Spring is here, indeed. World religions celebrate freedom, rebirth and communal solidarity in this season. Signs of spring bring hope, optimism and energy to all of us, even in a difficult economic climate. Our center, too, is experiencing financial difficulties as other nonprofits and their generous funders. Still, we believe that with ongoing support from our friends like you, we will be able to continue this important work without delay. Since I last wrote to you, ICfC has taken many long strides forward.
After a long search, we hired our first Executive Director, Anuradha Desai, who is hard at work strengthening the organization and bringing new strategic direction to our response to the global locations of religious and ethnic violence.
We added new board members of national and international stature who will strengthen our global reach.
The Justice and History Outreach Project in Cambodia is receiving international praise for our Historical Conciliation approach. More people are joining in the belief that until the memories of a pained population are addressed, a country cannot move forward.
Workshops in three communities of Israel have shown extraordinary signs of success. All our work there has taken on a greater urgency after the recent war in Gaza and bombings in Shederot. We are positioned to work with Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews in 10 more communities. People are recognizing that real dialogue needs to happen at the community level to avert a “Third Intifada.” Divided communities must free themselves from the stranglehold of distorted histories and pained memories, must acknowledge wrongdoings, while committing themselves to cooperative deve-lopment.
In Western Europe our efforts to create a stronger dialogue between immigrant and host populations have brought us to places like Amsterdam and Berlin. Following our successful workshop of 2007, facilitated by the Mayor of Amsterdam (link: Amsterdam Report), our trainings in Berlin in 2008, and our ongoing involvements in strengthening civil society initiatives, we were invited to return last month to facilitate a town-hall style community dialogue on the recent Israeli Palestinian conflicts and the local responses of citizens who identify with either side. Through the ongoing work of ICfC’s well positioned fellows and trainees, ICfC champions the idea that diversity is “the strength of nations” and helps translate that diversity into policies and institutions.
Here in Boston, we launched a new speaker series: Voices from the Field. The first focused on “Stopping Bloodshed in the 21st Century: Approaches to Historical Conciliation.” It brought participants a real sense of the work being done on the ground by our talented Fellows, Dr. Dasha Kusa and Jina Moore.
The evidence is mounting: overcoming deep hatreds and building bridges by confronting disputed memories makes the resolution of intractable conflicts and enduring peace possible, be it in the villages of Cambodia, in the ethnic enclaves of Amsterdam, or even in the Middle East where violent fragmentation is jeopardizing regional peace and economic stability. We remain as committed as ever to applying our methods in communities around the world where we can facilitate dialogues that deal with painful memories and help build trusting relationships through forward-looking joint actions. ICfC helps people “recognize old hurt,” in the words of Gershom Gorenberg, Senior Correspondent for The American Prospect. ICfC strongly believes that we can achieve stable collaboration and can give hope and human effort a serious chance if we enable the complexities of history, memory, and identity to surface and be resolved in the dialogue and negotiation processes between communities in conflict.
In a recent meeting of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, Dr. Daniel Taub, Chief Negotiator of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, spoke of the failures of the past Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and challenges for the future. In words that so much validate the focus of ICfC, Dr. Taub spoke of how he had been long in coming to realize that negotiations over territory and resources were relatively simple. The real challenge, he proclaimed, was in getting all sides in a conflict to work on constructing a “culture of peace.” The conceptual and organizational approaches of ICfC, we believe, will contribute mightily to that culture of peace.
With the financial problems that now challenge all of us as individuals as well as citizens and participants in civil society, we are all the more grateful to our many friends who continue to support the work of ICfC with whatever resources they can. We are particularly grateful to the Daniel and Joanna Rose Foundation, which has supported our work in Israel and is providing the seed money for our current plans to initiate ten trainings over the next eighteen months. We will mobilize and train Israeli Arab and Jewish leaders who will help prevent a “Third Intifada” that would postpone peace between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world for still another generation. We are also thankful to the Open Society Institute's ongoing support to our Cambodia project. It is with the devotion of our board, staff, Fellows, volunteers and the support of our friends that we begin the next phase of our work, in Israel and Palestine, in Cambodia, and across Europe.
Change is not going to happen overnight. With your sustained interest, support, and commitment, we will bring our message of peacebuilding through Historical Conciliation from community to community, region to region, and nation to nation to build enduring peace.
Since 2005, ICfC has engaged in pioneering community dialogues in remote villages of Cambodia, using methodology developed and perfected by ICfC fellows. ICfC's new Executive Director Anuradha Desai recently visited Cambodia to evaluate the impact of the Justice and History Outreach Project on the lives of ordinary villagers as they try to come to terms with justice and reconciliation 30 years after the Pol Pot regime.
Join us for for the second in the new speaker series Voices from the Field featuring ICfC fellows Shanti Sattler and Adam Saltsman and their contribution to healing historical traumas in Cambodia.
The ICfC program in Israel is progressing and growing. The facilitators reproduced a successful model developed in the previous projects into new areas and have included new groups of participants into the dialogue process in areas where a community dialogue has been going on for some time.
ICfC continues to be engaged in Western Europe assisting community leaders, municipal experts on social cohesion, educators, and others who grapple with issues of integration of immigrant populations and the fluid process of the shaping of identities in a mutual dialogue. Visit the links below to read more about the ICfC activities in Amsterdam and Berlin in the previous months.
Voices From the Field: Stopping Bloodshed in the 21st Century:
Approaches to Historical Conciliation
ICfC hosted the first in the new speaker series highlighting the International Fellows. The event gave participants first-hand accounts of reconciliation work throughout the world and the chance to discuss the relationship between reconciliation theories and realities. Read more about the Fellowship Program >
VIDEO
Nic Dunlop, the author of The Lost Executioner has been working on a documentary for Al Jazeera on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the journey of the Khmer society to justice. Villagers from the ICfC project in Svay Rieng are featured here:
Mr. Jean-Louis Sarbib is a managing director of Wolfensohn and Company, L.L.C. after retiring from his 26 year old service at the World Bank in July 2006. He currently chairs the board of the Development Gateway Foundation; and serves on the boards of the GAVI Fund, the Micronutrient Initiative, and World Links. Mr. Sarbib is also a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings, where he is associated with the Wolfensohn Center for Development.
From 2003 to 2006, Mr. Sarbib was Senior Vice President, Human Development Network, overseeing the Bank’s investments in education health, social protection, and HIV/AIDS. In that capacity, he advised the institution and its client countries on innovative and integrated approaches to improving health, education, and social protection with a view to helping meet the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). Mr. Sarbib represented the Bank on a number of global initiatives (GAVI--Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, UNAIDS Committee of Co-sponsoring Organizations, Education for All Fast Track Initiative, Health Metrics Network, etc.) and served on a number of boards of international organizations involved in human development. After his retirement, Mr. Sarbib continued to chair the Governing Board of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics until November 2006.
From 2000 to 2003, Mr. Sarbib was the World Bank’s Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa Region and managed operations that accounted for $1 billion (FY03) in new loans as well as Technical Cooperation Programs throughout the Middle East and North Africa. From 1996 to 2000, Mr. Sarbib was the World Bank’s Vice President for Africa.
Mr. Sarbib joined the Bank in 1980 to work on Africa. After working for the French Ministry of Industry as Deputy Director of the Groupe de Reflexion sur les Stratégies Industrielles (1974-1977), Mr. Sarbib returned to the United States to teach at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mr. Sarbib graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, before going on to the University of Pennsylvania to get a Master’s degree in city planning. In 2006, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.
Anuradha Desai,
ICfC Executive Director
Anuradha Desai
Ms. Desai joined the International Center for Conciliation (ICfC) as our first Executive Director in the fall of 2008. In this role she is responsible for building the financial, organizational, and administrative base of the organization while scaling the international programs and building its capacity to work with communities around the world through conciliation.
Anuradha recently graduated with a Master's Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government as a Presidential Scholar. Upon completion of her one-year mid-career program, Anuradha spent a year in Indonesia where she worked as a Senior Advisor for Tifa Foundation and Save the Children, before joining ICfC.
Prior to her studies at Harvard, Anuradha served as the Executive Director of Organizational Development at Citizen Schools, an innovative program that is revolutionizing the field of out-of-school education across the United States. She helped launch the Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University and worked at Oxfam America for over a decade in various leadership positions, including as the Director of Major Gifts and serving two terms as an elected staff representative to the Board of Directors. Presently she serves as an advisor to various nonprofit organizations in the Boston area.
Anuradha was trained as an architect before coming to the U.S. As a DANIDA Fellow she received her graduate degree in urban planning from the Royal Danish Academy in Denmark and her undergraduate degree in Architecture from the Center on Environment, Planning, and Technology in Ahmedabad, India.
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"No Small Mercy" is about Alice Mukarurinda, a woman who survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and Emmanuel Ndayisaba, the man who cut off her hand. At the request of the magazine, it’s told in the first person, alternating between Alice and Emmauel's stories. Everything about this exercise is fraught with political and historical complexity and sensitivity, and the project brings into starker relief the general dilemma of a journalist working outside her culture:
photo: Lionel Healing
how can we responsibly craft individual stories we know will substitute, for our readers, for the narrative of a collective experience? Almost every word you read here is lifted, untouched, from my interview transcripts. These are really their words, as unmediated as we could make them.
This series in three parts written for the Christian Science Monitor is about John Caulker, a Sierra Leonean human rights activist who wants to use rural traditions to promote reconciliation. Sierra Leone has had a truth and reconciliation commission and a criminal tribunal, but many Sierra Leoneans say these inter-national institutions didn't reach very far outside of the capital city and into the countryside, where ordinary Sierra Leoneans suffered the brunt of the decade-long war.
The series profiles Caulker and his efforts and asks what reconcilaition looks like if you don't start from the top down, but rather from the grassroots up.
Day One: "Sierra Leone's 'family talk' heals scars of war," a look at John Caulker's personal story.
Day Two: "Sierra Leoneans look for peace through full truth about war crime," a look at the first reconciliation program, and at the sometimes competing roles of justice and reconciliation in post-conflict countries.
Imagine 2009: Armenian and Azerbaijani Student Retreat and Dialogue
ICfC Fellow Phil Gamaghelyan is continuing in his successful program that brings together students from Armenia and Azerbaijan studying in the U.S. This May, the third annual dialogue workshop will be held in Virginia. Later this year, the dialogue program will be replicated also with young people from Armenia and Azerbaijan in Europe.
