David Harland's Geneva Peace Forum Keynote Address: Choosing Peace (full text)
I was born during the opening days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. So, my whole life has been a sort of ‘peace dividend’. That is: if Kennedy and Krushchev had not chosen peace a few weeks later, it might have been a very short life indeed.
33 years later, in 1995, just before email and the internet appeared, when information still had to be gathered the old-fashioned way, I was asked by the United Nations, for which I worked, to find out exactly what had happened at Srebrenica in Bosnia after it had fallen to the Serbs and the UN forces had evacuated. It turned out to be the first of many investigations and inquiries and legal processes.
I found myself one day early in this inquiry in a tiny Bosnian hamlet called Kravica, standing in front of a cement warehouse, just one storey, quite small, perhaps 8 metres by 12, just a single room. Outside, there were large numbers of brass-coloured bullet casings scattered around on the ground. And there were some marks outside of the building. So, I decided to stop and go in.
The room I went in to was empty. Empty, except that on all six internal surfaces – the four walls and the ceiling and the floor – there were splattered remains of human bodies. About seven hundred people had been pushed into that room after the fall of Srebrenica. And then paramilitary soldiers outside the warehouse had directed fire through the windows from the outside to such an extent that the bodies had disintegrated. By the time I came, they had bulldozed away the bodies, and they had hosed down the room, but in a fairly perfunctory way. All you could see was dappled remains of blood, hair and tissue.
I came out of that warehouse, and I stood in the sun and the stillness, not knowing at all what to think. But knowing that I wanted to devote the rest of my life to doing something about what I had just seen. To help prevent it from happening again, or to help bring those who had done these terrible things to justice, or something. But how?
The scourge of war
War has been the scourge of humanity for as long as we can look back into time. Palaeontologists say that the preserved skeletons of our earliest ancestors show signs of death by violence, at even higher rates than in succeeding generations, or now. The body of Ötzi the Iceman, who lived just over the mountains to our south and east, more than 5,000 years ago, shows not only that he seems to have died a violent death, but also that he had previously survived an arrow wound, with the head of the arrow found embedded in his shoulder. So much so that when he was discovered, the local police on the Italian-Austrian border called the homicide division.
Almost every human society has lived by organised violence of some sort or has paid the price. My own country of New Zealand unfortunately offers a textbook example. Human beings arrived on the islands of New Zealand from Eastern Polynesia about 700 years ago. There have been waves of migration and contact since then, almost all of which have involved some level of violence, including, I have to say, a lot of violence perpetrated by my own community, which came to New Zealand more recently. But one community, the Moriori of Rekohu, or the Chatham Islands as they are known in English, had lived in isolation for hundreds of years on their islands, which are remote even by the standards of New Zealand, and they had found a way of banishing warfare and of resolving conflicts peacefully. They called it Nunuku’s Law – the absolute prohibition of killing another human being for any reason.
In 1835, with the help of transport and weapons provided by my ancestors, the Europeans, a group of Maori arrived on Rekohu from the main islands of New Zealand and started exterminating all of the Moriori they found. The Moriori held a last meeting, to see whether they should at last break Nunuku’s Law to defend themselves, and they chose not to. Almost all of them were killed. Some of the women who survived were impaled on stakes and left to die; and a few were enslaved. When questioned later, one of the leaders of the attacking group said, “What of it? It was in accordance with our custom.” The Moriori genocide was small in terms of numbers, though it is one of the deadliest in human history by percentage of the victim group killed. And the lesson of the story seems to be a big one: it is that unfortunately, a society that gives up warfare lives at its peril.
So, what to do? Particularly now when technology has given us the means to wipe out not just the population of a small and faraway island, but the capacity to wipe out the entire human race.
The pathways to peace
There are many answers, none of them perfect and certainly none of them easy, but the city of Geneva offers us at least three.
First, one can accept the world more or less as it is and understand that war will not be eradicated; Nunuku’s law will not be applied, however much you want to be. And use the tools of diplomacy and of deterrence to try to keep the world less violent. It is quite grim – particularly because the central paradox of nuclear deterrence is that your threat to wipe out the world if attacked has to be credible. For deterrence to work, you have to be willing and seen to be willing to do absolutely unthinkable things that would greatly outshadow what ‘Little Boy’ had done in Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. It was that framework, and that conundrum, that brought Reagan and Gorbachev to Geneva in 1985.
A second option, for which Geneva is rightly renowned, is to focus on addressing the symptoms of war: to provide humanitarian assistance to the victims of war. The Red Cross movement and the UN High Commission for Refugees both have their seats in Geneva, as do dozens of other specialised humanitarian organisations.
A third option is pacifism, that is to reject war as a legitimate act, at all, and to try to find ways to address the world’s problems, including war, without resorting to violence. To banish war altogether.
All three of these are important and are worth devoting one’s life to. I should perhaps add as a parenthesis that I work in a mediation organisation named for Geneva’s great son, Henry Dunant. We work on the first of these options. And Dunant himself – although mainly remembered for setting up the Red Cross, which relates to the second option – actually worked on all three at different times in his life. But we need to be honest: these three options are not fully compatible with one another, and each one of them has the most terrible internal contradictions.
Diplomacy – including the progressive development of norms and laws, and of alliances that promote stability – has been incredibly successful. The number of people killed in warfare every year is lower than it was 1,000 years ago, despite the fact that the population today is vastly bigger. But diplomacy is an imperfect tool. There is no arrangement that guarantees that war will not erupt, whatever norms and laws are in place. As Immanuel Kant said, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.’ To embrace diplomacy as the main mechanism for managing the risk of war, which is now the risk of extermination of the human race, is to dance on the edge of a cliff. When the international system built on diplomatic ties entered a crisis in 1914, about 20 million people died, half soldiers, half civilians. If there were a similar crisis today – over the Baltic states or over Taiwan or over AI or over any one of the brittle issues we live with – the death toll would probably be orders of magnitude greater than in the world of 1914 to 1918, and all or part of the world might become unfit for human habitation. Even if diplomacy reduces the risks, which it has spectacularly, it’s still Russian roulette.
The second option, humanitarian aid in war, is in many ways fantastic – I have lived years of my life in a city under siege, and I have seen what humanitarian aid can do to save lives on a huge scale. And when aid is systematically blocked, as now in Gaza or Sudan, we rightly feel outraged at the cruelty of it. But humanitarian aid can prolong war; I’ve seen it myself. From Sudan to Sarajevo, the provision of aid often allows a weaker side to fight on. That may be good or bad, depending on the war, but it is not a morally simple equation. Saving lives today may well lead to more lives lost later. And the provision of humanitarian aid can be a substitute for more decisive action. We now have plenty of evidence that the provision of humanitarian aid in Bosnia, for example, was deliberately used by some donor countries as a substitute for more decisive action against the Serbs that might have prevented a genocide.
As for the last option – pacifism – it has to reckon with the fate of the Moriori and of Nunuku’s law. When the goal of an aggressor is extermination, which it often is, what can pacifism achieve? There is an awe-inspiring nobility in those who embrace non-violence in the face of certain death: Sophie Scholl of the White Rose movement in Nazi Germany; the Buddhist monks, and those who emulated them and burned themselves to death during the Vietnam war, I remember watching on tv as a child; the Quaker martyrs. They showed us humanity’s amazing capacity for goodness. But it is hard to say how much those people prevented the evil for which they gave their lives.
I have wrestled with all this since that day when I walked into the warehouse at Kravica. I certainly don’t think that I have found all the answers, or even that there are perfect answers. But I do know that choosing peace matters. We live at a moment when, after decades of steady improvement, things are now falling apart. Rules and norms and institutions are weaker now than at any time since World War 2. The number of wars and the number of people killed in those wars are rising. And the risk of truly catastrophic conflict is increasing. There is a great unravelling going on around us, which is enormously dangerous. Without a critical mass of people choosing peace, whichever imperfect path they choose, the trajectory of the next few years is likely to be very bad.
I regret a bit that it took a shock like the one I felt at Kravica that day in 1995 to make me understand just how important the choice of peace is. And I very much hope, particularly among the younger people here today, that the importance of that choice will be evident even without such a shock. Because of the pace at which things can now unravel doesn’t give us the luxury of a life of reflection.
So, I thank Mr Kennedy and Mr Kruschev – and I thank you all.