According to Wikipedia, the expression “from the river to the sea” was first used by the zionist movement to describe their goal of creating a zionist state on land that was still at that time occupied mainly by Palestinians and controlled by the British Empire. It was then adopted by the PLO in the 1960s to describe their goal of liberating that land for the Palestinians.
Since then, the phrase has been used by the Israeli Likud Party, including by Prime Minister Netanyahu, to describe their goal of fully controlling and/or annexing the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip and rejecting the concept of a Palestinian State. And it has been used by Hamas to describe their goal of fully liberating the entire region to create a viable Palestinian State.
It is also increasingly used by a wide variety of other actors to describe the goal of a “single-state solution” as opposed to a “two-state solution.” (see for example Rashida Tlaib’s reasons for using that phrase, in which she describes it as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”)
The two-state solution would mean the creation of a free, independent and viable Palestinian state alongside the existing State of Israel. That has been the goal of most Middle East peace negotiations over the last several decades. However, that goal is becoming more and more unreachable, not only because of growing hostility to the idea within Israel but also because the number of Israeli settlements on the West Bank are making a Palestinian state less and less viable (already almost an impossibility because of the separation of the two parts of Palestine between the West Bank and Gaza).
There is absolutely nothing anti-semitic or genocidal about proposing a single-state solution as opposed to a two-state solution to this conflict!
A single-state solution is one in which the current State of Israel, along with the West Bank and Gaza, would become one independent, democratic, non-sectarian state guaranteeing equal rights for all its citizens, whether Jew, Muslim, Christian or other. Whether that is any more viable a solution or likely to happen is not the point. The indefinite military occupation of the West Bank, total destruction of Gaza and denial of rights to the Palestinians living in these areas is not a viable option, either.
When it comes to Hamas and their use of this phrase, it was certainly the case prior to 2017 that Hamas was explicitly quoting Koran references that call for the “killing of Jews” as enemies of Islam. It should be pointed out, however, that there are also Old Testament references that call for Jews to kill non-Jews (see Deuteronomy 17:2-7). There is, sadly, nothing surprising about religious texts calling for the extermination of those belonging to other religions.
However, the Hamas Charter adopted in 2017 explicitly removed all such references to killing Jews and instead “affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”
Nowhere in the present Hamas Charter does it refer to killing Jews, extermination of the Jews or genocide of the Jews. Hamas does not accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel, but that is about rejecting zionism and proposing a single-state solution to the present conflict. Remember, this particular conflict did not begin on October 7th. The seeds were sown in 1917 when Lord Balfour of Britain decided to give European Zionists a piece of land that was already occupied by Palestinians. The conflict exploded in 1948 with the forced removal of roughly 80% of the Palestinian population from what became the State of Israel. And it has continued ever since because those people and their descendents have never been allowed to return to their homes or to receive compensation for the theft of their land and property.
In 2006, a majority of Palestinians voted in free and fair elections for a government to be run by Hamas. An internal struggle between Hamas and the other main Palestinian faction, Fatah, left Hamas in control only of Gaza while Fatah retained control of the West Bank.
In response to Hamas taking control of Gaza, Israel began a blockade of all goods going in and out of Gaza, other than those strictly controlled by Israel. By 2015, the World Bank was reporting the economy of Gaza was “on the verge of collapse” with 40% living in poverty and 80% dependent on food aid, mainly from UNWRA. Many human rights groups have described Gaza under blockade as an “open air prison” and living conditions there as “appalling.” This situation was going on for 17 years prior to October 7th.
And as appalling as the atrocities committed on October 7th were, they did not come out of nowhere. That is why it is entirely appropriate to be pushing for a fair and equitable solution once and for all to the long-standing conflict that has plagued this part of the world for decades, and not just focus on what happened on October 7th. And at this point, a single-state solution that gives equal rights to Jews and Palestinians living there and ends once and for all the ability of extreme right-wing zionist parties to control the government of Israel is probably the best option.
On 18th March 2003, MPs voted, by a very large majority, to go to war in Iraq. They can claim to have been misled, to have been acting out of loyalty and good faith, but the reality is that the debate in the House on 18th March was packed full of misinformation, half-truths and downright lies, punctuated with accusations and insinuations about anyone who dared to question the logic for going to war.
No one now disputes the fact the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster which not only caused many unnecessary deaths but actually created a situation which 13 years later makes the UK less safe and less secure as a result.
On Monday night, MPs voted again, by an even larger majority, to upgrade the UK’s nuclear capabilities. Once again, the debate in the House was full of flimsy rhetoric, faulty logic, unsubstantiated claims, misinformation and spin.
The whole notion that without Trident, the UK is suddenly going to be overrun by Russia or North Korea is patently absurd. It is as if we are being told all over again that Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons are ready to attack the UK within 45 minutes. Have the majority of MPs really learnt nothing from the Chilcot Report?
Image by Voice of America News: Scott Bob report from Azaz, Syria. Wikipedia (Public domain)
Hilary Benn’s closing speech during the House of Commons debate on intervention in Syria has been hailed by the media as ‘extraordinary’ (The Guardian), a ‘truly great speech’ (The Independent), ‘historic’ (Sky News), ‘outstanding’ (ITV News), ‘one of the greatest in Commons history’ (The Evening Standard’), ‘one of the best’ (The Times). Undoubtedly it was a great piece of oratory. But how does it stack up in terms of substance?
Benn started out by insisting that UN Security Council resolution 2249 provided “clear and unambiguous” authorisation for the UK to engage in air strikes against ISIS in Syria. He quoted from the resolution, saying that the UN has specifically called on member states “to take all necessary measures” against ISIS, but conveniently omitted what immediately follows that phrase in the resolution, which is “in compliance with international law”. Resolution 2249 calls on member states “to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, and in particular with the United Nations charter” to deal with ISIS. What does that actually mean?
The United Nations charter is actually clear and unambiguous in how it defines what member states can and cannot do to each other or on each other’s territories under international law. Bearing in mind that Syria is also a member state of the United Nations, it is protected under chapter I of the UN Charter from “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”. The UK is operating in Iraq under the direct invitation of the Iraqi government, which is very different from the case in Syria, where the only outside actor operating at the invitation of the Syrian government is Russia.
Benn also refers to Chapter 51 of the UN Charter, saying that “every state has the right to defend itself”. However, what Chapter 51 actually says is that:
“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”
The UN Charter does not give states a blanket right to defend themselves however or whenever they feel like it, based on intelligence that they may be facing an ‘imminent’ threat or based on any other security concerns, however legitimate they may be. Under the UN Charter, the right of self-defence applies only if and when an armed attack (by another state) has actually occurred. Even under those very limited circumstances, self defence against an invader is only authorised until such time as the UN Security Council has been able to intervene with a collective UN response to the situation.
Chapter VII of the UN Charter spells out what a collective UN response entails under international law, and although it has rarely been put into practice, the procedure is clear and unambiguous. Only the UN itself is authorised to ‘take action’ to restore international peace and security under Chapter VII, and when a UN Resolution ‘calls on member states’ to take action, that is clearly and unambiguously different, in UN parlance, from the UN deciding to take action itself, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
So while Hilary Benn and David Cameron may feel confident that they have a clear and unambiguous legal basis for bombing ISIS in Syria, in fact there is no more legal basis for bombing ISIS than there was for going to war in Iraq in 2003. The simple fact is that UK is now engaged in offensive military actions on the territory of a member state of the UN who has not given us permission to do so. That is clearly and unambiguously acting outside of international law.
Hilary Benn then went on to talk about the ‘achievements’ of coalition air strikes in Iraq, saying that these have ‘halted’ the progress of ISIS in Iraq and gave as specific examples the cities of Sinjar and Kobani which were under ISIS control and have since been ‘liberated’. These two examples, however, show up exactly the weakness of the case for bombing ISIS in Syria right now. Both Sinjar and Kobani were re-taken by Kurdish forces on the ground supported by aerial bombardments of ISIS positions by coalition bombers. But no one is seriously suggesting that Kurdish forces on the ground in Syria are ready or willing to re-take Raqqa, the ISIS ‘capital’ and main focus for Cameron’s air war. Without such a force, bombing by itself can achieve very little.
Benn did not at any point address this fundamental flaw in the argument for bombing, except to suggest that however many troops there may be available for taking back Raqqa right now, there will be fewer of them the longer we wait to ‘act’. “The threat is now,” says Benn, “to wait for a peace agreement is to miss the urgency.” But nowhere did Benn explain how a knee-jerk reaction to the atrocities in Paris is actually going to make a difference to the situation in Syria. He merely flailed around saying we have to do it, whether it makes any difference or not. That may be good oratory but it is a very weak argument.
Even more disturbing is Benn’s apparent loss of memory about what has been happening over the past 14 years. British, US and other countries’ warplanes have been dropping tens of thousands of bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya for most of that time, and yet during that same period groups like ISIS have grown rather than shrunk, and terrorist atrocities around the world have increased, not decreased. So where is the logic that yet more bombing will somehow produce an effect that 14 years of bombing so far has not?
The rest of Benn’s magnificent piece of oratory focused on the evils of Daesh and a comparison between them and the fascists of the 1930s. “What we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated… we must confront this evil,” he said as he built up to his final crescendo. His unspoken assumption was that the only way to defeat ISIS is to bomb them, whereas an important argument against bombing rests on the historical fact that bombing is not what got rid of fascism in the 1940s and it is not likely to get rid of ISIS in the 2010s.
While the media are lapping up the great oratorical skills of Hilary Benn and even hailing him as the next leader of the Labour Party, his speech looks insubstantial and weak compared to the one his father gave in 1998, railing against the ineffectiveness of bombing in general and the importance of standing by the UN Charter in dealing with a situation which successive British governments have only made worse and his son now thinks will be solved by yet more bombing. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfXmpJRZPYI with a much younger Jeremy Corbyn listening behind him!)
France’s Minister of Defence, Jean-Yves Le Drian, wants Britain to join him in bombing Syria (“Britain, France Needs You in This Fight”, The Guardian, 27 Nov). It’s nice to be wanted. And it’s nice to know that Jean-Yves Le Drian and Michael Fallon are such good buddies that they have already met ten times this year alone.
Jean-Yves would like British forces to help France “defeat” ISIS with our spiffy Tornados, ‘second-to-none’ Brimstone missiles and top-of-the-range armed drones. He says “we have achieved a great deal together”, citing Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq as examples of this. I’m surprised he did not mention Suez as one of the great examples of British-French military collaboration. At least in Suez, the British and the French were not just tacked onto a US-dominated coalition but were out in front, bombing Egypt all on their own.
In Syria, on the other hand, the skies are already very crowded. US warplanes, along with those of at least ten other countries, have already conducted 2,700 bombing raids on ISIS positions in Syria and all the while ISIS continues to gain recruits, continues to gain territory, and continues to conduct terrorist activities around the world.
Perhaps with Britain joining in, the situation will suddenly reverse. But if Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq are anything to go by, all we will achieve is more death, more destruction and more chaos – the perfect breeding ground for yet more terrorism.
remembrance at the CO stone “for all the dead in all the wars”
Remembrance Day is forever remembered as the day in 1918 when World War One came to an end, at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. As far as WWI is concerned, I am grateful for only one thing: that the last of the veterans who fought in that war are no longer with us.
Soldiers, of course, cannot be blamed for the wars they fight in. We should grieve for every soldier who was killed or wounded in WWI, along with every widow and every orphan and every soldier who fought and survived and indeed every civilian who lived through and suffered from that war. Wars are terrible things and we do well to remember that and to keep alive the memory of that most terrible of wars.
But I am grateful that there are no more living veterans of World War One because that frees us all to speak the truth about that ‘Great War’; the ‘War to End All Wars’: it was fought for nothing. Millions upon millions of people dead, four years of unimaginable bloodshed and destruction, engulfing an entire continent…for nothing. Wars are very stupid things, and this war was the stupidest of them all: armies in holes and trenches, gunning each other down by the hundreds of thousands, day after day, in the vain attempt to gain a few feet of territory from each other. And after four years of carnage, everyone was more or less right back where they started.
Of course many, if not most, wars are just the same: a clash of egos or ideologies or national ‘pride’ that leaves a trail of death and destruction – and to what end? Normally the result is that the men of war finally sit down and negotiate some sort of agreement that ends the war – an agreement they could have just as easily sat down and negotiated without the war, were it not for the egos and ideologies and national pride that got in the way first…
That is why I am proud to call myself a ‘pacifist’. I believe war is a stupid and outmoded way of dealing with human affairs and the sooner we rid the world of the scourge of war the better. I am not an ‘absolute’ pacifist because I do not discount the possibility that wars are sometimes a necessary evil and that I might find myself supporting, or even fighting, in such a war. But World War One was not a necessary evil, it was just plain evil. And the sooner we, collectively, acknowledge that fact and own up to the consequences of acknowledging that fact, the better.
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The above was written in 2012 for Remembrance Day and I still stand by every word of it. However what I then wrote about WWII at that time I have now decided was wrong. I tried to square the circle and argue that although WWI was an utterly stupid war fought for no justifiable reason, WWII was on the other hand a ‘just’ and necessary war against the evil of Fascism. Many people of course still hold that view, but I do not, for the reasons below…
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What about World War Two then? Was WWII was a necessary evil? It was a war to free the world from Fascism, and Fascism, especially its Nazi branch, is an ideology of war: it glorifies war and can only survive by making war. It is an economy of war, a politics of war, an enculturation of war. For Hitler and his cronies, it was of course not just a war against the rest of Europe, it was a war against all Jews, against all Slavs, all gays, all disabled people and many other categories of their own people.
Let’s be quite clear, Hitler and Naziism could have been stopped without a world war. There were many occasions in the lead up to World War Two when the German people could have said no and they didn’t, and there is much to learn from that, not just for Germans but for all of us. But once the malignant tumour had taken control and its poison had begun to spread and blood was already being spilt: once the Nazi war machine was up and running, could anything have stopped it at that point, except war itself?
Of course there were opposition and underground movements all over Europe and even in Germany, secretly rescuing Jews, undermining Nazi rule and fighting back nonviolently. There is also much to learn from these experiences and we now know that many a dictator and seemingly impervious regime has fallen purely through the nonviolent resistance of the people without a shot being fired. We know it can be done!
But in the case of Nazi Germany, it was surely far too late by 1939 for any kind of nonviolent resistance to have stopped Hitler and his war machine. The ‘appeasement’ policy of Neville Chamberlain appeared to give him more encouragement rather than curtail his ambitions. To rid the world of this hateful ideology, the world needed to be willing to fight back at that point, fight and beat the Nazi war machine. But how?
Unfortunately, the very fact that Fascism is an ideology of war means that it feeds off war, it lives off war, it thrives from war. To declare war on Hitler was exactly what he wanted and needed to keep himself in power and in full control of the Nazi machinery. War keeps everyone in a state of constant fear and willing to do whatever they are told for the protection and preservation of their ‘nation’.
Let us be quite clear about this. Hitler and the Nazis were doing terrible things by 1939. Jews were being persecuted, attacked, beaten and killed on the streets, their shops and homes were being burnt, they were being rounded up and put into concentration camps. But there were no gas chambers at that point, no ovens, no mass murder on an industrial scale. Hitler’s so-called ‘Final Solution’ only took place within the context of total war and did not begin until the middle of 1941. It was not the precursor or pretext for that war. We will never know if it would have even been possible to carry out the mass murder of Jews in Europe had there not been a second world war.
But the Nazis were also not the only party to commit atrocities or deliberately target and kill large numbers of civilians during WWII. Estimates of the numbers killed by aerial bombing vary enormously. In the case of the Blitz, the numbers of civilians deliberated targeted and killed in London and other British cities range from 20,000 – 60,000. The numbers of civilians deliberately targeted and killed by British bombing of German cities are estimated at 200,000-600,000, or roughly ten times the number killed in Britain. Even before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, estimates of the number of Japanese civilians deliberately targeted and killed range from 240,000 to 900,000.
The truth is that WWII dehumanised all sides and made us all accomplices in mass murder and the commitment of crimes against humanity. It fuelled the Fascism and Naziism it was meant to destroy, provided a cover for the worst genocide in human history and may well have prolonged the Third Reich longer than it would otherwise have lasted. And it led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, mostly innocent civilians who played no part in the fighting. Were there alternatives to all that slaughter and destruction available at the time? Perhaps it is too much to expect that the leaders of the day could have had the foresight to come up with them, but we need to learn the lessons of history and recognise in hindsight that there are always alternatives if we have but the courage, tenacity and creativity to seek them out.
Of course it is pointless to blame the generation who lived through WWII and had to make those very difficult choices and decisions about whether to fight and how to respond to the nightmare unfolding around them. It is not our role to judge them or indeed to belittle the sacrifices which they made in the honest belief that they were doing the right thing. Let us honour the dead and grieve for all those who suffered from the horrors of WWII as well as those who suffered from WWI and all other wars. But let us not at the same time fall into the trap of accepting war – even WWII – as a ‘necessary evil’. It is time to move on from that, and to move on from war, full stop.
Newton’s Third Law: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” – applies to politics as well as to physics!
David Cameron seems to think that extending UK air strikes in Syria would eliminate both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad (“No 10 plan for Syria without Assad and Isis”, 10/9/15). Yet, since the US and other coalition forces re-commenced air strikes in both Iraq and Syria last year, more than 44,000 sorties have been flown over Iraq and Syria, attacking some 7,655 ISIS targets and killing at least 10,000 ISIS fighters.
While up to 1,000 ISIS fighters a month may be killed from bombs and drone attacks, they are at the same time gaining at least that number of recruits every month, not just from Syria and Iraq but from the UK, France, Belgium, Russia and many other countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They are now conducting military operations in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt and Russia as well as in Iraq and Syria. They show no sign of being ‘eliminated’. Why would the addition of a few bombers from the RAF make any difference to this situation?
In fact, more bombing is exactly what ISIS wants and needs to get more recruits and consolidate its power base. That is precisely why they engage in ritualistic beheadings and the killing of tourists. Their strategy is to goad western governments into responding militarily to their provocations because that is the oxygen they need to exist – and we obligingly give it to them.
Think again, David Cameron! What is needed in Syria is not more bombing but a serious commitment to find a negotiated solution with all the parties in the region, including Iran and Russia. Nothing short of that is going to stop the appalling loss of life, loss of homes, loss of livelihoods and the steady stream of refugees who have nowhere else to go.
We all like to think of ourselves in the best possible light. We like to occupy the moral high ground and rarely see others as being quite as high up there as us. On the contrary, “they” are always bad guys, never us; they are the ones motivated by greed or hatred or jealousy, but we ourselves are always doing things for the purest of motives. We can easily see the speck on our neighbor’s eye, but never the plank in our own eye. This basic human trait applies to groups of human beings as well as to individuals. Families, clans, tribes, nations, religions, and every conceivable sub-category of these are benign if we belong to them and suspect if we do not. We ascribe all sorts of malevolent intentions to those “other” groups while assuming our own group operates only with the best of intentions.
There are degrees to which individuals and groups cling to this basic orientation, and by no means do all people think this way. It is, however, one of the most noticeable and enduring features of human conflict that both sides become entrenched with enemy images of each other that are almost identical apart from the names and the groups being reversed. Indeed it is one of the basic principles of military training through the ages that before people can be trained to kill an enemy, they must first see them as the enemy—as evil, hateful, and sub-human beings who are incapable of good.
Finding solutions to intractable conflicts and building sustainable peace depends very much on breaking down those enemy images and getting people to see each other as human beings with similar hopes and fears and dreams and aspirations. When it comes to reducing violence and protecting civilians from the rampages of armed groups, however, it is the positive self-image rather than the negative enemy-image that we need to focus on.
The positive self-image that we all have of ourselves and of the groups to which we belong, to some extent or other, represents a glimmer of hope in situations that are often drowning in despair. Believing that they are essentially good and well-meaning and deserving to occupy the moral high ground provides an opportunity for all but the most depraved psychopaths to actually be good and well-meaning and to take up their rightful position on the moral high ground where they may have thought they already stood.
At its most basic, what this means is that parties to a conflict tend to be exceedingly careful not to get caught doing things that could put them—or their group or their cause—in a bad light. This could mean doing everything they can to prevent anyone from seeing or getting anywhere near what they are doing. It could also mean killing the people who do see things that could be damaging to their public image so that words or photos do not get out. But in most cases, it means being on their best behavior when others are looking, trying to do their more nefarious activities out of public view and then to deny that they had anything to do with it.
This pattern is repeated in conflict after conflict around the globe. When the Nicaraguan contra forces knew that American civilians were in Nicaraguan border villages, they would not attack those villages. When Israeli Defense Force soldiers see that European activists are at a Palestinian checkpoint, they harass Palestinians less and allow more of them to cross than when European activists are not there. When OSCE monitors rolled up to a village in Kosovo prior to the 1999 war there, Serb forces would pull back and Albanian refugees would return home. When ceasefire monitors from Nonviolent Peaceforce entered an area in Mindanao, Philippines, Filipino troops and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) guerrillas would both be on their best behavior.
This is, of course, also the case when the outside party looking in happens to be a military peacekeeping unit from the United Nations (UN). In most cases, the conflict parties do not want to be caught, whether it is UN troops or unarmed civilians who are watching. That can only be good for the civilians caught up in these conflicts and it can only be good for the long-term prospects for peace, for so long as this principle holds in most cases, having people around and visibly watching is in and of itself an effective deterrent to indiscriminate violence and all kinds of abuses against the civilian population.
It should be equally obvious that having people around, whether UN troops or unarmed civilians, is sadly not sufficient to stop all violence and abuse. It can help to lower the levels of violence and abuse. It can push the violence and abuse elsewhere, which protects some at the expense of others. It can also lead to attacks on the outsider observers themselves to get them out of view and to keep them away. When the violence and abuse continues, despite outside observers being present, the reaction by most UN and nongovernmental organization (NGO) agencies working to protect civilians in those situations has been to ratchet up the pressure on those responsible, usually through denunciations in the media and by the diplomatic community. The hope is that such denunciations could lead to international sanctions of various kinds, including possible indictments at the International Criminal Court. Such approaches have been effective in some cases, especially where it is a national government who is being pressured and that government is quite vulnerable at that moment in terms of trade arrangements, International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, or other forms of pressure that Western countries can turn on and off at will.
These kinds of pressures, however, work less well on guerrilla movements and on countries that are not so susceptible to Western economic pressures. And they also work less well on the overall psychology of the conflict, because they undermine the perception of a particular party as still being a “good guy” and once that is lost, they have nothing to lose by continuing to be perceived as the “bad guy.” This can then ironically embolden them to do “whatever it takes” to beat their opponents. In the case of Sri Lanka, for instance, it could be argued that by forcing the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa into pariah status over its handling of the war from 2007 onward, the international community lost whatever leverage it might have had over that government and enabled them to get away with atrocities that might never have happened had Rajapaksa remained more overtly accountable to the international community for his actions.
The same argument could be made about Israel. The more Israel is isolated and pushed into a corner, the less hesitation its government has in defying the norms of the international community to achieve its objectives, since it has nothing to lose in terms of its image at this point. That is not to say that preserving the self-image of a pariah state is the most important item on the agenda and should override other considerations. If, however, our primary objective was the protection of civilians and the reduction of overall violence, it must be said that the international strategy of denouncing and isolating Israel and other pariah states is not working, although it could be argued that the strategy may have been more successful in the case of South Africa.
What else, then, might work to lessen violence and abuse of civilians when mere presence of outside observers is not enough? If we return to our original observation that most people want to be seen in a positive light, it must be obvious that there is more to this than simply observing someone’s behavior and hoping thereby to deter them from doing something terrible. Why not actually engage with these people and help them turn their positive self- image into reality? In a surprisingly large number of cases, from Colombia to Kenya to Sri Lanka to the Philippines, governments and guerrilla movements known for their ruthlessness and atrocities have nonetheless been willing to compromise and change their behavior to protect civilian populations.
In track one and track two mediation, the aim is to get government and guerrilla leaders to compromise and yield on some of the most fundamental values and beliefs that they hold in order to find a peaceful solution to a protracted and violent conflict. In the case of negotiating with these same actors to reduce violence and protect civilians, the only things on the table are their strategies and tactics for waging the conflict, not the ultimate aims and objectives of the conflict itself. What is on offer for them is an enhanced public image in return for a change in their strategies or tactics, and few would not jump at that opportunity. It is a far easier ask than trying to resolve the whole conflict through mediation.
There is more at stake here than an enhanced public image and a claim to the high moral ground, which almost all governments and guerrilla movements desperately want. What is at stake, also, are their own souls. We not only think of ourselves in the best possible light. Most of us want to be good as well as look good, and that goes for guerrilla fighters, revolutionaries, terrorists, and gang leaders as well as for soldiers, generals, politicians, and arms dealers. Those of us who come from a peace or a human rights background can fall into the trap just as well as everyone else of thinking that these are categories of “bad people,” “abusers,” men with evil or malevolent intent, men who kill innocent civilians for the hell of it, men with blood on their hands, and so on.
It is a surprising discovery for most people who go into this kind of work to find out that army generals and guerrilla leaders, not to mention their rank and file soldiers, are just human beings like the rest of us. Sure, some of them are psychopaths. There are probably a small proportion of psychopaths, sadists, and depraved people in any given group of people, whether in the army, the police, the clergy, or the peace movement! Fortunately they are normally outnumbered, even in the killing business.
Once we ourselves get beyond the idea that these people are evil and start treating them as human beings, we actually discover that they are human; they just happen to be living in terrifying circumstances with the lives of other human beings in their hands. Not all people in those circumstances want to do the right thing, but a very large number of them do, and we can help them do it. This is where the traditional model of UN peacekeeping falls down utterly and completely. UN peacekeeping troops come from national armed forces and are trained and equipped to fight battles. They are neither trained nor equipped to work with armed groups on how they can achieve their objectives with less violence and without their activities impacting on the civilian population. Sometimes UN peacekeepers are able to get that kind of message across to generals and guerrilla leaders, but in those cases it is more than likely in spite of, rather than because of, being military personnel assigned to the UN.
Unarmed civilians, properly trained and equipped, can much more effectively talk to generals and guerrilla leaders, engage with their troops and civilian counterparts, provide assistance and support in developing alternative strategies for achieving political objectives, and teach them about human rights, international laws of war, and their duties and responsibilities to the civilian population. By engaging with armed groups in this way, we are not just helping them to be seen in a better light, we are actually helping them to behave in a better way. Ironically, it is sometimes the most ruthless fighters who would actually prefer to achieve their objectives with less bloodshed if they knew how to do it.
The first step on this road to less violence is reducing the impact of war on civilians. Civilians are most often in the front lines of attack because they willingly or unwillingly hide and protect armed groups in their midst. Many models have been developed in different contexts to more clearly separate the combatants from the non-combatants, including the Peace Communities of Colombia and the Weapon-Free Zones of South Sudan. So long as both sides respect these areas equally, they can work quite effectively. Much more can be done to develop this idea further and in contexts where the separation of combatants is more problematic, but the key is getting a joint commitment from both sides to respect civilian areas and to stay away from them.
Another way to keep armed groups away from civilian populations is to consistently monitor and report to the leadership of those groups what is going on with their own troops. Often guerrilla leaders, and sometimes even commanders in national armed forces, are not aware of what their troops are doing on the ground. As with many of the efforts undertaken in the field of “security sector reform,” helping to strengthen the chain of command within poorly managed armed groups can actually be of great benefit to the civilian population, since much of the abuse that takes place outside of normal combat is through lack of discipline and misbehavior by rank and file soldiers who, once again, think they can get away with things if no one is paying attention to them.
One of the most effective ways of ensuring that civilians are not being abused or mistreated by soldiers on the ground is to have built relationships of mutual trust all the way up the chain of command, up to and including political leaders who may carry some weight and influence with the military leaders. When a problem arises at a checkpoint or with a patrol in the jungle or wherever, the first port of call is with the local commander. If the local commander is unable or unwilling to resolve the problem, sometimes just suggesting that we will be going to his superior is enough. If not, going to his superior is the next step, and so on up the chain of command until someone, somewhere along the way, realizes that this is a breach that could have an impact on their public image and therefore is willing to step in and resolve the issue.
Sometimes the military structure itself is unwilling to intervene or sees it as a strategic necessity to continue on the path they are on. At that point, it may take someone outside the military or guerrilla structure to have an influence on them. Rarely is it the case that there is no one at all who can see that it is in their own best interest to change course. The aim is to find someone who does understand the import of what is happening and is able to influence others. Sometimes it may take a very convoluted chain of influence to reach the right person with the right message, but it is almost always possible.
It goes without saying that a strategy of influence based on being able to talk to anyone up and down the chain of command as well as to people on the periphery of a military or guerrilla structure requires an extraordinary amount of relationship building and trust. This, at the end of the day, is the crux of this approach. Without building trust and close relationships with people inside both or all sides of a conflict, there is little chance of influencing them when it comes to protecting civilians and developing less violent ways of carrying on their conflict.
Building relationships with people engaged in violent conflict requires not only that we give up the idea that these are “bad guys” with blood on their hands and therefore unworthy of our trust and respect; it actually requires us to want to actively help these people and want to work with them to do the right thing, whatever that may be. This is not something that can be undertaken lightly. Your own life, not to mention the lives of other civilians you are trying to protect, is at stake if you are not sincere as well as competent in handling these delicate relationships. But the prize for success is the saving of souls as well as lives, because we are helping people move away from killing and bloodshed and toward a better way of being that benefits everybody.
Copyright ⃝C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online
Tim Wallis has a Ph.D. in Peace Studies from Bradford University, UK. He was International Secretary of PBI (1991–1994), Editor of Peace News (1994–1997), Director of the National Peace Council (1997–2000), Director of Peaceworkers UK (2000–2006), Training Director of International Alert (2006–2008), Programme Director of Nonviolent Peaceforce (2008–2009), and Executive Director of Nonviolent Peaceforce (2010–2012).
Today is Armistice Day, or “Remembrance Day” in the UK: the day forever remembered as the day in 1918 when World War One came to an end, at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. As far as WWI is concerned, I am grateful for only one thing: that the last of the veterans who fought in that war are no longer with us.
Soldiers, of course, cannot be blamed for the wars they fight in. We should grieve for every soldier who was killed or wounded in WWI, along with every widow and every orphan and every soldier who fought and survived and indeed every civilian who lived through and suffered from that war. Wars are terrible things and we do well to remember that and to keep alive the memory of that most terrible of wars.
But I am grateful that there are no more living veterans of World War One because that frees us all to speak the truth about that ‘Great War’; the ‘War to End All Wars’: it was fought for nothing. Millions upon millions of people dead, four years of unimaginable bloodshed and destruction, engulfing an entire continent…for nothing. Wars are very stupid things, and this war was the stupidest of them all: armies in holes and trenches, gunning each other down by the hundreds of thousands, day after day, in the vain attempt to gain a few feet of territory from each other. And after four years of carnage, everyone was more or less right back where they started.
Of course many, if not most, wars are just the same: a clash of egos or ideologies or national ‘pride’ that leaves a trail of death and destruction – and to what end? Normally the result is that the men of war finally sit down and negotiate some sort of agreement that ends the war – an agreement they could have just as easily sat down and negotiated without the war, were it not for the egos and ideologies and national pride that got in the way first…
That is why I am proud to call myself a ‘pacifist’. I believe war is a stupid and outmoded way of dealing with human affairs and the sooner we rid the world of the scourge of war the better. I am not an ‘absolute’ pacifist because I do not discount the possibility that wars are sometimes forced upon us and that I might find myself supporting, or even fighting, in such a war. But World War One was not a necessary evil, it was just plain evil. And the sooner we, collectively, acknowledge that fact and own up to the consequences of acknowledging that fact, the better.
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But what about World War Two? Personally, I believe WWII was a necessary evil, and I am sincerely and wholeheartedly grateful to all the soldiers who fought in that war to free the world from Fascism. And I am equally grateful to all the civilians who also suffered enormously and for all the sacrifices they also made on behalf of that particular war. Because while I still believe war is stupid, in fact WWII was a war again the ideology of war itself.
Fascism, and especially its Nazi branch, is an ideology of war: it glorifies war and can only survive by making war. It is an economy of war, a politics of war, an enculturation of war. For Hitler and his cronies, it was of course not just a war against the rest of Europe, it was a war against all Jews, against all Slavs, all gays, all disabled people and many other categories of their own people.
Let’s be quite clear, Hitler and Naziism could have been stopped without a world war. There were many occasions in the lead up to World War Two when the German people could have said no and they didn’t, and there is much to learn from that, not just for Germans but for all of us. But once the malignant tumour had taken control and its poison had begun to spread and blood was already being spilt: once the Nazi war machine was up and running, what else could have stopped it at that point, except war itself?
It is a foolish and unnecessary trap that ‘absolute’ pacifists fall into all the time when they are asked: “Well, what about Hitler then? What would you have done, just let him carry on killing the Jews and conquering the whole of Europe, if not the world?” The right answer to that question can only be “of course not!” but it does not fall easily off the tongue of an ‘absolute’ pacifist because in this case it is hard to imagine what the alternative to war would be.
Of course there were opposition and underground movements all over Europe and even in Germany, secretly rescuing Jews, undermining Nazi rule and fighting back nonviolently. There is also much to learn from these experiences and we now know that many a dictator and seemingly impervious regime has fallen purely through the nonviolent resistance of the people without a shot being fired. We know it can be done!
But in the case of Nazi Germany, let’s be honest with ourselves: by 1939 it was already far too late for any kind of nonviolent resistance to have stopped Hitler and his war machine. The ‘appeasement’ policy of Neville Chamberlain is to be rightly condemned as an inadequate response to an ideology of war. To rid the world of this hateful ideology, the world had to fight back and it had to use that necessary evil to do it: war.
That is why I am grateful today to all the service men and women who fought against Fascism in World War Two. I am grateful I do not live under a fascist dictatorship. I am grateful that millions more Jews and other non-acceptables have not been murdered by a state machinery of death that was halted in its tracks in 1945. I am grateful that the Fascist ideology and machinery of war were conclusively defeated by the forces of democracy, tolerance and global solidarity. The world is a far better place because of the sacrifices of those who fought and died in WWII, so thank you, thank you, thank you!
My final plea to all those who survived WWII and are with us today as we remember the fallen: in your gratitude for those who saved us from Fascism, please do not allow a new kind of Fascism to take root in the world: a Fascism that starts with the belief that war is the answer to everything and must always be supported, no matter what…
Civilian Peacekeeping [entry in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, ed. Nigel Young, Oxford University Press,Oxford, 2009, pp. 302-305].
In the literature of peace research, the concept of “peacekeeping” describes one of three complementary strategies for tackling violent conflict (Galtung, 1969). Peacekeeping is aimed at reducing the overt violence of the parties involved, while peacemaking is aimed at bringing the parties together to reach an agreement, and peacebuilding is the attempt to tackle the root causes of the conflict. Over the years these terms have come into common usage but with a variety of meanings attached to them. Because of its association with the large-scale peacekeeping operations of the United Nations, peacekeeping is generally understood as a form of military intervention involving troops sent into a conflict area by the UN or some other official body to stop the fighting and restore order. International police forces rather than military forces are increasingly being used to “keep the peace” in places like Bosnia and Kosovo, but nonuniformed civilians have also been playing a critical role in reducing violence and creating a safe environment for peacemaking and peacebuilding activities to take place in such situations. “Civilian peacekeeping” is a generic term used to describe those activities.
Neither military nor civilian peacekeepers can “stop wars” just by standing in the middle of the battlefield and separating the two parties, like a teacher breaking up a fight on the school playground. Effective peacekeeping involves a range of complementary activities that build relationships with all sides, increase the confidence of those caught in the middle to stand up to the violence, strengthen existing mechanisms and structures for handling the violence, and ultimately use certain forms of pressure and “force” to prevent or deter further violence when all else fails. Military peacekeepers have an array of armaments and military structures behind them to provide that pressure of last resort, and, in certain circumstances, those may be the only tools that will have an effect on the perpetrators of violence. However, civilian peacekeepers also have an array of tools available to them for applying pressure, and in some cases these can be even more effective than military might.
Strategies for Reducing Violence. The types of pressure that civilians can apply to prevent or deter violence include moral pressures, political pressures, legal pressures, economic pressures, and social pressures. Moral pressures are sometimes based on the authority of significant local or international religious leaders but also on common humanitarian values that may be shared by the perpetrators of violence. Political pressures may involve exclusion from certain international bodies, damage to one’s international status or status within one’s own community, or missing out on other significant developments, such as elections, negotiations, or plebiscites. Legal pressures include the possibility of being tried and convicted for war crimes at the Hague, as well as the threat of imprisonment in one’s own country. Economic pressures include the threat of UN sanctions, withdrawal of economic support from diasporas and supporters abroad, collapse of tourist revenue, denial of certain trade rights or budget support, or foreign investment or development aid. Social pressures include ostracism and collapse of support from family, friends, and communities or peer pressures—positive social reinforcements to engage in less violent activities, etc.
These pressures can be far more significant than is readily apparent in a society dominated by the use of military force and punitive sanctions to solve intractable problems. There is ample evidence that such pressures can affect the behavior of individual armed actors as well as the decisions and strategies taken by commanders and political leaders in war situations. The effectiveness of civilian peacekeeping to actually reduce levels of violence, however, may lie less in the forms of pressure that can be directly applied to the situation than in the implied combination of threats represented simply by the presence of international civilians in a potentially violent situation. Perpetrators of violence, atrocities, or human rights abuses generally do not want to be seen or caught in the act or identified, for any or all of the reasons listed above. This concept of a “physical presence which can deter violence and change behavior” underlies military peacekeeping as well and explains why the impact of UN troops has little to do with the quality of their firepower and much more to do with the fact that they fly UN flags and wear blue helmets and are seen as outsiders representing the international community.
For example, during the Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s, attacks on border villages would cease whenever a delegation of citizens from the United States was in the area. At Israeli checkpoints on the West Bank, treatment of Palestinians has been markedly more civilized when journalists or foreign peace activists have been present. Such responses cannot, of course, be guaranteed, but these examples illustrate the power civilians may have in such situations just by “being there” and representing the outside world.
Protective accompaniment is a more specific peacekeeping tool developed by Peace Brigades International in the 1980s and now used by a number of other organizations working in Latin America and other parts of the world. This involves being with individuals (human rights activists, for example) or groups who are under threat of violent attack for up to twenty-four hours a day. It relies upon the various forms of pressure described above to dissuade the attackers from carrying out their threat. This has proved highly effective in those countries where it has been tried, although it can also be dangerous to assume it will work in situations where the perpetrators of violence are not so susceptible to such pressures or may even find the internationals a more attractive target than the locals they are accompanying.
Official Civilian Peacekeeping. The UN employs growing numbers of civilians (including UN volunteers) on its “multidimensional” peacekeeping operations, and they are sometimes described as civilian peacekeepers, although they include support staff, translators, drivers, and logistics people as well as protection officers, human rights officers, ceasefire monitors, and others working in a more peacekeeping-related capacity. The UN remains firmly wedded to the military component of its peace operations, however, despite the mounting costs and debatable effectiveness of deploying uniformed troops in certain situations.
Smaller-scale observer missions and ceasefire monitoring teams have always been largely unarmed and have included not just retired military officers but other civilians coming from a more diplomatic background. Since international observer missions have no military forces to back them up, the deterrent value of such missions (as well as of the more classical peacekeeping operations that did not have a mandate to use force) comes very simply from the fact that they are internationals and have some authority through their association with the UN (or some other authority), rather than from the fact that they are military per se or have military muscle behind them to force the parties to comply when persuasion fails. In such situations it is clear that (nonuniformed) civilians can play just as valuable a role as do serving military officers or police.
Although the European Union (EU) has also deployed military peacekeepers in support of UN and African Union (AU) missions, its own peace operations to date have been predominantly civilian ones. These have been composed largely of police but have also included civilian observers, border monitors, and other civilian personnel with expertise in areas such as rule of law, human rights, disarmament, democratization, and security sector reform. “Civilian crisis management” is the overarching term being increasingly used in EU parlance to describe these activities, but a case can be made to include them within the concept of civilian peacekeeping since they involve efforts to reduce violence, reestablish the rule of law and create (or re-create) mechanisms for managing ongoing conflict less violently.
The same rationale can be applied to activities described as “postconflict stabilization” by the U.S. State Department and increasingly by governments in Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. These involve the recruitment, training, and deployment of civilian personnel to “backstop” ongoing military operations such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. While those military operations can be described as “peacekeeping” only in the broadest sense of the term, the civilian components of those missions, including, for instance, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, are more directly engaged in violence prevention and reduction than in fighting the ongoing “war on terror,” even if the rationale for their deployment is to provide an “exit strategy” for eventual withdrawal of military forces.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) currently has more than 1,000 international field staff and 2,000 local staff on eighteen purely civilian missions (including police) throughout Eastern Europe and central Asia. These are engaged in monitoring and promotion of human rights, elections, democratization and rule of law as well as basic monitoring of violence, borders and military activity. The largest civilian peacekeeping operation to date was the OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission, which was responsible for monitoring the withdrawal of Serbian troops and the return of Kosovan refugees to their homes in 1998–99. More than 1,200 civilian verifiers from across Europe and North America were involved in that mission before it was aborted by the NATO bombing campaign.
Other civilian missions have been established on an ad hoc basis: for instance, the Bougainville Peace Monitoring Group, the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission; the International Monitoring Team in Mindanao, and the Aceh Monitoring Mission—all official civilian missions, although not directly under the auspices of the United Nations.
Civilian Peacekeeping by Civil Society. There has been a proliferation of civil society organizations engaged in peacekeeping activities since the launch of Peace Brigades International (PBI) in 1981. Growing out of earlier projects, it was the pioneering work of PBI in Guatemala during the early 1980s that demonstrated how effective this work could be and set the scene for other organizations to follow. During the 1980s and 1990s, Witness for Peace, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Balkan Peace Team, Cry for Justice (in Haiti) and the International Service for Peace in Chiapas (SIPAZ) brought larger and larger numbers of Europeans and North Americans face to face with the realities of conflict and began to have a significant impact on the ability of local groups to function and organize in those regions. In 1994, the Ecumenical Monitoring Programme for South Africa (EMPSA) brought more than 400 people to South Africa to help monitor and prevent violence before and during the first postapartheid elections in that country.
Since the second Palestinian intifada began in 2001, many hundreds of people have gone to be part of the international presence there through organizations such as the International Solidarity Movement, Grassroots Initiative for the Protection of the Palestinians (GIPP), United Civilians for Peace, the Women’s International Peace Service for Palestine, and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI).
The most comprehensive attempt to evaluate best practice and lessons learned in civilian peacekeeping to date was commissioned by Peaceworkers (USA) in 1999. This two-year research project looked at mandates, strategies, infrastructure, field relationships, personnel issues, training, recruitment, funding, and political support behind the civilian peacekeeping efforts of fifty-seven civil society initiatives between 1914 and 2001. It also looked at a number of larger-scale civilian or predominantly civilian missions of the UN, OSCE, and other official bodies.
Out of this research effort grew a global initiative of over ninety organizations from forty-seven countries to build the capacity for larger-scale civilian peacekeeping interventions by civil society. The Nonviolent Peaceforce was officially launched in India in 2002 and is now running field projects in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, with further developments on the way.
The field of civilian peacekeeping is still young, and the many governmental and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in this work do not yet see themselves as part of a common field with a common identity and vocabulary. Some NGOs describe their work as “unarmed bodyguards” or “human shields,” while others talk about “witnessing,” being “monitors,” or providing a “presence.” Still others talk about “civilian protection,” “accompaniment,” or “confidence building.” Since they are all engaged in attempts to stop or deter violence, however, we may be justified in using the generic “civilian peacekeeping” term to describe them.
Bibliography
Galtung, Johan. “Conflict as a Way of Life” in Hugo Freeman (ed) Progress in Mental Health. London: Churchill, 1969.
Mahony, Liam. Proactive Presence: Field Strategies for Civilian Protection. Geneva: Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, 2006.
Mahony, Liam, and Luis Enrique Eguren. Unarmed Bodyguards: International Accompaniment for the Protection of Human Rights. West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1997.
Schirch, Lisa. Civilian Peacekeeping: Preventing Violence and Making Space for Democracy. Uppsala, Sweden: Life & Peace Institute, 2006.
Schweitzer, Christine, Donna Howard, Mareike Junge, Corey Levine, Carl Stieren and Tim Wallis, Nonviolent Peaceforce Feasibility Study. St. Paul, Minn.: Nonviolent Peaceforce, 2001.
Wallis, Tim, and Claudia Samayoa. “Civilian Peacekeepers: Creating a Safe Environment for Peacebuilding.” In People Building Peace II. Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 2004.
Weber, Thomas, and Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan. Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders: A Recurrent Vision. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2000.
UN ‘blue helmets’ have been deployed since the 1950s to ‘keep the peace’ in places like Cyprus, Lebanon, Liberia, Guatemala… How successful they have been at keeping the peace is disputable. What is beyond dispute is that the use of military forces for ‘peacekeeping’, ‘peace’ operations and supposedly ‘humanitarian’ purposes in general has become the main or even sole justification in modern society for maintaining such forces and for deploying them to other countries, even in a war-fighting capacity. Of course wars are fought for all kinds of political and economic reasons and rarely for a truly ‘humanitarian’ purpose. Nevertheless governments must be able to justify the use of public money and the loss of human lives in terms that are acceptable to the general public. Tony Blair could not have sent UK troops to Kosovo or even to Sierra Leone without justifying these interventions as ‘humanitarian’ ones. Although the war in Afghanistan was generally accepted as a punitive response to 9/11, even this was justified at the time in terms of the need to ‘rescue’ the Afghani people from the evils of the Taliban – just as the Iraq War was needed to ‘rescue’ the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, as well as to rescue us from those famous weapons of mass destruction.
If we were to give the British people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not so stupid or gullible as to swallow wholesale every piece of propaganda they get from the government, then we would be obliged to accept that so long as there does not appear to be any better way of dealing with natural and man-made disasters than to send in the army from time to time, they will continue to support and pay for standing military forces in order to be able to do just that. That indeed is the fundamental paradox facing UK and European pacifists in the 21st century – armies are increasingly justified as an essential tool for building and maintaining peace in the world! And you are in favour of world peace, aren’t you??!
Few pacifists may be willing to admit that in some cases, UK and other military forces have been a force for peace. They do on occasion stop other people from shooting each other and therefore occasionally save lives rather than destroy them. But of course in places like Afghanistan and Iraq the pretence of ‘peacekeeping’ has been largely abandoned and the armed forces are just doing what they do best, which is to fight wars and kill people – and in the process create more enemies for the future and put all our lives in more danger than they were before. Even when military forces are deployed with a strict peacekeeping mandate, as in the case of Somalia in the early 90s, their presence can still exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it, since military forces by their very nature are protagonists in a war environment, with military assets that other protagonists would like to have or at least to neutralise. They are also, by their very nature, set apart from civilian populations and unable to fully integrate with them except by taking off their weapons and uniforms and becoming civilians themselves.
For these and many other reasons (including above all, cost), even the most militaristic of governments is looking for alternatives to the deployment of military forces to each and every conflict zone in the word today. The sending of police forces rather than military forces is becoming more popular with the EU, for instance. These police forces still on the whole carry weapons, but there is a recognition that having police patrol the streets of Kosovo, for instance, is much more likely to lead to a return to normal life and to the establishment of democratic institutions than having troops still patrolling the streets a full nine years after the war has ended.
Getting blue (police) uniforms onto the streets of post-conflict countries like Kosovo is surely a step forward from sending in the tanks and blue helmets. But not only are these police still armed, they also have little or no training or background in how to handle real conflict situations. They are trained to deal with criminal behaviour and crowds. Police crowd control techniques may be useful in some cases for avoiding violence, but in other cases it can clearly fuel it, as was the case a few years ago when violence erupted in northern Kosovo largely through a mishandling of the situation by the international police. In fact, police forces have so far proved less effective than military forces in these situations, largely because their ability to prevent and deter violent behaviour depends ultimately on the use of force and unlike the military they don’t actually have any.
A true alternative to military peacekeeping must therefore rely on forms of pressure and influence other than the use of force. Foreign journalists and diplomats have known for years that it’s not just the stories they send back home that can have an impact. Just by being there, being visible and being foreign, they can have a very direct impact on the behaviour of soldiers and politicians in wartime situations and this impact can reduce violence and save lives. Col. Bob Stewart describes a time when he was commanding NATO troops in Bosnia and a column of Nato tanks was being held up at a Serbian checkpoint and not let through. He could have opened fire on the checkpoint, killed all the Serb soldiers and forced his way through the checkpoint, but the repercussions of that could have resulted in even more civilian casualties, with reprisals against the local population, round-ups, burning of houses, maybe even massacres. Instead he brought out the most powerful weapon he had at his disposal – the BBC! He sent them to the front of the tanks to start filming and interviewing the Serb soldiers. Within minutes, the tanks were through the checkpoint without a shot being fired.
In 1983, at the height of the US-sponsored Contra War in Nicaragua, small groups of Americans were going down to Nicaragua to see for themselves what was going on so they could go home and tell their fellow church-goers how their tax dollars were being spent. But time and again, they would go to a village that was being attacked by the Contras only to find that when they got there the attacks would stop. This led to the realisation that if a constant stream of Americans were pouring into these villages on a regular basis there would be no more Contra War! Over the next several years more than 20,000 people did just that and the ability of the Reagan administration to covertly overthrow the Sandinistas through the Contras was demonstrably curtailed.
No organisation has invested as much into this very simple concept as Peace Brigades International. Beginning also in the early 1980s, PBI volunteers discovered in Guatemala that by being present, being visible and being foreign they could actually stop death threats from being carried out against peace and human rights activists there. In El Salvador, where industrial disputes routinely resulted in the assassination or disappearance of trade union leaders, PBI volunteers were suddenly witnessing strikes, pickets and demonstrations that would end successfully without a single casualty. In over 25 years of providing this kind of protection in some of the most violent countries on the planet, not a single PBI volunteer has been killed – and even more strikingly, nor has a single person they have been accompanying.
There is, of course, much more to this than meets the eye. International presence and protective accompaniment does not always save lives or reduce violence. Other factors must also be in place and a lot of work must go on behind the scenes to back up the physical presence on the ground. Nevertheless, the fact that this presence can have any effect at all is remarkable and ground-breaking. Since the early days of PBI and Witness for Peace in Central America, the technique has been tried out by many other organisations in many other parts of the world, nowhere more so than in the Middle East, where dozens of organisations are deploying internationals to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli settlers and the Israeli Defence Forces. These organisations range from the World Council of Churches, with its Ecumenical Accompaniment Project for Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), with its olive-picking brigades and other efforts to get internationals to physically obstruct Israeli activities on the West Bank. The Women’s International Peace Service for Palestine gets women from other parts of the world to live and work in Palestinian homes and communities as a means of providing protection. Grassroots Protection of the Palestinian People organises summer camps and other events to get as many internationals into the West Bank as possible on a regular and ongoing basis.
In Palestine – and in Iraq – people have been killed doing this kind of work. And it clearly has not stopped the violence in these places. Yet these experiences are also demonstrating what is possible and we are all learning from them – from the successes as well as from the mistakes. The deployment of unarmed civilians from around the world into situations of violent conflict can protect people, save lives and reduce the incidence of violence. We are still at the very beginning of understanding what this discovery really means and how to use it. Perhaps it could transform the way people think about violent conflicts and how to handle them in the future. Perhaps instead of sending in the blue helmets or the blue uniforms next time violence erupts in Kosovo or Georgia or some other place, there will be a clamour for sending in the ‘blue shirts’ instead!
If pacifists really want to abolish the military and all that goes with it, we must first abolish the last remaining justification for it in the eyes of the general public. We must make unarmed civilian peacekeeping a viable option and one which can genuinely respond to humanitarian emergencies, war, genocide and ethnic cleansing. We still have a long way to go but the seeds of that possibility are there. The Nonviolent Peaceforce is the latest attempt to turn that possibility into a full-scale reality. It was launched in 2002 as an initiative of 75 peace organisations from over 30 countries to try to move the concept of unarmed civilian peacekeeping onto a new level, through advocacy at the UN level and a pooling of resources so as to deploy larger-scale international missions than any of the existing organisations have so far been able to deploy. Its first project in Sri Lanka currently has over 60 people deployed, both nationals as well as internationals from the UK, US, Germany, Egypt, Brazil, Japan, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, Nepal, Canada, Colombia, India, Philippines, Nigeria. Its impact is still quite small but the potential is there. It needs your support!
