Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice Blog

April 13, 2012
Post by IPJ Executive Director Milburn Line

This weekend thirty three Heads of State, including President Obama, will trumpet the possibilities for greater prosperity and stability through increased political and economic integration at the Sixth Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia. Yet the most obvious means to reduce violence and poverty in Colombia would be to end its fifty year internal conflict and focus security efforts on the neo-paramilitary criminal gangs that threaten the rule of law throughout the country. Despite having the most disturbing human rights and humanitarian record in the hemisphere conflict resolution in Colombia is not on the agenda.

In the lead up to the Summit attention has been focused on proposals by Latin American presidents to decriminalize illegal drugs to reduce the violence of the narcotics trade; whether Cuba should attend; and the declining health of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But one does not have to wander far from the meetings in colonial Cartagena to see the effects of a half century of armed confrontation firsthand. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ sultry city is surrounded by shanty-towns to which many have fled from violence and fumigations in Bolivar, Sucre and other departments and live in squalor. Colombia now has more displaced persons, five million, than any other country in the world. And the conflict-driven displacement continues, most recently amongst Afro-Colombians in Chocó on the Pacific coast, villages in Norte de Santander on the border with Venezuela, and across the border into San Lorenzo, Ecuador.

Cartagena, in Colombia

For a decade the Colombian government has, with billions of dollars of U.S. support, pursued a military strategy for ending the conflict known as Plan Colombia. The insurgencies, however, still have broad, albeit indecisive, operational capacity, as demonstrated by recent attacks in Arauca, Caquetá, Cauca, Chocó, Meta, Nariño and Norte de Santander. Insecurity in so many places across Colombia demonstrate that this low intensity conflict is only low intensity for those not in the middle of it.

Last week FARC guerrillas finally released the last ten Colombian soldiers and police who had been held hostage in the jungle for more than thirteen years, partially fulfilling one of the preconditions Santos outlined for eventual negotiations. Despite the terrible human costs of the fifty year conflict policymakers have been jaded about the prospects for a negotiated solution following failed talks a decade ago.

In Cartagena we are more likely to hear praise for Colombia’s efforts to reduce the tremendous violence of the last decades than advocacy for conflict resolution. The last three U.S. presidents, both parties in Congress and the State Department and Pentagon have been deeply vested in Plan Colombia, making scrutiny of its shortcomings unpopular in both Washington, DC and Bogotá. But scratching below the surface – or venturing beyond the picturesque walls of Cartagena – one finds praise for public security advances may be overstated. Colombia’s homicide rate was only recently surpassed by the rampant drug violence in Mexico. Serious human rights violations, including almost three thousand extrajudicial killings of civilians by the security forces and up to 30,000 forced disappearances, numbers as egregious as historic violations in Argentina, Chile or Guatemala, are under investigation by the Colombian justice system. Last month the United Nations warned that extrajudicial killings by the Colombian Army have continued in four conflict zones. Impunity for rampant sexual violence committed against half a million Colombian women over the last decade remains the norm.

Some "colonial" houses are in the foreground, and the Cathedral of Cartagena, Colombia is in the background.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has worked to address the suffering of victims through recent initiatives like Land Restitution and Victims’ Laws. But he also continues to affirm that he alone will decide when the conditions are right for peace. Latin American presidents should work with their Colombian partners to create those conditions. Both the FARC and ELN guerrillas have issued statements indicating they are ready to move forward on dialogue. While we should not be naïve about declarations of rebel groups waiting on them to fulfill preconditions only extends the suffering of Afro-Colombians, indigenous, peasants, trade unionists and the urban displaced. Colombian civil society and political figures ranging from opposition parties to former presidents have insisted on dialogue and a meaningful participation in the conflict transformation process. 74% of Colombians polled a year ago believed their government should engage in talks with the rebels. President Santos, with 80% approval ratings, has the political capital to lead for peace.

The Colombian military just requested more U.S. helicopters and even drones in order to reduce the FARC to half their troop strength by 2014. A better investment would be to negotiate their demobilization. Disarming 8,000 FARC combatants and up to 2,000 ELN fighters is preferable to their fragmenting into hundreds more drug-trafficking gangs.

The Colombian government estimates that 2% growth in GDP is lost annually due to the ongoing confrontation. Projected out over fifty years the opportunity cost of not resolving the conflict is potentially greater than current economic growth initiatives like the Free Trade Agreement, especially if you factor in the cost of maintaining over 400,000 members of the security forces.

Even an initial agreement with the insurgents on human rights and humanitarian standards with external monitoring could mitigate the suffering of civilians caught in the crossfire, as occurred at the beginning of the Guatemalan peace process in 1994. While Colombians understandably assert their right to address the armed conflict without external interference a multilateral international presence, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, OAS monitoring mission and UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, has been functioning throughout the country for a decade. Both the ICRC and Embassy of Brazil provided critical support during the FARC’s hostage release last week.

From a U.S. policy perspective support for dialogue could create clearer channels for reducing the illicit narcotics trade and achieving free trade certification. Multilateral leadership for peace is also more in line with the democratic values espoused by U.S. Presidents in a region where Latin American presidents continue to use Cold War rhetoric to characterize the U.S. as an imperialist hegemon. As the United States seeks direct engagement with the Taliban encouraging the Colombian government to talk with the FARC is not really a leap of faith.

The meeting in Cartagena will no doubt highlight Colombia’s achievements in the first twenty months of President Santos’ administration. It should not ignore the continuing human rights and humanitarian challenges in the Colombian countryside and the possibilities for resolving Colombia’s fifty year civil war.

Milburn Line is Executive Director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice at the University of San Diego. From 2007-2009 he managed a project in Colombia that worked with civil society and State institutions working to protect human rights.

March 8, 2012
Report from IPJ Executive Director Milburn Line

The people of San Felipe Chenla, a Mayan Ixil community in Guatemala’s Cotzal municipality, were waiting for us even though we had arrived early. The Sister Barbara Ford Peace Center and IPJ’s modest justice project in Guatemala celebrated International Women’s Day with 300 members of a village and region that has known violent conflict and discrimination all too well.

This region was one of the last to hold out against Spanish conquest in the early 1500s. When the Guatemalan Army implemented a scorched earth genocidal campaign in Mayan communities during the armed conflict (1960-1996), San Felipe was designated a “model village” — an extreme form of social control in which the Guatemalan military converted Mayan communities into concentration camps. Even today San Felipe’s residents are involved in a struggle to ensure that a local multinational hydroelectric project complies with national standards for prior consultation with the community.

Given the almost absolute impunity for crime in Guatemala, justice efforts are usually a woeful endeavor. As part of our project’s legal empowerment strategy to build grassroots connections to justice agencies, the project has worked to find ways to connect to local populations through justice festivals, programs to support Mayan restorative justice practices, public radio programs and today’s celebration in San Felipe Chenla.

Ixil women leaders addressing the community of San Felipe Chenla

Those of us who spoke in Spanish were received warmly by the community, but you could hear a pin drop during the presentations by the most inspiring members of our delegation: women leaders originally from the Ixil region, including the judge of Cotzal and the regional representative of the Presidential Commission for Human Rights, who addressed the participants directly in the Ixil language without our needs for interpretation. Together with a second female judge in nearby Nebaj, these women leaders have become part of a core group of officials working closely with our project to strengthen Mayan communities’ access to justice in northern Quiché.

Guatemalan women have long been at the forefront of efforts for peace and justice. Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, who spoke at USD in 2010, has probably done more than any other person to bring the world’s attention to the discrimination and genocide committed against Mayans in Guatemala. IPJ Woman PeaceMaker Luz Méndez participated in the country’s peace negotiations and has since worked to end impunity for sexual violence during the armed conflict. Helen Mack won the Right Livelihood Award, the Alternative Nobel Prize, for her efforts to obtain justice for the Guatemalan Army’s murder of her sister Myrna, an anthropologist who worked to expose the army’s mistreatment of displaced Mayan communities in the Ixil region. She has since led an initiative to reform the police.

Sister Virginia Searing, founder of the Sister Barbara Ford Peace Center, speaking at the International Women's Day celebration

Today both the vice president of Guatemala and the president of the Guatemalan Supreme Court are women. There are more than 300 female judges, and Guatemala’s first female attorney general continues to lead prosecutions of historic human rights violations and address the growing specter of crimes against women known as femicide. The challenges of gender violence and discrimination remain immense, but the efforts of women leaders in villages like San Felipe Chenla and at the highest levels of the State offer a historic opportunity to finally realize the full democratic potential of Guatemala.

Our justice project will continue to work in San Felipe Chenla on a variety of conflict issues, with a committed group of women leaders. One of the participants in this effort told us this was the first time they had celebrated International Women’s Day in San Felipe Chenla. It will not be the last.

Report from IPJ Editor Kaitlin Barker Davis

Child marriage and female infanticide. Rape. Domestic violence. Honor killings and acid attacks. Female genital mutilation. Sexual harassment and extortion.

All of these acts of violence against women are predominantly marginalized, sometimes unintentionally, as women’s issues. But they are not women’s issues. They are human rights issues that affect the well-being of a society — including the care of its young and old, its democratic vibrancy and economic prosperity.

U.N. Headquarters, New York

Though the theme at the 56th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) was empowerment of rural women, the topic of violence against women came up again and again during the parallel sessions that Dee Aker, Jennifer Freeman and I attended in New York last week.

Violence against women was such a pervasive topic because it continues to be pervasive around the world — on every continent, in every culture and religion, in urban and rural areas, and across age and class. At least one in three women worldwide have been victims of gender-based violence, according to the new film From Fear to Freedom: Ending Violence Against Women, whose screening we attended last week and is being launched online today, International Women’s Day, at www.learningpartnership.org/vaw-film.

Women are often only portrayed as victims, but the film, which enrages and inspires, highlights both the atrocities and the courageous women leaders and activists taking action into their own hands, combating violence with vigilance. Culture is one of the most frequently referenced excuses for gender-based violence, but as Mahnaz Afkhami, founder of the Women’s Learning Partnership (which made the film), said, “People make culture, and people can change culture.”

The international community is largely timid when it comes to violence against women, not wanting to step on the toes of culture. But no culture, or religion, fundamentally condones violence against women. “Women are literally the battlefield,” post-film panelist Sanam Anderlini said. “And we have to do something before we lose.” Another panelist, from Lebanon, noted the silent oppression and brutalization of women in Bahrain, ominously highlighting the absence of the Bahraini woman portrayed in the film who was supposed to be one of the panelists.

"Women, Media, Revolution" panelists (l-r) Jackee Batanda, Jina Moore and Jennifer Pozner

Building on the IPJ’s 2011 “Women, Media, Revolution” forum, the IPJ’s own parallel session continued the forum’s discussion of how women and media can encourage alternative, inclusive solutions to democratic peacebuilding, with a panel of women in media and a crowded room of nearly 100 people. Our panel was given a poignant prelude the day before when a Bahraini woman in a session on the Arab Spring insisted that there was no unrest in her country, that women were happy and making great progress. When questioned with references to Al Jazeera and other media coverage, she answered dismissively that the media simply wanted us to believe there were stirrings of revolution in her country. Why, she asked, did we need media when we had a Bahraini right in front of us? One wonders what the absentee film panelist from Bahrain would have said in response.

As CSW participants discussed the status of women worldwide, the United States did not escape scrutiny. The current U.S. contraception debate came up in multiple CSW sessions, as our government is on the verge of curbing women’s rights to healthcare and control of their own bodies. And to add insult to injury, women are being excluded from the official conversations.

As we mark International Women’s Day today, let us celebrate the vital force of the global women’s movement in the progress toward true equality. Let us also remember that the challenges are still many, but so are the men and women working to solve them. May we be invigorated to continue upholding and demanding the dignity and human rights of women everywhere.

Join the IPJ for our annual International Women’s Day Breakfast next Wednesday, March 14, as we hear from filmmaker Maria Luisa Gambale on her recent film “Sarabah,” the story of a Senegalese rapper and activist working to eradicate gender-based violence in her home country. For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.

IPJ Program Officer Zahra Ismail is currently in Kenya laying the groundwork for an election violence prevention project, with partner organization Cissta Kenya.

IPJ Program Officer Zahra Ismail (center) walking from Mathare with Cissta volunteer Wakasa Barasa (left) and a community participant

“Karibu Kenya!” announced the flight attendant as we landed on the tarmac at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. The air is cool and sticky as I make my way through the double doors of the arrival gate and see Jane, the director of our partner organization Cissta Kenya, standing in the very front with a warm, excited smile on her face. Cissta Kenya is a community-based, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization based in the Nairobi slum communities of Mathare, Korogocho and Kibera.

As we head to the hotel, Jane and Olouch (Cissta’s program officer) fill me in on the current political sensation caused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments of four of Kenya’s top political officials for crimes against humanity following elections in 2007. The post-election violence left over 1,000 people dead and an estimated 300,000 displaced.

The city is abuzz with furious debate, particularly about the charges against two presidential candidates — Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto — for crimes against humanity, and many of my first conversations center on this. Despite calls from civil society groups that Kenyatta and Ruto resign and not run in the elections, they have refused and appealed the ICC charges. On February 2, the constitutional court barred further discussion on the matter until February 17, when it will hear a case that could block them from running for the presidency.

We begin the week meeting with organizations and networks working on violence prevention and peacebuilding in Nairobi, both in and around the communities Cissta is working in. As we embark on our project, it is important to ensure that our efforts complement and work in concert with what is already being done in Kenya. At the community level there is essential work going on, and we are connecting with those groups so that Cissta Kenya can work with them and share resources in their sister communities. The IPJ was invited to partner with Cissta Kenya to build the capacity of local volunteers — in the particularly vulnerable slum communities mentioned above — in community conflict resolution, violence prevention and mobilization, especially in the lead up to the next presidential elections.

Ismail in Kibera meeting with the director of Citizens Against Violence

While continuing our meetings with local organizations and groups, we undertook a baseline survey in Mathare, Korogocho and Kibera to gain an understanding of community perceptions of violence, safety and the role they see for the community in keeping themselves safe. These assessments will enable the Cissta teams to focus their training and mobilization on the particular needs of each community. I had the opportunity to sit in on some of the focus groups and am astounded by the energy and passion of participants. Some of the discussions continued entire afternoons as participants discussed the struggles for trust in their communities, and the frustration of young people who are faced with unemployment, thus remaining idle and easy prey for vigilante groups.

Motivated by the expressed desire of the baseline survey participants for continued dialogue like the forums, I head into this next week excited to see how the Cissta volunteers respond to the training of trainers — and how it will help them take this forward and accompany their communities in the journey toward stability, accountability and peace in Kenya.

In early December 2011, IPJ Deputy Director Dee Aker and Program Officer Zahra Ismail were in Cambodia for the third Women PeaceMakers Asia Regional Network summit. The seven-day gathering, organized by IPJ Woman PeaceMaker Thavory Huot, provided opportunities to meet with youth, women farmers, Buddhist and Islamic community groups, as well as NGOs and women in political posts locally and nationally. The gathering was supported with funds from UN Women.

“We’re here to connect with each other’s efforts, so let’s get started!” This was the invitation from one of the IPJ Women PeaceMakers (WPMs) as we introduced ourselves during our very first roundtable dinner with a group of women activist leaders in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh.

As we went around the table listening to the experiences and key challenges facing Cambodian civil society, one that continued to come up both during dinner and in the days that followed was a lack of connectedness, especially among women in civil society. As one young activist put it, “We are still so far away from an us in civil society. We’re very fragmented, there is no collective we.”

WPM meeting with Cambodian women farmers

The next morning as the sun spilled out across the sky, our team of Asian Women PeaceMakers gathered with 30 women farmers representing three districts around Phnom Penh. Along with fresh coconut juice, the women shared openly and passionately the challenges they are facing: lack of education, ongoing situations of abuse and resistance to their attempts to strengthen their voices and those of other women in the political sphere. The number of women who are active in local or national government positions is very small, and the particular trials women face are for the most part overlooked. Again the question echoed: How can we better connect with one another and encourage women’s active participation in peacebuilding in our communities?

WPM Thavory Huot discussing justice challenges in Cambodia

WPM Mary Ann Arnado of the Philippines, speaking with compassion and humility, told of her experience bringing together more than 10,000 internally displaced persons to demand a ceasefire in Mindanao. As she spoke of their success, images of the thousands of people lining the roadway with their signs demanding the ceasefire appeared in the background. Then Cambodian WPM Thavory Huot shared her personal, painful efforts in the enormous task of disarmament in Cambodia following the Khmer Rouge. She too had witnessed success because of her struggles, and she urged the women gathered not to give up.

This exchange of stories and strategies filled the room with hope, and began to plant the seeds of connection between the women from different districts who were present. This continued throughout the seven-day summit. The WPMs shared their stories and exchanged ideas and strategies with civil society leaders, women’s groups, political leaders, local NGO staff and a group of young Buddhist women who are students and tailors, as well as a Muslim women’s cooperative in Battambang Province in northwestern Cambodia.

Throughout our meetings with local organizations and groups, the topic of the challenges and action needed to ensure implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 in Asia surfaced. In both formal and informal conversations, the WPMs discovered a common necessity and desire to monitor and work together to operationalize Resolution 1325 throughout Asia.

Understanding that Resolution 1325 requires parties in conflict to respect women’s rights, the women wanted to learn how to call on it to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction. The women felt they could play a significant role in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, and saw their participation as vital in the process of maintaining peace and security. However, despite the resolution’s passing more than 10 years ago, Cambodia and many other countries in Asia and around the world have yet to develop national action plans as a first step in its implementation. The United States only recently – in December 2011 – began exploring how it will launch its own.

Asian Women PeaceMakers (l-r) Manjula Pradeep, Thavory Huot, Bae Liza Saway, Mary Ann Arnado, Shobha Shrestha and Zarina Salamat

Sitting together on the last day of the summit, the Women PeaceMakers explored options and made plans for their Asia Regional Network’s development and growth in 2012. Ideas for approaches, activities and strategies around their common 1325 goal emerged, and a newfound sense of motivation planted itself in the group. With strengthened relations and partnerships, new insights and tools to use in their own work, and an agenda for collective action for the new year, the final strategy session came to a close.

“I feel rejuvenated and confident that I can continue to do this work, and that I am not, ever, alone,” reflected one PeaceMaker, capturing the essence of the summit. All of us left Cambodia looking forward to the next Asia Regional Network summit to be held in 2012 – and ready for the work ahead.

Click here for the first post about the summit, describing the current situation in Cambodia.