A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety

by Jimmy Carter

  On December 18 I met first in Zagreb with Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, who supported the mission, and then proceeded to the Sarajevo airport, wearing and sitting on flak jackets because snipers had been firing from both sides. I was grateful for Karadžić’s promise to refrain from attacks during my visit. I had a long talk with Alija Izetbegović, the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was seeking independence from Serbia and whose small territory was surrounded on three sides by Serbian forces. He supported my mission but limited any cease-fire to three months. I awoke early the next day, wrote out my most hopeful proposals, and then Rosalynn and I made a drive of almost two hours to reach Pale, a distance of only nine miles through a beautiful mountain area, site of ski racing competitions in the 1984 Winter Olympics. It seemed that there was a military checkpoint around every curve in the road. Karadžić met us, accompanied by the top leaders of the Serbs, including General Ratko Mladić, army chief of staff, and they gave me an official welcome witnessed by a large news media contingency. In our private negotiations with Karadžić, he insisted on a twelve-month cease-fire, and I finally got him down to four months in an attempt to accommodate Izetbegović. I agreed to request a lifting of economic sanctions against Serbia from the United States and UN but could not promise any positive results.

  I witnessed the signing of my document by Karadžić and Mladić. Its basic terms were cessation of hostilities on December 27, 1994, UN forces to be stationed along the line of confrontation for four months or for a longer period if mutually agreed, both parties to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement, unrestricted movement of relief convoys, unimpeded use of the airport at Sarajevo, and the protection of human rights. The White House was pleased with the draft agreement but stipulated that Izetbegović would have to approve. When I called Sarajevo to tell him that all his demands had been realized, he refused to talk to me.

  We drove back to Sarajevo and discussed the issues with Vice President Ejup Ganić, and the next morning we returned to Pale with a few minor amendments. After some intense arguments with his subordinates, Karadžić agreed to a final statement, which now had the cumulative approval of Izetbegović, Karadžić, Mladić, the United States, and the UN. We returned to Sarajevo and boarded our plane, shielded from ground fire by a large UN truck. The previous plane had taken four bullets through its left side. We took off with our flak jackets on, but I also wrapped an extra one around my hard disk and its documents and copies of the signed documents.

  After proceeding through Zagreb to Belgrade, we met with Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, who, like everyone I met, had first to recite a history of the region. I was thankful that he began with World War I instead of the twelfth century. I showed him a copy of the agreement, and he approved, but he was vituperative in his condemnation of Karadžić, his competitor for Serbian leadership. I asked him repeatedly what it would take for them to be reconciled, and he finally said that if the parliament voted for the “Carter Plan,” this would be adequate.

  The cease-fire went into effect the following week and prevailed for four months, but it was not extended. Conflict erupted again, and the international community supported Bosnia-Herzegovina and condemned Serbia. War crimes were committed by both sides, most terribly by the Serbs, and NATO dispatched sixty thousand peacekeepers and launched more than 3,300 bombing sorties against Serbian forces, mostly with American planes. Another more permanent cease-fire was signed in Dayton, Ohio, in December 1995, approved by Milošević, Izetbegović, and Tudjman. After Milošević conceded defeat, war crimes charges were leveled by the International Criminal Court against him, Karadžić, and Mladić. Milošević was arrested in 2001, and the trial continued for five years, until his death in 2006. Karadžić was arrested in 2008 and Mladić in 2011, and both are still on trial for war crimes. I have often pondered what might have happened if the basic terms of the 1994 cease-fire agreement had been fully supported by the international community.

  Peace for Israel

  A preeminent foreign policy goal of my life since I became president has been to bring peace to Israel, which of necessity means peace for the Palestinians and other immediate neighbors. This also became a key commitment of The Carter Center, which maintains full-time offices in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Gaza and has monitored the three Palestinian elections. The first was held in 1996, when Yasir Arafat was elected president and members of the Palestine National Authority were chosen. After Arafat’s death, Mahmoud Abbas was elected in 2005 to replace him as president, and then in January 2006 there was another election to choose new members of the parliament. Fatah, the Abbas party, and Israel did not want the election to proceed because candidates of Hamas were predicted to win up to 35 percent of parliamentary seats. However, the United States insisted that the already overdue election take place. The problem with Hamas was that it had not subscribed to the terms of the Oslo Agreement, which provided the basis for the Palestinian Authority.

  It was an honest election, and Hamas did much better than expected, winning 74 of the 132 seats. The elected candidates included doctors, lawyers, educators, business executives, and previous holders of local office. I carried a request from Hamas to President Abbas to remain in office and to appoint Fatah members to some of the choice cabinet seats. While willing to remain in office, Abbas resisted the option of including Hamas in a unity government. I returned home to Plains, changed clothes, and flew back to London to attend a meeting of the International Quartet, comprising the United States, United Nations, European Union, and Russia. They allowed me to make a brief appeal to support the election results and then voted without debate to nullify them by making demands that Hamas would not accept. Nevertheless, in March a Hamas-nominated cabinet was accepted by President Abbas, and during the summer there was movement toward a unity government. Israel arrested eight Hamas cabinet members and twenty members of parliament who lived in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a number of these officials were imprisoned for several years.

  I wrote a book that analyzed the situation in the Occupied Territories and spelled out a workable plan for a comprehensive peace in the area, compatible with long-standing official policies of the United States and the United Nations. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid made it clear that without a “two-state” agreement with the Palestinians, Israel would inevitably become committed to a one-state solution. This was a prospect that Israeli prime ministers had described as potentially catastrophic. With Israelis controlling the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, they would either have to give Palestinians equal voting rights and ultimately relinquish Jewish control of government affairs or treat non-Jews as secondary citizens, without equal rights. My book was condemned by the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), and a number of prominent political leaders, primarily because of its title, in which I was careful not to mention Israel. Within a few days of its publication, I received 6,100 letters, a strong majority supporting my position, with many writers identifying themselves as Jewish. Despite my attempts at book signings and other public events to reiterate my lifelong support for Israel and its security, this altercation has been very painful to me. A full-length film, Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains, was made of the book tour, directed by Jonathan Demme.

  The political fallout has persisted. When the 2008 Democratic Convention was held to nominate Barack Obama, I planned to attend and make a speech, as is customary for former presidents. I was contacted by his aides, who told me that neither Bill Clinton nor I would speak, but we were requested to make twenty-minute documentary films to be shown to the delegates, each film designed to be of most help to the current candidate. They wanted me to go to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, where Rosalynn and I had visited five times to build Habitat houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and demonstrate how Republican leaders had failed to respond properly to the disaster. I spent a day in the area to carry out this assignment, but when we arrived at the convention in Denver, I was told
that the film length would be only four minutes and I was requested not to speak, even to greet the delegates. (Clinton and his wife, Hillary, played major roles in the convention.) Obama’s top aide, David Axelrod, explained that he didn’t want to endanger his Jewish support. Unfortunately, this “estrangement” has persisted through his time in office, but our Center has continued our efforts to support U.S. and international policy and to encourage the Middle East peace process in every way possible.

  The Carter Center monitored the parliamentary and presidential elections in Egypt from 2010 to 2012 following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. I was there to head our group of observers. In my meetings with candidate and then president Mohamed Morsi, I urged him to honor all the terms of the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty that I had negotiated in 1979, which has been carefully observed by both nations. He complied with this commitment while in office.

  When Rosalynn and I went to Washington in January 2013 to attend President Obama’s inauguration, John Kerry and his wife, Teresa, came to our hotel room and spent two hours that morning talking about his goals as the prospective secretary of state. He informed us that he would make an all-out effort to conclude a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, and that President Obama would be visiting the Holy Land early in his new term. Secretary Kerry has done his best to reach this goal. There was hope for some months that the United States would present a definitive plan, based on international law and long-standing policies of our country, and let this public proposal be considered by the disputants and the international community. With full involvement of President Obama, it would be difficult for either the Palestinian or the Israeli leaders to reject this all-out effort. Without overt assistance from the White House and direct involvement by the president, these hopes have not been realized. The crucial relationships among Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States have deteriorated, and the Palestinians are now making efforts to refer the dispute to the United Nations.

  Monitoring Elections

  In my mediation of civil conflicts, I soon learned that antagonistic military leaders would refuse to negotiate even through an intermediary, and I decided to rely on the premise of “political self-delusion” that motivates almost all candidates, who believe they will be chosen. I began to propose an honest election, monitored by The Carter Center, and to encourage both adversaries to convince themselves that they would be the winning candidate. Following this strategy, we began to monitor elections in Latin America and soon were being asked to work in other countries around the world. Our role is to help nations to develop democratic societies by empowering their citizens. We also are a leader in improving election standards. Our normal routine is to send from four to six long-term observers into a country for an extended period in advance of the election, to learn everything possible about the country’s history, geography, government, and politics, and to become acquainted with political parties, candidates, and issues. They assess the registration of voters and the integrity and competence of the central election commission. Several days before the election, we send between forty and eighty short-term observers, and they receive a crash course from the long-term observers and are dispersed to key voting areas in pairs, each with an automobile and driver, an interpreter if needed, and a radio or mobile phone. We visit as many polling sites as possible, and the observer teams make reports to me, Rosalynn, or our other leaders, who remain in the capital city.

  The Carter Center has developed a handheld electronic tablet similar to a Kindle that permits each observer to make immediate reports on the situation at each site. We call the device ELMO (election monitor). After we consolidate and assess information from all observers, we make an announcement about whether the election process has been fair and free, accurately representing the will of the people who voted. The Tunisia presidential election in December 2014 was the ninety-ninth we have observed, and we normally complete three or four of these assignments each year.

  Rosalynn’s Agenda

  Rosalynn has been a full partner with me in establishing and governing The Carter Center, joining me as an observer of troubled elections, negotiating peace agreements, and making final decisions concerning our other projects. In addition, she has proceeded with her own agenda. She has maintained a commitment to mental health for more than forty-five years, including a superb program at The Carter Center after our time in the White House. In addition to annual meetings of representatives from all facets of mental health, Rosalynn recruits and educates leading journalists from America and foreign countries so they can report accurately on the subject. One recent project has been to train 144 psychiatric nurses in Liberia, where there was only one psychiatrist to serve people who have mental problems after decades of intense civil warfare. Rosalynn works to immunize young children throughout America and founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute at Georgia Southwestern State University to promote the status of caregivers. As she points out, “Everyone will be involved as a caregiver, either being one in the past, present, or future, or benefiting eventually from their services.”

  Habitat for Humanity

  Our work with Habitat for Humanity has been difficult, unpredictable, exciting, and gratifying. For thirty-one years, Rosalynn and I have led groups of volunteers for a full week of hard work, building and renovating homes for poor families who have never had a decent place to live. The families are required to pay full price for the houses over a period of twenty years, with no interest charges, and payments are invariably less than rental charges in the same general neighborhoods. The families are also expected to put in several hundred hours of labor on their own or neighbors’ homes. This has given us an opportunity to work with these ambitious and hardworking people, and to understand their plight and respect them as equals.

  Installing siding on a new home during the 2014 Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project.

  Habitat leaders and I approve the site location and basic design of the homes about a year in advance, and we attempt to simplify the proposed plans. Our normal project includes about one hundred houses, and the goal is to complete construction within five days, beginning on a Monday with just the foundation in place. We adjust the size of the work crews to make this schedule possible, and they range from twelve to thirty-five people, depending on the size of the homes and the type of construction. Our general policy is to alternate our annual work projects between the United States and foreign countries, and we have completed projects in many American states and in Hungary, South Africa, three cities in Mexico, South Korea, Canada, the Philippines, Haiti, China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and South Korea (including in the Demilitarized Zone). In 2015 we plan to build one hundred homes in Pokhara, Nepal.

  Life as an Author

  After writing Why Not the Best? in 1974–75 for use in my presidential campaign, and Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President in 1981–82 to explain aspects of my presidency, I found that I enjoyed writing. My books have sold well and provided a much-needed source of income for my family. An ancillary benefit that I didn’t anticipate has been a unique opportunity to present my political views and describe our work at The Carter Center. Talk shows and interviews on television, radio, and in newspapers have provided much greater opportunities than my teaching at Emory University or making occasional public speeches.

  My next major effort, in 1985, was The Blood of Abraham, which was based on my extensive travel in the Middle East, where I met with key leaders, took careful notes of their personal opinions about the prospect of a comprehensive peace, and compiled this information from Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinians.

  We had a major consultation at The Carter Center in 1984, which we called Closing the Gap. This analyzed the difference between what medical experts and individuals knew how to do and what they actually achieved. Afterward, Rosalynn and I decided to coauthor a book, Everything to Gain, focusing on personal health, and how the major determining factor was often a pe
rson’s own habits and success or failure in adopting universally accepted health information. Writing this book together evolved into the worst threat we ever experienced to our marriage. We divided the chapters between us, and each was to write the text and submit it to the other for editing. I write very rapidly, and Rosalynn treated my chapters as rough drafts. She writes slowly and carefully, and considers the resulting sentences as though they have come down from Mount Sinai, carved into stone. It is painful for her to see them modified in any way. Another difference was that we didn’t always remember events in the same way or treat them with equal importance. We had constant arguments and could communicate with each other only through harsh e-mails. When we decided to cancel the project and return the publisher’s advance payment, our editor came to Plains and proposed that he divide the controversial paragraphs between us—as unilateral authors without the other’s input. In the book, each of these paragraphs is identified by a “J” or an “R,” and our marriage survived.

  My next book, in 1988, was a labor of love. An Outdoor Journal was about my experiences with nature, beginning with my boyhood and extending from our farm to trout streams and mountains in Alaska, Argentina, Japan, and Nepal. Turning Point, in 1992, described my first political venture, when an election was stolen from me by a dishonest official who stuffed the ballot box, voted dead people, and browbeat other local officials. That same year, Dutton requested that I write a book, which could be used as a textbook, about the causes of conflicts and techniques used to resolve them. I used some of my own experiences to illustrate the points I made in Talking Peace: A Vision for the Next Generation.