Vicky
Rossi interviews
Diana Basterfield & Eirwen Harbottle
Ministries
for Peace
By
Vicky
Rossi - TFF Peace Antenna
Vicky Rossi's
conversations with peace visionairies around the
world
are listed at her CV page here
and collected here.
December 4, 2005
A People's Summit for Departments
of Peace was held in London, October 18 & 19 2005, in
the spirit of the United Nations General Assembly's
Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace
(A/RES/53/243 dated 13 September 1999) and its definition
of a culture of peace as "a set of values, attitudes,
modes of behaviour, and ways of life that reject violence
and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes to
solve problems through dialogue and negotiation among
individuals, groups, and nations" (A/RES/52/13). The
purpose of the Summit was to strengthen and grow the
international movement for a culture of peace and for
government Departments of Peace and Ministries for Peace.
Vicky Rossi:
Where does the concept of a Ministry/Department for Peace
originate?
Diana Basterfield:
I went on the demonstration in
February 2003. Despite the millions marching, the war
went ahead nevertheless. By coincidence, I was on the
mailing list for what was then called the Global
Renaissance Alliance, which is something that Marianne
Williamson was very much involved with - she and US
Congressman Dennis Kucinich. I read that Dennis had
introduced in 2001, before 9/11, a bill into Congress -
it is something like an Early Day Motion gathering
signatures - to set up a Department of Peace. I clicked
on the contents of the Department of Peace and it talked
about research into non-violence and 2% of the military
budget to be dedicated to working for peace. I thought,
'This is a fantastic idea. Let's have one of these in the
U.K. Let's call it a Ministry for Peace, to give it a
different name.'
Then, again by coincidence, the
left of the Labour party was organizing a conference
under the banner 'Labour Against the War'. I went to that
and the last speaker was Tony Benn. I rushed up to him
and asked him if he had heard of Dennis Kucinich and what
he was doing. I asked him why we weren't introducing
something like that in the U.K. He suggested that I write
an article for a couple of the Labour journals to see
what interest there was. So, I wrote an article on the
proposal for a Ministry for Peace and I also wrote to the
people at the top of the 'Labour Against the War' group.
I received a very positive response from the MP John
McDonnell. He said he'd help me to get the article
published and then we could talk about it further. The
article was published in "Tribune" on their website and
in the magazine "Labour Left Briefing".
Then I met John and we discussed
plans to get an initiative going in the U.K. and he
agreed to be the parliamentary spokesperson. That was
late May or early June 2003. We decided to call a public
meeting in the House of Commons on July 1st 2003. Neither
he nor I had been working directly within the peace
movement. We had been on peace demonstrations, of course.
My previous activism had been in the feminist movement
and in local politics where I was an elected Councilor in
my London borough. So since neither of us had worked
previously in the peace movement we decided to make the
first meeting very tentative: to ask people what they
thought of the idea.
We held a second meeting in
September to see if people wanted to take the idea
further. We had about 53 people come to the first meeting
and there was a great buzz and people were very energized
by it. When we came back in September around 80 people
attended the meeting and gave their support for us to go
ahead. John McDonnell said he had put in for a Private
Member's Ten Minute Rule Bill and that he had been given
the date of 14 October. Such a young organisation and we
already had to write a parliamentary bill! It got a 1st
reading and it was passed unopposed, but fell due to lack
of parliamentary time. It got cross-party sponsors,
Conservative, Scottish Nationalist, Welsh Nationalist as
well as Labour and was published by Hansard.
Vicky Rossi:
Which countries are currently actively pursuing
initiatives aimed at the creation of a
Ministry/Department of Peace?
Diana Basterfield:
Well, Dennis Kucinich put down
his original bill in 2001. He has resubmitted his bill
twice since then, most recently in September where it had
60 co-sponsors in Congress and one Senator. Then, during
the last U.S. presidential elections, he was a
presidential candidate and he mentioned the Department of
Peace initiative a lot during his campaign. Once the
presidential election was over, Dennis decided to proceed
further in setting up a Department of Peace. Together
with Dot Maver, who was his presidential campaign
manager, and Mike Abkin, who was also involved in his
campaign, he formed the Peace Alliance to work for a
Department of Peace. They have been extremely active.
They have the Peace Alliance, which is the political arm,
and then there is the Peace Alliance Foundation, which is
the charitable part that works on raising people's
awareness on a culture of peace.
The other people who have been very
active are the Canadian Working Group for a Federal
Department of Peace. They are based in Victoria. They
have managed to get a number of influential people in
Canada, academics and some politicians, including Lloyd
Axworthy, who was Foreign Minister at one point, to sign
up with their campaign. And that initiative has been
going for about the same length of time as ours.
And there are also some newer
groups. There was one, for example, in Australia in the
1980s - started by Stella Cornelius, co-director of the
Conflict Resolution Network and a specialist mediator and
conflict analyst. That kind of faded away and now it's
being resurrected and they've had a couple of meetings
there.
There is also a very energetic
Japanese woman, Yumi Kikuchi, who has set up the Global
Peace Campaign and is working for a Department of Peace
in Japan. Simonetta Pittaluga from Spain also took part
in the People's Summit and she's been working, through
NOVA, with the Catalan government to set up a regional
Department of Peace.
Vicky Rossi: Do
these national initiatives have the same ultimate goal in
mind? Are they all tending towards creating a Ministry
for Peace at a government level?
Diana
Basterfield: They are, yes.
That's right.
We also share a strong feeling that
it will not be enough just to have a structure within
government. Civil society is the driving force calling
for this Ministry or Department within government and we
feel that once that is set up, civil society will still
have a key role to play in motivating and supporting
governments to work for a culture of peace.
Such a Ministry would not only
focus on international relations and reducing war. That
Ministry would look at the root causes of violent
conflict both domestically and internationally. We have
held a number of training courses taught by Kai
Brand-Jacobsen of TRANSCEND and we find their 'violence
triangle' a very useful model for the content of the
future Ministry's work. This identifies three related
aspects of violence: direct violence - physical or
verbal violence, including war; structural
violence - political, social and economic structures
that repress, harm or kill; and cultural violence,
the name given to those aspects of a culture that
normalise violence - religions and ideologies that
condone direct violence, for example, or films that show
the use of extreme violence to 'resolve' conflicts. The
challenge for the Ministry is to tackle all three aspects
of violence together.
Vicky Rossi: Do
the other national initiatives see this wider meaning in
the concept of "peace"?
Diana
Basterfield: Well, right before
the People's Summit, all participants had a 2 day
training with Kai Brand-Jacobsen from TRANSCEND, in which
he went through the concepts. In the past, the Americans,
for example, have included these ideas when they have
spoken about a Department of Peace, but they haven't
specifically used the terms direct, structural and
cultural violence in their literature. Well, they haven't
until the People's Summit, although they may choose to
now that they have had the training.
Vicky Rossi: Are
the current Ministry/Department of Peace lobby
initiatives civil-society led or do they already enjoy
government backing?
Diana
Basterfield: John McDonnell is
very much on the left of the Labour party and the
government is on the other end of the spectrum! So the
initiative has some parliamentary backing, but it doesn't
have government backing. We also have some members of the
House of Lords who support us. Although we've been
working away for two and half years and we have had a
great number of meetings in the House of Commons, with
expert speakers on very interesting topics relating to
direct, structural and cultural violence and a culture of
peace, we very rarely get parliamentarians coming. That's
one of our tasks now for the next couple of years: to
make more contacts amongst parliamentarians and to get
more on board.
Vicky Rossi: Are
the initiatives in Canada and the U.S. also managing to
make contact with parliamentarians?
Diana
Basterfield: Dennis Kucinich
has been very successful. The Peace Alliance had a very
successful conference in September in Washington. They've
focused their energies in a different way to us. We focus
very much on educating ourselves and educating our
members of parliament on the breadth and range of issues
that a Ministry for Peace needs to cover. Not just
saying, 'Stop war'.
Whereas the Peace Alliance in the
U.S. has focused much more on building local grassroots
organisations. These grassroots organisations are quite
independent from the Peace Alliance centre. The centre
sends them out templates of letters and templates of
leaflets that people can reproduce and use. They also
invite the grassroots organisations to Washington where
they are taught how to lobby their Congress people and
Senators and how to campaign. Nearly all their
congressional districts now have a local Peace Alliance
representative. We find this excellent and we want to
copy that model.
The Canadians have mainly focused
on trying to reach people of influence. They are mainly
former ministers who have signed up so far. The next
People's Summit in June 2006 is going to be held at the
Royal Roads University in Vancouver. A World Peace Forum
&endash; the first ever &endash; is going to be held in
that same university immediately following our Summit and
Dennis Kucinich will speak there.
Vicky Rossi: Are
there any similar initiatives at the UN
level?
Diana
Basterfield: One of the
speakers at our Summit was Paul Van Tongeren, Executive
Director of the European Centre for Conflict Prevention.
In July the United Nations hosted the largest ever
gathering of civil society led by Paul, where a Global
Action Agenda for the Prevention of Violent Conflict was
presented to the Secretary-General. The Global
Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict is
calling on governments to work with civil society in
building a safer, more peaceful world.
Vicky Rossi:
What responsibilities would lie within the mandate of a
Ministry/Department of Peace?
Diana Basterfield:
Once you see violence in its
direct, structural and cultural components, we are
talking about embedding non-violent methods and
approaches into all our public institutions including
education, prisons, housing and of course the Ministry of
Defence and disarmament.
Vicky Rossi:
Would you then see a need for the Ministry for Peace to
liaise with all other Cabinet departments?
Diana Basterfield:
Well absolutely. On a visit to
Bradford University we spoke to Paul Rogers, a professor
in the Peace Studies Department, and several of his
colleagues. They felt we would have a lot of difficulties
with turf war, civil servants objections, etc. if we
pushed for a Ministry in the first instance. They
suggested we go for a "Minister" for Peace, which is
something that could be created by the Prime Minister
immediately. It wouldn't require legislation. It wouldn't
require being put in the manifesto.
The Minister would be someone who
would link up all these initiatives and act as an expert
resource to all the other ministries. If, for example,
the Department for Education and Skills was not sure what
should be done to reduce violence in schools, the
Minister for Peace could offer some suggestions. People
in his/her department would be thoroughly imbued with the
TRANSCEND model and so they could offer well-thought out
and well-practiced suggestions of what could be done.
The Minister for Peace could talk
to the Home Secretary and say, 'Look, here are 10
suggestions for what you could do to prevent violence
within the community, domestic violence', or whatever.
The Minister for Peace would be a bringing together
person, a big-picture person. Everyone else is bogged
down in their own ministries, but this person would be
able to stand back and have a particular perspective on
how to reduce violence.
Vicky Rossi:
What kinds of advocacy methods are being used to promote
the concept of a Ministry/Department of Peace? a) At the
governmental level? b) At the grassroots level i.e. to
raise awareness amongst "ordinary"
citizens?
Eirwen Harbottle:
With regard to advocacy at the
government level, you understand that it's a challenge
because so many people say, 'Oh, we don't need a Ministry
for Peace. We don't want another level of bureaucracy.
We've got enough bureaucracy as it is.' So, one has to
admit that initial barrage of opposition. The means of
getting into government are really through individual
members of parliament when one can persuade them to do
this: to submit, as John McDonnell did, his 10 Minute
Rule. He hopes to submit a new Bill in this session as
well as to have an adjournment debate so that he can read
the Summit Declaration into the parliamentary
record.
To engage grassroots level, that is
easier because one tries to identify issues which engage
people and give them a subject of common concern. One of
the things is violence in society and the need for
understanding non-violence, so we have done quite a bit
of training on non-violent behaviour.
People like Marshall Rosenberg, who
does a lot of work on non-violence in the way one speaks
and in our approaches to people. Every month, while
Parliament sits, we have a meeting in the Grand Committee
Room in the House of Commons. In this way, people are
seen to bring their concerns to Parliament and
psychologically that's a very powerful thing. Immediately
before the People's Summit we had an excellent training
with Kai Brand-Jacobsen of TRANSCEND, which made a big
difference to the way we were able to proceed during the
Summit itself.
At the grassroots level, we are
looking about in the community to see what kinds of
things a Ministry for Peace would do if it existed. We
have looked at non-offensive defence for the military. We
have also looked at the role of the media in
peace-building, which we're going to look into in more
detail at our next House of Commons meeting on November
30th. It seems that unless there's a disaster that they
can get ravelled in, the media is not interested. That's
a big snag.
We had an interesting meeting at
the end of July to mark the mid-way point of the UNESCO
Decade for Peace and Non-Violence for Children. At that
meeting, we had someone from the National Association for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to talk about how a
big NGO sees the Decade and what has been done during the
Decade from their point of view. We had somebody
representing a coalition of churches talking about their
point of view. Then we looked at a profoundly disturbing
problem in our society regarding a large section of young
people and adults with problems of visual impairment -
autism, dyslexia, etc. An optician, Ian Jordan, has been
researching the beneficial effects on people afflicted in
this way through the wearing of individually prescribed
and tinted spectacles. The healing aspects of colour have
long been understood. A recent examination of a new
student intake in a Scottish school revealed that 30% of
the children had some kind of visual problem.
Moreover in our prison population,
75% of adults and young people are illiterate. Very often
the reason is that they simply cannot see straight:
letters can dance about, merge into one another, appear
upside down - nothing makes sense. Yet they are not
examined for visual impairment. In school, children are
scolded for inattention, poor work, simply 'being
stupid'. Adults resort to all forms of deception rather
than admit they cannot read. Consequently, a huge swathe
of young and older people are marginalised through no
fault of their own and are virtually unemployable. Yet
there is no systematic examination of their eyesight. To
ignore such waste of a life is indeed an example of
structural violence!
The Welsh MP who chaired the
meeting was astonished to hear of this situation and
promised to bring it to the attention of the relevant
all-party parliamentary group which addresses such
problems. It proved a telling example of how to introduce
into the heart of government this particular realm of
misbehaviour by disaffected youth.
Another important issue we would
like to explore in a similar way relates to poor living
conditions and the lack of affordable housing for those
on low incomes or within immigrant/refugee groups. Help
could be at hand through the growth of Community Land
Trusts which offer new hope to those seeking a way to
become better integrated into British society through
becoming stakeholders in community land
ownership.
So these are examples of aspects of
peace-building which we do not currently see as
peace-building.
Vicky Rossi: Are
the various Ministry/Department of Peace initiatives
making progress in their lobbying efforts? How is this
progress measured?
Eirwen
Harbottle: It's very difficult
to measure anything after just two and a half years,
actually. I think, the more we can get people to talk,
the more we'll have the measure of our success. If we
could get the mainstream media to even say something rude
about us, it would be something! It would mean that we
might be worrying them.
Vicky Rossi:
What are the main obstacles to the creation of a
Ministry/Department for Peace? How can these obstacles be
surmounted?
Eirwen
Harbottle: The obstacles, from
my point of view, are the dreadful turf consciousness of
our government departments, the building up of little
empires and the reluctance to relinquish them in any way.
This is possibly also true within the aid agencies and
the peace movement. Everyone is so busy doing what they
are doing that is takes a heck of a lot of facilitation
to get them to do things together. Then there is the
reluctance to engage young people. This is the work that
I do with Peace Child - it's fantastic what young people
can do, but suggest to the government departments that
the young people have got a role to play and people think
that you're talking nonsense.
Vicky Rossi: Are
you doing any work with "alternative" schools like the
Montessori or Rudolf Steiner schools?
Eirwen
Harbottle: Not yet, but we
ought to. We're talking about education. I've been asked
to look into education and I have asked myself, if I were
a Minister for Peace what sort of areas would I be
looking at? I'd be looking at culture, security, the law,
the environment, health and so many things like that.
Education is so utterly wide. Like
Chief Seattle said, 'All things are connected'. This we
know, but holistic thinking is very difficult to find. We
did have a very successful meeting on 'peace education'
in schools last December with speakers talking about
'values education', 'Non-Violent Communication' and
Pierre Weill's 'Art of Living in Peace'.
Vicky Rossi:
What were the main agenda items discussed at the People's
Summit for Departments of Peace in London, 18-19 October?
Eirwen
Harbottle: First of all we were
listening to each other - what were they doing in Canada
or Australia, what did they want to do in Italy or Japan?
So that took a lot of listening and a lot of learning.
Then Kai Brand-Jacobsen, who facilitated the Summit
brilliantly, got us talking about specific issues in
small groups so that we could get more done. We looked at
different aspects of what we ought to be focusing on like
campaigning, what education means, what economic and
business structures there are, about justice, about
outreach abroad, etc. etc. We were really trying to get
down to the nuts and bolts of which way we ought to go.
By our next joint meeting, which will take place in June
2006 in Victoria, we will have had a lot of
inter-communication with each other and have shared more
about what we are doing in order to create a structured
base to go forward from. We are setting up a website so
that we can share things as the months progress.
At the end of Summit, we drew up a
Declaration and this was presented to John McDonnell at
the packed closing meeting in the House of Commons. Dot
Maver, from the U.S. Peace Alliance, congratulated John
on his courage in taking forward this initiative in the
UK Parliament. She then read out the
Declaration:
'Today, we announce the
launch of an international initiative for the creation
of Departments of Peace in governments throughout the
world.
Violence of all kinds is
increasing. There is an urgent need to find
responsible solutions, expanding on past and present
peace-building successes. This international
initiative will both provide resources and support for
existing national Department of Peace campaigns, and
assist new ones as they appear in other
countries.
While the exact role of the
department will differ in each country, its basic
functions will be the same.
(a) To foster a culture of
peace;
(b) To research, articulate and
help bring about non-violent solutions to conflicts at
all levels;
(c) To provide resources for
training in peace-building and conflict transformation
to people everywhere.
We, the undersigned, joyfully
vow to support and encourage each other, to share
information, to enrich each other's experience, to
listen to one another and to celebrate our
commonalities and differences in our journey together
towards a culture of peace.'
This Declaration was signed by
representatives of the 11 countries attending the
Summit.
Vicky Rossi:
Eirwen ends by putting forward the following suggestion
for students and young people
Eirwen
Harbottle: I am encouraging all
my young friends, 'Do a role play in your university or
student unions or wherever. Pretend there's been a
Ministry for Peace for one year. Identify all the
government departments. Then talk about, for example,
what happened in the Department of Trade and Industry in
that year relating to peace. What happened in the
Ministry for Health? What happened in the prison
service?'
One could have great fun doing it
and one could see that it's not actually impossible to
achieve this.
For further details on Eirwen's
role play idea, please contact her directly on
eirwenharbottle@hotmail.com
*This transcript represents an
accurate but non-verbatim representation of the original
interview.
For further information, please
contact:
Diana Basterfield, ministry for
peace
Riverbank House
1 Putney Bridge Approach, London SW6 3JD, England
Tel: +44-20-7736 7903
www.ministryforpeace.org
diana.basterfield@ministryforpeace.org
Associated
Links
Ministry/Departments
of Peace Proposals
UK: www.ministryforpeace.org
Canada: www.departmentofpeacecanada.com
USA: www.thepeacealliance.org
Australia: Biannca Pace,
Biannca.Pace@nsw.democrats.org.au
Japan: Yumi Kikuchi,
yumik@awa.or.jp
Spain: Simonetta Pittaluga,
mpnovaspain@hotmail.com
Department/Ministry
of Peace Conferences 2005-2006
The
Peace Alliance September 2005 conference
updates
The
London Declaration (in pdf
format)
Culture of
Peace
Peace
Alliance Foundation
(USA)
UNESCO
Global
Peace Campaign
Conflict
Transformation
TRANSCEND
European
Centre for Conflict Prevention
Bradford
University Peace Department
Global
Partnership for the Prevention of Armed
Conflict
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