Advocating for Unarmed Civilian Protection

Press Clip Source: Metta Center for Nonviolence
Link to Source: Here

In this interview from the Metta Center for Nonviolence, you'll learn about how NP is working to help the United Nations adopt more nonviolent strategies.

Interviewer:  This is Uniting Nations, a show about the power of nonviolence in the work of the United Nations. Today, I speak with Gay Rosenblum-Kumar from Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). NP's mission is to protect civilians in violent conflicts through unarmed strategies, build peace side-by-side with local communities, and advocate for the wider adoption of these approaches to safeguard human lives and dignity. Gay is the UN representative of NP based in New York.

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar:  Hi, my name is Gay Rosenblum-Kumar, and I'm the UN representative for Nonviolent Peaceforce based in New York. Nonviolent Peaceforce is an international non-governmental organization. Established a little over 20 years ago, we say NGO, we're still not a large NGO, but we have our main headquarters in Geneva, and an office in Minnesota, as well as a presence here in New York through me, and another presence in Brussels. We're working in about seven countries now.

What do you advocate for on behalf of NP at the United Nations?

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar: Well, NP is an organization based on principles of nonviolence, of the primacy of local actors, and working directly with local people on protecting them and those who are at risk of violence. So we're advocating with the UN in a number of ways, and I basically have three audiences that I try to reach. One is UN staff in various offices like peacekeeping and development, peacebuilding, UNICEF on children's issues, others on humanitarian issues. A second, very important group are the member states, these are the countries that belong to the UN. The third is the large group of other NGOs, or non governmental organizations that have representation of the UN working on a lot of issues, many of which intersect with these.

We are advocating that nonviolence becomes a first resort and not a last resort, when looking to solve conflicts. There's a line that is in a report, the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations UN report from 2015, known by its acronym HIPPO, which says, with respect to protecting civilians, the panel recommends that, "unarmed strategies must be at the forefront of UN efforts to protect civilians." So we try to infuse that into different kinds of thinking and policies and practices at the UN. We would like to make unarmed approaches a regular part of the menu of policy options that the UN, and particularly a Security Council looks at, when thinking about how to address violent conflicts in different parts of the world.

What role can the UN play in building a nonviolent future?

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar: Well, first let me go back a bit to a little more about what NP tries to promote, because we do several things. And I'll go into what we don't do. We work on direct protection of civilians at a very local level on the ground. That means physical protection, we call it protective accompaniment or protective presence, working with various sides to conflict, and trying to get them to come together. So while we work in an immediate way when there are people at risk, we also work in the long term in trying to build community capacity to resolve conflicts themselves, to understand self-protection methods. So I tie this to what you were asking about what the UN can do, because the UN has many, many aspects to its work that help build a nonviolent future. Most people know some of them like the World Food Program, which distributes food to people at risk of hunger or malnutrition, UNICEF, which provides child inoculations and various things to help children. The peacekeepers who are deployed, I believe now there are about a dozen peacekeeping missions with armed peacekeepers. By the way, we are not saying that we want to replace armed peacekeepers—  we know there's a place for them, and they do very important work. But, we feel that we could complement their work by introducing more nonviolent methods. The UN has a role both in helping improving the development of a lot of countries that are on the least developed country lists, because certainly where there is huge competition for resources and major inequities in wealth and injustices when governance is not what should be. These are all grievances that lead to conflict and I think the UN is working a lot toward remedying them. So as to stop the drivers of conflict and lead to a more nonviolent future.

In contrast, what drawbacks do you see that the UN has that could be remedied by a more robust commitment to nonviolent strategies?

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar: I think that in principle, most UN staff and member states would say that they have a commitment towards nonviolence. But the member states have self-interest and UN staff have their departmental areas of responsibility. I think this sometimes gets overlooked, and there is an automatic reaction to do what we've done before, and not a deep enough introspection about whether it's appropriate and it fits a new situation, because certainly the types and levels of conflict in the world have changed, since the UN was founded, and have evolved a lot in the past 10 or 20 years, especially with the ending of the Cold War, which had more proxy wars and cross border. Now most conflicts are internal, and against a particular state. While the UN tries to do prevention, it's not honestly very good at it. Most of the time the UN is reactive and comes in after there's a conflict. I think it would be more effective if it could have better connection with local people, more eyes and ears on the ground to really understand what's going on, and help local people use nonviolent and unarmed means to help build their capacity like NP does.

Another thing that's a drawback is, as most people know, and it's very high on the agenda at the UN, the Security Council and its formation of 15 members, five of whom are permanent members and 10 of whom are elected for two-year stays and represent different regions around the world, is very much locked right now and not able to move coherently. The five permanent members have veto power, and when they have veto power, this is going to block a lot of attempts to do more negotiation. I think that's one of the major problems. It is very much on the UN agenda Security Council reform to either have other members join or to get members to elect not to use their veto power, particularly in cases where there are atrocities and genocide being perpetrated, but they're pretty locked and haven't come to an agreement on that.

Interviewer: I can see how the structure and system of the UN itself could be a hindrance to its mission. Also, I remember you said earlier about how nonviolence should be the first resort, not the last resort, but in contrary, I think some people, or many people tend to think about armed and violent resolution as the first method to respond to conflict.

In thinking about things like the current war in Ukraine, the solution that most people think about is more armaments, more military expenditure, more military support to Ukraine. How would you counter that kind of rhetoric?

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar: Well, I think you're absolutely right. I think it has to do with the fact that people are just not aware, they don't know, and they're just not conversant in the canopy of other actions and also honestly some things I've heard people say is,"oh that's naive to think things can be done without guns", but actually I think there's a counter-argument to that. I know Nonviolent Peaceforce staff who I have seen working in some dire conditions, in Darfur or in South Sudan, they are not at all naive and not at all martyrs. They very much use a long-established, well-proven set of methods of unarmed civilian protection that have been proven to work by a lot of different means. One [method] is developing the trust of local communities, another is being nonpartisan and impartial so that you are not a threat to any one group, getting respect from people and being able to talk and negotiate. Also being able to remind all kinds of actors of their responsibilities as duty bears to uphold standards of human rights and international humanitarian law. And that the eyes of the world are watching them through us and that can be a deterrent because no one wants a bad reputation, usually. I think these are some of the things and also by modelling nonviolence, you bring nonviolence. If I could tell you a quick story?

I was recently in Darfur, and we have been in Darfur less than a year so it's still developing relations. We are working in North Darfur in what is called Zam Zam IDP camp. It's been about 20 years since the genocide in Darfur started. And there are, I was told, almost 400,000 people in this camp now- pretty bad conditions, but we are working and I was there last month for a number of things but happened to be lucky enough to see a graduation of four of our Women Protection Teams (WPTs). These have about 50 people each and these women have started their training in things like: how to protect themselves, how to negotiate, how to speak with authorities, and sound like you have authority. It was wonderful to see what they're hoping to do.

Then, the next day we visited a community outside the camp, about 15 kilometres away of the so-called other ethnic group that they have a conflict with. These are Arab herders who, in the past, they were known as the John Jooib people who were blamed for perpetuating violence, and they were explaining their problems, and they also said, and we found this out that because of this past reputation and humanitarian groups do not go visit them do not offer aid, and basically only work in the camp which then creates an imbalance because only one side are getting support and attention. And we were told at first that we could not go to this community without an armed escort. But on principle, Nonviolent Peaceforce will not accept an armed escort because we say, how can we say that we stand for nonviolence and then have soldiers behind us. It's a contradiction, so we won't do that. The other authorities said it could be dangerous to do this, but we have staff from all sides of the region and ethnic groups, and we reached out to our staff, and we started to explain what we do. We were very clear, we do not offer material aid or humanitarian aid, no food, no water, no health. We only offer this—  conflict resolution, capacity building protection capacity, etc.

Slowly, over time this conversation negotiated to which the people from the town of Kolgi met us outside the town on the road, we discussed and explained what we were bringing. My colleague said, "we build trust kilometre by kilometre". So, the first time we met on the road, then next week we met on the edge of town, and the next time we were invited into town. Now we have relationships. The best ending to this story is, after I got back, I got a one-line email from our team leader in El Fashir, which is the capital of North Darfur, who said, "Great news, the community from the IDP camp carried water on donkey carts to the Kolgi community." I think that shows an amazing advance of these two communities, not only starting to communicate but actually sharing a precious resource like water in a very dry town. So I think I probably went a bit off of your subject, but it seemed relevant to the kinds of things we want people to be aware of, and what's possible if you use your imagination and think more widely about what can be done.

Interviewer:  Definitely, and I think it's a perfect story to demonstrate that violence dehumanizes, but nonviolence brings in the humanity to the conflict.

What have been some Nonviolent Peaceforce victories that you've seen there?

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar: Well, I should say that I'm not the first UN representative for NP. My predecessor was Mel Duncan, who many people know, he's one of the co-founders of NP. He was the UN representative for about six or seven years, before I joined in about 2017. Since his time- of course he made the initial entry points and knocked on a lot of doors to get some to open- there are several things we can say we've done.

We've gotten language about unarmed civilian protection in several major UN documents like this High-level Panel report, like the resolution on 1325 on women and peacebuilding into several security council resolutions, including what they call mandates (which are the security councils method of laying out what should be done in a peacekeeping mission). Unarmed civilian protection has also been mentioned in several mandates for the mission in South Sudan. Most recently in the special political mission in Sudan, which started up two years ago when the peacekeeping mission ended, but it transferred into a more political mission. That's one thing.

Another thing is we've had good relations with the UN in several places in South Sudan (we work in some of the same places at the mission and I've heard it myself that we've been appreciated). We've gotten some funding from the UN on occasion. I know particularly that that funding was used during COVID to deliver, believe it or not, virtual online training on UCP to young people in- well, first of, all across the continent- then specifically in Darfur. And then specifically in the Sahel, there was a total of about five different courses, some in English and Arabic some in French, each one had about 40 people. The training had amazing repercussions and I'll tell you just one story in terms of how people were like hungry to understand this material and use it. One person wrote in the evaluation, one man from Darfur:"Before I took this course, I thought the only way our conflict would be solved was through the barrel of the gun, and now I see that the only way it can be solved is without a gun. Now, I'm going to do unarmed civilian protection." Then, he started doing trainings for others in his refugee camp.

So I think that's it. We are trying to get closer to the UN in a lot of ways. As I mentioned, we don't want to be part of the UN, we don't think the UN can do civilian protection because they're not civilians. They do have some staff called civil affairs, but these are still officers of the UN. But we do believe that UN staff can use some of our methods when dealing with local communities. We can share information and work in complementary ways with them.

How can people support your work at the UN and beyond?

Well, let's see. First of all, spread the word everywhere you can, that this is working, proven, needed more. And as you know, Nonviolent Peaceforce is not the only group doing unarmed civilian protection. We estimate there's about 50 organizations working in about 30 different locations. I'd say NP might be among the largest, but we're working very much on a community of practice in order to share information and learn best practices. Go to the Nonviolent Peaceforce website and educate yourself. If you get really interested, our manual is there in English, French, and Arabic, and soon in Spanish.

I should mention also that NP is now working in the U.S. following the murder of George Floyd. Being that we actually have an office in Minnesota, we very much had to look at ourselves and recognize that this work of unarmed protection is needed in many places in this country as well. So, we have a program in Minnesota and another in New York City. The one in New York City works specifically I believe on anti-Asian hate crime reduction and awareness raising. In Minnesota, I was told that when the city government wanted to stop having armed police in their high schools, they invited NP to train local community members in unarmed methods to protect the high schools and I believe they're still doing that.

So one thing is to equip oneself with examples of how this works. Certainly if people can contribute funding that is very much needed. I know from my own struggles that NP is a small organization that depends on grants. Now we do get some large grants from the European Union and the U.S. government. But those are for established programs and when we get requests to visit new places. We only work upon an invitation from a local group. We don't have like a back pocket or an extra bank account to fund that. In fact, we've had requests from Cameroon to work there and have not been able to find the funding for that. One of my latest effort is to develop at least a training program for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has had horrific violence, particularly in Eastern DRC as it's called. Again, looking for some designated funding, because I think just like in Darfur, if we could introduce training, we'd get a wellspring of support to actually come and help people establish teams on the ground. Also, if people belong to groups like you and the US, you and associations which have lots of chapters and lots of cities. I think that would be a good place to spread the word and we'd always be willing to send someone, at least virtually if we didn't have a close by to really talk about NP. If people are with universities, I do a lot of speaking and others do a lot of speaking to university classes. I'm actually doing one next month with a university class in Japan. I've done them with classes in Washington and Virginia frequently. So main thing is awareness raising.

Perhaps my last question, what drew you to work for NP?

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar: I have been working for NP for about six or seven years now. Before that I actually worked for the United Nations for 25 years. So I saw the other side of it. I think when you're up close and know the inside you see the strengths and the limitations. I knew that, even though I was working mainly on the peacebuilding side. I think the UN is gathering strength in that area. I also saw that there are a lot of people and parts of the UN that had blinders on. Like you said earlier, people gravitate first to the commonly thought belief of, let's end in peacekeepers with guns, and they weren't aware of other opportunities and options and how well they work. So when Mel was visiting and I retired from the UN, he said, "come help me with this!" I couldn't resist as a way to kind of infuse my combination of thinking into all my old friends and colleagues at the UN. I think we've been pretty successful but there's a long, long way to go.