Former fighters work together in Lebanon
A really great article by Nora Bustany in the April 22 WaPo about a group of Lebanese former fighters working together to promote reconciliation.
They were brought together by Initiatives of Change, a non-governmental organization formerly known as the Moral Rearmament Association.
I know that the MRA played an important role in facilitating quiet, behind-the-scenes contacts between French and German opinion leaders after WW2. I hadn't caught up with their recent work. It looks really interesting.
I can't write more now (rushing for plane to Philadelphia) but I just note that I've been writing quite a bit about a similar initiative-- that has gotten former foes to work together doing joint peace-promotion efforts in a Mozambican context-- here, here, and in my continuing book-writing project.
helena:
"Moral Re-armament" [in the us of a] was a '50s version of Dobson's "Focus on the Family" cum Aimee Semple McPherson, directed towards college students.
Main interest at the time: defeating "the international communist conspiracy"
Supporters-in-chief:Sen Joe McCarthy, Whittaker Chambers.
Main rival at the time: Youth for Christ.
Current fellow-travellers:Promise Keepers
Yes, in the past I have had many impressions of MRA being (from my viewpoint) very politically retrograde... On the other hand, what they helped to achieve as between France and Germany, was enormous and good, and this current project with Lebanese participants strikes me as being extremely helpful too. So when I'm in DC sometime I think I'll go visit the I-of-C folks to find out more about their work. In my book, anyone who helps to sow increased cross-cultural understanding is doing good work and it seems silly to let purely "ideological" (and possibly at this stage, outdated?) concerns and hangups getn in the way of networking with such people.
Have you read about this mutual exchange of apologies on Unity Day?
Jonathan, thanks for that. It was truly awesome. It seems to me I need to hotfoot it back to Lebanon as soon as I can...
I hate to throw cold water on this but I am not impressed. It is going to take far, far more political and social change in Lebanon before a reconcillation is brought about. We Lebanese are experts at staging phoney unity and reconcilliation festivals, Iand it is going to take more to convince this aging cynic (that the report is by Nora Bustany does not help either: spare me those idealic visions of a Lebanon that does not exist). To be specific, it is not that individuals are lacking in decency or drive at reconcilliation. It is that in a culture of secterian and tribal loyalties (and a system that is open to outside manipulations) the group collective trumps the free agency of individual citizen. Given that the lebanese polity is a zero sum game the potential for strife is always lurking in the shadows.