Civilians Can Prevent Civil Wars
OneWorld Netherlands journalist Nico Hammelburg recently spoke with Paul van Tongeren, founder and director of the European Center for Conflict Prevention (ECCP) in the Netherlands.
Van Tongeren worked for a Dutch development organization when several big civil wars broke out in the nineties—in the Balkans, in Somalia, and in Rwanda. He saw how the work to improve the situation in these countries went up in smoke and wondered why the international community didn’t see these conflicts coming. Part of the problem, he felt, was a lack of understanding of the conflict. Especially in the nineties, development workers that traveled to countries like Somalia and Rwanda didn’t really understand the conflicts in these places, said Van Tongeren. Who is involved in the conflict? What is the dynamic? Who is working for peace? Is the conflict about water, land, resources, or power? Is it more about ethnicity, or religious differences? Or it is about a president—like Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Lukashenko in Belarus—that doesn’t want to hand over power? Van Tongeren believes these questions need to be answered and that there needs be more awareness of the often complicated background of conflicts. “If we look at Kenya in the days of president Arap Moi,” explains Van Tongeren, “just before each election, the government would start to foment conflicts.” The government led an orchestrated campaign to highlight differences between tribes, or people who own or rent land—as is also happening in Zimbabwe today. False rumor spreads and certain people are paid to make trouble. In Kenya, said Van Tongeren, the result was that some slums were set on fire, thousands of people were scared away, and many were killed. What will make a difference in these situations is supporting grassroots organizations working for peace, believes Van Tongeren. In Kenya, for example, over 800 villages started local peace groups. The Council of Churches brought women, elderly people, and teachers together in hundreds of villages and taught them how to analyze their situation. People didn’t realize that they were consistently the victims of false rumors and they were advised to check the facts. If there were murders, community leaders were advised to respond immediately—to stop people from taking revenge and put the accused on trial. While there was still violence following the next elections, it was not in the areas where the peace groups were active. “Often it is the religious leaders who lead the action. Some call for violent battle, but many others work for reconciliation. Very often women’s organizations play an important role,” added Van Tongeren. “In Liberia, for example, the civil war lasted for years and years and the negotiations led to nothing. The women had had enough. Wearing white clothes, they sat down in front of the conference center where the peace talks were being held. After forming a human chain around the building, they were invited to the table. A peace deal was reached. These were normal women who had no training for peace-building, but they were involved because their children or husbands had been killed.” It is grassroots initiatives like these that Van Tongeren’s organization tries to support. Founding the ECCP in 1997, Van Tongeren has since seen many examples of people working for peace and these are detailed in two volumes of People Building Peace. Van Tongeren also believes that everyone can develop conflict prevention skills. He notes that there is more attention to this topic in the United States than in Europe. In U.S. schools students learn about peer mediation, says Van Tongeren. “Those are lessons for life; how do you deal with conflict within your family or in your work?” Seeing this work motivated Van Tongeren to create a European institute devoted to conflict prevention. Besides all of the above work, the ECCP is also lobbying for more attention to be paid to conflict prevention and peace building at the United Nations. Van Tongeren himself was instrumental in helping to organize a conference about the role of civil society in peace building, which was held in July 2005 at the United Nations. This article was translated from the original Dutch by OneWorld Netherlands editor Wiebke Pittlik |
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