*** Please help with the Big Catch Up! ***

From Never Again

This letter was given to guests at the Never Again London 'After Party', held on 18 October 2006, where £1000 was raised for the Peacebuilding Office

Never Again is based on the principle that working well together is the first step to trying to make, what many of us want to achieve individually, happen together.

Take the example of creating world peace! For some it happens very early, a youngster looks around at the world and sees so many things that are wrong. Only if we did it this way, or that were different, the world might be a better place. Soon we realise our hopes are impossible.. The world is big, complicated, people are difficult, demanding, sometimes self-interested, reluctant to change. We get older. We realise it is impossible. That is what it means to get older.

Never Again was founded as a youth network. While we were still innocent enough to believe it possible, we found a way to work together globally to try to change things. And we have had some success. Over the last five years of working together, and indeed growing older, our friendships and the energy we gain from our partnerships has sustained our network of volunteers.

Never Again has taken the idea of working together in partnership across the world to prevent conflict to its geopolitical extremes. This is a radical because in ‘reality’ and in our perceptions of reality we inhabit a deeply divided world. Many imagine a world where 20 % of us are developed, and 80% of us are developing. Never Again for the last five years has flattened that perception. We work across the world on the understanding that we are all developing, that we all live in a developing world and here in the West or there in the South, we all have as much to learn from each other as we do from ourselves.

Conflict prevention needs to be tackled globally. Rwanda shows us why. 12 years ago genocide took place in Rwanda. A UN peacekeeping mission was stationed there. They knew it would happen. They faxed the Security Council. Nothing was done. Almost a million people were killed that spring in Rwanda. Clinton later stands from a plane door at the airport. He apologises. Flies off. His feet never touched the tarmac. But, for the five minutes he spoke Rwanda was reconciled. A sign, however slight, that someone cared.

The genocide in Rwanda, was a violent demonstration of failure. A failure for Rwandans: of their government, their system, their society. A failure for the UN: of everything it is set up to do; for the nations that hold vetoes on its Security Council: one being the UK, for us who democratically elect our government and who believe in our institutions. It was a failure of humanity.

In Rwanda our colleagues are working now to build peace in their country. Their government has a solution in mind: an idea to preach peace unity using methods like solidarity camps. Ethnicity and History are taboo. Rwanda’s government, with the best intentions, has a strict party line on reconciliation. Genocide in Rwanda was not just a problem of 1994 but re-occurred in Rwanda in the 20th century. If policy changes in Rwanda the mechanisms are still there to preach hatred.

Our network in Rwanda is trying to offer an alternative solution, to fit in with the government’s plan for peace and reconciliation but to facilitate spaces and experiences for people which are safe, which do address the past, where people can speak openly, think critically for themselves and connect with each other beyond their ethnicities and their history.

In the UK, none of us have ever signed the genocide convention. Though Clement Atlee signed it on our behalf in 1948. For those of us whose families were resident here at the time, our grandparents agreed. We know why.

But what does it mean for us to be signed up to this document? To have a permanent seat on the UNSC? Should we care about what is happening to people now in Darfur? If we should, then, how? Are we responsible in some way for helping to find or to deliver solutions to global problems?

In the UK we are trying to do create experiences for people to re-consider these questions for themselves, and to bring them together with people from beyond a barrier: sometimes people who have lived through violent conflict with those who have not, policy makers with people for whom their policy might affect, people who share an office building but have never spoken before, professionals with their counterparts from the other side of the world. We provide a space for participants to think, to discuss, to make friends, to learn from each other and help to facilitate their work together.

There must be alternative solutions to conflict prevention to setting alight a civil war in Iraq in a supposed attempt to liberate a nation from a dictator and protect the world from a man who had no serious arms. There must be better ways to work together as people locally and internationally.

Never Again’s work has come to a juncture. In Rwanda the success of Never Again’s experiment there and the urgency for alternative solutions has meant the network has grown beyond the ability of the few volunteers to run it. They now have five ideas to develop programmes for the 2000 members they have, groups of young people with committees in schools and universities and some young people who do not go to school.

• Develop NA workshop programme and train trainers
• Rwanda’s first youth newspaper, by youth for youth
• Never Again football cup
• Never Again Connection Centre – internet café project to generate income for Never Again groups locally
• A peacebuilding House in Kigali for local projects and international interns

Never Again’s work in Rwanda has become unsustainable due to a lack of resources to meet a growing demand among young people in Rwanda to become involved and spread the project. This has complicated things for us. We have been forced to confront a reality that even though we are all one developing world, 80 % of those resources are here.

Here in the West, we are working to redress the balance. We want to help them find the resources they need to start up. Without their projects in Rwanda, our projects here in the UK is meaningless as all our work is interconnected.

We hope that soon the Never Again network in Rwanda will find ways to become self-sustainable and through their ideas like the internet café enterprise, they will. It will take a lot of hard work. Our loose network will need to be tightened. We need financial resources and therefore also to create an organisational structure with checks and balances. We are keen to do this without hampering the individuality, the personality and the passion that the network has enabled us all to use in approaching our work, so we need to work out how. As we get older as a nework we are confronted more by the realities of how the world works and as we get older as a network we have gathered the experience to work out how to challenge them!

It is a new part of a journey for us. If you would like to be involved in any way that interests you, we welcome you.

Thank-you very much for your contribution so far.

Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, Chair, Never Again