“We will not stop until all Muslims leave Boda. If this is what it takes, we will poison the wells to kill them all”. We were all sitting with several community leaders in a spacious, high-roofed room at the church of the Central African Republic city of Boda, listening astonished to these words from one community leader, while accompanying a high-level visit from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Next to the speaker was an old, poker faced European priest, calmly looking at the bare stone floor in front of him, his long, wrinkled face showing tiredness but also determination. He did not blink once. Outside, a slow, cold rain had been falling for days on end.
Boda was going in that month of April 2014 through a truly diabolical situation. Christians expelled from the Muslim-majority center of the town were cramming the church or hosted with family and friends. The now Christian-free center of the town was bursting with nomadic Mbororo cattle herders, mostly Muslim, expelled by militias from the rural areas around Boda, having joined the besieged Muslim population in the center of town. Around the center was a no-man’s land made of empty, partially destroyed houses, patrolled by a multinational African force as well as the French army, trying to prevent intercommunal killings. Stepping into the no man’s land meant a certain risk of a quick death for civilians.
Many of us humanitarians have been in similar situations. Communities are paralyzed and and the same time violently energized by fear of the other. Social tensions impede delivery of much needed humanitarian aid. Mistakes in targeting of beneficiaries are interpreted as favouring one community over another, thereby exacerbating community tensions. Refugees arrive to poor, fragile neighbouring countries and tensions rise over scarce resources such as water, land and jobs. Worst of all, there has been expectations that humanitarian workers, in particular protection practitioners, share a responsibility to actively mitigate community conflict, in particular in situations where there is a complete breakdown of legitimate authority – without having the required tools or training for the task.
In short, how are humanitarians expected to deal with social tensions and community conflict in war-affected societies? For a number of years, a rich body of theory and practice has been growing around the concept of conflict transformation through dialogue – in a nutshell, the idea that fostering communication and dialogue between conflicted communities contributes to transform the perception of the conflict and therefore conflict itself. Whereas the concept of “do no harm”, i.e. avoid interventions that create or exacerbate conflict is well known to humanitarians, concepts and tools such as conflict transformation and peacebuilding through dialogue are not a recognized part of the humanitarian playbook – not even of what is commonly known as humanitarian protection. Most of us have never heard of the theories and practice of John Galtung or John Paul Lederach, let alone read their books or received training. These practices are more commonly the domain of specialized NGOs, such as Search for Common Ground, or development agencies such as UNDP. At the same time, these more specialized actors rarely have the speed to intervene in sudden flare-ups of violence or situations in which, due to forced displacement, different communities enter suddenly in contact with each other. There is, therefore, a lot of space and opportunity for humanitarian and development actors to work closely together also in the field of conflict prevention and response at the community level. At the policy level, it is essential that development and humanitarian actors come together to develop tools, approaches and training to intervene through dialogue in unstable or quickly changing situations.
There are, of course, important pitfalls in humanitarian actors becoming actively involved in preventing and mitigating community conflict. The most important is the risk that we humanitarians yet again become the fig leaf of the lack of will or even ill will of those ultimately responsible to prevent and mitigate conflict, i.e. State authorities and armed actors. This may happen in a number of ways. It is telling that buzzwords around concepts of individual or community empowerment (such as “community resilience” in the development world, and “community-based protection” in the humanitarian domain) have gained a lot of traction roughly around the same time when economic crises hit the Western world and humanitarian and development budgets suffered massive cuts. There is a striking parallel, of course, with the insistence of many Western Governments on entrepreneurship – while letting salaries fall and scaling down social safety nets as well as investment in health and education. Communities and individuals should not be made unduly responsible for what authorities are for – keeping the peace and ensuring social justice.
Another important risk is that too much emphasis is put on the perceptions and emotions of communities – while in many occasions conflicts are mostly about access to resources. Anybody who is familiar with the Central African Republic knows full well that community violence has much more to do with access to grassland, development investment, gold and diamonds than it has to do with the Qur’an or the Bible. Many Christian and Muslim leaders went out of their way to reduce tensions and protect civilians regardless of identify, often at the risk of their own lives or sanity.
Here in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, where there is a level of social tension between Syrian refugees and host communities, a positive aspect of the situation is that local authorities seem to have a keen understanding of the bread-and-butter character of existing tensions: competition over low-skilled jobs and small commerce, pressure over water, sanitation and solid waste management resources as well as a perception that aid has not reached vulnerable Lebanese. In a situation like this one, a parallel risk is that humanitarians engaging in peace through dialogue become the fig leafs of donors when they take decisions on development investment on grounds other than evidence-based data on poverty, needs and presence of refugees, thereby contributing to exacerbate feelings of injustice. At a time when parliamentary elections approach, it is also very important that the presence refugees is not utilized for political gain in the public discourse.
With all these risks, weaknesses and shortcomings, there seems to be here in the Bekaa good momentum for authorities, humanitarian and development actors to work together on mitigating tensions linked to the presence of Syrian refugees – including through means of dialogue. Development agencies such as UNDP and humanitarian agencies such as UNHCR are working closely together and exploring diverse ways to collaborate. The Social Stability Working Group has been developing innovative, collaborative methods to analyze, measure and record tensions at the local level, and its work is going to be more integrated with humanitarian protection officials working for refugee rights. At the same time, there is willingness to coordinate more closely investment in local development, ensuring that remote, poor communities and in particular those with high number of refugees are not forgotten, to ensure that tensions are not exacerbated and that investment decisions are increasingly taken on need. We will also need to move beyond the analytical phase and strengthen effective, collaborative and swift mechanisms to intervene through dialogue and advocacy when conflicts do arise.
A number of important obstacles lie ahead. The year 2017 was ridden with crises in the Bekaa, including massive evictions of refugees and active armed conflict in border areas. This left very little time to reflect and improve humanitarian action and adopt a more mid-term perspective, and there is always the possibility that a similar dynamic will be present in 2018. At the same time, decisions on financial flows for local development, which are key to keep a level of social stability, are rarely made on the ground. Nevertheless, with all the difficulties and shortcomings ahead, it will certainly be worth to learn the lessons from 2017, collaborate across different knowledge bases and above all, to develop and implement tools and approaches for dialogue from the bottom up.