Hitting Bottom
By Mel Duncan
Sept. 3, 2014
The dramatic increase in forced displacement in 2013 and the fact that the average amount of time people worldwide are living in displacement is now a staggering 17 years, all suggest that something is going terribly wrong in how we are responding and dealing with this issue...
Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (UNHCR, 2014)
It is only with deep humility that any of us can write about protection of civilians. In absolute terms, the unmet need for direct physical protection of civilians against conflict related violence has never been greater than it is today. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) reported in June that the number of people living as refugees from war or persecution exceeded 50 million in 2013, for the first time since World War II. [1]
Events of the last couple of months since UNHCR issued that report have been excruciating.The need spirals as assaults on civilians escalate in South Sudan, the Central Africa Republic, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, the Ukraine and Ferguson, Missouri and other urban neighborhoods in the United States. Policy makers as well as civil society organizations are grappling to identify and field effective mechanisms to provide security and protect civilians
I was at the UN on July 30th when Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, *UNRWA, said the shelling of a school in Palestine was a "serious violation of international law by Israeli forces". Krähenbühl said: "Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in an UN-designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced."
I fear that the delicate membrane that protects civilians, albeit unevenly, based primarily on conventions and global norms advanced since WWII is being shredded. If we as a global community allow this to happen, the world will be an even bleaker place.
Tragically, the default position for many governments and multi-government organizations when violence does not work is to try more violence. We see this with the militarization of the police in the US. It is preposterous to think that the same thinking that got us into this mess will get us out. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
The world has hit bottom. Yet, writer Anne Lamott reminds us, “There’s freedom in hitting bottom…relief in admitting that you have reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you are still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged.”
We need to let go and cast out the old ways as we create the new. Unarmed civilian protection and peacekeeping as practiced by Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), as well as a handful of other organizations, is a modest component of this new creation. Strategic, unarmed civilian peacekeepers are protecting civilians and partnering with local civil society to reduce violence in some of the most violent places on our planet.
Last April two NP peacekeepers were on the ground when the Protection of Civilians area in Bor, South Sudan was attacked. They took cover inside a tukul (mud hut) with four women and nine children. That’s when the training kicked in. On three separate occasions men with guns came and ordered our staff out so they could kill the women and kids. The peacekeepers refused, holding up their NP IDs and saying that they were unarmed, there to protect people and would not leave the women and children. After the third time the armed men left. The people were saved. The key here being the strategy of acceptance of NP by all armed actors as it lives and works within and across conflict affected communities.
On a broader scale, an external evaluation of our work in Mindanao found:
"Armed Actors" on both sides confirm that the presence of a third party ‘watching over them’, including NP, has served to temper their behaviour.[2] The evaluators further found: NP is seen to be able to influence the actions of GPH and MILF armed actors, including the capability to cause armed actions to cease and desist through direct access… Accounts cite mere minutes as the time elapsed between the reporting of the incident solely to NP, and the pull-out of armed actors or the cessation of armed action in a locality.”
We are an active part of an emerging consciousness. Marianne Williamson reminds us, “the issue now is how to harness the energy and power of this new understanding, so we can get on with the urgent task of saving our world from the clutches of war and delivering it to fields of unending peace.” We know who we are and we trust that we will know what to do. Let us honor and support one another as we confront the cloak of violence with the light of nonviolence and love.
[1] UNHCR, 20 June 2014:World Refugee Day: Global forced displacement tops 50 million for first time in post-World War II era: http://www.unhcr.org/53a155bc6.html
* United Nations Relief and Works Agency
[2] Gunduz, C &Torralba, R 2014. Evaluation of Nonviolent Peaceforce’s Project with the Civilian Protection Component of the International Monitoring Team in Mindanao, Nonviolent Peaceforce.