Tag Archives: International Relations

Peace on earth …

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Rushing towards death on an operating table, Louise Diamond suddenly found out why she wanted to be alive. She told Karen Kissane about her work with people at war.

LOUISE DIAMOND is a product of the ’60s. She tells you so herself, her clipped American accent sliding into a wry drawl, one eyebrow cocked in amusement. So when she realised she would be working with violence, especially military violence, she knew she had to excise some of her sensitivities.

“I read every Vietnam war book I could get my hands on, ” she says. “I went to every Vietnam war movie I could find; I have never before or since that time gone to a violent movie.

I did it until I got to the point where I could understand, from the inside out, blood lust; until I could feel it in myself; until I could see how it is that people could kill, rape, maim and slaughter each other and really enjoy it.”
Diamond says this with composure and waits coolly while her interviewer regains hers. This is not what one expects to hear from someone who works as a professional peace builder.

So what does her blood lust feel like? She says, consideringly, “I could feel in myself, reading some descriptions, a certain excitement. I could see how people get high on violence. There’s a certain adrenalin rush. It was important to understand this if I was to be of any use.”
Diamond is the executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy. At last week’s Feminist Summit for Global Peace in Taiwan, she described her job as training ordinary people in skills to develop peace in divided societies.

“The term `multi-track’ refers to our basic premise that peacebuilding is the responsibility of people from many sectors of society, not just political officials,” she says. “For sustainable peace systems to emerge from the ashes of war and violence, a peace treaty is not enough; we must build peace from the bottom up, through social and institutional means, as well as from the top down, through political means.

” Diamond began her adult life as a high school English teacher but now works to defuse tensions in places as diverse as Israel, Cyprus, Ethiopia and Liberia. Academically, she is well qualified for the new field of professional peacemaking she has a background in applied behavioral science and her fourth degree was a PhD in peace studies but unexpected twists in her personal life have contributed at least as much to bringing her to where she is today.

At 28, she was surrounded by loss: in the throes of a divorce, caring alone for an 18-month-old daughter and facing her second mastectomy. She later discovered that her chances of surviving recurrent breast cancer at that age were almost zero. She survived not only that, however, but a massive haemorrhage on the operating table that almost killed her.

“It was a classic near-death experience, right out of the literature,” she says. “A tunnel of light, a sense of incredible peace and feeling so happy but hearing a voice saying that it wasn’t time, I had to go back, and then feeling such a sense of loss.” It took her some time to work out what had happened, as this was not a commonly described experience 21 years ago. But when the meaning of it hit her, “It transformed my life from the inside out.”
Diamond decided that what mattered was not when or how she died she could live for years or be run over by a car tomorrow but whether she would be full of joy and peace at her death.

“Every aspect of my life that wasn’t aligned with that goal had to be changed,” she says. “The way I thought about myself, my relationship with my family, with my religion, with my sexuality, all had to change.”
So did her relationship with the wider world. Four years later she found herself back in her native Washington nursing her dying parents. She cherished that task but found that she loathed the city and all it stood for. “I finally had to confront that reaction,” she says. “I had to dive into it. One of the principles I operate on is that where there’s a great aversion there’s also a great attraction. This was a power centre in terms of governmental politics, and I found that I felt that I had a contribution to make.”
Once over her initial shock “Who me? Work in the international arena?” she began re-educating herself and in 1992 teamed up with former US ambassador-at-large John McDonald to establish the institute. She now does with international communities the kind of work she did with individuals and families in her time as a psychotherapist and organisational consultant.

Take Cyprus, an island with a violent history and so divided that its Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities had no transport, phone or postal connections with each other; Diamond says this left them “to stew in the trauma of war.

Whole generations were being raised to think of the other side as the enemy without any contact to check out whether this was really so.”
Four years ago, members of the Greek Cypriot side, later joined by Turkish Cypriots, invited Diamond in. Diamond and her crew worked with people from the two communities separately for more than a year, teaching them conflict resolution techniques such as active listening. Eventually, participants from the two groups decided they would like to try out their new skills with each other. “We don’t bring people together to make decisions, only to reach understanding,” Diamond says. “And then action unfolds from that.”
Now more than 400 people have been trained and 100 more turn up to each new seminar; there are special programs for public policy leaders, business people, teenagers and the media; 15 bi-communal projects have been established in areas ranging from arts to women’s studies; and a bi-communal conflict resolution centre has been set up in the UN buffer zone.

The Cyprus project mirrored the institute’s programs: capacity- building, teaching individuals how to deal with group conflict; bridge-building, developing activities that bring the warring sides together and, finally, institution-building, setting up formal systems to keep the process going.

“The people of these two communities have done what their leaders and the international community have been unable to do for 30 years and that’s start a policy of rapprochement, ” Diamond says. “They had to face bomb threats and media campaigns against them `Traitor talks to other side’ but they persisted.

” `Dialogue’ looks kind of soft, but it can have a powerful effect if it goes on over a long period of time. It develops a momentum that changes the way people think about themselves and each other and their capacity to make change. Who knows where it will lead?”
Diamond is often asked whether she ever feels overwhelmed by the size of her task. She thinks of it this way: she might be holding only a tiny drop of water, which will count for almost nothing in a vast empty bucket. But if she throws in her drop, others might follow, and then the bucket will start to fill.

And the world has no choice but to turn to citizen peace building, she says; the United Nations has been unable to intervene in more than 90 per cent of conflicts since World War II because they have been between peoples within the same nation and the UN’s charter forbids it to interfere in a country’s internal affairs. “Since there are 185 nations in the UN, yet more than 5000 distinct peoples on this planet . . . this trend of conflict over identity and sovereignty is likely to grow,” she says.

Diamond sees humankind as a collective facing the same crisis she faced as an individual, all those years ago. It is critically ill, facing potential death from nuclear or environmental disaster and must make important decisions about its future.

“We all know that the military machine is big, it’s well- funded, it’s relatively efficient, and it has a deeply rooted infrastructure that allows it to operate all over the world, ” Diamond says. “What’s the infrastructure for peace-building?
It needs skilled people, culturally appropriate methodologies, adequate funding, co-ordination, alliances.

“I recently found out that one Patriot missile the kind they used in the Gulf War costs $270 million. I won’t tell you how many they manufactured last year; it’s in the billions of dollars. Imagine what we could do with $270 million: put a peace institute in every country of the world, with money left over to train people and send them out into the countryside.

All for the cost of one missile.”
Diamond says she is a happy woman, intensely so since her brush with death; she has learned her purpose in life and what fuels her. She also has no fear of dying, something she finds extraordinarily liberating. And she hopes her legacy will be that vision of a world full of institutes for peace: “For me, this is the greatest gift we could give our children. “

First published in The Age.

Defusing world time bombs

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A feminist perspective on peace was the focus of an international meeting of women politicians. Karen Kissane reports from Taiwan.

WAR used to be about the loss of sons and husbands and fathers.

It still is, but the nature of conflict has changed. Ninety per cent of the world’s disputes are now “intra-national” (between peoples who live in the same country), and women and children are suffering as never before.

In some African countries, boy and girl soldiers as young as 10 carry arms and kill. Many of those fighting in domestic conflicts use access to food supplies as a weapon, starving civilians in sieges or forcing them to flee as refugees.
Dr Musuleng Cooper, Foreign Minister of Liberia, says: “The UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) reports show that women and children comprise 80 per cent of the direct and indirect victims of military actions today. Where military personnel were the main targets of action in World War II, today, women and children . . . are exposed to more horrors, to death and mutilation caused by exploding mines, shells and rockets.” Dr Cooper spoke at the Feminist Summit for Global Peace in Taipei at the weekend to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific. The conference brought together politicians, diplomats and representatives of non-government organisations from the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Speakers challenged the way international disputes are handled and some questioned the principle that nations should not interfere in each others’ internal affairs.

Dr Cooper, who now cares for 13 foster children who have lost families in the bloody civil war in her country, says: “Should the international community stand idle while governments hide behind state sovereignty to violate the rights of their citizens, especially minority ethnic groups?
“Should governments not be held accountable for the protection of all victims of the breaches of international human rights laws?
“Should the United Nations charter, after 50 years, be revised to remove inhibitions regarding domestic jurisdiction and thus give member states legal standing to intervene in cases of massive human-rights violations?”
Phoebe Muga Asiyo, a member of Kenya’s Parliament and its shadow minister for regional development, says: “The concept of global security must be broadened from the traditional focus on security of states to include the security of individuals and that of the planet Earth.” When the sovereignty of the state is used to abuse the sovereignty of its people, the right to absolute national sovereignty should be forfeited, she said.

If wars continue to explode at the current rate, an obligation to intervene in internal as well as cross-border conflicts might prove overwhelming.

Dr Martina Gredler, an Austrian member of the European Parliament, said Swedish research shows that 28 big conflicts (more than 1000 people killed) and more than 22 smaller conflicts broke out in 1993 alone.

The world picture is not encouraging, says Bernie Malone, an Irish member of the European Parliament and the first vice-chairwoman of its foreign affairs, security and defence committee: “More than half the conflicts ongoing in 1993 had been underway for more than a decade and had claimed the lives of some five million people.”
Even when a conflict ends, the suffering does not. War victims must fight to survive in environments devastated by war. Many are homeless and many others are still being maimed or killed by landmines and other devices left by war.

“According to the UNHCR, the number of refugees and displaced persons has risen from 2.5 million in 1970 to 18 million in 1990,” Ms Malone says. “Abandoned or unexploded ordinance, such as land mines and cluster munitions, render large tracts of countryside uninhabitable in some 25 countries . . . The Red Cross estimates that more than 800 people, mostly civilians, are killed by land mines every month.” It all leaves the world’s once-great hope, the United Nations, looking like the ultimate parody of bureaucracy: better at documenting disaster than at preventing it.

Ms Malone is hopeful that a unit about to be set up by the European Parliament will truly help to hose down potential hot spots before they erupt. The Parliament has just approved a proposal by a former French Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, to set up a European Union Centre for Active Crisis Prevention.

The centre’s goal will be to pinpoint looming conflict, allowing action to be taken in time.

“People say that they knew Rwanda was waiting to happen, that they knew Bosnia was like a time bomb,” Ms Malone says.

“It’s very hard to impose a political solution once people are out in the battlefield. Northern Ireland showed that.”
Northern Ireland also showed that the only way to resolve conflict fuelled by long-standing enmity is to invite everyone to the table: “You have to speak to all sides and bring them in, and that includes the extremists,” Ms Malone says. “That’s the key factor.”
Ms Asiyo believes that the United Nations should set up a rapid-intervention force to respond to crisis and fund it with a global taxation on the arms industry. “The establishment of an international crime court to try leaders and governments who commit atrocities and perpetrate wars against their citizens is long overdue,” she says.

The conference endorsed the principle that the violence of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes against their citizens is as unacceptable as violent conflict between nations and that the issue should be part of the global security agenda.

It said that all sexual violence against women, including the enslavement of “comfort women”, genital mutilation and rape warfare, was criminal and should be punished.

The conference also voted to investigate setting up a women’s peace watch organisation and proposed that the UN declare 2000 an international year of global peace and security.

Achieving peace will require strengthening the economies and democracies of nations such as Africa, where the breakdown of traditional life leaves a vacuum often filled by authoritarian figures who maintain power by exploiting the fears of rival groups. It will require commitment and understanding, says Ms Malone.

“We think in the West that we have the answer to everything because of the type of democracy we have evolved but it has evolved over years and years; it didn’t just arrive.

“These countries in central Africa haven’t gone through any of this yet, and our democracies won’t necessarily suit these traditional societies. But they have the power within themselves to resolve their own conflicts. They can make the great leap forward; it just won’t necessarily be the same leap forward that we made.”

First published in The Age.

Women’s hopes fading on the road to Beijing

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If a reluctant China loses the right to host the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in September, the real losers could be women the world over.

THE PROBLEMS really began, they say, after the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Peng, went to Copenhagen in March for the United Nations summit on poverty. At one point, he walked past a group of hunger strikers with placards. He faltered, visibly shaken. Such sights are not permitted in China. It may have been then that the Chinese began to recognise what they had done in agreeing to host the world’s largest human rights conference in Beijing in September.

It was the booby prize, after all; the Chinese volunteered to hold the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women partly because they thought it would add to the credibility of their Olympic bid. They lost the Olympics but won the right to welcome more than 2000 government delegates and about 40,000 representatives from women’s rights organisations in 184 countries. Now, it seems, China is having second thoughts.

There has been such a series of rows on the bumpy road to Beijing that women’s groups internationally are now muttering “boycott” and warning that Beijing could face losing its UN contract. The problem is that it would be hard for Beijing to lose out without women losing out as well. A boycott by non-government organisations would benefit no one but the governments that would like to push their own agendas through without awkward questions. If Beijing lost the contract, where in the world could a conference this size be held on such short notice?
So far the run-up to the conference and its accompanying non- government forum has seen at least three moves that suggest China is concerned to limit the potential for political embarrassment. Many non-government organisations, including Tibetan and Taiwanese women’s groups, were initially refused UN accreditation for the forum, sparking official protests by some nations, including Australia; a Hong Kong newspaper has cited unpublished documents as indicating that China plans to use its visa system to exclude political “undesirables”; and China appears to be trying to isolate the forum and limit its influence on the official conference, by moving it to a site more than an hour
‘s travel from Beijing.

Meanwhile in New York, at a preparatory meeting on a draft plan of action for the conference, there were determined pushes by several countries and the Vatican to roll back the human rights gains of earlier UN gatherings.

It was hoped the Beijing conference would be a place of potential breakthroughs in the recognition of women’s rights; now, it looks as though women will be fighting just to hold their ground.

Trouble had been tipped as far back as the Vienna conference on human rights in 1993, where women’s groups argued that the conference should not be held in Beijing because of China’s history of human rights abuses of women, including forced sterilisations and abortions, female infanticide, and the torture and rape of female political detainees. They were also concerned that China had argued against the Vienna conference’s acceptance of the universality of human rights, insisting that human rights are culturally determined and that Western countries should not force their ideas on others.

The acceptance of universality was the great win at Vienna but women involved in the planning for Beijing have been appalled to discover that it may yet be lost. They expected the draft plan of action for Beijing to be finalised in March; instead, many important words and concepts, including “universality”, were put in square brackets.

This means they are opposed by one or more countries, which means they might not get up, as this kind of UN agreement must be achieved by consensus.

The result, warns Amnesty International, could be a “lowest common denominator” document that makes no progress because it has had to be acceptable to the most conservative nations. Some Latin American countries, for example, bracketed the word “gender” more than 300 times; the Vatican led a push to oppose “universality” because of its concerns that this would lead to universal reproductive freedom and more freely available abortion and contraception.

The Victorian coordinator for Amnesty, Kath Davey, says: “It is absolutely crucial that it’s understood that certain rights go across cultures, that you can’t leave it up to individual countries to decide . . . Culture often means religions, which gives you women and their bodies and the whole reproductive process. Culture is used as the reason for the continuation of appalling abuses: child brides, trafficking in women, female genital mutilation. If a schoolgirl gets shot in Algeria for not wearing the veil, is that their culture?” The main anxiety at the moment, however, is about a more basic problem. The Chinese have declared the original site of the forum structurally unsound. The new site is far from town and has neither the hotel space nor the conference facilities to house tens of thousands. It has been rumored, too, that China is considering an arbitrary cap of 20,000 on the number of non-government organisation representatives allowed to attend, possibly because of its enormous logistical problems.

The international non-government organisation steering committee has overwhelmingly rejected the new site and proposed alternatives. It has told the UN Secretary-General, Dr Boutros Ghali, that it wants a satisfactory response by 24 May. It has not said what action it will take if the problems are not resolved, but cancellation of the forum could result.

The news is not all bad. The Australian Government delegation to the New York preparations was successful in its proposal that Beijing be made a “conference of commitments”, requiring each government to stand up and specify what aims it has set for itself to improve the status of women. At the last UN Conference on Women, in Nairobi in 1985, more than 300 recommendations were subsequently ignored by most nations. The Australian move is to try to ensure this does not happen again.

Whatever the outcome, it has not helped China’s cause that the parties it most fears have now been antagonised. Amnesty International had already planned to use the conference as a platform for its campaign “Human rights are women’s right”, with an emphasis on China’s breaches.

The problems in the run-up to the forum have focused even more attention on Chinese policies and practices. Says Amnesty’s Ms Davey: “Their worst fears will be realised.”

First published in The Age.

Trade deals a bad deal for women – professor

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Free trade agreements and the opening up of world markets were dangerous for women and other disadvantaged groups, a Canadian academic, Professor Marjorie Griffin Cohen, told the Women, Power and Politics conference.

Professor Cohen, an economist and professor of women’s studies at a Toronto university, said these changes were putting women out of work, causing the cutting of social services relied upon by women and families, and dramatically curtailing the ability of governments to make decisions for the public good.

Professor Cohen said agreements such as the one between the United States and Canada (Nafta) allowed large corporations so much power that the democratic process was being subverted. She said that in Canada, government plans for plain packaging of cigarettes and the setting up of a state car insurance system were dropped when American corporations threatened to sue for the billions they would lose in current and future income from the move.

She said that Nafta, the (North American Free Trade Agreement) required the permission of trading partners before a new public program could be set up. It also insisted that companies in the trading partner country be compensated for any losses they might incur. “Any government that decided it wanted a national day care program or a dental scheme would be discouraged by trade enforcement of prohibitively expensive compensation to US providers of those services in Canada,” Professor Cohen said.

“The wishes of people as expressed through the actions of elected democratic governments are being superseded by international trade rules. It is becoming increasingly irrelevant politically what economic and social issues parties decide to pursue.

“Women, minorities and the disadvantaged are confronting a very nasty political reality: this is the experience of even less democratic participation than we have had … Real decision-making power will elude us as the seat of power itself shifts.”
Professor Cohen said that half a million Canadian jobs had disappeared since the introduction of Nafta, many of them belonging to women in industries such as clothing and textiles. She predicted that the Canadian public health system would collapse by 2000 because Canada no longer had generic drugs but had to use much more expensive brand- name pharmaceuticals.

The conference will tomorrow debate whether to condemn “economic fundamentalism”. It will also consider recommending the establishment of an International Equity Association, linking women’s groups that believe the present international economic order will create “growing gender inequity and the loss of civilised society”.

First published in The Age.