SPECIAL EVENTS
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Martin Luther King Lecture
(This is typed from a recording of a lecture)
TAPE 1, SIDE A
Ernie Tannis: Call us people on the Queensway, apparently some of flyers had the wrong address, I don’t know how that happened. And people are on there way, so we are going to give it a few more minutes and it’s cold so that’s ok we are going to start in a few minutes, thank you. Consensus all ready, that’s terrific. Apparently there is an accident on the Queensway, which is holding some people up so if we can just give it a few more minutes, thank you.
Good morning everyone, welcome, thank you all for coming and thank you to Ambassador and Mrs. McDonald for bringing the coldest day of the year with them from Washington. My name is Ernie Tannis. I’ll be your moderator for this morning. I’m sorry we had a little late start but it worked out, we are nicely settled in. There might be a few more people coming in during the morning. I want to just go through quickly, some of the logistics and then I’m going to ask June Girvan to speak. You should all have an agenda for the morning and attached to it is the multi-track diplomacy chart. And also if you haven’t done so please be sure to fill out a registration form. After the conference we are going to mail this out so everyone knows who was here. Also these proceeding are being taped so I will try to be a good model to speak clearly and slowly and will ask also that you identify yourself if you don’t mind because at the end of the proceedings we are going to hopefully transcribe the proceedings and post them on the internet for the world to see. The mikes here are going to be used by the various speakers in different fashion and after the break we are going to be doing an interactive with the group here and if you want to ask a question or make a comment I will ask you to go to that mike. That mike will be operated by our wonderful technician Rob, wherever you are, thank you very much and so he will be turning it on and off, you don’t have to do anything out there. Those are the logistics I have.
I would like to ask June Girvan to please come up.
June Girvan: There, thank you. Good morning everybody. Your Excellency, Mrs. McDonald, compatriots. In his book, “Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community” Martin Luther King wrote, “All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. We have inherited a large house, a great world house, in which we have to live together, black and white, easterner and westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Hindu. A family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest. Who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other.”
We who are gathered in Room 156 here this morning, in this people’s house, are from the west, the east, the south, the north. We are of different faith communities; we are united though in ideas, in culture, and in interest. We are here working with each other as a team of builders, peace-builders and reconciliation seekers. Martin Luther King’s dream is our dream. This Colloquium launches the History in the Street Reconciliation Day 2003 program of the J’Nikira Dinginesh Education Centre. This Colloquium, Ambassador and Mrs. McDonald, compatriots, this Colloquium is dedicated to you.
The abiding spirit of Mr. Ian Wilson, our National Archivist, makes us feel that this people’s house is an extension of the small space of our community grassroots organization, the organization I represent. Mr. Wilson is looking after the people’s business this morning but he hopes to join us at lunch this afternoon. I always have to say a special thanks to Bob Ferris who came by a few minutes ago, manager of Public Affairs at the Library and Archives Canada. He’s been our special friend. Thanks too to Louise Pilon who makes all the arrangements for us, we just need to pick up the phone and give her a list. To Rob Petrachuck up there, hello Rob, and to the many people that you don’t see in the Archives that makes events like this possible and very easy for us. It is a great uplift to have the collaboration of the conflict resolution community, led by Ernie Tannis, thank you Ernie. Among our collaborators in this program we have The Alternate Dispute Resolution Centre—ADR, Reach, The International Centre for Conflict Resolution and Mediation—ICCRM, it’s research affiliate—International Peace Science Initiative—IPSI, CBO Travel, the Royal Commonwealth Society of Ottawa, Common Cause Canada, the Library & Archives, and others. We also have the support of Gowling Lafleur Henderson and His Excellency George Bullen, High Commissioner of the Countries of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and Dean of the Commonwealth Diplomatic Core. And we also have the support of His Worship the Mayor Bob Chiarelli, who on behalf of the City of Ottawa will declare February 12, 2003 as Reconciliation Day in Ottawa.
I welcome you on behalf of our committee, William Abayomi, and you will have seen William outside during the registration, Azra Alvi, Collins Babalola, Skip Brooks, Louis Buschman, Mark Jowette, Dr. Ernie Kornelsen, Marjorie MacKeen, Jim Prowse, Heyam Qirbi, Rene Rivard, Salma Siddiqui, Dr. John Sigler, Dr. Karl Smith, and of course Ernie Tannis.
So this annual day then in February begins with the launch today. It culminates on the day that we celebrate Reconciliation Day in Ottawa. The program of that day is as follows:
Between today and February 11 we suggest that community members initiate random acts of kindness and unscripted acts of peace-building and reconciliation and then we come together on the 12th to celebrate.
Now this February 12, 2003, in addition to celebrating the launch of Mandela’s reconciliation work, we also mark the first anniversary of the United Nations Ban on the use of children as soldiers. And on marking that ban we pay tribute to some people, some groups. We pay tribute to the International Labour Organization, we pay tribute to South Africa, the first nation to have included children’s issues specifically on the Reconciliation and Commission. We pay tribute to our own nation, Canada, first nation to have signed the ban, signed the treaty. We pay tribute to all those who worked for the ban and all those who are working to implement it. The program then consists of the Mandela lecture and the community Reconciliation comes together. It will be in the auditorium in this building and the program is open and it is free to everyone and we hope you will help us again fill the auditorium, 398 seats and last time we had nearly 500 in the auditorium and we would like to make that happen again this year. We’ll deal with the Fire Marshall.
The program also includes some work that we do in the community and in schools. One is the ASK program. It means Attitude, Skills, and Knowledge. The ASK program relates to the attitude, skills, and knowledge that young people, all of us, require for peace-building and reconciliation. One of the programs will be the “Four R’s and the Forebearers”, another “Schools for Kids (War is not)”, and a third, “Peace, Unity and Reconciliation in Canada”, short form “Peace you are in Canada.
Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela have this in common—they represent people who have been persecuted because of the color of their body wrap. They also represent people who are glorified because their lives show us the possibilities of the grandeur, the nobility and the intelligence that is possible for our human spirit and that is the core of the matter. The J’Nakira Dinginesh Education Centre carries the philosophy and the mission statement of this family-based grassroots organization. J’Nakira is a word that means out of one humanity many peoples and out of many peoples, one Canada. Dinginesh is an Amaric word that means “thou art wonderful”. And so in a nutshell, the education that we do at the J’Nakira Dinginesh Education Centre is we are one humanity, we are all equally wonderful. And to affirm that we have a little ritual where we begin each event that we have with an affirmation of the wonder of each other by saying to each other Dinginesh. So I will ask you to now to shake hands, to give a hand to your neighbor, to the right to the left of you, to the front to the back of you and just say Dinginesh.
Now the origin of the word Dinginesh, well I don’t know if it is the origin, but how it is used in Ethiopia, is that if I say to you “Lucy”. You will remember that there are some ancestral relics that are known by that name. The people of Ethiopia refer to those fossils as Dinginesh in honoring of our ancestors. Forty years ago, this year on August 28, 1963 a 39 year old young man named Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. He said that in spite of difficulties and frustrations of the moment he still had a dream. I ask you now to take a half a minute to offer a silent thanksgiving to the wonder, the Dinginesh, of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the power of his legacy and the promise of our own legacy. Thank you.
Dr. King’s book, “Where do We Go From Here—Chaos or Community” was published the year before he died. In his book he wrote, “There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. We still have a choice, co-existence or co-annihilation. This may well be human kind's last chance to choose between chaos and community.
The title of our Colloquium is “I Have A Dream—Chaos or Community”. We who have gathered here this morning seem to have made a choice, in these troubled times we choose co-existence. Ambassador, at a Colloquium such as this, with a leader such as you, we hope this morning to strengthen the ties that bind us. And at the end of the morning we will present our book. We will ask you, Ambassador, to sign your name, to engrave your name, in the Dinginesh record of honor, which is on the table over there. This book, compatriots, is dedicated to forefathers and foremothers of our Canadian 16th, 17th , 18th , 19th century times. Forefathers, foremothers whose philosophy was much like the African philosophy of Abuntu, which means “I exist the grace of you” and vice versa. Abuntu then is the African philosophy that gave rise to the reconciliation movement of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Canadian forbearers of Abuntu persuasion include: our first Lieutenant Governor in Upper Canada John Grave-Simcoe and a woman named Cloe Cooley who was being sold into slavery. Because of those two, Canada was launched as a beacon of freedom throughout the world. Also include Father of Confederation the Honorable George Brown and Frederick Douglas, a refugee from slavery in the United States. Also the Abuntu persuasion for all the men and women and children in Canada who did something to give refuge to those who follow the north star to freedom in Canada via the mythical underground railroad. It includes all those who have since worked for reconciliation in our multicultural land. In essence then, Abuntu is the archetypal knowledge that penetrated the dream of the young, African-American Martin Luther King Jr. as he stood on those steps forty years ago. In his dream, his Abuntu dream, he said to all of us “we must forever conduct or struggle on a high plain of dignity and discipline. Again and again we must rise to majestic heights with soul force”. He looked out at many of the audience, who by their presence Dr. King assumed and realized that human destinies are all tied together. The freedom of one is inextricably tied to the freedom of the other. We cannot walk alone he said. That is the Abuntu philosophy.
And of course as a family and an Ottawa based community grassroots organization the J’Nakira Dinginesh Education Centre does not walk alone. We are not an umbrella organization we work strictly with collaborators. And because of this we always begin our presentations, our reconciliation day events, with a thank you to the group that’s with us. And we also express this thank you through one member of the group. So I would like now to ask Ernie Tannis to come to receive appreciation on behalf of the group and we pass our appreciation with a cinnamon stick golden wrapped. The cinnamon stick is associated with the Phoenix, the forever renewal and as we leave today we hope we leave with the renewal, which we know we will have from Ambassador McDonald.
Ernie: Thank you very much. This is a wonderful honor. Before I introduce the presidents and the collaborators it reminds me of a tradition in my culture. I saw a picture with a big hat on some time ago and I asked a Lebanese friend, my father’s from Lebanon and my grandfather’s from Syria, what was that hat. He said well that’s called a fez and that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire and when Turkey outlawed it by statute. I said what did they do with the fez? Well in the villages when there was a problem you always went to the person who wore the fez because they were the problem solver. So they came up with the expression I don’t remember your name but I never forget a fez.
I’m going to ask a few people to come up and spend a couple of minutes to talk about their group. First Mr. Claude Morrow who is here from Montreal, President of The International Centre for Conflict Resolution and Mediation.
Mr. Claude Morrow: Monsieur Ambassador, Mrs. McDonald, collaborator, and my friends, it is a pleasure to be associated to be here this morning, to be associated with this event, but to also have a chance for me to present ICCRM (French). (French). It started up with a small community centre out in Montreal North, and working already with school with parents and children. We saw the violence, we saw, we were witness to the violence in schools and also working a long time with delinquents but we found very often we tell children or we tell you not what to do I think for us was importance also to teach them what to do. So we developed up in ‘93 a concept of conflict resolution peer mediation, in 98 we launched a program and the program was so successful in one year it reached out to more than 100 schools in Quebec. Seeing the importance of this program we created the International Centre for Conflict Resolution which dedicated itself to conflict resolution into the school system to really develop with this type of program, promote it and do some research as well. So in 99 we founded the Institute and now 4 years later the program is now run in more than 500 schools in Quebec. It is also run in Beirut, Bolivia, and we now have a centre in France, and now a centre in Ottawa. It’s our belief the children, if we teach them, if we want a long-term solution we have to start with children. It doesn’t mean that we don’t do also community work, we have also pilot program with the Montreal police, we have also here programs with the OC Transpo with Ottawa. The program with OC Transpo with Ottawa is quite interesting because it does have also two components working with the workers within the system build the system design but it also to work with the schools and how to have children work out conflict resolution with the buses. So it does kind of give you a holistic approach to it.
I would like to say that I had a chance to be in Kosovo right after the war. I was in Pristina for 10 days teaching conflict resolution to an educator who had to work with the children. And when I left Quebec to be there for that people were saying don’t you think they have other priorities; they have to build whole country. I put that real forward to them that people were questioning my coming here and the educators say what other priorities other than our children, we don’t know what to do and what you’re teaching us is really going to help us build later. Also it was for me very revealing one day. Actually we were driving Kosovo, it is a beautiful country, it was a beautiful scenery with the sun coming out, the cloud and mountains and there’s sheep and the shepherd. There was one problem, the shepherd was walking at a military pace with a stick on his shoulder right next to the sheep, for me it became one type of a symbol and whenever I talk about this the emotion comes. I do feel that if we want to really make a difference we must invest, we must teach children. I have a dream, yes I can use that term too but I would like to say we have a dream and when I say that I think about everyone in the room and I think about all the teams and all the collaborators around me building this place. So thank you very much.
Ernie: Thank you very much Claude Morrow. I would like to ask the President of Reach, Mr. Mark Berlin, to come up and say a few words please.
Mr. Mark Berlin: Thanks Ernie. Excellency, Mrs. McDonald, friends, it’s always a pleasure for me as a President of Reach to collaborate on such wonderful occasions with grassroots community based organizations. June your introduction was nothing short of inspirational and I’m glad that you’ve hooked up with Ernie. Together it’s a force that it’s hard to imagine could be harnessed by any energy known to humankind but you’ve unleashed yourselves on us and the rest of the community and for that we’re grateful. It’s an amazing thing that, I actually shudder when I get a call from Ernie because I always wonder what it is that I have to do next or how else we are going to get involved and now I can understand it. Ernie is only part of the equation that with June is a formidable duo and so I warn anybody in the audience who may not know them, if you get a call from June or Ernie you will know you will be engaged in an activity, an event that will probably change you and the community. So wonderful to have such wonderful to have such outstanding community activists working to improve our community and the larger community with your energies.
I want to just bring a word of, like my predecessor, to give you just a quick word of what Reach is all about, for those of you who may not know our particular organization. Reach is an organization now celebrating its 23rd year. Reach Canada has tentacles across the nation as you try and export our model across the country. Reach is an organization of 250 lawyers who provide pro-bono free legal assistance to the disability community of Ottawa-Carleton and outlying areas around here. We serve both the English and the French communities and we do so in an effort to ensure that persons with disabilities are given the opportunity to have proper and appropriate and full integration into all facets of Canadian society. We also run a number of educational activities and research activities throughout the year that again aim to promote the greater integration of the disability community into the larger Canadian community.
Our relationship with Ambassador McDonald goes back more than a decade. In 1991,and again I guess its unfortunate for Ambassador McDonald, he’s friends with Ernie Tannis and again he must shudder when he sees the Canadian 613 digital code on his telephone. He’s “Oh my God, its Ernie, where do I have to go now, what do I have to go next?” And it started in 1991 when Ambassador McDonald was invited to celebrate the then 10th anniversary of Reach. Little did he know that our relationship would continue past the decade and into the next and so here we are in a new millennium continuing our longstanding relationship with Ambassador McDonald as you grace us with your presence here today. We thank our partners, we thank our conveners of the conference, and I wish you all well. And I thank you very much. Thank you.
Ernie: Thank you Mark Berlin. I just wanted to water down some of the great elevated comments that he made. First each person in this room could be up here speaking but I see each of us as a ripple, and each ripple can become a wave that help can wash away unresolved conflict from the shores of injustice so I just see us as an ocean of ripples together. Thank you.
The next person I would like to invite up is the President of CBO Travel, Mr. Ravi Gupta.
Mr. Gupta: Good morning your Excellency and friends. It is our pleasure to be associated with this very valuable event in Canada. The tensions around the world these days, we are all aware of what is happening all over the world. CBO Travel stands for Community Based Organizations Travel. This is a travel agency recently established in Ottawa. The purpose of the travel agency, CBO travel, is to provide travel solutions for international development organizations. It is an agency, which is owned, by three international development organizations, Care Canada, Cuso, and World University Services of Canada. So all the services are provided mainly concentrating on international development community. We are not interested in providing holiday travels or private travels, it’s only going to concentrate on international development organizations. I don’t want to take too much more time here but we are pleased and honored to be associated with this event here today. Thank you very much.
Ernie: Thank you Ravi Gupta. We have two more people. President of Common Cause Africa, Collins Babalola.
Collins Babalola : Your Excellency, Mrs. McDonald, ladies and gentlemen. We are most delighted on behalf of Common Cause Africa & Canada. I say a big thank you June for being part of this memorable occasion and I say a big thank you to Ernie Tannis who connected me to June and June connected me to the world.
Common Cause Africa-Canada is an international development organization whose focus is on how to develop young people in Africa through peace education collaboration. We have collaborated with a number of organizations in Canada since the Common Cause was established about 4 years ago. In the form of a federation that had a conference on Federalism at Mont Tremblant, which brought Clinton to Canada, the President of Mexico, Prime Minister, and Premier Bouchard from Montreal. We’ve also collaborated with various other organizations not only in Canada but in Africa. But it was a great opportunity for me after leaving UCLA about 22 years ago, I went back to Nigeria to start an advertising and international marketing company. Soon after I got to Nigeria I was involved in publishing a daily newspaper, which was very critical of the military dictator in Nigeria. And when the situation got too hot I was looking for a country to run back to and I came back to Canada. Since I left school I have never done anything academic until I met Ernie Tannis at St. Paul University. He was the lead trainer for the Conflict Resolution program. After taking his course my life changed entirely. I was in marketing and advertising for over 20 years. Now I’m working in peace-building focusing on youth. And it was from the training I had from with Ernie and attorneys that also introduced me to another program in the United States, the school for International Training, where I attended a summer program, which brought 125 peace builders from around the world.
I just came back from Cyprus, three days ago. In Cyprus last week Thursday over 30,000 people were on the street from the Turkish side, requesting the Government of Turkey to liaise with the southern part for peace. And over 20,000 young people were in that congregation and I was very happy that I was part of them. But why live in Cyprus? When we were going through the buffer zones through the United Nation buffer zone, we saw a big line of demarcation, which have divided the country for over 30 years. And when I point out about this division and I stepped over it. I saw this wall that divided Cyprus. I saw it in Canada. This is part of this peace here. I saw it in various homes that are divided by conflict. I saw the walls in various schools between teachers and students and I spoke to some of our participants that we need to start to break these walls so that we can be together. And it is because the walls have been broken that is why we are all together this morning and I think we are going to continue to break the walls that will not allow us to be together. The wall that divides black from white, black and white, the wall that divides all husband and wife and separate them forever. We pray that as peace builders we can be able to break this wall.
Common Cause Africa-Canada has a focus in three countries in Africa, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Ghana. And we have over a period of four years brought some young people from the west coast of Africa to observe what Ontario youth parliament are doing here.
I thank you very much June, I thank you Ernie Tannis. I adore you so much and I told your daughter that yesterday that I wish you were my father. I thank you for being part of this great occasion. It’s a great pleasure for me to be close to June and we see how connected the world is. When June was talking about bringing Ambassador McDonald, I told June I said I think I heard about that name. And she said where. I heard about him through a friend of the Ambassador who is Liz Diamond also a partner in the Multi-track Diplomacy who I’m also working with. So we are all connected and I pray we stay connected. Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen.
Ernie: Thanks very much Collins Babalola. Your kind comments and I’m glad to be mindful in my heart that we are all brothers and sisters under one father in heaven. Thank you.
And our final speaker is President of The Royal Commonwealth Society Dr. Carl Smith.
Dr. Carl Smith: Thank you Mr. Chairman, your Excellency and Mrs. McDonald, friends. The Royal Commonwealth Society is collaborating for the third or fourth successive year with the Centre, Centre for short, in the activities, which lead up to the Dinginesh lecture on the 12th of February. And we are very pleased to be a collaborator again this year. The Royal Commonwealth Society has existed for several decades. First it was centred in London during the good old days of the empire, and it evolved as an empire changed to Commonwealth. But the values which come from the sharing of experiences, shared values still exist and what we hear when we look at the literature, the words that come out are much the same as they were on the Empire. Our task is to promote these values and some of the nouns are unity, diversity, justice, dignity, respect, peace, development, equality, I could go on, tolerance and of course reconciliation. And it is with a great deal of pleasure that I represent the Commonwealth Society in these sorts of activities. There is a social side to our existence. We have two or three major events each year of a social nature. But to me, even more important, is the educational side where we try to represent these values to the public. Now for instance our next educational effort is a forum, which will be held on the 6th of February with the engaging title of “The Impact of Corporate Scandals on the Governance of Not For Profit Organizations”, organizations like ours. I invite you all to be present. I say no more because I think we are all anxious to hear Ambassador McDonald. Thank you very much.
Ernie: Thank you Dr. Carl Smith. I am very pleased to, in a moment, introduce Professor John Ziegler to introduce Ambassador McDonald. And I want to seque into that with a very brief comment. There are so many organizations all of which are ripples. Reach led by our great leader Mark Berlin and with the steady hand of Paula Agulnik, Executive Director is very meaningful to me. And you know Collins, when you talked about shaping someone’s life, Reach has helped me shape my life, helped me learn so much and it culminated when Reach successfully nominated Canada for the Roosevelt Disability International award in the late 1990’s. The first recipient was the United States. That’s understandable. And the second year 27 nations applied for that award. Canada was the only nation where an NGO made the nomination. It was the only nation that tied together disability issues and conflict resolution, wars, civil strife, land mines. Ambassador McDonald was on the international advisory service. A lot of people helped. John Ziegler has been a great mentor in Akwisosnee, he was a very, very fine person where on the ground there and I really thank him forever for the guidance he gave us. He kindly agreed and did nominate Ambassador McDonald for the Nobel Peace prize. Ladies and Gentlemen Professor John Ziegler.
Professor John Ziegler: For all of you this is obviously a unique experience about a lecture because you are hearing the influence of June and Ernie in this preparation group is all collaborators and that is extremely important as you listen to the range of activities that are represented and the person who would most welcome it is John McDonald who believes deeply in working with other people so that I think that’s important. I listened quickly to June and one of the things that came out in the background and working with this committee I said we should be sure that our American visitors remember Martin Luther King’s Massey lectures comments on Canada and June alluded to them. And so then when I did this I took up the collected writings of Martin Luther King prepared in the United States, a massive volume. So what do they do, they included the Massey lectures but left out lecture 1. Which includes, and let me just do it with Ambassador McDonald’s tolerance, just a bit of those few words. Most of you will be familiar with it. Many like me, as immigrants won’t be. When 1967 when King gave the Massey lectures here in
Canada he began as follows. And just quick two paragraphs, which are important to our occasion and June alluded to them.
King said in his incredible eloquence, “It is a deep personal privilege to address a nationwide Canadian audience. Over and above any kinship of United States citizens and Canadians as North Americans there is a singular historical relationship between American Negroes and Canadians. Canada’s not merely a neighbor to Negroes. Deep in the history of our struggle for freedom Canada was the North Star. The Negro slave denied education, dehumanized, and imprisoned on cruel plantations knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave, if he survived the horrors of a journey, could find freedom. The legendary Underground Railroad started in the south and ended in Canada. The freedom road links us together. Our spirituals, now so widely admired around the world, were often codes. We sang of heaven that awaited us and the slave masters listened in ignorance, not realizing that we were not speaking of the hereafter, heaven was a word for Canada. And the Negroes sang of the hope that his escape on the Underground Railroad would carry him there. And so standing today in Canada I am linked with the history of my people and its unity with your past. The Underground Railroad could not bring freedom to many Negroes yet it did something far greater. It symbolized a hope when freedom was almost an impossible dream our spirit never died even though the weight of centuries was a crushing burden.” So I thought on this particular occasion I had on the moment to remember this tremendous eloquence of Martin Luther King.
As Ernie eluded I am an old friend and supporter of our speaker today. Ambassador John McDonald is chairman and co-founder in 1992 of the Institute for Multi-track Diplomacy, an International NGO based in Washington and which focuses on national and international ethnic conflict. He served for forty years as a Career Foreign Service Officer serving in Bonn, Paris, Ankara, Theran, Karachi, and Cairo for some twenty years and then as Deputy Director General of the International Labour Organization in Geneva from 1974 to 1978. Presidents’ Carter and Reagan twice appointed him Ambassador at Large heading US delegations to a series of international conferences including Intelsat, The UN World Conference on Technological Cooperation Among Developing Countries, The Colombo Plan, The UN Treaty Banning the Taking of Hostages, The International Year of Disabled Persons, The World Assembly on Aging, The UN Decade on Drinking Water and Development, and the head of the delegation planning International Youth Year. While at the ILO he set up the first Women’s Bureau in an UN organization. He was at that time the highest-ranking American official in a UN agency. He was cofounder of the State Department Centre for the Study of Foreign Affairs, which became an important centre for innovative thinking in diplomacy. He pioneered the concept of multi-track diplomacy to show that the task of conflict transformation cannot be confined to formal diplomatic state-to-state relations but needed institutions and efforts from a broad range of civil society if breakthroughs deceivingly intractable conflicts were to be found. He and his team of associates from around the world have been active in mediation, training and new initiatives, in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Kashmir, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Atria, Liberia, Somalia, Nepal, and the list is even longer. He has long practice in advocated multi-lateralism and work with NGO’s and over the years has worked very closely with both Canadian Diplomats and with Canadian NGO’s. He is a distinguished international lawyer and has served on the faculties of the George Washington Law School, George Mason University and Burnell College. It is my pleasure to welcome for the Martin Luther King lecture Ambassador John McDonald.
TAPE 1, SIDE B
Ambassador McDonald: Well thank you John for the lovely words. I urged him to shorten the introduction a bit but he refused to do so. I want to thank Ernie so very much and June for bringing us here. As you’ve heard we have made a number of trips to Ottawa and to your wonderful country. In fact Crystal and I have, who is here sitting in the front row, have camped with tent from Washington, D. C. around the Great Lakes and back home. That’s about 4,000 miles actually so we’ve hit most of the Provinces there. Then on another tour we camped we went straight up to here and then out to Gaspe and back, another 3 or 4,000 miles. So we have probably seen more of your country than most of you. I’ve even been to Dawson Creek now how many of you have been there?
Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero for me, he is a man of peace and, I believe, a great American. As you’ve heard he made this “I Have a Dream” speech forty years ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Basically what he was saying was a very simple thought and that is that we in the United States should carry out our Declaration of Independence in our constitution, which states that all men are created equal. That was his dream basically. And actually I think he would be very happy about two events that have taken place in Washington, D. C. in the last three weeks. The first event was the fact that the most powerful man in the U. S. Senate, the majority leader on the Republican side, Mr. Trent Lott, was removed from office in ten days time by the power of the people because he was viewed as a segregationist. Dr. King would have been very pleased with that action. The second example, a most powerful woman in the United States, our National Security Advisor, Donna Lisa Rice, a woman and an African-American, was reported to have supported President Bush in the last few days and his attack on the whole concept of administration practices and admission practices at the University of Michigan. I believe that her political future is in danger by that particular statement.
Dr. King and his speeches and in the subject of this particular symposium was focusing on the role of the United States in Chaos and Community. Today I would like to focus on the question of chaos and community, because I too have a dream worldwide. I would like to talk about the role of Nations in the world and the state of the world today and how we got in the mess that we are now in. You all remember that after the collapse of the Soviet Empire we were promised a peace dividend. I must confess I have not seen any results of that in the last few years and I have given a lot of thought as to why this did not happen.
I have three theories and I would like to share with you as to why we are in the state that we are in as a world.
My first theory I call my empire theory. I urge you to go back in your thinking about a hundred years and you’ll realize that the world was dominated by ten great empires. Today they have all disappeared. They are all gone. We had, to begin with, the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and the German Empire and the Austral/Hungarian Empire, they all collapsed within a matter of months. After World War II we had the Japanese Empire, which disappeared. In the next twenty to twenty-five years we had the British Empire, the French, the Dutch, the Belgium, the Portuguese. And finally in 1991 the last of the ten, Soviet Empire disappeared in three months time to the astonishment of the entire world that it could happen so quickly. What’s important about this is that those empires ruled by fear, they ruled by force. They controlled any conflict within their areas so that it did not expand and did not get out of control. They kept the lid on conflict. Today there is nobody out there to keep the lid on that conflict. The United Nations cannot do that because they’re based on the concept of national sovereignty and the conflicts we’re talking about today are internal, within national borders. So national sovereignty is a key that you have to reckon with whenever you look around the world at the nature of conflict. Remember 1945, 51 nations signed the UN Charter. All the nations in the world except Switzerland signed the Charter, 51. Today there are 191 nations who are members of the United Nations. The irony is that in the last few months the oldest democracy Switzerland and the newest democracy East Timor joined the United Nations at the same time and they now make 191. So where did all those nations come from? They came from those collapsed empires so the concept of national sovereignty is new to 2/3 of the world. You read articles and books about the fact that national sovereignty is no longer an important issue. I totally disagree. I have been in 97 countries around the world and I can insure you that every country that I have been in national sovereignty is critically important. The only exception of this is of course the creation of the European union. All the rest of the world, including United States, and perhaps even Canada, national sovereignty is of critical importance. And that means that you cannot cross a boundary without being invited in by the leaders of that particular country. So that country doesn’t want the help; by international law you are not allowed to go in as a government and work together with them.
My second theory I tried out in Moscow in 1989 when I was invited by some senior people there to bring conflict resolution to the Soviet Empire. The interesting thing about that challenge was that when we arrived we realized that there’s no word in the Russian language for conflict resolution. Think about the sociological impact on that statement. They only ruled by force, and the gulag and the firing squads were what were required and that’s what they used. And so we were bringing a whole new idea into this empire. We met with five members of the Supreme Soviet who had just formed a committee, just been elected a few months before and they had formed a committee on ethnic conflict, they knew about that, but they didn’t know what to do about it. After meeting them for two minutes they asked me to solve the Azerbyjan Armenian conflict for them. And I laughed and said as you did I can’t do that. But at least I had their attention and I said you can’t solve it either and because you created it you are part of the problem. You need to find some third neutral party and first of all nobody outside of Moscow trusts you. They didn’t like to hear that but that was certainly true. They finally worked with the OAC and the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe and they got started about 6 years ago on the cc issues and now they’re still working on it. But I went on, remember this is 1989, and I said there are about 70 ethnic conflicts below the surface of your empire and you are responsible for creating most of them. Because you have violated three fundamentally non-negotiable issues for me and the first is language. You have required everybody in your empire to speak Russian and you have not allowed them to speak any other language and a people will die for the right to speak their own language. And I gave as two examples and when Japan invaded North Korea in 1910 the first act was to deny the Koreans to speak, read or write Korean. In Turkey today, and the Kurds making up 30% of the population are not allowed to speak, read or write Kurdish. So that’s a very key issue and with regard to ethnic conflict. The second non-negotiable issue is about religion. People have fought for the right to practice their own religion for thousands of years. For 70 years in the Soviet Empire no religion whatsoever was allowed to be practiced. They were an Atheist empire, an atheist empire, and if you practiced your religion you went to prison. And the third non-negotiable issue is over culture. If you deny a person’s culture you deny their existence in many cases. Their ethnicity is critical. If you try to take away their marriage and birth and death ceremonies, try to change the food they wear, the clothes that they wear, the food that they eat, their music, their dance, their art, their literature, are all a part of their culture, a part of their very existence. If you deny that and try to destroy that ethnicity you’ll have violence. And I said if you take away all three as you have done I said in the Soviet Empire you deny language, religion, and culture you’re bound to have violence and ethnic conflict surrounding that violence. And so I urged them to change their ways.
And my third theory has to do with the way the world is structured today and this causes me great concern because the world is designed on an old basis of national sovereignty. The conflicts today are internal. We estimate that there are 35 ethnic conflicts in the world today. Dealing only with problems within national boundaries. We are not designed as a world to cope with that. Our nation State system doesn’t understand that a shift has taken place in the world of violence. Today at this moment there are no international wars like Iraq invading Kuwait. That’s a violation of national sovereignty, the Security Council takes over. And that’s what we are designed to do when the conflicts today are within national boundaries and we are not designed as a world to cope and most Governments, including my own, do not even recognize the existence of this kind of intrastate conflict sufficiently to do something about it. I estimate that the State Department can cope with maybe three conflicts at a time internally. We have focused on Kosovo, we have focused on Chechnya, we have focused on East Timor, on Sierra Leone, at various times Afghanistan now, perhaps Iraq. But these, maximum is three over the last 20 years. What about those other 32 conflicts? Well they just go on their merry way. We in the United States are not able to understand with how to deal with those conflicts. Basically because they are people conflicts. So there is a vacuum out there and I believe that vacuum is going to be out there for at least another 10 or 15 years so you are going to be living with this concern about internal intrastate conflict for some time because I do not see our governments shifting fast enough to cope with those particular issues or even recognizing that they actually do exist.
Well what’s happened with that vacuum? Small non-governmental organizations, like my own, have stepped in, in various places including Canada has several as well. We are actually, our two countries, are the leaders in the world in this particular arena. And we are taking small steps to try and see what we can do in various parts of the world to fill that particular vacuum.
You all have a chart, you’ve heard the word multi-track diplomacy several times. Actually it started out 8 years before that. It took 8 years to develop and evolve this particular philosophy. In 1985 while set up in the State Department, I wrote the first book on track 2 diplomacy. Track 1 is government to government which I did for all those years. Basically it is often legalistic, it’s often narrow in its thinking, it’s very structured, it’s not very imagitive. As apposed to track 2, which is, citizen based, non-government to non-government, private citizen to private citizen, small group to small group, outside of government. It’s risk taking, it’s imagitive, it’s not formally instructed, it’s can do things to build peace that track 1 has not been able to do at least until this time.
I became President of the Iowa Peace Institute in Grenale, Iowa at the end of 1998 and had a chance to put into practice some of the things that I had been writing about and then in a chapter in a book expanding this concept to 5 tracks and then a year or two later Dr. Louise Diamond, whose name you have already heard, and I wrote the book on multi-track diplomacy which expands the 5 tracks to 9 tracks. You’ve heard track 1, track 2, which is basically an expansion of track 2, everything else in the group, is based on people orientation. Track 3 is the role of business in peace-building. It can be a very important field, its very difficult however, to find business leaders that have a long-term vision. It’s possible but difficult to do. Track 4, citizen exchanges. You come into one culture you learn about that, go back and take those lessons into your own culture. Its based on sort of small group to small group approach. Track 5 is what we do in our institute. Its training, education, and some research. Track 6 is people power basically and this is growing daily and yet still not recognized by our government. The power of the people again took place in Jakarta in 1999. Six weeks time, students and then adults overthrew a 33-year-old government. For 5 years the West tried to get rid of Malosvitch. The people of Belgrade got rid of him in 6 weeks by mass demonstrations over a flawed election. The same thing has happened in the Philippines, twice, it’s happened in Nepal in 1990 and as we heard just a few moments ago it’s in the process of happening in North Cyprus of all places. The people are speaking up collectively in a non-violent peaceful way to get their message across. Saturday we had 200,000 people in Washington, D.C. marching for peace. That voice has to be heard and it will be heard and that’s the power of that particular approach. It’s growing in importance all the time. I was in Zimbabwe last year and I was convinced after that flawed election that people would rise up. They did not because of fear. I estimate that in the next 6 months there will be a popular uprising in Zimbabwe because the power of the people, they are being starved to death by their leaders and that is too much for any people to take. The next track is religion. We work with religious leaders wherever we go when they want to become involved with us. It doesn’t mean that we believe that religion is the sole cause for the conflict it’s not at all. We have worked in Northern Ireland when I was with the Iowa Peace Institute and were told repeatedly that that conflict was not over religion yet the US press plays that Catholic versus Protestant and stops right there. But the people in the conflict say otherwise, its over economics, its over power, its over different things, but not over religion. So we don’t want to overestimate the impact of religion on conflict. It’s there but it’s not dominant in all particular cases. The next track is a most difficult one. Its money. We are a small not-for-profit, non-governmental organization. We don’t charge a fee for what we do overseas. So we have to raise money wherever we can to do the things that we have been asked to do. And these times particular in a post 911 period is most difficult to raise money across the whole country not just our own NGO.
And lastly that inner circle is communications. Powerful change agents, not just the press or the media, I am talking about the power of communications in general. In my philosophy you cannot solve any conflict at any level of society with your spouse, with your kids, all the way up to globally, until you sit down face-to-face, and talk. If you can’t take that first step you can’t ever resolve the conflict that you are involved in. The worst example that I know of in the US history is, on that particular issue, is over the Panama Canal Treaties. In 1903 the United States and Panama signed a treaty where Panama gave a 10-mile wide strip of land across the whole country to build the Panama Canal. The treaty said that land was given in perpetuity, which means forever. The next year in 1904 the Panamanian Government said to the United States Ambassador, we would like to sit down and talk about that treaty. We don’t like that word perpetuity; we would like to put a date in there. And the US said we don’t want to talk about that, we like that word, it’s a great word. It took 60 years, six-zero years before the US sat down and talked about that treaty. It took 10 years of negotiation. It passed by one vote in the Senate and just 2 years ago the last statement was actually carried out, the last part of that new treaty. It took over 100 years to resolve that particular issue. So the things we are talking about are long-term issues. There is no quick fix, there is no magic wand out there. It just takes patience and time in the art of communication.
I was meeting with a man from the World Bank about Bosnia we were trying to get some funds from the bank. A very able man and he listened well. And I said I would like to define the word peace-building for you with regard to Bosnia. First there are three levels. First is political peace-building. That’s what the Dayton Accords are all about, putting in a military force there and allowing free elections and so forth. And that Governments can relate to, they can understand and that happened. Far too late, but it finally happened.
The second level is economic peace-building. And Government’s understand that, that’s going in and repairing the destroyed infrastructure, getting people back on their feet and schools and roads and so forth and that’s easy to understand.
The third level is what we do. Its social peace building, it’s working with the people. It’s looking at the root causes of the conflict. Trying to figure out why the hate and anger and lies are there. And we recognize that you have to touch the heart of the people to change the way they think. And I said governments don’t understand when I talk about social peace-building. And I stopped. About 2 minutes later the bank man said we built 3 hundred houses in Bosnia and they are still empty. I said of course there empty and he said why do you say of course. I said because of fear but when you tell a World Bank Phd. economist about fear he really doesn’t understand what you are talking about. He’s talking about economic development, not fear. And I said there’s fear, and I also added there’s fear everywhere we go and every situation we enter. But in this particular case the reason those houses are empty is because you put them in the wrong place. You put them next to a community that they have been in war with and they are not going to come back because they are afraid to come back. They’re afraid they might be murdered in their beds at night. I said if we had worked with these two communities a few years before we might have even been able to get them to live next to each other but those houses are going to be empty for a very long time.
So that’s what we are involved in. We are dealing with the people; we only go where we are invited to go. We never cross the line between Track 2 and Track 1. We don’t negotiate a treaty, that’s up to the governments to do. Over the last ten years, we have had projects that you have heard briefly in Cyprus, and the Middle East, seven countries in Africa, in Bosnia, in Turkey, in India, Pakistan, Kashmir. I have been in Nepal three times in the last eighteen months. In Sri Lanka in the caucuses and working with the Dalai Lama and the Government to Tibet to exile, I helped them build the Diplomatic core. What I would like to do is go over several of these projects with you now to let you know how we do it and what’s possible and what’s not possible and what kind of results one can hope for with regards to building a peace process in various parts of the world.
You heard about Cyprus a few moments ago, the end product. Cyprus was our very first project. We first visited there in 1992. Cyprus is a beautiful island in eastern Mediterranean. It was part of the British Empire until it collapsed in the 1960’s. The British said that Cyprus was now a free and independent nation and they supported entry into the United Nations and that was great. But they had never had a tradition of democracy and this is a tough thing to do. Four years later they had an attempted coup. The Security Council met, put in Peacekeeping force in that same year, many of the Peacekeepers were Canadian, they have had a great history in peacekeeping in Cyprus. And they tried to keep the peace and stop the ethnic cleansing that was taking place there.
Ten years later in 1974 another attempted coup, this time Turkey, the neighbor across the straits sent in 30,000 troops, a lot more ethnic cleansing, all the Muslims moved to the north, all the Christians moved to the south, the green line through the capital city of Nicasee was really rigidly enforced. You couldn’t cross the green line, you couldn’t mail a letter, you couldn’t make a telephone call. This beautiful island was totally divided. No communication between North and South in 1974. The sad part is that Track 1 has been immobilized since 1964. There had been no movement until a matter of weeks ago. The peacekeepers are still there, the rules are still there and often rigidly enforced. We were invited by the people in the South to come there to see what we could do to start to build a peace process. We only go where we are invited because that is critical and we are only invited by people who are involved in the conflict. We went there, we listened, listened for three weeks. How many Governments will listen? We asked what there needs were. How many Governments ask what the needs of the people are that they, unfortunately on our side we often as a Government go in and we say well we know what your needs are, we will tell you what they are and we will fix them for you. Not the way to do it my friends. Not the way to do it. We have to work with the people, find out what their needs are, and see if there is any way you can be of help. Well we were told that we could be of help. We could provide some training in conflict resolution skills. Small steps were possible. We also got permission to go to the north through the United Nations and we found the same interests. So we worked separately, small groups starting to talk about these things. And then we visited four Track 1 entities just to let them know what we were doing there. We visited Mr. Denktash who is still in power in the north, which is now a state only recognized by Turkey. We visited Mr. Clareadies predecessor and then Mr. Clareadies, the present leader in the south, we visited the UN in New York and on the Island and State Department and the Ambassador on the Island. We said the same thing to all four Track 1 entities. We said we have been invited on your Island by the various communities represented in this multi-track approach and we’re invited to start to build a peace process. We want to train people in conflict resolution skills and you Track 1 are welcome to attend any of the trainings that we put on. We are totally transparent, we have no secrets, we want to help you as much as you want to be helped by us. And they were still puzzled about how this would benefit them in some way. I said that I believe that there is no such thing as intractable conflict. I think all conflict in any level of society can be resolved. I said that in some point and time you are going to sign a peace treaty and that’s great progress. And the Turkish soldiers will move off the island and the Peacekeepers will go home and in the next three weeks you are going to have peace. But then someone from the far right or the far left will throw a bomb or assassinate somebody and at moment the critical mass of people that we will have trained by that time in these particular skills will be in place. And they will have connections in that community or that village where that act of violence took place and they will go in there and they will contain the conflict to that village. Our goal is to break the cycle of violence so it doesn’t start up again as it has repeatedly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Angola, and Sri Lanka, etc. etc. If you can break the cycle of violence you can then have a permanent peace process involving all of the people in your particular conflict. Well they listened, they didn’t tell us we were crazy but I’m sure they thought we were. We didn’t get a piece of paper, we didn’t ask for permission, we just said here we are, we have been invited in and we are there if you want to come. And so we continued to do our work but they had been informed and from time-to-time somebody showed up to check us out I’m sure, also to learn and take a little of the training. And slowly we began to expand. We don’t advertise what we do we don’t put up signs or go on radio or TV. We build step-by-step trust. If you don’t have trust you can’t change the way a people think about the enemy. So you come and you sit with us for a few hours and learn what we are doing and then the next time you bring a friend and that person will bring a friend and gradually your network begins to slowly expand. And it’s based on trust. Once you have that you can begin to make the changes that we are talking about. It took us fifteen months, at least it wasn’t sixty years, but it took us fifteen months to get six people from the north to sit down in the same room on the green line under to the auspices of a Canadian Major who loved what we were doing, and we shared that space together. Those six from each side we had a political leader from each side, we had a University president, we had business leaders, and a journalist, we had a poetess. Those twelve people were leaders in their respective communities. They came together for the first time in their lives to meet each other. By that time they had the skills, they trusted us, they trusted us. And within an hour they bonded, they became one and they became our steering committee which has continued to this day.
Over the next seven or eight years we have trained 2,500 people in Cyprus. The critical mass is there. We work with young people. We are having in May our fifth training in the United States of students, of University students, half Turkish and half Greek from Cyprus in these same skills. So we work at all levels to continue these efforts together. I am really optimistic about the immediate future of that divided land. Kovi Annan has taken a leadership role and presented a draft program, which makes sense. The real pressure is on Turkeys desire to join the EU and Turkey’s pressuring of Mr. Denktash in particular. The new President and Prime Minister of Turkey have spoken out publicly urging that Cyprus resolve its problems so that both Cyprus as one Island and then later Turkey can enter the EU.
The people power that has been talked about a few moments ago is a critical new element they have never demonstrated in the streets ever in the history of the island. So you can see what’s rising up from the north, because their economy is declining, the young people want to get a part of the new world, of the new century, they don’t want to be left behind. And I believe that combination of people power, pressure from Turkey at this new level is going to make a difference and my hope is that in the next weeks we are going to see major progress on Cyprus and peace building.
My next example, I have a lot to choose from, we are focusing on Africa, Martin Luther King’s interest. Africa, 53 Nations by the way. You never talk about Africa you talk about one of the individual nations in Africa. Most Americans don’t even know that there are that many countries in Africa. We have worked and are working in at least seven of those countries. I would like to talk about Liberia, which has had a most difficult history. Some of you will remember 150 years ago Liberia was created by freed American slaves who went to Liberia over a period of several years created a new Government that dominated the country for 150 years and they basically became the masters over the indigenous population, as they had been slaves in the past. The indigenous population finally rose up in anger in 1980, murdered the entire cabinet, Sergeant Dow took over for ten years, he in turn was murdered and in 1990 the country fell apart. And it was tribe against tribe, warlord against warlord, total chaos in this lovely country with major natural resources. The Carter Centre had been working for several years in the early 90’s there. And they asked us if we would come in with our training skills to work together with them on the problems in Liberia. So they had the kind of connections that are totally essential to that particular phase of our process. We don’t wait until the war is over or till it’s peaceful, we go when we are invited to go and we were invited by the people through the Carter Centre to go there in 1994 after the sixth ceasefire. We went and we met with people and we finally identified nine people, 7 men 2 women, 7 Christian 2 Muslim, representing all of the tribes who were in at that very moment in violent conflict with each other. They are about the number 3 level, not the warlord or the deputy but the next level down who had connections with the warlord who of course knew what was happening and where they were going. And we took them to Ghana nearby because you need a save haven where people can sit together and not, in fear, but in a peaceful surrounding and there was no place in Liberia at that moment where all of these participants felt safe. So we took them to Akosombo in the northern part of the country, which is a lovely, lovely part of Ghana. And we sat together for 10 days. We always use a circle in our work wherever we go we sit in a circle. For reasons. The first is very practical because everybody can see everybody and hear everybody, so that appeals to one level of consciousness. The second reason is that it is a symbol of peace in every culture that I have ever been involved in. You go back far enough in the traditions of culture including the First Nation people of Canada. The circle is a powerful sign of peace. Sometime there is a fire in the centre, sometimes there is not but that is where the Elders get together, that’s where the community can meet, that’s where they talk in peaceful terms together. So that’s a recognized symbol around the world. The third reason is that we believe that a free open circle without desks and chairs and tables and so forth allows a free flow of energy across that circle. As you begin to build relationships you can feel the energy and what kind of energy it is—good, bad, in between—and that’s very important as you begin to build trust relationships. The fourth reason of course is the symbol of our institute, a circle. So we sat in a circle. There were four facilitators and nine Liberians and we spent half a day going around that circle to have people tell their story. Now we knew that every one of those people felt that they were the most traumatized people in the country. By the time all those nine stories had been heard everyone realized that everyone had suffered death, destruction of personal property, losing homes, whatever. They were equally traumatized. That became a bond because they realized that this civil war, this internal ethnic conflict, had damaged all of them regardless of what tribe they came from and that became a powerful binding event. The next thing that bound them together believe it or not was fear. Because they realized that everyone in that circle was afraid of everybody else, actively afraid and they had reason to be. But they gradually began to overcome that fear. And we moved on through a very powerful time together. At the end of the process the day before we were going to finish I felt that this coming together was beginning to really be felt. So I told the group let’s project 25 years ahead. 25 years that’s a long time for anybody particularly a long time for this group of people who were concerned about their return and whether they would survive the next week or month. I said I want you to think together and how can you develop a collective vision of what you want your country to look like in 25 years. Well they were very reluctant to even start, but they did and we spent a whole day on this. And for the Professors in the group we didn’t put anything up on the wall. Once you do that people start fighting over individual words and phrases. They just were allowed to talk from the heart. And I said that I will summarize what I hear by the end of the day and I will give you my summary the next morning for you to take a look at. So we spent the day defining the future of Liberia. And the next morning I had half a page only and I gave it out to them and they didn’t change a comma because it had the basic fundamentals of all of us. They had democracy, they had truth, they had freedom of the press, they had freedom of their religion, they had peace, prosperity, all the people dreams came to collectively on that half a page. That was their goal. So I said let’s come back now to the present and can you collectively agree on one step to move toward that dream. Can you take one step? Well I’ll tell you, I was astonished, by the end of the last day they had taken two steps. The first step was that we’re going to go back home and we’re going to create our own non-governmental organization—The Liberian Association on Peace and Conflict Resolution. Well that was terrific, great a brand new NGO, first time in the history of the country. The second step was fascinating. They said we have identified 21 warlords, key leaders in the country, Ambassadors, UN Officials, 21 people that we have agreed to meet with collectively, one by one, 21 different meetings the group of nine. We want to physically show them, particularly the warlords, that we now are together as a people representing all of the tribes in the country and we are a symbol of the future of Liberia. And they did that, they did both of those, they created their own NGO and they went back in the weeks that followed they met with every one of those 21 individual people and they started to build a peace process. We continued our training and they finally had an election and four of the private citizens that we trained are now in the cabinet. So you can’t tell where the path is going to go.
There are people interested in young people in this room and I would like to tell you about a fascinating project that we are carrying on in Bosnia. We first were invited into Bosnia in 1996. I have been there many, many times over the years and we started out with training of adults, leaders in the communities talking about post-conflict peace building, the things that we could offer them. And then in 1999
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And that’s great because that’s a lot of money. But he got totally involved in this whole process. So we together we designed a program that is unique in the whole development field and that’s saying something. I have been working in that area for many, many years.
We identified with the help of young people that we had already hired and were working with us. Thirty-five young Bosnians between the ages of 18 and 25 from all three religions and all three ethnicities, from villages and towns, large cities and took them to Lake of the Woods, northern Minnesota-Canadian border. I don’t know if any of you have ever been in that part of Canada but it is one of the most desolate places in the world with water and rock and just shrubs, nobody was living there. But on the US side there are a number of beautiful islands and a rich American, as a kid had been involved in a canoe camp existence on that camp and he went back as a councilor. So he had some ten years involvement with that and he said to me what I want to do is bring these Bosnians into this area and give them some new skills. The first week we spent on conflict resolution training. The second week was a wilderness experience and it was really wilderness in your part of the world. They divided up into five different canoe groups and they went out for five days. They carried all of their food and their bedding and their tent and their canoe with them. And at the end of that five-day period they came back and they had learned one fundamental lesson. You cannot survive in the wilderness without working together. The question of religion, the question of ethnicity, those things just disappear. And they came back together bonded for life from that five-day experience. So that was phase one of the project. Phase 2 which went over a 9-month period or more, back to Bosnia, each of them was instructed to identify their own small technical assistance project. In their particular village or their particular community, which they would carry out themselves. They had to write up the project, they had to design it and get it approved in the local community. Maybe with a mayor maybe with a city council, depends on the nature of the project. Put together a time line, put together a budget, they had done none of these things in their whole life. We had three trainers that went out regularly and helped them over that year. We had group meetings of the whole once a month group to check on progress and encourage people to continue to do them and help them. And at the end we had a graduation ceremony to honor them and to welcome the next group that had been selected.
These projects were terrific. I remember one of the most memorable ones. A young woman wanted to start a multi-ethnic kindergarten in her village. So we approved the project, she was a teacher and she rebuilt the building that she was going to use and started to get the few things that she needed but then she ran out of money because the building was too expensive to repair, more than she thought. Very innovatively, she went to the next village where there was a group of German soldiers, the S-454 group. And she asked them if there was some way that they could come over and use a big scraper to level the very rocky area that was going to be the playground. And when they came over and looked at it they said yeah we can help you. So they came over, they leveled the ground and then they got involved in the whole project and they designed and built all of the kindergarten equipment for the playground out of discarded motor parts from their motor pool. They had a big tank spring that they put a cushion on top you know that the kids could bounce up and down. All of that was designed and made by this contingent of German soldiers. And then they built a nice fence around it a chain fence so that the kids wouldn’t run out in the street. So this young woman, a very perceptive woman decided to hold an inauguration ceremony. A hundred people came. I was there, the mayor was there, the City Council was there and then in the middle of the ceremony, from the next village, came this contingent of German soldiers, fifteen of them led by a captain, who came there to be honored and given certificates of appreciation by the young woman. And that kindergarten is alive and well today.
Digressing for a moment. I lecture, I’m a graduate of the National War College in Washington, D.C. the only place where the military and the civilians get together and a career it’s a yearlong program and I still go back and lecture there. I remember last year, a couple of years ago actually, I told this story to this group of 22 Colonels and I said why is it that the German military can do this and the American military cannot do that? I said that in my thinking you’re always looking for an exit strategy. The only exit strategies that ever works is to leave behind a peaceful community and you’re not doing that. Why is it the Germans are doing it and you’re not? Three Colonels put their hands up right away. The first Colonel said it’s against the rules. I said I know that. The Pentagon won’t let you do it. Right, so he didn’t. The next Colonel who had put up his hand said well it’s against the rules but I do it from time to time. The third Colonel said it’s against the rules and I do it every day. That’s my man. I said what has to happen with this class is you have to go back to the Pentagon and change the rules. It makes no sense whatsoever for your GI’s to sit in their tanks staring at the village people as they go by not even talking to them. That’s not what it’s all about. It’s about people it’s about communication, that’s what we’re trying to teach people. I’ve now said that to four classes and just two weeks ago, maybe somebody heard me, because the Pentagon announced that they are changing the rules in Afghanistan and that now soldiers are allowed not only to talk to people to help them put in a road, to help to rebuild a destroyed school. So the military is final shifting its thinking in this particular regard and that’s a major step forward, its not Bosnia yet but at least in Afghanistan.
Well to continue this story. We are now into our fourth cycle and I’m going in April and May to look at each of the projects and now it is 46 young people and we had a graduation ceremony last year in the national theatre in Sarajevo. We rented it and we are going to do it again at the end of June. We have now impacted on a 150 future leaders of Bosnia that have come together, have bonded, have worked together in building and helping to rebuild their local communities at the people-to-people level. And that’s what we are trying to do in Bosnia.
I have two more stories that I’ll mention. Kashmir. Kashmir today seems to be a sign of violence and certainly of no hope. It’s located in that province up above India next to Pakistan. It was in 1948 when the two countries separated, they decided even though its leadership was Muslim and its vast majority of its people were Muslim, decided to side with India and that’s been the problem ever since.
I know something about that part of the world. I was accredited as a Diplomatic for four years to Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, I have been in the Indian sub continent going back to 1956. I’m familiar with some of that part of the world. But I was very surprised at the end of 1995 when I was visited in our office in Washington, D.C. by two three-star Generals, that’s about as high as you go. One from India and one from Pakistan, they came together to talk to me. And within the first two minutes they said we want you to solve the Kashmir problem. Well that was like the nor problem a few years before. I laughed and said I can’t do that. They said no, no we’re serious. They said we have fought two wars against each other, not knowing each other of course, and we don’t want to fight a third war over Kashmir. We want some outside help we want some new thinking. I said I would love to be a part of that, we don’t have any money, you don’t have any money, but let me think about it and we’ll keep in touch. Well two years went by. And within ten days, three things happened. A man from Bombay came to see me that heard about it, he had his own NGO, he had done some work in India and Kashmir. And we talked and I had an idea that I tried out on him. I said Track 3 is business and peace-building in our multi-track system. I said there are three power centres in the sub-continent, there’s the government, there’s the military, and there’s business. And business historically has never related to the other two. What do you think about the idea of trying to get business leaders in India and business leaders in Pakistan, train them, have them come together and focus on Kashmir with some new ideas, with some new thinking. I said in 1988 there were 800,000 tourists in Kashmir and now there are zero because of fear. And this would be a terrific business opportunity to recreate, reinvest and help to rebuild that part of the world. He said he thought it was a great idea, the next time I came to Bombay I should come see him. Then the very next day I was visited by someone the State Department had brought over who was a leader from Lahore, Pakistan, he was a businessman and a member of parliament and we had the same conversation and he thought it was a great idea too. He said you come to Lahore and we’ll put you in touch with some business people. A week later I got a letter from a lady in New Delhi who said that she would put us in touch with a Chamber of Commerce if we came there. So a few weeks later we got some money to continue our work with the Dalai Lama in Darmesala, which is in northeast India. Then we went there and did our training, and then when we came back, Louise Diamond and I, and we visited Delhi, Bombay, and Lahore. And I then started a process over the next years to continue that relationship, starting to build trust. It took four or five trips before we even can make that kind of progress. Finally, a year or so ago we did a training for 28 businessmen in New Delhi, co-sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and the University giving an MBA. And then a few months later we did the same thing in Pakistan with 50 business leaders and that particular session was opened by one of the two Generals from Pakistan that had come to me years before. He did a fantastic job of telling them what this was all about and our focus was on Kashmir. Because my hope was that they could then take some of these new ideas and come up with some joint ideas and interact in their own way, in their own language and in their own timing with their friends in the military and in the Government. That was my hope.
At the same time we have been working with Kashmirs because of contacts that I have had for some time. On the most positive side we have now had three trainings of Pakistan Kashmiries, Azad Kashmiries, free Kashmiries, that’s what they call themselves. There are 6,000,000 in India south and 3,000,000 in the north. And they offered to pay for these and I said well that’s great because nobody else ever offers that. I said it’s cheaper if we come to you. They said no we want to bring our people out, we are too isolated, we want them to interact with the rest of the world and learn these new skills that you are talking about.
So we have had three trainings. About twenty people in each one, most of them are Members of Parliament, some NGO’s, some journalists. And each time we have taken them to the State Department, we have taken them to several foundations, we have taken them to the US Peace Institute and I guarantee that this is the first time that any of those people have ever met an Azad Kashmir because they are so isolated and they have images of terrorists only which of course is quite different from my image.
And we are now planning our fourth training at the end of March in Washington, D.C. because last year there was a free election, a free independent election in Azad Kashmir. The party out of power won and the party in power lost and peacefully handed over the power of governments. My friend is now Minister of Finance where he was a private citizen before. And this has never happened in India Kashmir but it happened across the line of control because they divided the Province in half after a couple of wars. And so a very peaceful relationship here and a more troubled one on the other side. I have been of course to both sides. I have been to and Srinager, Muzaffarabad, and Azad, Kashmir. And in one of my last trips I made a speech to a refugee camp, people who had fled from India, Kashmir, and I reminded them of the bus trip that had taken place in 1999 when the Prime Minister of India came to Lahore and met with the Prime Minister of Pakistan and they developed the Lahore Declaration and talked a great deal about building peace in Kashmir. I reminded the people that I was talking to about this bus trip when I said I have a new idea. Why don’t we start a people’s bus linking the two capitals, they are only 110 km apart, there is a road there, they have to put in another bridge, but they just have to raise the barriers to allow the people on that bus would be from divided families. So they could meet together in each capital or the other, a busload at a time, and be reunited with the families that have been separated for decades. Well they thought that was a great idea and I came back to Washington and I have been working on that for the last couple of years. We have now actually gotten a letter from the President of Pakistan saying he likes the idea and he will see if he can raise this with his Indian Prime Minister the next time they meet. So that is another example of no money here but a symbol of peace, a symbol of building peace. If you just raise those barriers and allow that bus to go back and forth. We now have a British Member of the House of Lords who has bought a bus, a red two-decker British bus that he wants to take on that trip. So it is amazing how these little things begin to grow. Unfortunately on the business side we were never able to bring the two groups together because we ran out of money. The foundation that was supporting us from Minneanapolis, Minnesota had a change in Board of Directors. They went from global to State overnight. They only fund projects in the State of Minnesota. That is how you are going to get really clobbered when you are in the middle of something pretty inspiring.
The irony is that every politician around the world talks about the flashpoint of Kashmir and we can’t raise any money, pennies, to do the kind of things that we’re talking about. So that’s a real dichotomy that I have not been able to figure out and justify my own thinking. But that’s a reality of today’s world. But we are there, we are going back, we now have a little money from the US Peace Institute and we are going to bring together, this spring, in Katmandu, Nepal, eight Kashmiries from Pakistan and eight Kashmiries from India and they will be meeting together for the first time in 54 years. Neither country wants them to talk to each other. Neither country has ever asked them, remember I talked about listening and asking of the needs, neither India or Pakistan has ever asked the Kashmirs what their needs are. And now their needs have changed I can just tell you that. Originally it was to go with India or Pakistan. Now the vast majority of the people on both sides of the line of control, in my experience, wants independence so we will see what happens in the future.
My last story and then we can take questions, has to do with Nepal. That to every conflict, of course, has a history. Nepal was an absolute Monarchy for thousands of years. In 1990 the people, again the people, got fed up and for fifty days they demonstrated in front of the Palace. Now fifty days is a long time, a peaceful demonstration by the tens of thousands. And they said what we want is a new Constitution. We want a Constitutional Monarchy like Britain has. Well the King finally gave in. And so they developed a new Constitution and had a multi-party system, had freedom of the press, very positive. The King had only, basically a role by title, practically no power. And they began to move forward in that new Democratic way. Well you think back in your own country, think back in our country, ten years is not a very long period of time to do all of the things that you promised you were going to be able to do and they got sidetracked because they weren’t able to fulfill all of the promises the politicians had made.
In 1996 a group of left-winged members of the Communist Party broke off, called themselves the Maoists and went out to the villages and to the people and began to do some of the things that the Government had promised to do but had not done. Unfortunately they then became more violent and now there have been a number of killings. Estimates vary but in the last year, I don’t know about three or four thousand people have been killed, before that about two thousand. So they are a threat to the country and they are a small group but they seem to be growing and no one can quite figure it out why they are growing. I will comment on that in a moment.
We were invited by two human rights groups, some Nepalese, we found some money from a German foundation. We went there in May, a year and a half ago, in 2001 and we spent ten days listening and asking what the needs of the people were. We met with over seventy different people at all levels of society from the untouchable, they have a caste system there, its illegal but its there. From the untouchables, trade union leaders, women’s groups, youth groups, lawyers, journalists, business leaders, all of the key members of the various political parties including two former Prime Ministers. And the common feeling was we need some skills in peace building and how to begin to make things work better and conflict resolution would certainly be a major part of that.
So we went back a couple of months later, and unfortunately on the first of June there was a terrible massacre, by the Royal family was killed, the country was stunned, but they still wanted us back and so we went back. And we worked with twenty-eight people for a week from all of those levels of society that we had interacted with, they all wanted to have these training skills. We had a fantastic week together and I can assure you aside from the skill building the main thing that we were able to do to change the way they thought about the future. We convinced them that they did not have to wait for Government to act. Now just think about that. They did not have to wait for Government to act like they’ve been doing for thousands of years and the new Government of course followed that same path. They could begin to do things on their own. Begin local interaction, help communities build on ideas they had. And by the end of that time together they decided to also create their own non-governmental organization and peace and conflict resolution, which they have done now. We finally got some money together again and went back last September and October. And this time it was a training of trainers, we trained 26 people, a third of whom were from the villages, to go back out there and provide these skills to the village level. Fortunately the funder representative was with us for a few days during that training. She loved what we were doing and the foundation is going to provide more money to go back and do more things. One of the things we plan to do next is to do a training for women on trauma and healing. There is a lot of that because of the Maoists insurgency.
So we have I believe a long-term future there because the second group, which means we have now trained 55 people, also had the same experience. Freeing the mind to realize that they could go out on their own or in small groups and do things that they didn’t think they could do before. They did not have to wait for Government permission to act.
I finally determined in my own mind what the root cause of this conflict in Nepal is and it took me a while to figure it out. The root cause is the caste system. The caste system is rigidly there, it’s been unconstitutional since 1964. Five million of the twenty five million people in Nepal are untouchables. Five million. Five million men had no voice in the history of the country, no voice. I met with the leaders of the untouchables, I urged them to form their own political party. They hadn’t had a voice in the parliament under the new constitution, nobody has ever been elected. I say you have to get articles, get a radio station, get a journal, get a TV, you’ve got to organize and have your voice heard. The reason for the success of the Maoists in my opinion and half of their supporters are women, unbelievable, is that they went out into the village into the area of the untouchables and treated them like normal human beings. The Government never did and still hasn’t. And that’s the basis for their strength. So that is a fundamental issue, how do you change the way people think. It’s a very, very difficult thing, it’s a real challenge but at least now I know what the root cause is. And I’m sharing this now with Government and urging them to take action but that is a critical area that has never been addressed before and the people in Nepal don’t even want to talk about it.
Well I will finish by saying that I had signs of hope, obviously I have to be an optimist and hopeful of all the things that I do, but I really saw some movement of Track 1 which I didn’t expect the last couple of years. And I want to mention that because it’s on the books at least. The Group of Eight, eight major countries of the world, over the last several meetings and for the first time in their history have acknowledged in writing by their proclamations that there is a need for conflict resolution and preventive diplomacy. This has happened twice now for the eight members of the G8. The U.S.A.I.D. Administrator, when he took office a year and a half ago, testified that he wanted to have two new pillars in his administration. One to go back to basics in agriculture and second to have a pillar of conflict resolution, conflict prevention. Well I was excited about that. And he finally organized a committee and I was actually asked to be a part of it, another NGO and myself. We had just a year ago, we had a two-day meeting with about twenty people talking about the future that a consultant report and some terrific ideas put together in writing and we worked on that and we were to meet every thirty days. We never had a second meeting and the committee has been abolished. So that hope is still there but the G8 has never articulated the meaning of their definition or their requirements. Afghanistan came along and it’s been put on the back burner but it’s still there in writing and so it’s up to us to try to remind them of that and get them to focus on this issue. But for the moment, today, Track 1 has not produced in the ways that it has promised to do over the years. And I am disappointed in that because we really have been I think that the current events have overtaken them in this instance. But I do believe that my optimism and my hope continues and that unlike Dr. Martin Luther King I firmly believe that it is going to be community over chaos. Thank you very much.
Ernie : There will be many accolades I’m sure before the morning is out, thank you very much for that inspiration. I would like to just do a process piece here, all these process experts will help me. Between now and one o’clock I would like to suggest this because we had a little bit of a later start and every minute has been valuable. Before we take a break in a few minutes Melinda McDonald, Executive Director of the International Centre for Conflict Resolution is going to provide a spontaneous reflection and maybe pose a question as sort of a breaking the ice in terms of a seque into an interaction with the audience. Then we are going to take a break maybe for ten minutes, stretch, remember we are having lunch. And then we’ll come back after the break and have some questions. Those who came late if you can go up to the mike there it’s being monitored by Rob, hello Rob, whose taping us so please remember to speak slowly and articulately and if you mention your name and your organization if you wish and try to keep it to a minute we could still get about a 45-minute interaction and then we will have a closing ceremony. I should mention with Ambassador McDonald and Crystal since they’ve arrived from Sunday until Wednesday they’ve had ten events. I know when they came here in 1991 I was accused of not giving them much breathing room in between I asked Ambassador McDonald is it better this time. He said, well you know the answer to that. (Ambassador McDonald says I’m a Diplomat.) So he’s had one on ones with the water community, with the youth community, this afternoon with International Peace Science Initiative with Gowlings, so at the luncheon they are going to have a one on one with a couple of people so there will only be a short time plus they have a little space in between. If you haven’t done so, please fill in your organization’s name and number and I really hope that over time you can all connect with the website for the IMTD and you can carry on a dialogue with IMTD and Ambassador McDonald over time. And that way if you have any thoughts or questions you would have liked to interact with them I would ask you to let them have their one on one on their luncheon. But be in touch, he is really good at getting back to you quickly, he calls collect I think. Never. Melinda if you could just take a few minutes on that and I think Rob I am supposed to turn this off and you are going to turn that on.
Melinda: I’m just going to stand up but I think that I wanted to be part of the group because I wanted to not talk as an expert I wanted to talk as part of this entire group, people who are interested in what you had to say Mr. Ambassador and in the whole process of building some kind of peace.
Now one of the things that I have to say is that of course all of you are going to reflect on what the Ambassador said and I’m just starting the reflection, so to speak, and I can only do it from my point of view. And what I kept hearing you say is that we ignore the experiences of individuals and of nations who are in peril and like individuals who are in situations that have been traumatic we can’t expect that and nations are similar to those individuals, that we can’t expect that, simply by changing the circumstance, you mention Liberia for example, by somehow putting those individuals in power who have been colonialized, you can’t expect that they’re going to behave any differently. Their experience of power has been a certain experience of power and they internalize that experience. And so if there isn’t any sort of intervening process where people can heal and can have a different understanding of what power means and what it means to be leaders of a certain community then quite obviously you are going to have repetition. And so it’s not surprising in Liberia your stories on Liberia, really stood in my mind as really exemplifying that of suddenly having a domestic leadership that was again you know murdered and overthrown because these people became oppressors of their own people. And I think that was one of the things that stuck in my mind. Now the other was the story that you told about the economist at the World Bank who was speaking to you about the houses in Bosnia and its all these misconceptions of what we can do to help people but we forget the basic fundamentals. That human beings are human beings. And when they say this to people its they look at us, they know, they completely understand where we are coming from but this isn’t something that you talk about in professional circles. That somehow the people that who speak this way are far relaxed or their plain key, or other terminology is used to keep them down so to speak. But I think that, I hope, that at least that has become a counterforce that we hopefully learn from our experience that it’s at our peril, that we ignore these things. And there are many world leaders, and my background is in psychology, and I’ve always been interested in what creates certain kinds of world leaders and we can go back and look at the leadership of say Iraq and I remember watching a documentary on Saddam Hussein. And one of the things that really struck me was the absolutely abusive demoralizing, aggravating, kind of childhood experiences that he had. And so when you expose an individual or a nation I don’t think Nations are any different, to those kinds of experiences and what are they going to do when they enter power. It seems to me that they are going to repeat those experiences because those are the experiences they’ve learned. So Bosnia, Liberia, and your story also of your British-American friend I was speaking to a colleague of mine who has done a lot of work in Bosnia in conflict resolution and she’s a former Bosnian judge. And one of the things she said to me was “Melinda, what is going to happen in twenty years? When I went to school we were taught that you know we were one group, one nation that you know we were neighbors and we didn’t have these problems. Yes they were below the surface but at least that was not what we were taught openly. She said now what’s happening is that children are openly being taught to hate one another, openly being taught to dislike one another because of their religion or their language. And she said it seems to me that this is going to be painstaking and bringing a more horrific consequence. The last thing I am would say, the last thing that sort of came to me was it’s true that exposure and communication and healing and so on and common experiences can help it. But I’m reminded of the story of a group of Israeli’s and Palestinian’s who came together in a school where their children went to the same school. The children were taught Hebrew and they were taught Arabic. And the children grew up together, played together, the parents saw one another, etc. socially even though they were not encouraged to do so by the wider community. And then when the suicide bombings began to increase and the political climate began to change and become even more polarized that what happened was that these communities, these people became very divided, very angry, and very disillusioned with one another and in fact because there was no process to help them out of that they became even more extreme because they said oh yes well we tried all that, it didn’t work, so forget it. So we have to be careful, we have to say yes there has to be a structure that has to be able to support people even when they have gone a long way from that particular process. And I guess I want to be optimistic but I ask myself where’s that structure. You know, the UN at the moment I think, is hanging on tenterhooks and I think what happens in the next little while, for instance with Iraq, is really going to change the view of a lot of people. If, for example the United States was to move unilaterally, I believe in Iraq, that would completely undermind the United Nations and I think that would be the end of
the United Nations. I really believe that would be the end of it. And so what process would speak for the universal human family so to speak. And so I leave that with you Mr. Ambassador and with the group. Thank you.
Ernie: So you can take a, thank you very much Melinda McDonald, we can take a break and come back in about 10-12 minutes and we’ll interact and he’ll deal with that question and we’ll go into the audience. Thank you very much.
Ambassador McDonald: Things that are encouraging along that line. But you’ve got to remember that the United Nations is a system. There are 32 different international agencies in that UN system. They touch every aspect of your daily life, every aspect of the lives of everybody in the world. Now just let me give you a couple of examples that you may have forgotten about. The International Civil Aviation Organization, specialized agency in Montreal, has three international treaties, about twenty years ago against terrorism. They are the group that’s responsible for all of those detectors that you walk through in every airport in the world. That was done through three international treaties and impacts on your daily lives. Every time you send a letter to the United States or any other place in the world outside of Canada half of the value of the stamp is retained in Canada, half the value of the stamp goes to the country that delivers the letter. Billions of pieces of mail cross those national boundaries every year. The World Health Organization is involved in everybody’s life because they have done away with smallpox over the course of the decade impacting on your life. Every time you turn on TV or radio you hear the weather, that’s the World Ecological Organization has three hundred weather stations around the world that collects the weather, a UN agency, that collects the weather and allows you to project it on your screen locally. Every agency in the UN system has a service to the people. We are thousands and thousands of international treaties that you don’t even know about that unites the world. In my vision for the future in fifty years we are going to have a world government and it’s going to be based on the United Nations and NATO will be that military arm of the world, which the UN Treaty Charter calls for. I don’t know whether you remember but Article 43 says there should be a stand-by military force. Every Nation in the world has to sign that treaty that says that. Article 45 says there should be a stand-by air force. Article 47 says there should be a military staff committee made up of five permanent members, the Chief’s of Staff, the five military. None of those three paragraphs have ever been implemented. But they are there. And every country, 191 countries have sworn to follow the Charter and getting them to do it is sometimes is a problem. But the structure is there. Now I want that structure to be implemented and a little blip on this screen is not going to change that. That’s my answer to you.
Ernie: Thank you Ambassador. What I would like to encourage you to do so I can get a sense of and I would encourage you to interact, I am sure many people in the room have some questions and comments and try to keep them really brief, a minute or so. If you could so I could get a sense, everyone either stand at that mike or stand at this mike or you can come here or I can just start over here and just put up your hand if you want to ask a question or make a comment and I will go see you. All it takes is organization.
Paula Agulinik: And it’s actually a personal question. I am wondering what your organization is doing in the Middle East these days considering what is happening Ambassador.
Ambassador McDonald: You mean Israel and Palestine. OK. Well I lived eight years in the Middle East, basically eight years in the Muslim world. I had four years in Egypt and four years in Ankara, Turkey, around Pakistan so the Middle East I will focus on Israeli/Palestinian area. Whenever we can get money we go there. We haven’t been able to go there the last several years because nobody even at the recipient end is prepared to interact with us. But when we have been there, we have been there for years. We have always worked with the people from all three communities—the Israeli/Jewish community, the Israeli/Arab community, which is a million people living in Israel, and the Palestinians. And that’s pretty rare that a funder wants us to work with all three so that’s one of our difficulties. But I will give you one example of one of the things that we were able to do. And it was shortly after the, it was in the 1994 - ’95 period, where we did get funding and we were able through our connections there to bring together thirty women, thirty women. They were all leaders in their respective communities and they were from all three communities—Palestinian women, Israeli/Arab women, and Israeli/Jewish women. And it was a powerful day together because none of them had ever met before, there was very little trust, before so actually bringing them in the same room together was a major accomplishment. And we began to talk about the kind of things that we were trying to do and getting them to sit together, to understand each other, and to listen to each other. We finally broke up into smaller groups, I was the only man allowed in the room by the way, we broke up into smaller groups where all three communities were represented and I sort of sat on the outskirts of one of the circles and just listened. And what happened in that particular circle was that, there were three Israeli/Jewish leaders, there were two Israeli/Arab leaders and there were two or three, two Palestinians. A Palestinian woman spoke first, and she said, she just told a story, she said that what had happened the previous year was that Israeli soldiers had stormed into her home, broken down the door at 2 o’clock in the morning, dragged her out of bed and took her to prison. And she stayed in that prison for six months, she never knew what she had done, she was never charged, she was never told what her crime was, and then equally suddenly she was released six months later and found her way back home. No message about her whereabouts, no nothing. The second Palestinian woman basically in more detail described what had happened to her but it was over an eight month period. And by the time these two women had finished talking the Jewish/Israeli women were sobbing. Nobody in their entire lives had ever told them that this is what their military was doing to the Palestinian women. They had not a clue about this they said. They couldn’t believe the stories but they knew that these women were absolutely telling the truth and they apologized for the actions of their government and their military toward these particular women and gradually this trust relationship began to be built.
My colleague, Dr. Louise Diamond, went back three more times over the next year working with those same women, all leaders in their respective community gradually building and strengthening that kind of a trust relationship. And then we ran out of funds and that particular effort was stopped. But what that did was to build on the people that we, and many others, have worked with, in the whole peace-building field. There are literally thousands and thousands of people in Israel and in Palestine who have had training, who have had skill building, who have worked together when the political atmosphere and the leadership allowed it. So for me there is a fundamental base of peace-builders already in existence. All they had to be given is the opportunity to get together and to speak out and work together. I have hope for the future of that part of the world.
Ernie Tannis: Thank you
Florie Storie from the Canadian International Institute for Applied Negotiation (CIIAN)
Ambassador McDonald my question is you commented on the national Sovereignty, indicating that for most nations that’s still very much of a priority in terms of sovereignty of the nation. You commented that that’s problematic in terms of the world’s structure when it comes to responding to intra-state conflict, violent conflict. And at the same time you just answered to Melinda that the UN will be alive and well and you say that in fifty years that we will be a world wide government. However, in the meantime we do have those thirty-five intra-state conflicts and much other violence in our world. And I’m wondering for you what are you seeing at this point as two or three emerging key trends or directions that are going to help us as a humanity deal with those intra-state, I shouldn’t say deal with who are we to be so arrogant, but rather that we as a humanity can do something in terms of assisting or being involved to see that the world changes. And would you comment in bringing into that respect what the potential of the responsibility to protect direction has, the responsibility to protect. Thank you.
Ambassador McDonald: One of the hopes that I have is that in the next ten years genocide will be viewed under international law as an exception to national sovereignty and I think I see the world moving in that direction. For me the major blotch on history in the last two decades is the genocide in Rwanda, which not only the United States, but the other 14 members of the Security Council, totally left alone. I have great sympathy for your terrific Commander of those forces in Rwanda. A true hero in my book. He tried repeatedly to get Security Council to rewrite the Mandate. See every peacekeeping force has a carefully negotiated Mandate by the Security Council as to what they can do and cannot do. 3,500 Blue Helmets were in Rwanda when the massacre started were there, it usually takes a year to gather that kind of a force, and they were there, and when the genocides, when the killing started with machetes by the way as the weapon of choice, the Peacekeepers after a few were killed, the Security Council pulled out 3,200, ignoring the pleas of the Commander to just give him a little more to change the Mandate which had to be done politically and they could fly in some more weapons, if they could do that. But those people, those Blue Helmets, could of stopped that conflict if they had been allowed to do so and they didn’t. Now that to me was genocide. Our Secretary of State at that point and time an International lawyer, refused to use the word genocide in his speeches about Rwanda because he knew if he used it he would have to implement the Treaty that we had all signed saying
TAPE 2, SIDE B
side. So my hope is that this will be recognized as an exception to national sovereignty and we will go in, as we did in violation of international law in Kosovo, as did happen under international law in East Timor. We are beginning to learn in that particular area about how to do it. I’m optimistic about the situation in Cyprus, which I’ve already discussed. We look back on the great victory in South Africa where the transition between white and black power was done peacefully. Every journalist in the world predicted a bloodbath and it didn’t happen. And the untold story is that in 1991 Prime Minister De Klerk, a white South-African, got through Parliament the law providing the creation of a national peace institute. And over a hundred villages and communities were empowered to create their own local community peace centres and the South-African Government spent over $60,000,000 training in the next three years, 20,000 South-Africans at the village and community level in conflict resolution skills. And the reason that there was no bloodbath is that those people went into those places where there was going to be turmoil and resolved and kept that conflict from flaring up. They had actually done what I talked about earlier in Cyprus they had broken the cycle of violence. So that to me is a very positive and very inspirational thing.
And it’s what, well lets look at what is happening in Sri Lanka. In conflict since 1983 and there is almost a peace agreement there ready to happen and which is great progress.
So I have hopes in these particular situations and that we can resolve these conflicts and we can continue to build peace so that’s why I’m over the long-term hopeful and also optimistic. Does that answer your question? I hope I’m not—OK.
Douglas Ang, Carleton University: I want to raise one of the dilemmas of the peace process. And that is very often its very protracted and this can be (Ambassador McDonald—its all been protracted) at high human cost, I’m thinking of the western Sahara where they had a war, they had a cease fire for twelve years, negotiations have been going on and on and on. And it doesn’t seem like there will be any early resolution. Meanwhile, there are a 150,000 refugees next door in Tinda in the most primitive and horrible conditions and they’re not in the picture. Is there any way of speeding up the process?
Ambassador McDonald: No. Everything we are talking about takes time. Your country like my country is very impatient, we are the most impatient people in the world, the United States. We are also the poorest listeners and often the most arrogant so you have to keep those national characteristics in mind when you think about what’s possible and what’s not possible. I told you it took us fifteen months to sit together in Cyprus, just to sit down in the same room together. So these things are laborious. In western Sahara, which has been going on a long time, there has been a peace-keeping force there for many years, but they are not killing each other. It’s painful to people in refugee camps and unfortunately there are refugee camps all over the world right now. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is very over-burdened in what they are trying to do. So I never say that it is a simple process or it is a fast process. And we have to learn more patience but we have to learn more activism as well and this is why I’m hopeful that over time governments like yours and mine will fill this gap that exists out there between words and between actions. And one of the positive things that your Foreign Minister Axbury did was to create a $10,000,000 peace fund a few years back. Funded by CIDA but under the discretion of Foreign Minister. And that’s a major step forward. I don’t of any other place where there is an identifiable peace fund, which is controlled by the Foreign Ministry. I would hope you would make that a $100,000,000 a year and begin to expand that outreach and build that kind of support because every NGO I know in North America is facing financial problems. And we’re talking about pennies when we are talking about conflicts and war. The other end of the spectrum is its enormous it’s almost hard to believe we are talking about so much money and yet when we are talking about peace the money’s not there. And that’s what I hope can change because until that changes, until the gap begins to close we are still going to be threatened by these 35 internal conflicts.
Ernie:Thank you, I am keeping track of those who are beckoning me so I can get to go where you are seated.
Roger Hill, Consultant: Actually, your last comments fit very much in the line of what question I want put, which is given the extent of the gap between conflict situations out in the world, which if anything is getting worse and perhaps at any rate it certainly not getting much better. The situation out in the world and then the rather small scale of the response. What are your recommendations about how to get Governments more interested in the interesting conflict question? Secondly how to raise more resources? Because this seems, I mean to be, financial and other, and this does seem to be a major issue and I know that you over the years, of course, had a lot of dealings with the State Department, other governments and the United Nations. How are we going to get these groups, these Government or private agencies to put more money into conflict resolution effort?
Ambassador McDonald : It’s going to take people like yourself complaining to make it happen. I am very serious about this. The power of NGO’s in the world today, it has grown extraordinarily over the decade. My wife Crystal and I were at the First World Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972. That’s the first time I ever saw a group of NGO’s get excited about an issue and that excitement has begun to expand and expand and expand. In Beijing at the Fourth Women’s Conference there were 40,000 NGO’s present. Now that’s an amazing group of women power and they have affect over time. But they also have to begin to focus on some of the issues that you’re talking about I believe. I don’t think NGO’s have collectively ever tried to approach their respective governments to ask for money. Everybody is fighting for the same little piece of the pie and the pie gets smaller and the NGO’s get larger so it makes it even more difficult. So I think that’s an important idea of bringing consortium together. If you get a dozen NGO’s to go collectively to go to CIDA see them for example and say we are working together on this, we need your help. You might have a chance of attracting that kind of attention. The US Congress and your Parliament are also potential sources. The business community is a major source because they have money and if you can get their attention they are prepared to spend it because they see, some of them, over the long-term, that if they can build a peace process in a particular area then they can invest in there. And they have more money that governments at this point in time. And so I think a major effort that’s why our third Track is business and peace-building. That’s how important we think it is that you go there and try to excite them and get them to help you financially. It just takes time and patience. The fact that we now have two documents where the G8, Heads of State, have collectively agreed on preventive diplomacy and conflict resolutions, even have annexes to one of those statements saying that the roll of business in peace-building is key and the roll of women in peace-building is key. Well nobody knows about that but it’s out there and it’s in documented form and if people can pick that up and push their governments respectively. I believe in great power in the hands of NGO’s today. And it’s not being directed in that particular area because we are all trying to survive to do our thing so we don’t think in those terms. But you asked me for a longer term vision and I think that is the way to go. You have to force governments to recognize the world has changed. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear it. I wrote a little article for Foreign Affairs Journal for Harvard a few years ago. It was against the State Department. I say the Track Not Taken. And I talk about the fact that they haven’t even taken Track 2 seriously let alone the whole concept of multi-track diplomacy. You just have to keep pushing and that’s the only answer I have and sometimes even become obnoxious in the process. Don’t take no for an answer easily. Thank you.
Audience Member: First of all I would just like to express my thanks to the organizers of this important event. The other point is that, I would like also, to thank Ambassador McDonald and actually I am from the developing government world particularly from Sudan. Currently when we see that the policy which has been followed by the United States and now in front of us here to see somebody from the United States speaking his conscience, speaking his ideas, and working for peace, I wish that such kind of people also have a say in directing the administration in the United States and number 2…(Ambassador McDonald—I wish that also) (Ernie: Do you want to give him your name?). Thank you, I give you my name. My name is Alsad Abounifesa. I have been working with the United Nations now as a consultant in the peace-building and the resolution of conflicts for the last ten years. I have been in many places in the developing world actually South Africa, Cambodia, and many other places. Mr. Ambassador if you allow me to just say something that for my modest experience conflict in the Third World generally speaking the root causes are lack of power and wealth sharing and also it is conflict because of identity problem. And all these types of reasons and causes in my view they are also a result of colonial error in one way or another. The important point is that in, during, the cold war we have institutions called United Nations whose role was felt to some extent, but post cold war era and especially when we enter this so-called new world order and to you and your staff I don’t see the United Nations have a role and peace is the fundamental foundation for development for everything. There is no peace in the world. We are living in a very shattered world and those G8 countries, even when they talk about peace they talk about this selectively, when they choose some countries to enter or to go in, or to help, they choose them selectively unfortunately. Therefore, I think in my view, in this current world there is a high need for some kind of a change in the structure of the United Nations to cope with those kinds of situations because the United Nations is crippled financially and even politically in my view because also it is at the mercy of strong countries. And my last point… sorry for (Ernie—am I doing anything? Laughter.) After 11th of September Mr. Ambassador, I became pessimistic because the United States, the strongest country, came out after the 11th of September and said, those who are with us are with us, and those who are against they are enemies. And quite a number of dictators in the developing world immediately spoke up and said we are with you. Just give us the means to suppress, to suppress those who are terrorists and in my view there are quite a number of freedom fighters in some countries in Africa and Asia. They are labeled by their government as terrorists and the US and the allies are giving all the support for these dictators. Therefore my conclusion is that freedom, democracy, and human rights are in danger after the 11th of September. Thank you.
Ernie: And thank you.
Ambassador McDonald : I certainly agree with your last statement, there is a danger and that is what we have to be very careful about and see that it doesn’t happen. The same thing happened in the Cold War where we were we or they and we got used to this concept and I have been also concerned after 9/11 that this same idea is being pushed by the Bush Administration. We’ve extended our military might in countries that we never thought would even be interested in having our presence there in Georgia, in Nepal, in Uzbekistan we have a presence we never had before. And that worries me too as you say it’s not black or white it’s a very sophisticated and complicated thing. I go back to the United Nations. I spent more time on United Nations affairs, probably 16 or 17 year, than anybody else in the history of the Foreign Service of the United States and I’m a dedicated believer in the United Nations system and making it stronger and better than it is today. And its basic problem is that it is under funded. We are always cutting back on the US side particularly. And we are just making it very difficult, we have a zero based budgeting concept which doesn’t even allow for expansion in any way, just keep the thumb on, just keep it down and I think that is terrible of them and I am totally opposed to it. I’ve tried for three or four years to get a unit in the UN headquarters established and call it conflict resolution, conflict prevention, I can’t even do that. There is no support for that for whatever reason at the higher levels, I am working at the mid-level. But you need some kind of a structure when you are talking about this so there can be a career path or careers and they can become a part of that and make that a part of their passion and their whole career. And that is not happening and that is the kind of a structural change that I think is absolutely necessary to bring about the kind of change that we’re talking about.
I was interested that you are originally from the Sudan. You’ll be intrigued to know that I have been invited by Khartourm and by the SPLA, which is the group in Southern Sudan, to, with some friends of mine, to provide some training in negotiation skills. They have had three or four meetings to date and it’s all at the Track 1 level, they all have their positions stated, and nothing shifts. We have now have gotten both sides to agree to take some training in how to negotiate before you come to the table. Now we are looking for funding, I hope that the US Government might provide some funding. I have plenty of it earmarked for Sudan, we will see if that’s possible. We have a letter to Senator Danforth who is the liaison from the State Department and we hope to be meeting in the next few weeks. But that to me is a positive sign, a modest step forward to recognize on both sides that they don’t have the skills to do what they are supposed to be doing. And this is why it’s a long process as I said but it is possible to help through training to build those skills and then help them to go back to the table and actually do the changing themselves. So I just thought as a Sudanese, a former Sudanese, you would like to know that that small step may just take place in the next weeks.
Brian Broffman, International Centre for Conflict Resolution and Mediation : Mr. Ambassador, I am Brian Broffman of the International Centre for Conflict Resolution and Mediation. As the Director of the newest division of the Centre, which is Social Mediation, we try to develop dispute resolution projects, which have a social benefit to them. Those are generally local or regional, with potential for some international work but it is the newest division of the Centre. And I want to ask you, you said that you have only involved yourself I believe in projects for which you were invited in. If we were to do that as a relatively new entity I think we would not be involving ourselves in anything. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how to get the involvement of groups, or to get oneself involved in situations, which could potentially use the assistance of a group of dedicated well-meaning conflict resolution professionals. For example, with the situation at Concordia University a year ago we contacted them. They said the situation was just fine, are you aware of the situation at Concordia University in Montreal? It’s a situation which students have at one point rioted fairly recently over the Palestinian/Israeli issue. At any rate we saw this coming frankly, and suggested some conflict prevention work and they said the situation was fine and after which is was proven not to be fine. At which point we offered our services once more and there have been no calls returned after having been promised a meeting on the subject. At any rate I was wondering about how to get people interested and involved and how to get them at the table. On the other end of things once you are involved (Ambassador McDonald—let’s do one at a time) Oh I’m sorry, OK.
Ambassador McDonald : Well that’s a big question you’re talking about. Well first of all you’re talking about within the Nation State, within your own community basically. We only work internationally we don’t do anything within the United States because other people are doing that. But internationally, it’s often a life and death situation, which it is not in your community, and so you don’t want to enter that conflict until you know that the people you are working with are really interested and they also can help you and protect you because they are so interested. So for my work internationally I would not change that, you have to be invited and that was a fundamental. Where, for example, someone asked me why aren’t we in Burma or Iraq, and I said because we have never been invited because there is nobody on the other end that you can work with. And so someone is working on the Burmese side who heard me speak and talked about this a few months ago but it may or may not happen. But for us I will not change that because that’s just essential for our work. In the local community here I think you’re too impatient. I think you have to work on it and you work on it around the centre. You start talking with friends of the people on all sides of the conflict who know you and they can begin to impact on the people closer to the problem and you can start building that trust relationship, remember trust is absolutely critical.
So it’s a more complex process. And think about the multi-track approach. When we were working in the early 90’s with Tibetans in Dharamsala, for decades they had only focused on Track 1. We had thirty people from the Government in a week’s training and I really got in to what we mean by multi-track diplomacy, which is tapping all of these groups separately and then collectively. And it was almost like a light bulb went on in the room. They had never thought about asking the business community or other religious groups, or journalists, etc., etc., to do anything with them before. They changed their whole mode of operation on that multi-track approach. It’s a new way of thinking, it’s a new way of thinking, and that’s what I think you can adapt to and you can get others to help you and you will get in there but it’s going to take a little more time.
Brian Brothman : I think we are doing something right because our latest contact is a Libyan Montreal surgeon who is well respected in the Montreal/Arab community who is going to help us possibly get things going.
The second question was that once you do have a project going I’ve heard you say a number of times the funding ended and that was the end of it. So I guess that just implies two things—do you have any ideas how to keep the funding going and before the funding runs out, this is more of the core of the question, before the funding runs out can you comment a bit more on attempts to empower the community so that there are people, there are either, a champion who will continue the project on their own, or a group of empowered and enabled peacemakers, conflict resolution professionals, whatever term you want to use, within that community thanks to the efforts of your organization so that the community can continue things with their own efforts.
Ambassador McDonald : Well structure and process are critically important, I agree with that. One example that we did at the Iowa Peace Institute we started the first statewide program on peer mediation, which we heard about earlier, which is training teachers to train them in conflict resolution skills and they in turn train their students and every school in the State of Iowa now has required conflict resolution/peer mediation training. What we did to institutionalize that process internally within the State was to go to the Northern Iowa University, which produces half of the teachers in the State of Iowa, and get them to require every student teacher before graduation to take the 40-hour course on peer mediation so they graduated into the system with the skills already there. So you always have to think about systems process to try to make your future work over a period of time to last beyond your particular presence in that particular area. So I think that’s one of the areas that you have to deal with. Was there another part of your question? (Brian—No that was really good, that was great, thank you very much)
Ernie : I just want to do as my colleagues and training in intervention to do a process check. I had four or five questions back there, could you raise your hands again, I know who you were but I want—one, two, three, four, five. It is now twenty-five to one, I would like to try to leave here at 1:00 so if I stop at ten to one, we can do the closing ceremony. So we have about fifteen more minutes, so try to keep your questions brief please and if you have a comment hopefully it will lead to a comment.
Collins Babalola from Common Cause Africa-Canada and the Ottawa Centre for Peace and Conflict Transformation: There were three questions that I had I will put into one because of the short time. I will join my brother from Sudan to compliment you for your wisdom, for your vision and also for the various work you have done across the world. I was a witness of that in Cyprus. One question that I would like you to address I have stood throughout the time you have spoken, since you have came you numerous recitings on prevention on conflict prevention. Billions of dollars are available for peace-keeping, zero dollars are available for peace-building and conflict transformation. Within the United Nations organization budget available for peace-building for peace-keeping is almost a hundred times for peace-building. We would like you to address that. And the conflicts in Africa from your experience of Sudan and Liberia, traditionally Africans have waged war with each other, they use bows and arrows, they don’t have any guns, they don’t have any such fitted weapons. Where are these weapons coming from, who is producing these weapons? And why is there not more attention placed to the people who supply these weapons. Which nation supplies the weapons to Sierra Leone. I just can’t see where people have been apathetic. Why was assistance not given before ammunition? Thank you
Ambassador McDonald : The whole question of preventive diplomacy is a very difficult one. Boutros Galli, the Secretary General of the United Nations, in 1992 developed at the request of the Security Council an agenda for peace. And I urge everyone in this room to get a copy of that short blue booklet, the UN office can provide it, An Agenda For Peace. To me it is the most important document since the Charter of the United Nations. It projects the role of the United Nations over the next fifty years. And what he does is call for four things to work together. The first is preventive diplomacy, which nobody understands. The second is peace making. There is a Chapter 6 in the Charter, I’m talking about peace making in which the Security Council should instruct two nations who are in conflict, who are in potential conflict, sit down together, negotiate, reconcile, arbitrate, whatever, and if they don’t do that then the Security Council will put sanctions on those two nations. And that Chapter has never been used since it was drafted in 1945. Never. The Security Council has never had the guts to do that. So we have a major issue of political will here that I think is very important. And so preventive diplomacy, which I consider that to be, is very tenuous and very difficult. I will give you a practical example. I have had one meeting with Mr. Wilfredson, the Head of the World Bank. He is a terrific man and I admire very much what he is trying to do. My meeting was arranged by Morey Strong, Canadian and an old friend of myself and many of you here. And the three of us sat together for forty-five minutes and during that conversation I talked about preventive diplomacy. I said Mr. Wilfredson, you and the bank have just given 2 ½ billion dollars to Tanzania. I want to help you protect your investment—the way you get his attention as a banker when you talk about that—and he listened very carefully. And I said Tanzania is the only country in East Africa at peace. It’s surrounded by violence, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo, and so forth yet they have been able to maintain peace, which is fantastic. But there are three areas beneath the surface that are challenging that. The first is Christian/Muslim. The second is refugees from Burundi and Rwanda were there, a million were there at that time. The third is Zanzibar an island off the mainland, which is part of the country. There is tension in all three of those areas. What I want you to do is to hire us for the next three years. We have trained, and we have developed an NGO in Tanzania, we trained fifty Tanzanians in these skills, I want to expand on that and take them and others like them across the country for the next three years and we can at least keep the peace and to me that’s preventive diplomacy. Well he got really excited about this, I’m pleased to say. He went over to his desk, picked up the phone and called the Vice-President for Africa and said I want you to see McDonald, he’s got a great and then he reviewed quickly everything I had said including the dollar figures and the whole bit so he was a listener. A rarity at that level in governments. And so the following week I had a meeting with the Vice President for Africa, we did the whole bit. He brought eight people together. Unfortunately the Tanzanian director was not present he was out of the country. So I met with the Tanzanian director a few weeks later and I reviewed the whole thing. I said you know your President loves this, your Vice President loves this and he said I agree with all of the problems below the surface, he said I agree with that. But I don’t have time for this preventive diplomacy stuff, I don’t have any money for it. Thank you. Boom. Finished, end of issue. I tried six months later. He said well we have problems in Uganda. He was covering Tanzania and Uganda. Do me a project proposal, we’ll talk about it. I did the project proposal, sent it to him, he never answered my phone calls, we never met. That’s bureaucracy at middle management killing ideas generated from the top down. It happens every day, every day around the world so you have that to worry about. You have to infiltrate into the system that you are trying to change to be able to bring about the kind of changes you’re talking about. This is a real world situation I’m talking about. This happens all the time because bureaucracies don’t like change. Change is a threat, change is a challenge. I did it last year the same way I’ll do it this year because I didn’t get fired last year, I won’t get fired this year. You know it’s about job security, it’s about fear of being fired, they don’t change. So our role as NGO’s is to try to get bureaucracies to open their minds and to start changing how they think about the conflicts we are talking about. Preventive diplomacy is an absolutely essential issue if every one of these conflicts and in future conflicts and as governments we don’t even want to recognize that. So I thought that would be one area that you can actually appreciate so I will stop there.
David Lorne, Coordinator of the Canadian Peace-Building Coordinating Committee : Hello my name is David Lorne, Coordinator of the Canadian Peace-Building Coordinating Committee and my question has to do with how you get from working with people at mid-level in a conflict situation to the instigators of violence or the people who can be negotiated with at the next level up, the leaders of the country, the leaders of the military and so on. For me I would just like to hear you describe what those processes can be. Ambassador McDonald
We don’t even try. I don’t look upon that as our role. The problem that so many people, NGO’s, get involved in is that they want to go to the top and do it there. Well, it doesn’t work that way in my experience. And you can’t force the issue. Going to the top is not where it’s all about.
I heard a very interesting talk by Dennis Ross last year. Dennis Ross, for eight years was the Clinton coordinator on Israel and Palestine, intimately involved with negotiations for years. And he confessed something after he had left the government. He said the one fundamental error that I made in my eight years was that we always negotiated up here at the Track 1 level. We never brought anybody into the process below that either in Israel, Palestine, or the United States. It was all done in secret. He said I thought many times about bringing in NGO’s like IMTD into the process because you had the people-to-people connections down there, which we didn’t have. He said I even thought about funding NGO’s to do this but I never got around to doing it. He said that’s my one fundamental error. And he’s totally on target. If we and the dozen other NGO’s that had been working in that part of the world had been funded and been allowed to continue to do the kind of things that we were doing it would be a different world. But this is not the way Track 1 thinks. They think they got it all, they have all the answers, they have all the power, they have all the money. They certainly have the power and the money, they don’t have the answers. That’s what we have to change and that is what is most difficult to do. So I mentioned earlier that we work with people below that level, at the mid-level. As you said we don’t go up, if you go up you start getting involved in negotiation and when you start thinking that you are going to negotiate a peace treaty you’re stepping on Track 1 toes and you get kicked out of the country. And some of my friends and colleagues have been kicked out of the country because they crossed that line from Track 2 to Track 1, you can’t do that. So you have to stand back and be patient and continue your education process. You cross that line you’re dead meat. I’m just telling you. And I’ve seen careers destroyed because of that so don’t do that. But be patient and those people at the mid-level will begin to rise up and impact and talk informally with those particular leaders. And they will make a difference, some of the people that we have worked on in Cyprus are now very close to the leaders on both sides and they are making a difference on both sides. They are making a difference in small ways and that’s the way I believe you have to go to build a peace process that will be sustainable and that will actually last, which is our joint goal.
George Miller, Private Consultant: (Ambassador McDonald—private consultant to what?) I’m just hired to do things sometimes such as strategic initiatives sometimes work with Ernie at the ADR Centre. The question is how does one deal with the dictatorship apparent in the invisible face of the virus profitability. I am stressing the invisible face of profitability. How does one deal with that?
Ambassador McDonald : You don’t, you don’t. It’s not possible to deal with that. I said earlier we are always invited in the conflict. That’s the key reason. We have not been invited to Burma as I said, we have not been invited Iraq, there is nobody there to work with. Nobody invites you, don’t go, don’t push yourself because you won’t survive. They don’t want to talk to you. So what we are doing is not the magic global solution in the short-term. It is in the long-term because our hope is that governments will change in Iraq and in Burma for example and that eventually we might be invited to help.
People are already in Cyprus thinking about post conflict concerns because even once you have a peace treaty that lasts and even though you have contained the violence you still have the vast majority, I said we worked with 2,500 people but there are millions of people on that island, you’ve got to continue the process. And it’s now being looked at. The weakness of the Northern Ireland situation, which was great news when they signed the April 10 agreements is that they did not continue to work with the people on all sides of that conflict. The structure itself cannot stand by itself. You have to bring the people into the process. We don’t think enough about that. We are looking for the quick fix it doesn’t exist.
George Miller: Assuming that you are invited in then how do you deal with that invisible face of profitability that is out there as a counterbalance to what you are doing, the face is invisible. (Ambassador McDonald—I’m sorry you were talking about dictatorship, that’s the word you’ve used) No I was using the word profitably it is in a sense a dictatorship with an invisible face (Ambassador McDonald—well most dictatorships have an invisible face.) (Ernie—maybe I can recommend that this dialogue can be carried on)
Ambassador McDonald: No, no let me focus on that because there are people who want war certainly in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the diamonds, the timber and so forth, there are people who are benefiting from that. And they are often in positions of power. Well you have to recognize that and see again over the long-term what you can do in the ways that I’ve described. Again patience, there’s no quick fix it’s just not there.
Ernie: Thank you, I’ve got a speaker here and I’ve got two more speakers and then I can close it off there. Have I got that right? Okay.
Chanda—photographer: Hi I’m Chanda, I’m just taking pictures. I’ve just got two questions they are kind of joined. When you were talking about the state of the world and why the state of the world is the way it is you were saying that there is no empire and I was just wondering how the United States isn’t considered an empire of a strength according to you with some of the examples that have been brought up today. Second I wrote a paper in first year university on the UN and one of the criticism that I got back was that I didn’t discuss the influence of the United States on the UN because I thought that there was no influence at the time and I was wondering what you had to say about that as well as if there is that influence and how it affect the function and the credibility of the UN.
Ambassador McDonald: Let me talk about the empire question first. I use the empire in the historic meaning of the word, which is global reach. The British Empire was around the globe, the French Empire was basically Africa, etc., etc. So these ten great empires all had massive land acquisitions throughout their history and why they are empires and that’s what the word means in the definition of it. The United States does not have global desires for land. So we’re not an empire in the traditional sense of the word. I certainly agree with that we’re a super power the only one in the world at the moment and that’s obvious. And we have exercise of power in different ways but I do not call us an empire in the traditional sense that I was using it. As for the influence of the US on the UN, well I say that that changes over time in different administrations. I have been able to do amazing things within the UN system. I have created five agencies in my sixteen years on the United Nations all dealing with positive, population, environment, UN volunteers, etc. etc. I’m not bragging what I’m pointing out is that you can with knowledge, see the average tour of duty with the Foreign Services is two years on the United Nations system, we are just learning on how to go to the john by the time you finish that, multi-lateral diplomacy is far more sophisticated and different than bi-lateral diplomacy, one country to one country. You are working with a hundred and ninety-one countries. How do you get anything done? It’s possible if you know how the system works. And with all that time in the system both within the United Nations at the ILO and outside of the United Nations at the State Department you can make that system work in positive ways. The problem is that most people involved in multi-lateral affairs don’t have the skills, don’t have the time or the interest and they let opportunities slip through their fingers all of the time. So it’s possible to change the face of the UN system as I have personally done over the years so I am very positive about how that’s possible to bring about that change. And so that’s why I have long-term expectations and a positive sense about the future. So the United States tries to dominate more than its able to dominate. Look at the election about Libya to the Human Rights Commission. Well the world flaunted this and elected a Libyan. A slap in the face of the United States, a well deserved slap. We shouldn’t fight over issues like that, that’s a ridiculous waste of time. We spend all our energies sending out messages to Ambassadors on the Human Rights Commission that you have to change your vote. Well to me that’s a ridiculous waste of time. So a Libyan, a woman, she’ll probably do a great job, so let her do it. There are other ways to impact on that or to come up with resolutions that you don’t like, well ok, don’t attack the system like that. It’s a total waste of time and it makes you look foolish because your going to lose every time, the US is going to lose every time.
Steve Shapiro, Member of Reach: Hi, my name is Steve Shapiro, a member of Reach but this is more of a personal question. I was very interested in what you had to say about your fifty-year projection that we will be looking at world government in fifty years, and (Ambassador McDonald—I thought that ought to get somebody’s attention). And we will be looking at NATO as being the armed forces for this world organization. And given the fragmentation in the world today, like you’ve talked about going from six countries to one hundred and ninety one countries, given the ethnical, religious, and cultural differences even within those countries given the fact that organizations such as yours intervene on invitation only and also given the fact that you seem to be involved in crisis situations rather than long-term building, I am involved in that as well. I have typed two questions given all that sort of negative stuff, I just blurted out, what is the reason for your optimism that we will have a world government in fifty years and how to get from where we are now to there.
Ambassador McDonald: I didn’t realize that I ever said short-term so long-term is always the way I go.
TAPE 3, SIDE A
Things the way I repeatedly talk to. One of the reasons I’m optimistic is that the world keeps adding legal structures. And I’m a International lawyer and I have negotiated half a dozen treaties in the world and I know that every one of those is like a little stone building a wall and they begin to build and build and build. We heard about a treaty this morning put together by the International Labour Organization, my old organization in Geneva, which is tri-party, Labour, management and the government and has been around since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Can you imagine that that group, divided as it potentially is, in the minds of many people has negotiated 184 international treaties. They have done fantastic work over the decades that most people don’t even hear about. They came out in the 30’s with equal pay for equal work for women. Instead how it happened when it’s there on the books as an International Treaty, they thinking ahead. They are the ones, just last year that put together a treaty on slave labour and with that one paragraph on child soldiers. Well, nobody in the history of the world has ever had a phrase about child soldiers in a treaty. That means that it’s innovative, it’s not bound in the high archival sense of the world, people are thinking of the real world and what the needs are. The UN has repeatedly over the decades created new structures, and I am talking about to meet current concerns. And that is very, very far better than any national government has ever done. Far better. And so they continue to build a future of vision, a way ahead of the rest of the world. In 1982 I was head of the US Delegation of the world conference on aging. Well, the UN convened that conference, by the way at the request of the United States Congress, and had a first world conference on aging. In 1982 the projections were that every country in the world was aging and nobody, no government, realized it. Well a second world conference was held a few months ago in Spain confirming every one of the predictions that had been made 20 years before. That’s long-term thinking. And they didn’t change the plan of action they say we just have to do it more, do it better and carry out those ideas. So this is visionary work that most people don’t even realize is out there. But they are the only institution in the world that I know of that thinks globally every day of the year. That’s what my hope is about and they will continue to do that in spite of the fact that they under funded.
Ernie: Thank you, last person.
Audience Member: Ambassador, Ernie has left the best to the last so I will attempt to make the biggest impact. Ernie has selected the people in this room and with their active and different disciplines and community groups, world community and otherwise. All aimed at peaceful co-existence, that’s the goal. For myself I consider Ernie a very close friend. I guess I represent in this room a secular humanist and I am involved in Humanist associations here in Ottawa and the greater Humanists groups in Canada. When it comes to Ernie and myself in religions or life stands we also need a conflict resolution. You have spoken, Ambassador, on the freedom of religion in the Soviet Union and the Protestant/Catholic conflict in Ireland. In the American Constitution there is a declaration, this great document was signed by, (this Declaration of Independence is this great document) signed not by for the most part by religious people, but by non-religious people. That is that they believe strongly in the separation of the church and state, they were Unitarians/Humanists. I guess you know by now I am trying to make a case for a Democratic secular state, that is the only state that can really survive and thrive as opposed to a theocracy, which is in most cases very ruthless. The first three words of your American Declaration is “We The People”. Its all-inclusive not exclusive. It includes everybody regardless of race, gender, religion and this is one thing we don’t hear of too much, Ambassador, I don’t, is a non-religion. You stated not to overestimate the power of religion in the same way we must take care not to underestimate the evils of religion. All religions are based on myth and superstition. (Its impetuous is in a driving force is ignorance and fear.) The old my God is better than your God, God is on our side etc., etc. the root and seed of all this conflict is religion. What is being done, not what I want to ask you Ambassador, is what is being done, not to gloss this over, but to recognize this and deal with it accordingly that all human problems must be solved by human means. And just in conclusion, you have in your multi-track diplomacy here, track 7, religion. You don’t have non-religion life stance philosophy etc.
Ambassador McDonald: Do you want to focus the question a little more? I’m serious you’ve covered the waterfront and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to answer.
Ernie: I think he is questioning the focus on religion and there is a number of people called Secular Humanists or atheist or agnostics or other people who feel that there is too much focus on the value system based on that kind of God-centred universe and there is not enough balance in people who believe in a different type of value system that does not include a god.
Audience Member: Thank you Ernie
Ambassador McDonald: Actually I had lunch a few years ago with a Professor from Tel Aviv University, born in Israel and raised there and he told me he was an Atheist. And I said I never heard of a Jewish Atheist before. I have heard of agnostics or secularism but I never had somebody say that they were an Atheist and yet they were Jewish. He got very upset with me and he said there are lots of us out there. So it’s a matter of definition that’s also the problem. I would say that the phrase we the people which is a powerful one, is exactly what multi-track diplomacy. We have tried in that circle to include everybody in the world. We have not excluded anybody, we’ve given some labels to people and many people have several labels on them in that 9 track system, but our intent always was people oriented is to include all of the people because remember at the very beginning I said we are looking for a systems approach to peace. The only way a system works successfully is to bring everybody into it. Now we don’t look at labels. When we have a group around a room we encourage people to come into that room without their labels. I remember when Crystal and I were in a meeting in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem where we were asked to talk to a group of 25 people and we went around the circle and everyone of them started out the first sentence was told me their religious background. I’ve never had that happen anywhere else in the world. And there were all kinds of nuances of what they were. But that was the first thing they said to describe themselves from a religious point of view. And I told them I never heard that happen before in any other country in the world. I said what I would urge you to do is stop doing that and make it in the second or third sentence because you’ve got definitions that I never heard of before so I don’t know what you really are, they were so nuanced. And I said just think about that, how are you going to present yourself to a stranger? Don’t start out that way, tell them something more about yourself and get around to that a little bit later. But our goal is to bring in all the people of the world and I don’t know how else we can do that, how else we can make that clear but that circle includes the world. So we are not saying that by religion, it means X, Y, or Z. You can call yourself whatever you want to call yourself. But what we want is the people to come together without labels. Hard for people to do, they like to say which political party they’re from, which tribe they’re from, which clan they’re from, you name it. That’s the first thing that comes to mind—what religion you are. We urge people, and it’s hard for them to do, to leave your titles and your labels outside the door. Also leave your ego outside the door. Put your ego behind you not in front of you. Very, very difficult to do, but when you do all that then you begin to start to build a common bond of humanity, a willingness to recognize your neighbor is also a human being. That enemy over there has the same hopes and fears that you do. Witness my Liberian story. All the tribes that have been fighting again and had a common goal that they finally articulated. That’s what human nature and human beings are all about. That’s our future goal. Thank you.
Ernie: Thank you very much and there is equal thinking going on in here and that’s the only equal we want in here. Thank you all very much for participating in this process. Very much. Someone is going to phone and thank Ambassador McDonald but I would like to thank him for interchanging with you and standing up there and dealing with the depth of the intellect in this office is beyond description and everyone has something to say but you’ve really interchanged this is going to be in the proceedings. Thank you very much, will you do that?
It occurs to me that maybe one of the results could be a web-based site to continue the conversation. That is something we can think of doing.
Ambassador McDonald : By the way our website in case you haven’t heard it is www.imtd.org. (That stands for Institute Multi-Track Diplomacy
Ernie: I remember that’s what you told me it’s at the top of each agenda. Please visit it.
Ambassador McDonald: We are still working on it and we update it but its pretty good stuff right now.
Ernie: Thank you very much. There is only a couple of more small points before we go for lunch and I would like to invite June to do the honors and then after she is done that if Carl Smith, Dr. Smith could come up and complete the session and then after that everyone is invited for the luncheon outside. June is outside.
June Girvan: Friends, we have one last thing we must do and I beg your indulgence but also we need to vacate this room in 5 minutes so I would like to ask us if we could gather around the lunch table and we will do that task there. Thank you so much.
To visit the website for the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy of which Ambassidor. (Ret.) Mc Donald is president, paste the following link into your browser http://www.imtd.org.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
SUMMARY OF MATERIALS AVAILABLE TO BE PURCHASED IN RELATION TO THE NOV. 27TH, 2003 WORKSHOP ON OTTAWA COMMUNITY CARE ACCESS CENTER CUTBACKS, CO-SPONSORED BY REACH AND THE ONTARIO ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL WORKERS EASTERN BRANCH TO BE HELD AT 2-5 PM AT THE REACH OFFICE AT 400 COVENTRY ROAD
MATERIALS TO BE INCLUDED:
Visual Chart of the entire Appeals Process
Long Term Care Act, 1994 and Regulations thereunder
Community Care Access Corporations Act, 2001, and Regulations thereunder
Ministry of Health Appeal and Review Board Act, 1998 (No Regulations)
Health Services Appeal and Review Board Book of Rules and Procedures
Applicable Internal Review Process Procedures (Reference to the 43 CCAC’s)
There will also be reference to the Statutory Powers and Procedures Act and applicable jurisprudence. In addition, some relevant Board decisions will be included.
There is presently an Appeal by Ian Black which challenges the legality of the cutbacks and the Public Hearing is being scheduled in Ottawa, date to be announced. As may be legally permitted by the time of the workshop other pertinent materials may be included.
Other forms and precedents will be included in terms of the entire process.
BOUND VOLUME
The Materials will be in a bound volume, with a cover sheet, and a detailed index, with tabs for each section for easy reference.
USE OF THE MATERIALS
The Materials will have different usages and value for different persons:
The specifics of each legal aspect, and each stage in the process, will provide important precedents and guidance on how to conduct the negotiations in relation to CCAC cutbacks and appeals from the internal to the Board.
IF YOU WISH TO ORDER THE MATERIALS PLEASE CALL 613-567-9715