By George Lakey
ZNet, December, 2002

Even while George W. Bush beats the war drums to dramatize his utter lack of positive vision, I'm happy to report that an extraordinarily visionary peace project was hammered together last month in New Delhi, India. Attracted by how the organizers mix practicality with their vision, I went to New Delhi November 28 to help develop its training dimension.

Activists from 40 countries, representing 70 grassroots organizations on six continents, launched the Nonviolent Peaceforce. Its mission: "to facilitate the creation of a trained, paid, international civilian nonviolent peaceforce. The Peaceforce will be sent to conflict areas to prevent death and destruction, and protect human rights, thus creating the space for local groups to struggle nonviolently, enter into dialogue, and seek peaceful resolution."

To me as a U.S. citizen, the political advantages of this kind of visionary work are pretty large. The Empire hawks like to disguise their military moves with phrases like "humanitarian intervention," as in Kosovo. For people who are concerned about human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing, it's hard to oppose U.S. military intervention when it seems there's no non-military alternative. Further, when we see activists like ourselves tortured and killed in other lands we want some practical way of lending a hand; it's elementary solidarity. And those of us who are tired of the arrogance of the Imperium, within which even some radicals put on a know-it-all, "we can solve your problems for you" attitude, it's a welcome relief to find an inherently modest way of intervening in the affairs of another country, by keeping alive the local people who themselves need to forge the destiny of their community.

Now endorsed by seven Nobel Peace Prize laureates including the Dalai Lama, this new Nonviolent Peaceforce has staff working on four continents and offices in seven countries, even though it's so far operating on a shoe-string budget. First publically proposed at the 1999 Hague Appeal for Peace (where it was enthusiastically endorsed), the organizers used the time since then to explore whether this is the right moment in history to take this initiative.

It's not an entirely new idea. M.K. Gandhi, challenged by the turbulence of post-colonial India including Hindu-Muslim riots, began to build what he called a "Shanti Sena," or peace army. Probably the most visionary organizer of mass movements in the twentieth century, Gandhi had a sense of irony about what he was trying to pull off. Once asked by a journalist to identify himself, Gandhi said he was a "politician trying to be a saint."

At considerable risk, the Shanti Sena experimented with peacekeeping in India and created a local record of achievement which never quite reached the level of breakthrough. By the early 1980s the dream surfaced again, this time in the projects of North Americans acting in solidarity with Nicaraguans and other Central Americans trying to break away from Uncle Sam's stranglehold. Peace Brigades International, for example, found in Guatemala, where grassroots organizations were losing their leaders to the hit squads, that North Americans could act as nonviolent bodyguards and keep the leaders alive. Called "protective accompaniment," and backed up by an emergency response network of people in Canada, the U.S. and Europe who would activate the phone lines at a moment's notice when needed, these volunteers found themselves virtually living in labor union offices, going along to demonstrations, and even going shopping with women leaders of families of the disappeared.

Peace Brigades International (PBI) celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year having been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now with a strong base in Europe as well as North America, PBI has a track record in Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala, Haiti, the Balkans, Indonesia, and elsewhere. I was on the first PBI team in Sri Lanka in 1989 where we accompanied human rights lawyers. Other peace teams keeping local activists alive to struggle for justice include SIPAZ (Servicio Internacional para la Paz), Christian Peacemaker Teams, and Witness for Peace.

One reason why organizers of Nonviolent Peaceforce concluded that the world was ready for more was that even during their preliminary exploration 13 countries asked for Peaceforce intervention! The list of movements included Uganda, Tibet, Israel/Palestine, Philippines, Ecuador, Burma, and Zimbabwe! While the needs assessment was underway, a feasibility study was done -- the most comprehensive study of third party nonviolent intervention yet. The feasibility study is available on the website: www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org.

The other reason to start a new group is that Nonviolent Peaceforce will be larger than existing groups of volunteers; NP expects to reach 2,000 full-time, paid fieldworkers when geared up. Larger scale will increase the strategic flexibility of the force in using the techniques of third party nonviolent intervention. Techniques NP will train its "nonviolent soldiers" to use will be:

• INTERPOSITION: used when two forces are moving into confrontation (or preparing to) and one of them needs protection from the violence of the other. NP will physically move between the forces to prevent or reduce the violence.
• OBSERVING/MONITORING: can be used to assist villages to maintain zones of peace, or to monitor a cease fire that allows food and medicines to get through to needy people. Rather than interpose themselves between groups where violence threatens, the observers/monitors are expected to carry cameras, notebooks, and in other ways provide a physical reminder that "the whole world is watching," thereby restraining the violence.
• PROTECTIVE ACCOMPANIMENT: used when the fieldworkers agree with those who are threatened to remain physically beside them as nonviolent bodyguards. At the core of this technique is a defined relationship between the fieldworkers and the local activists who are accompanied. Sometimes those receiving accompaniment are individuals and in other cases they are groups or villages. Today the Guatamalan Accompaniment Project is sending international volunteers to accompany villages under threat.
• PRESENCE: used in situations of open conflict where, through public actions and visible, risky acts of service, the fieldworkers can influence the dynamics of the conflict itself. As with the other techniques I'm describing here, presence is sometimes used in local conflicts without the need for internationals to come in. For example, in the early '90s in Cambodia the Coalition for Peace and Reconciliation marched through areas disputed by the government's military and the Khmer Rouge. Some marchers were shot and two were killed in 1994. While refusing to take sides, marchers also refused to cooperate with the intimidation employed by both sides and modeled that behavior for the peasants and clergy. The Cambodian marchers were not in the usual sense a party to the conflict; they were intervenors whose focus was the field of conflict itself.

Presence differs from accompaniment in that the peaceworkers' actions are not organized around a relationship with a defined person or group, but instead is focussed on the field of conflict itself. Each conflict has a force field, much as electrical energy does. One of the tactics that influences a conflict field is modelling behavior which stretches the boundary of what local people believe might be safe to do, as the Cambodian peace marchers did. Another tactic is doing a visible, public service which combatants are too frightened to do, as when, recently in the course of their work in Colombia, Christian Peace Team members buried the body of a murdered villager.

Like the other techniques of interposition, monitoring, and accompaniment, presence expands the political space for the parties in the conflict and opens, through nonviolent intervention, new possibilities for the parties themselves to move forward.

PILOT PROJECT: SRI LANKA

The New Delhi founding conference, in addition to setting up the organization with by-laws, governing council and so on, chose NP's pilot project. NP will respond to requests from grassroots organizations in Sri Lanka to assist them in making the tough transition from years of civil war to a stable peace. Ironically, a dangerous time for social activists can be AFTER a negotiated peace settlement (the Tamil Tigers and the government are negotiating now). Spoilers can do violence to derail the process, actors who have benefitted from the status quo can feel threatened and act against grassroots leaders.

The pilot project in Sri Lanka is scheduled to start next summer, which means a very short timeline to recruit at least a hundred peaceworkers from all parts of the world and train them. Based on the evaluation of the pilot project, NP will build its capacity to maintain a force of hundreds and then thousands for nonviolent intervention in violent conflicts.

While civilian peacekeeping is only one part of the multi-dimensional vision peace activists need to create if we're to get anywhere in opposing war, I believe it's an essential part. It's too easy for the hawks to marshal resources by claiming "humanitarian intervention;" we need to become bolder in forging alternatives which defend human rights and protect activists working for justice.