My inaugural encounter with the Mennonite-affiliated peacebuilding practitioners and scholars was during my interaction with other African peace enthusiasts at the second Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API) 13 years ago at the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation (MEF) in Zambia. As part of my diploma studies in peacebuilding and conflict transformation, this foundation was reinforced by the valuable expertise of my brother and mentor, Mr. Babu Ayindo, MA ‘98; Dr. Carl Stauffer, then regional representative for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for Southern Africa; and DeEtte Beghtol, then MCC service worker seconded to MEF.

The formative leg of my peacebuilding journey was also “blessed” by the experiences of 91����Ƶ scholars, alumni and faculty including Mozambican brother Afiado Zungunza; Mzee John Katunga from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); Mr. George Wachira, then director at Nairobi Peace Initiative-Africa; Krista Rigalo, MA ’00, and Fidel Lumeya, MA ’00, then MCC country representatives from Angola; and Barry Hart, a member of 91����Ƶ faculty.

With great respect, the foundation these people contributed started me off and to a greater extent set me on a firmer peacebuilding journey. Globally, there is growing recognition that efforts in peace and conflict scholarships in molding a generation of peacebuilding practitioners will steer the next century into peace and stability. Thus, it’s this Mennonite exposure that drives me to claim a stake in this generation of peacemakers. Africa’s future, and certainly Zambia’s, is not anchored on undemocratic systems, and visionless and corrupt leadership, but more visionary and selfless peace-loving practitioners.

My stint at MEF was reinforced by a Winston Fellowship to attend the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) at 91����Ƶ in 2003. This scholarship solidified my interaction and engagement with the Mennonites and peacemakers from other faith traditions, and provided benefits from the expertise of peace practitioners and scholars, notably professors Hizkias Assefa and Ron Kraybill. And one of my key take-aways from the 2003 SPI, particularly from these celebrated scholars, is the inspiration and renewed impetus to spread additional peacebuilding knowledge and tools. In sum, SPI gave me fresh cause to firmly contribute to cultivating positive peace in my seemingly peaceful country, Zambia.

After two months of the Winston internship with Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation, I was formally engaged as an instructor. This new appointment once again laid before me valuable opportunities to collaborate with Mennonite associates, some of whom I co-taught courses with during regular classes and the Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API) courses. For several years, I served as a co-instructor during the API working with, among others, West African MCC representative and 91����Ƶ alumni, Brother Gopar Tapkida, MA ’01, from Nigeria. My firm peacebuilding foundation laid through the Mennonite tutelage and association was a precursor to subsequent scholarly engagements in Durban, South Africa and San Jose, Costa Rica.

The last several years, I have made my modest contribution to cultivating a culture of peace through trainings and workshops in Ethiopia, Japan, Rwanda, South Sudan (where I serve as an adjunct instructor at the RECONCILE Peace Institute), Uganda and Zimbabwe. Three years ago, I left MEF and joined the Dag Hammarskjöld Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at The Copperbelt University as a lecturer. Despite exposure to other peacebuilding philosophies, I continue to appreciate the indelible orientation that the MCC/91����Ƶ-CJP alumni, colleagues and associates rendered continue to shape my peacebuilding vocation.

I particularly share my subscription to conflict transformation versus conflict resolution or management. I have lately been sharing some of the resources with colleagues within the Institute, such as the Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding acquired through my 91����Ƶ exposure and contact. Anchored on the foundation, as part of my doctoral ideas, I work on transformative mediation and social conflicts within my context. I am particularly interested in the churches’ interventions (intermediary roles and contributions) and the effects on ameliorating social conflicts including gender-based violence.

Descriptively, Zambia may be peaceful, but there are a myriad of socioeconomic issues including violence against women (widows and single mothers) that warrant attention. Demographic health studies shows that women suffer violence from the age of 15 and about 60% cases are attributed to violence by husbands or intimate partners. It may be disputed, but gender-based violence is a peacebuilding issue. And the need to explore transformative approaches (or assessing how transformative existing interventions are) to such conflicts is great.

Ignatius Kabale Mukunto js a lecturer and Coordinator of the Human Rights, Governance and Peacebuilding Program, under the Dag Hammarskjöld Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies of the Copperbelt University, Kitwe, Zambia.

In the summer of 1994, about 40 peace and development workers gathered on the campus of 91����Ƶ for a one-week seminar called “Frontiers in International Peacebuilding.” It was the first official event held by what is now known as the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, or CJP, which was then so fledgling it had yet to be fully accredited.*

Organizers, including CJP founding director John Paul��Lederach, sociology professor Vernon Jantzi, and �ᾱ���쾱������Assefa, a mediator in conflicts around the world, invited friends and colleagues to talk and think about the cutting edges of practice and theory in international peace work. Some uncertainty surrounded the launch of CJP itself, Jantzi recalls, and the organizers of the Frontiers conference didn’t have any particular plans to make it an annual event.

And they surely didn’t imagine that 20 years later it would be thriving, would have brought 2,800 people from 121 countries to 91����Ƶ’s campus and would have directly inspired the creation of at least 10 other short-term peacebuilding institutes in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and North America. Nor could Lederach, Jantzi and Assefa have imagined that they would remain involved to varying degrees ever since, though Assefa is the only one has taught every year at the summer institute.

“There was so much energy generated,” Jantzi recalls, of the first conference. “People were so eager to share their experiences.”

Participants found that simply being together at a week-long peacebuilding conference was tremendously beneficial and inspiring for their work, and the response was enthusiastic. During the following academic year, CJP received its accreditation, had three students in the master’s program and admitted a dozen more to begin in the fall of 1995, and had hired its first full-time administrative staff member, Ruth Zimmerman. Things were heading in a good direction, and CJP organized a second Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conference in the summer of 1995.

Conference becomes “SPI”

For its third year, CJP gave its one-week peacebuilding conference a new name: the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or SPI. Word was spreading, interest was growing, and SPI was about to begin growing quickly in size, scope and length. By 2002, SPI attracted around 150 participants from about 50 countries and offered 20 classes over a two-month period.

One of the major early emphases at SPI – and CJP more generally – was grounding the academic curriculum and classroom instruction in practical, on-the-ground application of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Early in SPI’s history, outside funders helped bring participants from different sides of several major conflicts around the world, including groups of Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland and members of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups from Rwanda and Burundi.

This created a rich and challenging environment at SPI, adding a heavy dose of real-life experience from difficult, violent conflicts – sometimes involving opposing sides of the same conflict – to complement the theory-based aspects of the curriculum.

“In the classroom, that was pretty powerful,” says Tim Ruebke, who attended four years of SPI before earning his master’s degree from CJP in 1999.

Rich experiences outside classroom

Many report that the most powerful moments at SPI, though, occurred during informal, social times away from the classroom. Ruebke recalls an evening gathering at a home in Harrisonburg where participants from Northern Ireland shared stories, songs and dancing with each other and the rest of their classmates.

While the daily sessions focus on the cerebral, “head” aspects of peacebuilding, these informal, social times in the evenings get at its emotional “heart.” This aspect of SPI, Ruebke says, mirrors the reality of many real-life peace negotiations, where the hard work of compromise, connection and understanding between parties often occurs in relaxed, social settings before being finalized at the formal negotiating table.

“A lot of stuff that happens here is informal and relational,” says Jantzi. “We think it’s very significant.”

And as SPI participants often discover, the emotional aspects of peacebuilding aren’t always happy times of singing and dancing. One of the early SPI sessions included visitors from the former Soviet republic of Georgia as well as Abkhazia, a disputed region within Georgia over which a civil war was fought in the 1990s. One evening, an SPI professor had planned a discussion about this conflict and began by displaying a map of the region.

Ruebke was in the audience, and remembers that one of the parties was upset in some way by what was (or perhaps, what wasn’t) portrayed on the map. This immediately and badly derailed the session, and by the time things had been patched up and discussion about the conflict was able to proceed, the importance of the “felt” aspect of peacebuilding had been brought home to Ruebke in a memorable way.

“Even though we were a peacebuilding program, people brought their stuff with them,” remembers Ruth Zimmerman, who says that these sorts of conflicts would periodically flare up between participants. “We had a great learning ground for using some of those [conflict resolution] skill sets over the years.”

At the very beginning, the Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences and SPI were simply opportunities for professional development and learning. Before long, however, participants and graduate students in CJP began lobbying for an academic credit component to SPI. Though hesitant to accept the constraints of a pre-planned curriculum, CJP added a credit component to provide students with more flexibility in earning degrees through the program.

Some core courses have been offered year after year, including ones dealing with conflict analysis, restorative justice and trauma healing, and others that focus on practical peacebuilding skills like negotiation and reconciliation. Yet SPI stays true to its roots by exploring the field’s frontiers and updating its course offerings to reflect emerging themes in peacebuilding. Examples of new courses in 2014 include ones on media and societal transformation, playback theater, trauma-sensitive peacebuilding, mindfulness, and architecture as a peacebuilding tool.

Things ran on the skinniest of shoestring budgets in the very first years of SPI, when CJP professors opened their homes to participants after the day’s sessions had ended, while their spouses pitched in to help with meals. Volunteers filled many support roles. This contributed to the organic, intimate atmosphere that remains an important aspect of SPI to this day. But it was an exhausting and, in the long run, unsustainable way to run the event that itself led to conflicts between overworked staff members.

“It was so much work,” recalls Zimmerman, who filled leadership roles at CJP from 1995 to 2007. “I used to put in 70-hour weeks.”

Huge logistics behind SPI

In addition to planning courses and lining up faculty to teach them, coordinating the many moving parts of the growing SPI program presented huge logistical challenges. Once, a participant booked a flight to the Dallas, Texas, airport rather than Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport. Another one hopped in a taxi and directed the driver to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 185 miles north of Harrisonburg, Virginia.

In 1998, just after she became one of CJP’s earliest master’s program graduates, Pat Hostetter Martin (also a participant in the very first Frontiers in International Peacemaking conference) joined SPI to help relieve the growing crisis of stress and exhaustion the workload was placing on other staff. The following year, Martin became SPI’s co-director with Patricia Spaulding, and then sole director from 2004 until 2008.

In 2000, William Goldberg – a 2001 master’s program graduate of CJP – joined the SPI staff as the transportation coordinator. He later served as an associate director, co-director and, as of 2013, the director of SPI, which now has two full-time staff members and employs about 10 temporary staff each summer. (Other SPI leaders: Gloria Rhodes in the ’90s, Sue Williams, 2008-’11; Valerie Helbert, 2011-’13.)

As the first Jewish program administrator at 91����Ƶ, Goldberg embodies one of the ways that SPI has affected 91����Ƶ as a whole by bringing such wide cultural and religious diversity to campus. From the very first Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences, CJP leaders wanted faculty to reflect the religious and cultural diversity of the participants – a desire at odds with 91����Ƶ’s requirement that all faculty profess a Christian faith. After some discussion, CJP was able to negotiate exceptions to 91����Ƶ’s hiring practices and hire non-Christian faculty members during the summer, which Jantzi points to as an example of the strong support SPI has generally enjoyed from university administrators since its beginning.

91����Ƶ’s hospitable community

Support from the university extended well beyond the administration, remembers Jantzi. Cafeteria staff embraced the opportunity, rather than resented the hassle, of serving participants with a variety of religious and cultural dietary preferences, while the physical plant staff went to great lengths to ensure everyone stayed comfortable during their time on campus. Together, the welcoming atmosphere the entire university created at SPI for visitors from around the world became an important part of its success.

As employees and departments outside of SPI pitched in to help it succeed, SPI also tried to build closer ties to the broader university community by making events like the opening ceremonies and the periodic SPI luncheons open to anyone on campus and in the surrounding community. And when these general open invitations didn’t attract large audiences, Martin found greater success when she started targeting specific people and departments with invitations and paying for their lunches.

SPI staff have also made similar efforts to share the diversity present on campus each summer with the broader community in and around Harrisonburg. As SPI’s community relations coordinator for about a decade, Margaret Foth worked to connect participants with families, churches and civic groups in the area. She helped form a particularly strong relationship with the Rotary Club of Rockingham County, which hosts a speaker from SPI each year and has helped underwrite an SPI trip to Washington D.C. A close relationship also developed between SPI and Park View Mennonite Church, just down the road from 91����Ƶ, which has welcomed numerous international visitors in Sunday School classes and as participants in worship services.

“We wanted [participants] to know that it was an area that was welcoming and hospitable,” says Foth. “They weren’t just coming for an academic session. They were coming for relationships in a welcoming community.”

From 2000 to 2010, vanloads of SPI participants made connections farther from campus when they attended a peacebuilding conference held each summer by a group of churches in Knoxville, Tennessee, 360 miles southwest of Harrisonburg. (The minister who organized this conference, Jim Foster, is a graduate of Eastern Mennonite Seminary.) By staying with host families, the visitors enjoyed a more immersive experience in American culture; Foth says she could always count on enthusiastic reviews the following Monday, after participants returned to campus.

One year, a Vietnamese-American lawyer from California made the 12-hour round trip to Knoxville, and ended up staying in the home of a Mennonite pastor who, decades earlier, had fought in the Vietnam War. After they stayed up one night talking about their experience of that conflict, the lawyer returned to SPI and told Foth it had been a moment of great healing.

“I can still see him running across campus to give me a hug and say it was the best thing to have happened to him,” she recalls.

��

Akin to heaven on earth?

In 2014, a total of 184 people from 36 countries attended SPI – about the size that SPI has been for the past five years, Goldberg says. As its third decade begins, SPI is as strong and as thriving as ever – planning for 2015 began before the books had even been closed on this year’s session.

Those who have been involved with SPI in some way over the past 20 years treasure the many memories and friendships they’ve formed along the way.

“I think it’s one of the best things that’s happened for 91����Ƶ,” says Jantzi. “It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve been involved with here …. It’s just a really, really energizing time.”

One year, Jantzi and an Iranian seminary student who came to SPI struck up an intriguing, weeks-long conversation about whether converting other people to their respective religions could be done in a nonviolent, non-coercive way. This man later became a high-ranking diplomat who, years later, returned to the United States as part of an Iranian delegation to the United Nations. He contacted Jantzi and invited himself back to Harrisonburg to give a guest lecture in one of Jantzi’s sociology classes – an encouraging indication, Jantzi says, of the high regard this former SPI participant still had for 91����Ƶ.

Goldberg says he’s often inspired by the great lengths that people will go to so they can attend SPI. In 2014, a group of Syrian participants traveled at least 12 hours each way, through difficult and unsafe conditions, to Lebanon to get their visas to travel to the United States. Then they did it again to catch their flights – an illustration, he says, of “the need that people have for this training.”

And he’s similarly inspired by the eagerness with which people return to very difficult circumstances in their homes to put that training and learning into practice.

“No matter how difficult the conflict someone comes from, they want to go back and make it better with the new skills they’ve learned here,” Goldberg says.

More generally, Martin, as well as others interviewed for this story, says one of the most important enduring memories of SPI is “the rich diversity of the whole thing. Oftentimes, that came out so well in the opening ceremonies. That just humbled you.

“You want heaven to be like this,” she says.

— Andrew Jenner

Professor Hizkias Assefa responds here to questions about his successful efforts as a mediator to bring peace in early May 2014 to a large swath of South Sudan. This is an abridged version of an interview published by 91����Ƶ News Service (emu.edu/news) on June 17, 2014.

91����Ƶ: In brief, what was the result of the seven months of mediations you just finished facilitating between representatives of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan and the South Sudan Democratic Movement/Army?

Assefa: The two parties signed a comprehensive peace accord on May 9, 2014. This means that the war that has involved thousands of armed combatants and has killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians over the past four years has come to an end.

91����Ƶ: But I keep reading about continued warfare, with massive numbers of displaced peoples, in South Sudan.

Assefa: There have been two wars going on simultaneously in South Sudan lately. One is the outburst of violence that started on December 15, 2013, between the followers of President Salva Kirr of South Sudan and the followers of his former vice-president, Riek Machar. The conflict started over disagreement on governance issues but degenerated into a war between the two majority ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer.

91����Ƶ: I believe that is the one I have been hearing about in the U.S. media. Could you say more about the other [less-known] war?

Assefa: The central Government of South Sudan has been fighting an insurgency group called the South Sudan Democratic Movement/Army. The SSDM/A fighters are based in the largest state of South Sudan, Jonglei, and are primarily composed of the Murle, Anuak and other small ethnic groups. . . Their grievances have revolved around ethnic marginalization and discrimination, as well as massive underdevelopment of their area. In other words, they have not benefited from the fruits of independence like some other major ethnic groups.

91����Ƶ: How did you come to be involved in the peace talks?

Assefa: On different occasions the insurgents, led by General David Yau Yau, called for mediation by the African Union, UN and USA. But, in the end, it was the Church Leaders Peace Initiative in South Sudan, with the support of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and a Dutch organization called Pax, that contacted me to act as mediator.

91����Ƶ: When did talks formally begin?

Assefa: Contacts with the leadership of both sides had started in October 2013 and aimed at developing trust, softening the ground, and developing a shared understanding for the mediation process. . .�� After very intensive negotiations, the first phase of the mediation culminated in the signature of a Cease Fire and Cessation of Hostilities Agreement on January 30, 2014.

91����Ƶ: You referred to an agreement signed on May 9. How is it different from the earlier agreement signed in January?

Assefa: Since February, I’ve been working with the negotiating teams of both parties to address the underlying political, economic, socio-cultural as well as military and security issues underlying the conflict so that the ceasefire can be transformed into durable peace. The comprehensive peace accord signed on May 9, 2014, includes . . . six provisions [aiming to remedy the root causes of the conflict].

Hizkias Assefa’s role in this peace process was highlighted by Bishop Paride Taban, chair of the Church Leaders Peace Initiative in South Sudan, in a June 2, 2014, letter to the Dutch organization that funded the mediation process. “I would also like to express my deep gratitude for the mediation services of Professor Hizkias Assefa,” wrote Taban. “It was a privilege and honor for us to work with a man of his professional caliber and personal integrity – and indeed he was instrumental in ensuring the success of these negotiations, and thus the successful conclusion to this conflict. We would not have succeeded without him.”

The reason has two law degrees, two master’s degrees, and one doctorate is not because he loves living buried in university libraries.

It’s because he had to leave his home country of Ethiopia when his friends and relatives were being killed or imprisoned during the Derg’s 13-year military dictatorship.

He got to the United States on a student visa in 1973 and kept plowing through a succession of degrees while his parents were telling him: “Stay out. Stay where you are, or you will be killed.”

Assefa was able to return safely to Ethiopia in the early 1990s. By then he was married to a U.S. citizen, with two daughters.

In hindsight, Assefa treasures the breadth and depth of his formal graduate studies – law, economics, public management, and international affairs. “The more I learned, the more it whet my appetite to learn more,” he told magazine.

“I realized the benefit of this broad background when writing my dissertation. Every discipline gave me a different lens for looking at conflict and peace, and it was most useful to integrate them together and come up with a multi-disciplinary approach.”

Before coming to the United States, Assefa practiced law briefly in Ethiopia. “There was not a lot of integrity in the profession. It was competitive, and I felt like I was a hired hand for the elite. I felt co-opted into the system.”

Later in Chicago, when he again was part of a law firm, he felt the same discomfort. “The lack of integrity wasn’t as blatant as it had been in the Ethiopian judicial system – it wasn’t as crude – but it was there.” These experiences weren’t a waste – he believes studying and practicing law sharpened his analytical capacity and enriched his later work in the peace field.

Assefa turned to economics, earning a master’s degree in the field, in an attempt to understand poverty. He found economists have “fantastic ideas” – “great insights” – but offered little in terms of addressing poverty. If one tries to understand “economics without politics, it’s like clapping with one hand,” he says. “You need to understand politics to understand the role of power in economic systems.”

Outside of formal graduate programs, Assefa has delved deeply into psychology, philosophy and religion, subjects he needed to “put it all together.” As the “icing on the cake,” Assefa turned to studying peace and conflict transformation, plus practicing in the field, for 30 years now.*

“The kind of knowledge needed to be a peacemaker is not easy to define – I feel it more than I can talk about it. I think we have to start by reclaiming our humanity. Who are we as human beings? What is our place in the universe? What is life itself?” he asks.

“Human beings are not separate from everything in our environment. We cannot treat our environment as a group of objects to be used as we wish. We are part of an interdependent whole. If we can come to recognize this reality – that our survival, our well-being, derives from the healthiness of this interdependence – our attitude will change towards other humans, indeed towards all life and every aspect of living in this world.”

As Assefa gropes for words to describe the lack of awareness among humans about their place in the web of life, he explains that the English language limits his ability to articulate his feelings on this subject. “I am writing a book in Amharic now – though I stopped using it [his native language] 40 years ago – because it lets me touch on ideas that I can’t explain in English well. It lets me be less inhibited, less apologetic for exploring [in his book] the non-cognitive aspects of life and being that go beyond regular social science academic discourse.

“Some of what I want to say is beyond the intellect – in fact relying on the intellect alone can become a hindrance. It is part of the problem with discourse in the Global North: the main framework is intellectual, with very little room for the affective and spiritual.”

Assefa says there is wisdom in the perception of some indigenous elders that the so-called developed North tends to function as an immature child within the family of humankind, acting impulsively and without much self-reflection. “I hope the family will survive the growing-up stage of the child,” Assefa says wryly, adding that socio-economic and military practices of the so-called developed world underlie much suffering in the world today.

When Assefa feels tempted to succumb to despair, he calls to mind miraculous, heart-to-heart moments, like a time in 2006 when he was one of two with whom Joseph Kony agreed to meet in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kony, known to have used tens of thousands of children as soldiers and sex-slaves, had been indicted the previous year by the UN’s International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“After being lured into the bush, we were surrounded by armed people. I thought we were being kidnapped,” says Assefa. But when he finally met Kony face-to-face and spoke gently with him, Kony met Assefa’s eyes and said, “I never knew my father. Can I call you my father?” The question touched Assefa to his core – not that it diminished the enormity of the harm that Kony had set in motion for millions.

“I felt moved to see a flicker of humanity and vulnerability in this incredibly cruel and overtly invincible human being,” says Assefa. “It made me realize that compassion ought to be the starting point for peacework. The work of peacemaking is to nurture these little glimpses, however faint, and bring them out so that they can shine more and light up the darkness in our humanity.”

# # # #

91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) has more MA graduates in conflict transformation in Kenya than in any other country of the world, except the United States.

Thirteen graduate-level alumni or professors are based in Kenya. Our Summer Peacebuilding Institute has hosted 50 people from Kenya, including Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, one of six named from around the world as recipients of the 2007 Right Livelihood Award. Seven U.S.-based CJP faculty and staff members have done peace-themed work in Kenya.

So, where were “our” people when the killing started? Ironically, most were taking a brief break from their usual jam-packed work lives, like folks everywhere tend to do over the Christmas holiday period. Let’s look at these three people – Doreen Ruto, Babu Ayindo and Hizkias Assefa – as examples of the range of responses from the CJP group to the violence.

Doreen Ruto

Much of last year, Doreen Ruto, MA ’06, collaborated with Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, on developing a curriculum designed to teach conflict-transformation and peace education skills in Kenyan classrooms. By Christmas 2007, the UNICEF-funded project was nearing the pilot-stage of testing the curriculum in some schools and refining it. Ruto’s 11-year-old son Ronnie was out of school for the holiday period. (Her older son, Richard Bikko, was and is an undergrad at 91����Ƶ.) She left Ronnie with cousins and went to vote on December 27.

“It was the first time in my life that I voted. I just was not interested before,” she says. “But after going through CJP, I went back and said, ‘We need to be part of the change.’”

(Ruto came to CJP as part of her healing process – and desire to explore the path of nonviolent change – after losing her husband, the father of her two sons, in a terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. Her husband was not the target of the attack; he was in a neighboring building that collapsed.)

“I stood six or seven hours on the queue to vote. I was so determined. I wanted to see a difference. I wanted Kenya to have a more inclusive government and not confine its leadership to one part of the country.”

Ruto comes from an ethnic group that is different from the one of the current president. To understand why this is highly significant in her country, read “Towards Understanding the Violence in Kenya” on page 17.

When the violence began, Ruto was at home in Nairobi with Ronnie. They were imprisoned by the violence. Outside their doors, in the streets, supporters of her ethnic group were attacking and killing others and vice versa. After three days, she decided “enough.” She phoned George Wachira, senior research and policy advisor of the Nairobi Peace Initiative, to discuss what steps to take.

By January 2, Ruto, Wachira, Abdi and about 60 others – including Jebiwot Sumbeiywo’s uncle, Lt. Gen. Lazarus Sumbeiywo – convened at the Serena Hotel in downtown Nairobi. They called themselves Concerned Citizens for Peace.

For Ruto, traveling via taxi to the meeting took faith and courage. Soldiers and tear gas filled the streets. Roaming bands of young men could easily stop a taxi and pull out a single female occupant whose ethnicity did not suit them. Ruto had left Ronnie in the care of relatives, hoping that she would be returning to her son at the end of the day.

91����Ƶ 10 of the 60 in Concerned Citizens for Peace had a history linking them to CJP and thus to each other. Perhaps most remarkable – and fortuitous in this situation – the Kenyans trained at CJP have come from seven different ethnic groups. Ruto sat across the table from Anne Nyambura, MA ’06, who comes from the ethnic group viewed to be “in power” in Kenya.

“As graduates of CJP, we speak the same language,” says Ruto. “We see what is going on through the same lenses. We condemn the same injustices, even if we may have voted differently.”

More on Ruto follows in Babu Ayindo’s story.

Babu Ayindo

Doreen Ruto’s collaborator on the UNICEF-funded peace curriculum for schools, Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, was among the first Africans to earn a master’s degree in conflict transformation at 91����Ƶ.

If you Google his name, you will find that he has led trainings in places as diverse as South Korea, Fiji, Australia, the Philippines, and most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. He is renowned for using improvisational theater techniques in conflict transformation.

Yet at the end of December 2007, Ayindo was doing none of the above. He was in his backyard – literally. He was in a city on the edge of the Rift Valley. He was eight hours by bus from Nairobi, but only 100 meters from the area where violence would be the worst over the next several weeks.

“My wife and I have a quarter-acre farm where we raise cattle, goats, chickens. We grow passion fruit, mango, cabbage, kale, tomatoes, onions,” says Ayindo. “My wife grew up on a farm. We are resurrecting a tradition of sustaining oneself. Having constant contact with the land is important. I want my children to experience all this.”

Ayindo took a break from his gardening to cast his vote for the opposition on December 27. Not that he thought a new president might bring great change to Kenya – more equity, less corruption – but he thought it might be an improvement.

Then the attacks began on non-Luos in the streets outside his compound. Ayindo is Luo (though “I don’t look like the typical Luo”); his mother and wife are Luhya. “The crowds were out with stones and other crude weapons, looting and driving away people perceived to be sympathetic or to have voted for other parties (other than the Orange Democratic Movement). The police and the para-military were engaging the crowds with tear gas and live bullets.

“We kept down and away from the windows. Our three kids (ages 14, 10 and 4) came to recognize the sound of every type of gun. They saw their first dead people…I wish they hadn’t.”

By the end of the first week – a week with no water and electricity in his home – Ayindo was in cell-phone contact with George Kut of the Nairobi Peace Initiative. Kut flew to join Ayindo and by January 9 they were traveling through parts of the Rift Valley and Nyanza regions together, listening to people, particularly the youth, to learn more about what was going on. On January 12, they reported their findings back to the Nairobi Peace Initiative.

Their main recommendation was to urge peace workers to “listen deeply in order to understand the root causes of the unprecedented violence,” says Ayindo. The Nairobi Peace Initiative later expanded this “listening project” to other parts of Kenya.

Meanwhile, the Concerned Citizens for Peace had started circulating peace messages – “choose peace and not violence” and “let’s give dialogue a chance” – via cooperating cell phone companies and mass media. They put up a website, www.peaceinkenya.net, which presented constructive ways out of the conflict and offered the personal cell numbers of CCP’s leaders, including Abdi’s. Celebrities weighed in with a song of peace played widely on the radio. It began to be hummed throughout the country.

Out in the land of the center of the opposition, Ayindo felt that the youthful voices of despair that he had listened to over several days were not being addressed by the peace messages coming from Nairobi. “If the grievances of the people in the streets get ignored, another cycle of violence will occur. And I didn’t hear enough about addressing those grievances.”

Ayindo’s colleague Doreen Ruto – who had also voted for the opposition – was saddened by a text message she received after speaking on TV about the need for dialogue. A good friend texted: “We want justice and not peace.”

“I understood my friend’s anger,” says Ruto. “But my immediate priority was ending the loss of lives and the displacement of people from their homes. My greatest fear and concern was that if we went on like this, the violence would soon take the country to a point of no return. I tried to convince my friend of how the violence on the streets would soon catch up with us, even in the safety of our homes, but both of us seemed to be from two different worlds at that time. She wouldn’t hear of it.”

This exemplifies the truism that those working for peace also must deal with divergent views among themselves. In this case, Ayindo, Ruto, and Ruto’s friend saw the violence somewhat differently from their differing vantage points.

Hizkias Assefa

Hizkias Assefa, born in Ethiopia but based in Kenya, was among the founding group that launched CJP in 1994. Holding a PhD and JD, Dr. Assefa has taught at 91����Ƶ’s annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute ever since.

Known globally as a skilled and trusted mediator, Dr. Assefa is often one of the unnamed faces in photos taken at negotiating tables, when the big-names finally come face-to-face despite their mutual hostility. It suits Dr. Assefa not to be in the news – it makes it easier for him to quietly offer guidance on how to talk and what to talk about.

When the elections took place in Kenya in late December, Dr. Assefa was on holiday with his family in neighboring Zanzibar. He returned a week after the elections to a country that felt profoundly different. “Everyone seemed to be polarized,” he says. “At the early stages of the violence, it was difficult to find citizens who could stand above this polarization and see the big picture.”

After the Concerned Citizens for Peace began to assert itself, Dr. Assefa says it took time for the public to recognize that the ad-hoc group crossed ethnic lines and that it was not aligned with one or the other side in the conflict.

Many leaders from other African countries poured into Kenya to try to stop the violence from escalating and to bring the parties to the negotiating table. After a few weeks a mediation process sponsored by the African Union got underway in the same Serena Hotel where the Concerned Citizens for Peace had been meeting.

The mediation was led by Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations. Also on the team were the former president of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, and the former first lady of Mozambique and of South Africa, Graca Machel. Dr. Assefa was invited by Annan to join the mediation team.

“I was brought in as a mediation expert to help provide guidance on how to handle the negotiation process,” says Dr. Assefa. He dealt with such issues as how to structure the process, how to think through the root causes of the conflict, and how to help the parties move towards agreement. He also advised on overcoming obstacles, avoiding pitfalls, and involving civil society.

The Annan-led mediation process, held from late January to early May, is widely regarded as the turning point in easing the violence. From it came an agreement that moved the parties to a political solution to the crisis. The mediation process brought in national and international experts to help develop a powersharing government, as well as to design roadmaps for electoral, constitutional, land, public service and economic reforms to address the issues of the crisis.

“As a long-time resident of Kenya, I was directly affected by the conflict and could also see how it affected the lives of those around me,” says Dr. Assefa. “I therefore had an opportunity to bring the perspective of everyday Kenyans into the process.”

Dr. Assefa frequently argued for addressing the root causes of the conflict, such as the unequal distribution of resources, and not just papering them over. He said he sought consideration of the steps necessary for long-term stability and harmony, rather than being satisfied with temporary peace.

“Regrettably, addressing root causes is very complicated,” he says. “It is a long-term process. Once there is no immediate pressure of turmoil, it seems that the pressure is off of everyone – the politicians, the negotiators, the population, even the mediators and sponsors of the process. So people lose focus on the long-term underlying issues, and things slowly begin to return to business as usual.”

In Dr. Assefa’s eyes, one of the challenges of peacebuilding is getting people to recognize the factors likely to lead to destruction for a society and to take preventive steps before a crisis looms.