War and
Peace and War
BOGOTA, Colombia – At the end of last year, the world celebrated
what seemed to be the end one of history's longest standing internal wars.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who had brokered a peace deal with the
guerrillas of the FARC-Ep received the Nobel Peace Prize. Even after the
narrow, but defeating plebiscite in October, Colombia’s Congress was still able
to ratify an adapted version of the peace deal with the guerrilla troop in
December.
The armed struggle between the Marxist-Leninist rebels and the
Colombian state, persisting over 52 years, has killed more than 220,000 people,
displaced over 5,700,000 and left the country traumatized. FARC-Ep, which had
started out as defenders of the marginalized and silenced, became wrapped up in
retaliation, the drug trade, vile kidnappings and blood-shedding as their
movement mutated from one of resistance to survival, by any means necessary.
After a tumultuous journey, they have now committed to renounce violence and
participate nonviolently in the social and political process of the country.
Right now, all of the approximately 9000 FARC-Ep fighters
remaining have gathered in twenty special concentration sites and begun handing
in their weapons under the UN's watch. Yet, while the world believes that peace
has arrived in Colombia, signing the peace deal is in reality the beginning,
not the end of the story.
After more than half a century of continuous war, with hardly
anyone in the country knowing life without it, shifting from a culture of
brutality to one of cooperation, couldn't merely be done with a mere political
contract. How do you make peace in a country that has been embroiled in war for
two generations? Ending armed hostilities is one thing, building peace is
another, and the latter will involve a profound process of reconciliation and
restoring trust.
"Ending armed hostilities is one thing, building peace is
another, and the latter will involve a profound process of reconciliation and
restoring trust.
"
Colombia is a country at the tipping point, at a fragile moment
of uncertainty pregnant with both the prospect of a genuine humane
transformation and the imminent danger of a violent backlash that could be even
more brutal than the violence of its recent past.
After four years of complicated negotiations, with political and
economic power against them, most of FARC-Ep’s demands have been denied by the
government. The guerrillas’ clear commitment for a new path of nonviolence
comes close to a miracle.
Although the government has already failed to fulfill some of
their initial promises, the FARC-Ep has been steadfast in their vow to put an
end to warfare. In their camps, we've have seen moving scenes of
reconciliation, ex-guerrillas dancing with police men and UN officials. They've
committed for a national economic program based on small-scale cooperatives for
farming and production, hoping to make Colombia, a country highly dependent on
imports, food sovereign once again. And in one of the most progressive part of
the peace contract with the FARC-Ep, the Colombian government obliged itself to
return lands to seven million farmers that were displaced in the war.
The paramilitary state
Even with this hopeful backdrop, we have seen a massive
resurgence of far-right paramilitary units expanding their reach throughout the
country. For the past decades, these illegal right-wing death squads have been
the most deadly force in the civil war, but they're also the least known actors
in this tragic drama. Hired and commissioned by landowners and large multinational
companies like Chiquita, the fruit extraction conglomerate, paramilitaries were
formed as early as the 1960s to drive farmers and Indigenous people off their
ancestral lands for large-scale agricultural, mining and mega-dam projects.
The use of paramilitaries, as opposed to other acquisition
tactics, serve the purpose of crushing the massive popular resistance in the
Colombian countryside against these projects. What has emerged is an unholy
alliance of paramilitary units, the Colombian armed forces, the right-wing
oligarchy and international corporate and military power. The paramilitary have
become the hidden hand of the Colombian state and corporate power, many of them
trained by the U.S. Army.
To justify the state’s strategy of “accumulation by dispossession,”
as the eminent historian and geographer David Harvey describes it, politicians
labeled all strains of resistance, be it armed or nonviolent, as “terrorist”,
associating them with the guerrilla faction. In this sense, the battle with the
FARC-Ep has served the Colombian oligarchy as a welcomed alibi, allowing the
state-corporate complex to continue waging its war on nonviolent farmers,
Indigenous people, human rights activists and trade unionists standing in the
way of their neo-colonial agenda.
In the past few months, since FARC-Ep has abandoned their
territories, there has been an increased brutality of the hidden hand –
paramilitaries have silently intruded and occupied many of those areas,
threatening and displacing farmers, killing activists, forcing people to accept
their command as the new rulers – or else, face punishment. The number of
assassinated community leaders has surpassed twenty in the first two months of
2017 – more than double the number during the same period in the year before.
The paramilitary have especially targeted social leaders
involved in redistributing lands to farmers. Amnesty International, foreign
governments, the Vatican and the UN High Commission for Human Rights in
Colombia have all expressed concern with the paramilitary re-awakening in
Colombia. Yet, the Santos government, while acknowledging increased attacks on
activists, has so far been very careful not the use the word “paramilitary.” In
the government’s discourse, the paramilitary is a problem of the past, disarmed
and non-existent. Yet, the state’s interests of acquiring these lands to sell
or lease to multinational corporations in service of the neoliberal prime
directive of “increase GDP by any means necessary” perfectly aligns with the
paramilitaries actions.
The complexity of the Colombian situation and the rise of the
paramilitary reminds us of a stark fact: genuine peace will only be possible by
addressing the root-causes of the war. In other words, it cannot be done
without changing the rules of the global system that requires perpetual
exploitation of the Earth for maximum private profit and therefore necessitates
the displacement of people from their lands. And of course, requires human
beings to become a dependent, cheap labor force.
Colombia finds itself at a crossroads: Will a true process of
peace-building and reconciliation begin? Or will “peace” just be another word
for continuing a hidden war taking place in the country’s hinterland?
Building community for lasting peace: The example of San José de
Apartadó
Alongside the atrocious war, there also is another, more
beautiful face to Colombia – the almost unbreakable perseverance of people on
the grounds who have resisted the war by defending the values of community,
solidarity and peace, aspiring to create a different, more humane reality.
Though President Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize, these
less known people are the ones who most deserve international recognition,
having taken the pains of working for peace for decades. One of these is the
Peace Community of San José de Apartadó.
"It's the power of community, of building solidarity every
day, of sharing life and collaborating for a common goal that allowed them to
serve love instead of following revenge, under these most difficult
conditions."
Founded by 1350 displaced farmers in March 1997, after
paramilitaries roamed the entire region pillaging and massacring, the community
came together to protect themselves and their land, declaring the community
neutral in the war, saying that they would not give in to violence. The armed
groups made them pay a huge price for this decision, killing more than 200 of
their members, including most of their leaders. Almost all victims died by the
hands of paramilitary and national armed forces, working closely with
landowners and capital interests in the region.
Despite the horrors they have faced, they have stood their
ground and continue working together bound by an unwavering commitment to
nonviolence and reconciliation. It's the power of community, of building
solidarity every day, of sharing life and collaborating for a common goal that
allowed them to serve love instead of following revenge, under these most
difficult conditions.
Eduar Lanchero, one of their late leaders once said, “The power
of the community consists of its ability to transform pain into hope...” It's
been through community that they could begin healing the wounds of war,
activating the potential of empathy, forgiveness and collaboration amongst
people that had been deeply traumatized by the horror they experienced. With
their community, the people of San José show how to break the vicious
victim-perpetrator bond, understanding that any further act of violence would
just perpetuate the cycle that made them lose so many of their loved ones.
Lanchero further elucidated what's held them together and alive,
stating, “The armed groups aren't the only ones who kill. It's the logic behind
the whole system. The way people live generates this kind of death. This is why
we decided to live in a way that our life generates life. One basic condition,
which kept us alive was to not play the game of fear, which was imposed upon us
by the murders of the armed forces. We have made our choice. We chose life.
Life corrects us and guides us.”
Peace versus “development”
Despite of international accompaniment through Peace Brigades
International, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Operazione Colomba, an Italian
NGO, the persecution of the community continues and has augmented since the
peace deal was signed. The community of San José, too, has faced paramilitary
invasion, with their remote hamlets continually occupied, threats that the
community remain silent about the atrocities they have been afflicted by or
face further retaliation.
The army stands by tolerating the paramilitary, even threatening
the community to face public slander if they continue to denounce the
paramilitary presence. Recently, there have also been attempts by the state to
turn down visa applications for international human rights workers accompanying
the community. Additionally, some human rights organizations themselves are
considering to defund or abandon their Colombia programs in the wake of the
peace process. Without international accompaniment, uncounted communities and
activists in Colombia would be at the mercy of the armed groups without any
defense.
The state tells the people that now, as there's peace, there's
no longer any need for a peace community and offers them money to lure them out
of the community. Gloria Cuartas, the former mayor of Apartadó, the
municipality governing the region, says, “Parts of the government and
multinationals use the cover of apparent peace to manage what they so far
haven't – ending the peace community.”
You may wonder, why are they so worried about a community of
peaceful farmers? The Colombian army has been clear on this often stating that
the community is in the way of “development.” What do they mean by development?
Clearly they are not referring to peace and human development, but rather, the
narrow neoliberal definition of extractive-based GDP growth.
For twenty years the community of San José de Apartadó has been
living a working alternative of nonviolent resistance to the brutal agenda of
displacement and oppression. It seems to be the imperative of the state and the
power elites to dismantle it so it won't be replicated or emulated by other
communities living through the same struggles across the country.
Ati Quigua, leader of the Arhuaco people, who served as a
spokeswoman for Colombia's Indigenous nations in the Havana peace negotiations,
mirrors those worries, stating, “They are making “peace” in order to get rid of
the guerrillas, so that paramilitaries can take over the countryside, drive out
farmers and Indigenous Peoples and carry on with what they call “economic
development”. This isn't our peace. We want peace with the Earth. If things
don't change, Colombia is going to face a cultural and ecological genocide.”
Healing the colonial trauma
Addressing modern-day “development,” we touch not only the
political and economic system, but a traumatic chain repeating itself on this
continent all the way since Christopher Columbus arrived here in 1492. Edward
Goldsmith, one of the fathers of the British environmental movement, reminds
us, “Development is just a new word for what Marxists called imperialism and
what we can loosely refer to as colonialism – a more familiar and less loaded
term.”
Generation after generation, colonial rulers uprooted people
from their original home and ethical orientation that consisted in their
natural connection to land, nature and community. More broadly speaking,
patriarchy needed the isolated individual, separated from life, because this is
when people are most “governable”. The uprooted, violated individual suffered
profound trauma and will seek, if no healing outlets are offered, to pass its
trauma on to the “other”, proceeding the cycle of violence.
"Generation after generation, colonial rulers uprooted
people from their original home and ethical orientation that consisted in their
natural connection to land, nature and community."
To make people submit to their dominion, colonizers destroyed
communities, not just for material acquisition, but also because they
understood that community is the spiritual and ethical anchor connecting people
with all of Life. All throughout patriarchal and colonial history, all types of
authentic community have been dismantled – from the destruction of tribes
during the colonization of Latin America to today's struggles in San José de
Apartadó in Colombia to Standing Rock in the United States, where Indigenous
water protectors have fiercely resisted an oil pipeline running through their
native grounds, “defending the sacred” of water and Earth.
We see the same conflict everywhere in the world, in every
country, every region. Everywhere, an emergent humane impulse for community,
autonomy and healing clashes with the violence of state and capital power. How
can the power of community finally prevail?
Let us imagine an alternative that could save us from the
current collective suicide mission and provide us with the prospect for a
post-capitalist world. The “concrete utopia” of a free Earth could be a global
network of interconnected autonomous communities cooperating with all that
lives.
To get there, we need to combine the many struggles and movements
defending the sacred in a common global platform – a global alliance that comes
together to develop a common vision for the future, a new vision for
nonviolently inhabiting this planet. And, most importantly, an alliance of
people no longer guided by ideologies, but reconnecting with and serving life's
enormous powers of regeneration, healing and protection.
Life has survived all human aberrations. Life itself holds the
power which allows the tiny seedling to break through the thick layer of
asphalt, that is able to heal “incurable” diseases, that guides authentic
communities, and that is able to prevent and stop violence. By building
communities of trust that consciously heal the historic trauma and align
themselves with the powers of life in all they do, we open the door for a
process of global healing.
To dissolve the collective trauma, we must address its origin –
the separation between human beings and Nature. This was first created through
the Neolithic revolution, when our ancestors stopped relying on the bounty of
Mother Earth to feed them and imposed what Daniel Quinn calls “totalitarian
agriculture”. This was set into stone by the epochal divide between religion
and Eros in patriarchal societies and further solidified through the rise of
the city-state, hierarchy, empires and colonialism. And ultimately taken to
it’s logical outcome in the ecological mega-crisis that is globalized
capitalism.
"Colombia could become an example for genuine peace, which
other countries could learn from."
Still today, after more than 500 years of colonial history,
there are Indigenous communities in Colombia who are connected with sacred
knowledge – the Original Wisdom if you will. They have preserved the memory of
what human existence was like before the story of separation began. Patriarchal
religions tore the human heart apart by making people believe they should seek
God in some out-of-Earth dimension, while demeaning Earthly life, Eros, the
feminine and the body as sinful and evil. A culture that prohibits people to
follow what they long for and teaches them to hate what they love inevitably
becomes the breeding ground of explosive violence.
On the other hand, communities that can build deep levels of
trust can serve as “Healing Biotopes,” as the psychoanalyst Dieter Duhm calls
them. (Duhm developed the “Healing Biotopes Plan,” a strategy for initiating
global system change through complex small-scale models for a nonviolent future
culture.) And what better place to start then communities that have fostered
reconciliation in the heart of violence and oppression.
A vision for genuine peace
Indigenous groups and peace communities like San José de
Apartadó could assume a key role for the future of Colombia. With everything
they have suffered and experienced, with their profound knowledge about
forgiveness and nonviolence, they could teach disarmed fighters the ways of
nonviolent resistance, how to transform pain into hope, and hatred into
empathy. They're already working with international partners in this direction.
Sabine Lichtenfels of the Tamera Peace Research Center that has accompanied San
José since 2005, says, “The revolution we need will emerge from communities in
which people can foster profound trust among each other and cooperation with
nature and all beings. That's why we're working with San José and other
communities in establishing a Global Campus for a future without war.”
These communities can synthesize the best of Indigenous wisdom
with Western technik, applying best practices to restore nature and create
decentralized autonomy in water, energy and food, as well as deeper healing and
community knowledge for social sustainability. In San José, for example, or the
Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, education and healing centers for a peaceful
Colombia could arise. Self-sufficient, decentralized peace communities would
thus arise in the demilitarized zones throughout the country. Former warriors
would no longer serve the war, but the ecological and social restoration of the
country. Colombia could become an example for genuine peace, which other
countries could learn from. Peace communities, Indigenous people and former
guerrillas could come together for a powerful nonviolent resistance movement.
They would no longer fight against the system, but make it obsolete by
establishing lived examples for a post-capitalist society.
This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Martin Winiecki is the global coordinator for the Tamera Peace Research Center in
Portugal.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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