2012 PEACE CONFERENCE
“Peace and Democracy”
Yesterday we had the Peace and Conflict Diploma Period J it was the shortest Diploma Period we’ve had, just for the full day but I really enjoyed it.
There was a speech on Thursday night that I missed because I had to go to service by Jan Egeland. Who happens to be the father of one of my best friends here, Heidi. I ended up going to dinner with him and 7 other of Heidi’s close friends last night to Marcross- which was much more relaxed and really inspiring. He’s an amazing man. If you’ve never heard of him before, in our pamphlet this is what it said about him:JAN EGELAND serves as Human Rights Watch’s deputy executive director of Europe. As UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and as UN Emergency Relief Coordinator from 2003 to 2006, Egeland helped reform the global humanitarian response system and organized the international response to the Asian Tsunami and crises from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lebanon. In 2006, Time magazine named him one of the 100 “people who shape our world.” From 1999 to 2002, he was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser.
^^Pretty nifty stuff right there. Anyways back to the Diploma Period. We started with an opening speech at 9:00 by Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, on ‘Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Religious Conflict’.
He spoke for an hour and then was asked questions at the end. It was mainly about the context behind situations: group rights and grievances. We’re all apart of groups, whether chosen or inherited. There are few wars between countries now, it’s more expensive than profitable, and most wars are internal civil wars between ethnic and religious groups.
What can be done about this? How can democracy work if everyone is divided, the whole ‘1 person, 1 vote’ only works if there are no deep divisions in the society. So you bring about the electoral system, proportional representation (for example if there are 35% of Catholics in the vote than they should get 35% of the seats)… The peace process between political parties must be that – a process. Baby steps and contentious issues for later.
We then had a break out session which I really liked. We all had done some research about our own countries and then were split into about 15 groups and spoke about them. In my group was:Zena Andrews UK Gwynedd
There was a speech on Thursday night that I missed because I had to go to service by Jan Egeland. Who happens to be the father of one of my best friends here, Heidi. I ended up going to dinner with him and 7 other of Heidi’s close friends last night to Marcross- which was much more relaxed and really inspiring. He’s an amazing man. If you’ve never heard of him before, in our pamphlet this is what it said about him:JAN EGELAND serves as Human Rights Watch’s deputy executive director of Europe. As UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and as UN Emergency Relief Coordinator from 2003 to 2006, Egeland helped reform the global humanitarian response system and organized the international response to the Asian Tsunami and crises from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lebanon. In 2006, Time magazine named him one of the 100 “people who shape our world.” From 1999 to 2002, he was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser.
^^Pretty nifty stuff right there. Anyways back to the Diploma Period. We started with an opening speech at 9:00 by Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, on ‘Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Religious Conflict’.
He spoke for an hour and then was asked questions at the end. It was mainly about the context behind situations: group rights and grievances. We’re all apart of groups, whether chosen or inherited. There are few wars between countries now, it’s more expensive than profitable, and most wars are internal civil wars between ethnic and religious groups.
What can be done about this? How can democracy work if everyone is divided, the whole ‘1 person, 1 vote’ only works if there are no deep divisions in the society. So you bring about the electoral system, proportional representation (for example if there are 35% of Catholics in the vote than they should get 35% of the seats)… The peace process between political parties must be that – a process. Baby steps and contentious issues for later.
We then had a break out session which I really liked. We all had done some research about our own countries and then were split into about 15 groups and spoke about them. In my group was:Zena Andrews UK Gwynedd
Clara Bartram-Gurresø Denmark Tice
Sam Besceli UK PK
Chong-U Chua Malaysia Powys
Abi Drummond Cayman Islands Morgannwg
Phillipa Hawke UK Powys
Dmitry Gulyaevskyi Russia Morgannwg
Lajdon Hani Albania Powys
Marvin Kirschner Germany Gwynedd
Alexandra Lowndes UK Gwynedd
Michele Mattei Italy PK
Alice Rabourdin France Whitaker
Arjun Raina India Gwynedd
Diego Recinos Escobar Guatemala Sunley
Iiris Suomela Finland Gwynedd
Natasha Wickramasekera Sri Lanka Sunley
Solveig Xie Norway Tice
Yuxin Xing China Tice
I ended up speaking mainly to Alice from France. It was interesting to hear her talking about a Norwegian woman who moved to France in her twenties and is now trying to run for presidency, but so many people are against her since they don’t believe that she is ‘properly French’. We spoke overall if about quotas that some political parties must have on the amount of women and also about the social mobility of the people in the political parties à is it more about their connections or can they come from nothing and build their way up?
Lunch and then we had another speech from Srdja Popovic a Serbian who is executive director of the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). CANVAS has worked with the activists responsible for successful movements such as the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” of 2004 and the recent Egyptian nonviolent uprising. Srdja Popovic was one of the founders and key organizers of the Serbian nonviolent resistance group Otpor!, whose protests were instrumental in the fall of Serbian president Milosevic. He served as environmental affairs advisor to the Serbian Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic until Djindjic’s.
*It was titled: ‘2011: a bad year for bad guys’
One of the really funny things he said in his speech was ‘You can’t have a revolution without a Serb but you can’t have a strike without a Pole.’ He spoke about a survey which has been done from 1900-2006 of different conflicts and have the 323, 53% of the non-violent ones were more likely to work than 26% violent ones… I’m not quite sure what happened to the other 21%.
I then had a workshop titled: Civil Disobedience against Soviet Union In Baltic States by a guy in my History class called Sarunas Genys, who is Lithuanian. I signed down for it because of the little knowledge that I had over the issue. Boy am I glad I did!
He spoke about how his grandparents were exiled to Siberia, not coming back till the 1970s, this happened to many people unless they escaped the ‘iron curtain’. You were allowed to freely move throughout the Soviet Union but no where else. He’s an avid basketball player and he gave the great example of some really good basketball players in Lithuania simply weren’t allowed to leave to go and play for the NBA.
It was mainly about the revolutions in 1980s. Most featuring spontaneous singing of their national anthems as they weren’t allowed to sing them. Up to 300,000 Estonians gathered together on one occasion to sing hymns (which was against the law), in their national dress (ditto) waving their own flags (ditto again, as the Soviet Union flag was to go above all others).
My favourite was the ‘The Baltic Way’, where 2 million people held hands throughout the Lativia, Estonia and Lithuania, 600km of peaceful protesting. That’s a basic overview but I really liked it, Sarunas is super funny.
The link he showed us was:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp0h9Z97w1s
We had a final speech at the end of the day. I was that tempted to go to it to be honest because I was quite tired by this point and felt I had benefitted enough from the conference. But I went anyways. The speaker Professor William A. Schabas, Professor of International Law, Middlesex University, spoke about “'Truth Commissions, International Courts and the Challenges of Peacemaking'”. It started off with him telling a story about a guy falling asleep in one of his lectures and he asked the guy next to him to wake him up. The guy who was sitting beside the sleeping man said ‘Man, you put him to sleep, you wake him up’.
I thought it was going to be really exciting from such an interesting start but to be honest I didn’t manage to concentrate wholly.
Overall it was a super day J One of the many extra special things we get to do at AC. Now on to the piles of homework. Joy.
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