Sustainable Peace By V. S. Arunachalam and Rahul Tongia

Sustainable Peace: Moving Beyond Terrorism

By V. S. Arunachalam and Rahul Tongia* (Oct. 11, 2001)

The September 11 senseless attack on mass civilian targets and the resulting heavy loss to human life and property has catapulted terrorism as the foremost threat to national and global security. The insidious but continual spread of this terror in the past few decades, demonstrated through occasional but dramatic instances of attacks and destruction in many parts of the world, lulled us into thinking that this evil is endemic to only a few regions of the world, and can be curtailed either by strong police or military action, or by bringing the perpetrators of such crimes and their masterminds to justice. We now know that these responses were reactive and clearly inadequate against terrorism that has grown to be a monster, and much more needs to be done, especially in regions that have become the breeding grounds for terrorists and their distorted philosophy of hatred and alienation.

How does society rid itself of this evil? More in response to the World Trade Center destruction, the US is now busy building a global coalition to initiate military action against the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and Osama Bin Ladin and his private army of terrorists and their brains. Looking further ahead, it is also likely that this global coalition may work on finding political solutions to eliminate the many grievances of people who feel disenfranchised in some countries of Central and West Asia and Africa. We fear that even with these efforts -impressive as these initiatives may turn out to be - terrorism could still survive as its breeding grounds would remain the same.

This note therefore addresses the challenge of transforming such environments into peaceful and productive regions of the world. The enemies are really within people, and they are fear and a swell of profound alienation, often against their own rulers and other societies that they believe are responsible for their present conditions. Afraid that they would not be able to meet the basic needs and security of the family, or provide for the future prosperity and well-being of their progeny and unable to look up to a civil and caring society that would empathize with them and respect their beliefs, they begin to depend on various fundamentalist or radical outfits that cleverly masquerade as a caring world. The militant organizations substitute for civil societies - and in some places even for the state - by providing amenities such as schools or health-centers for people, emphasizing local culture and traditions while simultaneously building cadres of followers. These recruits are the possible future terrorists who are programmed to seek revenge against the society they are conditioned to hate, and are promised a future that would not be relevant to the living.

We must therefore reach out to the people almost at an individual level in an attempt to remove the alienation and distrust by providing them with the resources and tools they need. A sustainable peace can be built up by meeting following challenges:

1. Basic Human Needs
2. Empowerment
3. Building institutions and civil society
4. Strengthening inter-relationships

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1. The first initiative must be to guarantee the availability of the basic needs of humans, such as food, water, shelter, and primary healthcare. Today's prosperous global economy, some 40 trillion dollars in size, can readily provide the necessary resources to meet these needs, with greater challenges lying in distribution and access. The long-term objective is to ensure sustainability, and this can be achieved only when people are trained and provided with the necessary infrastructure to produce their own food and develop primary healthcare organizations.
2. This leads us to the second mission of human development, which is the empowerment of peoples. Empowerment is mechanism to create a dynamic environment that is forward-looking, creative, and all-inclusive. Its components include education, access to all information, gender equality, tolerance of diversity, and freedom to pursue all creative activities of human endeavor such as arts and sciences.
   During the empowerment initiative, we must encourage the creation of people's organizations, and especially of women, and support them with funding and sharing of knowledge and experience. However, such organizations will have to be locally created, staffed and operated if they are to be accepted and owned by the people. Unfortunately, in the present environment, the very survival of such institutions will be challenging. In many regions of the world, the state and the fundamentalist schools may find them unacceptable as they take away their draw and hold on people. There is no substitute for balanced and relevant education for generating new opportunities in the world of today and building good citizens for tomorrow.
3. Civil societies and robust public institutions make for good governance. This longer-term initiative will depend on the emergence of sustainable institutions during the empowerment phase and the full participation of the people. Other than political and judicial institutions, a successful state will need to sustain a vibrant and free press, religious and cultural institutions that are free from politics, a strong banking and financial system, and a well-functioning and accountable bureaucracy. The main tools for building such institutions will be education and empowerment of people and help from multi-lateral institutions and Non-Governmental Organizations. Other governments and multinational corporations should be supportive of such efforts but not interfere with local governments and institutions.
4. One of the important lessons of history is that alienation of a group, society, or country breeds hatred and violence. It is therefore important no country or group is marginalized in the global family. Other than relationships being built up at governmental levels, global trade, capital, and technology will be important in fostering economic progress and growth.

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Why do we feel that it is now possible to find a solution to these problems when we have not succeeded all these years? For one thing, the world has never been as well interconnected as we are now. Communications networks, satellites, and faster transportation demonstrate that how well we are interconnected. Increased free trade and free movement of capital and knowledge have also brought us closer. We have new technological tools available that mankind did not have even a few decades ago. These can be a great ally in such initiatives, and address many needs of human society, helping us secure not only food, water, and healthcare but also education, information, opportunity, and economic growth. Politically too we have become more astute, abandoning colonial, totalitarian, and authoritarian political systems. Though starting from different vantage points, the visions of different peoples are converging towards common goals of universal peace and human development and prosperity.

The participants in these missions are not going to be only governments or multi-lateral agencies or free markets. These must be led by people themselves through organizations and institutions created by them. What we refer to here is networks of people with common goals and vision. While some specifics may vary, the majority of the world is united in its fight against terror, tolerance to diversity, and the drive towards development.

How do we draw from and build networks of people with knowledge, experience, and resources to participate in the missions we outlined above? We suggest a meeting of concerned persons to broadly define the objectives and develop a plan for governments and multi-lateral agencies to consider and support. Such a networking of people is essential as they alone can provide domain-specific expertise and knowledge for meeting the above objectives.

Some may argue that the failures of a few countries in meeting the needs of its peoples or in building a civil society are their own responsibility and consequences of their own actions and inaction. But we now know that these failures transcend national borders and become drivers for criminal and terrorist activities that target humanity everywhere. We therefore consider the above initiatives as global imperatives. A brief description of the above initiatives shows that this campaign to build a terror-free world will be different from the many plans of the past. For instance, this will not be anything like a Marshall Plan as its resources were intended solely for the use of governments in Europe, for re-building, re-establishing or re- creating institutions and industries destroyed by the war, with the clause "re" entering all activities. The beneficiaries were largely democratic countries and the population literate, with few religious zealots or fundamentalist. The population pressure was also not large. On the other hand, the campaign for a terror-free world will be waged in countries with records of medium or low human development index, poor empowerment of women, modest amounts of literacy and marginal health-care. Many governments in the region are not democratic and their commitment to human rights is questionable. The resources will often have to be channeled through non-governmental or multi-lateral institutions and their equivalents in many countries, and appropriate institutions will have to be created and their objectives defined. Unless we progress towards the goals defined above, the campaign for sustainable peace can not succeed.

We are conscious that terrorism does not have to be the sole consequence of deprivation. In fact, many of the terrorists of September 11 appear to have been well educated and from middle-class families. There are also some high-income countries where terrorism is endemic. However, we persist to believe that exposure to people who are the victims of hatred, intolerance, and deprivation and the feeling of hopelessness against fighting such forces instigates the conversion. There are few concerted voices to counter the messages of hate and incitement to violence that many receptive people in the world are exposed to. We feel the necessity to minimize the number of disempowered and disenfranchised people in the world and build a countering force from the majority of the peoples who do not believe in the use of terror and violence.

We are not in a position to affirm that the steps we propose are adequate to root out terrorism. Given this disclaimer, we still argue that these are important steps, worth taking. President Bush stated that this war against terrorism would not be like any other war that the world had fought. We therefore suggest that the peace initiatives we pursue should also not be like others in the past but bold, long term, and universal.

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