"Peackeeping, Peacemaking, Peacebulding "

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
May 3, 2009

Reading: Peacemaking and Human Rights , excerpted, by Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz
“Mine is a wintry view of life, by which I mean very simply that I am deeply cynical about human nature, including my own. Perhaps that is not surpris­ing given my twelve years of experience as executive director of Amnesty International USA, with its corre­sponding exposure to brutality and war.

As one who was required on a daily basis for those twelve years to hear about the most sordid and gratu­itous violence, who met with some regularity those who had been the victims of it-twelve-year-old girls, for example, blinded and facially scarred for life because they had disappointed their fifty-year-old husbands to whom their parents in southeast Asia had sold them and whose husbands had therefore thrown carbolic acid in their faces-and who has visited the filthy prisons of Liberia and trod the refugee camps of Darfur, I am not easily convinced that humans, in the words of Psalm 8, are “but a little lower than the angels.”

Call it Calvinism, if you like; but in this respect I think eighteenth-century theology was far closer to the mark than much of contemporary liberalism: left unchecked, human beings are vicious sons of bitches with whom you would be very wise not to leave your two-year-old or your credit cards.
 
So what this means is that if we are to live in a world even occasionally at peace, we must create structures and norms that discourage the appearance of our basest impulses.  Some of those are cultural, some are legal, and some-ironically enough-entail the judicious use of force.  These latter, in other words, entail indulging our baser impulses in order to stop other people from indulging theirs. 

The cultural ways in which we can decrease violence are not simple, but they are straightforward: building self-esteem, for example; teaching conflict resolution; boycotting violent media.  I'm not going to elaborate upon these options, but I in no way underestimate their importance.  What I want to address are the legal and military options, for they are the nub of the issue.

Southern segregationists were wrong about every­thing, but one thing they were indisputably wrong about was their oft-repeated slogan, “You can't legislate morality.”  Well, not only can you legislate moral­ity; legislating morality is one of the major ways to change moral standards.  Today's [social] conservatives know that, which is one reason they are so afraid of laws per­mitting marriage between people of the same gender.  Few things will have a greater impact on changing social norms about homosexuality than if gay and lesbian people are recognized legally as marital partners. Within a generation of that happen­ing across this country, controversy about the morality of same-sex relations will be, if not a thing of the past, radically diminished. This is how most value changes take place.
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What does this have to do with the prevention of violence?  Well, one of the reasons national leaders have so frequently used violence, especially against their own people, is because they could get away with it.  In places like Rwanda and Bosnia and Darfur one or more political leaders sought to exploit long-standing ethnic and tribal tensions for their own purposes and thought they would pay no price for their treachery.

One of the most promising developments of the modem era is that international law and institutions have evolved to a point where impunity like that is no longer inevitable.  It started with the war crimes tribu­nals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and traces its way through the 1999 decision of the British Law Lords that sovereign immunity did not protect Augusto Pinochet from prosecution for crimes against humanity.  And of course this promis­ing arc now includes the International Criminal Court (the ICC), which has already issued indictments against alleged criminals in the Congo, Uganda, and Sudan, including now the president of Sudan.

We have a long way to go before international jurisprudence will be a reliable resource for deterring violence.  But, if the ICC is successful in its early prosecu­tions, imagine how much easier it will be to make the case to the American people that ratifying the Court's statutes, such that future Saddam Husseins could be dealt with judicially rather than militarily, is clearly and convincingly in America's best interests.  With the effec­tive criminalization of human rights crimes, we advance the notion at the global level that you can legislate morality and that eventually the norms of a civilized world will preclude torture and mass atrocities.

But mention of Hussein brings us, of course, to the heart of the question before us: Until the day comes that no tyrant can assume impunity, how does the interna­tional community, within the constraints provided by our religious and ethical traditions, use its power to pre­vent or stop or punish grievous crimes against human­ity?  Ought we to reject the use of any and all kinds of violence and war to resolve disputes between peoples and nations and adopt a principle of seeking just peace through nonviolent means, as the pacifist tradition would aver?
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Fortunately, just as international justice has evolved over the past years, so has the-concept of the “responsibility to protect”-it has evolved to the point where the United Nations in 2003 adopted guidelines regarding when humanitarian military intervention is justified.  It must, for example, be designed to counter large-scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing; it must be a last resort; it must receive some type of international imprimatur.  Had these guidelines been followed, the United States would never have invaded Iraq in the first place, but we certainly would be taking far more proac­tive steps to stop the slaughter in Darfur.

So where does this leave us with regard to the choice between violence and nonviolence?  It leaves us with a no when it comes to renouncing absolutely the use of force, but it leaves us with a loud and unqualified yes about all that we can do to curtail violence and limit the uses of force in international affairs. One of those things we can do is theological.

We are all tempted, in the face of our own failings, to lash out at others.  But from a religious perspec­tive, the appropriate response to a recognition of our own demons is not to demonize others.  It is to seek out common bonds.  It is to recognize that virtually all people, of whatever stripe, feel the need to be safe in their homes, to be treated fairly by the authorities, to pass on a better life to their children, and to enjoy their rightful share of the earth's abundance.  Part of the job of a government is to make it as easy as possible for its citizens to be their best selves, not their ugliest and most degraded, and part of religion's job is to help us understand what those best selves look like.  Let us not allow the stubborn, wrongheaded, pinched-nosed vision of neoconservatism to distract us from the fundamental recognition that we truly are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and that on rare occasions that fidelity requires us, with caution and humility to be sure, to dirty our hands in order to stay the worst monsters of the human heart’s recesses.”

Sermon: Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, Peacebuilding, by Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
For several months from the fall of 2002 thru the winter of 2003, I stood on the corner of 57th and Woodlawn at least once a week as part of a Meadville Lombard student protest against the US starting a war with Iraq.  The sign I held read, “Vietnam Veteran Against the War.”  I have heard tell that several Northern Hills members protested the war, also.  I also attended peace vigils, a peace rally in downtown Chicago where then Senator Obama spoke, and marched along with thousands of others to try to stop the war.  Peace activists had learned a few lessons about organizing, and got really good at turning out protestors.  Around the country and around the world, more people joined in anti-war protests than ever in the history of the world.  It was awesome, and I began to think the Bush administration would have to pay some attention to us.  But, for all the success of the protest movement, it was a total failure at preventing the war.  Maybe we should learn a lesson from that experience.

In March of 2003, the US military unleashed its “Shock and Awe” campaign, an invasion of Iraq using enough firepower to easily overwhelm the poorly equipped, poorly trained and unmotivated Iraqi military.  Within days, the conventional style battles, if you can even call them battles, were over.  Nobody in the world stands a chance of defeating the US military in what is euphemistically termed conventional warfare.  The US has built more military might than all the rest of the world’s militaries combined.  And if push really came to shove, all our high tech tanks, ships and planes are backed up by our nuclear arsenal.  Talk about awesome!

Now, over six years later, here is what one Iraqi has to say about it: “Salihee’s widow, Raghad al Wazzan, said she accepted the American soldiers’ presence when they first arrived in Iraq because “they came and liberated us.”  She sometimes helped them at the hospital where she works as a doctor.  But not anymore.  “Now, after they killed my husband, I hate them,” she said.  “I want to blow them all up.”   Maybe we should learn a lesson from her experience.

We are challenged to look at the lessons of past wars, genocides, ethnic cleansings and their aftermaths to find more efficacious and more ethical ways to settle differences.  We are also challenged to learn from past efforts at preventing the use of deadly force better ways to keep the peace and to build capacities for protecting human rights and making peace work in the future.  The Commission on Social Witness has asked us to study not war but peace so we Unitarian Universalists can help bring more peace to the world.   With the US involved in two wars there are debates within the military and on Capital Hill on the limits of force to either maintain our security or to ensure compliance with cherished American values and ideals.  There could be no more important time in our nation’s history than now for us to get involved in making peace.
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When we become aware of serious human rights abuses somewhere in the world, we are faced with a dilemma of how to stop them.  This often sets up a debate on war and peace in which two equally horrendous choices are given: either use deadly force and face the devastations of war or stand by while thousands of people are killed and displaced.  Although to find a third way between all out war and doing nothing is not easy, there are effective ways of responding that do protect civilians and do not lead to the miseries of war.  If war should only be used as a last resort, we must create responses to aggression, exploitation and terrorism that prevent armed conflict and heal war ravaged societies.

Dr. Sharon Welch, in her recent book, Real Peace, Real Security, a primer of current knowledge on peace, says, “While there is widespread support for multilateral humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect, there is an equally widespread disaffection with the legitimacy, morality, and even efficacy of traditional military intervention.”   She asks us to re-evaluate the effects of violence, to honestly assess what it can and cannot accomplish.  Lest we think her statement is simply the ranting of a wide-eyed liberal, feminist, Unitarian Universalist professor of theology, listen to these “representative paradoxes of counterinsurgency” as described in The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual:

1. The more you protect your force, the less secure you are.
2. The more force is used, the less effective it is.  Using substantial force increases the risk of collateral damage (which means killing innocent civilians) and mistakes, and increases the opportunity for insurgent propaganda.
3. Sometimes doing nothing is the best option.
4. The best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot.  Often dollars and ballots have more impact than bombs and bullets.
5. Tactical success guarantees nothing.  Military actions by themselves cannot achieve success.”

 
Statements like these turn traditional military thinking on its head.  US military leaders are really taking into account the moral, political and tactical costs of killing noncombatants.  The U.S. military is telling us that military power alone cannot produce robust security or enduring peace and that there are better ways than using violence to make peace.

What about the other end of the peace spectrum?  Have peace activists learned anything new?  Peace activists have long protested against violence to all who would listen, but maybe the types of protests that worked in Gandhi’s India and in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement have lost some of their power.  Mass peace marches may have a strong emotional effect on the marchers, but they do little to convince those who disagree with their message.  In fact, protests tend to increase tension and conflict between opposing groups.  While protests can exert some coercive force for change on people in power, protests alone don’t make peace.  Not only must we illuminate the ways our society falls short of our ideals, we must follow disruptions with the work of restoration and reconciliation.

Fortunately, we have gleaned important lessons from several decades of peace activism, from United Nations peacekeeping efforts, and from American military engagements.    The paradigms for making peace are changing. Welch tells a story on her cousin, a rancher.  He “stated that when he first began training horses, his goal was to make the wrong thing difficult.  Now, his goal has changed.  He finds himself working horses in a way that makes the right thing obvious.”   This is a story to remember as we look for better ways to create peace.
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The first task of the peace movement was necessarily to forcefully denounce the atrocities of war.  The second task was to claim a full set of human rights for all the victims of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing and the many forms of structural oppression which reduce their and our humanity.  Now, while the work to secure human right for all peoples goes on, we need to move beyond principled outrage and critique to political engagement in the construction of a framework for  enduring human security and sustainable peace.  Fortunately, we live in a time when the requirements of peace have been studied and constructive approaches to peace are already being attempted.  Peace processes can be grouped into “1) Peacekeeping – early intervention to stop genocide and prevent large-scale war, 2) Peacemaking – bringing hostile parties to agreement, and 3) Peacebuilding – the creation of long-term structures for redressing injustice and resolving ongoing conflict.”

Efforts at peacekeeping have evolved with each intervention by United Nations forces.  We have learned from many the UN’s failures and several successes.  While the failures have created reluctance to commit to the costs of military involvement, a world-wide consensus has emerged that states have the responsibility to protect their citizens from mass murder, systematic rape, and other crimes against humanity- and of the international community to respond when they do not.   Military intervention for human protection is justified to prevent large scale loss of life and ethnic cleansing.  The goal of a Peacekeeping force is not to defeat an enemy but to clear a space where negotiations can take place.  It should be used only when the Just War criteria of right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects are met.  While multi-national Peacekeeping forces may at times be necessary, they are never alone sufficient to create enduring security and sustainable peace.  For that, we must move from Peacekeeping on to Peacemaking and then commit to long-term Peacebuilding efforts.

Peacemaking, the work of obtaining political agreement for peace accords, requires the participation and creativity of all parties to a conflict.  It has the immediate function of stopping violent conflict, and it should lay a foundation for addressing the issues in conflict so the social order can be transformed by non-violent means.  Peacemaking also provides a structure for redressing grievances, restoring losses that can be, and setting the stage for continued reconciliation which will be required to establish a lasting peace.   Peace accords are negotiated and signed by political leaders, but they can’t be implemented without participation by the people.  Rebuilding a society after violent conflict requires participation by non-governmental organizations such as churches, women’s coalitions, businesses and more.  Peace accords, in order to help heal a society must “be seen as equitable, authentic, and grounded in the history, stories and aspirations of the particular culture of the people.”

Peace accords create the space to begin the long-term multi-faceted work of Peacebuilding.  Peacebuilding involves political activities to directly reduce ongoing violence, to allow non-violent conflict transformation, reconciliation of opposing parties through restorative justice, and building capacity to meet basic societal needs and protect human rights.  These efforts take years, more often decades.  Not only must buildings and material infrastructure be rebuilt, so must governments, judiciaries, police forces and other cultural systems.  The root causes of violence must be recognized and addressed.  Systemic, structural violence that can disrupt the peace of a society and institutionalized forms of exploitation, exclusion and marginalization must be stopped.  Prevention of violent conflict re-erupting requires recognizing the signs of grievances about to erupt in the short term and in the long-term systematically redressing the root causes of conflict before they can lead to violence.

Although our efforts to build peace will meet with failures again in the future, peacemakers must remain resilient and continue constructive efforts to improve the processes.  The United Nations and other peace organizations remain committed to analyzing the failures of the past and building on the successful techniques to improve the effectiveness of all stages of peace work from preventing violent conflict through post-conflict Peacebuilding.
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A member of our congregation told me she might bid on a sermon topic at the auction, but she did not win the bid.  I told her I would like to know her topic if it was important to her so I could address it.  She said she had a problem with the UU Principle that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  She thought some people were pretty bad, and it was hard to see there was goodness in them.  From our reading this morning, it seems Bill Schulz would agree with her.  Last week, I said, “in order to create a Covenant of Beloved Community we needed to make a spiritual assumption which was best expressed by the Hindu word, “Namaste,” and I gave my interpretation of Namaste as “In each of us is a place where Divinity can dwell.  I will look for the divinity in you and try to show you the divinity in me.”  I don’t see  these two positions, her concern about people doing bad things and  my idea that people can have divinity in them, as mutually incompatible.  People have the capacity to do both good and evil. 

The concept that human nature is not inevitably good or evil goes all the way back to the beginning of Unitarianism.  Here is a quote from Rev. William Ellery Channing’s sermon, Unitarian Christianity, the document we point to as the first definition of Unitarianism.  It was delivered on May 5th, 1819, 190 years ago:
“We believe that all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of man, that is, in conscience, or his sense of duty, and in the power of forming his temper and life according to conscience.  We believe that these moral faculties are the grounds of responsibility, and the highest distinctions of human nature…We believe, that no dispositions infused into us without our own moral activity, are of the nature of virtue, and therefore, we reject the doctrine of irresistible divine influence on the human mind, molding it into goodness.”   Our UU sense of human nature is that people’s potential to do good should be promoted, and we encourage each person to pursue his or her own spiritual growth.  The early Unitarians used different terminology; they urged people to “perfect their character.”  This internal, very personal work, of growing to spiritual maturity, is where the capacity for creating peace is built.   It is something we can all do to move the cause of world peace forward.

Gandhi knew that in order to create social justice, one must use peaceful means and that we must start with ourselves.  To do this, the agent of change must remain vigilant to use non-violent means to achieve peace and not become that which you are resisting.  He taught three goals for non-violent action: 1) to enlist the support of others, 2) to ensure the perpetrator of oppression loses moral authority, and 3) to help the perpetrators see the cost of their violence and stop.  He taught one must always appeal to the heart, to convert and not coerce, with the goal not of defeating your opponents but of transforming them by love.

“Eknath Easwaran tells the story of a woman who came to Gandhi to ask if he would tell her child not to eat sugar.  The child would eat nothing else.  Gandhi told her to come back next week.  The following week the woman returned, and Gandhi talked and joked with the boy telling him he really should not eat sugar.  After the conversation the woman thanked Gandhi, and then asked him why he had waited a week before speaking  to the boy.  Gandhi replied, “Last week I too was eating sugar.”  The point here is not that one should be blameless before others, nor is it merely that one should practice what one preaches.  The point is that certain opinions and moral ideas must be earned before we can express them with honest conviction…By changing who we are, we change everything else in an instant.”

I can’t compare myself to Gandhi, but I’ll have to admit I need to pay more heed to the lessons of non-violent behavior.  In my lifetime I have demonstrated my capacity for violent thought, word and deed.  My work for peace begins in my own heart.  Knowing this, I commit to active resistance to acting in violence.  Just as I can learn to act out of love, I am convinced that none of us here is so fallen we cannot be converted by love.  I hope that all of you will also commit to the law of love and refuse to cooperate with violence.  May what we begin here today, in our hearts and in our homes, someday make a difference in the Iraqs and Afghanistans of the future.