“Wars are everywhere where peace is fought for.” – Elazar Benyoetz
Benyoetz states a simple fact. In hot spots across the globe, war is the thesis, peace the antithesis. But that’s also where I begin to get confused.
Is Benyoetz’s quote pragmatic? Desirable outcomes sometimes require us to get our hands dirty, and one can see how peacekeeping has evolved to reflect this reality. General Sir Michael Rose, who commanded the 1994 UN Protection Force in Bosnia, even wrote a book about it – entitled “Fighting for Peace.”
Or, is Benyoetz’s quote cynical? Benyoetz is a poet; perhaps he is simply granting nuance to the old cry that “fighting for peace is like f*cking for virginity.” It may seem reasonable to suggest that peace could be achieved if belligerents would simply stop fighting; in fact, just the deliberate cessation of violence has been sufficient basis for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
Perhaps it depends on definitions. Is war the absence of peace? More importantly, is peace merely the absence of war, or does it also require justice? Stability implies peace while oppression is often described as war, but when some degree of stability is grounded in some degree of oppression, is it war or is it peace?
These are not new questions. When NATO intervened three years ago in the conflict over Kosovo, Germany faced both its first combat operation since 1945 and its most daunting practical challenge to a fundamental national principle: “Never again war / Never again Auschwitz.”
Critics of Germany’s liberal government charged that it had opted for the pursuit of the latter at the expense of the former, and they decried the return to the European continent of war as an instrument of policy. In so doing, these critics took the international community’s laudable rejection of the notion that “might makes right” one step further: Might, they seemed to suggest, makes wrong.
Earlier this year, I attended a speech by a respected French diplomat. With an eye toward current events, the diplomat extolled the virtues of, not surprisingly, diplomacy. Parties to a conflict must be treated as equals, he emphasized, and peace must be brought about through political means.
To illustrate this point, he referred to two historical examples: the civil war in Lebanon and the 1992-95 war in the Balkans. Both were, he explained, situations to which such a diplo-political formula for peace had been successfully applied. They should, if one were to extend his argument, serve as models for handling current or future conflicts; they were, at a minimum, great diplomatic triumphs.
The 1995 Dayton Accords did end the second Balkan war. But Serbian (and later Yugoslav) President Slobodan Milosevic, one of the primary signatories at Dayton, was transformed overnight by the West from the Butcher of the Balkans to a Partner in Peace, and he stayed in power long enough to preside over the third Balkan war in Kosovo. He is now imprisoned in the Hague, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.
Similarly, the 1989 Taif Agreement did end Lebanon’s 15 year civil war. But today, the country plays host to Hezbollah as little more than a Syrian puppet state, and religious hatred has not subsided. “The guns have fallen silent,” one Lebanese political analyst told the Washington Post. “That’s all that’s happened.”
In far too many conflicts, that is indeed all that happens. When the international community equates “cease-fire” with “success,” it prioritizes ending the fighting over securing a just peace.
If all belligerents in a given conflict were truly fighting for peace, and if such peace could be universally defined, this would be a sustainable position. But in the real world, conflicts are exactly what the term suggests – clashes of interests and values, where one or more sides see war as the most effective if not the only vehicle for advancing or defending those interests.
Pure diplomatic intervention therefore depends not on convincing the parties that they cannot win, but on convincing them that they should not win. Since the international community cannot effectively argue for a mutually agreeable concept of peace, it merely argues against war: The fighting must stop.
Given the limitations of such diplomacy, its messengers enter the fray as poorly equipped as the UN’s early peacekeepers. They demand peace but they do not fight for it, and standing unarmed in the middle of a battlefield, they quickly realize that at best they have no allies, at worst they have only enemies.
Bryant Walker Smith (bsmith@badgerherald) is a senior majoring in civil engineering.