How Peace Teams Work

How Peace Teams Work

TAKING CHANCES TO HELP PEACE

Nonviolent interventions are risky but
they show promise and deserve support

Philadelphia Inquirer op ed, 3/28/06
George Lakey

George Lakey is founder of Training for Change in Philadelphia and co-author of a training manual on third-party nonviolent intervention that MPT uses.

As thoughtful people sort out the lessons of the ongoing Iraq tragedy, some
look for seeds of hope.

Tom Fox and his fellow hostages from Christian Peacemaker Teams represent
one of those seeds. Three of those captives were freed last week. The body
of Virginia Quaker Tom Fox was found on March 9. The day before the
abduction, Fox wrote an entry titled "Why are we here?" in his online
journal (http://electroniciraq.net/news/2212.shtml).

They went to Iraq, in Fox's words, "to stand with those being dehumanized by
oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization."

It's easy to dismiss them as naive idealists, trying to make a difference in
the middle of chaos. But they are more than that. Christian Peacemaker Teams
(CPT) is one of the ongoing experiments in humanitarian intervention. I see
it as similar, in the political realm, to the early heart transplants: rare
but holding promise for the future.

I was myself on a similar team, with Peace Brigades International, in 1989
in the midst of a bloody civil war in Sri Lanka. Every day we risked our
lives as we accompanied human-rights activists who were targeted for
assassination by hit squads. We were unarmed bodyguards whose presence
raised the threshold for attack. The fact that we were internationals gave
some protection.

I'm not a particularly brave person, and I doubt I would have gone to Sri
Lanka if this kind of work had not already been tested in violent El
Salvador and Guatemala, where Peace Brigades International (PBI) assisted
local democracy advocates. There were some close calls, but no team members
were killed.

Not long after PBI opened in Sri Lanka, CPT went to Haiti, Israel, and the
West Bank. Both organizations are also now in Colombia, where villages
terrorized both by guerrilla and government forces have asked for
international assistance in establishing "zones of peace."

In Sri Lanka I was gratified that we assisted brave local leaders to build
democracy. I was also frustrated that there were so few of us, but this kind
of humanitarian intervention was too new and unproved to attract major
resources.

The abduction of the four CPT members, however, gives new meaning to the
concept of "resources." The captors said they would kill the four in a week
unless their demands were met. The week stretched to two, then four, and
then much more. What the captors evidently didn't expect was the range of
Muslim voices against taking the CPT members hostage. Protests poured in,
not only from mainstream Muslims but even from Hamas and Hezbollah. Unlike
U.S. and British military intervention, which has little humanitarian
credibility to most Muslims, the nonviolent Christian Peace Teams are
clearly the "real thing."

The other kind of resource - major funding for expansion - has still not
come to peace teams organizations, although PBI has been nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize and a new organization, Nonviolent PeaceForce, plans to
train thousands for a ready reserve to be dispatched to crisis situations.

Third-party nonviolent intervention, as researchers call it, is not a
panacea. Its small scale successes do, however, raise the question: Why not
expand to large scale?

I knew African American civil rights pioneers James Farmer and Bayard
Rustin, who led small-scale sit-ins in the 1940s. They didn't call for
federal enforcement of civil rights in public accommodations. Calling out
the military would have done more harm than good. Instead, they experimented
with a nonviolent methodology that was at once more subtle and more powerful
than military action. Their experiments became, in time, the movement that
ended segregation in public facilities.

Like Farmer and Rustin, CPT is experimenting with a technique that is both
subtle and powerful. The contrasting response of the Muslim world to U.S.
violence, on the one hand, and CPT, on the other, is dramatic. Will
pro-democracy forces take what actually works for humanitarian intervention
and increase its capacity a hundredfold, or a thousandfold?

Yes, but that depends on those who believe in genuinely humanitarian
intervention. People and institutions of good will can jump-start the
technique of nonviolent intervention by investing money where their values
are, backing the nonviolent "surgeons" who are already dramatizing the
possibility of a new heart.

George Lakey (www.trainingforchange.org) is the 2006-07 Eugene M. Lang
Professor for Issues in Social Change at Swarthmore College.