My Soul Path to Peace
I am deeply honored to receive the Goi Peace Award for this year, especially in view of the extraordinary work that this organization does all over the world. It moves me so much to witness the power of your work with young people. It is so vitally important.
You have also found a way to make inner work, the development of soul power, recognized and effective in the world. My belief for over 50 years of activism is that activism becomes far more effective when it is powered by inner strength. This is because, we are using another power, which is not ours but which can come through us, to convey the message to everyone in the world that ‘peace is possible’—especially right now in the midst of two terrible wars and many other less recognized wars. Just looking out at the audience today, I can see that here in Japan, there is a wonderful momentum for peace to happen.
I deeply thank Mr. and Mrs. Saionji and the entire team at the Foundation that have worked so tirelessly on all the different types of your work for so long. I bow my head. I am speaking now in the name of many people from many countries to thank you for what you have done.
My Life Journey
I was asked to talk about my life journey. I will start in 1953 when my beloved brother George was suddenly killed. I was 10 years old and it broke my heart. I mentioned that because heartbreak is a source of power and I will come back to that later.
Three years later, I was watching on a grainy old black and white television in my parents’ living room. I was 13 years old. Soviet tanks were crashing into Budapest and killing young people not much older than me. I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase. My mother came up and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m going to Budapest!” I didn’t even know where Budapest was. She said “What for?” and I said “Because something so horrible is happening there. I have to go and help.” She said “Don’t be so silly!” and I started to cry. And she got it. She understood straight away and she said “Okay, I understand. If you will just unpack your suitcase, I will see to it that you get trained, because you’re much too young to be any help to anyone,” and she did.
She sent me off at age 16 to work in a holiday home for concentration camp survivors, and I spent the summer peeling potatoes and listening to their stories of what had happened. Then I went on to work in an orphanage in Algeria, and then I worked for 10 years in South Africa on alleviating malnutrition in children. We were watching milk being poured down the mines in front of starving children with huge pop bellies. It was so clearly wrong that something had to be done. And we did it as well as we could.
In my teens, I grew up very conscious of the horror of nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could not understand how human beings could possibly do this to other human beings. As I learned more and grew up trying to be of service, I realized the acute danger of nuclear war by accident.
In fact, in November 1983, Moscow was 18 minutes away from ordering a major nuclear attack on the United States by mistake. The incoming radar information had been understood as an incoming American nuclear strike until a very intelligent engineer looked at the screen and said “No, hold it!” They had already alerted the Politburo in Moscow that they had 15 minutes to decide to fire, and this engineer said “It’s not an incoming flight of missiles. It’s a flock of geese.”
We were so close to a world disaster. I sensed at that time, that it was essential to talk to those who were making these decisions on nuclear issues in all the then five nuclear nations. This prompted me to start the Oxford Research Group because I had been working at the UN and it didn’t seem to me that we were talking to the right people. The politicians couldn’t really make the changes that were needed, so I decided to find out who were the physicists, who were designing the nuclear warheads, who were the engineers who were building the missiles to carry the nuclear warheads, who were the chief of military people, who were designing the strategy to deliver this terrifying manslaughter, who were the people making money out of the whole thing, and last of all, who were the politicians who were putting their stamp on the decisions.
We spent four years and it took us that time to publish a book called How Nuclear Weapons Decisions Are Made. Our book had wiring diagrams of how the bureaucracies, the military, and the physicists in each of the then-five nuclear nations, how they worked, and who were the individuals actually responsible. It was very shocking they tried very hard to prohibit the publication of this book, but now when I go into Ministries of Defense in France or China, I see copies of that book very well thumbed because they didn’t know how the whole system worked.
The next step was to say, can we bring some of these individuals in off-the-record conferences to actually meet each other and listen to each other. And that was the surprise. So we had first of all conferences in Oxford where I was working and living. And then we were invited to Beijing. We went to Beijing I think seven times to meet the equivalent dignitaries there, we went to Moscow, we went to France and we had many interactions with the United States. The key thing was to make this informal, so there was no list of participants. It was completely deniable, and that meant that more of these individuals, I think 95% male, were willing to come because they were not going to be accused at home of doing something disloyal.
What they were actually invited to do was to sit in a big circle with no desks and talk to their neighbors and more importantly to listen to their neighbors. We even encouraged these gentlemen to repeat back to their neighbors, not only the words that they heard but what were the meaning or feelings behind those words. Because many of these people were engaged in top-level formal negotiations, it was a real privilege and quite an effort to enable them to talk to each other in this way. It eventually formed the basis of treaties that the foreign offices of the relevant countries could propose and agree.
I did this work until 2002 when I handed it on to very, very able successors, because I began to recognize that something passionately exciting was happening at the grassroots. Ordinary people were doing extraordinary work to actually prevent and stop armed conflict where they lived. They were intervening often risking their lives to bring those very violent conflicts to an end. But nobody was supporting them. They were unknown. These are what we call non-governmental organizations and they are always short of money. So our job was to make their work known and to encourage them to keep going with the courage that was needed to do this because often they risk their lives in intervening to stop armed conflict.
So I set up the organization, Peace Direct. Over 20 years, it has now supported and trained peace-builders in 28 countries―for example, the work of Henri Bura Ladyi in bringing militias to the table in Eastern Congo, and the brilliant peace-builder Dekha Ibrahim Abdi who quelled the election riots in Kenya in 2009. This honor that I have received today shows a deep appreciation of all the work and the courage of these people.
My Approach to Peacebuilding
I’ve discovered through extensive experience that the most effective approach to peacebuilding is to work with women. Our work shows that women are especially good at preventing and resolving armed violence. They have a vast set of skills to bring help to calm chaos.
I would like to give you just two examples of what they have done in Northern Ireland where sectarian killings had escalated to a crisis level in the early 1970s. Betty Williams and Mairead Maguire co-founded the Community for Peace People, and they mobilized over 10,000 Catholic and Protestant groups to walk and march in the streets of Belfast. Just doing that was risking your life. People threw stones at you and worse. They received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for their efforts.
In Liberia in West Africa, after a 14-year civil war, Leymah Gbowee united Christian and Muslim women in an interfaith movement, the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. The women acted as intermediaries between Charles Taylor, the Premier, and the rebel leaders who had been incredibly vicious and violent for many years. The women did this by staging sit-ins. They would not allow the negotiators to leave the peace negotiations until they had reached a peace agreement. They boarded up all the windows and doors around the building with the help of the janitors, and they wouldn’t let them out until they signed an agreement, which they did. They also received a Nobel Peace Prize for doing this.
Overall, I think female teams have the skills to listen with care to all sides. Women consult victims of war – teenage orphans, mothers of the ‘disappeared’, widows starving in destroyed homes – to bring their concerns, otherwise unheard, to the fore. They insist on care of the wounded of war orphans and proper burial of the dead. And they bring all this into the peace agreements, which otherwise would not be considered.
The second major skill in peacebuilding, and I have touched on this, is the skill to listen. For example, when another person is angry or threatening, if we can listen deeply to their anger or their fear, if we can listen so carefully that we can feed back to them not just what we heard but what they meant, gently saying something like “I hear how angry you feel… You have been insulted. You have been hurt,” and this allows them to say “Yes! And what’s more…”, and then they pour out their pain.
That’s the way to make progress, and eventually, we can learn what they really need. They will spell that out and that can be built into agreements. The ability to listen is just one of the eight skills that we now teach worldwide in a course called the Mighty Heart.
Lastly, I have come to recognize that preventing war is the business of business. One of the most effective approaches to peacebuilding is to involve the corporate world. Why? Because companies have lost vast amounts as a result of war and also made fortunes from other people’s suffering.
Just one more example: those post-election riots in Kenya that I described cost over a thousand lives, billions of pounds in ruined businesses and economic contraction, and displaced over half a million people. Shocked, five of the companies involved that had their premises wrecked in Nairobi streets, realized that they needed to act and they got together, took advice from local peacebuilding experts and worked with local leaders, and planned how to defuse violence at the grassroots. As a direct result of their work, the elections of 2017 were called free and fair by the European Union. There was no destruction of property, no interruption of trade, and no one was displaced. And the cost was just over half a million pounds.
The financial losses of international businesses due to war in Ukraine are grave. My third organization Business Plan for Peace has worked closely with the international retail company H&M, showing what a company can do proactively, rather than assuming that peacebuilding is the job only of the United Nations or the diplomats or international charities.
One of the strategies that the Business Plan for Peace puts forward is that of Infrastructure for Peace, which effectively prevented civil war in South Africa. I lived in South Africa at the time when Mandela came out of jail, and everybody expected that there would be a civil war. But Mandela developed a plan. It was to have Peace Councils in every village, every town, every rural area and ultimately in the whole of the government structure. Each part of the structure had to have a Peace Council whose job was to develop a peace plan so that when localized violence broke out, they knew exactly what to do and who could do it.
My View of the World Situation
So how do I see the current situation? How can we use it as an opportunity to create a more peaceful and safer future? Given the grave disaster happening now in Palestine and Israel, and the stalemate in the terrifying war in Ukraine, can we see this as an opportunity for human awakening? What can ordinary people do to contribute to a better future?
When we don’t know what to do about unbearable news on the TV, the first thing to do is FEEL it. Don’t avoid it. That only leaves you more helpless. Let your heart open. You may feel like this breaks your heart. But if you can do it, there is a lot more energy and power behind the pain. That energy is very useful for change. Anything that breaks our hearts or exasperates us has energy behind it. This is the energy that’s fueled a lot of our own work with my colleagues.
Then we can realize that the heartbreak is also inside the leaders of these conflicts, whether you agree with them or not. Let our hearts open to them too. I encourage everyone to be someone who does not take sides but invites compassion. Invite the hearts of leaders to open to possibilities they had not otherwise thought of… Imagine them becoming ‘heroes of the future’ because they were able―in these terrifying times―to see and do what seems impossible, but what they know inside themselves is WISE.
We invite them, and all of us here today, to become great enough to carry fresh thinking and understanding through the blindness and the rage, to use skills learned in years of leadership to persuade, to take a stand for what is right, and to inspire others to rise out of the quagmire of violence.
Let us take the final moments of my talk, just to hold in our hearts, those negotiating between Israel and Hamas today, those working to end the war in Ukraine, and those in conflicts in different parts of the world, that they may find the courage to stand up for peace to prevail on earth now.
I ask you to take one minute and close your eyes. Just hold all those people who are frightened, who are threatened, and who don’t know what to do… Please hold them in your heart. The power that lies in the care of your heart is very strong. We must use it every day.
Thank you. YOU can make a real contribution to a possible peace. I am deeply grateful to the Goi Peace Foundation for supporting those working to stop violent conflict, by promoting consciousness, values and wisdom throughout the world.