Peace Does Not Trickle Down from the Top

May 25th, 2008

Common wisdom is that getting a settlement among high level negotiators at a bargaining table is the major difficulty in achieving peace. In reality, the biggest problem is often not across the table, but behind it. Peace does not “trickle down” from above. It has to be seeded broadly and actively cultivated throughout a society from near the beginning of the transition.

One reason for the success of the South Africa talks is that the politicians who designed them were quicker than most to learn this. A bitter season of killings threatened the entire process less than a year after talks had started in 1990. After several months of fumbling, South African leaders in the major parties responded by establishing structures and strategies at local, regional, and national levels to address the threats to peace that now faced every level of the bitterly divided country. They did this while the outcome of top-level talks still hung in a dicey balance, well before agreements were reached about the key issues driving the conflict.

Things had started, as they usually do, with a top-down focus. In February, 1990 President de Klerk shocked the world by releasing Nelson Mandela and unbanning his party, the African National Congress. Hopes for peace rose in April that year when the parties gathered for the first major round of talks. And hopes rose even higher in the following months when the parties agreed on a set of principles to guide the talks.

But the prospect of major change unleashes vast pent-up energies in a society. Human emotions, good and bad, are escalated. People desperate for change press hopefully forward with their dreams. Those who fear change or a repeat of past traumas raise shrill voices of warning. Those hungry for power grab what they can.

At the same time, the institutions and social processes that normally keep things under control are weakening. When people believe new structures are at hand, they take the old structures less seriously. In business, education, health care, transportation, human services, courts, policing, local and regional politics, people recognize that whatever was done in the past will change. Those managing these sectors postpone decisive action while they wait to see where things are headed. Governance and social control diminish.

Into this gap between raised hopes and reduced social order step a host of opportunists. Many are economically motivated. In South Africa transportation quickly became a warzone as poorly regulated local-level taxi owners competed for routes and customers. Business people, both legitimate and criminal, were quick to recognize new opportunities for sales and services. Real estate speculators spread rumors to drive prices in their favor.

Political groups of every stripe raised their rhetoric in an effort to win support for their favored formulas. Radicals stepped up their activities. Incidences of threats, intimidation and violence increased. By early 1991, South Africans picked up newspapers at the end of many weekends to frightening news: multiple deaths in faction fighting in Cape Town, dozens killed in raids by local level mobs run by political goons in Natal province, white farmers killed in rural areas by intruders unknown; scores killed and wounded throughout the country in violence of unclear origins; police moving in armored vehicles against stone throwers, hundreds of demonstrators tear-gassed, attacked by dogs, and targeted with rubber bullets by police. It seemed the entire country could go up in flames while politicians sat in endless talks. I was shocked one Friday evening to realize that every bridge I passed en route to a friend’s house was guarded by heavily armed troops. “It’s war!” I thought.

Something had to be done. The white government tried, convening a big “peace conference” to discuss how to deal with the violence. But they botched it by unilaterally announcing the event as a government initiative, without consulting the other parties. No black leader could stay credible in his own community by participating in a government-sponsored “peace conference”. Only white government reps and a few blacks attended.

Violence and panic grew. The politicians clearly were not going to deliver. In this time a handful of black and white business and religious leaders got together and agreed on a strategy: They would convene a conference on the violence on their own joint auspices and invite the politicians to attend. The group was well-balanced, black and white. They knew and trusted each other. They had good connections to key political leaders. No one group would gain power or credibility by having the conference convened in their name. Politicians of all backgrounds accepted their invitation to a second conference held in June, 1991.

The National Peace Accord that resulted established the largest structure ever created in support of a peace process. A dozen Regional Committees were formed, made up of respected black and white leaders. A National Peace Committee made up of senior national politicians oversaw the Regional Committees. Dozens of Local Peace Committees were set up in hot areas. More than two thousand training workshops were held, most several days in length, to train people in skills for monitoring violence, negotiation, conflict analysis, and mediation. Hundreds of salaried staff and a far larger number of volunteers served as monitors for marches and demonstrations, as advocates on behalf of local community needs, as mediators to defuse local tension points, and as motivators for peace within their own communities. A media section conducted a media campaign advocating peace. Programs in schools told stories of peace and trained youngsters in conflict resolution.

Key to the success of the National Peace Accord was that it immediately and directly addressed daily grievances that were outrageous to South African blacks. The conduct of South African security forces had for years been brutal. Even while peace talks were going on, white police were beating up and often killing black demonstrators. The Peace Accord included a first for the country: a Code of Conduct for the police and a process and structure jointly controlled by both sides to deal with alleged abuses. Community development funds also began to flow through the National Peace Accord to needy black communities.

The National Peace Accord structure had many flaws, but it enabled South Africans to maintain hope across long months of tough negotiations.[i] Police conduct, which had daily outraged and endangered blacks, improved. On dozen of occasions, confrontations that threatened large-scale violence were defused or diverted. The energies and goodwill of a vast network of supporters of peace were harnessed to maintain calm while talks were going on at the top. Equally important, South Africans at all levels had access to the peace process. In spite of traumatizing events that included the assassination by a white racist of Mandela’s key lieutenant and numerous bloody massacres, enough people were able to maintain hope in the possibility of peace that the talks always got back on track.

As director of training of a conflict resolution organization, I sat with a number of other civil society advisors on the training committee of that National Peace Accord structure. Half the committee were high-level politicians also deeply involved as negotiators in the national talks. I often wondered how they found time to meet several times a month over details of training conferences on negotiation and violence monitoring. But there they were. Key political leaders on both sides saw that they could not singlehandedly drive the country to peace. They made constant effort to root the process downwards and immediately address things that drove people to hopelessness. Though the politicians did the high level talking, they took measures to bring certain practical results to all levels of the nation. Not next year, this month. This allowed hope and momentum for change to grow and grow.

What worked in South Africa will not all work elsewhere. But as we behold a rapidly sinking Israeli/Palestinian peace process, I wonder:

Whether political leaders on both sides now see the limits of their present “trickle down peace” approach and recognize that keeping a peace process alive requires providing immediate results to the people of both sides in at least a few carefully selected ways?
Whether politicians on both sides would be open to rooting the peace process more deeply in the societies with additional layers of civil society leaders mandated to help address immediate needs on an urgent basis?
Whether civil society leaders here would be willing to make the commitments that South African ones did to actively support the faltering peace process
Whether leaders on both sides recognize how the bitter divisions in the other side damage the prospects for peace for everyone, and might be open to conversations about ways to reduce these internal divisions? This is a task which a mutual understanding would greatly assist.
Whether the international community, which generously funded South Africa’s National Peace Accord after the South Africans created it, might step forward once again to support such a structure if one were created here?

Copyright Ron Kraybill 2008. May be reproduced, but web versions must point to the author’s blog at www.RiverhouseEpress/WordPress.
Ron Kraybill, PhD, was Training Advisor to the South African National Peace Accord 1993-95. A professor of peacebuilding and conflict transformation and a consultant to the UN, he has trained leaders at local, national and regional levels in skills of negotiation, conflict analysis and peacebuilding in over twenty countries, including South Africa, Ireland, Sri Lanka, Liberia, and Guyana. Presently he is based in Jerusalem as Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Diplomacy for the American Friends Service Committee.

[i] For more information on the South African Peace Accord, see reflections by Peter Gastrow, a former MP and one of the negotiators, at http://www.gppac.net/documents/pbp/part1/8_joint_.htm Find substantial parts of the text of the Accord at http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/public-participation/southafrica-national-accord.php

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Peace Behind the Table – Managing a Divide that Counts

May 25th, 2008

Here is a poorly recognized reality of peace processes: the most difficult challenge often proves to be the divisions that inevitably emerge among colleagues behind the table, rather than between enemies across the table. During the years of the South African peace talks, by far the greatest number of lives – an estimated ten thousand - were lost in violence between rival black factions rather than between blacks and whites. In the Middle East, Egyptian radicals assassinated Anwar Sadat and attempted to kill Nasser before him, an Israeli extremist murdered Yitzhak Rabin, elements from Hamas threaten Mahmoud Abbas, etc.

Designers of peace processes largely overlook this reality. The media, the public, and the parties themselves focus on cross-table dynamics, assuming, it seems, that internal divisions can be dealt with later. But things rarely work that way. Internal divisions ignored or suppressed have a way of getting worse with time.

The most celebrated peace process in recent memory is South Africa. Part of Nelson Mandela’s gift to his nation was a remarkable ability to rise above divisions that threatened the unity of South African blacks, a tension so vast it nearly torpedoed the entire peace process. A powerful rival to Mandela’s leadership arose in the person of Gatsha Buthelezi, who begin his career as a charismatic co-activist with Mandela in the African National Congress. In the 1970s, Buthelezi formed his own Zulu-centric political party with affiliated paramilitary units and in 1980 he broke with the ANC over strategy. His paramilitaries clashed repeatedly with militants in the ANC, particularly in the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1994. An estimated ten thousand died in these clashes and many bitter words were publicly exchanged.

Though his own grassroots were crying for blood, Mandela pulled out all stops to bring Buthelezi and his party into the upcoming election. In March, 1994, he traveled to meet Buthelezi on his home turf. “I will go down on my knees,” he said in a public speech, “to beg those who want to drag our country into bloodshed and to persuade them not to do so.” Offers were made to suspend deadlines for party registration, to transfer land to Buthelezi’s tribe, and to give special recognition to his tribal king. One week before the election, Buthelezi finally agreed to register, and his party’s name was appended with stickers to already printed ballots, averting what was widely feared would be a bloodbath.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, upon winning the presidency, Mandela appointed Buthelezi to his cabinet as Minister of Home Affairs. In the following years, on two occasions, when he left the country on travels abroad, Mandela named Buthelezi as interim president. With no enemy to rail against, Buthelezi’s resistance melted and the militancy of his ethnic political base faded.

The reality of internal differences in one group presents important choices for leaders of an opposing group. Leaders commonly seek strategies that activate and amplify internal differences in their opponent’s group. The white government of South Africa employed such a strategy of “divide and conquer”, actively courting Buthelezi with special privileges, access to special funding and police training while imprisoning opposition ANC leaders. But whites were in the end terrified by the result: a rapidly escalating civil war among hundreds of thousands of hostile neighbors that threatened at any moment to engulf whole regions. Were it not for the wisdom and courage of Mandela in pulling this ticking bomb from the bonfires of internal resentments, South Africa would surely be a different place today. No person, white or black, would have been immune from the chaos and instability of civil war that nearly erupted.

Perhaps one reason why Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, the enlightened white president who became his opposite in negotiations, worked so hard to retain and stabilize Buthelezi’s group as a minority black party was that South Africa had just recently come through years of unionization struggle. Company executives feared and fought unions in the beginning, seeing them as a threat to profits. But ten years later, management openly sang a different tune. “We discovered that a strong union was one of the best things that ever happened to our company,” said an executive in 1990. “We used to have chaos, frequent wildcat strikes, and we had to deal with all kinds of workers groups. After the union came in, things stabilized. We had one set of negotiators to deal with, and once we agreed on a settlement, they made it their responsibility to keep their members in line.”

South Africa’s political talks were far from easy or steady. South Africans lived through terrifying moments including the assassination of one of Mandela’s key lieutenants by a white man, collapses and a coup in the provinces, numerous massacres, and grave tactical errors on both sides. But the process transformed in the end, in part because key leaders responded wisely to the challenge of managing internal divisions. Mandela exercised astonishing generosity in response to his own internal opposition, but no one hero can save a nation. Black and white leaders came to see that their own futures depended on their opponents’ ability to manage internal tensions wisely. Recognizing that stability and the capacity to implement agreements benefit from cohesiveness within each party, leaders cooperated to make it possible for each other to bridge internal divides.

I observed the South African peace process from the inside as training advisor for several years to the South African National Peace Accord, and I’ve spent the last 25 years in peace initiatives in Ireland, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and elsewhere. With few exceptions, these experiences suggest that it is the management of internal divides that makes or breaks peace on the long-term. I hope that Israelis, Palestinians, and their many friends abroad awaken to this reality in the months ahead.

Copyright 2008 by author. Ron Kraybill, PhD, lived in South Africa 1989-1995 and worked as a conflict resolution specialist there, serving as Training Advisor to the South African National Peace Accord. A professor of peacebuilding in the U.S and a consultant to the UN, he has trained leaders in skills of negotiation, mediation, conflict analysis and peacebuilding in over twenty countries. He now resides in Jerusalem as Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Diplomacy for the American Friends Service Committee. He can be reached at RKraybill@AFSC.org

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More Dangerous than Terrorists

January 13th, 2008

There’s a lot of fear these days about terrorists. George Bush got a very warm welcome in Israel recently because people here worry a lot about terrorists. They appreciate a man who worries as much they do.

I’ve lived some big pieces of my life in “dangerous places”. In the early 90s, I spent six years in South Africa during the political transition and visited the townships regularly. Secret police rifled my desk one night and stole my journal. I never got shot at, but once I led a workshop on conflict resolution for a group of radicals whose motto was “One Settler One Bullet”. Seriously. Since I looked a lot like a settler, it started out with a lot of frosty questions about who I was, who I worked for, and what I thought about Ronald Reagan, but by the end, they were enthusiastic and ready for more.

Presently I live in Jerusalem and spend a fair bit of time in Ramallah, which is a very dangerous place according to people in my neighborhood. I also visit sometimes in the south of Israel, where Hamas militants send rockets from Gaza. A few weeks ago a Qassam landed in the living room of the home of friends we had visited a month or two earlier. I guess I’ve seen the ugly face of danger often enough that I ought to recognize it when it comes around the corner.

Want to know what really terrifies me? What makes me sweat and mutter and complain? Car travel. Everywhere I’ve ever lived, worked, or traveled, the odds of dying in a car are far higher than dying from a bullet or bomb.

Including Israel. In the most dangerous of times from terrorism, Israelis had three times as much reason to fear death by road travel as they did to fear terrorist attacks. Specifically, at the height of the Intifada, the peak time of danger for Israelis, 440 Israelis died in road deaths during the year 2000. In that same time, 120 Israelis died from terrorist attacks. More recently, in 2006, which is well before the Wall was anywhere near complete, 15 times as many Israelis died of road deaths than at Palestinian hands. In that year, there were 345 people who died on the roads of Israel, while 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 660 Palestinians were killed by Israelis.

If you think that Israeli rates of road death are high, think again. The number of people per million who die on the roads in the US is roughly double that of Israel! So, it turns out it’s the folks sitting in safe ‘ole America who really ought to be afraid!

Every death is one too many. And there is something unnerving about knowing that there are people out there who’d intentionally kill innocent people if they had a chance. But the truth about terrorism is that the greatest danger is not that at any moment large numbers of us will die. Rather the danger is in wicked over-reaction on our part, that in our fear we will respond in ways that multiply victims, and thus escalate the danger to ourselves and our children long-term. This is a “feel better” response to terrorism – if we do something drastic, we feel better afterwards. There, we got rid of the rascals! Until sons and brothers and cousins of innocent victims caught in our counter-attack mount their own revenge….

Americans might have felt safer for a while after our leaders invaded Iraq. A nation traumatized and angry about 911 bought a basketload of untruth. But it is our children and grandchildren who will pay the bills, not only for the human and economic costs to us of a long and pointless war, but in the instability created in the Middle East and the hatreds stirred against all Americans.

Sustainable security starts with thinking carefully about long-term consequences and managing our emotions well in times of danger. We take it for granted that living involves risk. We accept that risk philosophically with road travel. We do not quake in our boots every time we drive, nor do we consider shutting down whole communities or altering our entire lifestyle due to this fear.

Fear is completely understandable. But when our fear-driven responses put the lives of many at risk we have a duty to recognize that fear is usually irrational and often drives people to do things that make things worse. To live responsibly in a world where terrifying things do happen we need to develop disciplines of analysis that help us not to yield to the adrenalin flowing through our brains and the distortions in thinking that usually accompany it.

Terrorists are rarely simply loony individuals that can be eliminated by “killing the bad guys”. In most cases they are the extreme fringe of large communities of people who bear significant grievances. Individuals can be removed, of course, but if the underlying causes that spurred them to sacrifice their lives are not addressed, they will eventually be replaced by others. Multiple others.

The only real answer is to address the underlying grievances. And in the meantime to find ways to reduce exposure to the danger of the extremist fringe without using tactics that aggravate the majority and drive them to extreme measures themselves.

By Ron Kraybill. May be re-posted or reproduced if credit is given to www.RiverhouseEpress.com/Wordpress.

For more on this topic, go to a previous Paxblog entry which develops the analogy of a bearhunter who unintentionally stirs up hornets. A related essay is Conflict Transformation in an Age of Terrorism.

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Common Gaps in Peace Processes

January 8th, 2008

Recently someone suggested that my last blog on the Israel/Palestine conflict is about “second-track diplomacy”. Not really. True, the strategies there focus on levels other than the traditional high level or “track one” political approach. But they differ from normal “track two diplomacy”, which usually refers to efforts by non-political people to mediate between top political actors. My concern is to highlight the need for peace to be constructed across all levels of society, not through a ”let’s hope peace trickles down from the top” approach but through direct involvement of people at all levels.

Imagine two pyramids, side by side. Each has a top level, middle level, and grassroots level. Now imagine lines across between the pyramids, connecting top to top, middle to middle, grassroots to grassroots. Most peace processes have only a line across at the top. A very important line, to be sure, but it is hard to carry the freight of decades of hostility across that one line, no matter how strong it is.

In South Africa there were many such lines constructed beginning very soon after the talks began. Some didn’t work, but others did.

Occasionally key linkages across at the middle level proved pivotal in helping keep the top level process on track. For example, the creation of the National Peace Accord which I describe in the last blog came only because, in a time of crisis when the talks were floundering, influential business and religious leaders got together and then jointly convened the politicians into a weekend of problem-solving talks. Or, near the very end when one of the key black leaders pulled out of the talks entirely and thereby threatened the entire process, it was a middle level Kenyan professor (summoned through religious networks) who flew to South Africa and talked Buthelezi into returning to the process.

But those are exceptional moments. The top-level usually is pretty good about arranging its own political mediators when people are ready for it.

What is missing in most peace processes:
- active linkages at the other levels
- awareness by people at the top that those other levels are critically important
- awareness by leaders at other levels of the society that they have a crucial role to play if they are to attain a peaceful society
- any kind of strategic coordination among the levels.

It is difficult and often impossible to get support for a peace settlement if it is forged at the top and then simply dropped on the rest of the societies involved. This “trickle down theory of peace” is very poorly supported in reality.

There needs to be a preparation process and some kind of involvements of people at other levels in the society in the dilemmas that peace creates. Awareness among the people at the top of how important work at the other levels is obviously critical to make this happen. Somehow top level politicians in South Africa realized this and put a good bit of time and effort into setting up mechanisms to enable this to happen, and they did this alongside their other involvements in the political track.

But the truth is that top level people rarely recognize the importance and potential for work at other levels. South Africa was gifted with a number of business and religious leaders (ie: middle level people) who had the chutzpah to establish connections among each other on their own initiative, and then used their personal connections with top level people to convince them of the need for attention at other levels.

The creation of the National Peace Accord, which largely focused on day-to-day tensions and crises at middle and grassroots levels of the society (eg: local faction fights, confrontations when angry white racists showed up at black demonstrations, joint monitoring of police conduct which was highly controversial, etc.) made it possible to coordinate among all the levels. It was often rudimentary coordination to be sure, but enough to enable the country to survive dozens of crises of large and small proportions that constantly threatened to freeze the talks.

Often there is resistance to creating such linkages. “Dialogue” comes to be seen by whoever’s lives are most disrupted by a prolonged conflict as simply a tactic to prolong the status quo and delay addressing the real issues. South African blacks were actively discouraged from any kind of dialogue by some of their leaders from the mid-80s onwards. But as the talks progressed even the skeptics relaxed and withheld criticism of those who engaged. The key is to make it clear that the purpose of engagement is to facilitate and hasten the essential process of change required to bring peace.

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Peace Requires a Base in the Civil Society

December 1st, 2007

By Ron Kraybill, PhD

Will the politicians and generals work out a deal this time? It was the question of the decade as emissaries returned home to Israel and Palestine from the Annapolis peace summit. But if the architects of peace talks review hard-won lessons from peace processes elsewhere, they might discover there are other equally critical questions.

Common wisdom is that getting a settlement among high level negotiators at a bargaining table is the major difficulty in achieving peace. In reality, it is often challenges at other locations around the table that block peace. As in war, success in peace must be pursued systematically on multiple fronts, with strategies that address all levels of the societies involved.

Peace rarely arrives through a simple “trickle down” process from above, it has to be seeded broadly and actively cultivated throughout a society from near the beginning of the transition.

One reason for the success of the South Africa talks of the 1990s is that the politicians who designed them were quicker than most to learn this. A bitter season of killings froze and threatened to de-rail the entire process less than a year after talks had started in 1990. After several months of fumbling, South African leaders in the major parties responded by establishing structures and strategies at local, regional, and national levels to address the threats to peace that now faced every level of the bitterly divided country. They did this while the outcome of top-level talks still hung in a dicey balance, well before agreements were reached about the key issues driving the conflict.

At the same time, the institutions and social processes that normally keep things under control are weakening. When people believe new structures are at hand, they take the old structures less seriously. In business, education, health care, transportation, human services, courts, policing, local and regional politics, people recognize that whatever was done in the past will change. Those managing these sectors postpone decisive action while they wait for word of where things are headed. Governance and social control almost unavoidably diminish.