Turkish journalist Zeynep Oral, the first recipient of the International Press Institute (IPI)’s “Press Freedom Dialogue Award”, is the co-founder, together with Margarita Papandreou of Greece, of the Women’s Initiative for Peace, or WINPEACE.

Founded in January 1996, following the December 1995 Imia Island Crisis which brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of a military confrontation involving sovereignty rights in the Aegean Sea, the group aims to bring women in both nations together “to sustain solidarity and peace in the region.”

Oral was born in Istanbul and worked for the Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet as a columnist and theatre critic from 1968-2001. In 1972 she founded the Milliyet “Cultural Review”, a bi-weekly magazine on arts and culture for which she served as editor-in-chief until 2001. Since then, she has worked as a columnist for Turkish daily Cumhuriyet.

She is set to receive the IPI Press Freedom Dialogue Award at the “Dialogue for Press Freedom” Dinner & Award Presentation at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna on 14 June. The dinner marks the launch of IPI’s Israeli-Palestinian Journalists’ Forum (IPJF) a two-day event during which IPI, as part of its six-decades-old mission to foster peace and understanding by bringing journalists closer together, will gather 12 Israeli journalists and 12 Palestinian journalists from across the political spectrum for dialogue talks in Vienna.

IPI: What do you consider to have been your biggest success with WINPEACE since you co-founded it?

Oral: Whatever we succeeded to do in WINPEACE, it was and still is the work, the effort, the imagination, the willpower and the courage of all the women who participated from Greece, from Turkey and from both sides of Cyprus. We, the women of WINPEACE, did not wait for a disaster, such as an earthquake, to reach out to each “other”.

I believe the experience, the existence of WINPEACE is a success in itself. The fact that it “touched” the lives and transformed the way of thinking of so many people, especially young people, is important. I believe that WINPEACE contributed to the promotion of a peace culture and had an impact on public opinion.

To put it in a more concrete way: our most important success was and still is to create “Youth Camps for Conflict Resolution Training”. We organised at least one or two youth camps for both high school and university students, every summer. The difference between “before” and “after” has been amazing, and seeing the disappearance of prejudices was unbelievable. Most of the students attending those camps became “Peace Ambassadors” later on. The conflict resolution workshops addressed the most critical political and social issues. At times students from Turkey defended the Greek point of views and vice versa.

These camps gave birth to two important outcomes. First, we introduced a WINPEACE Peace Education curriculum in some high schools and universities. Our Peace Education Manual – written in English, called “Peace Starts Within” – was translated into Turkish, Greek and Arabic. Our members also held a number of seminars to educate educators on the issue. The second important outcome was the official establishment of the Peace Education, Application and Research Center at the Bosphorus University – Istanbul in 2007.

Organising rural women from Turkey and Greece to get to know and learn from each other, creating “agro-tourism” projects, translating and publishing the works of women writers in both languages, influencing the general press to publish positive articles about “the other”, bringing together women representatives and members of Parliament from both nations, making sure that all this was made visible in the press – these were our activities which I consider successful.

IPI: What is a typical year like for WINPEACE, i.e. what projects and activities do you sponsor?

Oral: No one year is the same as the previous one. It depends on the projects we deal with. Some are long-term, some are short-term. We do not sponsor programs ourselves – we try to find sponsors in order to bring our projects to life. The European Union and some universities have sponsored us. Of course not everybody works on every project. The important thing is that we have a strong and powerful network. Every one of us gets involved should there be a cry for help! We race for help and can create miracles!

IPI: WINPEACE is approaching its 15th anniversary. Do you have any special projects planned to mark the occasion, and what are your major goals moving forward?

Oral: Right now we are busy organizing the summer youth camps. Given the economic crisis in Greece, we are trying to take over some of the burden from our Greek counterparts. Our major goal will be to promote the peace culture even more and to try to involve both sides of Cyprus.

IPI: In the early years of WINPEACE, did you ever have a moment when you feared that your efforts might not make a difference? If so, how did you deal with it?

Oral: Yes! Definitely we had fears! And how! Even before WINPEACE, when I was working with personalities like [Turkish writer] Yaşar Kemal and [Greek songwriter and composer] Mikis Theodorakis for Greek –Turkish friendship, and with peace associations, we were all treated as “traitors”.

When we created WINPEACE, we were again labelled an “Enemy of the nation!” In 1998, in our very first meeting in Kos, the news that the [Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)] had opened up an office in Athens suddenly reached us! How were we going to define our position? It was as if a bomb had exploded in the meeting room!

Of course, we had to educate ourselves in the beginning. One day we were almost going to have a huge fight with our Greek sisters. Not over the PKK, or the territorial waters or Cyprus. It was to whom “baklava” and “dolma” belonged! When we realized that, we had a huge laugh instead of a huge fight!

After the “traitor” period, there was a mocking style, like, “Oh, it’s just one of those feminist things,” or, “Those women who know nothing think they’ll be able to solve all the problems!” Some even derided our work by saying “You cannot have peace by ouzo and sirtaki”, or they ignored WINPEACE altogether.

In fact, we were not going to resolve all the problems and conflicts, but we were going to show that they could be resolved without violence – that we could help the process of peace- building by working together.

IPI: What haven’t you been able to achieve yet that you hoped to achieve by now?

Oral: We had demanded that the Turkish and Greek governments each reduce their military budgets by five percent, and that the saved resources be channelled to the human needs of women, education and health. Because of the economic crisis, there has been a reduction in the military budgets, but, alas, not for the benefit of human needs. We haven’t been able to arouse the interest of the Greek press as much as the Turkish press. We had a lot of other dreams that we couldn’t make come true, such as making joint documentaries, TV serials, fiction films, exchanging columns in newspapers on a regular basis, and so forth.

IPI: What has founding and operating WINPEACE taught you about yourself, and how has it changed you?

Oral: WINPEACE taught me how wonderful it was to work with other women for the same cause. That life could be a win-win relationship if handled with a positive attitude. That injustice, oppression and abuse for one is an injustice, and is oppression and abuse for all.

I learned that a “peace culture” can be created by learning how to resolve conflicts using non-violent ways and through “peace education” – that to collaborate and struggle for the things that unite us can turn our differences into an asset, and that inequality in gender matters is inequality in all matters!

I always believed that security can only be sustainable by equality, by fair sharing and by abolishing all kinds of discrimination – gender, ethnic, religious, status, etc. WINPEACE empowered that belief in me!

IPI: One reason for the founding of WINPEACE was to include voices in the media who weren’t portrayed before, particularly the voices of women. Have you succeeded?

Oral: I can answer for the Turkish side! Definitely, there was a great improvement. The amount of positive articles that have appeared in the Turkish press has increased immensely.

IPI: This year will mark the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11 September. Has the threat of global terrorism and governments’ response to that threat changed your focus or hindered your ability?

Oral: The attacks of 11 September or any form of terrorism would not hinder me from going on with my intentions and my work, or change my focus. Having said that, I expect to see some sincerity in the government’s response to those threats or at least that they should avoid a double standard point of view.

I remember visiting Baghdad with a group of WINPEACE members just before the invasion in 2003 to hear what the common people on the street were saying; listening to them, to women of different levels. And believe me; their perception of “global terrorism” was much different from the White House’s.