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Birol Yesilada remembers playing in his backyard in Cyprus one day when Greek militiamen scoped in on him and started using him for target practice. He remembers sniper bullets zipping over his head, his mother rushing out to fetch him, and the Greek militia overrunning his neighborhood, killing a few people, and then moving on.

“I don’t know how I grew up to become a normal person,” says Yesilada, Chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies, who spent the first 15 years of his life in a Turkish Cypriot enclave.

Across the table sits Harry Anastasiou, associate professor in Conflict Resolution. He also spent most of his childhood in Cyprus, but on the Greek side. Sectarian violence was a constant presence in his world, too—he once witnessed a political assassination—but it wasn’t until he was a student in the United States in 1974 that war forced a third of the Greek Cypriot population to leave their homes and move to another part of the island.

“To this day there are people in hope of having their homes returned,” he says.

Complex, deep-seated networks of resentment permeate this small island in the eastern Mediterranean. The “Green Line”—a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone that runs from coast to coast and right up through the capital city of Nicosia—separates the Greek side from the Turkish side.

Nothing would please Yesilada and Anastasiou more, they say, than seeing the Green Line go away. Long before the two grew to manhood, they realized the futility of the status quo. Three years ago the two came together to form the Peace Initiatives Project (PIP) at Portland State. Through PIP, which received private funding from Portland businessmen E. John Rumpakis and Al Jubitz, they’re providing assistance to the peace movement already existing in Cyprus. They are also creating opportunities for Greek and Turkish Cypriot students to study at PSU and for U.S. students to study in Cyprus. Recently they received $10,000 to help fund a survey of the island’s population, which will take place this fall.

“It will enable us to pinpoint similarities and differences in beliefs, values, and expectations of the people,” Anastasiou says.

Finding common ground lies at the center of PIP’s mission. To get there, all sides will have to weed through—and, ultimately, set aside—the damaging effects of history

.The Greeks and Turks have been at odds for nearly 200 years. Meanwhile, Cyprus was occupied by one empire after another—most recently the British—for nearly two millennia, all the while maintaining a mixed Greek and Turkish population. Violence by both the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots bloomed in the 1950s, largely against the British, but also against each other and within factions of their own ethnic groups.

The assassination Anastasiou witnessed as an 8-year-old-boy was one such incident. As he was watching a movie in the cinema his father owned, four Greek Cypriot men in the row in front of him rose and emptied their pistols into the man sitting in front of them. The victim was also Greek Cypriot and an auxiliary policeman in the British administration.

“The assassins were the revolutionaries fighting against the British. They escaped retribution; their actions were considered heroic,” says Anastasiou.

The British finally left, and in 1959 an agreement involving Britain, Turkey, and Greece set up a constitutional framework for the island, giving the Greeks and Turks virtual political equality—something the Greeks, with their much larger population, resented.

The new constitution proved unworkable almost from the start. Hostilities between the two sides came to a head in 1964, and for the next decade, Greece and Turkey threatened war against each other over Cyprus. Then in 1974 the Turks took over the northern third of the island, forcing 180,000 Greek Cypriots to flee their homes. As many as 45,000 Turkish Cypriots also became refugees.

Thus for Anastasiou and Yesilada and thousands of other Cypriots, 1974 forms an historical dividing line. Before then, in the minds of the Cypriot Turks, the Greeks were the bullies, exerting an undue share of power and forcing the Turks to live in scattered enclaves throughout the island. After 1974, it was the Greeks who felt stepped on.

Professors Harry Anastasiou (left) and Birol Yesilada (right) explain the conflict in their native home, Cyprus, while striving for a peaceful resolution. Anastasiou, a Greek Cypriot, and Yesilada, a Turkish Cypriot, have taken advantage of their unique heritages to work together at Portland State. [photo by Steve DiPaola]

“Nationalism has completely alienated the two groups,” says Anastasiou. “For years, the Greek Cypriots had no appreciation for what the Turkish Cypriots went through, and vice versa. You will find nothing in their books of what each did to the other side.”

By the mid-’70s Yesilada had begun to consider himself more American than Cypriot. His parents had shipped him off to live with a cousin in California in 1971 because of their fearful life in Cyprus. Within six months he went from living in a war zone to being just another junior at Santa Cruz High.

“It was a long time before I could even write a sentence about Cyprus,” he says.

Yesilada stayed in the U.S. for his higher education, eventually becoming an expert in Turkey and the European Union (EU). The U.S. State Department has called on him numerous times since 1990 to brief diplomats on sensitive issues before they head off to Cyprus.

“I don’t look at Cyprus as a Turkish Cypriot anymore. I can look at it from outside,” he says. “The problem with people trying to achieve peace in Cyprus is they are trying to do it within the box.”

Anastasiou, a college professor in Cyprus, met Yesilada in a workshop in the buffer zone in the late ’90s. Then in 2002 Anastasiou was invited to give a lecture at PSU.

“When I got here I was told there was another Cypriot. Then when I saw Birol, we smiled because we realized we had worked together.”

Anastasiou soon joined the PSU faculty to lead the PIP in cooperation with Yesilada as part of the Graduate Program in Conflict Resolution. In addition to being able to take a full menu of graduate-level courses through the program, students can actually go to Cyprus to get a front-row view of what they’re studying.

In a remarkable two-week trip to Cyprus that Anastasiou led in March, 24 Portland State students met and talked with leading peace builders on both sides, spoke with members of parliament, and had an audience with the both the U.S. ambassador and a former president of Cyprus. They visited both sides of the island, walking along the buffer zone with a Greek Cypriot guide one day and a Turkish Cypriot guide the next. They visited both Greek and Turkish refugees.

“One of the realizations for the students was that once a war is over and it’s not on TV anymore, the effects of the war go on. It gave them a sense of the profundity of what war really is, as well as what it takes to move the peace process forward,” Anastasiou says.

PIP was also a catalyst for the formation of the Portland Greek/Turkish Association at PSU. One of its founding members, grad student Dimitris Desyllas ’01, traveled to Cyprus last year and discovered just how strange it is to live day-to-day in a divided country where the EU only recognizes one side (the Greek) and neither side recognizes the other.

“When we crossed for the first time to the north (Turkish) side of the island we wanted to call some people on that side. We found out we had to call them through Turkey, so it was an international phone call—even though we had a cellular phone with a Greek Cypriot phone number and we had just walked 100 meters from the Greek Cypriot part,” Desyllas wrote in the Daily Vanguard.

Desyllas and his group solved the problem by getting a Turkish Cypriot phone chip and switching it with the phone’s Greek chip whenever they were in the north part of the island, then swapping it again when they traveled south.

It’s small, eye-opening experiences such as these that underscore the absurdity of the conflict. But simply listing grievances can only go so far in finding solutions, Anastasiou says. The goal of PIP and the student group is to get beyond that.

“There are many legitimate reasons to hate each other. What we want to do is open up a whole new level of understanding,” Anastasiou says.

Both professors say they are working for bigger stakes than just Cyprus. Reuniting the island could go far in improving relations between Greece and Turkey, which could ease the way for Turkey—which Yesilada calls the only stable, democratic Muslim country in the world—to gain membership in the European Union. That could, in turn, have positive implications for a larger Middle East peace.

Anastasiou says the Green Line is already eroding, thanks in large part to a grassroots peace movement within the country and a growing acknowledgment of the pain and suffering of the past. But the ultimate goal of a final political settlement remains elusive. The latest bump in the road was the failure of a United Nations plan, introduced in 2002, to reunite the island. The plan’s success depended on the approval of Cypriot citizens on both sides of the buffer zone through a national referendum conducted last year. Yesilada was part of the referendum effort, working with teams of people to convince the citizens that the plan was a good idea.

“It was the greatest effort of my life,” he says.

The Cypriot Turks voted in favor of the plan. But the Greeks, distrusting the Turks and the 30,000 Turkish troops posted on the island, turned it down. Yesilada fears that the referendum’s failure will reignite old resentments and that nationalism will resurface with a vengeance.

“If that happens, we’re back to square one,” he says.

The survey Yesilada and Anastasiou will help conduct this fall in Cyprus will poll 500 Cypriots on both sides of the Green Line about their fears, about their attitudes toward each other, and how much they are interested in changing the status quo. At least it will give them, and the international community, a benchmark that could help point to the next step.

Working within Cyprus, promoting student exchanges, bolstering the country’s grassroots movement—all are essential building blocks toward an eventual peace. But both Anastasiou and Yesilada agree there is a special power in doing these things from a base outside the Mediterranean.

Says Anastasiou, “The U.S. has the diplomatic clout—if it wants to use it—and the European Union has the peace enhancing institutions. They are the only ones who can actually move these rocks gently.”

John Kirkland, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the articles “Business Not as Usual” and “A Fish out of Water” in the spring 2005 PSU Magazine.