areas mentioned to me, trying to make head and tail of what I have in my lap… It all boils back to thinking a lot, even in my sleep and sometimes I would wake up and understand something that I have not before… It all boils back to investigating more, writing more, hoping that others would contribute with little information I come across to build the bigger picture and to understand what actually went on during those days of conflict back in the 60s and 70s…
I go to Poland to the Karnity Castle with my husband and my son to look at the lake, to walk in the deer park, to listen to hundreds of birds singing and one song sticks out: That of the cuckoo bird…
The cuckoo bird captures my heart, captures time, captures my soul… Time passes, time runs out for some of us but life continues… I sit and look at the lake with ever changing colours, clouds reflected on water, the forest around me, so quiet except for the birds and the call of the deer and boars… I walk with the four year old granddaughter of our friend who owns the castle to see the llama sitting in the park… Our friend's granddaughter, Elena calls the llama `Stephanik` and couple of times a day she goes to check on him… `Stephanik` looks at us with romantic eyes and makes funny sounds… It is a big animal with a soft heart – the elegance and natural kindness in animals is something that our species have lost over time as humans become more and more greedy and more and more egocentric… I have filled my luggage with books so I sit and read all day long – the weather is cool, not like Cyprus… I put on a thick sweater to go out and
when the sun appears, I feel happy and grateful…
I listen to the call of the cuckoo bird in the vast silence surrounding the Castle Karnity… I learn while there, of the death of two of my friends… One of them, Louise Diamond was our facilitator in `Conflict Resolution` in the 90s – she had started the conflict resolution process in Cyprus… Professor Dubb had begun a group back in the 80s but it was Louise who would build something that would have an impact on the larger society… She had beat cancer by taking out all poisons from her life – not just physical but things that had poisoned her psychology – and continued to live and work with conflict areas, trying to bring together different sides in conflict… Years later, cancer would come to visit her again and this time would stick with her, not leaving her alone… Louise would tell us that Cyprus is a `conflict habituated system` and in time I would understand perfectly well what she had meant… That the conflict has its residence in
Cyprus, that it is within the system and if you ensure one side to say `yes`, the other side of the conflict would manage to say `no` because you have not tackled the system itself, the source of the alleged conflict… An expired conflict, an imaginary conflict with roots so deep in our conscience and in culture and in stereotypes in our daily lives that we would only be seeing the tip of the iceberg… How to tackle the needs and concerns and fears – all human – that lie beneath the iceberg? Instead of confronting each other, how to ask questions and how to learn to listen because in our culture we never listen, we just get our answer ready before the question even finishes… How to learn personal stories and what this or that person has gone through… How to speak in our own name only, not generalising, avoiding speaking in the name of others… How to represent only ourself… How to reword what the person sitting next to us has just said to
us in order to see if we got it right, if actually that was what he or she meant… Communication skills…
We would build from scratch the `Conflict Resolution Trainers' Group` and meet endless hours separately in our own `sides` and when there would be `permission` to `cross` to Ledra Palace Hotel, we would meet there… After Louise, Benjamin Broome would come to Cyprus from Johns Hopkins University to help us tackle the sources of `the conflict` and to build a shared vision for the future with the help of a computer programme called Interactive Management Programme… The computer programme would shorten the time we would be spending in answering questions like `what aggravates the conflict more? This factor or that factor?`… We would go on to build our own groups – from 30 Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot conflict resolution trainers – the original group that worked with Louise Diamond and Benjamin Broome – our number would grow to 3 thousand, meeting at Ledra Palace, so much so that it would be difficult to find rooms to meet… All of this,
long before the checkpoints had opened – then the Turkish Cypriot authorities would `ban` our meetings at Ledra Palace back in 1997 and most of these groups would stop except some of us who would continue to go and try to meet at the Pyla village…
I would use all I had learnt from the conflict resolution process in Cyprus in order to bring together Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot women and some years later together with Katie Economidou, we would create `Hands Across the Divide`, the first joint NGO of Cypriot women – Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots… We would have to register it in London with the help of our friend, the writer Cynthia Cockburn and she would even write a book about us called `The Line`…
Others from our group would use their conflict resolution skills in creating other groups – Nikos Anastasiou, together with some Turkish Cypriot friends like Ekrem Varoghlou, Sarper Ince and Ulus Irkad, would get villagers who used to live in the same village but had never met since 1974 because of the partition – they would arrange meetings of villagers around Pyla in a park… Nikos would work with youth groups, bringing them together in Pyla…
My friend Katie with a beautiful voice – she sings and gives concerts for charity organisations all the time – would go out and form the original bi-communal chorus for peace…
Mustafa Damdelen would go out and form the original group of business leaders and work with them…
Katie Cleridou would form the first bicommunal desk in DYSI – something unheard of on those days – and she would come under harsh attack…
Fatma Azgin would bring educators and teachers together and work with them about how they saw as the sources of the conflict and to build a shared vision together…
Yiannis Laouris would go out and continue to work with computers and build his own youth groups…
Harris Anastasiou would team up with Birol Yeshilada in Portland, Oregon to teach at the Portland University to American students about Cyprus, Turkey and Greece and once a year would take his students to Cyprus to see on the ground what is actually happening…
Almost all from our group would go out into the larger society and build their own groups according to their own personal interests or contacts or beliefs…
We would all come under harsh attack... Hate campaigns would be waged against us but we would survive…
I would use everything I had learnt during the conflict resolution process when I would start tackling the humanitarian issue of `missing persons`… Listening, empathising, trying to understand what the other says, trying to go beneath the iceberg to learn the untold stories of our land in agony…
When Louise would be visited by cancer for the second time, Fatma Azgin would want to try to go and visit her or try to bring her to Cyprus so our original group of trainers could get together with her… We would not be able to manage that… The cuckoo bird would remind me that time had stopped for Louise, that at one point or another time would stop for each and every one of us but that life would continue… Others will come, others will live, others will die…
I learn about the death of another friend, Koullis Miltiadou with whom we had been working together at the Cypriots' Voice group… He had helped me to identify a possible burial site in Kaymakli (Omorphita) finding a witness – this was in the buffer zone so I would arrange and we would go together with Xenophon Kallis and some others from the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee – the UN would `accompany` us… Digging would start and stop – someone would tell the archaeologists that there might be mines there and despite grave efforts to show there are no mines in the area, digging would stop… Koullis a kind hearted friend whose vision was peace on the island would die in his sleep at the age of 68… I would learn of this shocking news while in Poland…
The call of the cuckoo bird will remain with me forever, sitting in front of the lake, trying to digest the news of the end of time for Louise and Koullis… May they rest in peace: They have spent their entire lives serving humanity and peace… They are the unknown heroes of this land that humans tend to ignore… But in my heart I salute them and will carry their memory with me always…
5.6.2015
Photo – The cuckoo bird...
• Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 21st of June 2015 Sunday.
No comments:
Post a Comment