Peace for Kosovo . . . and Costa Mesa

The wars may be fought a world away, but UC Irvine-based peace activists hope that studying conflicts in such places as Kosovo could provide keys to maintaining peace elsewhere, including Southern California neighborhoods.

More than a dozen activists from around the world gather today at UCI for a four-day conference on “The Role of Citizen Peacebuilding in Conflict Transformation,” which aims to explore the roots of violence and war.

“[Americans] don’t want to think of themselves as having the kinds of tensions other people do in other parts of the world,” said conference organizer Paula Garb, associate director of UCI’s Global Peace and Conflict Studies department.

Yet the exotic locations of some of the world’s deadliest disputes can obscure how the wars began--usually with a breakdown in relations between ethnic and political factions, Garb said. And those are problems to which Americans are not immune.

“I lived in the Soviet Union for 20 years in what I thought was a peaceful society where people of different ethnic backgrounds would not spill blood,” Garb said. “Almost overnight I watched the whole country disintegrate and several of its territories turn into war zones. While I’d like to think it can’t happen here, I want to participate in a process to ensure that it can’t.”

The aim of the conference is for advocates of “citizen peace building” to discuss ways of defusing disputes before they evolve into violence, whether the conflicts are between nations or neighbors.

Most of the conference, to be held in the UCI Student Center, is closed to the public. But an open session on citizen involvement in forging peace will be held at 3:30 p.m. today, featuring speakers from both sides of conflicts in Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Israel.

Although some had worked together on projects in the past, many of the activists never met before landing in Orange County. They learned of each other through their involvement in different peace projects and have tracked each other’s work in recent months via e-mail, Garb said.

Gang Violence, Immigrants’ Rights

During the past several days, the activists, who are staying in the homes of local peace activists, toured the Gang Violence Reeducation Project in Los Angeles, the Immigrant Rights Coalition in Garden Grove and Share Our Selves in Costa Mesa before the conference kickoff today.

A key goal of the conferees is to identify ways to encourage people to work together rather than segregate themselves and resort to bullets, organizers said.

The methods could have broad applications, from cooling political hot spots around the world to easing tensions in places such as Costa Mesa, where ethnic and class differences have surfaced with proposals to revitalize the city’s industrial-residential southwestern neighborhoods.

“There are many Mexican people living here, and there is a lot of anger toward them” by established white residents, said Karen McGlinn, executive director of Share Our Selves, a nonprofit Costa Mesa service agency that hosted a Tuesday meeting of some of the peace activists.

She said the agency encounters conflicts and jealousies even among its clients, some of whom complain that “ ‘You’re giving it to them because they’re black, because they’re Mexican.’ If we are going to achieve any level of social justice and peace, maybe we ought to look at the little square block we live in.”

Such tensions--from class divisions to ethnic differences--are universal, Garb said.

“We need to focus on the positive common ground we have,” said Garb, who has worked on peace projects in the former Soviet Georgia and its breakaway province of Abkhazia. “You have to look for issues that unite people around constructive changes that they all want. Then some of the ethnic tensions become less important than getting the street cleaned up or an environmental problem taken care of.”

How to achieve that unity has proven elusive.

In Georgia, persistence by peace activists--including Garb--has led to informal dialogues between Georgian and Abkhazi citizens over the roots of the 1992 war, in which Georgia sought to maintain government control over the troubled province. Abkhazi militias expelled the Georgian forces, and tensions remain high in what is effectively an armed standoff.

“Unfortunately, the majority of public opinion [in Georgia] believes the blame for the conflict rests on the Abkhazis,” said Paata Zakareishvili, 41, a Georgian who works with the Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development in the capital, Tbilisi. “We’ve been saying publicly that we need to accept some of the blame.”

As a result, he said, public opinion has softened, potentially opening the door to negotiations despite the influence of nationalist extremists.

“We feel as though what we have to say is gaining ground,” Zakareishvili said in an interview in Irvine. “There was a time when we were openly criticized for our peace efforts. Now the government takes into account what we think. . . . They have asked our help to facilitate contact.”

Arda Inal-Ipa, 43, a psychologist and activist with the Center for Human Programmes in Abkhazia, said the roots of war began with de facto segregation of Abkhazis and Georgians.

“We lived together, but our society was divided,” Inal-Ipa said. “We did not have the opportunity to understand the fears and concerns of each other. We tried with some other people to start some kind of negotiations when we felt the tensions grow.”

Those actions were insufficient to stop war, she said, which raises a critical question about the nature of civilian peacekeeping. If the decision to wage war is made by political leaders, how effective can grass roots peace activism be?

“I’m not sure it is very successful, if you speak about a political resolution,” Inal-Ipa said. “But to change the minds of people to be more humanitarian, then maybe there will be less chance that war will start again.”

In Kosovo, an international plan to bring Serbian and Albanian peace groups together died last year before it could begin. Its participants scattered across Europe as NATO bombs fell, said Gema Gonzalez, 26, who coordinated the peace project through the Richardson Institute for Peace and Conflict Research at England’s Lancaster University.

Overtaken by Events

Three seminars were held outside Yugoslavia in the months before war broke out, but events tumbled faster than peace activists anticipated.

“Lots of good things had been done, and we had made plans, but we never managed to put it into practice,” Gonzalez said. Now she is trying to piece together the coalition to determine what they could have done better. Two members--one Serb, one Kosovo Albanian--are taking part in the conference.

Gonzalez said she hopes to find some of the answers at the conference, which will also explore conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, and in Colombia, Northern Ireland, Cyprus and the former Soviet republics of Karabakh and Moldova.

“I want to hear what they have to say about their conflicts and experiences and hear how they do some evaluations of their programs,” Gonzalez said. “I want to see if we can establish some parallels in every conflict.”

The conference is sponsored by UCI and the U.S. Institute of Peace.