Abstract
On 12 August 2013, a feminist stood up at a podium and declared that she would work for the benefit of ‘everyone living in Cyprus, [irrespective] of language, religion, race, birthplace, class, age, physical ability, gender, or sexual orientation, to create an environment of fairness and equality, to replace the culture of conflict and violence with that of peace and reconciliation, while staying committed to the principles of democracy, social welfare, human rights and freedoms, and to establish a federal Cypriot state’. Her words were noted because the podium was a parliamentary one, albeit internationally shunned since it represents the unrecognised Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus, and because the context in which she uttered them was her swearing-in ceremony as a newly elected people's representative. The session was stopped mid-oath, live broadcasts went silent, questions of ‘treason’ were raised, and she reappeared, reading the ‘normal’ oath. Doğuş Derya later stated that she had wanted to swear according to her conscience and principles first, before reading out the given script. In Cyprus, this was the first of such public reformulations of constitutional tenets (isn't this what a legislature oath points to?). It remains to be seen how they might be followed up, especially in the current context of recently resumed peace negotiations.
Since 2009, we have been formulating, as members of the Gender Advisory Team (GAT), exactly such revisions to the political-legal regime in Cyprus. GAT's main target has been the high-level negotiations, ongoing since 1964, to end the ethnic conflict on the island. To this end, GAT has been working in the framework of UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, having identified it as an appropriate tool to make our voices heard at the leadership level.
But the overall aim has been to effect a wholesale change to the mentality in which these negotiations have been carried out. GAT has thus proposed the introduction of new legal articles, state mechanisms and approaches to citizenship that reflect different priorities from the nationalistic chess game so far played. It is no coincidence that this language of reform is shared in the feminist oath heard in the summer of 2013.
What we want to share in this article is a summary of ‘recommendations’ presented to the negotiators over the last four years, which were acknowledged by both negotiators and the UN, but received little notice as issues for future implementation. Whether this changes in the process of negotiation and post-agreement peace-building or not, we outline them here in the hope that they might serve as a template for waging battles in unexpected contexts and places, in Cyprus and elsewhere. We illustrate this through our proposals for changing scripts on power-sharing and citizenship.
Redefining ‘Power’ and ‘Sharing’
‘Power-sharing’ resonates with all those stereotypes about gender roles in peace work. Intuitively understood as the diachronic domain of men, ‘power’ tends to signal what women should not be interested in. Indeed, in Cyprus interest in power and politics is highly gendered: women occupy depressingly small numbers of parliamentary seats on both sides, and the same holds for cabinet posts, party leadership positions and business management. Polling on the Cyprus conflict shows that women are less interested in politics and the details of the negotiations, and are less aware of specific political issues that make the news (for example, discussions over cross-voting, rotating presidencies, or federation models). And yet, it often proceeds on these gender-biased premises to evaluate women's positions on proposed settlement alternatives (for example, two state vs. federal solution models) as less reconciliatory, more nationalist, more distrustful and more fearful of the ‘other’ (Cyprus 2015, 2012). Understandings of ‘power-sharing’ in a patriarchal and nationalist context (Hadjipavlou and Mertan, 2010), we instead claim, are part of this problem. Thus, we propose to invert the question from ‘how can women or women's perspectives change to enable peace?’ to ‘how can the politics of “peace” change so that they address women's concerns and needs in more meaningful ways?’ The point is not to prioritise women's needs over men's in an essentialist way, but to allow greater representation of a number of groups that have hitherto been marginalised (minorities defined by gender, ethnic, sexual, cultural and class criteria, for example).
This view of ‘equality’ points to the second shift we advocate, pertaining to the concept of ‘sharing’. ‘Sharing’ has a more ‘congenial’ ring to it than ‘power’, and thus could be a better starting point for unpicking what the ‘sharing of power’ might mean. In the given hyphenated structure (power-sharing), the second term tends both to be effaced by the power of the first and act as a prop that lends ‘power’ an added ‘technical’ implication. The question of ‘power-sharing’ is thus understood presently as a technical matter pertaining to numbers in the allocation of government seats in the calibration of each citizen's vote (as, for instance, in discussion about whether or not Turkish-Cypriots’ votes should be ‘weighted’ in specific ways and under specific conditions).
In sum, governance and power-sharing have resonated more with politicians, the vast majority of them male, who propose and reject schemes of assigning such weight to votes, but also to ministries and state institutions. This understanding harks back to the history of political representation in Cyprus, where the 1960 Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus divided citizens on each side of electoral rolls (Greek-Cypriots voting for Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots for Turkish-Cypriots) and assigned governmental and civil service positions on an ethnic basis (the vast majority of these clauses having been suspended since the breakdown of this power-sharing arrangement in 1964).
GAT's recommendations on governance and power-sharing take a different approach. At the height of the most recent round of negotiations in 2009, GAT realised that if things went well we might have negotiations that had been successfully concluded, and a bright new peaceful state that caters chiefly to two ethnic sets of men. A ‘better’ version of the 1960 Constitution would adhere to the principles of a ‘bizonal bicommunal federation’ agreed since 1977, where difference would be accommodated as long as it was ethnic. And if things did not go as well, we would continue to have two state structures—one recognised internationally, the other not—each catering chiefly to its ‘own’ men (restrictedly defined in more senses than the ethnic). Either of the two outcomes would be to the detriment of all those groups who fall through the gaps of the ‘ethnic’ divide. Women, constituting 49 per cent of the population, are obviously at a disadvantage through this exclusive focus on the ethnic divide. From the inception of modern statehood, women's representation in government has been minimal. And the ways in which the peace negotiations have been structured threaten to perpetuate this situation into the future state. GAT's key concern has therefore been to re-position the interpretation of ‘power-sharing’ within more pluralistic framings of democratic rights. And while women's rights are central to this attempt, they are not the sole concern. They also embrace the rights of sexual and immigrant minorities, and of children, youth and the elderly. The following is a brief overview:
UN Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs—Population Division, Population Estimates and Projections Section, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/population.htm, last accessed 21 August 2013.
State structures: In a context where ‘the Cyprus problem’ has been presented as ‘urgent’ and everything else as ‘secondary’, and because, despite its persistence over three generations now, ‘the Cyprus problem’ is likely to be outlived by the problem of gender inequality, women, along with other social groups, have a stake in the phrasing of the constitution, the government's organogram, the design of the courts, the make-up of the police and so on. The recommendations put forth by GAT serve, above all, as a reminder that ‘sharing’ must not be solely about ethnic ratios, but about gender ratios as well. And that it needs to be framed in the aim not of a compromise against some ideal of autonomy, but of obligation, cohesion, cooperation and inclusion—all necessary components of participatory democracy.
Primary law: Framing gender equality within the constitution rather than in secondary legislation is crucial to this. While the constitutions on both sides are currently mired by ‘special temporary measures’ for the purpose of curtailing rights, a future constitution must fulfil the promise of inclusion for everyone. The citizenry that will be expected to hold up the future constitution as its own needs to see its place clearly reflected therein. Women need to be acknowledged as the hitherto politically silenced majority, who now unequivocally have recourse to ‘the Law’. Gender equality must therefore be enshrined in the foundation of the state, and not subject to ‘emergency measures’ and special laws that could abrogate the rights gained by restricting gender equality to secondary legislation only (where it should additionally be included).
Quota system: The hitherto exclusionary and divisive application of special measures must be turned on its head in a Constitution that commits the state to ensuring the actual implementation of gender equality. The distribution of cabinet, parliamentary and local government seats along gender lines must complement ethnically based distribution. Far from being seen as a negatively connoted ‘positive discrimination’ measure favouring women who would not otherwise deserve such seats, allocations based on gender quotas must be viewed as a measure addressing historical power imbalances. This proposition is of particular relevance to Cyprus, where ethnic quotas have been normalised in public perception to the exclusion of all other kinds of quota systems.
Anti-discrimination measures: As the Cypriot conflict experience has proven that discrimination can easily topple the state itself (as happened in the 1960s and 1970s), it is crucial that discrimination is addressed as an issue of constitutional priority and not a side issue. The language of all peace agreement and state documents must seek to overturn assumptions embedded in words about men's and women's roles in society. ‘Morality’, ‘honour’, ‘ownership’, ‘protection’, ‘order’ and ‘role’ are such words; particular descriptions of parenthood, home-making and the public–private distinction are other minefields that weaken women's agency. Thus, the wording of the terms of a peace agreement is not merely an issue of semantics but of essence. It must be seen in the wider effort to inaugurate a more just and less prejudiced society where equality is engrained in public perceptions. Key to this is the overturning of historically engrained perceptions of women as victims, symbols of the nationalist order, and integrally tied to the domestic but not the public realm (Vassiliadou, 2002). Furthermore, coming out of a conflict nationalist culture, it is essential to avoid feminising pain and suffering and address psychological trauma and pain as gender issues that have affected both men and women.
The language of an agreement must, in short, enable a paradigm shift in women's position within Cypriot society. To bolster this, equal access to justice must be ensured for women across the constituent states. Women's rights must be ensured across the whole of Cypriot territory and not be determined by a woman's location. This also calls for a shift in the conceptualisation of citizenship.
Reconsidering Citizenship and Inclusion
At the heart of the rethinking that GAT proposes lies the reconfiguration of concepts about ‘citizenship’ on a more inclusive basis—this conceptual shift does not translate as easily into ‘thematic chunks’ as presented above, but requires deconstruction and reconstruction of the frame in which citizens have been managed.
In Cyprus, the experience of emergency legislation (which includes exceptional laws passed in the 1960s that are still in force) shows that so-called ‘temporary measures’ may remain in place long after the end of hostilities, with adverse effects on large numbers of citizens, be they minority members or not. The sidelining of gender within the frame of the ethnic conflict makes it all the more important to protect gender-relevant citizenship rights from suspension under exceptional legislation. Non-discrimination is a vital presupposition to securing this form of citizenship.
To effectively eradicate already existing forms of discrimination, these must first be acknowledged. Cyprus’ modern history is rife with exclusions that are ethnically determined—for example, of acknowledged and unacknowledged minority groups and the effacement of hybrid identities (Constantinou, 2007). These exclusions impact on gender in two ways. First, they distribute power along ethnic lines, overlooking gender differences. The needs of men across ethnic groups are thus prioritised over those of women, while smaller minority groups are largely silenced. Second, in being based on a particular image of an ‘ideal’ citizen, stereotypes are formed and become engrained in the public imagination of citizenship. This ideal citizen is, in Cyprus, male, belongs to a majority ethnicity (Greek-Cypriot/Turkish-Cypriot) and is the protector of the nation—thus able-bodied, masculine, heterosexual and combat-ready. The historical construction of this citizen has assumed that women, by correlation, are the ‘weaker sex’, in need of men's protection (in a father's home, or in marriage) and vulnerable to assault by the enemy. It is indicative that Article 2 of the Republic of Cyprus constitution does not recognise women as citizens in their own right but provides that ‘a married woman shall belong to the Community to which her husband belongs’ (Article 2, par 7a). For the last century at least, women's traditional status has been in the home, as reproducers of the family and nation (Anthias, 1989). Over the decades, these imbalances have been subsumed into the heritage of the Cyprus conflict, rendering gender differences invisible against the hegemonic idiom of ethnic difference (Demetriou, 2012). Even when women took up other roles as wage earners, this perception of gender roles remained intact, shifting inequalities into the plane of feminised migration (Agathangelou, 2004). This legacy must be addressed on both the institutional and societal level.
On the level of institutions, the position of the army as a privileged body within the government mechanism, which perpetuates masculinist, combat and violence-oriented stereotypes, must be reassessed. The assumption that proper personhood consists of heterosexuality (i.e., the assumption of hetero-normativity), purity of blood and affective orientation towards the nation (the precepts of ethno-nationalism) should be superseded by more inclusive concepts of personhood and citizenship that are sensitive to multiple differences. To achieve this, institutional reform, including of the military, and extending to the media, education and migration policy, must be complemented by measures that render unacceptable (through criminalisation) actions and behaviours that seek to marginalise and victimise others across a range of identity vectors.
The approach to citizenship must leave behind once and for all the treatment of women as the property of men implied, for example, in the constitutional article quoted above. A fresh approach to citizenship must recognise the equality of men and women in acquiring, changing or retaining citizenship. This should hold not only for citizenship, but also for membership of communities or constituent state/federal units, where the criterion of marriage is clearly discriminatory on gender grounds. The framing mentality of negotiations thus far has taken the rights-obligations model of citizenship as a basis and has viewed voting rights as a key determinant of citizenship. It has hence interpreted ethnic belonging as a corollary to federal unit/ constituent state membership. This mentality de-prioritises other forms of citizenship and perpetuates an exclusionary rather than inclusive approach to citizenship.
To rectify this, citizenship rights must be viewed in their multiplicity: cultural rights (e.g., to education) must be seen independently from political rights (e.g., voting). Breaking up this unitary bundle of citizenship rights would allow their transferability between federal units/constituent states. This is especially important to citizens who are not voters, that is, minors. Rather than determining that where children live will also determine the educational, language and other cultural rights they have access to, on the basis of the kind of voters they are expected to become, those cultural and civic rights that are not tied to voting should be equally accessible to all citizens. Thus, where people are educated, or even work and access social rights, should be a matter of free will rather than being determined by birth or residence. Minors, who are excluded from some political rights due to age (mainly voting), should be able to enjoy all other citizenship rights everywhere on the island.
Those groups that are excluded from citizenship rights by virtue of not being citizens must nevertheless not be allowed to fall beyond the purview of state protection. Statelessness must not be considered a tolerable condition. Similarly, the vulnerability of persons whose rights are under threat in their own states must be recognised, and rights should be granted to them to ameliorate their predicament. Such vulnerable groups are refugees, victims of torture and victims of trafficking. It should be recognised that large numbers of such persons exist in Cyprus and will continue to remain in a precarious state following a peace agreement.
To effectively achieve all this, gender differences must be treated as an aspect of all social relations and gender differentials accounted for across all state structures. Specialised structures devoted to implementing and monitoring gender-mainstreaming must also be set up to ensure that efforts are effective. This includes specialised offices, as well as the integration of gender expertise within existing offices pertaining to equality and social and economic rights. Education should aim at fostering a new citizenship consciousness that addresses the inequalities created by history and introduces more inclusive mentalities of citizenhood.
The state should take legal and practical steps to eradicate gender-based violence, which has traditionally been obscured by nationalist rhetoric. The results of this have been the failure, for example, to address domestic violence as a public issue and the treatment of gender-based violence perpetrated in the course of hostilities according to a patriarchal ‘honour-shame’ model (which prioritised the needs of the nation over the needs of women, as, for example, in the case of war rapes). To combat domestic violence effectively as a public matter, protection within the federal units/constituent states must be complemented by efficient cooperation across the state structures that span them, including the police and courts. To redress these failures more widely, matters of civil law (which have often been relegated to a status within communal legislation) must be given attention and streamlined across the island, not treated as corollaries to tradition or religious custom. The recognition of civil partnerships falls within this frame. Equality in parental rights is another aspect. Marriage, divorce and custody are matters where equality provisions should be propped up with gender-sensitive provisions, arising from the recognition that across the divide, women are often the partners who face more challenging economic and social problems after the break up of a marriage.
Concluding Thoughts
The recommendations on power-sharing and citizenship are only two examples of how the mainstreaming of gender in the peace negotiations, and the implementation of an agreement, as well as in efforts outside the formal frame of negotiations, will contribute to a different understanding of the problems that have mired the island over the decades. Working them out as GAT members from north and south of the island, who aspired to some day be identified as other than ‘Greek-Cypriots’ and ‘Turkish-Cypriots’, and whose feminist priorities differed at points, brought home the fact that ‘the Cyprus problem’ is neither unitary nor only a problem of ethnicised politics and foreign interventions. It is a multitude of issues bundled into a specific social and patriarchal order that persists on both sides. A change of script requires that we chip away at this order, including by changing the meaning of words like ‘power-sharing’ and ‘citizenship’, which, contested or not, have taken certain premises for granted. The work of GAT is timely and necessary and for this reason set to continue, in its capacity as an independent body, into the next phase of negotiations—and with the hope that feminists on more podia will take up stances of alliance.
Footnotes
Authors’ Biographies
Olga Demetriou is a social anthropologist interested in gender, human rights, minorities and migration, and a founding member of GAT. She is currently Senior Research Consultant at PRIO Cyprus Centre. As a researcher for Amnesty International between 2003 and 2008 she conducted research into migrant women's rights and trafficking for sexual exploitation, and as an affiliate of universities in the UK and Cyprus she has taught on the sociology of gender, anthropology and feminism, and gender-based violence. She has published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2012) and elsewhere on gender in relation to space, conflict and migration. Her monograph Capricious Borders: Minority, Population and Counter-Conduct between Greece and Turkey (Berghahn Books) was published in 2013.
Maria Hadjipavlou is a well-known expert in conflict resolution and feminism and a founding member of GAT. She has been promoting reconciliation and peace across the divide in Cyprus for the last thirty five years, and helped establish the nongovernmental organisations the Peace Centre and Hands Across the Divide, of which she is president. She is a trainer in conflict resolution and gender-raising consciousness. She has been a trainer for UNFPA and WINpeace (Women's Initiative for Peace)-Turkey, Greece and Cyprus; she is also a member of the scientific committee of the Cyprus Observatory of Gender Equality. For a number of years she has been on the expert team of the Council of Europe on gender issues and inter-cultural dialogue. She was instrumental in the establishment of an inter-disciplinary minor in gender studies as well as a graduate programme in gender studies at the University of Cyprus. She has published widely in the fields of conflict resolution, Cyprus and gender issues, including the monograph Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict (IB Tauris, 2010). She is an Associate Professor at the University of Cyprus where she teaches, among others, courses on gender and politics, feminist theory and conflict resolution.