Large Scale Unarmed Peacekeeping
Speech by David Grant
Dear friends:
The speech below was delivered at a workshop organized by the Association
for Social Defence in Germany in March 2000 by David Grant, the
erstwhile
Education and Training Coordinator of the International Fellowship of
Reconciliation (IFOR) in Alkmaar, The Netherlands. Here is now a Senior
Advisor with the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
There is no gainsaying the fact that apart from being an indisputable guru
in the acts and practice of nonviolence - a veritable Gandhian and Kingian
disciple in his own right, David eats, breathes, lives and walks the path of
the phenomenon in all spheres of life. He and I have met at different fora
and each time he dazzles me always as an indispensable role model in this
divine call and experience.
As most of us are probably aware, the Nonviolent Peace Force was an idea
mooted at the Hague Appeal for Peace global conference in May 1999 with
David as one of the brains behind the project. Our dear friends and
colleagues, David Hartsough and Mel Duncan - the major human dynamos at
Peace Workers Organization in the United States have been carrying the
banner of the project aloft since then and this has taken them to nearly all
corners of the world.
It may interest you that David Grant is in the process of officially
introducing the project to a number of countries in Africa while Nigeria is
his first port of call where he will spend at least a week. That is from
June 4 - 11. The speech below speaks volume of the turning point in
enshrining the alternative way to peace-making and enforcement in our
national psyche.
You will all recall that last year, a delegation from PARC visited the
Republic of Benin last and introduced the Nonviolent Peace Force concept
to
both the Government and the people of the west African coastal nation. We
were more than overwhelmed with the outcome. There is, therefore, no
gainsaying the fact that the Council sees itself as having more than it
can
imagine in its hands as far as the Coordination is concerned the - just
like the Hague Appeal for Peace in 1999.
In a very recent development, John Stewart of the African Caravan for
Peace
and Solidarity in Zimbabwe is also in the country to introduce the idea of
the project to major non-governmental and community based organizations.
A Caravan for Peace and Solidarity will take a year-long journey across
Africa. Beginning at Roben Island, South Africa on June 26, 2000. It will go
through Southern, Central, Western, Northern and Eastern Africa ending its
journey in Arusha (Tanzania) on June 21, 2000.
The African Caravan represents a symbolic travel across the continent.
During its year-long progression, groups of people will journey through the
various sub-regions of Africa. To emphasize the link between the various
sub-regions and the unity of Africa, two symbols will be handed from one
group to the next: the African Charter for Peace and Solidarity and a
sculpture that will carry the different soils of our countries.
Since John Stewart and PARC are expected to undertake a serious deliberation
on the Caravan concept, both the full details and the outcome will
eventually be communicated to you all through this wonderful medium. Be on
the lookout.
This, no doubt, is going to be a very busy week for us all at PARC with
yours sincerely as the anchorman. Yes, Africa deserves more than this from
all of us since as Martin Luther King junior would, "there is no other way
to peace, peace is the only way.
This is wishing you a happy weekend.
Yours sincerely.
Ade. Adenekan.
Executive Director.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Large Scale Unarmed Peacekeeping
Speech by David Grant for the Bund für SocialeVerteidigung
(Association for
Social Defense)
Bonn, Germany, 3 March 2000
Abstract: Although peacekeeping is defined by some as a military function,
Gandhi proposed to accomplish
peacekeeping via nonviolent means. Distinctions must be made among the uses
of nonviolence: for social
change, for social stability, for humanitarian intervention. Consequences
follow: partisan "struggle
for justice" versus non-partisan "confidence-building".
Small-scale unarmed
peace teams have increased recently in number and have demonstrated
usefulness.
Large-scale proposals are under discussion. OSCE is tending in this
direction. The issue of "who pays?" remains highly problematic. Also
the
question of NGO cooperation with governmental and military bodies. Ethnic
and national identities play important, and potentially surprising, roles
for both peacekeepers and combatants.
********
As a seven-year-old boy I was pestered on the school playground. I told my
father about it and he said: "Do
you know exactly when these boys are going to hit you?" "Yes," I
said, "they
come up to me everyday at
lunchtime and beat me up". "OK," my father said, "what you
should do is
simple. Hit them first!"
I followed my father's instructions and hit the leader of the gang as soon
as I saw him, right on the
nose. It worked. I ate my lunch in peace. But my peace didn't last. One of
the gang challenged
me to a fist fight. I had watched the boxing matches my father viewed on
television and I faked my way to
an honorable defense. But these battles continued for years. The reason I
was pestered was because I was the first Afro-American to attend the
previously all-white elementary school. I became a good fighter and
actually enjoyed the sport of it.
I value this experience very highly. It led me to realize, a few years
later, that it was easier and more fun to make friends. Or to outsmart my
tormentors. But it was not a logical decision at the time. It rather came as
an enlightenment. It was decades later, when I ran across Gravity and Grace
by Simone Weil, that I understood that the gravity of the situation had
opened me to grace. I didn't really come to the principle of nonviolent
struggle for justice. It came to me.
I tell this story because it has a lot to do with why I am standing here
with the task of thinking about
"Large Scale Nonviolent Intervention". When it comes down to it, it's
one-on-one, individual choice. None
of us is a collectivity. There are universal human rights and universal
human responsibilities. "I will
not kill my brother. I will not harm my sister. I will protect and defend my
children. I will do unto others
as I would have them do unto me." Those are all in the first person
singular.
On the other hand, we are also "ubuntu". That is the word used in
South
Africa meaning: "I am because you are". We make our individual choices
in
relation to the other. "Ubuntu" is the African version of Martin
Buber's
"I-Thou". Therefore the issue at hand, nonviolent intervention, can
rightly
be talked about
in two categories: individual choice and "large-scale"operation. But
we must
continually remember these
categories are inseparably linked.
With that caveat, I quote from Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders: A
Recurrent Vision, edited by Mosher and Weber: "...an assessment of the
viability of nonviolent unarmed strategic large-scale
interpositionary peacekeeping, based on an analysis of previous attempts,
and measured in terms of physical effectiveness, seems to suggest that for
all practical intents and purposes the concept is not a viable one." I
quote
this to underscore the fact that we are talking about something which has
been tried, at least in part, and has usually failed. Not to worry. Nothing
great has been accomplished without plenty of trial and failure.
At the beginning of the last century, the 20th Century, William James wrote
"The Moral Equivalent of
War". He argued that warfare fulfilled a deep-seated human need. I'm
tempted
to say male human need but I am not going to. James challenged humankind to
find a replacement. The price of fulfilling this need through warfare had
become too costly. The increasing percentage of civilian deaths required,
James said,
something else. It so happened that that "something else" was being
developed just then in South Africa by
Mohandas Gandhi. And a decade later, 1920, the first general secretary of
the International Fellowship of
Reconciliation, Pierre Ceresole, responded directly to James's essay and
created the Service Civil
International. That organization continues to provide a "moral equivalent
to
war" through intercultural work camps. Of course the first really big
manifestation of the "moral equivalent" was the campaign to free India
of
British rule.
Before going any farther it is important to refine some definitions. I had
the opportunity last week to
sit with officials at the OSCE in Vienna. One of them remarked that
"civilian peacekeeping" was a
contradiction in terms. "Peacekeeping", he said, "is by
definition
"military". For a member of the Shanti
Sena (Peace Army) which Gandhi had proposed and which became operational
after his death...or as a member of the short-lived 100,000 member world's
first professional nonviolent peace army of Badshah Khan in Pakistan in
1948... or for a would-be member of Martin Luther King's proposed 10,000
member nonviolent peace force...or, most importantly, for the current
proposed "International Unarmed Peace Force" as proposed by David
Hartsough
and Mel Duncan..."peacekeeping" can indeed be unarmed. We have a duty
to
maintain this understanding, especially as nonviolence becomes mainstream.
Nonviolence itself needs etymological change. For one thing, I am sure
you've chafed against the negativity of the word. It's like
"horseless
carriage", the first English words used for automobile. In a similar way we
only define this new thing in relation to what we know from the past:
not-violence. Naming is important. What will be the "automobile"
equivalent
for "nonviolence"? Or, similarly, "un-armed"?
Until we have an answer to that, we are going to have to do a better job of
defining "nonviolent action".
Peace worker George Lakey warns us: "It is as if Thomas Edison tried to
invent the light bulb while
being equally fascinated with candles and oil lamps. The clarity of
[Edison's] vision, of what he wanted to
invent, was much sharper than simply illuminating a room and ours must be
sharper than nonviolent action." Lakey encourages us to distinguish among
three types of nonviolent action: social change; social defense and
third-party nonviolent intervention. {OVERHEAD PROJECTION}
I presume that most of us have come to nonviolence out of the social change
movements. I was part of the
American Civil Rights Movement and was imprisoned for refusing to kill in
Vietnam. You have sought avenues of reconciliation and restitution in the
wake of national socialism. You have lived through the
re-building and re-unification of German democracy. You face the challenges
of a multi-cultural society
and the xenophobic threats against it. We struggle to make our flawed
democracies more tolerant and
egalitarian. The area of social change is a battle within civil society.
Social change work is partisan:
the struggle for rights, for justice, for peace. Gandhi, King, People's
Power, Aung San Suu Kyi. Social
change seeks new systems.
Social defense, on the other hand, is about security and maintenance.
Examples of social defense include
protection of environments and communities. Some governments have
incorporated elements into defense
planning. A little over a year ago I took part in a large-scale
military-civilian simulation in Sweden.
Members of Fellowship of Reconciliation Sweden gave introductions to
nonviolence theory and practice to a thousand soldiers from the armies of
the Baltic and Scandianian countries. These soldiers were being
prepared for duty as United Nations blue helments.
I hope I don't need to remind you that it is only a rare psychopath who
actually wants to engage in death
and destruction. In a "Listening Project" I led at four American
military
bases right after the Gulf War,
we found that 50% of the soldiers were actively interested in using
nonviolent means, but felt that
they had no option to do so. Since social defense protects the status quo,
it should surprise no one
that most governmental money for research into nonviolent peacekeeping has
probably gone into
civilian based-defense.
The third area identified by Lakey, "third-party nonviolent
intervention",
continues, for the most
part, to be a tantalizing dream. Gandhi was the first to posit the most
extreme form, satyagrahis willing to
martyr themselves in order to awaken the moral conscience of the killers.
For him suffering is a
creative process. I like the connection to the preamble of UNESCO's
constitution which I slightly
amend to: "Since wars begin in the hearts and minds of humankind, it is in
the hearts and minds of humankind that the defences of peace must be
constructed."
As enumerated in Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders the actual record of
nonviolent interventions
is, to-date, disappointing. Recent attempts include the large-scale fiasco
of the Mir Sada event at Split,
Croatia and the smaller-scale Gulf Peace Team. Mosher and Weber's book was
written, however, before the OSCE Kosovo Verifiers Mission which, I would
say, was a step towards large-scale "third-party nonviolent
intervention".
More about that later.
Lakey identifies three distinguishing features for third-party nonviolent
intervention {OVERHEAD
PROJECTION}:
1.) it is unilateral, not requiring both parties to assent to it;
2.) it assists the struggle to continue; success lies not in agreement being
reached but in the conflict continuing on a less violent basis; and
3.) it uses nonviolent action to directly affect the field of physical
conflict.
He also names four forms of third-party nonviolent intervention:
1.) accompaniment, of which Peace Brigades International is the best known;
2.) interposition, as in the Philippines when civilians stood between
pro-Marcos and anti-Marcos factions of the army;
3) observation-monitoring, often used in elections; and
4) modeling, in which third party teammates do not interpose physically
but
use behaviors like active listening to embody values of decency and respect.
The Russian group Memorial is cited.
What is important to keep in mind about "third-party nonviolent
intervention" is that, unlike social change
and social defense, it is non-partisan. Almost all of the literature argues
that it must be so because
non-partisanship keeps the interveners safer, it increases their credibility
and it opens the way for
mainstream acceptability.
I think it is fair to characterize "third-party nonviolent
intervention" as
a type of mediation.
Recent experience in Africa shows that the basic logic of mediation,
confidence-building, has been the key to durable peace agreements. In a
recent special issue of Track Two Laurie Nathan makes this case apparent,
pointing especially to the mediation by San Egidio regarding Mozambique.
Power politics, Nathan says, only increase fear. The problem here for those
of us coming out of the social change movements is that we are no longer
allowed, ostensibly, to "struggle for
justice".
I personally think non-partisanship may be only a temporary necessity for
the immediate future. I recall
a story about the ancient Chinese military strategist and peacemaker, Mo
Tzu. Mo Tzu is said to have
practiced peacemaking in this way. He would go to both warring sides and
train them each in the most advanced military techniques. In his time that
was said to have been defense against a siege. Once having given away all
the military secrets to both sides, he would then ask each side to come to
negotiations. If either side refused, he would then make a judgment as to
which side was just and would commit all of his military knowledge to
supporting that side. This may be an apocryphal story. But it is essentially
the choice made by the Christian Peacemaker Team. In Palestine and in Haiti,
they have deliberately sided with the oppressed, though they also make every
effort to keep their lines of communication open to all sides.
In thinking about cooperating with the military or not, this issue arises.
Dag Hammersjkold was reported
to have said something like "Soldiers are not trained to keep the peace,
but
unfortunately they are the only
ones with the capacity to do so." As you know, NATO mantles itself now as
engaging in humanitarian action. Recent newspaper photos show KFOR troops in
Kosovo acting as third-party (armed, but weapons unused) interveners between
Serbs and Albanians. Are these partisan or non-partisan actions?
As much as it is true that all current governments are run by economic
elites and that therefore all
militaries are enforcers of the wishes of economic elites, I would challenge
us to remember that the
military itself is not fundamentally, in a democracy, the problem. I hold,
furthermore, that nonviolent
intervention, like any manifestation of power, can never be fully and purely
non-partisan. I don't think
we have to abandon the dilemma of struggling with The Powers. What I think
should be the defining factor is that nonviolent power derives its strength
from moral stature rather than from physical might or formal
structure. This point is crucial when examining large-scale efforts.
At the OSCE office in Vienna we did not have time to go into depth about
these philosophical dilemmas. But in the briefing by their Conflict
Prevention Unit, given to me and Pete Haemmerle of Fellowship of
Reconciliation-Austria, it was evident OSCE is struggling with the same
issues we are. We were
heartened, for instance, to hear that they had tortured themselves over the
question of whether to
use armored vehicles. OSCE wondered if that would not compromise their
civilian status. They decided to use the vehicles, painted orange. Since
some vehicles were strafed in the field, their use saved some lives.
We also were heartened to hear that the verifiers had left Kosovo, not in
order to allow NATO to violate all
international laws in its bombing campaign, but that they had made an
independent decision to leave due to
the inability to carry on their own mission. They had, in fact, been
betrayed by NATO's failure to keep
agreements regarding their protection. Furthermore we heard again that some
verifiers had begun to go beyond their mandate to merely observe and report.
Some had been called upon to actively and nonviolently intervene. I must
tell you that in the power point presentation about the Verifiers' Mission,
Pete Haemmerle and I had a hard time distinguishing between the stated
mission objectives of the verifiers and the mission objectives of the Balkan
Peace Team.
Finally we asked if the OSCE felt encouraged or disheartened by the Kosovo
Verifiers Mission. The
Mission Officer said emphatically that they felt the Verifier Mission was a
positive development, one to be
tried again, improved, under other circumstances. Their Training Officer
also told us about their recent
decision to create Rapid Expert Assistance and Cooperation Teams (REACT), of
which IFOR trainers could be a part. I hope you all are as happy as I am to
hear that. But of course this does not mean that
those of us with a Gandhian perspective must join up with the OSCE.
The longtime Gandhian Narayan Desai writes: "Those looking for permanent
solutions to our problems will have to deal not only with current conflict
situations but to nonviolence as a way of life". This remark
highlights the apparent difference between OSCE or UN nonviolent
intervention and that of spiritually-based nonviolent intervention. The one
is based on effectivity, the other upon moral wholeness. Gandhi
insisted upon seeing suffering as a creative process, but he also saw
himself as a politician, a shrewd one,
and not a saint. I think we can not separate these two outlooks into
opposites.
The American researcher Gene Sharp of course has done much to clarify this
point. Practically, however, this does lead into operational questions for
nonviolent interveners. Is it OK to wear flak jackets, for instance? For a
civilian doing a job, the answer is obviously yes. But for a satyagrahi
whose essential standpoint is sacrifice, I have my doubts. There will be
many similar questions in other areas. I have a personal interest, for
interest, in seeing a "special forces" section of cultural workers
being
part of an Unarmed Peace Force. I include an appendix to this speech about
this idea.
On the subways and at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, my "Peace
Troupe" group practiced Invisible Theatre techniques, adapted from the
methods of Augusto Boal. I am certain these techniques could be useful,
could be effective, in third party nonviolent intervention. These techniques
are also open to criticism of manipulation, a type of psychological warfare.
But they could save lives. This leads on to such questions as: What about
tear gas? Stun guns? Electric fences? Gene Sharp allows the use of any
techniques that "lower the body count".
A related question is the one of professional versus volunteer. Paid or
unpaid? Furthermore: is it ethical
or is it even simply possible to demand -- which is what payment does --
that the unarmed peacekeepers
accept that suffering is a creative process? Does one who works out of
"truth force" lose credibility if he
or she is beholden to a salary? If this point matters, then the question of
who pays again comes to the fore.
Frankly I am a lot less concerned about this than I once was. I think a
military soldier, acting from the
highest ideals, is not much different than a satyagrahi. Both have to eat.
Both have families to
support. Both deserve the respect given to those who make personal
sacrifices for the common good.
I once had the unpleasant experience of proposing to a former member of the
U.S. Congress that unarmed
peacekeeping might be a good idea. He bristled, "Send our boys into combat
without arms? Preposterous!" I responded as civilly as I could: "Would
you
allow it if they volunteered?" He didn't budge, "I could never
face the families of those boys if they were killed." Then I said,
"Not even
if it meant less casualties and
it were cheaper?" He walked away without a word. I had not "won",
however.
Let's face it -- without an
example to point to, he could have called me for a bluff.
When we think about any type of intervention, there is another important and
obvious aspect to consider:
timing. There are stages of conflict. Some are better served by small-scale
and others by large-scale. In
this scheme from Kumar Rupesinghe's Civil War, Civil Peace we can see those
stages. {OVERHEAD PROJECTION: a bell curve, horizontal axis: early to late
state of conflict duration; verticle axis: Durable Peace to Stable Peace to
Unstable Peace to Crisis to War ... and descending, the reverse} It seems
that in all but the most acute crises, many smaller-scale interventions
would be preferable to a massive one.
George Lakey, in fact, tends to prefer a thousand small-scale efforts to a
few large-scale one. I think,
however, that in order to raise public support for unarmed peacekeeping,
there is need for an
unambiguously successful large-scale effort.
I hope it is taken for granted that local people are the ones who in the end
will make the difference in
the nonviolent transformation of violence. The OSCE's Kosovo Mission employs
two locals for every OSCE outsider. The Balkan Peace Team of 3 to 6
volunteers exists primarily to support local peacemaking and peacebuilding
initiatives. Naryan Desai puts it bluntly: "Nonviolent strategy works more
efficiently
if the people who suffer themselves take up nonviolence as their means of
liberation."
Before closing, I'd like to enumerate some provocative questions about the
concept of "large
scale unarmed peacekeeping". I ask for your help in a mutual exploration of
weak points.
* In the invaluable accompaniment and witnessing done by international
volunteers, often at great personal
risk, white skin has been a main protective device. This is obviously
unacceptable to one of my skin color
and, I assume, to all of us. Multi-ethnicity is a stated goal of the
International Unarmed Peace Force
proposal. Still, people under threat in the Philippines recently asked for
protective nonviolent
accompaniment by those, "the whiter the better".
There is a simple solution, of course: a uniform. Here it is. {Put on robe}
It is made so that it can
easily be secured high for mobility or left foot-length for formality,
modesty or majesty. I know
that uniforms are anathema to many of us independent spirits. But, besides
the fact that this looks too
much like the robes of a Gospel Choir, I ask: Does anyone have any other
solution to mark an Unarmed
Peacekeeper, besides a uniform?
* I have alluded several times to the question "Who pays?" Let's look
at the
three income sources:
government, business and non-governmentals. In the Unarmed Peace Force
proposal the most likely
sources for "large scale" are the governments of democracies. But even
if
these funds would come "with
no strings attached", need I point out that merely by the "yes"
or "no" of
providing the funds, "strings"
are inevitably attached. And not merely to the foreign policies of those
governments but more fundamentally to their taxpayers. And shouldn't we, the
taxpayers,
control some strings?
About the non-governmentals, the question of "Who Pays?" is answered
by:
volunteer donors and, again,
taxpayers through government subsidies. Non-governmentals always face the
accusation of being
a special interest, supported by only a segment of their national
populations. What mandate justifies the
growing principle of "Sans frontierisme"? The director of Handicap
International, closely associated with
Medicin Sans Frontieres says NGOs have, not a right, but a duty to intervene
or, as he prefers, "to
assist". American peace researcher Elise Boulding worries about "peace
colonialism" in this regard. I
think there are cases where no one needs permission to be one's "brother's
or sister's keeper". But again,
who makes the decision, inevitably partisan to someone, to intervene?
Finally, to business. What happens if commerce comes to answer "Who
Pays"? I
like to note that Executive
Outcomes has made a living out of providing mercenaries to the highest
bidders. That is foot-to-the-fire market capitalism: put up or shut up. I
like to speculate that eventually our third-party nonviolent interveners
could earn their keep in free competition with all comers. When this happens
-- when
we can say, with a certainty that need be no more approximate than that of
always risky military
solutions, that nonviolent struggle will defeat those with the guns -- then
I'm heading to the stock
exchange to buy stock in "People's Outcomes" or "Shanti Sena"!
I'm not making as much of a joke about that as you may think. Many
humanitarian aid functions are already being challenged by commercial
outfits who are, in some cases, showing that they can indeed do a better job
of delivering humanitarian assistance than the good-willing, but sometimes
slow-moving, NGOs.
Speaking closer to home, I myself "make a living" as a Nonviolence
Educator
and Trainer. Why is the
competition of the marketplace any less useful to my position than our
less-accountable goodwill motive
supported by church, state and citizen philanthropists?
I don't want to stand here as an apologist for market capitalism, but it is
interesting to note the trends.
Private business outdid the U.S. Marines in Somalia. The Marines were third
to land. They were preceded by commercial media recording the
"invasion".
And the media were preceded by Brown & Root, a logistics giant, whose job it
was to set up the Marines' tents. In the article about this in Humanitarian
Affairs, the author stated: "Those who pay want reliable and quantifiable
outcomes: initially tonnes and times; perhaps later mortality and morbidity
rates."
But actually this kind of calculation is nothing new. In the Netherlands,
the tragedy of the UN Dutch
soldier's abandonment of Srebenica in Bosnia was recently examined by the
BBC. The commander's instructions were impossible: protect the safe haven
enclave but return with no Dutch body bags. The
soldier's highest ethos is sacrifice, but when the price might be my son or
daughter...or, more
cynically, my election to office...the calculations skew otherwise.
This brings us back again to what I and others consider the most difficult
question: to work through
and with government, and thus its foreign policy and, in my opinion,
inevitably its military? Or not? At one
time I was a hardliner against. Mostly an anarchist. But now I'm more
willing to simply go where the spirit
leads me, into whatever den of iniquity that may be!
Regarding support by the German government for these ideas, I found the plan
outlined in "Effective Crisis
Prevention: Challenges for German Foreign and Development Policy" to
be
most sensible. I am happy to
see that the plan is already being implemented via Forum Ziviler
Friedensdienst (Forum for Civilian Peace
Services), among others. You probably have heard that they are setting up
seven peace bureaus in the
Southern Balkans for the graduates of their five month training program.
They also are providing two weeks of training for the OSCE in Herzegovina.
It seems evident, therefore, that there need not be much more discussion
about whether we should focus on
bottom-up or top-down, on a thousand small-scale teams or on a few
large-scale ones. All of these are
happening now simultaneously. Individuals and organizations need feel
responsible only for
accurately measuring their own capacities, in the knowledge that others are
carrying the load elsewhere.
In conclusion, let's be open for surprises. I opened with the story about
myself as a child, with the
surprise that I came to nonviolence after having been taught to hit first.
I'll close with a couple of more
recent stories, also with surprises. An Austrian friend and I were walking
in a city in the
Netherlands. Two young men bicycled up, spit big globs on us and sped away
without a word. I assumed
immediately it was the usual thing: racism. But my companion corrected me:
we were speaking German. This realization made me laugh out loud: a new
oppression! Of course, a one time spitting incident is not a house burning
or a lynching.
The other incident happened in Ghana. To fully appreciate this, it helps to
know that in Brazil and
most of Africa, my racial status is considered "white". But my Ghanian
host,
many times blacker than
I, acknowledged my African roots. He took me to the slave fort in Accra. Or
rather he took me to the
colonial-era house standing right next to the slave fort. Then he apologized
to me. On behalf of his
great-grandfather who had captured peoples of the interior, some of them my
probable ancestors, and
brought them to sell to the Europeans in the fort, he apologized. Again, I
had to laugh. In the U.S.,
Afro-Americans overlook this fact.
These twists of identity and surprise endings are, in the final analysis,
what makes me maintain momentum
towards a seeming chimera like "large-scale nonviolent intervention".
We are
talking, after all, about
shedding national and ethnic identities. Or perhaps "shedding" should
be
complimented by "expanding". In
the International Tolerance Network, sponsored by the Munich-based Center
for Applied Policy Research, we ask the question: "How to strengthen the
universal without losing the local?". For Germans I know this
question of identity is a central one. It has been one root of war.
In 1845 Henry David Thoreau went to jail for refusing to pay taxes for the
U.S. war against Mexico, a war to support the slave trade. His friend,
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to bail him out. But first he
asked "What are you doing in there?" Thoreau replied "What are
you doing out
there?"
Beyond the obvious political lesson there, I use that story as a Zen koan, a
logically-unsolvable question
about the essence of our identities. Social change for social defense
through third-party nonviolent
intervention. Having given you the safe haven of categorization, I want to
unsettle you. Thoreau used
that two-day experience to write a seminal tract of unsettlement, "Civil
Disobedience".
Large-scale nonviolent intervention is not a safe or settled idea. Emerson
redeemed himself when he wrote:
"People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any
hope for them." Conflict is an essential of life. Violence, violation, is
not.
May the Bund für Sociale Verteidigung (Association for Social Defense) and
the International Fellowship
of Reconciliation and all of our brothers and sisters in the struggle for
peace and justice remain
unsettled, remain disturbed, remain discontent. This is what it takes to
engage in the nonviolent
transformation of conflict. Only through the permanent acceptance of the
unsettlement of our identities are
we going to be able to create a durable new invention called, perhaps,
People's Peace Force.
Thank you.
THE END
Appendix to Speech for Bund für Sociale Verteidigung
Thinking Towards an INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL WORKER PEACE TEAMS
People develop cultures over time. Some are more inclined to violent
solutions to conflict than others.
In our globalizing world, violent solutions are less and less tolerable.
International Cultural Worker
Peace Teams can be an important element in efforts to teach or strengthen
cultures to solve their conflicts
without violence. Such a team could consist of one to two dozen cultural
workers, drawn from diverse nationalities and professional disciplines.
The team would develop means of using the cultural arts to address violent
conflict in all of its phases (before, during and after). Means would
include: performing arts (drama, music, dance), visual arts (posters,
murals, comic books, pamphlets) and electronic communication arts (radio,
video,
internet). Means might further include the healing arts, the culinary arts,
textiles and so on. Deployed
in units of four to eight people, such a team could rotate in and out of the
field. Other team members
could concurrently be involved in research, development and planning for
their next deployment.
These teams should be coordinated with a much larger multi-faceted
peace-making, peace-keeping and
peace-building effort.
A typical deployment might be imagined thus: a team of internationals
arrives in a pre-conflict situation.
They have previously identified local cultural workers with whom they spend
several weeks engaged in
developing a cultural arts strategy to address the potentially impending
violent conflict. They might,
for instance, develop a dramatic performance that then tours the region.
They might also develop a weekly
radio "soap opera" which is built upon this live performance troupe
and is
continually informed by what
the troupe learns on tour. The international team would stay long enough for
the local team to develop
self-sustaining capacity, with an assumed average of six months.
Another deployment might be: the team of internationals prepares to enter
into a situation of
active violent conflict by spending several weeks outside of the area,
working with exiles and refugees
to develop a mobile, conflict-specific, cultural arts response. It might be
a visual arts installation. It
could even be something as non-threatening, but provocative, as a design for
peacekeeper clothing or
as a catering service to diplomats and negotiators.
The international team could deploy into the conflict, shuttling as
mediators between the opposing sides,
probably addressing the leaders of the conflict. The team would use the
means developed as a focalizing
point for ending the violence and beginning a process of restorative,
equitable justice. A third possible deployment, appropriate for a
post-conflict situation, might be to work with local cultural workers to
develop long-term sustainable strategies for reconciliation. This might
include developing videos and comic books made by the former combatants,
with proceeds going to restitutive and
rehabilitating actions.
If an International Cultural Worker Peace Team were initially funded as a
four year program, such a team
should be able to deploy into three to six situations of pre-, post-, or
ongoing violent conflict. The team
should also plan a public relations strategy outside of the conflict areas
in order to establish its moral
authority, to enhance its professional credibility and to pave the way for
the team's long-term
institutionalization, including of course a permanent funding base.
Comments to: David Grant / Spoorstraat 40 / NL-1815 BK
Alkmaar / The Netherlands / fax: +31-72 515 1102 /
<BlueFoxNL@yahoo.com>
=====
David Grant * Spoorstraat 40 * 1815 BK Alkmaar * Netherlands
<BlueFoxNL@yahoo.com>
* fax c/o IFOR: +31-72 515 1102 * work tel: +31-20 568
8216 *home tel: +31-72 511 4687 (voice mail after four rings)