THE Cypriot President, Tassos Papadopoulos, and the Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat will meet next Wednesday to discuss how the island’s two communities might take steps towards reunification.
But hopes of a breakthrough are slim. In a referendum in 2004, Greek Cypriots rejected a UN-sponsored plan to reunite the island, which has been divided since the Turkish invasion of 1974. In the same referendum, Turkish Cypriots accepted the plan. Since then, the two communities have moved further apart. Relatively few Cypriots have taken advantage of newly opened crossing points on the UN-manned dividing line.
Many Turkish Cypriots feel bitter about the Greek Cypriots’ “no” vote in the referendum and the failure of the EU to honour promises to ease economic restrictions on the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
Among Greek Cypriots, feelings of nationalism and fear of the Turks, encouraged by, among others, President Papadopoulos and the Greek Orthodox Church, are not conducive to dialogue and compromise. Those in both communities who favour reunification also say that the education systems foster distorted interpretations of history.
An anthropologist, Yiannis Papadakis, is researching the teaching of history in Cyprus for the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo (IPRIO). History, he says, “often presents a very negative and one-dimensional image of those on the other side, of the enemy, while presenting a very positive and one-dimensional image of those in one’s own ethnic group”.
Nicos Anastasiou, a teacher who has worked for many years to improve relations between the two communities, says that the declared aim of the school system is to promote understanding, but, in reality, “the end result is one where generations of young people have a very negative generalised image of the other as being fundamentally evil.”
Groups on both sides of the island’s dividing line are striving to change the way history is taught. Four years ago, the Turkish Cypriot administration approved the re-writing of school history textbooks.
Mete Oguz, who worked on the new texts, says that in the latter “the students don’t see that all Greek Cypriots are the enemy and are guilty: they see that some Greek Cypriots are guilty. And some Turkish Cypriots as well are guilty about the Cyprus problem.”
Most observers agree that a political solution leading to the island’s reunification is impossible as long as Greek and Turkish Cypriots are unable to empathise with each other’s experiences. For this reason, few are optimistic about a breakthrough.
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