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Z. Rizvi: Peace Depends on More Than Governments
Written by Zia Rizvi, Director General, Independent Bureau for Humanitarian Issues, Pakistan
Monday, June 16, 2008
Paper delivered at the Interreligious and International Peace Council Inaugural Meeting, “Global Governance for a New Realm of Peace,” New York, October 1-3, 2003
The Constitution of the United Nations Educational and Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, states, “Since war first begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that defenses of peace should be constructed.” Peace is not just absence of conflict. Peace is solid and durable when it is born inside the mind of man. Working on minds with spiritual guidance will build peace very differently from the way we have been trying to do it for the last century. This is a noble task that certainly deserves support.
I have spent almost all my working life in the United Nations. For more than fifty years we have been unable to have a department for peacemaking. We only have a department for peace keeping. But you can keep peace only when you have made peace. And there is no group of people who are devoted entirely to making peace.
We never go to root causes. We think that if we are able to buy time—perpetuate problems rather than solve them—then we have done our job. We have not. Similarly, in the United Nations system there is no peacebuilding department. I think that these two elements, peace-making and peace-building are extremely important, particularly at this point in time. Now what kind of peace are we talking about? First of all let us recognize that war has changed in its nature. The humanitarian law, the law of war, was about wars between states. And now wars are not between states. Most of what we call wars are, in fact, internal conflicts. We have ethnic, religious and other communities that fight with each other. And therefore we need to radically review the whole international system in order to address the new kinds of wars that we are facing.
The United Nations was established in order to save future generations from the scourge of war. What has actually happened? In the last decade alone, more than eight million people were killed in wars. And what systems have we developed in order to face this kind of strange environment in which we live? Nothing yet. And that is why I personally am convinced that if we are able to take initiatives where people come first, we might succeed at least in relative terms as compared to governments.
Although I still owe my loyalty to the United Nations, the United Nations are not united anymore. And they are not nations any more. The organization is an organization of disunited governments and what are governments about? The acquisition of power. They acquire power, but they do not learn how to exercise it. Most people who come to power spend more time and energy acquiring and keeping power than learning how to exercise it. If people in power, for instance, find that telling a lie is more in their interest than telling the truth, what do you think they do? They tell a lie. If they know that they can keep their power by doing something ignoble, do you think they will not do it? They will. And that is where things go wrong. It is not the governed, but the governors that are the problem. One of the things that is missing is that people and people’s power should play a role.
Theoretically, governments should represent people. Theoretically they do; in practice they do not. Non-governmental organizations and religious bodies are closer to people than governments can ever be, why? Because they are directly involved with the people, they know what is happening at the grass roots. Therefore, they have a very decisive role to play.
There is an intrinsic complementarily between the efforts of people and the efforts of the governments. Within the intergovernmental structure which is the United Nations, we should introduce a dimension that is missing—the spiritual and human dimension. Modern people are at peace neither with themselves nor with what surrounds them. The greatest challenge that modern people have is how to be humane. For that, we do not have to go to the United Nations or to the government; we have to just look inside us, because that is where the spiritual and human dimension is, that is where peace resides, and that is what we do not do when we are in the peace and war game.
It is of the utmost importance that non-governmental organizations and people devoted to spiritual and humane values make every effort not only to strengthen the UN by bringing into the UN a new element and also by making people around the world aware that peace depends on them and not only on governments. If people could stand up, as I think they are going to do and tell the world in a loud voice that inside us there is a desire for peace that may make a difference. Outside, we make speeches about power and about doing good through war. Should we be using our intelligence in order to make better weapons to kill other people? Should we be inhuman toward others? If we believe in spiritual and humane values, why do we feel proud when we make better and bigger bombs? I have seen nations that have become nuclear jubilantly celebrate. I consider that to be extremely vulgar.
It is understandable that the governments should be very cautious and very afraid. When people stand up and make noise, governments tremble. An interreligious council can further the inherent complimentarily between non-governmental and governmental aspects of life. We need to have something of that nature inside the UN. We should, so that that spiritual dimension, the humane dimension, is introduced into the political and economic sphere. We need a modus operandi that is acceptable and that does not raise unnecessary objections and hurdles. I am not unduly optimistic. But it is better to go for something noble and fail than to go for something ignoble and succeed.