Activists train as peacekeepers
Tony Hotland, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
A peacekeeping force does not necessarily carry guns, wear bulletproof vests and ride in tanks or armored cars. They simply need to understand the root of the conflict they are to help resolve.
That was all that crossed the minds of Ichsan Malik and his colleagues from the Peace Building Institute (ITP) when they initiated training for community-based facilitators to prevent and manage conflicts.
The institute has selected 24 non-governmental organization workers from seven conflict-prone provinces for training, which began on Saturday.
"We want to form some sort of civilian peacekeeping forces that are available to build peace at any time," Ichsan of the University of Indonesia said.
Learning from the way the government dealt with communal conflicts in some areas in past years, the institute believes peace would likely last with the help of facilitators at the community level.
"The government always acts like a fire brigade, which takes action after a conflict breaks out. It never thinks of searching for the root of the conflict in order to prevent it from recurring," said Ichsan.
The peace process in Maluku and Poso in Central Sulawesi between 1999 and 2002, which between them left some 7,000 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands of others, bore fruit only after numerous attempts that included peace agreements between leaders of the warring groups.
Ichsan said the initial reconciliatory attempts failed because they did not involve the community, where the source of the conflict usually lies.
The 24 trainees were selected from the provinces of Papua, Maluku, North Maluku, Central Sulawesi, South Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara and West Nusa Tenggara.
The training, held in cooperation with the New Zealand Agency for International Development, will consist of three two-week classes, with two field training sessions at the participants' areas of origin in between. The whole training covers eight months.
"(The participants) will be supervised by our team under a monitoring system that allows us to observe their programs based on the lessons given in class," said Ichsan.
Some of the issues to be addressed in the training include analysis of conflicts and sources of conflicts, building capacity as peace facilitators, organizing the local community, as well as understanding basic values of humanity, nonviolence and pluralism.
"Besides that, we'll try to provide them with knowledge on advocacy methods and peace campaigns," Ichsan added.
"In the end, we expect the participants to possess good analytical skills to find possible sources of conflicts and to come up with a proper diagnosis should a conflict occur," he said.
The institute plans to hold two more lots of training with 40 more participants from areas considered hotbeds of conflict in the coming years.