Southside Pride

I kept thinking about “Gangs of New York” for days after I saw it. It was illuminating as well as riveting. The movie depicted people who believed that violence was necessary. The layers of their belief system were revealed in scene after bloody scene. I wondered what Gandhi would have said to The Butcher, to Amsterdam, to Priest Vallon, not to mention the politician from Tammany Hall.

I realized that the film’s story took place in a time before Gandhi’s groundbreaking work, before the creation of the United Nations, before the Declaration of Human Rights and before the world faced the possibility of nuclear annihilation. It was in a time before people were so frustrated with violence that they were willing to consider a notion as outlandish as nonviolence. During the time period portrayed in “Gangs of New York” it would have been impossible to even conceive, let alone give birth to, the idea of a nonviolent peaceforce.

Now, spread out over the globe, pockets of people who believe in nonviolence are creating an organized peace force. It’s the shantisena, the “peace army,” that Gandhi was working on when he died in 1948. It’s a brave and passionate experiment. What is there to lose? As Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew.”

The new organization, called the Nonviolent Peaceforce, estimates that it will need approximately $3.5 million to deploy a group of unarmed peacekeepers to the island of Sri Lanka as it launches its pilot “peace army” this summer. According to the text of a donation request sent out by the Nonviolent Peaceforce, $3.5 million is what the U.S. military spends in five minutes. Personally, I would like to see the U.S. military contribute five minutes of its budget to the Nonviolent Peaceforce to see if the shantisena could really work.

On a small scale, the concept has worked. For nearly 20 years small teams of unarmed peacemakers such as Witness for Peace, Peace Brigades International, Servicio Internacional para la Paz and Christian Peacemaker Teams, to name a few, have been going to areas of armed conflict around the world with remarkable success. In 1985, after two members of an activist women’s group in Guatemala were assassinated, the group asked Peace Brigades International for 24-hour nonviolent accompaniment for their leaders. During that time civilians were terrified of the military and unable to work to better their society. For four years PBI provided “unarmed bodyguards” day and night. No more women in the group were killed and the presence of the PBI provided encouragement for other groups to emerge and begin rebuilding a democratic society.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce proposes to do the same type of work as PBI but on a much larger scale. Donna Howard of Duluth, one of many Americans involved in the formation of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, said what has been missing has been a large-scale, nonviolent intervention mechanism. “There is a need for something larger, more inclusive, diverse and mainstream—something that can be developed to the point of stopping armed conflict.”

From Reactive to Proactive

Howard has spent her life worrying about everyone’s well-being and trying to change the world. It is her calling. She laughed when she said she was born with an “overactive conscience.” She has worked in shelters and soup kitchens, read Dorothy Day and lived in a Catholic Worker community. She has been opposed to war her entire life, hating the violence of it and hating what it does to poor people the world over. One day she read somewhere that the U.S. military was spending approximately $57 million a day preparing to wage nuclear war while people in America (as well as other parts of the world) were suffering from lack of food and shelter. So, because she wanted the military to stop what it was doing and spend its money on something constructive (to explain it in a simplified way), she joined forces with other activists and cut down a few poles that support the cables used to transmit ELF signals, extremely low frequency signals, that command U.S. nuclear submarines to attack without warning. The activists “disarmed the Navy’s nuclear trigger.” Of course, it’s a federal offense to do that, and Howard went to prison for three years. Those three years could have been a waste of time but they weren’t.

“In prison you have lots of time to think,” said Howard. After obsessing on all the ways one could oppose war she finally concluded she couldn’t just keep protesting war in the same old way. She couldn’t just be against war. She had to be in favor of peace and work toward it in a concrete way.

Her release in 1999 coincided with the Hague Peace Appeal that brought together 9,000 activists from 100 countries who drafted a proposal stating among other things that “peace is a human right” and “it is time to abolish war.” The idea to finally create Gandhi’s shantisena had ripened and popped up all over the world. It was the zeitgeist of 1999 that metamorphosed first to the planning stages, then to the development stages, and culminated in the formal creation of the organization at a global conference held in India from November 29 to December 3 of 2002.

The mission of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, officially stated, is “to facilitate the creation of an international civilian nonviolent standing peace force. The peace force will be sent to conflict areas to prevent death and destruction and protect human rights, thus creating the space for local groups to struggle nonviolently, enter into dialogue, and seek peaceful resolution.”

Sri Lanka

When word got out that a peace force was being organized, more than a dozen areas of conflict around the world asked the group for their presence. Because it was impossible—the mechanism was not in place, they didn’t have the organization or the resources—to send troops to all the areas, the Peaceforce decided to select just one of them as a pilot project.

During the past three years, researchers were sent to study the potential sites. Sri Lanka, the site that was picked, was the one where Howard participated in the study. Her two visits totaled five weeks in the country. She and fellow researchers worked around the clock and met with parties on all sides of the conflict. Many people in Sri Lanka speak English as a second language so it was usually possible to communicate in English but occasionally it was necessary to speak through interpreters.

The situation in Sri Lanka is similar to many. In a nutshell, a dominant group oppresses and discriminates against a certain segment of the population, turning those people into second-class citizens who end up desperate and trying to fight back. The beautiful island 30 miles southeast of India has been torn up by civil war since the mid-1980s. Approximately 64,000 people have been killed and 1.6 million people have been displaced.

The violence started when a new constitution written by Buddhist Sinhalese leaders, the majority that controls the government, declared that Buddhism and Sinhalese would be the official religion and language of Sri Lanka. After nonviolent protests by the Hindu Tamil minority were repressed, the Tamil eventually turned to the more traditional tactics of weapons and explosives. The northeast section of the country is now controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, LTTE, and the official government is in the capital on the southwest coast. A tentative cease-fire is in place and four rounds of peace talks, mediated by the Norwegian government, have taken place. The first three rounds were very successful. However, in the most recent round, although agreement was reached on important issues, the talks hit a brick wall of fear when the government wanted the LTTE to disarm and the LTTE wanted the government to get out of their territory. The LTTE is on the U.S. list of terrorist groups and is under increasing pressure from the United States to disarm. According to Howard it is common in conflicted areas for groups who are trying to be heard and get what is just and fair for their people to have the “terrorist” label stuck on them.

It is understandable that a group in the position of the LTTE would feel vulnerable when asked to disarm. It is also understandable that the dominant segment of society would fear loosening its grip on an indignant minority.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce’s nonpartisan philosophy is essential. They can contribute to a peaceful solution and do things, simply because they are not from Sri Lanka, that Sri Lankans working for peace can’t do. Because an NP team member is neither Sinhalese or Tamil, their motives are not suspect. NP team members can look at the situation from the outside and respect the right of everyone to have their voices heard and also use their impartial judgment to document wrongdoing. “They [NP team members] can look at everyone as having the potential to enter into a resolution with dignity and honesty. The ‘side’ they [NP team members] are on is the ‘side’ of healthy conflicting that can be resolved.” They are also impartial in the sense that not only are they not from Sri Lanka, they are from all over the world, and therefore will not represent the interests of Europe and the United States. “We will not be a white, northern organization,” said Howard.

There are other important things to understand about the Nonviolent Peaceforce, said Howard. One is that the NP won’t go where it’s not invited. It will respect the requests of the conflicted area; for example, NP had originally planned to train and send 150 people but changed the number to 60 because that was the number Sri Lanka asked for.

Another is that NP will not go to solve the problems, it will go to create a safe situation in which the parties involved in the conflict can struggle toward a solution. An international presence automatically creates a level of safety because the parties involved are sensitive to global opinion. “People working for justice will be in less danger and can work with a courage and creativity not possible without the safety [provided by NP],” explained Howard. NP team members would not be able to provide safety in a place where the conflicted parties didn’t care what the world thought of them.

Based on this sensitivity, NP team members stationed in Sri Lanka will be backed by an Emergency Response Network, about 500 people in 20 countries who are ready to call heads of state, the Sri Lankan ambassadors in their country or their own ambassadors in Sri Lanka, to report a human rights violation against one of their team members or perhaps the abduction of a Sri Lankan child into somebody’s army or other dangerous situations.

Training for NP

Training to become a member of NP will be intensive and profound. Third-party nonviolent intervention requires more than “just good hearts.” Global trainer George Lakey of Training for Change has been commissioned by NP to develop the manual, which he has been working on for the past year. Howard calls it “the most complete, extensive, serious curriculum of this kind that’s ever been created.”

People who might be recruited for this type of work are: former peace team members from a variety of organizations; members of veterans for peace organizations; people with military and law enforcement experience; members of religious and spiritual communities; veterans of other nonviolent movements such as civil rights, national freedom, labor, anti-war, women, or environmental; former Peace Corps volunteers and other veterans of international service; mothers and grandmothers; and “ordinary” people willing to devote a couple of years.
The goal is to start out with 200 active members, 400 reserves and 500 supporters and work up to 2,000, 4,000 and 5,000 respectively by 2010.

NP peaceworkers will be taken care of by the organization. The goal is to pay them enough while in active duty to live comfortably but not lavishly in the culture, make health insurance and counseling available to them, and then pay them enough when they go back to their former lives to make up for lost wages.

The People of NP

The people involved in NP are breathtaking. To mention two of them besides Howard, there are Mel Duncan and David Hartsough, often called the co-founders but, as Duncan wrote in the NP newsletter, Rumors of Peace, “That is an overstatement at best. If anything we are holders of the focus. ” Duncan has been an organizer on issues of peace and justice for more than 30 years. His office is at NP headquarters at 801 Front Avenue in St. Paul.

Hartsough is located in San Francisco. A dramatic story from his life, told in the March 23, 2002, Bangkok Post, demonstrates the nature of his commitment to nonviolence, a commitment shared by team members forming the Nonviolent Peaceforce.

During the days of the Civil Rights Movement, Hartsough was heavily involved in protests against segregated lunch counters. Once he spent two full days at a lunch counter in Arlington, Va.., with 11 friends and reported that they were “the most difficult two days of my life.”

The American Nazi Party taunted them and called them names. Worse, they dropped lit cigarettes down their shirt-fronts and punched them so hard they were knocked to the floor where they were kicked. At the end of the second day Hartsough was meditating about loving his enemies when a man threatened to stab him through the heart with the switchblade he held in his hand if Hartsough didn’t get out of the store in two seconds. Hartsough looked him in the eye, called him “Friend,” and told him to do what he believed was right, telling him he would still try to love him. The man left the store. Hartsough said that was the split second when he had to decide whether he truly believed in nonviolence.

His belief in nonviolence was reinforced the following week when Arlington desegregated its lunch counters.

The meeting in India at the end of 2002 brought 130 like-minded people, representing peace organizations in 47 countries, together. At that time 60 organizations had joined NP but by now there are more than 70. Among them are the Fellowship of Reconciliation (international) and grassroots groups such as Tikkun Community, an international solidarity movement in Palestine; the Organisation des Femmes pour la Paix et le Developpement in Kenya, and the Iniciativa Ecumenica Oscar Romero in Uruguay. Other organizations that have signed on are the the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, the Muslim Peace Fellowship and the Jewish Peace Fellowship.

Illustrious speakers were: Ela Gandhi, member of Parliament in South Africa and the granddaughter of the late Mahatma Gandhi; Samdhong Rinpoche, Prime Minister of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile; and Nozizwe Madlalala-Routledge, Deputy Minister of Defense for South Africa and a member of the Peaceforce International Steering Committee. Trainings that focused on establishing and using a global understanding of nonviolent action were presented by Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen, director of a Romanian peace organization.

NP has been endorsed by seven Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and many heads or former heads of state. The Dalai Lama said, “There is an important need to pursue this ideal.”

On the local front, there are at least 15 veterans of peace and justice work living in the Seward Neighborhood who are involved in NP.

Fund-raising

Because funds for NP will probably not come from the U.S. military budget, fund-raising is a high priority for NP. On 9/11 last year, St. Albert the Great Catholic Church, at 33rd. Avenue South and East 29th Street, held a dinner and program, and collected money for NP from people who had committed their day’s wages to it. Similar events were held throughout the country. One guy in Arizona gave his tip income of $382, which was matched by his employer. Another guy in Washington gave $1,000 saying that he’d never made that much in a single day in his life but believes his work is worth that much. Lenief Heimstead who works at the NP office says she has worked in many nonprofit organization but has never seen so many notes included with donations, just expressing solidarity and encouragement. Besides individuals, funds are solicited from foundations, religious organizations and so far from the U.S. Institute of Peace. Other governments—Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and EU— have also been asked to contribute, with the full understanding that NP will not support the interests of one government over another.

The newly elected international governing council of the Nonviolent Peaceforce will meet in the Twin Cities in March. Everyone is invited to meet them at a fund-raiser at the Weisman Art Museum, 333 E. River Road, Sun., March 2. FFI about the event call Mary Lou at 651-487-0800.

To find out more about NP visit www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org or call 651-487-0800.