Former federal prosecutor and author of ‘Speaking Their Peace,’ Colette Rausch talks about ways to create peace and bring people together in many war-torn countries
Not many people know that the United States has a federally funded peacekeeping program. The U.S. Institute of Peace (usip) sends people overseas to countries that are having internal conflicts — including civil wars — and tries to bring together opposing sides and ideologies to talk and find common interests. The program also trains police in how to interact with civilians and protesters in ways that respect human rights, helps set up justice systems and trains judges to try to bring about the “rule of law.”
Colette Rausch, once a federal prosecutor and now the associate vice president of Governance, Law, and Society at the usip, is the author of “Speaking Their Peace,” a series of interviews with people she has worked with on peace-building overseas. Rausch has worked in a wide range of countries, including ones where the U.S. is also involved in overt or covert wars.
Rausch has some insightful and inspiring ideas about how to bring about peace. However, she seems to be careful to avoid criticizing U.S. foreign policy, even when they would seem to be at odds with a peace-building goal. It’s up to the reader to consider whether it’s really possible to build peace and make war in the same country at the same time.
Rausch met with Real Change to discuss how she sees her mission at usip. She stressed that all viewpoints expressed during the interview are her own.
How did you get involved in overseas peace-building?
The U.S. Justice Department sent me to Bosnia to help with the judicial system and work on a training program for new criminal codes. After six months, how I perceived the world, my work and what’s important all changed. I went back to my prosecutor’s office and thought, this is not where I want to be. So I went to Kosovo.
What changed for you?
Having seen what was going on in Bosnia. Regular communities were completely fine. People wanted to say it was age-old hatreds that created hate, but in reality they were fine with their neighbors. But the minute the war started, certain leaders were pushing buttons to stoke divisions, to stoke hatreds and to fan those flames. I realized how precarious these lines of safety and of peace [can be].
In Kosovo I worked with defense lawyers, helping train them, also judges and prosecutors [about] international human rights standards, and also the police in how to communicate and work with communities rather than using undue force.
Did you find it discouraging when conflict continued?
I used to, because I kept thinking naively that if I did my work, it would end. You would work really hard with your colleagues and everything they’ve worked for could almost be turned over overnight. But those are the cycles of violence and the cycles of humanity.
You also work on establishing the “rule of law.” What is that?
To me, rule of law meant a system where no matter who you are or where you come from, you are following the same rules and there’s justice and security that applies to everybody equally. But in Myanmar, you’d say rule of law, to them it meant law and order. We can have law and order and not have a lot of justice.
There was one woman in Nepal, she said, “I can’t answer your question because I’m illiterate.” Then she said, “If we had discipline, we wouldn’t have these problems.” Internal discipline, she meant: The fallout of what you do has ripples in your family, your community, your country, and you think about it, hopefully before. All these written laws are really just a way to codify what people would hold in their heart [if] they realize their effect on everything.
What about the way the police apply the laws?
One of the things that I’ve been working on is to bring together communities and police to discuss issues. In many places, like Nepal, police were told to crack down on protests. The civil society activists, human rights activists and youth were throwing stones, and you can imagine what would happen. The police are at the front line, the communities are at the front line. They started to look at what are the deeper drivers of this conflict. There was one meeting between police and civil society where there was so much anger. {Members of the] civil society were angry because the police had been killing people. The police were trying to show how they had been killed [too]. Then the civil society was saying, “Well, we don’t care, because you’re supposed to be better than that.” I remember feeling, “Oh, wow, it’s going to combust.” But once they started to talk to each other, over the months and the years they created coalitions. Then they started to be able to make political change.
It’s critical that people who want change from all different sides work together, even if you don’t think you have anything in common. You can’t assume all police are bad or all civil society is bad — police were blaming civil society for everything.
In Nepal you interviewed some Maoists who didn’t sound satisfied with the peace process. Is there a role for ideology in your peace-making?
The only way to build peace is from the middle. You need to work and talk with everybody. I had friends that found out I was talking to the Maoists: “I can’t believe you’re doing that!” With the Maoists, a lot of them had come from backgrounds where there were legitimate grievances and a lot of them were treated poorly either by the security forces or the Maoists sometimes. But once ideology becomes ingrained, it’s very difficult to deal with.
You hear that on other sides, too. The security forces had this mantra that “all of them are evil.” Some of them, through different exposure, can start seeing that maybe ideology may not be the right approach. Their grievances were legitimate, but maybe there’s a different way.
In Nepal, the protesters were saying, “Until we burn tires, nobody cares.” That to me is very sad, because why do you have to wait for that to prevent something?
What do you see as the role of the United States in internal conflicts, especially in a place like Yemen where you’re trying to do peace-building but the CIA is doing a drone war?
When I go to countries, some of them can’t imagine that we’re able to do the work that we do. They come from countries that are so controlled from the top down. Someone in Afghanistan said when I first went there, “OK, I’m confused: You’re coming to help build peace and civil justice, there’s other parts of your government that are fighting a conflict here.” They couldn’t get their head wrapped around how our country had different things going on. That’s the one thing with the U.S. that is very open in a way, the fact that we do have a Peace Institute, that it’s our job to try to do active peace-building on the ground, and we’re free to be able to do that.
Do you have issues with the military and the State Department when you’re working in a place where the U.S. is also actively involved militarily?
We certainly talk with them, and we coordinate, but they appreciate that we’re independent. Even when we were in Nepal, we needed to be able to bring everybody together even though the U.S. was not working with the Maoists.
But we certainly keep them apprised.
Would you be in trouble if you were talking with Al Qaeda in Yemen?
There’s certain things we cannot do because of federal laws. You cannot provide material assistance to certain people. There’s also the Leahy law, where if you’re going to do any work with military forces, they have to be vetted for human rights violations.
Do people ever accuse you of working for the CIA?
Everybody assumes that overseas. They come from a country where everything is top-down, and they don’t have any First Amendment.
But when they see the kind of work we’re doing and that we don’t get pressure and that we’re working to try to bring people together, they appreciate we’re trying to actually put the pieces together.
What is the U.S.’s interest in trying to put the pieces together?
Having things secure and peaceful helps our national security. If people are at odds or marginalized groups are not in the process, then they become susceptible to radicalization. In Libya, the prison director was desperate to improve the prisons because so many of the people there had been tortured and that makes them susceptible to joining radical or terrorist groups. To the extent that you can prevent people from being abused or tortured, they won’t be susceptible to recruitment or radicalization.
What made you decide to write this book?
So many of my friends, Yemenese and Libyans and Kosovars and Bosnians, the more I listened to them, it was apparent that their wisdom and their experiences were not heard. If they were heard, it was just parsed down into an academic or policy paper. What was missing was the voice of people who were living it.
Many times people would see something in their community that was very apparent, yet people from the outside would come with preconceived solutions that were created far away or only [from] talking to a certain group within a country. These would fail because they didn’t take into consideration the complexity of the situation, different ethnic groups, religious groups, political views.
I’ll be in a place where we’re trying to pass this one law, and I’ll say, “Let’s do a consultative process” and they’ll say, “We don’t have time for that; we know what’s best; let’s just do it.” I explain, “Even if you don’t think it needs to be done, it does, because whatever time you will save, you will pay for later. Somebody will tell you something you didn’t realize or there are folks who will actively work against you because they weren’t included. If you’re pragmatic, you’ll do it.”
Why did you choose an interview format?
I wanted to do an interview form because I learn more from stories or biographies that, again, [are] not parsed into policy prose. That’s what inspired me. I was surprised by how open people were. First they wanted to know, “Why do you want to talk to me? What do I have to offer?” But once I would explain that it’s to share their voice so that other people in other countries will share that experience and learn from it and also share with their policymakers and policymakers in different countries, then they were very keen, because they felt like they could contribute, where maybe people wouldn’t go through what they did.
One of the things that was really important was that the book not have conclusions. That’s the architecture of the book, to just have the stories.