Peace Please

Peace Please

Written by Morph

Review by Jodine Stodart

Peace Please:  Four writers on the experience of war talk with Robert Sullivan at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival May 2011, Aotea Centre.

Interestingly, the Readers and Writers Festival  event ‘Peace Please’ began with a negation of the title itself.

“We should not ever beg for peace”, says Izzeldin Abuelaish, “we need to take action and responsibility.”

Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor, lost three daughters and a niece during an Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2009. In his life story I Shall Not Hate (Bloomsbury, Feb 2011) he pays tribute to the lost members of his family and calls for peace.

“War is not a matter of soldier against soldier, a soldier fighting or dying. War is your children, your sister, your mother or your brother”.

During his rousing talk, Dr Izzeldin applied medical metaphors to describe the condition of war and hatred. Wars, as he sees them, are a sickness, and hate a chronic disease. “Peace is not the absence of conflict or war, but the presence of safety. Peace is living with security, health, freedom to pursue your dreams and the means to make them real”. These ideas were communicated through his deep and resonate voice booming around the auditorium like a rallying cry.  There were few dry eyes left in the room.

Sisters Hana Schofield and Atka Reid also told an affecting story, from their book Goodbye Sarajevo (Bloomsbury, May 2011), of their own transformation from the innocence of student life - looking forward to the next disco and worrying about what to wear - to becoming messengers in a warzone, communicating with countries outside Bosnia in an attempt to provoke them to action. Reduced to living in refugee camps in what they described as medieval conditions, they survived in refugee camps with no running water, living off a handful of rice a day.  They gained strength from family, the remaining sisters in the camp and their grandmother, a survivor of the second world war, who taught them how to make ‘stinging nettle pie’. Their testimonial asserted that peace is possible only when there can be political negotiation, and that this can happen only when there is a balance of power – often a balance arising from both sides being equally armed.

James Fergusson, who has spent twenty years as a war correspondent in places such as Algeria, Haiti and Somalia, was a last minute inclusion in the talk (due to Ingrid Betancourt being unable to attend).  A little more academic than personal, his opening line of war zones being “not as bad as the media makes out” was a novel viewpoint but perhaps badly positioned after the heart-breaking stories of those writers before him. However, it didn’t stop me from buying his latest book - Taliban: The true story of the worlds most feared guerrilla fighters (Corgi, 2011). Daring to go into Taliban territory to interview the Islamist militia leaders directly, he provided an original standpoint on the continuing war in Afghanistan. He pointed out that people are people wherever you go and spoke of his aim to prevent demonisation, saying “without demonisation there can be no war”.

I took away from the session several themes on how to take action for peace; the action of cherishing and protecting your family, of using whatever agency and education you have to speak out against injustice, whilst being personally responsible for your actions, and of reaching out to connect people across borders everywhere in order to foster greater human understanding. 

Peace out.