Waging War on War

Jeffrey Mapendere knows peace is hard. A senior associate at the Carter Center in Atlanta and a former liberation fighter in his native Zimbabwe, Mapendere walks with a cane and confesses to a fear of heights that didn't stop him from parachuting into hostile territory as part of his freedom-fighting duties. War demands much of its soldiers, he says, but peace requires more.

"Any idiot can make war," Mapendere told an audience in California last weekend. "A single person can cause chaos. But making peace, that's where you need moral giants, real generals -- and there are very few."

Last weekend, some of the few met on the campus of the Monterey Institute for International Studies (MIIS) for the inaugural conference of Global Majority, a fledgling organization dedicated to promoting dialogue as an alternative to war. Students and practitioners of the art of negotiation engaged in policy discussions, hands-on mediation workshops and in conference hammering out a declaration of their intention. Those deliberations produced the Monterey Call, the heart of which is the goal "to prioritize the use of non-violent means of conflict resolution as a moral imperative of the 21st century."

It's hard to imagine a more quixotic venture. War is a $1 trillion global industry. Global Majority, on the other hand, has almost no budget and all of 65 members, most of them MIIS students. To attend the conference, panelists flew in from Atlanta, Botswana, Gambia, Tel Aviv and Washington on their own dime, or on the largesse of their home organizations. A boon to the group's funding came in a Friday night benefit concert by the silver-maned anarchist-humorist-folk singer Utah Phillips that raised $1,100. Local media ignored the conference, with the exception of the local alternative weekly and Univision. Even the presence of Colombia's ambassador to the United States, Luis Moreno, could not rouse the mainstream television crews from their weather-and-traffic-induced stupor.

But no venture is more worthwhile, either. In two and a half days of panels and workshops, the audience got an earful: about the 3 million Colombians who have been driven from their homes by the 40-year civil war that the guerrillas, government and paramilitaries just won't put to rest; about the 3,000 refugees at Dukwi Refugee Camp in northern Botswana who, having escaped wars elsewhere, now face the area's 37.7 percent HIV prevalence rate even as their daughters face the necessity of selling sex to local men in exchange for food; about the estimated 10 African civilians who die from war-related causes for every African soldier who meets his death on the battlefield.

It goes without saying that the obstacles are formidable, starting with the fact that the peace movement remains stranded on the banks of the mainstream.

"Who actually has a voice?" asked Joyce Neu, executive director of the Joan Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice in San Diego. "The people who have a voice are the people who have options -- the option of waging war but choosing peace. At conferences like this we're preaching to the choir."

The war on terrorism emerged as a prime culprit. Two years ago on a visit to Washington, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni invoked the U.S.-led war on terrorism as an explanation for his army's harsh crackdown on rebels in northern Uganda. Similarly, Moscow has played the terrorist card against the Chechens, as has Nepal's King Gyanendra against the Maoist rebels and the notorious Uzbek government against Islamic groups. The United States has regularly turned a blind eye to abuses, tacitly endorsing violent suppression over negotiation.

In perhaps the ugliest example of where this kind of cynicism can lead, last month the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency -- a high-ranking member of the same government that is persecuting its own people in Darfur -- was invited to Washington because Sudan has uncovered valuable information about al Qaeda.