In a world ridden with conflicts of all nature from class to race to politics, Prof George E. Irani’s specialty is perhaps very crucial to give peace a real chance. He teaches ‘conflict resolution’, though he prefers to use the term ‘conflict control’ as the former is too farfetched in the real world. In this interview he weaves in and out of international politics from Europe and Middle East to Africa to explain the complexities involved in the resolution of conflicts. In a world where the ghosts of persecution from the past are not easy to exorcise, how can one advocate forgiveness and reconciliation? What are the steps that need to be taken to pave the way for lasting peace after conflicts, and how can the shards from broken histories be swept away from creating more pain? Professor Irani tries to answer some of those profound questions.

Question: You were one of the organizers of the conference titled Acknowledgement, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Lebanon, in 1994, while you were teaching conflict resolution at the Lebanese American University (LAU). Tell us about some of the lessons from that conference.
Answer: For societies going through transitions to have some kind of peace or stability you need also to have a process called policing the past. Take for example, South Africa. First of all you need to have a strong leader that has liberated himself or herself from the legacy of victimization. In a sense we are all victims. What Mandela did after 30 years in jail was that he came out and basically empowered his people. Empowerment is the key word. Like Gandhi, Mandela basically called for reconciliation. Bishop Tutu created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There are several steps towards attaining that peace after conflict. First of all, you acknowledge that you have harmed the other person. Secondly, you apologize. It has to be a verbal apology.

Q: These are steps the perpetrator has to undertake?
A: Yes. It is the people who committed the crime who should apologize.

Q: So, it is the minority white people who had to do this in South Africa?
A: In a sense yes. Then you have ‘Compensation.’ It can be moral or material. In the case of Germany and Jews, Germany until today is paying compensation to the Israeli government. They have paid something around $ 40 billion since 1945 in compensation for the Nazi Holocaust.
After this, you get into forgiveness and reconciliation.
This is a culturally related concept. Forgiveness is a Christian concept. Like the Satyagraha undertaken by Mahtama Gandhi in India.
So, the conference in Lebanon was the second conference in the world dealing with forgiveness and reconciliation after South Africa.

A famous Polish historian and journalist Adam Michnik was also invited to attend the conference. He was in jail during the communist era in Poland. He was the first to advocate reconciliation with the communist regime.
Some people attending the conference said that it was too early to talk about reconciliation as the war in Lebanon had ended in 1990. Ironically ten years later everyone in Lebanon was jumping on the bandwagon of forgiveness. But everyone knows that there has been no reconciliation in Lebanon.
Then I worked with the displaced communities. There were internally displaced people, like the Druze and Christians from the villages in the Shuf Mountains.
We were trying to create a kind of intercommunity dialogue. A process funded by the US Department of State and the Swiss government.

Q: Did the process also include the return of the displaced communities?
A: The idea was that. There were three stages. One was to have an inter-Christian dialogue followed by an inter-Druze dialogue. We were trying to create a smooth process for the Christians to go back to their villages.
This has been an important part of my work.
Professor Vamik Volkan, a famous psychiatrist, dealing with conflict resolution, once did a film called Dragon’s Egg based on the conflict in Estonia between Estonians and the Russian minority living there. He was also involved in the Cyprus crisis between the Turks and the Greeks.
Volkan visited also Kuwait three years after the Iraqi invasion. He came here to do a study on Kuwaiti society after the war. It was a very interesting study.

All kinds of painful things had happened in Kuwait at that time. The scars exist till today.
I had also done a study on Arab-Islamic rituals of reconciliation. In Arab culture, especially in places like Jordan, when you have a crisis, let’s say a car accident, people do not go to the police. They go to a friend of the families for conflict resolution. It could be a religious leader. This person plays the role of mediator, and he decides what kind of a deal to make and compensation to pay (diya).
The purpose of this is to stop the process of revenge. Otherwise, if you have a crime, it begins to escalate. It’s after this traditional reconciliation that they go to the police or other concerned authorities. It’s still there.
I have also lived in British Columbia for two years, teaching. And then I went to Spain. I lived in Madrid for 4 years and worked at the Toledo International Center for Peace (CITpax).

Q: How meaningful is this term ‘Conflict Resolution’ in the current world? We find conflicts everywhere, and rarely do we hear of a resolution.
A: Yes, Kashmir is an example. Syria is another example. The term itself is problematic. I prefer to use the term ‘Conflict Control and Reduction’ or ‘Conflict Management.’
Resolution is a farfetched project. It takes a longer time. An example of resolution is the relationship between the Germans and French after WWII. They fought each other for centuries, after WW II, French leader Charles De Gaulle and German leader Konrad Adenauer decided to foster reconciliation between their peoples. It took them a while, but they achieved it.
In the Middle East, you have the Israel-Palestinian conflict. A long- term conflict. I don’t see a resolution soon. It has become more localized. I see it being solved either by Palestinians coming under the Jordanian government in some sort of a Jordanian condominium or federation.
Then you have the current conflict in Syria.

Usually, what we teach in conflict resolution is that we have to discover people’s interests and have interest-based negotiations. For example, in 1967, during the Arab-Israeli war, Israel occupied Sinai, which belongs to Egypt. In 1973, there was another war. The Egyptian army tried to cross the Suez Canal and take back Sinai but they were pushed back.
In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter, tried to engage the two countries in a peace treaty. He achieved it by inviting President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel to Camp David in the US.

Egyptians wanted sovereignty over Sinai, which was very important. For Sadat as he wanted to regain his country’s sovereignty and honor. For Israel it was an issue of security and recognition. They wanted to be recognized by Egypt the most important Arab country. So, in the Camp David accord it was agreed that Israel will withdraw from Sinai and that Egypt would recognize Israel. A patch of land in Sinai close to the Israeli border would be demilitarized. This was a successful example of interest-based negotiations.
This is an example of speaking to the interest of people. And of course, there is money involved. The US had to shell out money to Egypt and Israel. Every year, Israel gets $ 3 billion from the US government and Egypt gets $ 1.5 billion dollars.
This is why despite all the turmoil in Egypt Egyptians never said they are going to cancel the Camp David agreement with Israel.
In the instance of Kashmir, it’s much more complicated because there you have territorial , historical and religious claims and then you have the locals who want to be on neither side. It is very complicated by the clashing interests of India and Pakistan.

Q: What role does justice play in conflict resolution? How much would you have to compromise on justice for the sake of peace?
A: In all the communities that came out of a crisis, or a dictatorship like you had in some South American countries, the question is “how do you define justice?” It depends on your values, culture and history.
In the case of South Africa, they forgave the white policeman who committed torture and so on and so forth. However, some of the parents of victims were very angry. This is why you need tribunals to establish accountability. They created a special tribunal for Yugoslavia, and then there was one for Liberia. There is also a special tribunal for Lebanon, and it has been five years now they have been doing investigations are being conducted to find out who assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri

So, it is a matter of how much weight you give to justice and how much weight you give to forgiving and forgetting. It’s hard to forget, even if you forgive. The past lives with you. That was the genius of Gandhi by the way in India, where he basically advocated the principle of non-violence, which Martin Luther King later used in the US.
In Rwanda for instance, there was a massive genocide was perpetrated by the Hutus against the Tutsis. 800,000 people were massacred in one week. When the massacre ended, they created what they call traditional courts. They brought in local lawyers and through the community itself, they tried to manage the country. They tried to bring together the perpetrators and the victims. It was a painful process, but it led to conflict control and reduction.
In Lebanon, they tried to forget the past. This is why there is no reconciliation. Lebanon today is a mess. When Harriri came, he tried to tell the Lebanese to forget the past and move on. But that is not possible. It is very hard.
Of course the issue of justice is crucial. But the question is how much weight you give justice. If you actually get into the details of Hariri’s murder and the court comes out openly and condemns the perpetrators, you risk having another civil war.
In the former Yugoslavia, the resolution was by splitting up the country. Of course Kosovo is still not finished. Similarly the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is a long unending story.

Q: But the question is who decides all this. Who decides that the victims should forgive? Is it so easy to feel the pulse of a collective conscience? Even if there is one victim who can’t forgive and who wants to see justice served, shouldn’t his feelings be respected?
A: It depends on the context. If you take the French and the Germans, there you have two modern states, and leaders who came out and said let’s forget the past and move on. Plus they understood that their interests were mostly economic, which is why they created the European Common Market which later became the EU.
But in fragmented societies, the feeling of victimization is deeper. Basically, this is what you have to work on. Add to that the role of religion. It can play a positive role. Or it can play a negative one.
In the case of Arabs and Israelis, they haven’t been killing each other for centuries. But certainly both of them are victims.
There is also the question of perceiving the other. Despite all the ruckus over globalization, I don’t think it is leading us anywhere to some kind of a resolution of conflicts. It’s only making conflicts more global. In Syria, you have these extremist radicals coming from all over the globe. They are even sending women. You even have fighters coming from Belgium, the US, Chechnya and other places to fight in Syria. This has become like in Somalia or Yemen. The globalization of civil wars.

Q: To make things simpler, are there any such factors to which all conflicts in the world can be reduced to, like for instance economy?
A: By the way, economy is a very important factor. You have to feed your people. In conflict resolution we teach Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. So we have basic needs like food, shelter and then it goes up to education and things like that. The thing is you have to provide people with is their basic needs. And secondly, you have to provide people with a sense of fairness; that they are not being abused.
Conflicts, by the way, people have this notion that conflict is negative. Of course, conflict can lead to terrorism, violence and so on. But conflicts can also lead to change in direction, rethinking, forgiveness and it forces you to think about the way you are living and look for alternatives.

Q: What is your take on the role of the UN in conflict resolutions? We find that some of the biggest conflicts in the world have come about after the creation of the UN, like Kashmir, Palestine and so on.
A: UN is a useful instrument to manage conflicts. But the major condition for that is that you need to have the agreement of the biggies. So the question is why can’t we have countries like India, Germany, Brazil be made permanent members of the Security Council. The fear is that if you open that can of worms then you have a mumbo-jumbo and the whole organization can collapse. The UN is useful for conflict management, peace keeping, peace making, up to a certain point. But the UN mainly works for the interest of its members. Look at Syria, how many times UN Security Council resolutions were vetoed. Things move only when the major powers in this case the US and Russia agree with one another.
There is a famous quote by the great Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. It says
Eye for an Eye will make the whole world go blind. How true this is in our violent world today.

biography

George E. Irani is currently Associate Professor of International Relations at the American University of Kuwait. Between 2005 and January 2008 he was Director for the Africa and Middle East Program at the Toledo International Center for Peace in Madrid, Spain. Until June 2005 he was a Professor in the Peace and Conflict Studies Division at Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. Prior to that, he was senior policy analyst with the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Between 1993 and 1997, Irani was assistant professor in political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut (Lebanon). While in Lebanon, he organized two international conferences funded by USIP. The first dealt with the issue of forgiveness and reconciliation in Lebanon and the second tackled the issue of the internally-displaced population in postwar Lebanon.

Dr Irani holds a laurea in political science from the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milano, Italy) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Southern California.

Selected Publications:
1975-2008: Pulling Lebanon Together (PAPERS IEMED, Number 6, 2008)
Regional and Ethnic Conflicts: Perspectives from the Front Lines (Prentice Hall, 2008)
Rituals of Reconciliation: Arab-Islamic perspectives (University of Notre Dame, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Studies, 2000)
The Papacy and the Middle East: The Role of the Holy See in the Arab-Israeli Conflict (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989)

By Valiya S. Sajjad
Arab Times Staff