CCTS
Newsletter 11

Deep demilitarisation

All real peace-building activity contributes to de-militarisation. Hence it could be argued that the way to de-militarisation is to construct a peaceful environment. This 'indirect approach' to militarisation is especially relevant in dealing with armed groups that are not state sponsored. At the same time, militarisation in general can derail peace processes and armed groups often have an interest in doing this. Therefore in this section, I concentrate on addressing demilitarisation directly as distinct from general peace-building.₈

Organising against militarisation

There seem to be three basic lines of approach:

1. Name the militarisation. That is shorthand for awareness of how militarisation is embedded in a society, and a determination to limit the prerogatives claimed by military groups, to render them accountable to those - if any - they claim to represent, and to question the attitudes engendered by militarism.
2. Propose alternatives - at the level of perception (de-activating enemy images) and at the level of social organisation - and so expand the non-militarised options. The range of alternatives has to address not just personal and cultural issues but also economic and security issues. Even if an alternative is not acted on - as with many of the ideas brainstormed in workshops - it may serve to open a public space, encouraging different ways of thinking to develop.
3. Organise collectively. While militarisation is a self-perpetuating process, it also serves interests. Alternative civil processes serving wider social interests require social struggle, on the one hand putting pressure on the institutions, on the other spreading a different approach through their own activities. Often the initiative has to be taken by people forming small groups. Members of such a group can provide a safe space for each other in a society where most people feel under siege, and through this people may find types of action that suit them and encourage each other to experiment to see what power they have to change situations close at hand.

To detail the kind of activities relevant to each of these steps would require writing a manual of anti-militarist action - perhaps worthwhile, but not my purpose here. Two themes that seem essential to mention, however, are those of a) civil disobedience and b) allegiance to values that transcend either a state or an ethnic framework.

1. Disobedience is not just a right but at times a duty - when faced with immoral orders. It also expresses a personal commitment that can grow into forms of collective non-cooperation that ultimately can undermine war machines.
2. To go against the tide of a dominant war-making culture requires personal strength, and to be sustained collectively it requires an alternative identity that underpins non-militarist values. This identity may be localised, sub-cultural, religious or professional (eg physicians); it may be a transnational identity or allegiance (eg feminism or human rights advocacy). It could be something as simple as the bonds of a cross-boundary friendship that withstands the social pressures towards antagonism and mistrust.₉ Militarisation pushes people to define their identities according to what is at stake in war. A vital task of demilitarisation is to strengthen non-militarised identities that may offer common values.

These lines of activity oppose an atmosphere of militarisation and in particular will challenge state militarism. Non-state armed violence, however, is more difficult to reach. My awareness of this problem is heightened by the news while I have been writing: in Spain, an armed band - presumably ETA - has assassinated one of the leading voices for dialogue in the Basque Country, while in Kosovo the right-hand person of Ibrahim Rugova has been assassinated.

One useful structure for reaching non-state armed groups might be the 'cross-sectoral peace committee'. This was central in initiating the Peace Zones in the Philippines (see below). The committee is formed of citizens groups whose involvement in different sectors of work gives them an extensive network. The committees are not identified with a particular political agenda beyond 'peace' in a loose sense, and ideally include some who have the ear of one or other of the warring parties.

A psycho-social approach

Maynard₁₀, in an essay primarily looking at what foreign agencies can contribute, has proposed five phases of post-war psychosocial recovery:

1. Establish safety and protection.
2. Communalization and bereavement. "This process of sharing traumatic experiences with others and allowing a period of mourning over the losses is essential to healing. These can be done only in an atmosphere of safety."
3. Rebuild trust and the capacity to trust. "Renewing interpersonal relationships begins with restoring honor to the adversary, which has been destroyed by dehumanizing the enemy during the fighting."
4. Personal moral recovery and the re-establishment of social morality.
5. Re-integrate all societal elements into the community and restore democratic discourse.

This schema is useful, but also has to be treated with caution:

Is someone's recovery more likely to be advanced in the safety of exile or by running the risk of return to re-build their own home? Is trust necessary to re-establish a social morality? Can there be trust without confidence that certain basic rights will be recognised? If people do not have a relationship their antagonists, will they learn to recognise their rights?

It is striking - although not remarked on by Maynard - that no action is demanded of the antagonist community - for instance, no apology nor handing over war criminals. Rather, each person remains responsible for their own actions, including regaining their capacity for empathy. It depresses me to hear Kosovo Albanians argue that for coexistence with Serbs to be possible (that is, for the current violence against Serbs to stop), Serbs must acknowledge what they have done in the past. The violence against Serbs this past year is unacceptable. If Nekibe Kelmendi, whose husband and two sons were taken from their home and killed on the day NATO joined the war, can say that she will not call any Serb a war criminal until he or she has been tried, then I would urge every Kosovo Albanian to adopt the same standard.₁₁

The international growth of trauma counselling in the 1990s has brought with it a rather bad press, especially among those living in the societies where it is practised. The prime problems have been that it has been insufficiently attuned to the cultures in which counsellors are operating and in particular that some approaches encourage the individualisation of an experience that was widespread and social. It has also attracted practitioners or even trainers who would be better staying at home. For instance, it perturbs me to read a British trainer in trauma counselling from Child Advocacy International quoted as describing her purpose as 'to encourage forgiveness' and lauding the British capacity to 'forget' and co-operate with past enemies.₁₂ The point of trauma counselling should be to help somebody digest their experience, so freeing themselves from some of its often unconscious effects and hence making them better able to determine their own future. It is a goal that the person tortured does not him/herself become a torturer, but going beyond that it is for the person who has been traumatised - not for a British professional who sees her own society through rose-coloured spectacles - to decide whether to forgive, whether to press for the prosecution of those who caused the traumatisation, or whether to concentrate on rebuilding a new life.

The loose use of a term like 'collective trauma' worries me. It seems to remove moral responsibility from each person under the collective. Can those Tutsi who, on their return to Rwanda, massacred Hutu or those Albanians who, on their return to Kosovo, torched Serbian homes plead 'temporary insanity' on account of collective trauma?

Again this is not to deny the value of, say, Unicef's efforts to support local teachers in developing classroom activities that can help the psycho-social recovery of children exposed to war. Nor of the work, usually based in forming self-help groups, with torture and rape survivors. Post-war, some kind of social space has to be opened for people to talk about psychologically damaging experiences. However, I am less convinced of what a generalised 'therapeutic' approach offers for demilitarisation than in methodologies rooted in the mutual support of a group of people who share the same reality, face many of the same choices, but also have a common commitment to change. As examples, I have in mind groups such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War or those facing political repression in El Salvador and Guatemala, often people whose loved ones had been 'disappeared', as documented by Beristain and Riera.₁₃

Vietnam Veterans Against the War was one of the first groups in the peace field to consciously address the issue of trauma. Many US GIs sent to Vietnam reacted against the war; many also were traumatised and began to abuse drugs and alcohol. More US Vietnam vets have died through drugs overdoses or suicide than the nearly 60,000 who were killed in combat. VVAW based itself on mutual support groups, people who understood each other but also made a commitment to take action to stop the war, a commitment that has broadened to opposing other wars, opposing militarism, and even organising journeys of reconciliation - not only to Indochina but to what was the Soviet Union, for instance meeting Soviet veterans of the war in Afganistan.

Collective memory

The collective memory of war is itself militarised. In the case of ethnic war, the memory deals in stereotypes - of rape, torture and ethnic cleansing by Them, and of heroic resistance and nobility in protecting women and children by Us. To break with these stereotypes takes courage. There is a quip from Belfast that "to fire questions in your own community takes far more courage than to fire a bullet in somebody else's".

It is important to challenge a stereotyped, militarised memory by offering other examples. One means to do this is to honour the war resisters of the other side - the conscientious objectors, the draft resisters and deserters who refused to join in the war. This rarely happens. Their refusal puts human solidarity above the claims of each ethnic camp, an act that can bring into question the ethnic discipline in both camps and also can raise the issue of how their counterparts - the war resisters on the other side - have been treated.₁₄

Similar remarks can apply to human rights activists who may earn the opprobrium of both military parties by their monitoring of human rights violations on all sides. Their witness to values that transcend communal divisions and apply to all offers a profound alternative to the militarised worldview.

Also excluded from the collective memory tend to be the acts of common humanity that cross the lines of ethnic conflict - those who protect or shelter those of the other ethnic group, or even those who try to offer protection at the cost of their own lives and fail. Every war has its small-scale Schindlers.

One of the goals of truth-telling after war should be to acknowledge the complexity of what people have just lived through. It is important that people can talk about what they suffered, and if those responsible can be called to account, so much the better. But people also need to speak of the difficulty of the choices they made, the limits they faced, and what helped them survive. The local media can help enormously in this by not simplifying the memory of war into stereotypes, but exploring it in its diversity.

Displaced people

Those who want war can find a pool of potential recruits among displaced people. They have a grievance, have lost their livelihoods and usually are unwanted in their temporary 'host community' and are therefore vulnerable. At times the displaced themselves become an organised lobby demanding redress through military action.

Self-help economic development programmes can help displaced people regain or maintain their self-esteem and in some cases offer an alternative to joining an armed group. The general point, however, is not to sugar the pill of displacement, but to recognise that displaced people are more than victims: they are people who can organise themselves and who have the right to return. From the point of view of demilitarisation, the key is to develop non-military means for claiming that right by working within the situation from which they were expelled to enhance the conditions for return and by supporting the refugees' own efforts to devise nonviolent courses of action.

Usually the most important factor in people's decisions to return is their perception of security. There are no guarantees. A heavy international military presence might even convey an illusion of security. The need is to be able to make an informed decision. Therefore return has to be prepared, taking a long-term view. Where people have been expelled on ethnic grounds, the ethnic resentment among the displaced is likely to harden, unchecked by any contact beyond the communities of the displaced. Preparations for return should include meetings with people remaining in the situation. Local human rights groups, where they exist, can make a good entry point: for instance, Otvorene O_i (the Balkan Peace Team in Croatia) helped arrange for human rights groups from the Knin area to go to Banja Luka to meet displaced Serbs. A second step can be return visits in the company of international agencies. The point is to take limited risks in as controlled a way as possible. A third step is negotiation between the returnees and those who claim authority over the land where they want to return, be they a state, a guerrilla force or an international administration, or all three. The point is to make the return non-threatening, to press the authorities into at least some recognition of legal or moral obligations towards the displaced and perhaps to establish some joint commissions to monitor progress and deal with problems that emerge. The fourth step can then be to enlist international support - economic aid to assist resettlement and development and activity as non-armed observers of the return process and non-armed escorts for the return.

Referring to the experience of Bosnia and Croatia, Stubbs concludes that "large-scale, high-profile, NGO work on repatriation ... is as likely to have negative as positive consequences. Work with traditional trust-builders - church leaders, citizens' associations, sports clubs, and so on - may actually be more valuable".₁₅ In the situations he studied - of ethnic conflict where there has been intensive international engagement, including a military presence - gradualism and small-scale initiatives may be indicated. However, in situations with a much lower international presence and where refugees may be contemplating returning in arms, it is worth considering non-military strategies for large-scale return.

A well-documented example of nonviolent accompaniment of a large-scale return took place in January 1993. A caravan of 78 buses, each with international volunteers, carried 2,480 refugees back from Mexico into Guatemala. Most had fled 10 years earlier in the face of the scorched-earth methods used by the government to combat the guerrilla rebellion. In Mexico, the refugees established their own democratic organisations and established their right first to visit Guatemala without losing refugee status and ultimately to negotiate their return. The two major issues for negotiation were demilitarisation and access to land, the essential condition for the refugees' economic reintegration. The refugees insisted not only that they should be exempt from military recruitment and the so-called 'civil patrol' system, but that the military should be excluded from their communities and that they should have the right to choose their own international non-armed escorts to accompany the return.₁₆

Peace Brigades International, one of the smaller organisations involved in the return to Guatemala, has more recently been working with displaced in Colombia, offering accompaniment in attempts to return to territory that is still contested. An essential concept here is the idea of local peace zones - villages that have declared their determination to live without weapons and, on that basis, have enlisted international aid for economic development.

The main experiences with peace zones have been in the Philippines since 1988 and in Colombia. In the Philippines a peace zone has been defined as "an area-based community initiated, nonviolent approach to armed conflict. In essence, it includes a people-initiated ceasefire where armed combatants are called upon to withdraw forces and operations from the peace zone. A community becomes a peace zone through a unilateral declaration. In some cases, the declaration is accompanied by a set of guidelines, community structures or mechanisms for specific peace-building tasks such as: (1) consultation with the community and decision-making on the people's peace agenda; (2) liaison/negotiation/dialogue with armed combatants; (3) monitoring of combatants' activities to ensure adherence to Peace Zone guidelines; and (4) information dissemination."₁₇

Through such local initiatives, people can try to establish a demilitarised space even when there is deadlock in national negotiations. Such zones are not an easy option. Those initiating peace zones take enormous personal risks. Indeed, in Colombia, one can say that any activist who works for popular empowerment is in danger. Moreover, the zones remain vulnerable, with or without a ceasefire agreement and with or without the presence of observers from international NGOs. However, the communities which declare peace zones or the displaced people who are attracted to them are already vulnerable. The space they are creating is not 'safe' - nor for that matter are the 'safe havens' under perpetual military protection. Rather it is a space to engage in social struggle, to try and build a better life. For this reason such zones have to be based on the commitment of those living in the area, not on incentives that can be offered by outside agencies or an international administration.

Cross-community initiatives

I have already referred in passing to cross-community initiatives - in the context of psychosocial recovery, of collective memory and of working with displaced people. The earlier paper in this series by Diana Francis also raised a number of issues in this connection. In addition, I want to raise the issues of different levels of contact and of timing, which is a more general problem.

A phrase recently used by the Balkan Peace Team about its cross-community work is 'self-paced interaction'. This seems a good concept for the grass-roots level, where BPT works. At the top level - where leaders purport to speak for whole communities - the contact cannot be self-paced: outsiders may need to cajole, pressure or bribe leaders to the negotiating table. At the grass-roots level, however, outsiders can only invite, suggest, offer opportunities, create a safe space for. What is important to recognise, however, is that 'self-paced' has to accommodate both the tortoises and the hares within a community.

A recent success story in Kosovo concerns the city park in Gjilan where a foreign volunteer from Balkan Sunflowers prevailed on some former UÇK fighters (now in the Kosovo Protection Corps) to work with a group of Serbs to revive the park. This volunteer was told by every international worker he spoke to that it was 'too soon' for such an initiative. However, he was headstrong enough to push ahead, and he turned out to be right. If this had been a initiative from on high, I'm sure that all the reasons why it was 'too soon' would have come into play and the project would have been sabotaged.

At the same time, the grassroots outsider with a vision of peace also has to recognise that this is not her/his situation, that it is for locals to determine what is appropriate and when. The outsider's role is then one of prodding and trying to create spaces where people can take risks at their own pace.

Workshops facilitated by outsiders offer such a space to test ideas. This is true of workshops with members of just one of the conflicting communities as well as with cross-community workshops - a chance to say what is 'unsayable'. Some workshops produce visionary ideas for non-military forms of action. I think it is important to stress the need for follow-up of workshops, for some continued support to participants in converting the ideas generated into action.

At a workshop organised by the United States Institute for Peace with municipal level leaders from the Serbian and Albanian communities in Kosovo, one suggestion for action to change the ethnic atmosphere was 'protected walks' by multi-ethnic groups of prominent citizens down the main streets of cities. It was unclear from the report what form of protection was being referred to, and I do not know of any body working to translate this idea into action.

For me, this idea suggests a form of nonviolent action that could have dramatic and demilitarising results. In many parts of southern Europe there is a tradition of an evening promenade - in Kosovo called the korzo - down the main street. A multi-ethnic korzo with respected figures such as former political prisoners could be a powerful repudiation of the atmosphere of intimidation. I have little doubt that the transformative impact of such an action would be far greater if it was carried out as a nonviolent action abjuring military protection but instead relying mainly on the public esteem of certain walkers and the desire of most people to end the violence. Although, as we have seen in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, peace marches cannot by themselves disband armed groups, they can and often do fortify the civil courage needed to overcome intimidation.

next  |  seminar report

newsletter  |  ccts