CCTS
Review 36

Models of Accompaniment

The resistance mechanisms of communities that PBI accompanies in Colombia

The communities of Jiguamiando and Curbarado that PBI accompanies in Colombia have developed similar strategies to those of the Peace Communities in building resistance to displacement and protection of the lives of their communities. They have formed what they call Humanitarian Zones (HMZ). There is a network of national support which includes:

1. The Commission Interecclesial de Justicia y Paz (CIJP), made up of lawyers, priests & nuns, teachers, and human rights defenders. Members of this organisation live with the communities. They are documenting the abuses, for the IACHR among others, that have taken place in the past and they send out urgent actions when violations are threatened.
2. With the help of CIJP the government has been persuaded to form an intergovernmental commission of verification of the palm oil exploitation. This involves government departments, national & international NGOs, lawyers groups, such as the Colombian Commission of Jurists, palm companies and international observers – in the form of PBI. The commission seeks verification of the actions of the palm companies, planting palm trees on what was rich bio diverse rainforest, stealing communally held lands and displacing communities in the process.
3. Special protection measures are taken by the IACHR. The communities also use the mechanisms of the UN Human Rights Council and Rapporteurs.
4. PBI volunteers accompany CIJP to enable the Commission to go in and out of this very remote, tropical part of Colombia, so that the Communities are supported physically, legally and spiritually. The HMZ themselves also have international solidarity groups living with them.

A complex network of national and international support has been developed, involving both civil society solidarity organisations and international legal mechanisms to ensure safety and to create the space to resist.

Resistance has been costly but there have been real achievements. The Community have kept their dignity. They are not living in poverty in the urban slums. They are still in the rural area and have not lost their land completely but are able to continue with subsistence farming. This has slowed the process of forced removals from the land. They have demonstrated a process of resistance and a model for living which has been adopted in different ways by other communities around the country. Their resistance has also brought into the open issues which have been masked by the internal conflict, such as economic interests in exploiting the land for palm oil, gold, other minerals, and the wealth of the region’s biodiversity.

Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine/Israel (EAPPI)

Floresca Karanàsou, Middle East Programme Manager at Quaker Peace and Social Witness, talked about the purpose and practice of this programme initiative, the protection mechanisms of accompaniment, and the civil courage of people who engage in acts of resistance in violent situations.

She began with a brief account of the background from which the programme had emerged. The second intifada, which began seven years ago, had been very bloody. There had been three failed attempts at the UN Security Council to set up a peacekeeping or protection force. Representatives from Palestinian and Israeli civil society went to international partners seeking protection for civilians in the conflict, and international advocacy. The Heads of Churches in Jerusalem went to the World Council of Churches and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel began in the autumn of 2002.  QPSW had begun its own, smaller, human rights observers’ project earlier in 2002. As the only church in the UK implementing such a programme, QPSW was asked by other Churches and church-related organisations to be the implementing partner of a broader partnership in the UK & the republic of Ireland to join the international EAPPI. Eleven countries are involved currently: Canada, Eire, Finland, Germany, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. The South African EAPPI is financed by Sweden. The North Americans have the least resources and send the fewest EAs – a problem given the importance of advocacy in the US. EAPPI uses the word ‘accompaniment’ in the same way as PBI, meaning protection by presence. When ‘Ecumenical Accompaniers’ return from the field they are committed to a certain amount of public speaking and to advocacy with MPs, government bodies and senior officials in the Churches.

Accompaniers serve for a period of three months and are active in six different localities - two villages and four cities. The Local Reference Group, which advises WCC-EAPPI staff, includes the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, Palestinian organisations and peace activists, and Israeli peace groups.
Acts of resistance are carried out in the struggle to hold on to the land and avoid displacement in the face of construction of roads, settlements and the ‘barrier’ that has been built by Israel, which cuts many Palestinians off from their fertile land. For the first 20 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, in the Palestinian resistance there was ‘steadfastness’ i.e. non-cooperation with the occupation authorities. Then there was the first uprising or intifada (1987-92), which was a popular mobilisation, unarmed and nonviolent, except for stone throwing. The second uprising (which began in 2000) was mostly violent and was led by armed groups affiliated to different parties, and the nonviolent actions have received very little attention. No resistance has succeeded in reversing Israeli occupation policies (e.g. settlement expansion or the building of the barrier), so those Palestinians who can afford it now take legal cases against the Israeli authorities to the Israeli courts. Very few rulings have been favourable to Palestinians and even fewer have been implemented by the Israeli authorities. There have been very few successful prosecutions of settler violence.

International advocacy is regarded by Palestinians as essential, as it is assumed that the conflict can end only with international pressure on Israel to change its policies and withdraw from the Occupied Territories. The EU is a major focus for advocacy, since it is Israel’s largest trading partner.

So far the international community (meaning here international organisations and some individual states) has not applied pressure on Israel effectively. The International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion in the summer of 2005, according to which the barrier should be dismantled and erected on Israeli territory, and compensation paid to Palestinians. This advisory opinion was adopted by the UN General Assembly, but no action was agreed by it or by any other UN body to press Israel to abide by this ruling. Those in power are aware of the situation but there is a lack of political will for change.
Why then do people continue the struggle? This is the only way to hang on to the land, and land is key to this conflict and to Palestinian livelihood. At the local level acts of resistance, which continue, include actions by Israeli peace groups and Palestinians working together, for instance to gather the harvest, providing protection to Palestinian farmers who are attacked or prevented from accessing their land by settlers or the Israeli army.

International solidarity networks, EAPPI accompaniers and international conferences are used by those who have faith that ‘the international community’ will do something. In one place where villagers had suffered at the hands of vigilantes, EAPPI has provided protection since 2003. An example of the kind of ‘small victory’ that this presence achieves comes from the village of Jayyous, which has been cut off from its most fertile land by the barrier. One day a villager, who had a permit to go to his land through a barrier gate, was refused permission by soldiers to take his tractor through. They said that the rules forbade it. EAPPI checked the rules with the Israeli Humanitarian Hotline and informed the villagers of Jayyous that tractors could indeed go through the barrier gate as long as the drivers had permits. The next day all the villagers with tractors turned up at the gate, en masse, to force the implementation of the rule, and they got through. Similar ‘small victories’ are scored at checkpoints and in areas where Palestinians live near settlers, when EAs challenge abusive behaviour, prevarication or arbitrary orders. Incident reports, and monitoring logs of checkpoints and barrier gates produced by the EAPPI, are used by the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The WCC programme has a 2013 horizon. EAPPI in the UK and Ireland runs to 2008, when it is hoped its life will be extended.

During the discussion that followed Floresca’s presentation, a question was asked about other international groups active in the region. These include the International Solidarity Movement, the Christian Peacemakers Team and the International Women’s Peace Service. All have different mandates and emphases. They have to work together and to avoid overlap or conflict, focussing on tasks rather than geography, and co-ordination has improved.

The ultimate vision of the programme is of a peace process that leads to the resolution of the conflict on the basis of international law. It is unlikely, however, that the occupation will be lifted in the near future. Governments and others have made a commitment to the dismantlement of the settlements and a return to the 1967 borders. They should be held accountable to this commitment. The occupation must be named for what it is. It is important to struggle for transparency and human rights, irrespective of the outcome.

It seems as if nothing is being achieved through democratic processes. What then should we and our organisations do to support resistance and struggle? There was discussion about the practicability and value of advocacy. Charities have restrictions on campaigning. It is still easier for the churches, if they are in agreement about the campaign. INGOs have become professionalised and are concerned about their funding, so selling stories of struggle is not easy. It is important not to give up on holding government to account. Parliamentary committees have drawn the same conclusions as INGOs about the situation. There can be no effective economic development in the Occupied Territories unless the restrictions on movement are lifted. At present there is increasing aid and also increasing poverty. There must be engagement with Hamas. Perhaps there may be hope for change with a new leadership in the British government.

What can we and should we do?

The issue of whose responsibility it was to take what kind of action was debated more generally. It was suggested that we do not share the dilemmas of those living in situations of violent conflict and our role is to see how best we can support their struggle. It is not up to us to propose nonviolent direct action to others who are ‘on the edge’ when we do not bear the consequences and cannot support those who do.
One participant noted that his organisation had been asked by its potential donor to make a commitment not to encourage nonviolent direct action in its Zimbabwe programme. To make such a request is to misunderstand the nature of civil society organisations. In the Colombia film it was clear that the community was not taking orders from INGOs. In Zimbabwe, grass roots groups are driven by the situation on the ground.

There was some debate about whether we ourselves were, or were not, ‘on the edge’ – at a critical point that called for resistance. The argument was put forward that we are, in that we are at a critical point for decisions that will determine the future but do not realise it because no one is pointing a gun at us. How, then are things going to change and what can we and our organisations do?
Our organisations may present a challenge themselves. When organisations are structurally conformist it is important to identify what can be done within this framework. For instance, a member of one organisation said that its public affairs spokesperson might be encouraged to talk more in political circles about power realities and cleavages which contradict the ‘moralistic, corporatist assumptions’ of the US and the EU. These assume an uncontested, legitimate consensus or ‘moral majority’, entitled to force particular outcomes, in international negotiations, on those defined as rogues because of their failure to follow the prescribed script. He instanced the unquestioned presumption that Russia would comply with a western policy agenda over Serbia and Kosovo. This has been refuted by a resurgent Russia, under Putin, pursuing its own interests for its own reasons and backing Serbia to the hilt. The hypocritical diplomacy surrounding the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons programme was subject to the same criticism and played directly into the hands of Ahmadinejad and the radicals in Iran.

Within organisations that have become ‘sclerotic’, individuals need to be more radical. We need to ‘speak truth to power’ within our own organisations. The approach shaped by ‘logframes’ (logical framework analysis), now used widely and required by many funding bodies, dilutes the radical vision. The funding agenda distorts what we have to say. Transforming reality and building peace has become part of a technical script. Governments have their own agendas, and we should question whether we should be sharing them at all. It is increasingly clear that the order we have now is not sustainable. In this context, talk of sustainable peace is verging on fraud.

Tony Benn once said that we all recognise the need for freedom of speech, but what about the freedom to be heard? Where do you go with your voice? Direct action can be a powerful form of communication.
In the Colombia film someone goes and speaks at the UN. NGOs can facilitate such actions, i.e. amplify the voices of those who struggle nonviolently for freedom and equality, so that they are heard in international forums. With globalisation it is increasingly important to work both locally and internationally to support resistance. We must keep on with the struggle.

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