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Human Rights, Civil Society and Conflict in Cyprus: Exploring the Relationships

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Human Rights, Civil Society and Conflict in Cyprus: Exploring the Relationships SHUR Working Paper Series CASE STUDY REPORT – WP3 Human Rights, Civil Society and Conflict in Cyprus: Exploring the Relationships Olga Demetriou and Ayla Gürel International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre SHUR wp 03/08 June 2008 SHUR: Human Rights in Conflicts: The Role of Civil Society is a STREP project funded by the 6 th Framework Programme of the European Commission (Contract number: CIT5-CT-2006-028815). www.luiss.it/shur 1 Acknowledgement .......................................................................................................... 3 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 4 2. Background ................................................................................................................ 6 Historical Outline.................................................................................................................. 6 Civil society development overview in relation to the conflict.......................................... 9 Civil Society typology ......................................................................................................... 14 3. The European dimension ......................................................................................... 20 The EU Accession process.................................................................................................. 20 The Role of the European Court of Human Rights......................................................... 23 4. Interview analysis ..................................................................................................... 28 Fuelling Impact ................................................................................................................... 28 Overview............................................................................................................... 28 Actions and discourses.......................................................................................... 28 Framework of Action............................................................................................ 31 Political Opportunity Structure............................................................................. 31 Holding Impact ................................................................................................................... 33 Overview............................................................................................................... 33 Actions and Discourses......................................................................................... 34 Framework of Action............................................................................................ 35 Political Opportunity Structure............................................................................. 36 Peace-building Impact........................................................................................................ 37 Overview............................................................................................................... 37 Actions and Discourses......................................................................................... 37 Framework of Action............................................................................................ 40 Political Opportunity Structure............................................................................. 40 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 42 References .................................................................................................................. 466 Internet sites consulted ................................................................................................ 49 2 Acknowledgement The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Christian Braun of Marburg University in collecting information relating to the role of European Institutions and in drafting section three of this paper. In addition, we would like to thank SHUR colleagues for providing valuable comments on the paper, and particularly Sergio Andreis of Lunaria, and Nathalie Tocci and Raffaele Marchetti of Luiss University. 3 1. Introduction The formulation of ‘human rights’ as an international legal concept has, since its inception post-WWII, taken the state as the main guarantor of the rights of its citizens. This has also meant that human rights violations have translated into failure of the state – understood, by the formulators of ‘human rights’ discourse, as the democratic, peace- seeking state. Based on this rationale, violations of human rights reflect undemocratic and/or conflict-ridden blemishes on the record of the state which needs to be corrected. But where the lack of democracy and conflict are endemic to the functioning of the state, the gap between internationally-understood human rights protection practices and the situation on the ground widens exponentially. It is not uncommon in such situations for a local group-bound concept of ‘human rights’ to develop, where the exclusion of the rights of others, which in fact underlines all notions of ‘human rights’ (Douzinas, 2000) is emphatically maintained 1. Considering the variability of the levels and possible forms of conflict, it is obvious that diverse situations exist between the different ends of a spectrum. On the one extreme of this spectrum there is the ideal situation of a fully democratic and peaceful state where the human rights of all residents are respected while at the same time pluralism and multiculturalism prevail. A glance at reports of major international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) working on human rights such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, as well periodic appraisals of state reports by UN committees working on human rights proves the impossibility of this scenario all over the world. On the other extreme there are the situations of ethnic conflict characterized by attempts to completely annihilate the other, where no rights are respected and where crimes against humanity exemplified by ethnic cleansing are being perpetrated. In contradistinction to the ‘ideal’ extreme, examples of this have persisted in the 20 th century, from the Holocaust that effectively caused states to place human rights in the centre of the UN map, to the 1990s’ Bosnia and Rwanda, and currently Darfur. The point of this paper is to explore the situation in the middle of this spectrum, where in fact one would expect most societies, and for the purposes of this paper, conflict societies in particular, to fall, by focusing on the case of Cyprus. Within this frame what is examined here is the impact of a ‘frozen conflict’ on the development of various understandings of ‘human rights’ and the relation of these understandings to the work of civil-society organizations. In turn, these relations are contextualized within local state structures and specific political discourses. The paper thus firstly examines the formation of the postcolonial state in Cyprus and the long-term effects of the conflict on the developments of mono-ethnic state structures south and north of the dividing line, the first being internationally recognized as a state representing all Cypriots despite the lack 1 The exclusion referred to here arises from the qualification of rights as ‘human’, whereby, as Douzinas insightfully reminds us, is a concept that throughout history has rarely included the totality of people in the world. Consider, for example, the exclusion of women from voting, blacks from political and civil rights, to more recently, the curtailment of the rights of undocumented migrants and terror suspects – all these examples are instances where ‘human rights’ in its very application, creates exclusions of those somehow placed outside an understanding of ‘humanity’. 4 of Turkish-Cypriot participation in its government, the other being unrecognized except by Turkey and claiming to protect the rights of Turkish-Cypriots. On this basis an overview of the development of civil society on the two sides is then provided, spanning the early years of the conflict up to 1974, the years of separation between 1974 and 2003, and the political developments relating to the island’s accession to and membership of the European Union (EU). The following section attempts to classify civil society organizations on the basis of their work relating to the Cyprus conflict along the lines of civil society typology developed in the context of the SHUR project, i.e. determining their potential for fuelling, holding, or transforming and resolving conflicts (Diez and Pia, 2007; Marchetti and Tocci, 2007). One concern of the paper is also to show the impact of the European dimension in determining this potential. This is done by examining actions at the levels of the EU and Council of Europe (CoE), in the third section. This is especially important in the case of Cyprus because of the changes in the political dynamics brought about by accession to the EU, which have been analysed elsewhere in reference to the process of conflict resolution (Demetriou, 2004), but which are also very relevant in the examination of the human rights dimension. This section thus refers to EU accession and the various ways in which EU institutions have got involved in the Cyprus conflict, how this compares to the involvement of CoE structures, and how both have impacted the situation on the ground. The fourth
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