Building an alternative to military intervention

Christine Schweitzer

There are many possibilities forcivilian intervention in conflicts. Today the UN, the OSCE,and even NATO, speak of the importance of civilian personnel in complexpeace-keeping missions.
Most industrialised countries have cre-ated conflict resolution budget-lines, and even the World Bank is concerned with"conflict prevention". However, at the same time they all insist that in case ofviolence, there needs to be a military presence to protect the civilians. That hasbeen the ideology and also the practice of the past decade. The military protectcivilians and open the space for civilians to do their decisive work for peace. This article argues that this is a matter of ideology, not a reality without alternatives.

Nonviolence of necessity

Since the Second World War there have been around 200 wars, mostly in Southerncountries. In only a minority of these has any external military intervention takenplace. Think about Chechnya, Colombia, Senegal, Sudan, the genocide in Rwanda,Burma, the Philippines, Nepal, IsraelPalestine and Sri Lanka. In these and inmany more places civilians often have been the main victims of war, and humanrights activists have been arrested, tortured or assassinated. In these cases therewas no military protection for non-combatants and those who struggle for peaceand justice--for activists in those countries, it was not a choice but a necessity tofind nonviolent means of action.
Generally in a violent conflict, there are three tasks needed:

to restrain or de-escalate violence(peace-keeping);
to negotiate and find a political solu-tion (peace-making);
to work on the causes of conflict and tochange the negative attitudes and hate that often accompanies conflict (peacebuilding).

These strategies need to be pursued at the same time if a conflict is to be suc-cessfully transformed. Without peacekeeping, for instance, peace-making andpeace-building will be very difficult because force can easily threaten thewhole process - groups who want to sabotage a peace initiative can easily provokearmed incidents. Or without peace-building addressing the roots of the conflict,peace-making can lose the support of a population leading to a re-escalation.
Peace-making and peace-building aregenerally accepted as civilian tasks. But peace-keeping? Normally it is seen asmilitary, but there are well-known methods of civilian peace-keeping:

Protective accompaniment (ofhuman rights activists, for example)
This method which is mainly associatedwith Peace Brigades International (PBI), although many other groups practise it aswell, has proven to be very effective in situations where potential offenders heedinternational opinion. To date, no activist under escort by PBI and no escort hasbeen killed. The underlying strategy is one of civil dissuasion--the internationalpresence inhibits attacks because very often the violent groups don't want theiractivity to attract international attention. In Palestine, the International SolidarityMovement and perhaps a dozen other groups are showing how to protect civil-ians against a powerful army. They accompany ambulances, observe demonstrationsor the harvest of olives, and have gathered in Arafat's compound to prevent its bombing or his arrest.
International presence
When many peaceworkers establish a presence in vulnerable villages in frontierareas or zones of conflict, this is like an accompaniment for a whole community.It is necessary when the violence is on one side, when the parties cannot be separated,and it aims to reduce the risk of violence more than protect an individual or particu-lar group. A recent international example would be the activities of groups such asWitness for Peace in restraining Contra violence against frontier villages inNicaragua in the 1980s.
Witnessing/monitoring
By seeing to it that "the whole world is watching you", nonviolent activists dis-courage acts of violence, rendering them politically unacceptable.
Interposition
Peaceworkers can interpose themselves between opposing groups to try to avoidviolence, so creating a time for reflection and a space where local groups can try toresolve conflicts peacefully. This is a method not for stopping wars (all projectshaving tried to nonviolently "enforce" a cease-fire have failed so far) but which maybe effective in cases of communal violence.

Following in the footsteps

A complete history of nonviolent intervention in conflict has not yet been writ-ten. There was a wave of such actions in the late 1960s and 1970s, for instance inCyprus, Vietnam-Cambodia, Bangladesh, the Middle East and Northern Ireland.The early 1990s saw the Gulf Peace Team going to Iraq at the time of second GulfWar and various actions concerning Bosnia. Numbers involved vary a lot. Per-haps the biggest was "Mir Sada", a peace caravan to Bosnia, initiated by Beati iCostruttori de la Pace and the French humanitarian organisation Equilibre in1993, with around 2,000 people. Perhaps the smallest was just 20 people. But asimpressive as any numbers might be has been the willingness of participants to risk their lives in such actions (althoughit should also not be forgotten that these were short-term projects).
Local groups have sometimes taken on similar work. The best known are the ShantiSena in India--the "peace army" proposed by Gandhi that became a reality in the1950s. They went to villages in zones of tension, working there, offering mediationwhen needed and trying to restrain the violence through their presence, without arms.Here, we can speak less of "dissuasion" and more of the positive force of nonviolence--Gandhi's satyagraha.
There are also examples of civil peace-keeping with large numbers of participants, including some organised by statesrather than by civil society organisations. These include the World Council ofChurches monitors for the South African elections of 1994, the OSCE Kosovo-Ver-ification Mission in 1998-99, and the Truce/Peace Monitoring Group inBougainville/Papua New Guinea from 1997 onward. The first and third arecases of success; the second had many achievements but in circumstances thatfrustrated its ultimate success.

The peace army

To return to the starting point--do civil missions need the protection of soldiers?The existence of examples where security was established by nonviolent meansshows that the belief in military protection is more ideology than reality. Thereis a logic of violence--a logic that says that force is the ultimate means.
    But there is another logic, that of nonviolence, and this is superior because it contains a vision of a common future forall those in conflict.
    A new project trying to realise thisalternative logic is the international NGO Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). NP is aim-ing to create an international civilian "peace army". Its goal is to prevent deathand destruction and protect human rights, creating the space needed for local groupsto struggle in a peaceful way, enter into dialogue and seek a peaceful resolution(since it is only those who are part of the conflict who can resolve it satisfactorily.)
    The Nonviolent Peaceforce proposes to send large numbers of people to conflictzones. It aims to have 2,000 active and 4,000 reserve staff, trained and ready toserve. Naturally this goal will take time--NP was only launched in 2002. Sothe Nonviolent Peaceforce is the reconstruction of the idea of the "peace army",but an army not at the bidding of the UN, but organised by civil groups at theglobal level.

Reducing violence on the ground

At the moment, NP has a pilot project in Sri Lanka and working groups on otherconflicts (Israel-Palestine, Myanmar, Korea, Philippines). The pilot project isonly on a small scale, but otherwise has the elements envisaged for larger-scaledeployments later: training and preparation, paid staff on two-year contracts, pro-fessional supervision and evaluation.
    After a general three-week training, andanother four-week training in Sri Lanka (including language classes), the projectbegan with an 11-member team in four sites, plus three project staff based in Colombo. They come from 10 countriesand from every continent except Australia. NP hopes to enlarge the team to perhaps30 people who would work in six to eight places.
    The major goal of this project is to reduce violence to increase the safety ofcivilians in Sri Lanka so they can contribute to a lasting peace with justice.
    Among other things, the teams are working in mixed Tamil-Muslim areas,active providing protection and accompaniment for civilians under threat fromharassment by different ethnic groups, the security forces and the LTTE, includ-ing the issue of prevention of and protection from under age recruitment. In apurely Sinhalese area they are confronted with the issue of inter-party tensions. Insome areas, they are the only foreign presence in the area under threat.

Another century of nonviolence

Conflicts are not only inevitable, but they can be positive if they arise from attemptsto end oppression and injustice. The problem in every case is violence. I am con-vinced that the force of nonviolence, that was so important in the 20th century--despite all the violence of that century --can be even more decisive for the centuryin which we now live. The development of nonviolent means of intervention can makea contribution to that task.

Christine Schweitzer is Research Director of the Nonviolent Peaceforce (http://www. nonviolentpeaceforce.org/ ) and a staff member of the Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent Conflict (http://www.ifgk.de/ ).