Going
back to the roots and
traditional values
By Abiy Demilew
‘Democracy and the Social Question III’ is a lecture
series organized by the Goethe Institute in collaboration with Frederick
Ebert Foundation and the Addis Ababa University.
The latest lecture “Tradition of elders in peace making”
delivered on January 22nd 2008 by eminent scholar and peacemaker,
Professor Ephraim Yishak, featured last week and concludes today.
Capital has regularly covered the popular lectures in its capacity
as media partner to the initiative. The lectures, held in English,
with speakers from both the Ethiopian and international community,
provide a podium for open dialogue on democracy issues.
The original objectives of the AHPC, deeply rooted in such a spiritual
culture, were 1) the confidential, traditional method and mandate
of spiritual shimagele/jarsa or elders role in conflict resolution;
2) bridge-building, reconciling, and supporting efforts to resolve
conflicts among the parties; 3) sympathetic listening, broadmindedness,
impartiality, and advocacy of serious dialogue; 4) facilitating
a fair process and an open forum through which all conflicting parties
could come together to work out their differences; 5) providing
a safe, conducive environment for discourse facilitation where participants
themselves could address each other and work out solutions; and
6) trusting that their efforts would be blessed from the Almighty.
Without further ado, all parties to the conflict (the then-conquering
EPLF, EPRDF, and OLF; as well as all the other parties EDU, EPRP,
MEISON, EPDA, ALF … and even the reluctant Derg, then still
in power, warmly welcomed the elders, and their vision and resolve.
Thus, right from the outset our elders were able to establish regular
personal contact and correspondence with the respective leaders
of all the conflicting parties. For over a year, there were daily
telephone exchanges with “friends” within the diverse
conflicting parties. AHPC was able to bring together several of
the parties on a bilateral or multilateral basis and urge and pressure
them to end their hostilities speedily. In an atmosphere of a quiet
spiritual diplomacy—the role and mandate of spiritual shimagle/jarsa
elders in the implementation of a confidential, traditional method
of conflict resolution-- a series of careful, non-publicized negotiations
developed at a time when the combatants were not talking to each
other or to outsiders.
Consequently, our elders were successful in laying the foundations
for dialogue and were making progress towards understanding among
the conflicting parties both because of the catalytic nature of
the AHPC and the strengths of its constituent elders. The elders
themselves managed to show great flexibility in fast-changing Ethiopian
military and political situations due to the fact that AHPC’s
paramount goal of peacemaking had been clear and unsullied by other
ambitions. Above all, the elders were more tuned to the result of
their efforts on high moral ground than to personal fame and publicity;
hence, in this regard, all attempts by the media to identify the
members did not succeed, and requests for interviews with the Chair
were turned down even when there were sensational stories. (In fact,
after all these years, this is the first time that I myself have
agreed to speak with some detail in public about the AHPC and its
activities.)
The AHPC contributed to the speed of the cessation of hostilities,
made formal at the Addis Ababa “Conference for a Peaceful
and Democratic Transition” in July of 1991. At that meeting
the Transitional Council, the interim Parliament of Ethiopia, was
constituted and the Transitional Government of Ethiopia was formed.
The AHPC not only contributed to the conflict resolution process
throughout, but also played a major role as a backer of the meeting,
helping to defray the cost of the meeting in Africa Hall. I was
delegated to represent AHPC as participant-observer, along with
diplomats, religious leaders, and representatives of the international
community. As Chair and on behalf of AHPC, I gave one of the concluding
messages, a spiritual admonition that peace must grow into a lasting
reconciliation.
One international organization that believed in our spiritually-motivated
elders and became a ready partner of our AHPC, a matter for which
we were profoundly grateful, was the Swedish Life and Peace Institute
(LPI) of Uppsala. This Institute was aware that religiously-motivated
elders had a track record since times immemorial: in recent years,
the Quakers played a role in the Nigeria-Biafra conflict of the
late 1960’s, the World Council of Churches in the Sudan in
the 1970’s (a peace effort that led to the intervention by
the eldership of Emperor Haile Selasie in 1972), and other church
groups in Ireland and Bosnia. According to the late Olle Dahlen,
then Board Chair of the Institute, “church bodies have been
instrumental in contributing to a good climate in Korea” through
the good offices of the churches in the South together with the
Christian Conference in Asia that established and kept contact with
the churches of the North and the respective governments. Our LPI
partners, led by Rev. Sture Normark and Mrs. Susannah Lunden, also
recruited Norwegian Church and Government aid and two Mennonite
Church partners, John Paul Lederach and Menno Webb, as facilitators.
As plans evolved to have a meeting in a secret Alpine resort, the
Swiss Government also offered assistance to allow political dissidents
to get entry to the country. What subsequently took place is explained
below.
AHPC was a peace organization led by nationals with good foreign
friends as active supporters and facilitators. It was a prototype
of conflict resolution and a model of cooperation that can be highly
successful. The interested international parties empower the local
spiritual elders in the spirit of a genuine search for peace without
too much interference or credit hunting.
Concluding remarks
Warring, unfortunately, has always been a part of human history.
Religious (and for that matter ethnic or political) differences
do not necessarily cause war, but those who wage it have used these
differences as rationalizations for it and its escalation. The real
root causes of warfare are deeply embedded in human psyche, as Freud
once explained to Einstein in response to a League of Nations query
addressed to the later whether peace was ever possible. Freud rightly
argued that war, a social phenomenon, and aggression, a personal
phenomenon, are different manifestations of the natural human animal
instinct of violence, or, as Hobbes put it, homo homini lupus, although
such a statement might be unfair and offensive to the wolves. In
other words, conflicts arise from an individual’s animal self-
interest for survival, and the egoistic human instinct of personal
glory, feeling of superiority, greed or love of money, and of course
an irrational sense of a divine mission or karma. Marrying this
volatile human animal instinct to the superficial dimension of religion
has been the cause of many wars and is the catalyst of modern terrorist
infernos.
Resolution of the root causes of anger and hostility, preventing
or even eliminating war, and for that matter of suicide bombings,
cannot therefore be found solely or primarily within the confines
of ordinary diplomacy or logical conflict-resolution expertise.
It must also come from the realm of humble wise eldership with sensitive
disposition and categorical determination to promote calm emotional
dialogues of the heart based on mutual respect and understanding
among conflicting peoples—in particular, their grassroots
backbone. We must actively seek and delve into the deeper spiritual
fountain of the mind to help us turn our differences into assets
and our angers into empathy.
This type of religiously motivated peacemaking is bridge building,
but it is not bridge building carried out by engineering, or overly
analyzed systems of thought. The bridge goes between heart and brain,
and heart to heart. It is not solely a product of a rational act.
Elders are like conductors, not engineers. Conductors should know
music, but their communication with the musicians has to be, to
use a German Phrase, es ligt in Blut, a natural gift. While international
peace negotiators generally look at border conflicts on the land,
spiritually-guided elders look into the hearts, the border demarcations
between the veins and the aorta, and never give up even if they
fail over and over again. That is the basis of the philosophy of
the Horn of Africa religiously motivated elders movement that begun
in the late 1980’s.
In addition, professionals might find it easy to bring political
leaders together to a table to sign a peace accord. But there can
never be lasting peace anywhere unless there is involvement, participation,
and reconciliation on the grassroots level. When Ethiopia, a signatory
of the Algiers accord, declined to proceed with the Ethio-Eritrean
border demarcation finalization, the Government announced that the
people had rejected the decision and that, therefore, the Government
could not go against the will of the people and fulfill the international
court ruling. When the popular President Clinton put all the mighty
clout of the US behind the Middle East peace and tried to bring
Prime Minister Barak and President Arafat to the peace accord-signing
table, and other Arab leaders were urging him to go ahead, Arafat
“could not bring himself to say yes,” afraid of public
opinion or what his people would say, as we learn from Clinton”
autobiography. In the latter case, one of the most persistent conflict
ridden region, to date, peace professionals have not actively mobilized
ordinary Palestinians as well as well as culturally related Arab
Jews of Yemen or Iraq or Morocco, as peace bridge builders. I humbly
do not believe that there can be real peace between conflicting
groups anywhere in the world, be it Northern Ireland, the Balkans,
or elsewhere, until there is at least a modicum of reconciliation
among their respective peoples.
In brief, then, I maintain that the best method of reconciliation
of warring factions in our weapons-sophisticated world might ironically
be the age-old method of negotiation: peace making by spiritually
or ethically grounded elders imbued with the idioms of the respective
religious traditions of their respective regions and connected to
their respective broad grassroots population. Spiritually or ethically
grounded wise elders, men or women regardless of age, profoundly
understand the human dimension and the soul and ethics, psychology
and history, not just the ideology and devices, of the combatants
or political contestants among their own peoples. These elders know
personally the blood of their own kin will flow if they fail to
broker peace. They participate or officiate at the burial of the
dead soldiers, some of whom might be their very relatives. The warring
peoples or political parties generally consider them venerable moral
guides. And, when all is said and done, the warring parties know
that it is with the local respected elders of their community that
they have to live as neighbors and fellow citizens for a long time.
In the case of Ethiopia and Eritrea, they have a culturally and
historically inbuilt system of spiritual eldership, as alluded to
elsewhere in this paper. Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian leaders
used to have “Soul Fathers,” or “Father Confessors”.
There also existed venerated hermits and troglodytes who could come
out of their caves and rebuke the most feared leaders; none, including
the supreme rulers of the land, were supposed to cross them. Similar
visionaries and official and unofficial spiritual leaders were also
found among the Moslems and Jews, and still exist in the region.
Among the great Oromo people of Ethiopia there exists an age-old
democratic culture, based on mutual trust and confidence between
the ordinary people and the sagacious community elders who settle
practically most of the conflicts that arise in the community. The
study and knowledge of such ancient traditions will benefit not
only international mediators but also even the region’s western-educated
leaders who now hold the reins of political and economic power,
and some (not all) of whom since the 1970s ill-advisedly tend to
turn first to modern methods of conflict resolution that have, however,
not succeeded to fully undo the bitter hostilities of three decades
in the Horn of Africa so far.
No one questions that international mediators and peace professionals,
governments and their diplomats, established religious organizations
and NGO’s, and all parties working on conflict resolution
and stability in the world have surely made and still make great
contributions. They indeed do. However, they must also understand
and respect traditional peacemaking practices as well as seek and
devise ways of collaborating with and empowering local spiritually,
ethically-guided elders wherever conflicts exist, arise, or might
arise. That way we can all work together with mutual friendliness
and respect and make the most effective contributions to regional
and world peace.
To its credit, the UN has been to a certain extent supportive of
the idea of working with local spiritual elders in Africa as a valuable
channel of peacemaking. Only recognition by all other international
professionals and governments of the elders’ councils, and
renewed efforts by the elders themselves can bring peace to our
region—and as its consequence, in time, possibly glorious
achievements inspiring to the whole world. The role of native spiritual
elders/peacemakers and bridge builders must be accepted, respected,
and supported by all peace-loving governments and international
institutions. Progress towards lasting peace and reconciliation
within and among the nations of the world must be pursued by the
UN jointly with the religious communities and institutions like
the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, The Temple
of Understanding, and similar organizations that make effort to
promote the peacemaking properties of religion. (A word of caution:
all parties must be aware that unfortunately not all who pose as
religiously motivated peacemakers might be sincere. The UN and other
non-religious peace mediators who earnestly seek to engage spiritual
elders must guard against charlatans who abound and are ready to
take advantage of them.)
We are today reviving the tradition of eldership - thanks to the
PM Meles who had the wisdom to make our Government examine our own
culture and show respect to our culture of eldership. Likewise,
we thank the leaders of the competing (I do not like the word opposition)
parties that also welcomed our intitution of eldership with respect
and open heart, and the great people of Ethiopia that gave us this
great inheritance.
As Ian G. Barbour in his When Science Meets Religion and other instruct
us, today, quantum physicists and theologians are having a serious
dialogue about the ultimate meaning of our existence. If such a
dialogue is taking place between hardcore scientists and theologians/
metaphysicians, why not between us, distinguished conflicting parties
and elders, spiritual peace dreamers…. Together can we perhaps
not make a difference in our society and future?
If we say yes, to use Shakespeare,
There will be mirth in heaven,
When everything made well
Atone together
(AS YOU LIKE IT)
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