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The Seemingly Impossible Versus the Clearly Unacceptable
by Rajmohan Gandhi08 September 2003
 Samuel Doe
If the vessel of a functioning state breaks, the beverage of peace spills to the ground. It seems absurd, in the Middle East, to hope for state-making without first obtaining some 'impossible' peace-making.
If the vessel of a functioning state breaks, the beverage of peace spills to the ground. This is how I interpreted the message of a talk this summer at the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Caux, Switzerland, by Samuel Doe of Liberia. Recalling close friends and colleagues whose heroic struggles for reconciliation had ended in sorrow because of a collapsing state, Doe, a scholar and activist for peace, seemed to imply that peace-builders needed an alliance with nation-builders.
Though he did not discuss the question, it would seem that Africa's fight against Aids is also dependent on a functioning state. That is, health-builders too need an alliance with nation-builders.
Doe's words in Caux were paralleled by cries for international assistance from thousands of Liberians, their country devastated by a long civil war. As of writing a large Nigerian contingent and some two hundred Americans are involved in peace-keeping in Liberia, but word of terrible deaths continues to come out of there.
If the choice is national sovereignty or a huge human tragedy in a portion of Africa, the world has to transgress the former. On this the international community seems to agree, but there is a shortage of action. Since Liberians are not charged with designs on the well-being of the world, they have attracted insufficient and slow action.
Iraq, on the other hand, divided world opinion and yet drew a massive intervention, led by the U.S.A. and the U.K. and supported by other countries, including Poland, Ukraine, Denmark, and Australia. Acknowledging that Iraq's reconstruction is proving harder than earlier realized, Washington now seeks the involvement of other nations and support from the United Nations. Some countries that had opposed the U.S.-led intervention have indicated that they would join in the effort for reconstruction (and presumably for peace-keeping) if control over Iraq is transferred by the U.S.-led coalition to the U.N. or something like the U.N. But the bridges that once linked the U.S. to the U.N. and to some of the world's major countries are in poor shape.
The difficulties of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq are heightened by a widespread Arab (including Iraqi) sense that Weapons of Mass Destruction and the evils of the Saddam regime were not the only reasons for the intervention in Iraq. In the Arab perception, oil and an opportunity to strengthen Israel vis-à-vis the Arabs were additional considerations.
Many who are not Arabs have shared the perception. They ask for evidence that the design for reordering the Middle East that is said to animate Washington includes a viable Palestinian state that is not dishonourably small or maliciously broken up. In other words, many in the world want signs that the Americans are even-handed between Israel and the Arabs.
But the sympathy that much of the world feels for Palestinians subsides when Israeli children are bombed out of existence. When such bombings occur, predictably inviting harsh reprisals, questions are raised not so much about Israeli occupation and reprisals, or about American bias, but about the interest of Palestinians in their own future.
Statements that no one on the planet has a solution for the Israel/Palestine question are routinely heard on the world's media. And the story of peace hopes shattered by a bomb or an incursion is by now an old and expected one.
So it is a case of the seemingly impossible versus the clearly unacceptable - the idea that people must kill their neighbours before being killed by them, which is what the Middle East, birth-place of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, peace be upon all three, seems to symbolize today.
It seems absurd, in the Middle East, to hope for state-making without first obtaining some 'impossible' peace-making - without some reconciliation, or healing, or patience, or forbearance that human beings may only find through grace from Above. That is, the vessel of an earthly state there, or the vessels of two states, may need a divine alchemy.
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