About Us
We, the women of Greece and Turkey.
We came together in order to challenge and to transform the relations
between our two countries…
We, the women of Turkey and Greece.
We joined our hands in order to create and to work together.
We hugged women from both North and South of Cyprus, in order to achieve empowerment of women, equality, economic and social justice.
We joined our experiences, our forces, our capability, our creativity, our ability and our empathy in order to build a culture of peace.
All this started when a sea accident brought the two countries to the brink of war!
We worked hard, very hard!
We learned and demonstrated that “Women’s Issues” are not separated from the primary agendas of human rights, democracy, environment, development and peace…
We put our hearts, our minds, and our spirits together and we ran very fast! We tried to move the mountains and at times we succeeded. When we couldn’t move the mountains, we at least moved the public opinion.
We felt the joy of coming together, laughing and crying together, and mostly celebrating together. We reached out to other NGO’s which were basically working on women and peace issues in different countries…
We reached out further to Palestinian Women, Afghan Women and
Iraqi Women…
We especially reached out to the younger generations, since the future
belongs to them and since they have great aspirations for a better tomorrow…
WINPEACE – Women’s Initiative for Peace was and is a miraculous experience which started with a few people and developed into Peace Education and Research Centre and to so many other things… The aim of this book is to share this experience with a larger public and raise the international public awareness. In the coming pages you’ll find why, when, where, how, WINPEACE became, what it became and helped the process of building a culture of peace. This book was made possible thanks to the support of the Turkish Office of the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung
in İstanbul.
Margarita Papandreou – Zeynep Oral