My current reading - "peacekeeping" and politics

Among the many books I am currently reading are two that stand out as potentially being of interest to the work I am aiming to do on this blog:

• Barack  Obama’s “A Promised Land”, which provides excellent insights into the deal-making and realpolitik that is unfortunately necessary in many political systems; and
• Roméo  Dallaire’s “Shake Hands with the Devil”.

Ever since a group of US “peacekeepers” in Somalia in the 1990s watched a woman assaulted, abused and murdered just metres away from them, I have considered the term “peacekeeping” to often be a misnomer: in some cases, they are no more than observers, no matter how desperately they cling to the peacekeeper fantasy (and they did, in the responses to the letters I wrote at that time). When the sort of egregious violence I just mentioned occurs, there is no peace - anyone who thinks peace is just the absence of military conflict is, in this context, effectively being misogynistic, an enabler of domestic violence and the abuse and murder of women. A society that allows that culture of violence is INCAPABLE of being peaceful. It may take time for the forces of violence within that culture’s psyche to swirl into cohesions for long enough to manifest as the sort of physical conflict that those who arrange “peacekeeping” generally seem to think of - or did so before the Rwandan genocide - but it will happen.

(When preparing for workshops/lectures, one question I sometimes consider - e.g., when talking about being a carer, which requires consideration of the wearing effect of watching a loved one in pain or suffering, - is a response to a question along the lines of “what if that isn’t distressing?” My planned reply - never delivered yet - is “then that person needs psychiatric help, as lack of empathy is a serious problem - it is how the nazis committed the holocaust, and may be - IMO - a precursor to domestic violence, but, in any case, it shows the relationship is not functioning properly, and expert assistance is needed.”)

A culture of violent bigotry and violence makes organised covert violence inevitable - which forebodes poorly for a Taliban-approved peace agreement in Afghanistan. Such an agreement may allow men to settle for a few decades, but violence is inevitable until the violence in the soul that allows bigotry and hate is exorcised. (A ceasefire is a separate matter: a ceasefire enables cessation of active harm, healing, and a chance to search for a true and lasting peace.)

The USA is a particularly apposite example at the moment - both over  systemic  racism and far  right  wing  extremism (where were the police when a group of armed thugs walked through a US city a few months ago? Why are US federal agents going against the reason for their existence? And why did police shelter a teenaged thug who had just committed two murders? And then we get onto the so-called “GOP” extremists ... That nation seems to have a history of around 50 to 70 years for cultural violence problems cohere into a widespread outbreak - e.g., from independence to civil war [over slavery], and from the Civil Rights Act to the current violence. There probably would have been another in-between, I suspect, but World War Two got in the way).

The need for peace to be genuine requires that peace negotiations, peacekeeping, and governance all include women and minorities.

Otherwise, it is doomed, and the only debate is how long it will take for the “peace” façade to fall over and reveal the hate behind it.

I’ve been well aware for some time of the history of UN peacekeeping - a term which came out of a suggestion by Canada’s 8^th Foreign Minister (later 14^th Prime Minister) Lester  B.  Pearson in the 1950s (for which he deservedly was awarded the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize), although the activity could be considered to date back to at least the 1930s. I consider the term to be driven by political needs - a way to enable nations at that time to feel good about themselves, and thus more likely to agree to it, despite the lack of details about the newly invented concept, and the problems which emerged from some missions.

(There is also considerable complexity in what is being aimed at here - the actions include peacemaking, peacebuilding, peace enforcement, peace observers, as well as what is generally referred to as peacekeeping. On top of that, there will be needs for justice to consider.)

There are, it must be said, some missions which have worked well - for instance, on Cyprus. Others have had their moment of glory - such as in the Sinai, and peacekeeping is still active.

But some have been abject failures - such as the mission to Somalia, which went awry when its scope was increased beyond ensuring humanitarian aid was delivered. At the time I didn’t understand the military complexities of that change: for anyone else who doesn’t, I recommend Lt.-General Dallaire’s book - and the under-resourced mission in Rwanda is another example.

However, in all these cases, my opinion is that the biggest problem has been lack of political will.

If the political will had been there to do the job properly, all of these missions would have been done better, and possibly with success (that is not inevitable - there was a shortcoming of understanding, knowledge and thinking as well, and other constraints).

The lessons of Rwanda led to better rules of engagement for the UN  mission in East  Timor, thanks to a combination of horror from everyday people and the determined campaigning of insiders such as members of Australia’s military who had experience of the Rwandan genocide (some of whom wound up with PTSD from their involvement in the clean-up of the massacres).

So, again, we cycle back to politics.

Politicians are a bit like farmers. Farmers grow and sell what people buy: if everyone stopped buying meat or some other type of crop, farmers would change their practices (with difficulty, it is true, if they change from animal husbandry to cropping). The sugar industry in Queensland (which  used  slavery) is an example of that, with changes in response to reduced sugar consumption including conversion of fields to prawns (yes, flooded fields with little crustaceans), using sugar/cane by-products for ethanol (see here and here, for instance), and combining cane with other crops (interspersing cane with a few rows of some type of bean, from memory, improves yield while reducing nutrient run-off - which has been known to be a major problem for the Great Barrier Reef even when I was working up there in the early 1980s).

Farmers respond (albeit possibly with some complaining and counter-campaigning to try to stop the landslide, no matter what the cost to others - as do most other people to change that is not at their behest) - to changes in their customers’ appetites.

Just as farmers respond to their market, so too are politicians sensitive to what their “customers”, the voters in their electorate, want.

If their voters complain about short / obvious / immediate expenditure, many politicians look to ways to reduce costs - and those reductions are likely to include things that are not going to result in voters feeling good. In xenophobic and racist Australia, “peacekeeping” does not have enough votes these days (it did in the late 1940s, when we supported the foundation of the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention - but that was well and truly before John Howard, let alone Scotty from Marketing).

Those particular pollies (I know several who are decent and genuine, and consider others I have not met are also decent and genuine, so it must be kept in mind that not all pollies are problematic) may try to sound caring to create enough of a pseudo-caring “vibe” to get progressive / humanitarian voters off their back, but the reality will be a crippling indifference leading to missions that are doomed to failure - and Lt.-General Dallaire’s book sets that out quite well.

The solution ultimately is for voters to accept their responsibilities - to understand that:

1. we are in an interconnected world, and anything that happens in one nation WILL affect its neighbours, and thus possibly eventually us (as exemplified by the aid the USA gave to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, which some consider  contributed  indirectly to 9/11 [the suggestions of direct financial aid have been rejected, and show simplistic and/or weak  thinking / understanding of the world, IMO, but the creation/exacerbation of a culture of violence is - again, IMO - more likely to be significant] );
2. every time voters
   (a) vote for a small-minded, hateful, bigoted measure (and this is a little complicated, given the complex mix of policies political parties embody),
   (b) fail to let their elected representative know they are for decency and caring and a humanitarian response on a topic, or
   (c) assume bad faith (particularly on social security measures),
   those voters are showing their true nature to be a twisted, uncaring, and lacking in empathy/imagination.

This is also complicated by the role of some very biased (“partisan”) sections of the media - notably, IMO, Murdoch  outlets (whose journalists should also read Lt.-General Dallaire’s book, along with Hannah  Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, and consider how comfortable they are being agents of evil), and on that point, I recommend considering making a submission to the Senate enquiry into media diversity.

This also requires activists, such as myself, to get better at telling stories - not only to individual politicians (I used a personal story [“how will we feel in the future when we look back at our contribution, excellent though that is, and realise it equates to $X/person. Will we feel comfortable that we did all we reasonably could?” when lobbying for more aid to Yemen: there was an increase, but no doubt that was due to many people, not only me), but also to members of the public. The need for this is very ably described in former-President Obama’s book, and this is how the sub-class of politicians who are actively aiming to promulgate hate will be dealt with: by a counter-narrative appealing to decency that is more appealing.

(It is also requires teachers to counter parental / peer pressure in order to get students to be both aware of and considerate of “the bigger picture”, and more empathic. This is being done successfully with some young people, but not others.) 

PS - one of the other factors that was clearly an issue in Rwanda in 1994 were events elsewhere at the same time - the war crimes / crimes against humanity (actually genocide) in Bosnia, which the génocidaires considered a likely distraction of the world, and the attempted  coup and subsequent genocide in neighbouring Burundi.