Some Thoughts On the Work of Peace
One of the most vexing problems on every human social scale is not just conflict, but the peace that could follow it if we could just get it right. It’s not easy for people to live side by side with each other after they’ve inflicted horrors on each other.
Just imagine it.
You have to learn to live side by side with the people who shot your spouse or raped you or destroyed the home and business you spent your entire life building up. Or you did that to the people who have to find a way to live with you. How can such rifts be healed? How can such people put aside their pain or their guilt to live peacefully as neighbors for the rest of their lives and the lives of their children? So that the conflict that defined the relationship between those two groups of people fades away into the fog of history.
There are as many pathways through this as there are conflicts. And there are a lot of conflicts! We can be an aggrieved species, full of violence, anger, the need for power and wealth, and the need for revenge. In terms of armed conflict alone, there are currently more than 45 active armed conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia, 7 in Europe, and 6 in Latin America (mainly in Mexico and Colombia).
To bring an end to those conflicts, people need not only to stop fighting, but they have to want to stop fighting. And then they have to learn to live with each other again.
There are so many questions to ask.
Take the situation in Ukraine. The people of Ukraine had deep personal, cultural, economic, and historical ties to Russia, for better and for worse. I can remember standing in line at the airport in Los Angeles about a month before Russia invaded in 2022, having to actually physically check in for a flight because of the crazy COVID restrictions. I ended up behind a young pair of Ukrainians but in front of a young pair of Russians who lived in Ukraine. Or maybe it was the other way around. As soon as they discovered each other, they let me go ahead of them so they could chat their wait merrily away. As the storm clouds of war were gathering, I was nothing short of shocked by the camaraderie between people who were about to become enemies. Since then I have wondered what has become of these four people and what would happen if they had met in that line right now, after nearly two years of brutal fighting.
Will there ever be close ties between the Russian people and the Ukrainian people again? What would it take to let go of the hate created by the killing of 400,000 people (admittedly, most of them belonging to the invading force), the destruction of the homes, livelihoods, and life’s work of so many Ukrainians, and the abduction, torture, rape, and murder of countless Ukrainian civilians?
It’s hard for me to imagine it happening in our lifetime. But, then, people can be full of surprises.
Case two is Myanmar. Remember the tanks rolling in during the coup in 2021? That was just one of the latest big events in more than seven decades of civil war during which more than 200,000 lives have already been lost. In the event that a lasting democracy finally comes to Myanmar, how will the people of the various different ethnic groups and cultures involved find a way to work together to fairly administrate their country? It’s hard to imagine them all saying, fine, we’ll all just be fair to one another! I won’t try to favor my people over yours.
Likewise, will the various ethnic groups and cultures whose massacre of each other in the Ethiopian civil “conflict” that broke out in 2018 ever find a way to share their country with one another? Imagine how much hate that has created. That conflict has killed something between 200,000 and 700,000 people in just five years. Then there are all the atrocities that went along with that. If, at some point, everyone with a weapon decided to put it down, there would still be the hard work of the survivors (and the surviving perpetrators) learning to co-exist harmoniously.
Lastly—except not really lastly, given that we have nowhere near exhausted the list of major ongoing conflicts—there is the question that is at the forefront of everyone’s mind at the moment. What will it take to stop the fighting between Israel and Palestine?
Between 1947 and 2019, that conflict claimed roughly 50,000 lives and displaced 700,000 people. The last few months of war between Israel and Hamas have added more than 20,000 more deaths, most of them of Palestinian civilians. And that’s to say nothing of the resentment, dehumanization, and acts of violence that have built up over the decades as both sides of the conflict have failed to pursue a peace that involves sharing their corner of the world with each other. Given how heated the conflict currently it and how angry and righteous both sides feel, how could even a two–state solution be possible? These do not appear to be two groups of people who could ever tolerate living side by side in a relatively small patch of Earth.
All of these conflicts seem unsolvable. There are so many grievances involved at this point and so many wrongs that can never be made right. What hope is there for ever permanently ending any of these wars?
If there is anywhere to look for hope for an end to such conflicts, it is in an absolutely amazing documentary that came out earlier this year. It’s called Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, and you can find it here https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0ff7cg0/once-upon-a-time-in-northern-ireland or here https://www.pbs.org/show/once-upon-time-northern-ireland/ or, if you’re a German–speaker, here https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/RC-024552/es-war-einmal-in-nordirland/ in somewhat abbreviated form.
By documenting the pain and experiences of individuals on both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland, this documentary ends up having a lot to say about the work people who’ve reached the point where they’re tired of conflict have to do for peace.
You won’t find this in the first several episodes of the documentary, though. They wade through the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland that pitted the people who more strongly identified as Irish, were generally Catholic, and wanted to see Northern Ireland united with the Republic of Ireland against the people who more strongly identified as British, were more generally Protestant, and wanted Northern Ireland to remain a part of the United Kingdom. These first few episodes are there to show you how horrific the whole thing was, how much pain it caused people, and the extent of the injustice involved.
It would take a long time to explain it all and I’m not really qualified to do that. So I’ll just say that the conflict between the Irish and the British goes back hundreds of years, involving battles, wars, rebellions, famine, repression, terror, assassinations, disappearances, paramilitary groups, bombings, imprisonment, propaganda, and more tit–for–tat than you’d think could ever have been put a stop to. The 30 years from 1968 to 1998, known as The Troubles, are the bit most seared into living memory. Between the pro-Irish paramilitary groups, the pro-Britain paramilitary groups, and the British Army, a number of people equivalent to 2% of the population of Northern Ireland had been killed or wounded between 1966 and 1998. The sort of wound that tends to fester, not heal.
To look back at it, it feels like very decade was more violent than the one before. The bombings got bigger. And so did the retaliations.
And then, when the bombings seemed to reach their peak, the prospect of peace began to raise its head.
It took a lot of political will and international support to broker the political end to the fighting. Two impermanent cease-fires made way for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. This was the political document that stated that Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom, but that this would only be the case until the majority of the people in Northern Ireland decided they’d rather unite with the Republic of Ireland. It was also the political document that laid out how the various fractions that make up Northern Ireland could share power in the government.
Then it was up to the people. They had to agree with this solution. And then they had to find a way to live peacefully with their neighbors for the first time in living memory. They had to learn to let go of their hatred of the other side and they had to decide to let go of any desire they had for retribution for wrongs that had been done to them. They had to decide that living in peace and prosperity was more important than these things.
This last aspect… the work that people had to do to co-exist in peace since 1998 in Northern Ireland… is what the final episode of the documentary addresses. It achieves this through a powerful set of interviews with people who had lost a someone dear to them, such as their father or mother, one of their children, or a sibling, to the violence or had been maimed by it. Through these interviews, we hear how they grappled with their hate and their anger and their sadness or their desire for revenge. Choosing peace was not trivial for these people. They gave it deep thought and years of work. And it took courage.
One of these people, a man who, when he was a young boy, had had his eyes shot out by a British soldier, tracked down and befriended the remorseless man who had intentionally injured him. Although this was yet another bitter pill to have to swallow, that even after all these years, the former soldier did not feel he’d done anything wrong, in the end the two of them worked through it. It took years, but they came to understand each other and for the one who’d been forgiven to find it in himself to say he was sorry for what he’d done. And then life was better for both of them. They could co-exist, not simply in peace, but as honest friends.
These stories that these people have to tell of how they gave up rage for peace so that they could share territory with their former enemy are all deeply moving. My feeble writing can’t even begin to convey the depth of it. You need to watch this final episode of the documentary and hear these people speak for yourself. You, too, will be moved. What these people have to say should be a lesson to us all, no matter now small nor major the conflict we are embroiled in. For we are all touched by conflict of some sort almost every day.
But, again, I don’t mean to say that peace is easy. I’m definitely saying that it takes determined work, and not simply on the part of politicians.
Yes, for war to end, war must first end and people must have some reasonable political possibility for self–rule, even if it requires power–sharing. There are also grievances and injustices that must be addressed, even if addressing all of them would be impossible. Only then can the very real, very hard, and very personal work of establishing and maintaining peace between people who were enemies begin. Because otherwise no conflict would ever end. Not even after centuries. It would just keep flaring up again and again and again.