Sun, Jan 30, 2000 page9

• `Soft power' is working around the world to prevent more wars

  The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Sweden is seeking peaceful solutions in such places as Yugoslavia, Georgia and Burundi

  • By Jonathan Power
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  It's only a mom and pop shop, and it lives precariously on the edge of financial oblivion, but it is one of the very rare organizations of its kind. Like King Canute, from whose ancient capital it works, it attempts with one hand to hold back the waves of violence, conflict and war, and, with the other, the creditors.

  The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, (TFF), based in the ancient ecclesiastical and university town of Lund in the south of Sweden, combines research into the origins of human conflict and practical application as mediators in some of the high profile dramas of our age, first and foremost in ex-Yugoslavia, but also in Georgia and, most recently, in Burundi.

  The creation of an ex-academic political scientist, Jan Oberg and his sociologist wife, Christina Spannar, it runs on a modest budget of US$50,000 a year, but with a group of high-powered unpaid advisers at its beck and call and a team of also often unpaid conflict mitigators who make repeated trips to its adopted trouble spots. Part of the work is to analyze the conflicts from a non-partisan perspective, but part is to work to mitigate them and to set up long term projects of peace education and reconciliation. TFF has served as advisors to ministers in the unfortunately short-lived, peace-orientated, government of Milan Panic in ex-Yugoslavia and to the moderate Kosovo-Albanian leadership under Ibrahim Rugova. When I read what Oberg prescribed for Kosovo six or seven years ago on his many regular visits there, before most of us knew where to find it on the map, I was struck with the thought that perhaps much of what came to pass could have been avoided. He also proposed an alternative to the Dayton plan for Bosnia and has elaborated a series of ideas for violence-prevention in Macedonia.

  In Oberg's chapter on UN peacekeeping, contributed to "A Vision of Hope," the official book to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the UN, he observed, "The UN rather than intervening in the early days of a conflict and thus seeking out a "bigger peace for the buck" has found itself embroiled in impossible missions in the wake of catastrophe". What the UN needs, he wrote, "is skilled operators and training for conducting violence -- preventive diplomacy ... peace building can take place in a local community long before there is a signed agreement between national leaders. Indeed, serious local peacekeeping efforts -- peace from the ground up- can serve as an important stimulus for peacemaking at higher levels."

  Oberg's special gift is his ability to combine penetrating observations on the disturbed parts of the world we confront with an intensive, hands-on, conflict prevention work. It seems to give his naturally acerbic tongue extra bite. In a recent newsletter he describes the Western alliance as a power adrift now it has lost its favorite enemy, the Soviet Union. This, he says, "has deprived it of vital elements of its own vitality. Incapable of living without its enemies its depressive side has created scores of rogue states, dictators and terrorists. While its manic, messianic side has invented grandiose projects -- globalization, disciplining interventions as in Kosovo, cultural supremacy and renewed militarism."

  But one shouldn't have been surprised, he adds in a laconic aside, "Two Western-based wars, nuclear bombing and overkill, and some 150 wars since 1945 mostly fought with Western-supplied arms, have not persuaded those in power that war as a legitimate institution must go. One would have been a fool to expect a Pauline conversion just because the Berlin Wall came down."

  "It is important", he says, "to learn from the twentieth century that violence is rooted less in human evil (although I don't discount that element) than in ignored or mismanaged conflicts. Conflicts are neither good nor bad, they happen. Violence and war is humiliation for both sides. The perpetrator and the victim are deeply connected, usually in a Devil's account."

  "The outsider, if he wants to be useful, has to project soft power, that is humility, tolerance and nonviolence. But too often the West uses hard power, hard talk, hard technology and hard economics as its tools and doesn't think enough about how to build a cooperative and sharing society."

  When Oberg and his team go into a war zone he doesn't change his tune.

  "I tell them how reconciliation takes at least two individuals. It aims at achieving something constructive out of a dark, hurtful past. It does not mean forgetting, but remembering the past to live normally and more fully in the future. We should forgive because we cannot forget."

  In various parts of ex-Yugoslavia, TFF has set up reconciliation workshops, most recently funded by the Council of Europe which latterly has begun to understand the importance of his work.

  TFF's work in Burundi is just beginning. Oberg will bring this country ravaged by tribal conflict the expertise he gained from working with the divided tribes of Yugoslavia.

  His precepts can be summed up in a phrase: "there is no "good" violence which can solve the conflicts of "evil" violence."

  He has found a soul mate in Burundi's minister of education, Prospect Mpawenayo, whom he met at the State of the World Forum chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Oberg recently finished a report commissioned by the minister on how to introduce into Burundi a program of peace education and research. "And now we begin the hard part", he adds.

  Thanks to the Internet, TFF is able to have a world-wide influence. The Washington Post described it as "an organization that aggressively uses the web.".

  Its web site (www.transnational.org) gets about 350 hits a day compared with only 10 a couple of years ago. During the Kosovo crisis the figure shot up to 1,500 a day.

  Perhaps, if the members of the UN Security Council were more serious about bringing peace to distant and troubled parts, they would hire TFF, give it a special mandate, a good budget and tell it to replicate itself everywhere the UN is involved.

  Jonathan Power is a freelance columnist based in London.
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