Connecting across religious divides: program update from Sri Lanka

I recently returned from two weeks in the Sri Lankan city of Trincomalee, where we had earlier launched our year-long reconciliation program with a series of workshops within Buddhist, Christian, Muslim and Hindu religious communities. This time, for our second workshop series, I facilitated groups of religious leaders from the four different faiths combined.

Religion is important in Sri Lanka as an identity marker, a community, a spiritual focus, and a cultural way of life.  In the rural areas, religious groups tend to live, work, educate their children, and enjoy their public spaces in distinct villages with very little connection to those of other traditions. In urban areas these barriers are looser, but still fraternization is largely along religious/ethnic lines. The long civil war has only reified these divisions and added an element of distrust to the already complex issue of identity.

After Sri Lanka’s civil war and tsunami, raising Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian voices for peace

Christian religious leaders open their intra-faith workshop with Karuna Center.

The beautiful island of Sri Lanka, lying just off the coast of southern India, has endured one of the more brutal wars of the last century, lasting 26 years and claiming 80-100,000 lives. The Sri Lankan government’s military victory in May 2009 brought an end to the violence but left many challenges in its wake, as reports of civilians deaths and human rights abuses abound and the grievances of Tamil and Muslim minorities remain unmet.

In October I travelled to the eastern coastal city of Trincomalee to launch a year-long reconciliation program with 80 Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian religious leaders from surrounding areas. It was deeply affected by the war as well as the 2004 tsunami. Repeated flooding has further damaged homes and infrastructure, compounding endemic poverty.

Join Us to Celebrate Women Peacebuilders Across the World!

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is being awarded to three women peacebuilders for their non-violent efforts to achieve the safety of women and realize women’s rights to full participation in peacebuilding work. It is also a recognition of women’s contribution to peacebuilding efforts across the world—to bring an end to the suppression of women that still exists in many countries, and to realize the greater potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.

For 17 years since its founding, Karuna Center for Peacebuilding has been fortunate to partner with many women peacebuilders who have taken brave and effective steps toward peace across divides. In celebration of the three women winning the Nobel Peace Prize, we would like to feature four women peacebuilders with whom we have worked, and celebrate all ongoing peacebuilding efforts across the world.

Using conflict resolution to help stop global warming

Karuna Center Associate Eileen Babbitt and I recently co-facilitated the “Green Summit on Carbon Pricing,” a meeting of some 50 environmental leaders and advocates in the U.S. We were asked to apply our experience in conflict resolution to a new area: climate change solutions.

The absence of any means of pricing and/or limiting and taxing carbon emissions means that there is no economic incentive in the U.S. to reduce carbon emissions, the major cause of global warming, which is arguably the greatest threat we face as a global community. There is an ongoing division among environmental advocates over which form of carbon-emissions pricing should be adopted by U.S. legislation and policy. Wide public support will be required to get Congress to act, and little will happen if leading environmentalists are not all pulling in the same direction. Karuna Center was brought in tobegin a process of consensus building among environmental leaders so that they can move forward with greater clarity, unity, and impact.

Youth power and peace advocacy in southern Senegal

Earlier this summer, I facilitated a training in Peace Advocacy in Oussouye, Senegal as part of our ongoing work to support the Comites de Paix (Peace Committees) and community-based radio stations in the Casamance region. As discussed in the report of my last trip, the Casamancais people have endured a civil war between rebels and the Senegalese national government for the last 25 years.

At the youth festival, there were many spiritual creatures such as this one, which play a role in the traditional religion of the region.

The three day training in Peace Advocacy in Oussouye took place immediately following a three day trans-border festival of youth culture, organized by World Education Casamance for 500 youth from Casamance, Guinea Bissau and Gambia. I attended this youth festival, held in Sindian, Casamance, April 28-30, as a guest of the World Ed team. The training I facilitated, Plaidoyer et la Gestion Sensible du Conflit (Conflict Sensitive Peace Advocacy), took place May 2-4 in the town of Oussouye, and was followed by a de-brief for future planning.

The festival of youth culture was a profoundly exciting, engaging and effective experience, including ample opportunity for youth to sing, dance and compete together, as well as an intense day of collective dialogue about both the aspirations and the responsibilities facing the youth of the three countries. The festival culminated in the formal delivery of a declaration on the part of the youth to their respective leaderships at all levels.

Bosnia past, Bosnia present: reflections on Bosnia’s divisions and dilemmas

Paula Green re-visited Bosnia for a week in July, the first time back since our projects ended there a decade ago.  Here are her reflections:

Paula Green with Vahidin Omanovic in front of the Center for Peacebuilding in Sanski Most, Bosnia

A decade later, Bosnia is both the same and different. Most of the homes destroyed in the 1992-95 Bosnian War have been rebuilt, either by their former owners or by displaced people seeking shelter because their own homes had been demolished and they no longer felt safe returning. Some housing, however, remains in its bombed-out state, serving as a stark reminder that war was recent and human beings can be destructive in the extreme.

The fields are blooming again, the pastures have been restocked with animals, the  infrastructure repaired, and the shops busy. What locals report is that the primary difference between pre-war and post-war Bosnia is a sharp ethnic separation, with Bosniaks (formerly called Bosnian Muslims), Serbs, and Croats living in different regions and no longer in neighborly relation to each other.  Not only is the dream of an ethnically mixed Yugoslavia long gone, but the dream of Bosnia as the most diverse state in the region was also shattered by war and further harmed by the postwar legal arrangements.

Don’t forget: interview with an Afghani civil society activist

KCP Executive Director Olivia Dreier interviewing Orzala Ashraf in Kabul, 2007

We recently looked back to a recording made during a Karuna Center workshop in Kabul, in which Olivia Dreier interviewed an Afghani activist named Orzala Ashraf, founder of Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan. This interview, from almost four years ago, is remarkably relevant now.

Envisioning a coalition of Sudanese women, after the split

A woman from northern Sudan shares her vision for the future of the coalition during a workshop exercise

I recently returned from Nairobi, Kenya, where I facilitated dialogue for a coalition of 30 women from North and South Sudan. The people of South Sudan recently voted for independence, and on July 9 this largest country of Africa will become two separate nations, a result of peace talks that followed 20 years of civil war.

Karuna Center was invited to lead a workshop for these women by our colleagues at the Institute for Inclusive Security (based in Washington, D.C.), which advocates for the inclusion of women in political processes such as constitutions, parliaments, ministries, and elections. Their Sudan desk officer was a student of conflict transformation who I had the pleasure to teach at the SIT Graduate Institute. We have also received support from the Institute over the years, and are collaborating on a future program for women members of parliament and civil society in Nepal.

Through a back channel to common ground

Nepali political leaders at Karuna Center training, Feb. 2011

Paula Green and I just held a videoconference with Nepalese political leaders, together with our colleagues at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. This follows up on a trip I took to Nepal in February to facilitate a training and an intensive retreat. Our role is to support Nepal’s new Constituent Assembly with negotiation and collaborative leadership skills, in the hopes that Nepal can have a constitution by the current deadline of May 2011.

Until recently, we were not able to engage a key element: the Maoists, who hold 38% of seats in the multi-party parliament. This is far and away the largest proportion of any party, but complicated political reasons prevented any of them from participating in Karuna Center initiatives last summer and fall.

Learning from Rwanda’s healing work

This January, I traveled with 12 students to Rwanda for a weeklong field seminar, as part of the Graduate Certificate program that I direct as part of Karuna Center’s relationship with the CONTACT Program at SIT Graduate Institute.  My co-teacher, Adin Thayer, is also a Karuna Center Associate.  The trip connected students with a variety of NGOs and government institutions, many of which Karuna Center has worked with in the past, and allowed us a glimpse of courageous processes of healing and reconciliation among a population that was traumatized by the 1994 genocide no matter their ethnicity.

CONTACT students visit a TIG (Travaux Interet Generale, or “Work in the General Interest”) camp, where those who have confessed to genocide crimes may perform community service instead of serving prison sentences.

One of the more remarkable testimonies we heard was from a young man who joined the Hutu militias in the Congo in the late ’90’s and participated in attacks that included rape and plunder on Rwandan villages. On one of these raids he was severely wounded by Rwandan government soldiers. To his great surprise, rather than being killed, he was treated in a Rwandan hospital and then sent to a demobilization camp. After returning to his village, he decided to participate in a local reconciliation training led by Karuna Center’s long-term partner ProFemme, a national network of women’s organizations. The experience dramatically changed his outlook, and he in turn now co-leads reconciliation trainings together with survivors.