Becoming Peace-makers

Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil, SDB

Guwahati, India

01. In the Kuki-Paite clashes in Manipur (India) in 1997, some 400 people lost their lives, hundreds of villages were burnt, and thousands of people were rendered homeless. The violent struggle lasted several months. We succeeded to hold peace parlays with the representatives of the two groups in Guwahati and Churachandpur. I still have a bullet in my drawer which I earned at Churachandpur. Peace came at last in 1998. Hardly 1% among the people are Catholics, though many are Christians.

02. In the Bodo-Adivasi conflict around Kokrajhar, Assam (India) during 1996-97 a similar number of people died and over 200,000 were rendered homeless. At least 180,000 people still remain in refugee camps. The Church leaders earned credibility among the people doing relief work for several months, and organized a series of peace-meetings at Guwahati, Kokrajhar and Gossaigaon, till the hostilities ceased. About 5% of the two communities may be Catholic, most are not Christians.

03. It was my good fortune to have been able to organize, with the help of my ecumenical friends, not only activities like peace meetings, campaigns, rallies, prayer-meetings, symbolic actions, signature campaigns, peace clubs, and produce educative materials like booklets, posters, and slogans; but also to have been closely associated with direct peace negotiations. I give below a few of my learnings from my peacemaking experience.

04. With increasing instances of violence the world over, peacemaking has become a central task urgent upon every citizen. We have been fed for over a century on philosophies of struggle and so inspired by the ideals for fighting for justice and striving for our rights, that our combating spirit has grown. And our reconciling skills have sagged.

05. We know that all religions glorify peacemaking, while people like Nietzsche critiqued compassion and glorified violence.

06. If, in a conflict, we take for granted that one side is definitely right and another side assuredly wrong, that one is a demon and another a helpless victim, and that we have to take sides and fight to finish, we shall not succeed to become mediators between the two.

Most contenders in the fray are convinced that they are fighting for a good cause. They claim that they are wrestling for justice for their own people. Correspondingly, we will find that the other side too is waging a war in behalf of fairness to their community or set of interests. Thus, perceptions of justice clash. And when justice clashes with justice, the peacemaker becomes helpless. So the first learning from experience in this area of peacemaking is that the peacemaker should be prepared to fail.

07. The next learning is this: you will not be in a position to initiate a reconciliation-dialogue with contending groups unless you have a measure of sympathy for their cause in your heart. Excessive preaching and repetition of pacifist platitudes in the early stages of the dialogue will sound provocative and humiliating to them. Hasty condemnations will enrage them. Even if you believe that their claims are exaggerated, unless you can empathize with them at depth and are touched by the passion they have for their goals and the sense of justice that motivates them, or their approach to the problem, or at least some aspect of their cause, they will not open out to you.

08. But if you are profoundly struck by the magnitude of their grievances and are able to understand (not necessarily approve) the excesses to which their legitimate anger (at least the way they think) has driven them to, they will gradually, and with caution, begin to respond. The same will be true of the other party as well.

09. Neither group is asking you to condone their immoderation, they are asking you to understand how they felt compelled to go to such lengths. They are not asking you to say much, but feel much. They are not asking you to appropriate their anger, but to experience their pain in the inhuman situation in which they are imprisoned at the moment ( which, of course, they themselves had a share in creating).