Quarterly Bulletin of AMERICANS FOR UNESCO, Spring 2003
I discovered UNESCO and its unique peacebuilding potential in Italy in 1993. One of a small group meeting in springtime Venice to discuss UNESCO’s role in a changing world, I expected to be the token military man in a pleasant conversation about post-Cold War opportunities. I left with my life’s work changed.
Among those gathered by Director-General Mayor were former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel physicist Ilya Prigogine, Chilean presidential candidate and economist Manfred Max-Neef, British MP Emma Nicholson, and American futurist Alvin Toffler. A naval officer and international security strategist in the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, I arrived from the Pentagon where I had begun using the phrase “deep peace” to describe the era which seemed to stretch ahead.
High optimism was afoot inside our Venice conference room. From our survey of the sciences, education, information technologies, economics, and politics, the world seemed to be reinventing itself after the collapse of the superpower rivalry. We agreed during the scheduled discussions that a culture of peace ought now supplant the globe’s long-dominant culture of war.
But at coffee breaks, the TV brought us a world veering into a different, deadlier channel. Almost coincident with our late April meeting, the Rwandan genocide had begun. Early reports were confused. Not until later did the world understand that 800,000 people could be killed in a hundred days, but in Venice we did know that something horrific was underway. And we knew that the soon-to-be-infamous Radio Colline was encouraging the killing. That is when I saw UNESCO’s capacity for muscular intervention at first hand.
Hoping to dampen the still-young fires of death, the DG phoned the Secretariat in Paris with authorization for the immediate funding by UNESCO of a radio operation to counter the hate broadcasts. UNESCO’s follow-on study of the media dimensions of the genocide helped the world understand how the vaunted information revolution—seen in our Venice discussions as a hopeful force for human progress—could also supply the tools for inciting exceedingly lethal violence among neighbors.
I returned to Washington convinced that the conjunction of the Venice hope and the Rwanda horror reflected a profound transformation in the natures of war and peace. Focused inward on the use of new technologies in our own weaponry, we military theorists had missed the fact that sometime in the late twentieth century war itself mutated. Armed conflict had moved off the battlefield and into the community. Rwanda was an extreme, but not an aberration.
My naval career complete, I have continued to study the evolution of war and the nature of peace, often at first hand in at-war and at-risk countries. No longer is the clash of armies the characteristic form of armed conflict. In war nowadays neighbor kills neighbor, incited by a malevolent leader. Rwanda showed just how lethal this “community war” can be. In one conflict after another—among them Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, and now Iraq—homely weapons and improvised explosives turn out to be more decisive, more modern, than the high tech fighting machines still treasured by the Pentagon. More significant than the shift in tools is the change in fighters. Unless placed there by outside intervention, we don’t find traditional soldiers on the contemporary battlefield. Gone are disciplined troops under professional command acting within the rules of war. Replacing them are brutal and brutalized people, many still children, who swirl in frenzied mobs or pop up from hidden terror teams at the urging of warlord-thugs whose only morality is personal power.
These changes in war and warriors telegraph an equally profound transformation in the nature of peace. Peace is no longer a military deliverable. Exactly as the UNESCO charter has it, peace is now built in and by the community, not harvested on the battlefield. Militaries still have a role—a stronger UN military intervention in Rwanda might have saved many lives—but as we see in Iraq and Afghanistan, armies cannot shoot their way to peace, no matter how impressive their firepower. Peacebuilding is a newly demilitarized vocation.
Enter UNESCO.
Recall the familiar history: emerging from WWII, the UN architects were determined to prevent more wars. The foresighted framers knew that political mechanisms centered on the Security Council would not be enough. They knew, as we know freshly from our 21st Century wars, that the taproots of peace and war spiral all the way down into the mind and circumstances of each of us.
UNESCO’s designers created a prevention instrument powerful enough to touch all the channels of human endeavor, an arena so capacious it can encompass all the dimensions of peacebuilding. But before UNESCO could grow into its clothes, the Cold War interfered. The superpowers took over the job. Their weapon-wielding strategists, myself included, considered UNESCO irrelevant, if we considered it at all.
Not now. The pedigrees of today’s violence are to be found exactly where UNESCO’s charter points: in the hearts of everyday people lured by malevolent leaders to expect salvation from their poverty and powerlessness by destroying their neighbors. With its unique charter, UNESCO is singularly equipped to be the world’s main facilitator of deep peace peacebuilding.
To his great credit, DG Matsuura is committing UNESCO to the practical work of peacebuilding in the field. The UNESCO role in helping rebuild Afghanistan’s educational system is one example; the recent colloquium between Israeli and Palestinian journalists at the Secretariat in Paris is another. But UNESCO’s charter runs much further than promoting dialog or designing school curricula. Those are tactics. UNESCO was designed to be strategic.
Of all our peace-enabling instruments, only UNESCO can facilitate the kind of muscular, whole-society peacebuilding and conflict prevention work the world must do if it is to escape this era of neighbor on neighbor war. Only UNESCO can draw together all the threads of multi-sector civility in ways that defuse conflicts before they ignite.
An example I discovered while helping Central Asian leaders design a conflict prevention mechanism is “water-based” peacebuilding. Sitting just north of the Afghanistan cauldron of instability and drug exports, the region’s five former Soviet republics have yet to erect a practical mechanism for steering away from the several problems that could drag them into violence, even into state collapse. One of those problems is water. Some have it, all need it.
Since water questions touch almost every activity in a society, water is strategic—either fuel for conflict or lubricant for cooperation. As my Central Asian colleagues pointed out, all of UNESCO’s multi-disciplinary competencies can be—indeed, must be—engaged in the sorts of holistic economic, social, and scientific cooperation required to underwrite any durable peace in that fragile region. Many other regions offer similar peacebuilding opportunities.
Our disorderly, community war-torn world desperately needs the whole of UNESCO up on its feet and fully engaged in the truly strategic peacebuilding and conflict prevention role assigned by the UN’s founders. Unaware of UNESCO’s capabilities, Pentagon strategists are again turning to their own toolkit, never mind that military operations may pour gasoline on the fire.
Let us hope that America’s return to UNESCO soon results in America’s appreciation of UNESCO’s peacebuilding muscle.
Larry Seaquist, a member of the AU Board and a former US Navy warship captain and Pentagon strategist, writes about conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Appointed a Senior Special Advisor to the DG as a result of the Venice conference he directed UNESCO’s Venice Project—a pioneering effort to demonstrate UNESCO’s capacities for innovative peacebuilding. The three volumes of the Venice Papers reporting on this work may be read on-line at www.unesco.org/cpp/venice.html.