While attention is focused on New York, where everyone awaits some movement on the Cyprus issue with whatever hope and faith they have left, something perhaps more significant has happened in Nicosia.
At Mia Milia, Cyprus’ first bicommunal photovoltaic park has begun operating as part of the shared wastewater treatment plant. It happened without grand declarations and outside negotiating rooms.
Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are cooperating to generate energy for an infrastructure that connected the city when memories of war were still painfully fresh and continues to serve both communities today.
Cooperation in practice
The two communities worked together to address an everyday problem.
Local authorities achieved in practice something the political leadership has discussed repeatedly without tangible results: a genuine confidence-building measure.
A photovoltaic park will obviously not unlock or solve the Cyprus problem. Nor can a shared wastewater treatment plant substitute for a political settlement.
What such projects can do, however, is something that no agreement can impose on its own: create the experience of cooperation.
Many initiatives promoting a culture of peace have emerged over the years. Some were undermined. Others became trapped in state bureaucracy and political inertia or were left to fade as theoretical declarations in negotiators’ drawers.
This time, the two communities succeeded.
Through solar energy, they illuminated the possibility of a shared, sustainable future. Through common green infrastructure, they demonstrated a path towards cooperation in confronting the climate crisis, which threatens our common homeland.
They also sent a simple message: challenges shared by both communities require shared infrastructure and a common vision that extends beyond dividing lines.
Most importantly, they gave substance to what has too often remained an abstract concept: real confidence-building measures that serve an entire city, and potentially the entire country, regardless of checkpoints.
Where real confidence is built
This is how genuine confidence-building measures are created, and this is what the next day of our common homeland should look like.
Cooperation between society, municipalities, communities, citizens, universities, political parties, chambers and young people.
Cooperation in energy, the environment, water, transport, civil protection and culture.
In every area where Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots can discover that working together is not a concession to the other side, but something that benefits both.
The example for the two leaders is already here.
If they grasp its significance, perhaps they can do what the UN Secretary-General has urged them to do: look within the island and their own communities for initiatives that facilitate cooperation and establish trust, rather than spending half a century searching for the right atmosphere in foreign diplomatic centres.
