What Quakers can contribute to R2P
From Never Again
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What canst thou say? A shorter version of this article appears this week at The Friend
This version is being opened up for collaboration (personal points of view will be edited out as I have time!) ClareWhite 18:34, 29 June 2006 (CEST)
Responsibility to Protect was a phrase accepted by the UN General Assembly in September last year. It brings into a new emphasis to an obligation to match the sovereignty of nations: governments have the duty to protect their own populations and if this protection breaks down to the extent where there is massive killings and the government is unable or unwiling to act, the international community shoud step in.
R2P obliges people to wrestle with the full implications of intervention in a crisis: to look into the very heart of the storm. It is never simple. I was looking forwrad to having my assumptions challenged and questioned at a meeting of Friends, organised by Jack Patterson, working on this issue for AFSC and hosted by QPSW. I wasn't disappointed.
For me, the starting point is genocide and my belief that it is a crime that can be stopped. But there are many types of violent conflict covered by R2P. We looked at the dilemmas around this issue, world trends and how Quakers work with their strengths and face their weakneses.
How does intervention change a conflict? Does 'protection' in fact disempower the victims? Are we more concerned that the killing is stopped or the means to stop the killing? What do we do to engage in systems we don't agree with or the potential for violence in a supposedly preventive operation? At the point of crisis, do we only have the choice of invading or walking away? Are we right to assume that there is always a nonviolent alternative to invasion?
Visions that initially looked outlandish became grounded in current possibility as we discussed them in a spirit of honesty and from a variety of perspectives. For example, from initially denying that 'protection' could ever be harmful, I began to see that protection has a disempowering effect. My 'just stop it' viewpoint opened into the greater menu of options I had been unable to imagine alone.
We discussed many different examples of conflict and saw how important it is to have access to people on the ground who have useful input into the most appropriate response. Peacekeeping can create a wall over which it is impossible to make peace. Intervention could have the effect of strengthening one side and perpetuating the conflict. On the other hand, there are situations where people simply need to be protected from massacre or saved from starvation. We may need to face down the mob with the machetes - maybe every day for months. How does that square with your interpretation of the Peace Testimony?
Our approach has to be flexible and responsive and we have to listen.
Where Quakers already haves a trusted network that could be incredibly powerful. Friends need improved ways to share information, from the ground where conflicts are taking place, to the public who can influence powerful governments, to the international governance and NGO sectors who deliver the action. At the moment, good work goes on, but it isn't necessarily shared to those who may replicate or use it in other ways.
Different interpretations of the Peace Testimon often stalls debate. We heard that the mere mention of arms has been enough to stop many debates on peacebuilding in their tracks - I have heard of this happen before. Holding a vision, an absolute, does not excuse us from doing anything. In this context, silence will be taken as consent, whether by the killers or the violent interveners. The people being killed won't thank you for your principles.
Rather we need to be bubbling over with ideas, with alternatives and creative suggestions. If there are alternatives to violent intevention, don't keep them to yourself. Quaker faith and practice is not written by one person, is it? Quaker history has been rich with ideas and statements. Why are there so few public statements - is it because Friends have become scared of appearing to speak for everyone. Why should there be only one Quaker voice?
Another factor stifling debate on these and otherissues is the climate of fear or perhaps suppression which leads people to say that something shouldn't be said because it isn't Quakerly. In a climate of loving conflict and a determination to see the discussion through to the vision of peace at the other end, nothing needs to be left unsaid. If you haven't rehearsed the most contentious points you can think of, then against great evil you will be left mute.
We have a collective strength of empowering people to play a small part in peacebuilding. In recent years there has been a growing sense that individual leadings have been stopped by beaureaucracy and 'managerialisation'. We need structures to magnify individual strength, but the structures need not, should not stifle the spirit. Any structure which fails to operate in a way that allows its 'parts' to flourish may perhaps be a legitimate target for nonviolent resistance.
Living adventurously means not allowing yourself to be fenced in by perceived limits, but also listening and submitting yourself to collective discernment and discipline. It means having the argument, not burying it, having faith in a positive outcome, striving to see the legitimacy in other's views while being willing to define genuinely illigitimate action.
We fall into a trap when we do nothing while we fret and feel sad. There is already a host of available options in the legal, legitimate framework and we could be pushing harder to use them. We can use intelligence, find voices on the ground, insist on answers to questions freeze arms sales, publicise the conflict, lobby for action, use nonviolent peacemaking and observation teams that should be allowed free movement, or perhaps they could be from the communities themselves in which case allowed free communication.
Although it is sometimes interpreted as an erosion of sovereign rights, R2P actually strengthens the right of countries to run their own affairs, making action without clear reasoning more unnacceptable in the eyes of the law. It allows for the conditions, the right, for people to flourish. It assumes that state functions can look after themselves and, for example, people can peacefully overthrow their governments or consent to different types of government through non action. It obliges the whole human community to look out for each other and if those conditions break down it obliges us to find the most effective solution, while allowing for that solution to be tailored to all the different possible scenarios. Protection therefore loses its disempowering connotation and becomes the 'freedom from' elements of genuine human security.
It is up to the Quakers and the other peackeepers to improve their capacity and match the easy and, for some profitable, solution of firepower with solid ideas. We don't have to give up and turn back to the long term, the theoretical laying of the ground for 'never again', valuable though that is, we have an enormous amount to contribute to the now, to the Darfur, the Congo or the Northern Uganda. We need to magnify the strengths, the small circles and quiet processes that are often incredibly tranforming, and we all need to nurture and challenge our own response to these issues. The games are going on: only by entering the arena can we possibly hope to play a part in building a peaceful world.
I am very grateful for being invited to participate in the meeting that provoked this article. Many of the ideas were not my own but I hope the other participants will not mind me absorbing and adapting them
