The U.S. envoy on an Afghanistan peace initiative has met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah in Kabul, a day after he held talks with Taliban leaders aimed at ending the 17-year war in the country.
Get the full story from the Wall Street Journal here.
When Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Deeyah Khan met with neo-Nazis she was scared.
“I decided to pick up my camera and go and see if I could sit down with people who feel this intense dislike, or even hatred, towards people like me,” Ms Khan told Peace News.
The daughter of immigrants, a Muslim woman, a feminist, a liberal and a human rights activist, Ms Khan is familiar with being a target for hatred.
“For these movements, and very much represent something that they absolutely despise and that they are trying to prevent,” Ms Khan said.
Khan released her film White Right: Meeting the Enemy last year to bridge divides between opposing groups and see if it was possible to “hate in person”.
“For me it’s about primarily getting in touch with our common humanity,” Ms Khan said. “To see if it’s possible for us to break down the prejudices that exist between groups.”
Her first interview was with the leader of the US National Socialist Movement. She was more than a little intimidated. Death threats are not a new experience for Ms Khan and the violence she has encountered was at the forefront of her mind when she went into the interview.
“He asked me to come to where he lives, in his neighborhood, at a specific motel,” Ms Khan said. “We set up all our cameras and were just waiting for him to arrive and I remember thinking ‘what are you doing?’. America is filled with weapons and a lot of these guys are usually armed. I was thinking ‘What if he’s armed? What if he’s bringing people with him?'”
Once he arrived, however, Khan said the experience was extraordinary. It was awkward at first, but without the usual context of angry mobs facing each other and shouting, Khan said the dynamic had to shift as well. She said just by being ready to listen, everything changed.
“Because they’re not used to someone engaging with them,” Ms Khan said, “they also weren’t able to behave in the way that they are used to behaving – they know how to react to someone who comes in pointing fingers and shouting at them, ready for a fight.”
They talked about everything. Life, family, and politics were all part of the conversation and Ms Khan said that, as she’d hoped, her interviewee couldn’t hate her in person. She left that first meeting feeling liberated and wants to share what she found.
“It reminded me that they are just people, they are just human beings,” she said. “I have spent my entire life being stereotyped, I am not going to turn around and do that to somebody else.”
The Norwegian-born filmmaker, who now lives in the United Kingdom, recently earned an International Emmy award for her film, and has previously been nominated for BAFTA awards. Her film was picked up by Netflix in June and is available on the streaming service in the U.K. and the U.S.
Her previous film, Jihad: A Story of the Others, focused on violent extremists and Ms Khan is the founder of Fuuse, a media and arts company that focuses on minorities telling their own stories.
“I’m also interested in the human, emotional, psychological and social drivers of why people are drawn to these movements, in the hope that we can understand it better so we can be better at countering it.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee today announced its decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2018 to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.
Both laureates have made contributions to focusing attention on, and combating, war crimes. Denis Mukwege has devoted his life to defending victims, while Nadia Murad is a witness who tells of the abuses perpetrated against herself and others. Each of them in their own way has helped to give greater visibility to war-time sexual violence, so that the perpetrators can be held accountable for their actions.
Dr Mukwege is a physician who assists victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since the Panzi Hospital was established in Bukavu in 1999, Dr Mukwege and his staff have treated thousands of patients who have fallen victim to such assaults. Most of the abuses have been committed in the context of a long-lasting civil war that has cost the lives of more than six million Congolese. He has repeatedly condemned impunity for mass rape and criticized the Congolese government and other countries for not doing enough to stop the use of sexual violence against women as a strategy and weapon of war.
Ms Murad is herself a victim of war crimes. She is a member of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, where she lived with her family in the remote village of Kocho. In August 2014 the Islamic State (IS) launched a brutal, systematic attack on the villages of the Sinjar district, aimed at exterminating the Yazidi population. Ms Murad is just one of an estimated 3 000 Yazidi girls and women who were victims of rape and other abuses by the IS army. Following her escape, she chose to speak openly about what she had suffered. In 2016, at the age of just 23, she was named the UN’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told journalist Stig Arild Pettersen that these awards will highlight what victims experience. “If we want people to say ‘no more war’, we have to show how ugly, how destructive, and how brutal it is,” Ms Reiss-Andersen said.
Ms Murad encouraged the global community to take a stand at a recent conference on the Victims Ethnic and Religious Violence. “Rebuilding and protecting minorities is a choice,” she said. “We can choose to protect minorities and ensure that extinction is not an outcome for any people or culture. I call on all nations to join us and commit to taking these steps. We must realize that uniting, working together, protecting minorities and rebuilding, is the only way to heal after genocidal campaigns. If we fail to do so, we make genocide possible.”
This year marks a decade since the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1820 (2008), which determined that the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict constitutes both a war crime and a threat to international peace and security.
Photos: UN Photo/Manuel Elias, UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe, UN Photo/Rick Bajornas, UN Photo/Marie Frechon
Words in the dictionary: Warmongering, Fighting, Battling, Warfare, Hate Speech.
NOT in the dictionary? Peacebuilding.
‘Peacebuilding’ was coined in the 1970’s by Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, who defines it as projects that involve “concrete action” towards peace. The word gets 7 million hits on Google, but isn’t in most dictionaries. Now a campaign has started to get ‘peacebuilding’ included.
Mike Jobbins from Search for Common Ground says it’s been a real frustration in the peacebuilding field to constantly get the Microsoft Word red squiggle from the spellchecker.
“We have UN departments, we have legislation in the States, we have governmental departments from Nigeria to Myanmar that use the word peacebuilding, but fundamentally we’re not well understood in the general public,” Mr Jobbins said. “You sit next to someone on an airplane and say ‘I work for a peacebuilding organization’ and people don’t really know what that means, and there’s so many great people doing such amazing things around the world that we thought it was time to make sure that gets recognized.”
Harriet Lamb, CEO of International Alert, pointed to the variety of new words that have recently been introduced to dictionaries that are being recognized as part of the English language. “You’ve got words like ‘hangry, which means you’re so hungry you’re angry, through to ‘instagramable’, ‘bingable’, ‘totes’ and ‘adorbs’. Yet peacebuilding – an incredibly serious concept that’s been around for 40 years has still not been recognized in our lexicon of words, so that’s why we launched this campaign.”
The campaign, led by several organizations such as Alliance for Peacebuilding, Conciliation Resources, International Alert, Peace Direct and Search for Common Ground, seems to be gaining followers on social media and has had some success. “We’re super pleased that in the last week, we’re now in three – Collins Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary and Macmillan Dictionary have all added it in so it’s fantastic progress in just a week after 40 years of set-backs,” said Mr Jobbins.
Oxford University Press confirmed that while “peacebuilding” is not currently covered in the Oxford English Dictionary, it will be considered. “We have collected evidence for the term and will consider it for potential inclusion in a future update,” their publicist said.
Leaders of the campaign have been inspired by the response they’ve received from the public, said Ms Lamb. “We’ve had lots of positive responses, and from the dictionaries themselves, so we are really hopeful the campaign will achieve its first objective of ensuring peacebuilding takes its rightful place.”
Ms Lamb said getting the term peacebuilding into the dictionary is a first step in a much larger issue. Peacebuildes are keen to see peacebuilding used as a viable option in conflict zones, and for policy makers to know that it works, is popular, and is cost-effective.
Tech giant Microsoft is stepping up to help save the world by offering its artificial intelligence (AI) technology for working on humanitarian efforts across the world. Microsoft announced on its blog recently that over the course of next five years, its ‘AI for Humanitarian Action’ program will invest $40 million towards initiatives focused in four priorities; disaster response, refugees and displaced people, needs of children, and human rights.
For the full story visit the Business Recorder here.
Peace News Network aims to present stories from conflict zones we often don’t hear. Our stories are about people taking risks for peace. We highlight the opinions of ordinary people who want non-violent solutions to their political differences. Our stories aren't always about shootings and explosions, but they do tell you stories from war zones that hopefully go some way towards building trust and reconciliation.
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