Multi-Track Diplomacy: A Positive Approach to Peace

Transcription

1 Multi-Track Diplomacy: A Positive Approach to Peace Track-By-Track Case Studies By John W. McDonald U.S. Ambassador (ret.) Occasional Paper # 22 May

2 The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy 2014 Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy All Rights Reserved Edited by Christel G. McDonald, Historical Researcher For more information on the Occasional Paper Series, contact IMTD 1901 N. Fort Myer Drive, Suite 405, Arlington, VA USA Phone: Fax:

3 Acknowledgements This Occasional Paper is dedicated to my esteemed friend and colleague, Dr. Louise Diamond, co-founder of IMTD in 1992, Washington, D.C., USA. I wish to thank my Personal Assistants, Malala Elston and Whitney Louderback, for their insight, dedication, professionalism and their assistance in the preparation of this Occasional Paper. 3

4 Preface On May 26, 1992 Dr. Louise Diamond and I co-founded the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy (IMTD) as a non-profit 501 3, non-governmental organization, based in Washington, D.C. I became Chairman and CEO, while Dr. Diamond became Chief of Training, and later Vice President. The Institute was created to spread the concept of multi-track diplomacy across the world. In 2000, Dr. Diamond retired and returned to Vermont. A year later, Dr. Eileen Borris, based in Phoenix, AZ, became Chief of Training. As of this writing, some twenty-two years later, I am still Chairman and CEO and Dr. Borris is still Chief of Training. One of the basic principles IMTD has always followed is to only execute projects that have the support of the population in the area of conflict. We are a people-to-people organization. When invited, we go and listen and find out what the people s needs are. We never charge for our services, we are not funded directly by the United States government, and are supported by our members and private foundations. Wherever possible, we make a five year commitment to the projects we assume. The purpose of this Occasional Paper is to update Louise Diamond s and my book, first published in December 1991, and titled Multi-Track Diplomacy: A Systems Approach to Peace. That book laid out the principals of our nine track approach. This Occasional Paper, published 23 years later, and based on my personal perspective, describes individual projects or case studies, track by track, we have carried out during this period. The only way to solve a conflict at any level of society is to sit down face-to-face and talk about it. John W. McDonald 4

5 The mission of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy is to promote a systems approach to peacebuilding and to facilitate the transformation of deep-rooted social conflict. 5

6 TRACK I Government to Government Peace-Making Through Diplomacy Government, which is Track I, often fails to solve problems by NOT discussing them face-to-face with the parties involved. Two examples of such failures in diplomacy include the Panama Canal Treaty negotiations and the Israel-Palestine Peace Talks. 1. Panama Canal Treaty In 1903, the United States government and the Republic of Panama signed an international treaty in which Panama gave a ten-mile wide piece of land across the entire country to the U.S. government, in perpetuity, for the purpose of building the Panama Canal which would link two oceans. In 1904, the Panamanian government told the U.S. government that they would like to replace the words, in perpetuity" in the treaty, with a finite date. However, the U.S. government loved the word, in perpetuity and refused to discuss the issue further. In 1964, riots broke out in the Canal Zone and many people died. Given this turn of events, President Lyndon Johnson decided that the time had come to sit down with the Panamanians and negotiate a new treaty. In 1967, a new treaty emerged, but failed to be ratified by the Panamanian government. It took another ten years (February 1977), when President Carter sent Ambassador-at-Large Ellsworth Bunker and Ambassador Sol Linowitz to sit down with the Panamanians to negotiate a new treaty which was ratified in the spring of 1978 by the US Senate by one vote over the two thirds majority required. The final phase of the treaty was completed on December 31, On this date, the United States relinquished control to Panama and gave the Panamanians complete control over the Canal in This is an instance in which governments refused for decades to negotiate despite tensions from the beginning of U.S. control of the Canal. It was predictable that tensions would at some point rise further and would ultimately lead to violence. However, when the parties finally agreed to negotiate face-to-face, a peaceful solution was achieved. 2. Israel-Palestine Peace Talks In 1996, toward the end of his second term in office, President Clinton convened a dozen members of the Israeli and Palestinian governments at the Wye Plantation in Maryland. The goal was to develop a two-state solution and a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine. The group met for two and a half weeks with American officials. Everyone became angry, the talks broke down, and no one achieved any positive results. Why? One reason is that the United States government put the Israeli delegation in one room, and the Palestinians in another. A third room, between the Israel and Palestine delegations, was for American advisors who carried messages back and forth between them. At no time during the entire two and a half weeks did the Israeli and Palestinian delegates ever sit down together and to talk face to face! 6

7 Unfortunately, as of the writing of this Occasional Paper, the two parties still have the same problem. 7

8 TRACK II Multi-Track Diplomacy as a systems approach to Peace-Building The Origins of Track II Mr. Joe Montville, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer and colleague, wrote an article in the edition of Foreign Affairs magazine describing what he called Track I and Track II diplomacy. Track I dealt with government-to-government relations in the field of foreign affairs, and Track II dealt with everything outside formal government relations between people from around the world. It was a fascinating article. Beginning in 1983, Joe and I served together at the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department. There I learned more about his definitions. I was fascinated by this new approach to diplomacy. In 1985, while still at the Foreign Service Institute, I put together the first book on this subject titled Conflict Resolution: Track II Diplomacy. Joe Montville wrote the first chapter called The Arrow and The Olive Branch: A Case for Track-Two Diplomacy. The book contains an additional seven articles by other authors, describing the efforts to resolve conflict peacefully at the level of private citizens. The book was ready for publication as a State Department document when my boss hesitated and blocked its publication. However, at the U.S. Foreign Service, a person eventually gets transferred. I waited eighteen months for this to happen to my boss. The day after his departure, I got the book published by the U.S. Government Printing Office as a formal State Department publication. It was a revolutionary document at the time and slowly this concept is gaining ground. Positive examples of multi-track diplomacy People s Bus - Kashmir In 1995, I was approached by two retired three-star generals. One was from India, the other from Pakistan. They had been invited to the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. for a month. While there, they heard about IMTD and met with me. Within two minutes they asked me to solve the Kashmir problem! I laughed and said I could not do that. However, they were serious men and urged IMTD to get involved. They said, We have fought two wars against each other over Kashmir, and do not want a third one. Our governments have not taken any action when we have raised this issue. We hope that you can build relationships, and eventually peace, between the two sides of Kashmir. In 1997, we raised funds from the U.S.-based McKnight Foundation, as well as the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo and developed several projects in Kashmir. One of these is the People s Bus. In 1992, I met Shah Gulam Qadir. He is the Director of a Kashmir NGO called Kashmir Institute of International Relations (KIIR) in Islamabad. We became good friends and in June 2000 he invited me to Muzzafarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir in Pakistan. I met with the Prime Minister and other 8

9 senior officials and was asked to speak to a refugee camp outside the city of Muzzafarabad, where about a thousand Kashmiris who fled Indian-controlled Kashmir into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, and who were now stranded there with their families These Indian Kashmiris who, in fear for their lives, had fled across the Indian Line of Control, into Azad Kashmir, which is a self-governing territory controlled by Pakistan. Here these Indian Kashmiris, mostly Muslims, are living with their families and totally separated from family members who remained in India. The camp leaders briefed me on their situation and asked me to speak. I was reminded of the Politicians Bus that was used the year before, in 1999, when the Prime Minister of India took a bus from New Delhi to Lahore, Pakistan to meet with the Pakistan Prime Minister. They negotiated the Lahore Declaration involving Kashmir, but it fell apart a few months later. I suggested that the camp leaders, IMTD, and Kashmiri representatives work cooperatively to develop a People s Bus, based on the earlier Politicians Bus model. This project would facilitate visitation of Kashmir citizens on both sides of the Line of Control for the first time since The refugees loved the People s Bus idea and when I returned to Washington, D.C., I began to generate publicity around it. For instance, the cover of the largest English language magazine in Pakistan called Musawaat International (September 2000 issue) discussed and strongly supported the project and praised IMTD as a leading think-tank. In 2003, I noticed a press release issued by the Indian Foreign Ministry entitled, Track II Initiatives and identifying five confidence-building measures designed to strengthen Indian-Pakistan relations. The third measure was the People s Bus. My advocacy efforts had paid off! Four days later, the Pakistan government said they approved IMTD s proposed project but they neglected to move forward with it. Then, in December 2004, the new President of Pakistan and the Prime Minister of India ordered negotiators, who had been arguing for a year, to make the People s Bus a reality. On February 15, 2005 both sides issued a press release saying the bus would make its first trip on April 7, 2005, exactly five years to the day after I had put forward this idea at the Pakistan refugee camp. The Prime Minister of India and the head of the Congress Party, Ms. Sonja Ghandi, flew up to Srinigar and waved good bye to the bus headed for Muzzafarabad. The next day, April 8, 2005, the front page of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post all showed a photograph of 20 Pakistanis from Azad Kashmir, crossing over the rebuilt and renamed Peace Bridge into the Indian side of Kashmir for the first time since 1947! The bus is still running today and officially called the Srinagar Muzaffarabad Bus. It is a passenger bus service connecting Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir with Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistan-administered territory of Azad Kashmir across the Line of Control (LoC). The bus is of symbolic importance to the efforts of the two nations' governments to foster peaceful and friendly relations and is one of the most important confidencebuilding measures in the history of the two countries. I was pleased to see that the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) which teaches a course on Multiparty Negotiations: The Power and Coalition Building, cites in one of its lectures the Power of the People s Bus to change systems. 9

10 The Georgia-South Caucasus The British Petroleum Pipeline In 2001, I was invited by the President of an NGO called the Georgian American Business Association, located in Washington, D.C., to speak at the first meeting organized by this organization in Tbilisi, Georgia. I went with my Georgian conflict resolution colleague, Irakli Kakabadze, who obtained his Master s degree in Conflict Resolution from George Mason University s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. The conference was opened by Georgia s President Shevardnadze. The first day, we discussed the recent treaty signed by Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to build an oil pipeline starting in Baku, Azerbaijan, continuing through Georgia, bypassing Russia and the Black Sea, passing through Kurdish territory in the eastern part of Turkey, and ending in the Turkish port of Cyan in the Eastern Mediterranean. I was the first speaker on the second day of this conference and pointed out that nobody had talked about the people or the conflicts near the path of this 2000 km pipeline. I talked about our Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy s systems approach to peacebuilding and the importance of involving the people living along the pipeline. I suggested that whoever was building the pipeline should hire local villagers along the whole length of the pipeline to build and maintain the pipeline which would not only have an economic impact, but also give them a sense of responsibility for protecting the pipeline. British Petroleum (BP) got the contract and hired eighty percent local workers to build it. I pointed out that this pipeline was going near various local conflict zones (Nagorno Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia), and would exit in eastern Turkey through the Kurdish territories. I suggested BP hire IMTD for conflict resolution training along the pipeline path, but I was not successful. My second idea had to do with the pipeline itself. I learned that BP was planning to construct a heavy metal wire fence on each side of the aboveground pipeline. I proposed that instead of spending the money on 4000 kilometers of fence, that they bury the pipeline 6-8 feet underground so villagers could still plant crops and graze their cattle, and so that no terrorists could access it. BP finally agreed. To my knowledge, this is the only buried pipeline in the world. In 2003, I was invited back to Tbilisi by the Minister of Petroleum to settle a perceived issue of legality regarding the BP pipeline. During a four hour meeting with 60 NGO representatives, all from Tbilisi, I learned two things. The first was that they had never met before and many did not know of each other s existence. And second, that they all believed that the 17 km section when moved to the National Forest was illegal and they would demonstrate against the change of the originally chosen path. I finally suggested to my colleague Irakli Kakabadze that we go have a look for ourselves at this environmental issue, as it was only a two and a half hour journey. We discovered that at the site in question on the right side was a national forest, in the center was a river, and on the left side of the river was the proposed pipeline. It was nowhere near the forest. There was nothing illegal about the project None of the complaining NGOs had ever left Tbilisi to look for themselves. Rather, someone had started a rumor and everyone had believed it. I learned a powerful lesson from this experience: Management By Walking Around (MBWA) as opposed to Master of Business Administration (MBA) whose followers only stick to their computers. 10

11 When I got back to town with Irakli, I asked that the original NGO group be reconvened. I told them the results of our trip and added that President Shevardnadze had personally ordered the shift of the pipeline because the original plan had this pipeline section in the vicinity of a Russian military base in Georgia and therefore it was too vulnerable for a possible Russian attack. Abkhazia In tandem with my work regarding the pipeline, the Petroleum Minister asked a friend of his to brief me on another issue, i.e., regarding the breakaway province of Abkhazia. After meeting with his friend for about an hour and a half, I suggested that what had been done so far to build peace in the breakaway province of Abkhazia had not worked and a new approach would be necessary. What needed to happen was the creation of a Peace Zone in Abkhazia and over time, try to reunite the province with Georgia after five years of civil war when the Soviet empire was breaking up in I explained that my idea of a Peace Zone would be a de-militarized zone. Over the next five years I proposed working with the people to gradually re-build relationships and bring business and investment back. A few days after this meeting, I received a phone call from the Chairman of the National Security Council of Georgia, Tedo Japaridze, inviting me for a visit. It turned out that the friend of the Minister of Petroleum s had gone to the NSC to report on my idea of a Peace-Zone. After I had briefed the Chairman of the Georgian NSC on my Peace Zone idea, he agreed to recommend it to President Shevardnadze. A few weeks after my return to Washington, D.C. I was told that President Shevardnadze had officially approved the Peace Zone idea for Abkhazia. He was the first head of state ever to agree to a Peace Zone. In September 2003, the Deputy of the Georgian Parliament came to Washington, D.C. We spent a week together discussing the Peace Zone idea. I took him to members of our U.S. National Security Council, the State Department and other organizations where we received a supportive response from everyone. Unfortunately, on November 3, 2003, after a terribly flawed parliamentary election in Georgia, the people rose up in anger. They marched onto parliament on November 23 as President Shevardnadze was speaking. His friends took him out the back door of the building and he resigned as President of Georgia the next day. He still lives peacefully in Georgia to this day. The Rose Revolution, as it is now called, was taking place, and the Peace Zone idea disappeared from the Georgia political agenda. On October 1, 2012, the opposition party won a parliamentary election and the Peace Zone idea is once again actively pursued by some leaders in the Georgian government. Nepal In 2001, IMTD was invited to Katmandu, Nepal, by two Nepalese NGOs who wanted us to help solve a Maoist insurgency. We were funded by an education NGO in Aachen, Germany and visited Nepal and listened for three weeks. As this was our first visit, we met with representatives from all of our nine tracks and learned all we could about the conflict. Nepal was a Hindu nation and its people were organized into a Hindu caste system formed three thousand years ago. This divided the population 11

12 into 24 castes in order to control the people. The top caste consisted of the Brahmans. The lowest caste was called the untouchables or Dalit. Out of a population of twenty-five million people, five million are still Dalit. In many ways the caste system is still alive today despite of the fact that it has been unconstitutional for decades. I was invited to lunch one day by the Chairman of one of the NGOs which had invited us to Katmandu. He proudly showed me an eight-page color brochure describing the activities of his NGO. On page three I noticed a chart listing the thirteen hundred people that had been killed by the Maoist insurgency which had started in All of them were listed by their caste. I showed the page to our host who was a PhD and a Brahman. I told him that the page was unconstitutional! The Nepalese Constitution, written years earlier, said quite clearly that a Nepalese citizen could not be referred to by his/her caste. My host was appalled that this had never occurred to him. He promised in his next edition to change the reference to list the dead by province instead. Among many of the people that I met with, was Mr. Nepal. He was the head of the Marxist- Leninist Communist Party of Nepal. In spite of his title, he and his institution were really social democrats. He told me that the Maoist leadership was a breakaway group from the left wing of his party. They had gone to the villages in the mountains to work with the untouchables and help build infrastructure, schools and other facilities. They were successful and well considered by the poor who appreciated their help. They then began to peacefully demonstrate against the Nepalese government which created great concern in the capital, Kathmandu. The local police were armed with World War I Enfield rifles and intervened. They shot the Maoist demonstrators and the Maoists retaliated. So began the conflict. I asked Mr. Nepal why they called themselves Maoists, since Mao, the Chinese Communist revolutionary and founding father of the People s Republic of China, which he governed as Chairman of the Communist Party of China from 1949 to his death in 1976, was a harsh ruler responsible for the deaths of thirty million Chinese citizens. Mr. Nepal informed me that they were referring to Mao as a young revolutionary, leading a military retreat undertaken by the Red Army of the Communist Party of China, the forerunner of the People s Liberation Army, to the North of China, known as the Long March (October 1933-October 1935). I responded that I thought it was an unfortunate name because few people in the west remember that point of history, but only associated Mao with death and oppression. I later visited with the U.S. Ambassador in Katmandu. I told him that I thought the root cause of the conflict was not the Maoists, as most asserted, but the still existing caste system. He agreed, but said he was only concerned with the Maoists. At the end of our three-week visit, we were invited back by the people with whom we had worked, to carry out conflict resolution workshops. We were planning to return with funds from the organization in Aachen when we learned that the entire royal family of Nepal had been murdered, including the very popular Crown Prince, who was later charged with the crime. The official version of the incident was that the Crown Prince, for whatever reason, had murdered his family and then committed suicide. No one in the country believed this story, nor did I. When the body of the Crown Prince was found, he had been killed by a bullet to the back of his neck. The King s brother, who was not in the city at the time of the murder, assumed office. He ruled the country with an iron fist. 12

13 Yet, in spite of the royal massacre, IMTD was asked to return to Katmandu a few months later, to train thirty people for one week. This included many of the people we had met with during our first visit, including two people labeled untouchables and a Maoist. At the end of that successful training in the Dhulikheli Lodge about an hour east of Katmandu, we helped create a new Nepalese NGO called COCAP. All thirty of the participants in our training joined the NGO. It is still operating as a human rights NGO to this day. We currently have two active projects in Nepal, one dealing with disability issues, and the other involves the training of journalists. 13

14 TRACK III Business Peace-Making through Commerce India-Pakistan Training of Business Leaders In 1995, as I had mentioned earlier, I had been visited by two Three Star Generals, one from Pakistan and one from India who launched IMTD s involvement in Kashmir. Unfortunately, they had no money and neither had we at that time. In June 1997, I was visited by Mr. Sundeep Waslekar from Bombay, India. He had established an NGO in 1991, called the International Centre for Peace Initiatives, working on Indian Kashmir issues. We discussed peacemaking possibilities in Kashmir and decided to focus on the role of business. He invited me to Bombay and promised to introduce me to local business leaders. The very next day, I was visited, via the U.S. State Department International Visitors Program, by Mr. Humayun Akhtar Khan. He was a parliamentary leader in Islamabad, Pakistan and businessman with the Pepsi-Cola franchise in Lahore. I discussed our idea about training business leaders and he loved it. He invited me to Lahore and promised to take me to Karachi to meet with business leaders interested in Kashmir. A week later, I received an from the PhD Chamber of Commerce in New Delhi. They had heard about IMTD and asked for more information about the role of business. In 1988 there was a wave of violence in Indian Kashmir. The 800,000 tourists that had visited each year stopped coming and the economy collapsed. Thus, Dr. Louise Diamond and I decided to try to draw business leaders in Indian and Pakistan Kashmir to invest or re-invest in Kashmir economic opportunities. We visited New Delhi, Bombay, and Lahore to begin discussions on business development. A few months later, I was invited to speak in Minneapolis where I met the Program Manager for an NGO called the McKnight Foundation. She was fascinated about my ideas regarding business possibilities for Kashmir and asked me to submit a grant proposal. Subsequently, IMTD received a McKnight grant for $ 150,000. The Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo heard about the project and also made a grant of $ 70,000 for IMTD s work on the business diplomacy project. The PhD Chamber of Commerce in New Delhi and Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS) agreed to host IMTD training sessions. In 1999, IMTD held a three day training in New Delhi, for twenty-eight business leaders on the role of business in conflict areas. The training team included Dr. Diamond, Mr. David Hurd, a top business executive from Iowa (President of Principal Financial Group), Mr. William Elliot, President of Davis H. Elliot Company, Inc. from Roanoke, VA, and myself. Several months later, we held a similar training with the same group of trainers, at LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan. The training consisted of fifty business leaders from around the country, and was opened by the Pakistan Lt. General who had visited me in 1995 as mentioned earlier. Both events were an outstanding success. All participants agreed to actively consider investing or re-investing in the Indian-Pakistan Kashmir economy. 14

15 TRACK IV Private Citizen Peace-Making through Personal Involvement Interns Since its founding date of May 26, 1992, IMTD has been honored to have the essential professional support from 287 Program Managers from sixty-eight countries, who are all getting their Master s or PhD s in the field of conflict resolution. None of them get paid. IMTD carefully selects students who are passionate about peacebuilding. In the early years we accepted summer, spring, and fall interns. However, more recently, under the leadership of our Executive Director Karen Dickman, we have focused on yearlong internships, if possible. National Defense University The National War College (NWC) was created in 1946 at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. It was the senior training arm for military leaders and senior civilians in the U.S. government. The Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) was established at the same time in 1946 and was designed to focus on the more practical procedures required to carry out the goals of the military. In 1976 the National Defense University (NDU) was established to consolidate the nation s defense community intellectual resources, and ICAF and NWC became the first two constituent units of the new institution devoted to joint higher learning whose graduates receive Master Degrees at the end of their full-time 10 months course. Today, NDU is comprised of five colleges and includes officers from many different countries allied with the United States. As a State Department official, I was accepted as a student at the National War College and graduated in In November 2005, after I had completed a lecture about IMTD and multi-track diplomacy at NDU, I asked Professor, Dr. Alan Whittaker, leader of the course, if I could compile a twelve-week elective course that would be called Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding. The goal of the course would be to teach students that there were other ways than the gun to solve conflict. He agreed and set up a meeting with the Dean who supported my proposal for the curriculum. IMTD had twelve students in our first class in January At the end of those twelve weeks, a full Colonel in the Marine Corps, whose last post had been in Iraq, came to me and said, If I had only had this course before my assignment in Iraq, I would have done things totally differently. At the end of our second twelve-week course in the fall of 2007, eighteen students, the maximum number allowed for an elective course, enrolled. A full Colonel in the U.S. Army told me, This was the finest course I have ever had in my entire military career. As of December 2012, IMTD had taught the course twelve times and graduated 180 students from 53 countries, 98 of whom were non-american. This elective has been the most widely attended by international students of any elective class in the program at NDU. 15

16 TRACK V Research, Training, and Education Peace-Making through Education Cyprus Background In 1960, as the British Empire was receding, it agreed to take its former colony, Cyprus, to the United Nations. Britain was sponsoring its independence. Cyprus was accepted in 1960 as a member state of the United Nations. In 1964, Greece got greedy and attempted a coup. As a result, a great deal of killing took place. The U.N. Security Council met in an emergency session and quickly dispatched a peacekeeping force made up primarily of Canadians. In an effort to keep the peace they drew a Green Line down the middle of the island. An uneasy peace lasted until There was another coup attempt by the Greeks when Turkey deployed, to Cyprus, thirty-five thousand troops to prevent the coup. All of the Muslims on the island moved to the North, and all the Christians moved to the South. No one was allowed to cross the Green Line to make a telephone call or send a letter. Each side of the island was effectively sealed off from the other, even though mixed religious communities had lived together in peace for a thousand years. Unsuccessful efforts at resolving the conflict at the Track I level by the U.N. and others occurred in the following years. IMTD Involvement Based on a speech I gave on Track II Diplomacy in 1991 while being President of the Iowa Peace Institute, Dr. Louise Diamond as well as a Cypriot Professor from the University of Maine connected and Dr. Diamond was invited by the professor to go with her in 1992 to Cyprus shortly after we founded IMTD in May We decided to make Cyprus peace IMTD s first project. The professor from the University of Maine had roots in the Greek Cypriot as well as the Muslim communities, and we got permission from the U.N./Canadian Peacekeepers to cross the Green Line to build our contacts on both sides on the island. We stayed for three weeks learning about the mounting crisis. We called upon Prime Minister Rauf Denktash of the Turkish-Muslim North, Prime Minister Glafkos Clerides from the Greek Christian South, United Nations representatives in New York, UN Peacekeepers and the State Department. At each meeting we explained who we were and that our long-term goal was to bring people together from both sides of the island to gradually build a peace process. We were basically informing Track I of our intentions to return to conduct training in conflict resolution and invited them to participate. Over the next fifteen months we returned often to Cyprus and met separately with private citizens from all the diplomacy tracks, to learn more about the conflict. Finally, in 1994, we brought six Cypriots from the North together with six from the South, for a meeting on the Green Line at the Ledra Palace Hotel, where the Peacekeepers were staying. 16

17 The group consisted of a political leader from each side, a university president, a business leader, a journalist, a poetess and other male and female peace builders from both sides. We had previously trained each separately, and now united them in a dialogue. Within an hour they bonded and we made them our Steering Committee until 1998, when we ran out of funding and IMTD had to leave. The trainers we had trained also trained an additional 2,500 Cypriots which motivated the U.N. to build a training center on the Green Line. Unfortunately, Track I never sent anyone for training. Dr. Diamond and Dr. Diana Chigas from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard acted as lead trainers and they did a magnificent job. Harvard received funding from the U.S. Department of State Fulbright Program out of the U.S. Embassy on Cyprus, and IMTD sub-contracted with Harvard. 3 Related Stories 1) A few months after we had established our Steering Committee, we took a group of twenty people to Oxford, England for training: the original six on each side from the Steering Committee, plus four of their associates. We had ten great days getting acquainted. At the close of the training, we held a farewell dinner party for the group and several invited guests. It was a great success. At the end of the meal two guitarists, belonging to the Turkish team, appeared and all sang Turkish songs of their youth. After half an hour the guitars were passed to the Greek side and they, in turn, sang Greek folk music. In a matter of minutes the entire assembly stood up and started dancing arm-in-arm. It was a great moment! A young man came up to me after the dance who was the son of one of the participants of the training and told me he never would have believed this scene if he had not seen this with his own eyes. 2) Early in our training cycle we decided to never advertise our activities, but rather to let word of mouth spread this information. The Turkish side invited us to do training and thirty Muslims showed up including ten women. We always sat in a circle and I went around to ask each person for an introduction. Halfway across the circle was a medical doctor who said that he had hated the Greek Cypriots all his life because his parents had been killed by them in He said he was in the circle because of what happened in his home a few nights earlier. He had gone to kiss his ten year old son good night and found that he was in bed with a long wooden rifle. He asked his son why he had the rifle and the boy replied, to kill the Greek Cypriots when they come after me. The doctor explained he was at our training because of his son. He wanted to learn how to bring peace to the island. He added that he forgave the Cypriots for killing his parents! 3) In 1996, we brought twenty Greek and twenty Turkish Cypriots to a training camp in West Virginia for a week. They had never met before. On the bus from Washington, D.C. to West Virginia, I sat next to the only woman member of the Supreme Court of North Cyprus. During most of the journey, I listened to her complaints and why she had finally decided to participate in this event. We conducted team-building exercises designed to get the Greeks and Turks working together cooperatively. The training was an outstanding success. The woman, member of the Supreme Court, returned to North Cyprus and wrote rave reviews in English of her West Virginia experience. These were distributed in the Greek community. 17

18 4) Spring 2004 The Deputy Prime Minister of the Turkish-Muslim North announced that for the first time since 1964, the Green Line would be open to anyone wishing to cross over for a visit without any official documents being required. Within the first twenty-four hours, a total of 5,000 Turkish and Greek Cypriots crossed the Green Line. No one was shot, beaten, or otherwise harmed. All were welcomed by the other side. Within the next three months, 700,000 people crossed the Green Line. There are only a million people on the entire island. Who raised the gates? The one Muslim political leader who was a member of the group of six in our trainings with the Steering Committee! Track I is still arguing about a peace treaty when we estimate there have been ten million crossings since The people have spoken. Bosnia Background On December 1995, the Dayton Accords, reached in November in Dayton, Ohio, were signed in Paris. This brought five years of intensive civil war in Bosnia-Herzogevina to an end. NATO sent in peacekeepers and representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to help rebuild the country. In December 1995, I was approached by a U.S. member of the OSCE who wanted IMTD to conduct conflict resolution training at their expense for OSCE staffers who were on a six-month assignment in Bosnia-Herzogevina. I proposed a start date of February However, as we prepared to depart for Sarajevo, he asked us to postpone the trip until April. In April he asked us to postpone until June. Dr. Diamond and I finally arrived in Sarajevo in June 1996 and met with the OSCE. I asked about the delay and was surprised to learn that there was an Ambassadorial Committee in Vienna responsible for approving OSCE projects in Bosnia. When they reviewed our project proposal for $25,000 they decided that it was a waste of money because theoretically, all OSCE diplomats already knew about conflict resolution. Thus, the OSCE representative asked me to train Bosnians in these skills, not diplomats. We agreed and started training locals around the country under OSCE auspices. They provided the forums, transportation, supplies, safe lodging and contacts in the local communities. Each time we conducted training for Bosnians, local OSCE representatives attended in order to listen in and refine their conflict resolution skills without telling their masters in Vienna! IMTD also set up a local Bosnian NGO called Nesto Vise to help us work with young people. Mr. Dan Whalen, an American business man from Oakland, California, heard about our work and approached me in 1999 and was interested in accompanying one of our trainers to Bosnia in the Spring of Dan was deeply shaken by the disaster that war had wrought upon the country and wanted to help. Dan had no connections with Bosnia before, but this visit had a major impact on his life. He asked us to put together a group of thirty-five young people and bring them to an island in northern Minnesota where there was a Canoe Camp perfect for trainings. Our Bosnian NGO selected the students for the training from Muslim Sarajevo, Serb-Orthodox Banja Luka, and Catholic Mostar. These communities were divided and did not relate to each other. It was important from our point of 18

19 view to unite young people from each of those three ethnic groups to learn to work and co-exist together. Stage I - Training in Minnesota Dr. Diamond, IMTD s Chief of Training, worked effectively with the thirty-five Bosnians for over three weeks in After the group returned to Bosnia, Dan Whalen continued to fund the project. We decided that each of the thirty-five participants should develop their own small-scale technical assistance project for their village or community. The projects would be implemented over the following year, at Dan Whalen s expense. Carol Yamasaki, from California, was the Chief Trainer in this year-long process. She was assisted by two other personnel from the United States. Dan Whalen, Carol, and I attended the monthly report briefings usually held in Sarajevo. At the end of the first year, we held a graduation ceremony and everybody was delighted with the achievements of that first year. The projects that were selected were all grassroots related and impacted on the people of these three regions. Stage II -Training in Minnesota Another group of thirty-five young people was selected in 2000 and I took over from Dr. Diamond as IMTD s representative. Dan Whalen hired a woman fire walker trainer for an impressive 3-step process. Step one: each participant was required to take the shaft of a three foot arrow and place the steel-pointed end into a block of wood held by a staffer. The other end was placed under the participant s Adam s apple. All of the participants chanted together, as instructed by the trainer. This was combined with the outstanding drumming by a South African drummer who was living in Bosnia and became a part of the group. The goal was to move your body forward and break the arrow. Every participant did this, including me. Step two: the same process was repeated, but this time with a six foot hollow iron construction rod. One end was placed under the chin of one participant and the other end under the chin of a second participant and, with the chants and drumming taking place, both people moved towards each other until the rod was bent into a large U. I was asked by the resident cook, a big man who weighed some 280 pounds, if I would bend the rod with him. I agreed and we were successful. Step three: late that evening all participants were invited to walk barefoot across the glowing coals in a ten foot wide and twenty foot long pit, where a fire had been burning all day to create the coals. Again, to the chant and to the drums, most participants walked across the burning coals. I did not do this. Several of the participants walked two or three times across the bed of coals, and nobody got a single blister. The goal of the fire walker exercises was to break down fear and other mental barriers that showed that these three exercises could happen without intense pain, and it confirmed the belief in success of the participants - and nobody was injured! 19

20 The other major confidence-building measure was also remarkable. The thirty-five participants were divided into equal inter-ethnic groups and with counselors went on a five-day survival canoe trip. The landscape in southern Canada and northern Minnesota was basically barren, with small bushes and multiple small streams and rivers. Each group had to carry their own their bedding, their food, their tents, their clothing and in several instances carry their canoes over portages. They learned a remarkable lesson: to survive you have to work together regardless of your ethnic differences and help each other. It is safe to say that these individual canoe groups bonded for life and they all survived their week-long experience! The 35 young people in year two returned to Bosnia and began to work together and on their own individual projects. Dan Whalen, Carol Yamasaki and I returned every month of that year to Sarajevo to receive monthly updates and give advice on planning and budget-development on each person s project. Again, all of this was funded by Dan Whalen. Stage III and Stage IV - Years Three and Four The entire process for Stages 1 to 2 was repeated in the third and fourth year. One hundred thirty-nine participants from 65 communities across Bosnia-Herzogevina graduated from the year-long process over four years. Education Dan Whalen sponsored a full college degree for every training participant! Approximately 40 of our program participants attended either St. John s University where Dan Whalen had graduated years earlier, or the women s College of St. Benedict, in Collegeville, Minnesota. The remaining participants attended universities in Bosnia-Herogevina. Several went on to get Master s degrees and one a Ph.D. The Future All but two of the participants in our program returned to Bosnia and developed a number of successful projects in their respective communities. In 2013 they had a reunion with over one hundred of the program participants and all of the original trainers in Mostar. IMTD honors the personal dedication and the generosity Dan Whalen has devoted to this project over the years. He is a unique human being and a critical change agent in peacebuilding. Chris Fessler, his personal assistant, has been of enormous help over the years. Carol Yamasaki s support throughout the whole program,and her deep understanding of the needs of the young people and the goals to achieve, contributed greatly to the overall success. In my opinion, the graduates of this program are the future leaders of Bosnia! 20

21 Track VI Activism Peace-Making through Advocacy Track VI is a very important part of our systems approach to peace. We believe in the power of people to create change. When large numbers of people demonstrate peacefully, they can change the thinking and approach of Track I. We have recorded ten examples of People Power in three of our IMTD Occasional Papers. These can be downloaded from our website at free of charge. These include: 1) The Rose Revolution, Occasional Paper No. 15, March 2005, by Irakli Kakabadze. Irakli is IMTD s colleague from the Republic of Georgia and was present during the Rose Revolution. Briefly, on November 3, 2003 there was a corrupt parliamentary election in the Republic of Georgia. The people organized in anger. On November 22, 2003, President Shevardnadze declared martial law. The next day, tens of thousands of people marched on the Parliament that was surrounded by a thousand armed soldiers. Not a shot was fired. Each soldier received a rose from the demonstrators, hence the title of the uprising, the Rose Revolution. President Shevardnadze was removed from office. Under the Georgian constitution, the head of Parliament is next in command. She called for elections and in February 2004, a free democratic election was held and Georgia began its journey to democracy. 2) Demos Kratos, Occasional Paper No. 14, August 2004, by Cheryl Duckworth and John W. McDonald, Ambassador (ret.). Cheryl wrote this paper while an intern at IMTD, working on her Master s degree in conflict resolution. This paper discusses the following cases of People Power: Nepal 1990; Indonesia 1998; Yugoslavia 2000; Hong Kong 2003; and the Georgian Rose Revolution To quote one example: in 2000, one and a half million people demonstrated in Belgrade against the terribly flawed election. Within weeks, the dictator Slobodan Milosevic stepped down, was arrested, and sent to The Hague to be tried as a war criminal. 3) People Power, Occasional Paper No. 18, August 2007 by Vladislav Michaldik. The author worked with us for many months while studying for his Master s in law from American University in Washington, D.C. He is now a global peace activist and works in Lima, Peru. This paper looks at the following countries: Ukraine; Lebanon; Nepal; Kyrgyzstan; Bolivia; Uzbekistan; Togo; Cyprus; and Hungary. The one negative example on this list is Uzbekistan. The government there felt threatened by the 2003 Georgian Revolution and the neighboring and subsequent revolutions in Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in The Uzbek military fired upon two thousand men, women and children who were peacefully demonstrating and eight hundred people were killed. The survivors fled across the border to Kyrgyzstan. A few weeks later the UN High Commissioner for Refugees ordered an air lift. The refugees were flown to Romania. This is the first time that I know of that the UNHCR airlifted a people to safety. Demonstrations help People Power continue to take place. In January 2014, the people of Ukraine rose up in anger for a second time and on January 28, 2014 the Prime Minister resigned and the conflict persists to this day. 21

22 Track VII Religion Peace-Making through Faith in Action Track I. Track VII is a very critical component of the multi-track system, and one usually dismissed by Douglas Johnston is the former Executive Vice President and COO of the Washington, D.C. thinktank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He wrote a number of books on faith-based religion and the relationship to diplomacy. He asked me to review one of the books and it turned out that my review was his favorite. In it I said that in forty years as a U.S. diplomat, I had never heard the word religion associated with diplomacy. At no time in my career was religion ever considered as an element of foreign affairs and diplomacy. Doug subsequently started his own NGO, the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. At the end of his first day as President, he called me and said it was the first day in his life that he had ever worked without an income. I laughed and said, join the crowd. Almost every project that IMTD has been involved in has involved people of different religions. For example: 1. The divided Cyprus (8 years): Christians and Muslims. 2. Bosnia-Herzogevina (8 years): Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. 3. Israel and Palestine (5 years): Jews, Muslims, and Christians. 4. Since 1990, IMTD has worked with the Dalai Lama and Buddhist leaders. 5. From 1993 to 1996 IMTD worked in Liberia with Christians and Muslims. 6. Since 1997, IMTD has worked with Muslim and Hindu Kashmiris. 7. Since 2001, IMTD he worked with Nepal and Hinuds/caste system. 8. Since 2008, IMTD has worked with the Sikh community in India, Pakistan and the U.S. We continue to believe that the recognition of the role of religion in conflict is essential in our systems approach to peacebuilding. 22

23 Track VIII Funding Peace-Making through Providing Resources I have found over the years that this track is a very difficult track because it is hard to raise money for peacebuilding from private institutions and individuals. However, these are the institutions and individuals that have supported us over the years. I wish to thank them for making our existence and work possible. The Hewlett Foundation On May 26, 1992 after developing bylaws, articles of incorporation, and a Board of Directors I visited the appropriate office in the District of Columbia, paid $26.00 and became incorporated as a notfor-profit corporation called the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy. At that point Dr. Louise Diamond and I had no money, no space, no computers, no staff and only our individual donations to help us get started. At the end of our first year, Dr. Diamond and I had raised $14, from friends, new members, and the ARCA Foundation. Two hours before we planned to celebrate our first anniversary, I received a phone call from the Hewlett Foundation of California, advising me that their Board of Directors had approved my grant proposal, and that IMTD would be receiving a check for $250, to be paid over the next three years for non-project contributions. We were launched! In order to offset staffing costs we decided to bring in unpaid interns in post-graduate programs in conflict resolution. Also, we continually expand our membership of individuals who are willing to support our peacebuilding work through annual contributions. McKnight Foundation In 1996, I was invited to speak at a conference in Minneapolis, MN regarding the work of IMTD. After I had completed my presentation I sat down next to a person in the audience who was a program manager for the McKnight Foundation based in Minneapolis. She was fascinated by IMTD s work with Track III, the business community, and asked me to apply for a grant. I did this and IMTD received a generous grant of $150,000 for our work in India and Pakistan with business leaders, with a focus on Kashmir. The Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Tokyo The Sasakawa Peace Foundation heard about our work in the business community in India and Pakistan and sent us a check for $ 70, The Whalen Foundation From 1999 to 2003, the Whalen Foundation very generously funded all of IMTD s work in Bosnia-Herzogevina and Dan Whalen has continued on a smaller scale to assist IMTD financially on various projects since. 23