Development and Cooperation


	Contributions from the Column Focus Interview with Tilman Evers: “Small beginnings, great potential” of civilian engagement Rolf Paasch: Illusions of intervention in Afghanistan Dominic Johnson: Congo’s recent electoral split Peter Croll and Volker Franke: UN Peacebuilding Commission needs positive notion of peace Francis Rolt: Media’s role is often misunderstood 12/2006		“Tiny seeds grow” In 1999, the German government, then composed of the Social Democrats and the Green Party, established the “Civilian Peace Service” (CPS). In crisis regions, it supports local organisations that attempt to prevent violent conflict in the first place, try to put an end to conflicts that have erupted, and help to promote structures that foster peace once conflicts are over. The programme is run in cooperation by the government and civil society. State agencies and non-governmental organisations can apply for funds, which are disbursed by the Development Ministry. According to those in charge, the instrument has proven its worth. [ Interview with Tilman Evers ] Why do you consider peace-keeping and peace-building primarily civilian tasks? Today, peace-keeping affects 10% of the countries on this planet; international troops are deployed there. Three times as many countries are affected by crises. So “failing states” are not some odd exceptions, but rather a global and fundamental challenge today. Obviously, economic and political globalisation are at the root of the problem. We are repeatedly dealing with issues of dominance, wealth distribution, justice and multiculturalism. Even in advanced nations, we have become used to speaking of state failure, and we are witnessing the regulatory power of national governments evaporate. Indeed, the West is exporting such phenomena, though, of course, each fragile state is specific in its own way. Local power holders and rent-seeking elites always play a role. For the people in the countries concerned, the question is simply whether violent conflict or peace is more profitable. They will only choose peace if there are community structures that provide basic levels of security, possibilities of earning livelihoods, the freedom to live a cultural identity, and of course a certain level of say in matters that affect them. These are all civilian objectives. What is the military needed for then? Armed forces from abroad can only play a very temporary role, concerning security. Fundamentally, what people want and need is civilian perspectives for their lives. Why does that rarely figure in public discourse? Usually, we’re discussing troop numbers and who will command them. Well, armed conflict plays well on television, whereas peace does not. Violence can appear to be efficient, whereas sustainability demands long-term peace-building. For the media, it is more difficult to present and explain development work. Moreover, governments are interested in how they are perceived abroad. As the saying goes, if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail – so as soon as we have the military, we’re tempted to use it even when it may not be all that helpful. That’s why we send soldiers into situations where they can’t really achieve much because civilian experts are what is really needed. Today, German soldiers abroad outnumber aid professionals two to one. This ratio is obviously distorted. What does the Civilian Peace Service (CPS) do better than soldiers? I just mentioned the material side: peace must pay a dividend. But perceptions also matter. How do local people understand the conflict? How do they view the various opponents? We are dealing with attitudes, we must start processes of cultural change, leading to mutual understanding, socio-political equilibria and senses of self- as well as co-determination. It takes many years to achieve these goals, and the military is neither trained nor equipped for the task. In Bosnia, the EU troops entertain 40 so called “Local Observation Teams”, composed of four members each. 160 soldiers are not doing anything else than keeping in touch with civilians, trying to stay informed and to boost the troops image. These soldiers are rotated after a few months, they hardly now the local language, culture or mentality. What we would need instead are 160 civilians, speaking the language, networking among the peace-willing members of the population, and supporting all inklings of cooperation among former enemies. Civilians would definitely achieve much more in terms of peace promotion. Is that what the CPS does? In our experience, yes – though perhaps it does not succeed in every individual conflict. We know that the Civil Peace Service can help to prevent conflicts from escalating in countries where different ethnicities and cultures threaten to clash. Similarly, the CPS can also help to promote dialogue and understanding after violence has stopped, helping groups that used to fighting one another to engage in cooperation. Give us an idea of an especially successful project. Just after the war in Kosovo, we started working on getting the remaining Serbs and the Albanians, the majority population, to talk to one another again. In the beginning, doing so was only possible abroad, in Macedonia. That is where we got a group of Serbian and Albanian young people to sit down together. We also invited a Catholic and Protestant from Northern Ireland, they came and talked about their experience. The group was thus able to listen to personal accounts of how people who had spent decades waging bloody battles against each other had finally returned to talking terms. Later, this group of Serbs and Albanians even travelled to Northern Ireland themselves. During that trip, former “enemies” actually became friends. They have kept in touch since. Many of them now work in cross-ethnic action groups, providing what one might call a platform for civilian peace activists in Kosovo. Sometimes tiny seeds grow and become something really big. Are there limits to what the CPS can achieve? We must always consider very carefully whether to become involved in situations where geopolitical interests dominate, particularly when expressed in military terms. My organisation, for instance, would not get involved in Iraq today. In the past, some projects failed because of local conditions. For example, a city in Croatia where we wanted to work turned out to be so dominated by nationalists that our peace professional there hardly changed anything in two years. We withdrew her accordingly. We have also experienced setbacks because of overriding government action. In Israel, Palestine and Lebanon this year, we witnessed the breakdown of many contacts we had worked hard to establish over the years. We can only look on helplessly when those in political power ruin the preconditions for our pro-active peace work. But those are the exceptions. Most of our projects turn out more successful than we initially expect. How many German CPS peace-keepers are currently abroad? Right now, the total number is of almost 140 worldwide. Since the programme was launched in 1999, some 250 posts were approved, some of which have already expired in the meantime. And how many people would it make sense to employ? The sky’s the limit, there are tensions in many countries. The CPS does not claim to be able to safeguard or create peace on its own. Rather, it cooperates closely with various governmental agencies and non-governmental organisations in Germany and the countries we work in. Wherever the CPS becomes active, however, it plays a crucial role because of its access to various strata of society. I think Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development was right to decide to expand the CPS in incremental steps. I am pleased that Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul announced that she wants to see 500 officials in office by the end of her term. And the price tag is not even very high. To expand the CPS fivefold, one would only need the funds devoted to militarily securing elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. On the other hand, military resources often do not seem to suffice. Apparently, more troops are needed in Afghanistan. I am not an expert on Afghanistan, but it seems to me that wherever we need multilateral troops to make sure a state stays intact, much damage has already been done. I suppose that, had we begun a massive, appreciating dialogue with the Muslim World after September 11, 2001, military intervention in Afghanistan might not have been necessary, and terrorism would probably now be an issue of a handful of isolated fanatics. At very least, such a dialogue should have accompanied the military campaign. Instead, the attack on Iraq added to the violence. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world believe that the West is engaged in a war against Islam. Therefore, we have already lost some vital battles before they even began. Moreover, Afghanistan is a special case. The distinctions between fighting coalition troops and ISAF peace-keepers is blurring increasingly. The rural population probably can’t tell who is acting on whose behalf, supporting exactly what interests. As long as their standard of living does not improve, they do not see the international presence as profitable – be it uniformed or not. Accordingly, the local people tend to rally around war lords, and I doubt that additional NATO troops can make any difference. Is that a call to strictly separate civilian aid from the military? Yes, I warn against mixing the two. Civilian peace promoters can only do their job if they are seen as people who will refrain from violence under all circumstances, always focusing people’s needs instead. As soon as you start blending in military concerns, the civilian personnel is at great risk, because people then perceive them as part of the occupation force. The Bundeswehr, the German army, argues differently. Its decision-makers hope that mixed civilian-military missions, the buzzword is “CIMIC”, will improve the troops’ image. In most countries where the CPS is active, there is no multilateral force. Israel/Palestine is one example. Accordingly, cooperation with the military is no issue in those places. On the other hand, there are countries in which both troops and CPS staff are deployed. Inevitably, they meet. But that has nothing to do with systematic cooperation, something my organisation would strictly refuse to participate in. As for CIMIC, that is a genuinely military concept, designed to garner local support for the armed forces. It irritates us to see the military take on civilian tasks, resources and staff, as if there were not enough civilian capacities. In terms of its equipment and expertise, the military is not designed to protect the interests of the local population, nor even to perceive its viewpoints. Traditionally, the military was designed to impose national interests regardless of both the law and any other interests. Peace-keeping, however, can only be legitimate in the sense of enforcing international law, taking account of all interests involved. That is essentially a police task, and not what armies were invented to do. We should move on to some kind of armed, international police-force, enforcing international law with an adequate doctrine and appropriate training. Some progress has been made in that direction concerning international courts of law. That is the direction we must move in, and even if all that were in place, we would still be quite far from a desirable situation of international peace. We are always preaching democracy, but CIMIC is pointing the other way. That approach is about militarising civilian affairs, rather than civilising armed forces. The CPS plays an important role in the Germany’s official policy on “Civilian crisis prevention, conflict resolution and peace consolidation”. The idea is that several ministries are to coordinate the policy’s various dimensions. Does that work as well in practice as it sounds in theory? You should probably ask those in charge at the ministries. My impression is that the inter-ministerial coordination is inadequately equipped and still too low-ranking. The Federal Government’s first progress report on the matter has proposed that the people concerned should be of higher rank, closer to administrative tier directly below the ministers themselves. Up to now, the various officers tell each other what their departments are doing, but they cannot plan or decide together. But that is what they would have to do if they are supposed to make use of synergies. I believe that most progress was made when the policy was drafted, and that the momentum has somewhat died down since. For instance, the government’s first progress report took a more conventional approach than the policy itself did initially. The report only mentions civil society in passing, for example. Moreover, the progress report confuses civilian and military aspects as though there were no fundamental differences in approach and attitude. To what extent are other donor countries pursuing a strategy similar to Germany's Civilian Peace Service? In its current form as a partnership between governmental and non-governmental organisations, the CPS is unique. But other European countries do have similar approaches, and we support them to the extent we can. Then there is the Nonviolent Peaceforce, which operates globally and gets support from civil society and governments. The German Foreign Office, for instance, is contributing funds. And of course, peace has always played a crucial role in the various development activities of donor countries. However, it is more and more understood that sensitivity to potential conflict is necessary across the board, and that we need pro-active peace promotion on top of that. The British government is working on mainstreaming its activities in these fields, and it is quite interested in the German policy and its implementation. No doubt, Germany will have something positive to show when it takes over the presidency of the European Council next year. The first evaluation of the CPS in 2002 was not all that positive, however. Come on, that evaluation was done very early – and limited to the institutional set-up. There now is a good number of professional assessments, both of individual projects and of target regions. Of course, it is always possible to improve something, but overall the Civilian Peace Service has become much more professional in the past few years. I can attest that from my own organisation. Our standards have considerably risen in terms of how we define projects, select of peace-keeping staff and manage our activities. Questions by Hans Dembowski. Tilman Evers is Chairman of the Board at the Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst (Civil Peace Service Forum), a non-governmental organisation rooted in the peace movement and church groups. The Forum is part of the Civilian Peace Service Consortium, along with other governmental and non-governmental agencies. tilman.evers@web.de http://www.forumzfd.de http://www.ziviler-friedensdienst.de