Imagine: Reflections On Peace.
When battlefield prowess and political manipulation are not enough to achieve peace through victory, we summon our best and brightest to negotiate an end; we celebrate peace settlements; and we give prizes, if not to victors, then to visionaries. We exalt peace as a human achievement, and justly so. But the reality of peace is flawed. The rewards of peace are elusive for the men and women who live in the post-conflict societies of our time. Why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it is so easy to imagine?
That is the question behind Imagine: Reflections on Peace. In this expansive project, world-renown journalists and authors take us into societies that have suffered searing conflict—and survived. Photographic essays make the stakes during war and peace grippingly palpable. Compelling backstories about negotiations, tales of survival, and accounts of the search for inner peace make the big picture personal. They also reveal the complexities of redemption and rebuilding in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Cambodia, Colombia, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda. With added insights from scholars and practitioners, the book offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into the unvarnished story of peace and a window into what it takes for societies and individuals to move forward after unspeakable brutality.
Imagine: Reflections on Peace is a book, exhibition, short films and educational curriculums conceived to encourage discourse and conversation around peace building in post-conflict societies and ending conflict. It is an initiative of The VII Foundation, which was established in 2001 to challenge complex social, economic, environmental and human rights issues through documentary non-fiction storytelling and education.
Out of War
In 1988, I flew to Bangkok on a cheap KLM flight and sat at the back of the plane with the smokers. My rucksack was in the hold and my precious Billingham camera bag on my knees. The flight was the third I had taken in my life. When the plane landed, I went to the Bangkok Youth Hostel on Phitsanulok Road, beginning my career as a photographer from a bunk bed in a dormitory.
In the 20 years that followed, I lived with an omnipresent inner conflict between my wonder at just being present and my distress about the violence and injustice I was witnessing. I lived through incidents that made me feel grateful but profoundly uncomfortable, like the moment when a Khmer Rouge officer—a man who had, 10 years earlier, been involved in the slaughter in Cambodia—tenderly held my hand and guided me safely through a minefield.
As my career progressed, the intensity of the wars also ramped up. In 1993, I moved to the former Yugoslavia to document war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Balkan country’s civil war. I covered conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, the occupation of Afghanistan and the civil war in Kashmir. I also worked in Latin America, South Asia, and North Korea.
For nearly two decades, war was my life. It was also central to the lives of many of my friends and indeed led to the formation of many friendships. War consumed us—literally, in the case of some who never made it home. And in the case of others who survived, war remains buried deep inside us decades later.
War invaded any peace I tried to find, like a parasite burrowed into my skin, eating away, invisible but present. One day, in April 2003, shortly after returning home from Iraq, I visited a close friend and pored over the photographs I had taken there. The invasion of Iraq was a personal turning point in my journalism career and my final act of photographing violence. I was exhausted by it. I wondered what it would take to make peace in Iraq, as well as in the neighboring countries, which were fast falling prey to violence. Reflecting on all the countries I had covered during wartime, I couldn’t say that peace had proved to be an unmitigated success. In some cases, the best that could be said was that the peace was preferable only to war—a notion which struck me as a very low benchmark.
That conversation about war and the inconclusiveness of peace was the first of many. Collectively, these conversations led to the making of this book, and it continued in the essays themselves. One synonym for peace might be tranquility, yet we are hard-pressed to find such calm in the wake of war. Peace is universally lauded as one of the humankind’s highest achievements, yet every city is filled with statues of soldiers cast in bronze, and we continue to define valor as bravery in war. Violence is palpable, horrific, yet it doesn’t necessarily fade when conflict yields to concord, or when concord relies upon cobbled-together agreements. Violence is graphic and describable, peace more of an elusive ideal, an ephemeral space between wars, a pause, both an aftermath to war and prelude to yet another war. As long we celebrate warriors more than peacemakers, as long as we hew fiercely to our differences, rather than humbly seeking our commonalities, peace will be framed in the context of war, as an absence of something rather than as a presence.
Once a war starts and people are indeed hemmed in by its violence, they summon the elusive ideal and try to imagine peace. As the war consumes more and more lives, the desire for peace becomes more and more acute. When battlefield prowess and political manipulation are not enough to achieve peace through victory, we summon our best and brightest to negotiate an end; we celebrate peace settlements; and we give prizes, if not to victors, then to visionaries. We exalt peace as a human achievement, and justly so.
But the reality of peace is flawed. The rewards of peace are elusive for the men and women who live in the post-conflict societies of our time. Why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it is so easy to imagine?
That is the question at the heart of this creative endeavor. We asked a dozen journalists, six photographers and six writers, to revisit countries with which they had become achingly familiar during the months and often years of seemingly intractable conflict. We wanted to see peace on the ground through the prism of their journalistic experience; to revisit the towns and villages; to talk to the women, men, soldiers, civilians, statesmen, and students who had survived the conflict or who had been born or had grown up in the postwar society, and discover what their experience of peace felt like. We sought input from academics and peacemakers. And because every story has many facets, we invited citizens of those countries to give us their very personal narratives, in their own voices.
While we have hewed to journalistic methods and the art of fact, the pursuit of authentic voice has been central to this project. We gave all the writers and photographers the freedom to tell the story in the way they deemed fit, and we encouraged them to bring their full subjectivity to bear. We did not soften hard edges or delete unpalatable impressions, but rather trusted that these distinctive parts would add up to an edifying whole.
Peace in every country has a distinct shape and hue, but these reports, analyses and first-person accounts revealed some common elements that can hinder reconciliation and growth, as well as others that can help build the road to an empowered and stable society. We want to understand those elements.
In Cambodia, a generation after the UN supervised elections and the long war ended, rural citizens have the quiet they craved but have scant access to adequate health care, education, or basic freedoms, and they are ruled by a dictator who was a former Khmer Rouge commander. In Bosnia, the Dayton Accords, imposed by outside powers, stopped the killing but created a dysfunctional political system, which failed to deliver dividends: 60 percent of the country’s youth is unemployed, and almost half of its population now lives elsewhere. Northern Ireland reached the much-heralded Good Friday or Belfast Agreement in 1998, yet the arrangement of power-sharing in Stormont, the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly, collapsed in 2017. The haggling over Brexit and Northern Ireland’s borders with the Irish Republic, an issue that was at the heart of the negotiated agreement, has exposed the fragility of the two-decade-old peace. In the 1990s, when I covered the Tutsis’ revenge murder of thousands of Rwandan Hutus in Congo, I could not anticipate that Rwanda would become the poster child for peace—and yet Rwanda has demonstrated a commitment to justice and reconciliation, boasts the highest number of female parliamentarians in the world, and has seen its “miracle economy” grow at 7 percent annually. Its populace, though, has never elected a replacement for its autocratic leader. Lebanon continues to suffer from the destabilizing influence of its squabbling neighbors; with more than a quarter of its population refugees. Colombia today, flush with the success of a peace treaty ending 50 years of civil war, is getting down to the difficult business of binding together a society riven for a very long time by violence, with both sides threatening to undermine—or abandon altogether—the terms of the accord.
Not everything is bleak. Humans are resilient. Concentration camp survivor Elvis Garibovic and genocide witness Dydine Umunyana have emerged from their experiences without succumbing to bitterness. Palestinian filmmaker Mira Sidawi and Cambodian bomb disposal technician Sophary Sophin use the legacies of war as inspiration for art and activism. John “Jackie” McDonald is building cross-community relations from the ground up in Northern Ireland. Kamal Mouzawak welcomes all comers at his restaurant, Tawlet, in Beirut.
These are not the wars of our grandparents, wars that we’ve heard about but that are so distant they are abstract and easy to disown. The countries we chose for this project share recent histories of violence that are part of our collective consciousness. The peace in these countries, and the treaties that world leaders and diplomats are brokering outside their borders, may not hold, but the success or failure of these efforts will affect us all. Even if we feel no personal responsibility, the consequences of failed outcomes will lead to further conflict, epic migration, the destabilization of societies, the rise of populism, and the politics of fear.
A century ago, the Treaty of Versailles—an accord that created the conditions for an even more terrible war than the one it tried to resolve—offered a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of peacemaking. A hundred years later, we should ask anew: How can we raise the benchmark? How can we make a better peace?
In the last days of assembling this book, just before heading to the printing plant, we find ourselves staring into the breach of unseen but universal horrors a worldwide pandemic of unknown consequences. Emerging out of Wuhan, COVID-19 soon cloaked Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington in an invisible shroud, and along the way, it infected Beirut, Phnom Penh, Kigali, Sarajevo, Belfast, and Bogota.
As the major world powers look inward, fighting political battles at home and struggling to rebuild broken economies, the appetite for solving problems far from home may diminish. As Samantha Power notes, in this time of rising populism and nationalism, the commitment to diplomacy is already impoverished; it may be further lessened as attempts to grapple with the pandemic and it’s aftermath take precedence over efforts to prevent destabilizing conflict.
Still, we must learn from the questions posed in this book; this is no time to turn our eyes away from tribalism, dogma, and extremism.
Gary Knight
Massachusetts
April 2020