The International Peace Academy

Let's talk a little about the work now that you're undertaking as President of Peace Academy. I know that it is a goal of your institution to train people to have skills to contribute to peacemaking operations such as we've discussed, and negotiations. Tell us a little about your curriculum and how you feel such a learning experience is made possible for diplomats and others.

We have two major activities by the academy. One is the development of training models for teaching skills in third-party roles for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. We have subdivided this into two. One is the area of mediation and negotiations. There are third party roles in mediation and negotiation, and the emphasis is on third party roles. We have developed training models which run from one day to five days, depending on the availability of the personnel. They teach the process and the skills which are required. We have based this on all the research and writing of the social scientists, experts in international diplomacy and peacekeeping. So it's a very interdisciplinary approach on our part, except that it is very pragmatically oriented.

In other words, we bring people of mid-career from the diplomatic service and military service, or international civil service, and put them through these very short orientation courses where they simply sharpen their skills which they already have. If they don't have them, there's nothing we can do for them. But if they have already had some background, some practice, through this experience they will improve enormously. These are heavily skill-oriented programs and so the basic models of teaching are based on background reading which we have selected, and we have done some publishing of our own.

We are now coming out with a new book on international mediation and negotiation. Like our Peacekeeper's Handbook, we are hoping that this will be at least the first publication which will make the task easier for the negotiators. We have a special presentation on each type of negotiation, like bilateral group negotiations, trilateral negotiations, international negotiations, conference negotiations, group negotiations.

And then we have, sometimes it's required, on demand, specialized courses like economic negotiations, environmental negotiations, arms control negotiations. It's very easy for us to make those special adaptations because the basic skills and processes for negotiations are the same, which is bilateral, trilateral, group, multinational, or international. These courses are run frequently for the UN diplomats, and we run them in Europe for the diplomatic community there.

The second type of training is in international peacekeeping, which starts with how to negotiate in a war, and all the processes and the constitutional machinery that is available to do that. [For example], how do you supervise a ceasefire? The arrangements which are required, which could be observers, could be peacekeeping forces, and the mechanics of introducing them, like the role of the Security Council, the role of the secretary-general, the role of regional organizations, multinational forces, as have been put together under American initiative. We have now included the teaching of that as well.

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Then we get down to the problems of command, which deal most with military issues and in which political leadership is very much involved, because these decisions are made in New York, not by military experts but by diplomats. And so, there's a combination of these. We teach them actually how to handle critical situations, the techniques of non-use of force, self-defense, negotiations at a very low level (like if a machine gun breaks out, how do you stop fighting, how do you stop the firing of that machine gun -- that process), and the command of the liaison arrangements which are essential for implementing those constitutional arrangements, host country agreements, logistic supply, etc., reporting back to the UN Secretary-General. So this one part, the training part, of our activity.

Our second activity is related to research of conflicts. We had to start that because we needed case studies and we needed practical approaches to the resolution of current conflicts, because our participants are involved in current conflicts, and they were not satisfied by simply reading past cases. They felt that they were coming away from jobs and they were going to those jobs which were actually dealing with conflicts, and they would like some enrichment of their knowledge and some better ability to go back and advise their governments accordingly. So we started with the Arab-Israeli conflict which, regrettably, has stayed with us to the entire life of the International Peace Academy, and has been one of our major studies, both third-party roles in the settlement of disputes, and third-party roles in providing security to the region.

Similarly, we have been asked by regional organizations to work with them in how they could evolve their systems in improving their machinery for the settlement of disputes and for peacekeeping. We've done a lot of work with the OAU on how they could possibly have handled the Chad situation, and how they might handle that type of situation in the future. So this is the other area of our work. It involves a lot of travel.

Currently, I have a team in the Middle East who are visiting Israel right now, and then will go to the Arab countries and end up in Lebanon. I, myself, have returned from Korea and from Thailand a couple of months ago. My African colleague has been to Nigeria to look at the Chad situation, and I have an American buddy who's directly involved in the study of Central American issues. So these are some of the studies we're doing. And then of course, to back all this up, like any other academics we must write, produce, to survive.

One final question. It was a bad summer in some ways. We had the Falklands and Chad wars, the Lebanon crisis. For people who are concerned about peace, what do you see as most hopeful down the road? That we are developing skills such as you have just discussed, different curriculums and different contexts? Or is it that the political actors in international affairs will see that this road to war is something that we have to avoid because of the nuclear danger? What is the note of hope that you see in the present situation worldwide, and in you experiences both at the UN and now in the Peace Academy?

The note of hope is, as indicated by you, there's a much greater realization that everything must be done to avoid a nuclear war. That even getting to the point of serious military confrontation can be extremely dangerous. That war, as several wars in the Arab-Israeli context have indicated, and other wars that have been fought around the globe, is not been able to resolve the political differences. That each war has simply brought another war, and that we are simply buying time. Therefore, it becomes essential that we improve our ability to negotiate. What has been brought home very clearly to us in the Academy is that one of the basic reasons for conflict has been the inability of the global system to provide nations with security. It's the lack of that sense of security which makes them fight in self-defense, or makes them carry out aggression intended for the purposes of defense.

If the global community were to develop an international system -- and I believe the best tool that we have so far invented has been the international system by the United Nations, for all its limitations, in all its weaknesses -- that's the area which we should be working on in order to provide that security which is absolutely vital for people to be able to negotiate with each other with a degree of confidence that their very life is not threatened.

General Rikhye, thank you very much for being with us. This was a very enlightening experience, your sharing with us these experiences of what the work of peace is all about. Thank you very much. And thank YOU very much for joining us on An Open Window.

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