Jul
24
Let Peace Be
Filed Under Diplomacy & History | Leave a Comment
At Regent’s College in London, I took part in an interesting and deeply moving event with bereaved families from the Palestinian and Israeli side. Two speakers - one from the Israeli side, Robi Damelin and one from the Palestinian one - Ali Abu Awwad.
Were I to summarize the meeting with Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad in just one sentence, I would say that it was probably the most remarkable lesson on peace and philosophy of life that I ever experienced. Even before attending the event, I was expecting it to be a moving moment that would leave room for thought, but I can say it was even more striking than I had imagined it to be. It’s not every day that one gets to sit face to face with people for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is not merely a page in a history book, but an intrinsic part of their existence, people whose lives will never be the same because of that very war that most of us analyze and write papers on in a detached way.
The Israeli speaker, Robi Damelin, lost her son David in the conflict. It was a touching moment to hear her read aloud the letter that she had sent to the family of the sniper who killed her son; even though it probably wasn’t the first time she was reading it in front of an audience, I could sense her voice trembling at times, as if it were just about to break into tears. It takes not only a tremendous courage but also an immense empathy to be able to forgive the person who has deprived you from the thing that meant the most in your life. Sitting in that room and listening to her reading the letter, I couldn’t help not wondering if, in her place, I would have been strong enough to do that, to ask for reconciliation with the person that I would probably have been humanly entitled to despise. I still don’t know the answer to that question and I hope with all my heart to never be forced to find it.
As a person who is an outsider to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, hearing about Israeli children who have never met nor talked to a Palestinian in their lives definitely comes as a shock. After reading about the conflict, hearing about it on the news and even writing papers on it, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that these two peoples are each fighting an “invisible” and “abstract” enemy. Just like Robi Damelin convincingly expressed it “For most of the Israeli and the Palestinians there is no face on the other side”.
This is the true narrative that nobody can see, the one that is taking place on a daily basis, beyond the closed curtains of the negotiations and intents of peace agreements. Listening to Robi talking about the way Israeli and Palestinian children never even get to meet each other, I could truly understand why this conflict is still ongoing. Even if peace was signed at international level, it would still take a significant amount of time until people would get to understand and accept each other, simply because at the human level they don’t have any idea what the other side is all about.
Most of the bad things in the history of mankind have come from our fear of the unknown, leading us into destroying others for fear of not being destroyed ourselves. So I cannot help but wonder, how can anyone preach about reconciliation and peace in the Middle East when these two peoples that have co-existed there for more than half a century now still don’t have a minimum knowledge of each other at the individual level?
When in college, I remember reading extensively about the Holocaust and what the Jewish people had to go through. I visited museums of the Holocaust throughout the world and I even have friends whose relatives have lived those dark times. Nevertheless, there was no other moment I could figure out with so much clarity the whole psychology of the Jewish people than the moment I listened to Rubi Damelin talking about her childhood. If at the beginning I was surprised to see how much empathy she was showing for the people on the other side although her son had been killed by one of them, after hearing her speak about her childhood in Germany, I completely understood.
She is one living proof of the fact that a little bit of empathy can go a long way, it can bring lifelong enemies together and make them try to understand each other for maybe the first time. And I also understood the “psychology of fear” that the Jewish people still have entrenched in them, a fear that Robi Damelin experienced herself and therefore can recognize in the people from the other side.
To Palestinians, Hebrew is the despised “language of the occupier”, just like German was the despised language for the Jewish people in the Second World War. One who has experienced a drama can understand another drama. And this is what makes Robi Damelin such an extraordinarily courageous person. However, what can now seem as an admirable and outstanding way of thinking to those from the outside probably took an immense amount of effort from her part. Getting over the death of your own flesh and blood and being able to understand the pain of the people that you deem guilty for his death…that cannot possibly happen overnight. Nevertheless, I truly admire her for reaching the point in which she can identify herself with someone else’s pain, instead of judging it. It takes not only audacity, but also an enormous generosity and will of helping others and ending this painful war.
Even if I am lucky enough to have never experienced anything similar, I could truly relate to her story merely by understanding her philosophy of life. When something as awful as losing a loved one happens, especially in the given circumstances, the first feeling than one experiences is utter anger. Then comes sorrow and eventually, after an endlessly long amount of time, comes the feeling of letting go, but not in terms of forgetting nor renouncing justice, but simply no longer feeling a victim. For most people who have ever lived dramas, letting go of the feeling of being a victim is probably the hardest thing to do, above all because anger and victimhood go together. As long as you carry anger inside of you, you remain stuck in the state of victimhood.
Having this as an anchor point, it is easier to understand from the broader perspective of IR that the peace in the Middle East is not just a question of a cease-fire or of an international truce. People have to make peace with their own feelings and sorrows and to understand the dramas on the other side in order to live together in a peaceful way. Just like the Jewish people carry inside them the same fear they experienced in the times of Holocaust, the Palestinians have the inborn fear of Israel and of all it stands for, because most of them come from refugee-families, just like Ali Abu Awwad.
Their outlook on the people from the other side is influenced by their personal dramas, by their feeling of homelessness and confusion and of not belonging anywhere, of feeling uprooted from their very birth. It’s their personal dramas that add up to the point in which hatred is born. That is why, in my opinion, more people like Robi Damelin and Ali Abud Awwad are necessary in order to make the change happen, people who can go to all the effort of understanding one another and not viewing each other as enemies but merely as people united in a mutual cause – attaining peace.
If Robi Damelin is definitely a courageous and generous woman, Ali Abu Awwad is a just as daring human being, since he was capable of letting go of his past in Intifada, of his bitter childhood in which his mother was repeatedly arrested for being a political leader and even of the death of his brother in the hands of the Israeli. Robi showed tremendous courage in turning her personal tragedy into an engine for helping other people and preventing other similar dramas, while Ali showed just as much courage in turning from a jailed militant who used to fancy violence as a way of solving things into a warden of peace and a fighter for reconciliation.
Beyond the personal tragedies which brought them together, it is that inner strength and capacity of changing themselves and reassessing their fears and their feelings that makes Robi and Ali get along and fight together for their cause. They might come from different sides of the conflict, but they are both of one kind – they are people who chose to be fighters instead of victims and chose, as Robi put it “to sit around a table and talk instead of seating by a grave and cry…”.
Each of them could have turned his personal tragedy into a reason for hating the people on the other side even more; instead of that, they decided to identify themselves with the misfortunes of the people who harmed them and to look beyond what meets the eye. To look for the internal reasons that make people react in a certain way. Just like Robi, instead of pointing to the other side and saying that the enemy comes from there and has to be destroyed, Ali chose to look for peace, to make sure that nobody would go through what him and his family have gone through.
Extrapolating from their two personal tragedies into general IR and leaving aside the guilt and hatred that nourish the conflict from both the Israeli and the Palestinian side, the conflict between the two peoples has one more decisive partaker – the rest of the world. Just like Ali pointed out, as much as other states would try to help the two sides solve the clash, the division of the world into a “Pro Palestinian” and “Pro Israeli” one is not only not going to lead to a positive outcome but will fuel the conflict even more.
On an international level, all states have a more-or-less straightforward position in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but their approach is mainly directed onto the idea of having a “positive” character and a “negative” one respectively; their mere narrative is built in such a way that a solution would have to lead to a win-lose rather than to a win-win situation. The pro-Palestinian embark from the start on the foundation that the Israeli are at guilt and they have to be defeated, while the pro-Israeli start on the premise that Palestinians carry the guilt and that they are the ones who must surrender their fight. In a divided world, peace is unattainable and utterly impossible, as each side awaits the other side’s defeat. This is why Ali’s words are indeed wise, as they have that wisdom that only sorrow and the experience of pain can give one: “Peace is something to work for, not to wait for…”.
After listening to both Rubi and Ali, I share their opinion that peace has to come from both sides and crystallize into a mutual agreement that would provide each of the two peoples with the dignity of ending a chapter and starting a new one, of peace and reconciliation. This is why the agreement should be seen as a compromise, not as the action of the strong imposing on the weak. In fact, nothing should be forced on any of the sides, as any imposition would just defeat its rightful purpose of installing peace.
The best way of expressing the difference between attaining peace and imposing it is by making use of the example of Hebron, where the Israeli reached the point in which they had to put bars on people’s houses, so that they wouldn’t throw stones at the occupiers. In the absence of true peace and will of both peoples, this is what an international agreement with equal; it would be merely the band aid trying to protect a not yet healed wound. It would be the formal and fully-diplomatic way of preventing people from throwing stones, but not the way to do away with the inner tensions that drew those people into stoning their occupiers. No peace can be attained if the solutions only aim at the consequences and not at the causes of people’s actions.
Overall, after hearing Rubi and Ali talking about their projects, about the one-day of hunger strike weekly and after watching “Encounter Point” again on YouTube, I just sat and thought about everything that was said. If one had asked my opinion on the peace perspectives in the Middle East just a couple of months ago, I confess that I would have been skeptical. But after meeting both Rubi and Ali, I truly think that there is a way. It’s just a question of choice and a question of people fighting for the same goal. Just like Robi said in the trailer of “Encounter Point” - “You have only two ways – to seek revenge, hate and continue the same cycle or to try to do something about it”. To that, I would just add what A.J. Muste, the famous pacifist leader used to say - “There is no way to peace, as peace itself is the way”.
P.S. If you are interested in the process for peace in the Middle East, watch the 7-minute trailer of Encounter Point, in which you will also see the two people that I have written about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiZ7vlRf8aI
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May
20
The Angels on My Doorstep
Filed Under Diplomacy & History, Travel & Personal Experiences | Leave a Comment
This is a true story about special people, people who have lived and died but through it all they left behind so much love and infinite proofs that the faith in God and in all the good things that life has in store for each of us is the only salvation there is… These people are for me the closest thing to saints, as they are the living proof of what Jesus Christ wanted us to learn. Yes, they did it the hard way and without ever complaining about anything. And if someone were to ask me one day how I portray the angels in my mind, I would just look up to the sky…and think of THEM…
At the beginning of the XXIst century, Profira Zavelita saw the light of day in Cernauti, the North of Bucovina, part of the Romanian territory that later ceased to belong to Romania, being from then on part of Ukraine. Daughter of Samuil Zavelita, mayor of Cernauti, descendant of a Polish aristocratic family - von Zavelita and graduate of the University of Vienna, Profira met Toader Luchian, the man who was to become her husband and the love of her life.
All the people who knew them, all the people who ever had the chance of being around them, they all talk about their love as ,,that special kind of love that few people have the luck of ever encountering in their lifetime”. Only…love isn’t always the ending of a story, as life is almost never easy and linear, as the story rarely continues with merely ,,…and they lived happily ever after”. In fact, their story truly began at that point. Behind their ,,…and they live happily ever after”, laid a continuous fight, a world-shattering faith and an incredible courage. Not only love. In their story, love was merely the invisible veil that sheltered their drama and kept it all together…
When Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union, Profira and Toader decided to leave Cernauti, along with their family, giving up on on all their possessions, in order to start a new life in Romania, far away from the communist regime. As their leaving was actually eloping, Profira and Toader escaped through the woods, by night, with only a bag with clothes on them. They reached the Romanian land and settled in Banat where through hard work and struggle they managed to rebuild their lost home. Sadly though, the story does not end with an “…they lived happily ever after” here either.
In 1950, the newly-arrived communism in Romania embarked on the so-called “collectivization”, which meant putting into practice the principles of communism and declining the right to any private possession, as everything was supposed to belong to the “state” and to “the people”. Profira&Toader’s family, along with all the intelectualls of that time, were reckoned to be “a threat” for the communist movement, as they were part of the bourgeoisie that had fled the soviet domination in Ukraine and they were considered dangerous for the future of communism in Romania.
Awoken in the middle of the night and embarked on cattle wagons that would remind us of the horrors of the Holocaust, thousands of people were taken away and forced to leave all their possessions. They shared the railway wagons with their cows and horses and were taken to the middle of Baragan, a barren and deserted lowland in the South of what is now Romania. Only there had the communist regime considered them to be far enough in order for the “threat” to be annihilated. With a devilish fierceness, they were taken 50 kilometers into the lowland, where there was absolutely nothing…no living soul… And as if this wasn’t cruel enough, the communists had already arranged for families to be torn apart, so that the grandparents would live more than 30 km away from their children and their grandchildren.
In small, miserable houses, with no electricity or heating, thousands of people who used to be professors, doctors, scientists…all found the strength and the courage to build in that deserted place a school, a church, an administrative building. Everything making use only of the strength of their hands and “armed” with faith in God, with courage, with the determination to survive…
The youngest of Profira and Toader’s daughters was only a couple of months old when they were taken to Baragan and was raised there by the age of 10, studying in the elementary school to the erection of which her parents had contributed and having as teachers some of the greatest intellectuals of that time. People whom, just like them, had had the “misfortune” of being two honest and two intelligent for an absurd communist society in decay.
Samuel Zavelita, Profira’s father, once the mayor of Cernauti…lived for the rest of his life in the dust of Baragan lowland, in a miserable adobe house. Nevertheless, up to the last day of his existence he continued to wear his suit, like a true gentleman, and to impeccably polish his shoes, with the same discipline as 20 years ago, when he entered the Cernauti Town Hall. His sad fate had done nothing to change his habits nor his relentless trust in the fact that a man cannot be brought down to his knees unless he willingly accepts it.
In 1960, when the forced domicile was lifted, Toader began fighting to bring his family back to the world, to fulfill his and Profira’s dream of getting their daughters into college, turning them into ladies. He had secretly saved the documents of a house in Botosani, that he had bought before the nationalization in 1948. He went to the Town Hall and presented the situation, asking for the right to live in the house he had bought years ago and which was the only possible place for him and his family to turn to, since they had been left with nothing. Nonetheless, the answer failed to arrive.
In that very moment, Toader and Profira took a step that few people would have had the courage to take…they took their daugthers and left for Botosani, armed with faith and with justice on their side. As fall was approaching, two of their daughters had to start highschool and the youngest one had to finish the 8th grade. Toader and Profira were firm in their decision : their three girls would get to study and make better lives for themselves. They settled in their cart, on the front yard of the house that was rightfully theirs, although the officials refused to admit the inevitable.
For 6 months, their 3 daughters went to school day by day and got excellence awards for their study. All that…while living in a cart on the front yard of a house. Every time Profira talked about this, the tone of her voice would suddenly become sad, almost dramatic. She was too strong of a woman to cry, but one could read the tears out of her lips when she talked about those times. “At night, the people from the house, the tenants of that time, would unleash their dogs and set them on us just to scare us, hoping they would drive us away like this…”
Finally, the decision was taken at the Town Hall, somehow forced by Toader and Profira’s relentless fight. The house was given back into their possession and the tenants that lived there, that had been tenants to the state, became THEIR tenants. The same people who used to unleash their dogs to scare away the family that endured winter in a cart…those same people had become their tenants. In life, what goes around, comes around…
Their three girls studied in Botosani, then left for college in Bucharest and became engineers and architects. Toader and Profira remained in the house they had obtained through such a struggle…but only until the fatidical moment in which the communist regime found another way of tormenting them - the start of the demolition era in Romania. Thousands of people were driven away from their houses once again, as the state had to build blocks of flats, since houses were another sign of the ,,dangerous bourgeoisie” that threatened the communists.
For the third time in their lives, Toader and Profira were left with nothing. That house they had fought for, with sweat, tears and sacrifices…that house doesn’t exist anymore. On the place where it once stood…only blocks of flats. Tens of them… They became tenants of a small apartment in one of those blocks of flats. Ironically, on the same street where their house had stood once.
Toader couldn’t cope with this last shock, he simply couldn’t come to terms with the idea of having built 3 houses and then having lost them one by one…to finally become a tenant of the communist state. It was a thought that he never made peace with until he died.For those who met him, he will live eternally in their memories as a brave and honest man, who fought his entire life for the things he believed in. For family, for love, for what was right.
Profira found herself alone, without her lifelong-companion, but nevertheless blessed with her daughters’ love. She continued to help them and to raise her grandchildren with the same love and commitment that life never managed to take away from her. That love and commitment with which she raised…me, the baby that used to climb into her arms, look her in the eye and ask in a sweet childish voice “Com’ on grandma’, tell me that story again…”.
With patience, infinite love and tenderness, she raised me as well and a great deal of the person I am today I owe it to her. Because, yes…Toader and Profira are more than the “characters” of this true and dramatic story. They are my grandparents. The people whose learnings I carry with me, in a silent corner of my soul, the people whose blood runs through my veins and the people that I have pledged myself to make proud. My fight is theirs too. And each and every victory I will ever have will be their victory as well…
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Nov
15
Always Blame the Americans
Filed Under Diplomacy & History | 1 Comment
…cause even when you’re wrong, you’re right…” said the main character in a 1969 Costas Gavras movie. And indeed…why is America viewed so badly worldwide?
The first Chatham House(Royal Institute of International Affairs) event that I attended in London had an intriguing title that left room for both interpretation and analysis: “What is America doing to improve its image abroad?”. After months spent as a grad student of an American university, I was truly interested in finding out an answer to this question, or at least hearing what a “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy” such as the speaker Colleen Graffy had to say on the matter.
I will have to admit that I was somewhat biased in my conceptions about the US when I embarked on this Master Program and most of my outlook on what America stands for and on American values and ways of doing things has known significant changes due to the insight that I’ve had for the past three months. Hearing Colleen Graffy speak about encouraging young people from Europe and all over the world to study in American universities or come with study abroad programs in order to discover US from the inside and not through stereotyping and prejudicial thinking really made me think of myself and my former perspective on things.
First of all, from my point of view, the most interesting element of the conference was the analysis of the concept of Public Diplomacy, a new and interesting term that would at a first glance be deemed illegitimate by scholars because of the mere association of “diplomacy” with the word “public”. Diplomacy was never supposed to be public; it was always seen as an art of establishing and maintaining international relations through the intercession of diplomats, people who would negotiate crucial aspects of the inter-state relations in a totally non-confrontational way. Before being endorsed by politicians and government people, treaties and important papers were always analyzed by diplomats, which gradually placed into the public mindset the idea of diplomats as people who are usually not seen, but who help orchestrate the official actions of a country.
However, in our times diplomacy is a process that no longer takes place exclusively “behind the curtains”, but has actually become a public action. Our speaker, Ms.Graffy, stressed this aspect at the beginning of her presentation on America’s image abroad and underlined the role of “public diplomacy” as an art of communicating a country’s values and messages to peoples in other places of the world. As she interestingly formulated it, thanks to public diplomacy “people can disagree with the United States without being anti-American”.
Public diplomacy was heavily used during the Cold War as a way of getting messages thorough, from the Western World onto the Eastern European peoples who were constantly subjected to the Communist propaganda that depicted the West as the one and only enemy of the socialist state and the main hindrance towards reaching the communist goals. Nevertheless, for a brief period after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was considered futile, as governments thought that their policies will speak for themselves and will freely transmit the message of their states.
This proved to be a wrong move for the Western countries and for US in particular, as Public Diplomacy is a constant process that cannot be “turned on and off” according to the temporary interests of the parties involved. It entails a continuous process of communication within countries, a process that cannot and should not be stopped regardless of what policies are put into practice. Policy-making and public diplomacy should work close together or, the way Coleen Graffy convincingly expressed it – “Public Diplomacy should be there at the take-off, not only at the crash landing”.
Basically, the United States is presently trying to convey its message to the world through a series of channels, the majority of which imply engaging diplomats in an active communication process, in order to get them out of the so-called “Washington Bubble”. This entails a whole range of methods, including providing them with an immediate alert of the narrative overseas through the EUR Alert – a compilation of the news overseas, extracted from the most important newspapers.
Moreover, if traditionally the ambassadors were thought to be the exclusive messengers of a country and the only ones to speak out on behalf of their states, the Public Diplomacy strategy of the US targets all diplomats, who must be present where the public that is absorbing their information is. In order to implement this somewhat theoretical concept, special websites have been set up, with diplomats taking turns blogging about important issues and giving answers to people’s questions and concerns. The main goals of these actions are to have all the embassies officials engaged in communication and to prevent the spread of rumors that have the tendency to harden intro conventional wisdom before they get to be countered through traditional channels.
In order to meet these purposes, the US is presently setting up Media Hubs in Europe and Asia, respectively in Brussels (where a TV studio is to be built as well), London and Dubai. This implies, in Graffy’s opinion, a certain amount of “pre-activity” (a concept situated in between “reacting” and “acting proactively”), of anticipating what the story will be and lining up the voices needed for it to be heard. Moreover, I found very interesting the fact that there are people whose jobs are to log onto Arab blogs (where the information is written 100% in Arabic) and to counter misinformation intended to mislead the population.
From the cultural point of view, US is promoting the English language through language courses in Muslim communities and is trying to engage citizens in the program of “Citizen dialogue”, by which American Muslims travel in Arab countries for organized dialogue with the Muslims abroad. There is also an outreach to women, through the promotion of breast cancer awareness in the Middle East and Latin America and a support for business women in Russia.
From a personal point of view, ever since I first encountered the term of “Public Diplomacy”, the thing that came to my mind was the business-related term of “Public Relations”. Public Relations implies acquiring public sympathy and positive feedback from the public by using of a series of tools that are mainly focused around communicating brand values, engaging the customer and creating a positive image of the company and/or brand. Drawing a parallel between the Public Relations(PR) and Public Diplomacy, I would say that Public Diplomacy does for International Relations what PR does for International Business – bolsters the development of a positive image of a country worldwide.
As a graduate of International Business, I would simply call this “country marketing”. The concept is of utter importance nowadays and it is also essential for building a country’s credibility and image for the ordinary people. Diplomacy itself handles the official ties between countries, but Public Diplomacy is meant not only for officials, but for the entire population, for the ones who are most vulnerable to stereotyping and to absorbing negative aspects that are heavily promoted throughout more or less biased media channels.
From this perspective, US is generally criticized for being too frivolous, having too many religious fixations, lacking values and profoundness of thought, for being too materialistic and too puritanical. Having these traits as anchor points, it is easy to imagine why the term “Americanization”, used in explaining the process of adopting certain features of the American way of life in European countries is always thought to have a bad connotation. I found very interesting a quote from Oscar Wilde that Colleen Graffy used for emphasizing the idea of the bad image of US that must be countered – “America is the only country who went from Barbarity to Decadence without Civilization in between”.
Indeed, America is often seen as the unsophisticated and superficial state that only relates on military and economic power in order to attain its purposes, regardless of the ones who suffer the consequences. However, this image has not emerged solely as a result of a strategy meant to discredit the United States but it came as a consequence of some of the political choices made by the American leaders throughout history.
As much as I have personally appreciated Colleen Graffy’s attempt of depicting US in much brighter colors than its real image, the best example that comes to mind in regard to the way America is viewed by the world can be extracted from her very speech. When asked about the way the war in Iraq is affecting US’ image abroad and attracting negative vibes from the people who are anti-war and who consider America’s intervention in Iraq illegitimate, her answer truly struck me. I have been working in the field of Public Relations for the past 4 years and I perfectly understand that image must be handled with care, that there are aspects that are too delicate to be directly tackled and that there must always be a strategy.
However, I am also aware that the tactic of handling a company or a country’s image must be a sensible and reasonable one in order to attain the goal of shifting the public opinion from the negative to the positive side; it must have the substance and the consistence necessary for rendering it believable.
With this framework in mind, I found Ms.Graffy’s answer not only naïve but dangerous for the credibility of the sheer image that she was trying to uphold: “I may sound idealistic, but America went in Iraq wanting to make a positive difference in the Middle East”. As idealistic as I am myself and as much as I would want to believe the good intentions that led the US into intervening in Iraq, I am also realistic enough to separate economic interests from pure and unconditional humanitarian intervention.
Just as we had debated during the Research Methods class with regard to single-variable explanations, US’ intervention in Iraq cannot possibly be explained by a single-variable; even more when that variable is roughly “making the world a better place”. Clear economic interests, worries regarding weapons of mass-destruction as well as the previous conflict between US and Iraq have all led to the American intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
From this standpoint, one of the first rules of Public Relations is that it is better to give a “No comment” answer or simply to remind the person who asked the question that this does not fall within your range of authority than to provide an answer that will clearly be interpreted as fake and inconsistent with the real situation. I truly think that the same principle should apply to Public Diplomacy as well.
Nevertheless, I am by no means in disbelief regarding America’s good intentions worldwide, expressed in the policies that it is promoting throughout the world. While I was listening to Colleen Graffy talking about Radio Free Europe and Voice of America as one of the main tools of American Public Diplomacy, I couldn’t help not thinking about the days when Romanian people were persecuted by the institutions of the Communist Party or even imprisoned for the mere act of secretly listening to Radio Free Europe. My grandparents were politically detained and persecuted during their entire lives for being “anti-communist” and even deported with forced domicile for 10 years because of their political beliefs.
I therefore know what being idealistic means and I know that during the Cold War Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have done more for the people in Eastern Europe than the US can probably imagine. What is today considered a tool of Public Diplomacy was back then a tool of ideological survival for the peoples of Eastern Europe; it was their oasis of mere sanity in a desert of communist propaganda that was meant to make them lose contact with what was happening in the world, keeping them exclusively connected to the Communist rhetoric. From this point of view, I totally agree that Public Diplomacy was acting for bettering the world; however, that does not imply that America itself always is.
Moreover, Public Diplomacy should never be just a one-street approach, as the negative image that America has in Europe is most of the times counterbalanced by the European conception that America itself has a negative image of the rest of the world. The so-called “American exceptionalism”, seen as a sign of superiority is inherently undermining the relations between US and other states of the world.
Just one of the many possible examples with regard to this matter is the reluctance of the United States in signing the Rome Treaty and becoming a state-party to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The thing that most shocked me while reading about this issue before the visit to the ICC was the assertiveness of the US officials in claiming that “having our American citizens, especially the members of the armed forces, indicted and tried by other than American judges would be unacceptable”. This not only undermines the credibility of a Criminal Court meant to act as a legal guardian for the same world that the US wants to „make better”, but it also sets a double-standard for justice, according to the level of power of the state in question. When a state uses its power to claim a different treatment, the feedback of the rest of the world cannot possibly be a positive one.
Overall, this Chatham House event was extremely interesting for me and I would say interesting for any International Relations student. Public Diplomacy is becoming an increasingly active part of international relations, an aspect that one should be fully aware of when pursuing a career in this field. It was a valuable insight to find out from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy of the US how the mechanisms of Public Diplomacy really work. Nonetheless, it would be also interesting to know how the effects of these actions can be assessed on the long term, if there is a way of quantifying the outcome of the ongoing programs and how they will affect the country’s image in time. If they will truly make the desired change for the better it is still to be seen in the future
Extrapolating from the benchmark of ”American Exceptionalism” and thinking about the final call in Ms.Graffy’s speech, for “leaving the negative conceptions about the US aside and joining in a united effort to face world challenges”, I reckon that America’s image will stop being a negative one in the moment in which the cultural and social actions that it undergoes and its claims for a better world will be supported by an attitude of solidarity with the rest of the world rather than one of domination. For, in my opinion, this is what “united effort” is all about.
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Nov
15
A Big Brokenhearted World
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If one were to describe a visit to the Imperial War Museum in London, words would prove scarce and furthermore heartless and impersonal in comparison to the overall experience it provides. Although the concept of “museum” in itself is more about facts and less about emotions, the Imperial War Museum stands for much more than just the history of war, as by trying to depict the world conflagrations that shattered humankind it also puts forward something even more important - a testimonial of what war does to people’s lives. The kind of testimonial that can cause grief, amazement or shock, but it cannot possibly leave one indifferent.
The Museum includes 4 floors, one Ground Floor and one Lower Ground, each of them illustrating different periods of history and vividly recreating all the elements of the respective eras, hence providing the visitor with a sense of truly witnessing history in a retrospective.
The Ground Floor is dedicated to Children’s War, analyzing the impact of war on a child’s world. An utterly unique and often neglected topic, as usually the war is examined through the eyes of people who were an active part to it. Of men who served on the battlefield, on women who soothed their wounds, almost never of children, of those who knew too little about battlefields and guns but so much about losing a parent, losing one’s home or losing one’s childhood.
The quotes written on the walls and extracted from children’s letters to their parents, from stories of people and from autobiographies are so heartbreaking in their simplicity that even without showing any exhibit from that period, merely with bare white walls and those quotes written on them, ”Children’s War” would still have been an incredible experience.
As I took my time and patiently studied each, trying to understand and relate to the feelings of the children who wrote them, I was secretly trying to discover in them something that would help me understand my mother’s experience. I am the daughter of a deportee. My mother spent her entire childhood in a deportation camp and for political reasons my grandparents were evacuated from their house three times. As soon as they managed to get their lives back on track, they would be evacuated again and be left to start from scratch. This is why, while I was reading the quotes, they all made me think of my mother and, in addition, of my grandfather and of all the people like him, who died with the grief of having forever lost the right to a place to call “home”.
All the time I was evacuated I used to tell myself that one day the
war would be over and I could go back home.
After the war…I made my way back to where we used to live.
The whole area had been obliterated during the Blitz and I was quite unable to find the spot where our house once stood.
That happened more than 50 years ago, but somehow I am still waiting to go home
Jim Bartley, evacuee
This is precisely one of the reasons for which what the Imperial War Museum did with the “Children’s War” is extraordinary; it recreated war through the eyes of a child, presenting its atrocities with utmost clarity. Every person who ever embraced the idea of waging war as a means of solving things should spend an hour at the Ground Floor of the Imperial War Museum; it will guarantee him a different perspective on things.
“It’s a soldier, Mummy, with a kit bag. I think it’s your husband!”
Boy seeing his father for the first time;
Going up to the higher floors, the 4th Floor gathers the exhibition of “Crimes Against Humanity”, which entails a 30-minutes-documentary about the bloodshed in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, or East-Timor. The facts presented there are amazing in their cruelty. Finding out that 60% of the children in Rwanda have seen a person killed before their eyes and that over 40% have seen a member of their family killed before their eyes, truly leads one into questioning whether justice really resides in remembrance. From the viewpoint of history, how could these children ever balance the need of remembering what happened to their parents against the need of letting go as a chance of leading a normal life? This is why one always wonders if people ever learn their lesson when it comes to the tragedies that have shattered the world or if the “Never Again” that we endorse after each major catastrophe remains more of an intention and less of a reality.
Although the 4th floor and implicitly the 30-minutes-documentary about the genocide was not recommended for children under 16 years of age, one would have been surprised to see a group of teenagers who had chosen the projection-hall as a hang-out place, for joking and having a good time. Analyzing their behavior was indeed a bitter enterprise.
While on the screen the stories of people who survived incredible crimes and tortures were unfolding, while victims of rape from Rwanda were remembering their suffering in trembling voices, children with dreary eyes were remembering their dead parents and survivors of the Holocaust were talking about the inhumane conditions in the concentration camps, the teenagers were laughing out loud, throwing empty Coke cans at one another and running around the projection hall. At the same time the narrators, among whom broadcaster Fergal Keane and African affairs expert Alison Des Forges, were talking about remembrance and about the need of teaching our children how not to repeat our mistakes.
This sad episode can only make one even more convinced of the need of lucid recollection, of the need of reconstructing the course of the events and furthermore of teaching one’s children about it. Of the need of “Never Again” assumed not only as an attractively formulated slogan but as an inspiration for actions meant to prevent crimes like these from ever taking place again.
As the visit continued with the Holocaust Exhibition, something totally unique happened during the one hour and a half spent there. It was probably the first time in my life I ever felt like shedding tears while merely looking at picture in an exhibition hall. It all simply got to me - all the images of suffering people, all the pain conveyed by the testimonials, all the unavoidable thoughts of the somewhat similar burden my grandparents had to carry.
Probably the most disturbing thing of all about the Holocaust is simply the thought of how it all started. The thought that human mind can cause pain and suffering infinitely more easily than doing good and that what we call catastrophes are merely the product of human minds laid in the service of evil rather than of the good.
Looking back to history, it was the conditions in Germany after the war that had allowed the Nazi Party to flourish. The defeat in the First World War had shocked most Germans and the transformation of Germany into a democracy had discontented them, all building into the conception of Germany having been “stabbed in the back” by Communists and Jews, as one of the Communist leaders of the revolution was Jewish. Feeding into this prejudice and in the context of economic depression plaguing the society, the Nazi party seemed to be offering not only a political but an ideological support that appealed to people’s nationalist side. The price, however, was infinitely too high.
As the Nazis founded their state on the idea of a “Master Race”/Herrenvolk, superior to all others and made up of Germans and northern Europe neighbors, especially the blond and blue-eyed Nordics, their entire ideology was based on the claim that the so-called inferior races threatened to subvert the Aryan culture and “pollute” the Aryan bloodlines.
Therefore, the purpose of the Holocaust was cleansing Germany and Europe of these supposedly alien influences. Drawing a parallel between the Holocaust and the other crimes against humanity like those in Rwanda, Yugoslavia or the sadly still-ongoing Darfur, everything started from the evil conception of “cleansing” away elements of a society, regardless of the fact that those “elements” are not merely disposable objects, but actual people. The same patterns repeated over and over again, the same allegedly “noble” cause of doing away with “bad elements”, ridding the society of them in order to secure its flourishing. Even the term “cleansing” of a society is chosen in a positive connotation, as if it would legitimize the throwaway of some of its members.
Reading about the deportations of Jewish people to the concentration camps brought back again memories of my family, of the way the communist regime packed up people, including children and old people in cattle wagons, in freezing cold, transporting them to deportation camps as they were deemed enemies of the society. Nevertheless, I am grateful that, unlike Holocaust victims, my family was at least granted the right to life. This is one more reason that makes the Imperial War Museum so utterly important, as by illustrating the war and its wrongs in their entirety it reminds us that no ideology should ever be allowed to gain its legitimacy based on crime.
Going out of the Holocaust Exhibition and exiting the Imperial War Museum, a quote written in big red letters on the black wall caught my eye. Just one sentence that I recognized with sheer surprise to be the life-motto that I had chosen during my high school years and that stayed with me ever since. Reading that quote on the wall, after 3 hours spent in a time-bubble of history, really laid things in an incredible perspective and it reminded me of my reasons for being there. Of the reasons behind some of the choices I’ve made in my life so far. It brought me back to the real values that one must never forget nor forsake, because indeed, “For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing” (Edmund Burke 1729-1797).
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Sep
15
History Repeating
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I visited the International Criminal Court in The Hague for my professional seminar in the Netherlands, inherently trying to compare it to the four previous visits, especially to the ones at the other international criminal tribunals such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. Looking back and analyzing my expectations at the first visit and comparing them to my present perspective on things, after having been acquainted to all these institutions, I would definitely say that I embarked on this experience with a fairly more naïve approach on international justice.
I somehow expected these institutions that I had heard and read so much about to be the true peace wardens that I had pictured them to be. I might be biased by my inborn intolerance to injustice and impunity, but since we are boasting with leaving in a 21st century society, completely modern and technologically endowed, I had supposed that people were bettering not only the material side but also their social awareness and the relations between them. That after all the wars and man-induced disasters that humanity had to face we had learned our lesson and our keenness of not repeating the same mistakes was stronger. Regrettably, history always seems to be repeating itself.
I can say that I enjoyed the visit to the ICC. It provided the final piece of the puzzle, the one that I needed in order to have a broader view on how international judicial mechanisms work. Of how law is enforced and how relations between states work. I can truly say that, as rewarding as the readings about the ICTY, the ICC or ICJ may be for a person’s basic knowledge; the actual presence at their premises is a totally different and enriching experience.
Even though the answers that we get to some of our questions bear traceable elements of PR, it is still a valuable insight that we couldn’t have obtained otherwise; it is the simple fact of sitting face to face with people who are closer to the mechanisms that make the world as we know it work. That is something that no book or guideline will ever be able to provide.
Going beyond the broadly known information about the ICC and its activity, one of the interesting things that I found about it was related to the new elements that it has brought to international law. Including gender crimes against women on the list of codified crimes which are subjected to investigation and prosecution is a huge step for law, as it comes to fill a void that existed for too much time. As no innovation or brand new idea can succeed without previous opposition, the concept of “gender crimes” encountered serious opposition from the Arab states which are parties to the Rome Treaty. The use of the term “gender” instead of “sex”, because of its more broad meaning which encompasses both biological differences and social ones, was met with disdain by the conservative and patriarchic Arab societies in which the role of women is highly different from Western societies.
I had wondered whether their objections to the use of the term had led to a change or at least the creation of a system of reservations or provisions that would handle the different debatable aspects of the Rome Treaty. However, our fourth speaker cleared my doubts, as it seems that the law was adopted in its original form, which sets a milestone for international criminal law. This is indeed impressive and hopeful for the future of international justice. Just as interesting from the point of view of improving international judicial mechanisms is the fact that victims are represented at international level and, to some extent, they can even lodge appeals. Although cost-engaging, this brings people closer to the law and gives them the chance to voice their opinions in the right way to have them heard.
An interesting and endlessly debatable aspect of the ICC is certainly the reluctance of the United States in signing the Rome Treaty and becoming a state-party. What had shocked me at first, while reading about this issue, was the assertiveness of the US officials in claiming that “having our American citizens, especially the members of the armed forces, indicted and tried by other than American judges would be unacceptable”. On one hand, this would mean undermining the credibility and the impartiality of the Court (even more, after finding out from our speaker that the US has actively contributed to refining some aspects of the Rome Treaty) and on another hand, it would mean setting different standards for countries, according to their levels of power. Roughly, this could be interpreted as selective justice. Big powers get the easy way out and have a chance at deciding their own fate, while smaller ones are compelled to fully comply with the letter of the law.
What astonishes me is how the world’s biggest democracy can serenely make claims regarding the honesty of its people and of the fact that American citizens are unable to commit any crimes, yet fail to accept the jurisdiction of an International Court to the creation of which it had even contributed. The most dangerous thing for international law is this setting of a double-standard in judging people, when justice is supposed to be equally applicable to everyone.
I had been disappointed with the Romanian judicial system, which still has a long way to go until becoming fully unbiased by personal interests and immune to financial incentives. At times, I was outraged with the impunity of people just on terms of their financial or social power, which might be among the reasons that boosted my hopeful feelings regarding these international courts. I was anticipating that international law still had an unprejudiced seam. It seems however that the international environment is merely a large-scale representation of the low-scale injustices that take place everyday in most countries.
From this viewpoint, my overall impression of the ICC is that there is still a high degree of uncertainty floating in the air, partially nourished by the world powers unable to harmonize their interests. “Crime of aggression” is still a vaguely defined concept, due to political aspects and 80% of the communications from people trying to raise awareness regarding committed crimes fall outside jurisdiction because they “lack the gravity threshold that would trigger the court’s jurisdiction”.
I cannot help not thinking if it wouldn’t be preferable to prevent the committing of crimes in their incipient state rather than to desperately try to stop them when they start plaguing the society. How can someone establish a “threshold” for the gravity of the crimes? Do lives of human beings, pain and suffering fall within a measurement scale? And, more importantly, can we really know what is the borderline between “not enough” and “too much” when it comes to people’s lives?
On the train back from The Hague, I tried to reach at least a preliminary conclusion to what I had experienced in these two months with the Professional Seminar visits, to draw a line and sum up my moral victories and defeats, my expectations and my outcomes. I thought to what Dr.Suransky had told us, about the way we could do something to improve the present state of things. The only thing that I can think of is strongly people-related; the only force that we have to change anything for the future resides in people’s consciousness of their mistakes and on the honest desire of not reiterating them. I do believe that we have reached a crossroads in our world history, a moment in which we have to look deep inside ourselves and figure out what is the right path to follow, since the borderline between the good and the bad seems to have become barely noticeable.
Those were my last thoughts, on my way back from The Hague. With my iPod turned on, I couldn’t help not thinking whether I am too idealistic in my wish of doing something to change and better the world. Whether the world really wants to be changed. The only echo that I found for my thoughts was in a song that I deem just as idealistic as my perspective on life, and whose lyrics I wrote below. As I listened to it and watched The Hague drift away, I tried to provide myself with a conclusion that would serve as a closure for the first stage of my experience. I don’t know if I found it; what I know for sure is that I am going to keep hoping and acting for this world’s change for the better, even if I will only be able to induce an infinitesimally small change. It would be still a place to start. And that is the best I can possibly do.
“Gazing through the window at the world outside
Wondering will mother earth survive
Hoping that mankind will stop abusing her, sometime…
After all, there’s only just a few of us
And here we are still fighting for our lives
Watching all of history repeat itself, time after time…”
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Sep
15
Justice, Light Your Fire
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Although brief, my visit to the International Court of Justice in The Hague was an informative and thought-provoking experience that left a strong impression on all of us, due to an interesting combination of factors. Having the impressive and breathtaking architecture of the Peace Palace as a background and benefiting from the experience and skillfulness in explanations of Mrs. Laurence Blairon, Secretary of the Court, who not only provided a scrupulously structured presentation but answered all our questions with patience and benevolence, we found out more about ICJ in one-hour than we could have in weeks of reading. The insight information and detailed explanations she provided are unlikely to be found in books and certainly not in the straightforward and practical way in which they were delivered to us during our one-hour discussion in the Red Room.
I would have to admit that the expectations that I had set for the visit to the ICJ were overtopped by the actual presentation, as we had been previously warned to expect more of a PR-oriented speech rather than one tailored to our questions and doubts. However, Mrs.Blairon’s presentation was attention-grabbing and concise, not lacking certain elements of PR but overall very clearly-cut and realistic.
One of the most interesting sides of ICJ’s actual activity has to do with the current pending cases, that our speaker provided insight details and comments on. Firstly, even before starting to work on the actual cases, the challenging issue for the ICJ judges’ activity consists in finding the right way of harmonizing Common Law with Roman Civil Law, given the strong mix of legal people coming from both Law Systems who must work together in solving cases. Moreover, the ICJ system does not resemble any other international judicial mechanism, since all judges partake in the decision-making and each one has to produce a 60 to 90 pages anonymous assessment of the case. The judge that directly handles the case must read all the drafts his colleagues provided before the first meeting, where a majority usually emerges in terms of opinions on the case and where a Draft Committee is elected. This is a fascinatingly complex procedure as, unlike other ruling mechanisms that I came across so far, it is based on the equal participation of all its members, allowing each one to offer his input and thus increase the chance of an impartial and unbiased final ruling. Interestingly, the average age of the judges is around 65, with ICJ president Rosalyn Higgins being the first and only female appointed to the ICJ, later becoming its president.
The complexity of ICJ’s activity also resides in the nature of the written proceedings, which can take between 2 and 6 years to complete, with all the needed steps undertaken. Nevertheless, taking into account that the ruling is made – as our speaker put it - “for eternity”, without even the possibility of appeals, it is considered to be only fair to give the states enough time to carry out all their research, provide all the necessary documents and build a strong case for themselves.
At present, some of the most interesting cases which are pending at the ICJ and which caught my attention are Romania vs.Ukraine –“Maritime Delimitation in the Black Sea”, the first ICJ case ever to come from Eastern Europe and the “Pulp Mills on River Uruguay” (Argentina vs. Uruguay), the latter being extremely intriguing given the background of the two disputing countries, Argentina and respectively Uruguay. Researching about this case, I couldn’t help not think about the Global Apartheid that we had debated both during the International Relations class and in our midterm, observing the way in which poverty can even lead to the distortion of relations between traditionally friendly and good-neighboring countries. Argentina brought Uruguay before the ICJ purportedly fearing the pollution that the setting of the pulp mills can cause to river Uruguay, which is a natural border between the two states.
On the other side, Uruguay claims that the pulp mills are completely environmentally-safe, as they represent one of the biggest foreign investments in Uruguay and are to be built by European companies, using non-polluting technologies. The people of Uruguay, however, see Argentina’s attempt of blocking this project as a sign of economic-jealousy, given Argentina’s bad current economic situation, considering that Argentina’s attempt of bringing the case before the ICJ is merely an intention of hindering the foreign investment coming to Uruguay. Indeed, for some of the Latin American countries, especially those confronted with great disparities, the illusion of the West and the hope in the investments coming from rich countries which can rebuild their fragile economies is hard to shatter.
Aside from ICJ’s complex activity, there are a few aspects that I found intriguing and not fully in line with the way in which I had pictured that an “International Court of Justice” would be. From this viewpoint, one of the things that I appreciated the most about our speaker was her willingness in offering answers even to the “inconvenient” and “not fully politically correct questions”, such as those related to the somewhat biased relation between ICJ and the permanent member-states of the United Nations’ Security Council.
First of all, an intriguing aspect of the ICJ’s activity relates to the jurisdiction of the court or, specifically, to the reluctance of UN members in granting the ICJ jurisdiction over disputes that may arise from their relations to other states. Although according to the Optional Clause System, states can submit declarations by which they give ICJ jurisdiction in settling disputes with other states that submitted the same declaration, at present only UK has such a declaration actually enforced. Moreover, the declaration submitted by a state can be, at any point, modified in order to exclude certain types of disputes or even totally withdrew, withdrawing ICJ’s jurisdiction over the state’s disputes just as well. From this viewpoint, I cannot help not wonder how do the principles of justice and solving differences on which ICJ was grounded blend with the reluctance of world powers such as the US, France, Germany or Japan to actually acknowledge the ICJ as the international organism for instituting world peace and solving states’ conflicts ?
The ICJ was created as the highest court in the United Nations System and it represents the main judicial mechanism which can solve disputes between states or provide legal advisory on legal issues. It was therefore a “creation of the states”, a regulatory legal organism whose legitimacy however, the same states who created it increasingly tend to question or to avoid, in most cases due to the collision between law and national or regional interests.
In my opinion, if the UN wants the ICJ to become a true guardian of peace and a fighter against impunity, it should have its own member-states setting the example and fully accepting ICJ’s jurisdiction over all their disputes, without making use of legal loopholes such as reservations or exceptions in order to prevent the ICJ from taking decisions which would not be fully advantageous to them.
I was honestly impressed by the frankness of Mrs. Blairon in answering the question related to the criticisms of ICJ in terms of the powers that Security Council members enjoy. It is known that the ICJ experienced major criticism by the fact that permanent members of the Security Council can use their veto-powers in order to prevent the enforcement of cases to which they had previously consented to be bound. Mrs. Blairon had a blunt reaction on the matter, simply reminding us that this is one of the principles stipulated in the UN Charter, which would have to be amended in order for any changes to happen in the current order of things.
Nevertheless, this issue was never actually brought into discussion, as the amendment of the UN charter is a delicate subject that nobody seems to have the availability of tackling. In many ways, it probably is much more comfortable for the world powers to have a pre-established network of loopholes at their disposal, which they know how to use in their best interest, rather than face the situation of actually having to comply with a clear and unambiguous UN charter, which would offer equal positions vis-à-vis the law for all countries.
As I stepped out of the impressive wrought-ironed portal of the Peace Palace, my eyes caught sight of a small monument that I hadn’t noticed on my way in, the “World Peace Flame”. After this experience at the International Court of Justice, I truly hope for this flame to never cease burning and, optimistically, I wish for it to shed more light over world justice as well.
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