Field report from South Sudan

March 26, 2012 – Juba, South Sudan

This training was for South Sudanese women leaders, as part of Karuna Center’s ongoing work with a network of influential Sudanese women in both North and South.

We are starting our third day of workshops this morning. Farah Council of Institute for Inclusive Security and I are co-teaching days on Coalition Building and Strategic Planning. Additionally, I am teaching Managing Conflicts Successfully and Reconciliation/Forgiveness. So it’s a full agenda. Attendance has ranged from 30 to 18 daily thus far. Some of the women are known to us from previous work and others are new; they are varied in age, tribal/ethnic identity, and occupation, although most are with NGOs. They are not varied in heartbreak; each has had a life that no human being should be asked to endure. It is a wonder to me that they carry themselves with such dignity, dress up and show up for workshops, and care for their families as best as possible.

South Sudanese have been massively dislocated by war for decades. Juba was an army garrison town during the war, and its residents moved around within and beyond the southern region. Many women come from Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and have never lived in Juba, while  others have arrived here from rural areas having undergone endless hardships and profound loss. Everyone is either internally displaced or else a refugee returning from Kenya, Uganda, Europe, North America. A large group, perhaps thousands, arrived this week in Juba after walking for weeks from Nuba Mountains, far away from here. The tribes raid cattle, which is a traditional method for settling disputes and buying brides, now made lethal by the availability of guns. The border regions between Sudan and South Sudan are fiercely contested, with the Sudanese army responsible for massive death, displacement, starvation. The humanitarian community is unable to enter the region with aid and shelter. Juba has no armed conflict right now, but it remains a shambles of shacks and dust, and does not much resemble a capital city.

Ripples of peace in an island nation: training the trainers in Grenada

The island nation of Grenada is blessed with great natural beauty, people as lovely as their landscape, and no armed conflict. Inter-personal violence, however, is endemic on this tropical island, including domestic violence, corporal punishment in the schools, street violence, and occasional police violence. Everyone knows of the problems, but the patterns continue largely unabated, resulting in a great deal of suffering, family cycles of harm, and generations of single mothers struggling to maintain families in a challenging economy. More women than men attend our conflict resolution workshops, more women than men achieve educationally and vocationally, and more women than men are willing to talk about what is wrong. Some men, however, are fully responsible and engaged, including men in the police department and throughout the bureaucracies and institutions.

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.

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.

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.

Grenada: sharing conflict management skills for the workplace, home and community

Participants practice conflict management skills in pairs

A small island in the Eastern Caribbean, Grenada is home to St. George’s University, where I have been a Visiting Professor for two weeks during each of the last four years. This January, I led workshops for approximately 150 people in conflict management skills for the workplace, community, and family. Participants came from the University faculty and staff, but also from NGOs, educational and religious institutions, and government offices throughout the island. We held special workshops for the Royal Grenadian Police Force and for the St. George’s University Medical Clinic.

CONTACT: Bringing South Asian peacebuilders together

Nepali participants in CONTACT South Asia open the Certificates awards night with a Nepali song of peace.

 

I recently returned from Nepal, where I facilitated the second annual CONTACT (Conflict Transformation Across Cultures) South Asia program for peacebuilders from throughout the region. South Asians are bound together by geography, history, religion, language, and ecology—but they are also separated by war, mistrust, and many of the same issues of history and religion that bind them. Our participants and faculty together spoke 38 languages, some almost extinct—and yet were connected by the common language of Hindi, which they learn from Bollywood movies and television.

This year’s CONTACT South Asia program brought together 44 participants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal and ran from December 7-17, 2010. We were fortunate to have four very active and articulate women from Afghanistan selected by the US Embassy in Kabul, as well as four Afghan men who were sponsored by non-governmental organizations. The diversity of the CONTACT participants created rich opportunities for relationship-building across the divides of nations, cultures, customs, religions, and perspectives in the region.

Most of the participants work in non-governmental organizations in their countries, although some serve in governments, academia, education, media, and law. They attend a core course in theory and practices of peace and conflict for the first week of CONTACT, and choose between two electives in the second week: Peacebuilding and Development, or Negotiation and Mediation. We provide the participants with hands-on training in skills and tools to prevent inter-communal conflicts from escalating into problems that threaten regional, national, or even global security.