This article is from the EMU News Archive. Current EMU new is available at www.emu.edu/news

Toward A More Peaceful World

By Luanne Austin, Daily News-Record

Fiji’s third military coup, in May 2000, was particularly violent. The South Pacific island country suffered much in the way of visible damage.

"But it is the damage done to the hearts and minds of the people that is the real, and often overlooked, hurt," said Koila Olssen of Fiji.

Olssen was speaking to a class, "Capacity-Building for Peace Orgnizations," about how she’s helping to build a peace center in Fiji. She was one of 183 participants in EMU’s ninth annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute, a program of the school’s Conflict Transformation Program, held May 3-June 15.

SPI features four sessions of seven daylong classes, each session consisting of five concurrent classes. The program is designed to provide specialized, intensive training in peacebuilding, conflict transformation, trauma healing and restorative justice to practitioners from around the world.

SPI’s interactive approach in the classroom draws on participants’ experiences, as well as the instructors. Participants may take the classes for college credit or professional training.

Olssen was also part of a special conference hosted by SPI this year which drew 15 leaders of peacebuilding groups from around the world to form a network between existing institutes in the United States, the Philippines, Ghana and Zambia, and groups planning peacebuilding institutes in Jamaica, South Asia and the South Pacific.

The conference, which ran May 30-June 4 between SPI’s third and fourth sessions, was held in response to requests from CTP graduates working in the field. It was funded by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace, which was established in 1984 under President Ronald Reagan.

Olssen works in Fiji with the Ecumenical Centre for Research, Education, and Advocacy. After the coup in 2000, ECREA, a Christian organization, decided to start a program to respond to what had happened to the people. Olssen heads up the effort to establish the program, which she calls a peace center.

"I didn’t know what I was doing," she told the class. "My background is in social work."

She enrolled in her first SPI three years ago. Since then, she and ECREA have made great progress in determining what the Fiji people need in a peace center. Even so, they still have a long way to go. The peacebuilding conference helped a lot.

"The discussions were very focused on what a peacebuilding organization should consider," she said.

"People who have been through CTP and gone out to work in or start peace organizations are now asking for this," said Ruth Zimmerman, CTP co-director. "They want to know how to start it, how to run it, how to deal with conflict in the organization."

Sometimes conflicts arise in peace organizations because many people in the field feel called to it, said Zimmerman.

"They are visionaries, so what they decide is it," she said.

In discussions and workshops, participants from both established and fledgling organizations learned from each other, said Zimmerman.

"This room is packed with experience," said John Katunga Murhula, acting director of Nairobi Peace Initiative-Africa, which, at 20 years old, is the oldest peace organization in Africa.

Katunga, as he is called, was referring to the two dozen participants in the "Capacity Building" workshop, held June 7-15, which used materials generated from the peacebuilders conference. The class led by Katunga and CTP staffer Vernon Jantzi dealt with the nuts and bolts of founding and sustaining an effective peace organization.

"One of the deep issues in this field is to see as many people as possible with many different types of skills be involved with peacebuilding," said Katunga.

Another important principle is to articulate the vision and invite those who share that vision to help. Most of the conflict in peace organizations arises from disagreements about the group’s vision, he said.

In Fiji, Olssen said, the vision is to deal not only with the pressing physical needs, but with psychological and social reconstruction as well.

"You can broker all the treaties you want, but if people are hurt and angry, reconstruction will not occur," said Olssen. "We must deal with people’s hearts and emotions."

Other countries represented at this year’s SPI include Ghana, Tanzania, Burundi, Bolivia, India, East Timor, the Philippines and Haiti. One man from Palestine is working there to establish a peace organization with Mennonite Central Committee; a business woman and consultant from Fair Oaks, Calif., uses and teaches peacebuilding principles in business; and a police officer from Pakistan who has done U.N. peacekeeping is learning about restorative justice practices.

Classes included such topics as "Strategic Nonviolence," "Religion: Source of Conflict, Source for Peace," "Qualitative Research for Social Change," "The Practice of Restorative Justice" and "Peacebuilding for Traumatized Societies."

reprinted with permission of Daily News-Record

— posted June 22, 2004