"Hasn't anyone here told you that our objective here is partition, not reintegration?" ..An Interesting Article to read!

[Ipek Gunduz]

Bismarckian board games
The partition of Cyprus resulted from the lazy certainty that, time and again, separation works

The question - from Gaza to Pristina - is whether peace arrives top down or bottom up, whether it's ordinary folk or diplomatic men in suits who do the business. And from an island of strife 45 long years ago is the beginning of a surprising answer. Can we find friendship and understanding between warring communities? Perhaps we can.

The presidents of Greek and Turkish Cyprus met again top down last week. It was the 19th encounter of this negotiating round, and the third stuck in argument over property rights to the land seized when the Turkish army invaded. These talks remain the best chance of settlement since intercommunal life first soured a decade before Ankara sent in its troops; but they lumber on. Finish as promised by Christmas 2008, chaps? Make that autumn 2009. You're still hopeful because the ordinary people want to draw a line under tragedy. But need it ever have come to this?

Martin Packard (Commander RN, retired) never believed in the inevitability of Cyprus partition. Through the first six months of 1964, for the British army and then for the UN, he led a tiny trouble-shooting team - a Greek, a Turk, two Brits - who believed that a countryside of split, frightened villages could live in harmony again. He drank endless coffees with village chiefs, he sorted out disputes, he liaised with both sets of Cypriot leaders who, in turn, liaised with each other through him.

And everyone knew he made a difference. Why else did the Foreign Office and the US state department contrive to send him home and close down his operation? "Very impressive, but you've got it all wrong, son," one of the high priests of US foreign policy, George Ball, told him. "Hasn't anyone here told you that our objective here is partition, not reintegration?" The west didn't mind a divided Cyprus on Nato's eastern flank. The men at the very top were playing their own Bismarckian board games.

Packard has documented the story of those turbulent six months in a passionate new book, Getting It Wrong. But don't get too bogged down in the might-have-beens. The crux here is the way the straight-shooters sorted out trouble, face to face. The point is how - bottom-up - they made so many hopeful waves that the suits had to shut them down. Contact, communion, community, care.

Just look around today and wonder where those verities went, for lines are still being drawn on state department maps. Can Serbs and Albanians live together in Kosovo? Pass the pencil. Can Palestinians and Israelis coexist? Pass the cement mixer. The fundamental assumption, time and again, is that separation works. Keep two sides apart by building a wall - and you've taken the hard work out of the problem. Now we can let the diplomats loose ...

But that's self-deluding. Distance and isolation equal indifference. The people of Gaza didn't have to live in southern Israel through the years of rocket attacks. The people of Israel clearly lacked all empathy for the retribution their army heaped on Gaza. Take a loyalty oath to despair. Once you assume that coexistence is impossible, life settles back into fearful enclaves - and fleeting hope arrives only from Washington.

Terrorism delivers beleaguerment. But let's be clear-headed. Israel, left to ineffectual chancelleries and retributive devices, makes no progress. Kosovo remains a disaster waiting to happen again. Peacekeepers merely freeze attitudes, they do not facilitate change.

The killing sprees in Cyprus didn't mean the island had to fall apart. That was ordained from afar. And if Cyprus somehow comes together again, that won't be because Barack Obama is dispatching more envoys. It will be because Cypriots on both sides demand it.

[e-mail]
Peter Preston The Guardian,
Monday 16 February 2009

[chad steele]

I like this sentence... "Peacekeepers merely freeze attitudes, they do not facilitate change." Indeed.

Where in your life are you being a "peacekeeper" instead of being a bold leader?

What's the difference?

[Michael Donahue]

I don't doubt the need for the peacekeeper role on the island. I actually stood with a man on a street corner in Nicosia who pointed out that the Turkish soldiers had reached a particular location that would have blocked access to a church for the Greek speaking community, yet the British soldiers implored them to move back one block which worked.

Yet the presence of the UN soldiers as well as the Turkish soldiers is almost comical when one watches people from both communities stroll up and down the battle scared streets by the Ledra Palace and move freely around barriers once brightly painted in colors and propaganda , now fading and peeling from time and being ignored. Much like the Berlin wall, I have a sense that the buffer zone is shedding the meaning it once had. Unlike the walls of Palestine , this wall is beginning to show itself for exactly what it is. Mostly junk, rusting oil cans sprouting plant life, rotting bags of sand, and wooden planks now looking like driftwood as it grays with age.

A great question regarding Bold Leaders. Where are they inserting themselves? Our trip to Cyprus certainly revealed that many of them have found niches to insert themselves. Even risking relationships with family and friends. Some have done things they have not shared, and many others have simply used our instructions to better what they want to achieve. All of that will come to fruition if and when the author's assertion about bottom up from the Cypriots is realized. Of this I am not certain.

What I do suspect is more true then peacekeeper"s freezing attitude is what it takes to thaw. The author asserts; "Distance and isolation equal indifference." This, too, is present on the island. I saw in the eyes of the GSC Bold Leaders what it took for them to cross over that buffer zone. For some, it took great courage. I would trust that the TSC who proclaim the "other's" or the "Greeks" do not care would be dispelled by that demonstration, or for the forty TSC who had one GSC teen girl sit and listen like her life depended on it to their confusion and internal upset about the future. And for the GSC who wonder about the TSC. . .well they exist. . .they are there, and as they cross each day to work, almost 1/4 of them each day. . .I know from practice, they would love someone to look them in the eye and say, good day or hello in any language. For Distance and isolation actually equal dehumanization.

I am proud to know so many young people who are engaged in the thaw and the reclaiming of the past. To remember then change.