Soft
Power is Working to Prevent More Wars
By JONATHAN
POWER
Jan 26, 2000
LUND- It's only a mom and pop shop, and it lives
precariously on the edge of financial oblivion, but it is
one of the very rare organisations of its kind. Like King
Canute, from whose ancient capital it works, it attempts
with one hand to hold back the waves of violence, conflict
and war, and, with the other, the creditors.
The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future
Research, (TFF), based in the ancient ecclesiastical and
university town of Lund in the south of Sweden, combines
research into the origins of human conflict and practical
application as mediators in some of the high profile dramas
of our age, first and foremost in ex-Yugoslavia, but also in
Georgia and, most recently, in Burundi.
The creation of an ex-academic political scientist,
Professor Jan Oberg and his sociologist wife, Christina
Spannar, it runs on a modest budget of $50,000 a year, but
with a group of high-powered unpaid advisers at its beck and
call and a team of also often unpaid conflict mitigators who
make repeated trips to its adopted trouble spots. Part of
the work is to analyze the conflicts from a non-partisan
perspective, but part is to work to mitigate them and to set
up long term projects of peace education and reconciliation.
TFF has served as advisors to ministers in the unfortunately
short-lived, peace-orientated, government of Milan Panic in
ex-Yugoslavia and to the moderate Kosovo-Albanian leadership
under Dr Ibrahim Rugova. When I read what Dr Oberg
prescribed for Kosovo six or seven years ago on his many
regular visits there, before most of us knew where to find
it on the map, I was struck with the thought that perhaps
much of what came to pass could have been avoided. He also
proposed an alternative to the Dayton plan for Bosnia and
has elaborated a series of ideas for violence-prevention in
Macedonia.
In Oberg's chapter on UN peacekeeping, contributed to "A
Vision of Hope", the official book to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the United Nations, he observed, "The UN
rather than intervening in the early days of a conflict and
thus seeking out a "bigger peace for the buck" has found
itself embroiled in impossible missions in the wake of
catastrophe". What the UN needs, he wrote, "is skilled
operators and training for conducting violence - preventive
diplomacy....Peace building can take place in a local
community long before there is a signed agreement between
national leaders. Indeed, serious local peacekeeping
efforts- peace from the ground up- can serve as an important
stimulus for peacemaking at higher levels."
Oberg's special gift is his ability to combine
penetrating observations on the disturbed parts of the world
we confront with an intensive, hands-on, conflict prevention
work. It seems to give his naturally acerbic tongue extra
bite. In a recent newsletter he describes the Western
alliance as a power adrift now it has lost its favourite
enemy, the Soviet Union. This, he says, "has deprived it of
vital elements of its own vitality. Incapable of living
without its enemies its depressive side has created scores
of rogue states, dictators and terrorists. While its manic,
messianic side has invented grandiose projects-
globilisation, disciplining interventions as in Kosovo,
cultural supremacy and renewed militarism."
But one shouldn't have been surprised, he adds in a
laconic aside, "Two western based wars, nuclear bombing and
overkill, and some 150 wars since 1945 mostly fought with
western-supplied arms, have not persuaded those in power
that war as a legitimate institution must go. One would have
been a fool to expect a Pauline conversion just because the
Berlin Wall came down."
"It is important", he explains in his airy, book-lined
office hung with eye-arresting modern art, "to learn from
the twentieth century that violence is rooted less in human
evil (although I don't discount that element) than in
ignored or mismanaged conflicts. Conflicts are neither good
nor bad, they happen. Violence and war is humiliation for
both sides. The perpetrator and the victim are deeply
connected, usually in a Devil's account."
"The outsider, if he wants to be useful, has to project
soft power, that is humility, tolerance and nonviolence. But
too often the West uses hard power, hard talk, hard
technology and hard economics as its tools and doesn't think
enough about how to build a cooperative and sharing
society."
When Oberg and his team go into a war zone he doesn't
change his tune. "I tell them how reconciliation takes at
least two individuals. It aims at achieving something
constructive out of a dark, hurtful past. It does not mean
forgetting, but remembering the past to live normally and
more fully in the future. We should forgive because we
cannot forget." In various parts of ex-Yugoslavia, TFF has
set up reconciliation workshops, most recently funded by the
Council of Europe which latterly has begun to understand the
importance of his work.
TFF's work in Burundi is just beginning. Oberg will bring
this country ravaged by tribal conflict the expertise he
gained from working with the divided tribes of Yugoslavia.
His precepts can be summed up in a phrase: "there is no
"good" violence which can solve the conflicts of "evil"
violence". He has found a soul mate in Burundi's minister of
education, Prosper Mpawenayo, whom he met at the State of
the World Forum chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev. Oberg recently
finished a report commissioned by the minister on how to
introduce into Burundi a program of peace education and
research. "And now we begin the hard part", he adds.
Thanks to the internet, TFF is able to have a world-wide
influence. The Washington Post described it as "an
organisation that agressively uses the web". Its web site-
www.transnational.org- gets about 350 visits a day compared
with only ten a couple of years ago. During the Kosovo
crisis the figure shot up to 1,500.
Perhaps, if the members of the Security Council were more
serious about bringing peace to distant and troubled parts,
they would hire TFF, give it a special mandate, a good
budget and tell it to replicate itself everywhere the UN is
involved.
Copyright © 2000 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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