Mari Fitzduff, from Ireland, gave a 'Caux Lecture' on her peace-making work in Sri Lanka, Israel, Ireland and elsewhere, drawing on her personal experience.
Mari Fitzduff, from Ireland, and now Professor and Director of the international MA programme in Coexistence and Conflict at Brandeis University in Boston, USA, today spoke about her peace-making work in Sri Lanka, Israel, Ireland and elsewhere, drawing on her personal experience. She was giving a Caux Lecture at the Initiatives of Change international conference in Caux, Switzerland during a conference on ‘Tools for Change’. ‘I see in this room the hope that we can solve our conflicts without bloodshed and despair,’ she said. And ‘only those crazy enough to believe in a different, better future are the ones who can bring it about’.
A Southern Irish Catholic, who fell in love with and married a member of the northern Anglo-Irish ascendancy, Fitzduff spoke from her own personal experience. Their family business was blown up three times, once by loyalists and twice by nationalists. Before their teenage years, she said, her two sons had learned 32 ways to discern an enemy, in a country where almost all the population were white and Christian. Thirty of their neighbours lost their lives – and she had felt ‘there has to be another way’. She had started to study conflict resolution and mediation, and to teach as a way of learning more. Half of her first class knew so little about the subject that they thought they were coming to a class on meditation!
Forty per cent of New York was now foreign born, and in the attacks on the Twin Towers people from 80 nationalities lost their lives, she said. ‘All our countries are struggling with problems of ethnicity, different cultures and languages. We must learn to respect and validate diversity,’ she went on. ‘All our wars are global; all our wars are connected.’
‘We like our enemies to be simple; we like our beliefs to be simple,’ Fitzduff continued. The tendency to fundamentalism is there in all of us, she suggested. She confessed that for a time, her feminism had convinced her that the true enemy was the male half of humanity. Others might blame the British or capitalism. But weapons would never change our enemy’s views. In conflicts, there were structural and cultural issues, but conversation with ‘the other’ must be robust enough, strong enough to deal with issues of equity, she said. Peacemakers have to choose between two roles: the role of the advocate for excluded groups that need defending, or the role of intermediary. These are both legitimate choices, she suggested. In conflict situations, the actors, the paramilitary and state police and armed forces, but also the population could be ‘addicted to life on the edge’. It is important, she continued, to give young men ‘good ways to be heroes’.
Wars are not inevitable, she insisted. And she went on to underline their cost. Currently wars and arms are costing $1,000 billion a year, ten times the amount spent on development aid and 250 times the amount spent on peacemaking and peacekeeping. The Irish professor, who from 1990-1997 was Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, called for ‘leaders who move beyond following their followers’, ‘transformational leaders’ who transcend the needs of their own group. But such leaders must be ready to take risks. Many of her audience were studying and learning conflict resolution skills. She told them, ‘If you continue with this work, you’ll risk becoming a stranger in your own land.'
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