by Noah Raford
House played many roles, but he was a serial refuser of public offices. He was a member of the Texas elite, a ruthless political-campaign manager, an idealistic novelist, a private envoy for Wilson to the councils of war-torn Europe, and an informal architect of progressive policies and narratives (including many of those that appear in Philip Dru). Finally, House was Wilson’s man at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where he championed the establishment of the League of Nations and other principles, and struggled—too often in vain—against some of the petty but fatal idiocies of the Allied Powers, such as the exclusion of the German delegation from full participation in the conference and the territorial humiliation of Italy.
Despite his close links to government, for me, House was undoubtedly a white hat. Although he harnessed the power of politics and the state, he never became consumed by them. He seems to have remained first and foremost a modest citizen of his country and of the world. We will return later to House’s story and to that of Philip Dru, because they are paradoxical and illuminating in equal measure. They also provide a good preamble to the first type of white hats I want to chronicle: the private diplomats, practitioners of “Track II” informal negotiation channels, and envoys of global civil society.
All around the world, wherever there is conflict, there are also people seeking to resolve it. They trace root causes, they seek to understand the positions and cleavages of the parties and what might affect their decision making, and they advise the players and propose policies. Sometimes they even organize private negotiations and channels of dialogue or become the midwives of peace, reconciliation, and coexistence.
Governments are often involved in official efforts at conflict management or transformation. These efforts can be carried out by diplomats, spies, or politicians. But these people often find it hard to gain the trust of the parties, because they are perceived to come with their own agendas. So in a surprising number of cases, it is independent citizens—academics, religious activists, social organizers, or journalists—who have become the crucial catalysts of reconciliation. And even where governmental actors take the lead, they must usually adopt an independent white hat mentality to be successful.
Case studies and profiles form a significant part of this essay, because a mental picture is often worth a thousand words. There are dozens of fascinating and idiosyncratic stories to tell about these envoys of hope and civility. The Community of Sant’Egidio is one of the more well known examples. A Catholic lay movement of tens of thousands of people founded in 1968, the community began in Italy with students coming together to read the Bible, making contact with poor immigrants, and helping the immigrants’ children learn to read and write.
The community developed social and humanitarian programs for the poor: first at home, then overseas. But increasingly, it realized that conflict was a major cause of the poverty and suffering it was trying to alleviate. So members of the community began to explore informal dialogues in conflict zones—most notably in Mozambique in the early 1990s, where the community was eventually accepted by both the ruling party and the rebels as a formal mediator, and it helped shepherd through a peace agreement, which was signed at its headquarters in Rome. It has engaged in similar activities in Lebanon, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere.
These are fragile processes, depending deeply on trust and on the ethics of the mediator. The community’s practice and values have been crucial to their impact. They have eschewed bombastic claims. Their founder, Andrea Riccardi, ascribes their contribution to their commitment to the security of the multitude of poor people affected by conflict: “Our moral power during the negotiations was being the mouthpiece of the suffering poor populace, sometimes the only one.”
Another region that has been riven with conflict is the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria, full of warlords, oil barons, and desperate but resourceful communities. Judith Burdin Asuni, an American married to a Nigerian, who has lived in the region for decades, is one individual who has played a fascinating white hat role in this region. Burdin Asuni is named in the prison chronicle of Mujahid Asari-Dokubu—the leader of MEND, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta—along with Jomo Gbomo, the shamanic spokesman of the MEND militants,2 and she was briefly arrested and accused of espionage by the Nigerian government for her contacts with the militias. But from her small organization, called Academic Associates PeaceWorks, she has worked on police reform and community development, and she has published important analyses and recommendations for the re-governance of the Niger Delta and how the basic grievances of its people could be addressed.3 (There is a larger story here, to which we will return.)
A third example of a white hat worth mentioning here is Michael Semple. If we were casting a white hat Western, Semple might make a good lone ranger. An Irish national, he began working in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He ran the Oxfam’s humanitarian and development operations there and later worked for the prominent Ismaili leader the Aga Khan.
In a remarkable talk to the Carr Center on Human Rights at Harvard University, Semple described his early civil-society experience in Afghanistan: “If you wrap enough bands of hand grenades around you, shoulder your Kalashnikov, and look fierce, the Pakistani border guards will salute you. It worked. But I wouldn’t advise it.… You’re much better off without them.”4
Semple has moved on from his white hat civil-society origins. Today, his self-conceived identity appears to be close to that of the autonomous “political officer” of the British colonial frontier—for example, the Kashmiri operator Mohan Lal, a public entrepreneur on the chessboard of the Great Game in Afghanistan. But as he took on governmental roles, Semple appears to have only deepened his white hat commitment to and understanding of the social power and human security of the local population at large, something which many diplomats and other frontier officials today lack. He appears now almost as a hill tribesman.
Semple was serving as the deputy representative of the European Union in Afghanistan when, at the end of 2007, he was thrown out by the government for talking to the Taliban. He had, however, been working closely with the Afghan National Security Council on these questions. According to him, his expulsion can be traced not to any particular misdeed, but to the interests of a tribal leader and power broker. His book about the period leading up to this, Reconciliation in Afghanistan, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand events in that country today. Semple’s EU superior, Francesc Vendrell, claimed not really to know what the Irishman had been doing. Of these events, he merely said, “Michael was a person who had a tremendous amount of initiative.”
Semple then moved to the United States, where he shared his experience and insights, and, it seems, where he ran a subtle campaign to shift the policy and elite debate toward support for dialogue and the civilianization of international support to Afghanistan.
Like most people who know that country deeply, Semple seems to be concerned about three things: the deepening effects of massive Western counterinsurgency on various aspects of Afghan society; the risks of precipitate withdrawal; and the likelihood that the West may repeat its mistake of the early 1990s, when it cut off support after the mujahedin’s victory over the Soviet Union, failing to help properly with reconstruction and development.
Elsewhere, Professor Mary Kaldor of the Centre for Global Governance and Global Civil Society at the London School of Economics—a white hat social activist as well as a formidable academic—has been riding forth to promote the paradigm of human security for militaries and foreign services. She has worked closely on this with some of the world’s leading experts in stabilization and counterinsurgency operations.5
Replumbing the state to serve the people better is a continuous challenge. Valuing dialogue and prioritizing the bottom-up perspective of affected citizens are two common threads in white hat conflict transformation, whoever is doing it. The Community of Sant’Egidio worked with local missionaries in Mozambique to collect lette
rs and petitions for peace. Through this process, the leader of the rebel delegation received a letter from his father, whom he had not seen for a decade.
The community’s Riccardi says, “I believe in the power of dialogue till the very last moment. It is not easy. Dialogue means a conversion towards the other person: you have to try understanding him, and at the same time help him to change his agenda.” These ideas of understanding and change bring us to the curious case of Conflicts Forum, which I had some experience with during several years working on the Middle East, but whose work in that arena was probably of more provocative interest than my own.
In 2002 in Jerusalem, journalists and experts were whispering about a man called Alastair Crooke. Crooke was reportedly a British intelligence officer living in caves with the Palestinian factions—like some latter-day Lawrence of Arabia—and working on cease-fires.
I failed to track him down at that time but managed instead to meet in Gaza with Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader involved in these contacts, as well as with the political independent Ziad Abu Amr, who later became a minister in both Fatah- and Hamas-led governments. These conversations took place a couple of days after Israel had dropped a bomb on Saleh Shehadeh, a head of Hamas’s military wing. An extraordinary, poetic declaration had just been issued, signed only by the Tanzim militia, which declared a unilateral cessation of attacks on civilians. When we met, Abu Shanab was in no mood for compromise. Within a year he would meet the same fate as Shehadeh.
Crooke was removed from his post as “EU security coordinator” to the Middle East not long after. I suspect that, by then, he was already some way down a path that, by all accounts, led to him separating from the British secret service and moving to Beirut. Over time, I believe Crooke came to consider himself what we are calling a “white hat” (others have compared him to a John Le Carre character). He also began working closely with another man with white hat credentials, an American named Mark Perry. Both men had been involved in ceasefire conversations and in mediation around the siege of the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem.
Mark Perry had previously been a U.S. truckers’ union organizer, a senior official of the Vietnam Veterans of America and the Campaign to Ban Landmines, a political consultant and lobbyist, an unofficial adviser to Yasser Arafat, and a prizewinning journalist and author. He is one of the most interesting historians of U.S. military leadership working today, and he has strong informal networks with people in the U.S. military and security establishment.
Crooke and Perry set up Conflicts Forum in 2004, in the crucible of the post 9/11 terror wars. It was the year after the invasion of Iraq. U.S. policymakers were still dreaming of creative destruction and secular domino effects. The coalition in Iraq had already made a series of fatal and hubristic mistakes in failing to engage with—or even gain a basic understanding of—that country’s social fabric.
The declared purpose of Conflicts Forum was “Understanding Islam, Recognizing Resistance.” Put differently, its purpose was to persuade Western governments to accept that dialogue with Islamic political movements with political legitimacy and a broad base of popular support in their communities was sensible, and that not every Muslim entity currently on a terrorist list should be classed with al-Qaeda.
Perry and Crooke organized formal and informal meetings between former U.S. and European officials and representatives of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other movements linked to the Islamic revival, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranian revolution. These were meetings of deep listening, but also of mutual challenge.
It is hard now to remember just how radical a move this was to make out in the open at that time. The Conflicts Forum enterprise has been far from fully successful, but it and similar initiatives, such as Forward Thinking, have had a deep impact over the last few years in reshaping some of the underlying mental models of decision makers and opinion makers—not just in the West, but also in the Middle East.
Bilateral advice was an important part of Conflicts Forum’s approach. There are differing views about the shade of gray of the hats worn by the leaders of these movements, but there can no longer be any doubt that they are primarily political rather than terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, some of their underlying narratives and models of organization are now more contested than before, based on knowledge rather than ignorance, most importantly in their own societies.
Needless to say, this is a moment of great promise and danger in the Middle East. As someone connected to these processes said recently about the Arab Awakening, “There is a growing demand, not just for open, democratic and accountable states, but also for open, democratic and accountable movements.” Despite the ups and downs of recent history, we have barely glimpsed the full potential for transformation across the landscape of Middle Eastern political and social organization.
A wave of change was already well underway when I met Perry and Crooke in 2005. Hamas and Hezbollah had moved closer to a full commitment to parliamentary politics, and tumultuous debates were unfolding across Arab and global civil society. Perry, Crooke, and I were among a handful of observers of the Middle East who were starting to plan for the likely rise of Hamas, the reconfiguration of the Israeli political landscape, the regional fallout of events in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the challenges and opportunities of these transitions.
We were good at predicting events, but less good at the white hat mission of decisively changing their course. Palestinian elections went ahead. But promising conversations were cut short immediately afterward by the Quartet principles agreed to by the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia, which set strict preconditions for any formal engagement with Hamas, and this shifted the balance of power away from advocates of a political path.
Despite private acknowledgments of unease or inconsistency, many Western politicians and decision makers were drawn into sponsoring civil strife among the Palestinians. I was in the region in late 2006. On learning that I had contacts in the British government, one Fatah security official asked me unashamedly for more weapons and training to fight Hamas. At the same time, others from a different wing of his movement were working toward reconciliation between the factions.
This process came to a bloody climax in June 2007 in Gaza, just months after a Palestinian unity government had been brokered in Mecca. Contacts had been tracking news of agitation, weapons transfers, and training for months beforehand. The neoconservative David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser the following month, later said, “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” adding that his own administration had been “engaging in a dirty war in an attempt to provide a corrupt dictatorship with victory.”6
Still, stepping back for a moment, the careful reader may already have noticed the missing characters in this story. The only white hats visible so far are a small network of somewhat egotistical lone rangers.
This is a mistake which policy entrepreneurs and private diplomats very often make. They design elite processes of dialogue and policy change that fail to connect sufficiently with the legitimacy, the agendasetting power, and the transformative potential of broader public engagement. Often, they take the legitimacy of the actors they are convening too much for granted, or they fail to recognize the forces of inertia.
A broad yet schismatic community of people and organizations have attempted to initiate channels of dialogue in the Middle East over the years. This became a veritable industry in the early 1990s, when a process run by Israeli and Palestinian citizens and facilitated by Norwegians led to the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
The Middle East peace-industry dialogues were sometimes valuable, but they also proved increasingly inadequate, because they tended to engage only the “peace camp” on both sides, and they became more transactional than transformational. The interlocutors often had mo
re in common with each other than with the consensus in their own societies, and they did too little to reach out to their own publics. After the collapse of negotiations and the resumption of hostilities in 2000, very few of these private peace dialogues proved to be of much value.
The legitimacy deficit proved also to apply to some of the work done by Conflicts Forum and others. Despite a number of provocative conversations about deliberative polling, locally legitimate security orders, or supporting all-party popular committees at the neighborhood level, these approaches were never sufficiently operationalized or owned by local white hats.
It was in an effort to learn these lessons that I focused my final project in this field on securing support for two parallel projects which I played little or no part in. The first was a scenario-building process that brought together Israelis across social divides to contemplate their shared future, led by Adam Kahane, who had run a similar process for South African leaders. The second was the Palestinian Strategy Study Group, facilitated by a Palestinian and an Egyptian, which brought together Palestinians across divides to develop a more effective and democratic national strategy.7
The importance of democratic civilian power cannot be underestimated in these processes. My personal experience of providing advice to politicians and policy makers on the Middle East over this period had shown me that, usually, they would acknowledge the force of the arguments, then make unconvincing realpolitik excuses about why they needed to stick to their existing strategy until it had finally and decisively failed. Bad policies have been kept on life support for years in this way.