Peacebuilding works: a British foreign policy priority
Speech given by executive director Andy Carl at Conciliation Resources' 10-year anniversary event co-hosted by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2 November 2006
Distinguished Secretary of State, Your Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
I would like to welcome you all to this event. I am delighted to see so many people here. Thank you all for coming. I would particularly like to thank the Minister and the FCO’s Conflict Issues Group for generously co-hosting this event.
I have an agenda here tonight - one which I hope you share. There are three things I’d like us to focus on: The first is to celebrate with you 10 years of hard work and achievements on the part of Conciliation Resources. The second is to reflect with you on the question of how peacebuilding works – and the third is how we can see it receiving an even greater priority in British foreign policy.
We initially set up CR to offer a professional service and what resources we could muster for conciliation. It was our ambition to make long-term personal and organizational commitments to courageous partners in what were long-term conflicts. We believed then and now that in the front-lines of violent conflicts around the world – not only were civilians being killed and displaced at an appalling scale - from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone - but in every conflict there were civilians - as well as officials of course - doing what they could to prevent their conflict from becoming violent, or where there was already organized violence, doing what they could to bring the war to an end.
I would like to give you three examples from our work that give meaning to the term ‘peacebuilding’ and I would like to offer three recommendations to our hosts for your consideration.
From Sierra Leone, following the brutal murder of the Irish Missionary, Father Felim MacAllister in 1994 by RUF rebels with the assistance of dissident soldiers, CR had a visit from a Catholic nun who had been with him, and an invitation to take part in a workshop in Makeni exploring community-based reconciliation processes. This quickly led to our playing a role providing training and support to two of the country’s more visible civic organizations and soon we were also working with an independent diaspora group, here in the UK. When we hosted our first delegation of intermediaries, on seeing our modest offices they were quick to remark that we had chosen the wrong name for ourselves and we that should be called ‘Conciliation WITHOUT Resources.’
More than 12 years on and we are still active in supporting community-based peacebuilding in Sierra Leone. Seven years since the signing of the Lome Peace Agreement – and five years since the war was officially declared over. We continue to support partners like the Bo Peace and Reconciliation Movement – a group made up of committed citizens, market traders, school teachers, ex-combatants, lorry drivers. With support from the Civil Society Challenge fund, they have organized themselves into a team of community peace-monitors. The work is very practical and very concrete.
Over the years CR has played a role in a great number of conflicts ranging from supporting an Ad-hoc Peace Committee for dialogue in Somaliland to organizing training meetings for negotiators and intermediaries in Sri Lanka and Nepal, from supporting the case of an Indo-Fijian cane-worker suing the government for the restoration of their Constitution to advising the LRA leadership in Uganda on peace negotiations.
You will hear in a moment about a project in the southern Caucasus. I think our work in the Caucasus led by my colleagues Jonathan Cohen and Rachel Clogg is really a best-practice example of the roles an international peacebuilding organization can play. There we work on each side of the conflict divide and across it - in support of groups working at the community and national and international levels. Over the years we have done and supported really groundbreaking work including exceptional documentaries made by journalists from both sides of the conflict and with local partners and the BBC we have done innovative radio work - where people tell their own moving stories about how they have experienced the war and their thoughts for the future. Between the Georgians and the Abkhaz we have been organizing a series of unofficial dialogue workshops, which are now in their fifth year. They have provided a space for key individuals to get to know one another and hear the concerns and experiences of one another, and it’s been a forum where, unofficially, ideas and issues can be constructively explored.
Finally the third example of CR’s work I wanted to briefly give you is of our programme and publication series we call Accord.
It has been our aim to help strengthen peace processes around the world by creating a resource and opportunities for those involved in such process to learn from documented first-hand experience.
We were interested in documenting how wars ended, or how seemingly insurmountable obstacles were overcome and traction was found in intractable conflicts. We have documented peace processes in Sudan, Nagorny Karabakh, Angola, Colombia, PNG-Bougainville, Northern Uganda, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Georgia-Abkhazia, Philippines-Mindanao, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Guatemala and Liberia. These publications and the team who made them are here tonight.
Let me take this unusual opportunity to draw a few conclusions and make a few recommendations.
What we have seen in all the conflicts we have documented and have been involved in, at risk of stating the obvious, is that peace and peacebuilding processes are almost always worth pursuing. By any measure of the comparative costs of war and of military interventions, peacebuilding initiatives are fantastically cost-effective.
Everyone in this room knows of the value of diplomacy, official and otherwise, of how negotiation processes and peace agreements define new constitutional arrangements, offering new ways of dealing with old problems both in terms of the institutions of governance and within society.
While an agreement reached is not a conflict resolved, even the interventions that fall-short are essential in the peacebuilding process. As the Minister has said you have to address the causes of conflict and you have got to keep on addressing the causes of conflict. It’s a long and tiring road. The collapsing talks in Colombia with the FARC; the talks that ended inconclusively last weekend in Geneva between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government; the negotiations in Juba between the LRA and the government of Uganda – just to name a few ongoing processes - as the Minister has suggested - their success, or otherwise matters and their outcome directly effects us here in the UK. At these critical times there should be no doubt that the efforts were worthwhile. As a Colombian author wrote in our Accord issue on peacebuilding efforts there: 'In each peace process the previous ones appear: as light or as shadow'.
In the time since we set up shop, Britain’s conflict policies have completely transformed, and Britain is engaged today in places and ways that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago. Now there can truly be said to be a conflict management architecture within Whitehall.
Of course, governments rarely, if ever, pursue their conflict policies by exclusively peaceful means. Which government wouldn’t prefer to win its wars over negotiating the peace? It would be intellectually dishonest to not acknowledge that we are here today discussing the foreign policy priority of peacebuilding overshadowed by the UK’s other foreign policy priorities of winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan and Britain’s support for partner governments engaged in civil wars with their ‘terrorists’ not to mention our government policies of support for the UK’s own arms industry. The Minister made the moral case for peacebuilding as a strategic priority – but I for one, think we operate in a context of moral ambivalence. We, of course, would like to see a deeper understanding of and commitment to conflict prevention and peacebuilding in our foreign and defense policies. If non-military approaches to conflict are going remain just one of the UK government’s foreign policy paths we would like to see that path as clear and as wide as possible.
Outside of government CR is part of Britain’s other, unofficial, capacities for peacebuilding. Many peacebuilding organizations are represented here today. Now with institutions like International Alert, Responding to Conflict, Saferworld, Peace Direct, IWPR, Concordis and the University programmes at Bradford, Kent and the LSE, Britain will continue to play a prominent role globally in this emerging field.
All that said - together, we are still, simply, not doing enough
I will end by flagging three areas where I see opportunities for HMG and would urgently like to see more support:
First –– under the current war on terror – it is not getting any easier to engage with unrecognized governments, armed groups and other ‘difficult’ actors. Working with these non-state groups involves its own set of challenges. But we have learned that it is the inclusive peace processes that deliver sustainable agreements. Peacebuilding means engaging with groups like Hamas, the LTTE, the SPLA, the IRA, and the ANC. We all know that diplomacy privileges bi-lateral and multilateral relations with states, and the ‘un-level playing field’ of negotiations in civil wars is perhaps an understatement. Britain can and must do more to support policies of inclusion and engagement in peacebuilding process.
Secondly, we have been privileged to have insights into several peace talks. It seems to be more often the rule than the exception that parties in peace processes experience a great deal of ad-hocism. Too often when it comes to planning and positions – the parties are making it up as they are going along. Reading negotiation positions on the flight over to the talks, planning the agenda the day before are some of the signs that parties to violent conflict are more skilled at waging war then waging peace. These processes need professional, political and sustained support and the parties themselves need the same. Given what I said about the ‘difficult’ nature of some of the governments and most of these non-state actors, who provides these forms of support? It’s not just about money. It’s about people, skills, knowledge and experience. I believe Britain could show more real leadership in this area.
Lastly, I think the enabling relationships we enjoy with the Foreign Office and other parts of the government are good example of the possibilities of better understanding of the complementary roles between government and civil society groups operating within our shared commitments to the normative frameworks of human rights and humanitarian law. We appreciate the recognition that it is not just governments and their multilateral institutions who have important roles to play but that civil society organizations inside and outside conflicts can also be influential in peacebuilding processes. We know that this involves some risk-taking, but that without Britain’s help neither our partners nor we would be able to do the peacebuilding work we do.
While the 20th century will be remembered for its wars, I hope that together we can help make the 21st century remembered for when we learned how to make violent conflicts history.
Thank you.
