Transcript - Home from the War

 

__: You know, the use of the military, there are some people that are now suggesting that if you don’t want to use the military to maintain the peace, to do the civil thing, is it time to consider a civil force of some kind that comes in after the military that builds nation or all of that. Is that on your radar screen?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I don’t think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. Are we going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That’s what it’s meant to do.

MARK SOMMER: When US soldiers entered Baghdad and President Bush triumphantly pronounced “mission accomplished,” none of them imagined that this was not the end of the battle, but just the beginning. A President who earlier dismissed nation-building as someone else’s job found to his chagrin that in shattering the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein, he’d given himself the monumental task of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. From Iraq to Afghanistan, the Congo to Sierra Leone, once the bombs stop falling, the cameras move on to the next battlefield. But the combatants return to the rubble of a collapsed infrastructure, a ruined economy, political chaos, and bitterly divided communities.

VANESSA FARR: They may have particular healthcare needs associated with long-term depravation, malnutrition, HIV, malaria, TB, you name it.

MARK SOMMER: Today, on A World of Possibilities, “Home From the War: Reintegrating Ex-combatants.”

KLUBOSUMO JOHNSON BORH: By sharing of stories, we ... (inaudible) to come ... (inaudible) your traumatic situation.

BETH COLE: If you don’t secure peace in places around the world, it’s as dangerous as a nuclear bomb.

MARK SOMMER: My name is Mark Sommer. Join us as we examine international initiatives to help ex-combatants give up the gun and take up the hammer and plow to rebuild and replant their societies on native soil. Welcome to A World of Possibilities.

Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, and author of the best-selling book, A Long Way Gone, describes how, after being inured to violence from an early age, he and his fellow soldiers initially sabotaged well-intended efforts to help them reintegrate into civilian life.

ISHMAEL BEAH: The mistake that they did at that time, because the people who are rehabilitating kids, who had started this program, they didn’t know what to do. They had brought it from the rebel side and from the Army side and put all of us in the same home. That night it was war all over again, because once we learned that they were from the other side of the war. We just started, like, fighting each other. And, actually, I think one or two people lost their lives that night, and a kid’s eye got gouged out with a bayonet, and I got stabbed a little bit. A lot of people got stabbed. A lot of staff members got stabbed. But they realized then that they were supposed to put us in different camps of rehabilitation, the rebels ... (inaudible).

MARK SOMMER: One of the most difficult challenges facing fragile governments and the international community in the aftermath of civil or international conflict is demobilizing and reintegrating regular troops, guerillas, forcibly conscripted recruits, and child soldiers back into civilian life. An already difficult task is made still more problematic when so few material, financial and social resources are available. High unemployment is compounded by a lack of marketable skills among ex-combatants, who may have known little but war for most of their lives. Many struggle with haunting memories of atrocities committed by or against them by former friends and neighbors of a different ethnic group.

Through both UN and non-governmental aid programs, the international community has dealt with many such situations in recent years, from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Rwanda, to Kosovo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Gradually, a body of knowledge, skills and techniques is accumulating to guide future efforts. Larry Attree, a researcher with the UN Development Program, Transition International and Safer World UK witnessed the plight of former child soldiers, and, in particular, young women in Liberia, whose childhoods were stolen from them when they were caught up in the whirlwind of war.

To describe the challenges faced by those who seek to help them reintegrate into civilian life, Larry Attree joins us now from his home in London.

LARRY ATTREE: With an entrenched long-term conflict of that kind, and especially one that involves such severe human rights abuses, you end up with a big challenge in terms of reintegration, because a lot of the people that you’re dealing with have grown up in a society at war, which often means, I mean, in the case of children, it means that they lose their childhood essentially and all the things that you’d associate with a normal childhood. So, you’re taking about children who have never went to school, who have never known anything but growing up in fighting forces, who’ve been involved in perpetrating horrific things as well as suffering a great deal themselves, and who are obviously therefore severely traumatized. And, also, you have, in reintegration, a certain skill space to build on with ex-combatants, but if what they’re used to in terms of working is either fighting or being part of the back-up to a military force, then there’s obviously a lot that they’ve missed out on in terms of normal education and normal skills development that enable them to go into normal jobs. So, that’s something which, you know, you need to catch up on. And a lot of the time, as well, is building on the different potential that children and young people have after they’ve been involved in heavy fighting.

MARK SOMMER: What is the age-range of the children who were involved in the Liberian war?

LARRY ATTREE: Girls as young as seven, eight or nine, which become involved in fighting forces, you know, either forced into recruitment or joining armed groups because of a variety of difficult social situations that they found themselves in or a direct danger to themselves. And so, I mean, anything from age probably seven upwards, and then performing roles from, you know, sexual slavery and just carrying bags and support roles right through to combat roles and also leadership roles within fighting forces. So, it’s quite a side spectrum in terms of both age and the different experiences.

MARK SOMMER: When you did this study, did you interview these young women?

LARRY ATTREE: It was actually a young Dutch anthropologist called Anmik Buskans (?), who went to live with Ellen, who is a former girl combatant and a former commander of 1,000 other girls. So, Anmik went and lived with Ellen during the reintegration phase, and, through her, interviewed a variety of former girl combatants with a lot of different experiences and different roles in the fighting forces, and obviously gathered detailed information from them about their experiences, both of the conflict, their reasons for recruitment, but also of the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process.

Also,. I mean, this is true in many contexts, but also true in Liberia: Girls tend not go through the formal disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process for a variety of reasons. It’s much more likely that they’ll be excluded than males. So, there we girls who had been through the DDR and their experiences in that, but also girls who, for a whole host of reasons, had decided to stay away. And we gathered the stories of both of them.

MARK SOMMER: What did you find among the Liberian girls? What were they carrying with them from this experience and how did they readapt when efforts were made to reintegrate them?

LARRY ATTREE: Well, I mean, it’s interesting looking at the interview materials that we have from the different girls in Liberia, but there’s certainly that sense that there’s a potential for violence that remains, especially once the girls who’d been fighters, that if the process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration isn’t swift and if it doesn’t deliver a holistic range of assistance that meets the needs and the potential of young people, and this is true of girls and boys, of course, and then obviously the scope for violence and destruction is very, very strong.

And I think that’s why so much attention has been paid to the issue of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration by the international community, and why there needs to be increasing effort to provide assistance. And it’s not just, you know, setting up a program and making resources available, but the timing is crucially important.

If you don’t start planning reintegration as soon as you can when you feel that the peace agreement is on the cards, I mean, even before a peace agreement is signed, there’s much, much that can be done to prepare reintegration, which prevents a very dangerous gap from developing from the point when someone goes into barracks or a containment site or a camp and they’re supposed to stop fighting and then not be a violent actor, from that point on the time gap before those people receive assistance in going back to communities and finding livelihoods, healthcare assistance, assistance that enables them to access opportunities which can also include child care or drug rehabilitation, if those things aren’t available quickly, then you have a very explosive situation, and that’s very dangerous and something which needs to be avoided.

MARK SOMMER: You said that it requires a holistic approach. What are the components of a holistic approach to reintegrating ex-combatants?

LARRY ATTREE: The components are quite diverse and that means that the task of reintegration is very difficult indeed. But there are specific health problems which affects ex-combatants and which need to be dealt with, and that can include things like prosthetics, it can include care for people who have been infected with sexually transmitted diseases. Then you have the widespread trauma that’s been experienced by ex-combatants, not just as victims, but also as perpetrators of human rights abuses.

And also a big issue for success in reintegration is how ex-combatants will relate to communities. So you have to sensitize communities and also deal with issues such as fear amongst ex-combatants of returning to places where they may be blamed for violence or stigmatized because they have been sexually active as young people and all those kinds of issues. But aside from all of that, and probably most important, is the challenge of giving ex-combatants an economic stake in a peaceful life, which involves, for some, catch-up education, for some, training in a job or profession, or a skill which will give them access to opportunities that are available in a society or setting up apprenticeships to enable ex-combatants to make the transition into work.

And as well as all those things, I mean, usually in war economies, the opportunities to go into work are very hard to identify and few and far between, and you often have to focus, therefore, on generating opportunities in terms of small businesses, which an ex-combatant can start independently or in groups with fellow ex-combatants. So, in order for that to happen, you need things like microfinance or small grants to be available, which is, you know, a whole area of development assistance in itself.

So there are obviously myriad things there to be coordinated. But if those all don’t come on-stream at the same time, you find that it’s very difficult to succeed in these various other areas that you’re trying to get progress on. So it really is a holistic area of work to successfully reintegrate an ex-combatant.

MARK SOMMER: The complexity of this is somewhat staggering, and it would seem that the international community has, at the moment, neither the focus on it nor has dedicated the resources to address it in any decisive way. Do you see that happening at some point? Do you see the international community coming together at some point to do this sort of thing, because the nations themselves in which these traumas have occurred seem least able to do it for themselves.

LARRY ATTREE: I think there are a large number of institutional problems that need to be overcome in the international community to make the work more effective as well as the simple issue of there being more money and money available when it’s required to plan reintegration. Often you have programs starting with only a proportion of the funding that they need to ultimately be successful. And if you spend too much on disarmament and demobilization, and you don’t have enough left for reintegration, then you’re in big trouble and you’ve wasted your initial ante there.

And it’s very difficult to deal with lack of cooperation from the parties to a peace agreement and problems such as corruption or nepotism in the structures that are set up to cooperate with UN agencies. And that’s a big challenge.

MARK SOMMER: Larry Attree, a specialist in demobilization, disarmament and reintegration at Transition International and Safer World, UK. After a short break, we’ll hear how the UN and other international agencies are seeking to help young girls and women reintegrate into their home communities after the chaos and carnage of war.

__: This is A World of Possibilities. If you wish to contact us, please direct emails to info@aworldofpossibilities.com. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

MARK SOMMER: As with so many other underfunded mandates, the primary task of coordinating and implementing demobilization, disarmament and reintegration processes most often falls squarely on the already overburdened shoulders of UN agencies, especially the UN Development Program, or UNDP. The UNDP’s Vanessa Farr focuses on the unique experiences of women. A researcher at the UNDP’s Crisis Prevention and Recovery Program, Vanessa Far joins us now from her home in Geneva, Switzerland.

VANESSA FARR: For example, a group of men will cross a border because they’ve been sent there by their government, and they’ll form alliances with women in the second country. And they’ll forge what they consider to be marriages, although they’re not traditionally sanctioned, they’re not sanctioned by an exchange of bride wealth or any other thing that would make a marriage in a normal circumstance. And then those men are forced to withdraw at some point because there’s a peace agreement signed or there’s an intergovernmental agreement that these men will fall back.

Then the women follow them for love or for the fact that they consider themselves to be married or because they have children or whatever the story is. And then they find themselves abandoned on the other side of the border, and they can’t get home because they don’t have official papers. So, yeah, there’s one instance of a complex situation.

MARK SOMMER: I would think also that there’s a whole hierarchy of needs that need to be met in some order, and that it’s actually, though it isn’t simple, it’s certainly simpler to count heads and take guns away and inoculate them and deal with their immediate physical health problems. But it would seem that you would need very long-term support for the emotional traumas?

VANESSA FARR: Yeah, exactly. You’ve just hit the nail on the head. The problem is, of course, that the demobilization and disarmament piece of it is comparatively simple. And it’s comparatively, well, because we’re talking militarized structures, it’s comparatively easy to do. You muster people. You tell them, “Present yourself at Point A at 8 o’clock in the morning on the 15^th of January. Be there.” And people will arrive. And, indeed, it’s a case of, “How many of you are there? Do you have all your own teeth? How many wives, how many children, how many whatever? Give me your gun or your hand grenade or whatever else it is that you’ve got, and, boom, we’re done.” That piece of it is comparatively easy.

But that longer-term rehabilitation, reinsertion, what we call the R part of DDR is way, way more difficult to do. Getting people reintegrated into communities is extremely challenging. And don’t forget that you’re not just dealing with returning combatants. You might also be returning people who have been internally displaced in the conflict, people who have been refugees in the conflict, all of whom have similar needs, as in they don’t have housing, they don’t have jobs, they may have missed out on education, they may have particular health care needs associated with long-term depravation, malnutrition, HIV, malaria, TB, you name it.

So, there’s indeed, the big problem is, what do you do with people in the longer term period? And one of the questions you have to ask yourself is, if you can’t satisfactorily deal with the immediate psychological and social needs of former combatants, are you sitting on a time bomb? Is this something that’s going to explode again in your face in a short time?

MARK SOMMER: That is haunting. It would seem that what we know, for example, from child abuse is that it goes down through the generations, that if you’ve been abused, you’re more likely to abuse your own children. I don’t know if that’s any kind of parallel, but we know even in more privileged countries like, say, the United States, that when people come back from war and they’ve seen things that they never wanted to see and been involved in various kinds of violence that they wouldn’t in ordinary life, that it can haunt them for a life time. And they have all kinds of access to psychotherapy and many other forms of support, but in an impoverished country that’s just been through war with very limited international interest, what can possibly happen for people like that? I mean, they have to essentially try to heal themselves.

VANESSA FARR: And, certainly, we shouldn’t underestimate communities’ capacity for indigenous healing ceremonies. And this, again, is very interesting, you know, because let’s not be naive and assume that this is the first generation of people who have been exposed to war. That’s not true. Certainly, I think the intensity and the viciousness of wars have grown because of easy access to small arms and light weapons and other forms of munitions. But communities often have quite well-developed indigenous methods for dealing with people who have gone out to conflict and then come back impure, needed some form of cleansing or reacceptance ceremony.

And there are ways in which I think, you know, indigenous practices can actually fairly easily be reignited in communities. But the challenging thing from agenda perspective on all of that is, you know, if the tradition of that community, and 99 percent probably of the world, is that the man goes out to conflict, you know, to fight a war and he comes back and then he’s a hero or a zero, depending on which way you look at it. But he’s going to be, somehow there’s going to be something he will go through with the male elders of that clan and possibly a sort of acceptance, reacceptance ceremony by women -- there’ll be some way of reinserting him into the community.

Now what’s become very much more complicated with the new formations of armed groups that we’re seeing is that there may not be similar parallel ceremonies for women. There may be nothing at all for children. So, what do you do when your community is torn apart in the way that we’re seeing with contemporary conflicts, where literally every single person in that community has blood on their hands, whether coercively or because they thought they were doing the right thing or they just didn’t know what they were doing?

And I think that’s much more challenging. And what we’re seeing here is sometimes a failing in an indigenous practice of reconciliation to be able to include people who just don’t fit what that community’s notion is of a norm of somebody who would go out to war. So, much harder there, I think.

MARK SOMMER: And then there are these, if the war has actually occurred within the region of the communities themselves where these combatants have come from, then they return to a community that is, where they have either perpetrated violence or violence has been perpetrated on them or their families. Certainly, what would be true in a place like Rwanda, wouldn’t it? And how would you -- or Bosnia, for that matter -- how does that happen? It would seem like it would just be excruciating to go back to living next door to someone after you know what they’ve done or what you’ve done to them?

VANESSA FARR: Absolutely. I remember vividly sitting in Congo with a woman named Kinshasa, who was now a member of parliament, who had been captured and gang-raped over a period of days by a group of men who were now also contending as legitimate politicians for seats in this government that they were trying to form. This was a few years ago now. And just sort of sitting with her and her saying to me, “What am I going to do? How do I move forward? I mean, everybody knows, everybody knows that those men raped me. Everybody knows that I’m a very, very good political leader, everybody knows my views on things, and I have a constituency and I have a lot of support, but how do I personally reconcile with the fact that my rapist may be sitting on the bench next to me in Parliament?”

It’s extraordinarily difficult. And this is where I think women, in particular, are so mis-served by any kind of justice after the conflict, because rape is such a robbery of women’s freedom and autonomy and right to bodily autonomy, and that’s why when mass rape is used as a method of war, which it definitely is being used, for example, in East Congo now and definitely was used in the wars in former Yugoslavia, this is a particular burden that women have to bear after the war, because how do they look their rapist in the eye? How do they ever feel shriven, cleansed of this dreadful, dreadful pain that they had to suffer?

And that’s why our emphasis in the UN is on the prevention of sexual violence where we possibly can exert that kind of influence. And it’s an incredibly difficult piece of protection work to do. You don’t want women to ever get into the situation where that’s the choice they’re facing, of having to look their rapist in the eye and know that that guy is never going to be brought to justice, that there was a way in which the act that he perpetrated was considered to be appropriate and even a good idea. It’s very, very painful, and difficult for women caught up in those kinds of circumstances, and of course the men that love them, their families -- everybody knows. It’s a small community, everybody knows who was raped, everybody knows who the rapist was. How do we bring those kinds of things to justice? How do we stop that cycle of violence?

MARK SOMMER: Given the scale of what we’re facing, the international community, and the numbers and the size of these conflicts, and the destruction of them, how are we ever going to muster the resources and focus the world’s attention sufficiently on this post-war recovery and reintegration when so much of the energy goes into the war itself instead.

VANESSA FARR: Well, I’m kind of going to answer this in a bit of a backhanded way, but the good news is that the scale, the numbers of conflicts, does seem to be diminishing. And I think that this does show us that our peace-keeping interventions are working, our preventative interventions are working, you know, the discourse, the ways in which people are being able to reflect on the very long-term destructive capacity of war, I think there are more ways in which more people are finding mediation, negotiation alternatives, you know, discussions, et cetera, et cetera, useful.

I think that that sort of long-term peace-building stuff is actually showing dividends, and I think it’s very important for people to hold onto that, because it is easy to become just overwhelmed by the bad news stories. Let’s focus instead on our successes as an international community in stopping wars from ever getting to the point that they’re at.

But, yes, I mean, the very important question that you’re raising is, you know, from a development perspective, wars derail our capacity to achieve things like the millennium development goals. And so, we have to constantly ask ourselves what portion of our budget should be given to defense? And, you know, this is a very interesting question for an American audience to ask itself: You know, why is the American economy still driven by the industrial-military complex? To what extent should your research budgets be going to developing smarter technology use for bombing rather than smarter technology use for ameliorating climate change, which might be, in the long-term, a conflict prevention tool?

If people are going to war because there’s a lack of water, or people are going to war because there’s not enough oil in the world, wouldn’t it be better and wouldn’t it be smarter to be investing our money in technologies that are going to lessen our reliance on oil? And couldn’t you look at those actually as long-term peace strategies or conflict prevention strategies?

MARK SOMMER: Vanessa Farr, a researcher in the Crisis Prevention and Recovery Division of the UN Development Program in Geneva, Switzerland. I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

__: You’re listening to A World of Possibilities. For more information about this and other programs, and to access the whole interviews with some of our guests, please visit our website at aworldofpossibilities.com.

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, “Home From the War: Re-integrating Ex-Combatants,” is underwritten by the Compton Foundation. Coming up in this half-hour, we’ll hear from a former soldier who now teaches conflict resolution and war trauma counseling to ex-combatants on all sides of the horrific conflict in Liberia. But first we’ll hear about the crucial challenge of creating useful employment for thousands of restless young men, most of whom have known little other than war and possess few skills other than wielding an AK-47 assault rifle. This challenge is particularly daunting in the already weak economies of least-developed nations with vast numbers of uneducated and underemployed youth.

As a senior program officer in the Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations at the US Institute of Peace, Beth Cole tackles head on the task of nation-building that US armed forces been until now reluctant to undertake. Co-author of The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-building, she emphasizes that in the absence of legitimate employment opportunities, the first doors to open are often international criminal syndicates based in places like Moscow, New York or China. Beth Cole joins us now from the studios of CNC News in Washington, D.C.

When it’s not channeled in other more constructive directions, does that sort of violent background sometimes erupt in other anti-social forms?

BETH COLE: Well, you hit on a point that goes right to the heart of the problem. In these places that have been at war, you can’t just look at the ex-combatant. You have to look at the other elements of society and people from outside the society who are now inhabiting that place. And in almost every single one of these places, if you just drew the cells of organized criminal syndicates, arms smugglers, drug smugglers, people smugglers, and organized, well, terrorist cells, there’s a perfect overlay because they like places that are in conflict. They can move, they can operate.

And so, the ex-combatant, the first line of business for them and the first doors that are open are often the international criminal syndicate that’s run out of Moscow or New York or China or wherever. And then the terrorist organizations, as well. So, it is a huge problem. So, when we go into a country, before we go and try to deal with these ex-combatants, we have to map the country and we have to look at the other forces that are at play, as well.

MARK SOMMER: A few years ago, in a few radio programs we produced on child soldiers, we interviewed a young man named Ishmael Beah, who has since become famous with a bestselling book of his experiences being a child soldier in Sierra Leone, and he described not only what happened during the war when he was very young and forced to commit appalling atrocities, but after the war, when there were efforts on the part of the international community to reintegrate him and others back into civil society, and the first thing they did when they were given good food and dormitories to sleep in was to burn down the dormitories. He said, “We couldn’t help ourselves. There was so much pent-up anger in us.” How much of that have you seen happen -- not those specific things -- but how much have you seen that kind of violence when people that young are exposed to it, the very difficult to uproot?

BETH COLE: Well, the burning down of those dormitories is repeated over and over again in these places all around the world. It is a gigantic challenge, and it’s something that we have programs, but sometimes they’re not the right programs. Let me give you an example, we just, the United States Institute of Peace over the last couple of years brought together leading experts in reconciliation processes, called social reconciliation, to look at truth and reconciliation commissions, truthtelling, all of these methods that we employ out there to try to get a society back together and to heal.

And what we found is that there’s this whole aspect that is missing from the equation. The mission leaders and the people that go out there to do DDR, they don't think about that. And so, there’s ongoing processes and wounds that are constantly occurring that we don’t take into consideration. And that’s just what you’re talking about.

I mean, the child soldier who commits arson, the community who puts up a makeshift memorial that inflames another part of the community. It’s such a sensitive environment, and we need to employ those social and psychological and cultural anthropologists and others right at the very beginning. It’s not enough to put peacekeepers on the ground. We need to have all of those other people with us.

MARK SOMMER: What have you found in the work that you and others have done been the most significant challenges for reintegrating ex-combatants and child soldiers back into the societies from which they come?

BETH COLE: I think the hardest challenge has been on the economic front. We can disarm combatants, we can demobilize combatants, and we can train them, minimal amount of training with very little follow up to do certain things in their community. Primarily we focus on the agricultural arena. But in a post-conflict environment -- and I hesitate to use that term, because there’s often conflict going on in a whole host of other arenas, conflict continues -- but in that environment, the international community doesn’t really get around to economic development in the short-term.

They’re very focused on security. And so, the idea, I mean, the very definition of reintegration is that you find a sustainable civilian livelihood for that ex-combatant. And the idea that we can do that in the short term is really quite utopian. And so, we find that we fail over and over and over again.

MARK SOMMER: I imagine that the economies of societies that have just been through war are themselves shattered to such a degree that even the non-combatants are having trouble finding work in those kinds of circumstances -- is that right?

BETH COLE: Well, everyone is having problems finding work. There are some successful examples. For example, in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army was successfully transformed into what we call the Kosovo Protection Corps, which was a security force, but a force that was really more oriented towards helping society cope with natural disasters and other types of civilian emergencies, and not an army, per se.

And we would look at that as a pretty good example of successful, quote-unquote, “reintegration.” But that society is one that was almost wholly Albanian. The KLA were perceived as heroes. And even then we had some bumps, but, I mean, that’s a good example, but we had a pretty good environment for that. In other places in the world, whereas you say the whole economy is shattered, the international community and the host nation and the people that are trying to, the locals who are trying to put the country back together again, they’re just facing fundamental things like, “How do you actually set up some kind of rudimentary banking system where you can pay salaries of people who you hope are going to come back to ministries or teachers or police or whatever?” So, they’re really starting at ground zero.

And when you don’t have that kind of structure, how are you really going to get ex-combatants back to work? I remember General Abizaid, who, as you know, led our central command that ran our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said the most important thing in any of these places, the first most important thing, is to get the warrior off the street. And that’s really true.

But when you have a society that’s been at war, and the warrior has been at war, the community just doesn’t stop. There are women, there are children, who pick up the pieces and who assume very large economic roles. And a lot of these very male-dominated societies, you have then former warriors who you’re trying to get back off the street, as General Abizaid says, but then they’re displacing the other people, the women and the children, who took up the reins. So, you have other kinds of conflicts in it, too. It’s a very, very complicated process.

MARK SOMMER: We see from reports from Iraq that the decision to shut out the Baathist Party and the military factions that used to be part of Saddam Hussein’s sort of elite corps, the decision to shut them out actually fueled the insurgency and made it an especially effective force in disrupting the post-conflict environment. Are there any lessons to be learned from that situation in Iraq?

BETH COLE: I think the lesson is that you want everybody in the tent to begin with, and then you figure out who should stay and who should go. And that’s called vetting in this context. The person who was supposedly down the line in charge of that decision told me that, “We had no choice; they disappeared. What were we going to do? Call them back to where? To barracks and other places that had been destroyed? We simply couldn’t do it.”

That’s an answer. But in today’s world, where you can swoop in on a situation where there’s been a massive earthquake and provide tents for tens of thousands of refugees, certainly we could have found a way to bring those fighters back, to put them in some kind of tent facilities or some other rudimentary facilities in order to figure out what we were going to do with them. Because, well, we’re living with the consequence today.

MARK SOMMER: The nations in which these wars have occurred, usually at the end of these wars, they are utterly impoverished if they were not at the beginning of the war -- in fact, often the war happens from a place of profound scarcity and conflict over resources -- so, after the war, what kinds of resources are available to that nation to engage in this very careful and, I would think, very expensive work of reintegration? And if they can’t afford it, how much is the international community interested in funding this sort of work?

BETH COLE: In a post-conflict environment, when the international community decides to go in, the infusion of funds in the very beginning is actually quite large, and a lot of these societies experience this bump in economic growth, because of this outside infusion of funds. But it’s where the funds go, that’s the critical question. And out of necessity, there’s kind of this Maslow hierarchy of needs that’s implemented. And so, you find that a lot of the funds go to security, not surprisingly. A lot of the funds go to direct humanitarian assistance. A lot of the funds go to the conduct of elections, which probably could wait. Elections are very expensive undertakings for the international community and the host nations.

By percentage, not a lot of those funds, or not enough of those funds, are targeted at economic development and the re-start of the economy. And so, if you look at Afghanistan, for example, what do we have? We have a drug economy that really it rules that country, and we have problems with ex-combatants and others that are part of that drug economy. So, the challenge of re-starting economies and spending the requisite resources on that is critical.

You have to have security. I mean, the World Bank and the international economic institutions that play in the economic arena aren’t going to go into a place unless it’s fairly stable. But there’s a lot of people today that are starting to question whether development leads to security or security leads to development? You know, what’s the cart before the horse? I think you need both, and I think we need to figure out better how to provide people with that economic livelihood quickly.

MARK SOMMER: Beth Cole of the Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations at the US Institute of Peace. After a short break, we return to Liberia for a conversation with an ex-soldier turned peacebuilder.

__: This is A World of Possibilities. If you wish to purchase a CD of this program, please write to info@aworldofpossibilities.com. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

MARK SOMMER: It’s challenge enough for any former soldier, let alone one who fought on the side of a notorious warlord now before the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity to make the journey from warrior to peacemaker. But that’s exactly what Klubosumo Johnson Borh has done. A founder of the National Excombatant Peace-building Initiative, or NEPI, Mr. Borh now serves as its national program director, leading courses in psycho-social rehabilitation, mediation, human rights, conflict transformation and community empowerment. Since its founding in 2000, NEPI has trained more than 15,000 ex-combatants and 7,000 community residents with the goal of creating a transformed, nonviolent, armed-free society in Liberia.

Klubosumo Johnson Borh joins us now from his office in Monrovia. In the background you’ll hear the laughter of curious neighbor kids, playing and poking their heads inside the door of his office, curious to see what he’s doing.

KLUBOSUMO JOHNSON BORH: Yeah, that is one of our challenge, because people have been using ... (inaudible) as a form of coping mechanism, which is not actually good, because when the ... (inaudible) well out of the body you try to see yourself back into your own problem, into your own story, and into your old way of life. So, we are actually working on that, trying to make them to understand that ... (inaudible) is not a way out as a coping mechanism. By sharing your story, you’re actually helping to come out of your traumatic situation.

MARK SOMMER: Tell me more about that, the sharing of stories helps you come out of this trauma. What kinds of stories are people sharing and how do they go about sharing them?

KLUBOSUMO JOHNSON BORH: The stories that people are actually sharing have to do with their war-life stories, how it ... (inaudible) in war, what carried them there, and what ... (inaudible) them into war and all of this stuff? What were their ... (inaudible)? And then it’s like putting it in a form that we refer to as community outlook or looking back. We take you from where you were before the war, and during the war, what were your activities during the war, and, after the war, where you need to go. Then we try to allow you to look at this, there are gaps. Before the war, during the war and after the war, we actually try to identify the ... (inaudible) that you have gone through and then what needs to be done when it comes to your own ... (inaudible) for life, taking into consideration your age as well?

So, we actually allow them to go through these stories and, on a gradual ... (inaudible), you will find out that some of them will be able to sit down and actually give their wartime story in a kind of chronological order, which proved to us that, ... (inaudible), guys are actually coping with such traumatic situations. Because when you are traumatized, you don’t actually give a straight kind of story. It can always be like a disjointed memory.

MARK SOMMER: And you are saying that when people are able to share the stories of what their lives were like before the war, during the war, and since, it helps reconcile them or heal them, because they are able to reveal what they have been holding inside themselves?

KLUBOSUMO JOHNSON BORH: Of course, because if you have a lot of pain and wounds in yourself, sharing that story from the war actually helps them to get relief from that traumatic situation, as I said, because that’s a form of healing. That’s a form of healing. I’m actually helping them to relieve them from that trauma. So, we see very confident that our strategy being deployed in this community can work as more ... (inaudible) through our program.

MARK SOMMER: You’ve had quite a different life. I mean, two different lives for someone still so young. You were a war fighter and now you’re a peacebuilder. Which do you prefer?

KLUBOSUMO JOHNSON BORH: I prefer to be a peacebuilder. I will never prefer going back to war, because I know that war is dangerous, war destroys life and property, war bring about hatred, wounds in the minds of thousands of people, and I know that war is not a way forward. But peace can always ... (inaudible) and will always ... (inaudible). So, the way out is peacebuilding. If we can continue to build peace among ourselves, we can ... (inaudible) our differences, but not war.

MARK SOMMER: Kubosumo Johnson Borh, national program director for the Liberia-based National Excombatant Peacebuilding Initiative, in Monrovia.

BETH COLE: Well, the ... (inaudible) forces are clearly trying to understand the complex nature of these peacebuilding missions. Stabilization really refers to the security part of this equation. And what you and I have been talking about is everything else. It’s political, economic, social. And, yes, the world is really struggling to ramp up and try to meet the challenges of the non-military parts of these operations, but we, you know, we’re in kindergarten, and we need to be in college. We’re just barely taking the baby steps. We need to do so much more. We do need more resources, we need more education, we need more training.

If you look at the training and education of the United States soldier, it’s phenomenal. We took decades to build the institutions to train people in peace studies and arms control, et cetera, et cetera, to build arms control agencies and negotiators and hotlines and all that stuff. And in some ways, this is comparable. We need to do that institution-building -- and it’s a decades-long process -- but I hope, just like we understood that, and understand, that nuclear weapons are really a gigantic threat to everyone’s security on the planet, I hope we understand that this is kind of the same. If you don’t secure peace in places around the world, it’s as dangerous as a nuclear bomb.

MARK SOMMER: Beth Cole of the Center for Post-conflict Peace and Stability Operations at the US Institute of Peace. Remember Ishmael Beah from the start of our program? He was forced into service as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s long-running civil war. And by his own account, he inflicted atrocities on innocent women and children. But with the patient help of others encountered through programs of international agencies, he achieved a remarkable recovery, and he’s now reintegrated into society as a public speaker and best selling author, living in New York City. Here’s what he has to say today.

ISHMAEL BEAH: You know, I would say, you know, all of us, life throws us these different things that we have to deal with, but that there is hope, that if people get out of it and they’re given the right support, they can definitely find a life and be normal people again. And some of them could even be the greatest peacemakers in the world, because they’ve been on the other side of what it is like not to have peace in your life and what it’s like to always constantly live in fear.

MARK SOMMER: War by painful war, we’re learning the arts of peace. The better we learn how to heal these wounds, the less likely it is that they will re-erupt in armed conflict. I’m Mark Sommer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

__: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities with host Mark Sommer. Production engineers are Mike Schwartz and Matt Fidler. Production assistant, Sierra McVicar. Associate producer, Naeema Didi (?). Senior producer, Greg McVicar. Music courtesy of Asra (?) Records, Putamayo World Music, World Music Network, World Village USA, Third Mesa Music, Songs and Creations, and Audio Pharmacy. Additional audio courtesy of C-Span. Support for this program was provided by The Compton Foundation.

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