News of unrelenting violence in the Mideast may suggest that it's utopian to expect peaceful resolution of abiding ethnic and religious hatreds, but some less visible efforts at cross-ethnic cooperation are getting results.
Consider Northern Ireland, watered by many rivers--the Lagan, Bann,Ballinamallard, and Cam--but none so powerful as the river of religious hatred.Regularly overflowing its banks, drowning Catholic and Protestant communitiesalike in violence, it has cost more than 3,600 lives in the last 30 years. Therecent decision by the Irish Republican Army to decommission arms is an importantstep in flood control, but what's really needed are bridges connecting the twocommunities so they can take the further step of decommissioning hatred.
Who can build those bridges? Listening to the Northern Irish, one gets thesense it is probably not the political leadership. People are skeptical of theshenanigans that surrounded decommissioning. Catholics feel that giving up armsreduces their safety from gun-toting Protestant extremists, while Protestantsfeel that the IRA has made only a symbolic gesture, for which it has receivedwildly disproportionate political gains. As a result, neither side has reaped thepotential joint benefits of reduced arms--less violence, more economic growth,and policies crafted to reflect some of what each community wants.
Hope for decommissioning hatred now rests mainly among the nongovernmentalorganizations of civil society. Fortunately, Northern Ireland has just suchgroups--so-called "concord organizations"--committed to building commonworldviews and skills necessary to work effectively across communities. Thoughthey rarely get much press outside of Northern Ireland, these groups providecrucial democratic assets for the new society that Northern Ireland wants tobecome. Among a population of 1.6 million people, there are some 2,000 concordorganizations and projects--large and small. Their work helps to achieve thecloser connections between Catholics and Protestants, an aspiration held by morethan two-thirds of the Northern Irish in every public-opinion poll.
"Effective intercommunity work at the local level can act as a break on thezero-sum-game approach to politics that is often found in divided societies,"explains Avila Kilmurray, the director of the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust,which supports scores of community projects that fit the concord model.
A few examples give the flavor of this work. In a country where Protestants ofsome denominations do not consider other Protestants, let alone Catholics, to beChristians, Corrymeela, an organization of about 250 Protestants and Catholics,is committed to the transcendent idea of the discipleship of Christ. Each year,Corrymeela brings together several thousand people of all faiths to learn fromone another in structured, small-group conversations. For many participants wholive, go to school, and work in highly segregated settings, these occasions arethe first time that they have met or talked with people from the other communityin anything other than a highly formulaic way.
The Belfast Interface Project takes another step. It works with leaders onboth sides of "peace lines"--the often violent boundaries between religiouslydefined neighborhoods--to communicate accurate information and reduce sectarianbloodshed. Using a mobile-phone network maintained by Interface, communityleaders monitor actions on their side of the line, check rumors for veracity, andtransmit this information through trusted sources to leaders on the other side ofthe line. When it's quiet in neighborhoods separated by peace lines, Interfacehas helped to make no news.
And then there are the integrated schools, which mean something quite different than integrated schools in the American context. In Northern Ireland,about 96 percent of schoolchildren attend tax-supported religious institutions, either state Protestant schools or separate Catholic schools. Both teach therequired religious curriculum. Integrated schools, now tax-supported, arose froma movement started about 20 years ago by parents. They provide religiouslygrounded, denominationally sensitive education for Catholic and Protestantchildren together in schools with roughly equal numbers of children from eachtradition.
Since there are no entirely secular schools in Northern Ireland, the very fewnon-Christians in Northern Ireland flock to the integrated institutions, whichhave excellent leadership and a whole-child educational philosophy with high and equitable educational outcomes. The integrated schools have noticeably narrowedthe "test-score gap" between children of different religions, classes, status,and parental educational attainment. People as different as Martin McGuinness,the Sinn Fein education minister, and Sir Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable of theNorthern Ireland Police Service, support integrated education.
What makes concord organizations successful? In Northern Ireland andelsewhere, effective cross-community groups share similar organizationalprinciples. They promote overarching values that members share, such as a betterlife for their children, a reduction of violence, a wiser use of resources, andcloser personal connections with the wide range of people in their communities.By "talking through" divisive issues, they strike a balance between values thatmembers share and those that divide them. They make no effort to convert peopleto one point of view but rather try to get each side to acknowledge the other'sexperiences.
Concord organizations function with organized rules of behavior. MaloneCollege, an integrated secondary school, has the only bill of rights for studentsin any school in Northern Ireland. They model good behavior and don't play"gotcha." And they commit themselves to the long run.
Using these principles, Northern-Irish concord organizations provide knowledgeand skills that build bridges across communities. Single-minded, violent peoplewill not walk across these bridges--indeed, they may want to blow them up. Butfor the rest of Northern Ireland and many other parts of the world, theprinciples developed in concord organizations can help people achieve the civilpeace that is the precondition for democracy, freedom, and life itself.
