ATHWAAS, Kashmir

Athwaas brings together widows of both soldiers and insurgents in Kashmir, from the Indian and Pakistani areas. They include Muslims (Sunni, Shia, Ahmedia) Sikhs and Hindus. Athwaas has already built links between elite women in both countries, and has created five Samanbals - centres where women can meet, work together on projects such as sewing or microfinance, but with the core aiming of sharing strategies to create peace on the ground. The project Peace Direct will fund, at the level of £8,000 per year, will enable them to create five more salambals, involving 200 women, and work more extensively on the Pakistan side of the line of control. They aim to get local authorities across the border divide working together when violent incidents occur to resolve them before they escalate, to persuade young men from both sides of the conflict not to take up arms, and to have a strong voice advocating for peace in the forthcoming elections.

Centre Resolution Conflits, Congo

The Centre Résolution Conflits was established in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1993 and became a formal organisation in 1997. In the beginning training in alternatives to violence started with training community elders, church and non-governmental organisations and political leaders. But in 2000 the emphasis shifted to training young people, including through introducing conflict management courses into universities and colleges in North Eastern DRC. However in 2002 the main centre was ransacked as conflict broke out again in Nyankunde. In the words of the founder, Ben Mussanzi wa Mussangu; ‘I realised that working for peace is like working with people who are addicted to drugs. You take four steps forward, then circumstances change and you take ten steps backward.’ The Centre was moved to Bunia, but the equipment was stolen when conflict again caught up with it. Peace Direct helped to raise funding to replace the equipment so that the Centre could be set up again in Beni, in a different part of the region.

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Colectivo de Mujeres Pazificas de Cali

For the last 40 years Colombia has endured a conflict that has pitted left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and Colombian security forces against each other. Civilians have borne the brunt, with estimates of over 35,000 killed in the last decade. The highly stratified society has spawned left-wing revolutionary movements such as FARC and ELN. At the other end of the political spectrum are paramilitaries descended from vigilante groups established by land owners and drug traffickers to protect their interests. The Colombian state response has been the ditching of peace and the pursuit of all out conflict with rebel factions. Cali, Colombia’s second largest city, is central to much of this. It is home to the infamous Cali Cartel, and scene of the gunning down of Archbishop Cancino which shook even battle-hardened Colombians. The Colectivo de Mujeres Pazificas has set up a Women's Peace School in Cali. It gives 50 influential women from all sections of Cali society a chance to learn about and debate non-violent resistance, ways of influencing policy on human rights and how to protect women from violence. This knowledge is then spread into all areas of the community.

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Building peaceful communities in Sri Lanka

Friends in Need, a project of the Centre for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation, is a post-tsunami reconstruction project with a difference. Its purpose is not only to meet human needs for food, shelter and employment, but also to create communal harmony in the affected villages.

The war in Sri Lanka between the Tamil LTTE (Tamil Tigers) and the Sri Lankan government lasted for more than two decades, and left at least 60,000 dead when a cease fire was agreed in 2003. After independence the Tamils demanded greater communal and individual rights than the dominant Sinhala government was prepared to recognise. This led to demands for a separate state of Tamil Eelam. Fighting between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government was intensive through the 1980s and 1990s, despite frequent talks and conciliatory gestures from both sides. Although the intense conflict has ended, there is little progress towards a true peace. The Sri Lanka government has not taken the opportunity of the tsunami to bring the communities together – in fact in the early days it vetoed a visit by Kofi Annan to the Tamil areas which were badly affected.

Friends in Need is recruiting political science students from three of Sri Lanka’s universities & village youth , based in Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim areas, to work as volunteers in reconstruction & social mobilisation. The first part of the Friends in Need Project is in Kalmunai District on the east coast (two villages – Muslim & Tamil), Ampara District on the east coast (one village- Tamil) & Matara District on the southern coast (one village – Sinhala). Kalmonei , Ampara & Matara are multi-ethnic and religiously diverse semi-urban areas linked to a number of villages, almost a microcosm of Sri Lanka. Different communities have very different access to resources, also typical of the situation in Sri Lanka.

Friends in Need uses the young volunteers to identify potential youth leaders from all communities among the local students of secondary school age. These are trained in community development, how to assess community needs, and then helped to implement small scale tsunami related projects, that bring different groups together. These include cleaning buildings, running children’s programmes and distributing a wide range of donated goods.

So far the project has completed work in the first group of four villages, with just under 60,000 people( Madiha 7503, Periyanilavenai 17379 ,Ninthavur 17409, Thirukkovil 16899) benefiting from the project. The total cost of the first phase has been £90,000 with many donations in kind in addition. Funds raised from this concert will help to replicate it in a further four clusters in the Southern and Eastern provinces.

Mandera Peace Committee

Dekha Ibrahim Abdi has left footprints of peace in the sands of strife-ravaged frontiers. From the onset, coincidences of history prepared her for the future challenge. She grew up in Kenya’s North Eastern Province under emergency laws that placed permanent dusk to dawn curfews. Learning would be occasionally interrupted in school, as people were rounded up to answer for the killing of a soldier whose body was found in the neighborhood. During the disturbances that followed the August 1982 abortive coup, Dekha was in Nairobi, where she had gone to pursue admission to a medical college. Terrified, she returned home to news of her father's death and the direction of her life was altered — she has since never deviated from the path of peace. More recently conflict flared up in Mandera in Northern Kenya, sparked by competition for water and other resources. Many people died, largely women and children, and thousands fled their homes. Then Dekha stepped in. She had contacts and courage, and with funding from Peace Direct and local business leaders, members of her peace group were able to bring rival factions together and orchestrate change, bringing the killings to an end and allowing over 250,000 people to live together in peace. The Committee's work continues to maintain peace by resolving conflicts as they arise.

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Horror of tsunami brings hopes of peace in Aceh

Of all the areas affected by the tsunami, Aceh took the biggest impact, with an estimated 150,000 dead and 400,000 homeless out of a total population of 5m. This project exploits the resulting opening up of the peace process to bring civil society organisations into the peace negotiations.

At the time of the tsunami, Aceh had already been suffering from 30 years of conflict between the Indonesian government forces and the Free Aceh Movement, GAM. In May 2003 the government declared martial law and closed Aceh to foreign organisations and journalists. The human rights situation deteriorated and 3,000 people have since lost their lives, while at least 2,000 people have been arrested and convicted of alleged involvement with GAM.

The tsunami has had the effect, however, of opening up Aceh to the outside world, through the involvement of international NGOs in disaster relief. Combined with the election of a new President in 2004, this helped to create new possibilities for resolving the conflict. Since the beginning of the year there have been talks under the Helsinki based Crisis Management Initiative between senior government representatives and GAM. In short, the prospects for peace look better than for some time.

This is an unprecedented opportunity for civil society to engage ensuring that peace is a lasting one, and not simply the cessation of open violence. Organisations representing civil society urgently need to contribute to the discussions about the peace settlement, rather than it being left entirely in the hands of those who were responsible for the war. To capture this moment, Peace Direct is supporting a gathering in Indonesia in July which will bring together grass roots groups mostly based in Aceh, but also from the rest of the country. The aim is to develop a co-ordinated contribution to the peace process to ensure that the warring actors create a realistic and sustainable enforcement process of the agreements incorporating in full the demands of civil society organisations. The cost of this gathering, and of follow up work over the next six months, will be £15000.

These demands include building respect for human rights, establishment of democracy, reduction in the use of violence and reconciliation based on an acknowledgement of the damage done by the conflict. At the same time civil society organisations need to challenge the culture of corruption, violence and impunity, while ensuring that Aceh does not revert to being closed off from the outside world.

Humanitarian Liaison Centre, Kirkuk, Iraq

Sami Veglioglu is a British Iraqi who was impelled to return to his home city Kirkuk to set up a Humanitarian Liaison Centre, in which individuals who have suffered wrongs as a result of the conflict in Iraq can have their story heard and be helped to find redress. ‘I have to reach people before they pick up a gun and take matters into their own hands’ says Sami. Peace Direct has been funding the centre since it opened in July 2004, and is helping Sami find other sources of funding. So far the Centre has documented 2,500 cases from all sections of the community – predominantly Arabs Turkomans and Kurds, and both Muslims and Christians. Sami is now seeking to expand the Centre’s work to encompass employment creation – unemployment being a major cause of violence – by setting up a ads listing paper which will be sold on the streets and through newsagents. Proceeds from the paper will fund the Centre in due course. Sami is also planning to build on the broad base of clients at the Centre to develop programmes with local schools for social and cultural integration.

Coalition for Peace and Unity, Afghanistan

CPAU – the Coalition for Peace and Unity – in Afghanistan has been operating since 1996. During 2002 CPAU made a strategic decision to work in different parts of Afghanistan with different communities and ethnic groups. In each location CPAU facilitated the creation of Peace Councils at district level, with Peace and Development Committees in village clusters bringing together groups such as women, teachers, young people, and ex-combatants. Peace Direct’s grant will fund a conference to bring together four groups from different areas to exchange their experiences, and to invite senior politicians, donors and the media to the event to develop their understanding of peacebuilding.

Educational Training Centre for Poor Women and Girls, Afghanistan

The Educational Training Centre for Poor Women and Girls of Afghanistan (ECW) was established in October 1997 when Afghan women were prisoners inside their houses and had no chances to go out to work, study or even shop for themselves. ECW was one of the very few to establish women’s centres inside hidden houses, moving around in secret from the Taliban officials and government. At that time ECW had no financial support. Peace Direct is funding ECW to conduct Legal Rights and Human Basic Rights Awareness workshops for both women and men in Kunduz province. Raising awareness of social economic cultural and legal rights is the first step in moving towards a respectful and peaceful life for all, where people do not need to resort to violence to settle disagreements.

ACTION for Conflict Transformation, worldwide

ACTION for Conflict Transformation is a worldwide network of peace activists most of whom have experienced the training programmes of Responding to Conflict. Through ACTION peace activists can learn from each other and benefit from support from people who know exactly what they are up against. ACTION’s aims are to build capacity to transform conflicts, to empower communities and to link and learn by developing networks. Peace Direct helped to fund ACTION’s International Forum in Johannesburg in November 2004 which was attended by 53 people from 26 different countries.