ADDRESS TO THE URSULINE CONFERENCE
The theme which I have been requested to address is: “A global perspective of working in the service of reconciliation, justice and peace. i.e. servant leadership with an educational perspective”.
It was 6.30 a.m. on a hot, humid morning in January 2003. The place? A United Nations airbase at Lockichoggio, in the far north of Kenya, just 10 kilometres from the Sudan border….Sudan, a huge country embroiled in conflict and war, with immense suffering, for years. In front of us the small Cessna Caravan plane ready to take us on a long trip to the Nuba Mountains in Sudan,home of the oppressed Nubian people – no radio, no air-traffic control, no beacons to guide the pilot, just his GPS co-ordinates. This was one of several trips I made during 11 years of solidarity with these suffering people, and in advocacy for peace with international governments and the local role players. Three and a half hours later we touched down on a dirt strip near the mountains; we disembarked, and looked at an Antonov transport plane which had crashed on that runway. Into a 4x4 landcruiser for the journey to the Holy Cross parish compound at Kauda.
Early next morning we walked up the side of a hill overlooking Holy Cross parish area. Around and below me everything spoke of simplicity and a struggle against inhuman odds. On the side of that hill was theCatholic parish primary school – adobe (mud brick) walls covered by grass roofs, blending into the boulders and soil. Very obviously a camouflage to hide the school. Why? Because four years before, this cruel war had visited this place of tranquillity and goodness. The fundamentalist Islamic Bashir Khartoum regime, in its single-minded commitment to maintain and extend political power and to “Arabize” the entire country through military conquest, was conducting a brutal campaign to terrorise and subjugate the African people of the south, including the Nuba mountains area. The regime’s forces used Antonov transport planes, like the one you saw on the slide, to fly over villages like this one, and crude barrels of explosives mixed with shrapnel were rolled down the ramp at the back of the plane onto the innocent victims below.
One day an Antonov flew low, right over Holy Cross parish church. At that time, the school was in the parish compound. The school children and their teachers were busy with classes in the shade of the trees on a very hot day, just down from the simple grass church. Three barrels were rolled out of that Antonov. A simple shrine, a cross, marked the tragedy of that day. A barrel of explosive hit the ground a few feet from the class of 14 children and their teacher – all of them were killed.
After the time of mourning, the parents, priests, children and community walked up that hill to start again, and they built their camouflaged school. The entire school community lived together around the parish compound with the surviving parents, guarded by rebel soldiers. The teachers really struggled to fulfil a dream, viz. to teach the children, many of them orphaned by the war, through the medium of English - because this was a means of liberation from the oppression of the forced Arabization of the people by the Khartoum regime which demanded teaching in Arabic.
This struck such a chord within me as I reflected on our own history in South Africa and the uprising of the youth in Soweto in 1976 to protest against the apartheid regime’s enforced use of Afrikaans, instead of English, in their schooling. This would subjugate them to an inferior education system and prevent them from ever realising their innate potential. They analysed their situation and correctly concluded that unless they were taught through English and given every opportunity to advance on the basis of equal education for all – well, their future would be compromised. And for this ideal, they were prepared to die.
One memory of that visit to the Holy Cross Parish in the Nuba Mountains remains with me in a special way. We climbed the hill again to the school…We met the teachers, only one of them qualified, in their staff room. We looked at the board with the statistics……118 orphan children, 11 disabled kids, 10 teachers…and the poignant school objectives……building more classrooms by parents, teachers and the parish priests; strive for quality education in the Nuba mountains; admission of more girls in the school; teacher training program; encourage tree planting at the school environment. So touching! In one of the senior primary classes – no desks, and just logs of wood on which the children sat – I asked the children what they wanted to do when they finished school. A girl about 12 years old, stood up – the wide, open innocent eyes were so striking. “I want to be a doctor”. Why I asked? “There is so much suffering and sickness here. I want to care for my people”. Yes, I thought, a Catholic school community striving for an ideal against immense odds, and teachers exhibiting truly servant leadership in the way they were passionately committed to holistic education founded on a Catholic ethos which would touch the hearts and spirits of those “little ones” whom I was privileged to encounter and listen to. As a result, a young girl at that vulnerable age could analyse her situation so simply and clearly, and visualise her life and future in terms of serving and caring for her people.
The words of that little girl echoed the insights of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador: “Let us form in the heart of the child and the young person the lofty ideal of loving, of preparing oneself to serve and give oneself to others....the Church must propose an education that makes people agents of their own development, protagonists of history, not a passive, compliant mass, but human beings able to display their intelligence, their creativity, their desire for the common service of the nation”.[1] In Oscar Romero one sees a continual interplay of the themes of justice rooted in the actual historical reality, and integral human development for the common good. That is what I believe holistic education in our Ursuline school communities is all about – and all of you are part of making the dream happen – holistic education, including the spiritual dimension, in view of integral human development and an inclusive relationship with all beings and all creation.
I truly believe that the mystery of relationship is at the heart of all we are and do - relationships between individual people, in families, in schools, in communities, nations and - just as important – the relationship between all of us and the creation, the environment, the planet. And it is when relationship breaks down at any level that we see what seems to be happening increasingly in our world: violence in all its forms, wars, atrocities, genocide, unimaginable suffering for the vulnerable of our world, and destruction of the environment. And what happens at the global or macro level is reflected, mirrored, at the micro level……..what takes place at the level of family and community life, e.g. in the appalling statistics of gender-based violence in South Africa, the outbreaks of xenophobia and mistreatment of refugees and asylum seekers who are seen as threats by those born in South African instead of being seen truly as brothers and sisters, human trafficking even of children and especially girl children, pollution of scarce water sources and wetlands, mineral prospecting in regions of sensitive ecosystems, and so on and so on. Only holistic, inclusive education can change this, and you are called by God to make the difference that will bring life, and life to the full as Jesus promised….. “I have come that you may have life, and life to the full” (John 10:10). This is at the heart of our calling, our vocation, our education ministry in the quest for a healed and reconciled people, world, and creation - all based on justice.
All is one, as the mystic Hildegarde of Bingen so succinctly articulated: ““Everything in the Heavens, on the Earth and under the Earth is penetrated with connectedness, is penetrated with relatedness”.Therefore, holistic education across the spectrum of this spiritual vision of relatedness and connectedness is critical for the future of humankind and the cosmos, the planet. The effects of this holistic education to create a new mindset and worldview in the young people we serve should be seen in the way they develop critical and analytical minds, able to critique policies and practices, and indeed reality, from a value-based perspective which is founded on the Gospel and the principles of Catholic Social Teaching.
But, and there is a “but” – we live and minister in the real world….and so I go back to what happened in me in the terrible struggle of the children and people in the Nuba Mountains.
Everything about that encounter in that remote region spoke to me of the need to work passionately for justice for the “little ones” of that society – and we tried. We - Church leaders, support groups in Europe and the West, and peace and justice activists in the Sudan - began a campaign to meticulously document and verify every such atrocity of the Khartoum regime and its infamous bombing campaign, followed up by relentless advocacy with the Governments of the world. This led eventually to the cessation of the bombing strategy. We also took up the cause of the people in the south of Sudan at an international conference of the Sudan Ecumenical Forum in London which adopted the slogan “Let my people decide”. Through our advocacy this eventually became part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement worked out out in Naivasha, Kenya, which led to the referendum in the south and eventually to a new state in 2013 - the nation of South Sudan. But the cost was terrible –over 3 million people killed, millions displaced and forced to live as refugees elsewhere. Oscar Romero’s words on 18 September, 1977, were a powerful echo of my story from that remote region in Africa:
“Would that the many bloodstained hands in our land
were lifted up to the Lord with horror of their stain
to pray that he might cleanse them.
But let those who, thanks to God, have clean hands –
the children, the sick, the suffering –
lift up their innocent and suffering hands to the Lord
like the people of Israel in Egypt.
The Lord will have pity and will say,
as he did to Moses in Egypt,
‘I have heard my people’s cry of wailing’. (Exodus 3:7)
It is the prayer that God cannot fail to hear”.[2]
But, after wars, human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, the commitment to justice must promote and bring about a transition which will gradually transform reality for the suffering and oppressed and open the door for them to lead at least an adequate human life -it must lead to integral human development. This process has been termed “transitional justice”, which I will come back to in a little while. It involves important interdependent objectives, but it also comes down to realizing some of the dreams of the “little ones” who will never be centre stage in the global socio-political arena. I deeply believe that if Archbishop Romero had been standing in that little classroom instead of me, his heart would have burned with an insatiable desire that the dream of that little girl should be realised – no, not as something “nice” to happen in her life, but as a matter of justice!That day, as I stood in that classroom I thought to myself: if only we as Church could build and run a teacher training college so that those brave and committed teachers in that incredibly poor school, and all over the impoverished South Sudan, could be trained to become properly qualified teachers and teach as they truly wanted to, to truly form their children to reach their full potential…..if only.
And little miracles did happen. After the new state of South Sudan was formed, through the International Headquarters of religious congregations in Rome, a teacher training college was set up and staffed by religious sisters in Juba, South Sudan. This was followed by the Solidarity with South Sudan organization, and the building of the Good Shepherd Centre for Peace in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, again staffed by religious and their co-workers, supported by the internationnal network of religious and Church. Truly amazing efforts to bring hope and healing to people who have suffered so much…..this is what we need to be about as Church and teachers in our suffering world, and at the heart of every home and community.
But, sadly in the new country of South Sudan, the hopes of so many were dashed when, a mere two years after independence,the country descended into a vicious civil war, with ethnic overtones, between the President Salva Kir, a member of the majority Dinka tribal group, and Riek Machar, of the Nuer group. Khartoum started the bombing campaign again. Several splinter groups and militias all over South Sudan have terrorized the innocent civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom have been forced to flee to neighbouring countries, or into United Nations camps. The future looks truly bleak, in spite of several efforts towards peacemaking.
Why has this happened? Because, as in other places, the underlying causes of the war and violence over decades had not been dealt with holistically and inclusively with all sectors of the society in a process of transitional justice. This, in my view, is a very important contribution we, as Church, can make in an educative process which deals not only with the symptoms of war and violence in all its forms, but also – crucially – with the underlying causes of all this at the macro and micro level, so that a sustainable and just peace will lead to real transformation for all.
An example. In the awful war in the former Yugoslavia, characterised by massive atrocities, ethnic cleansing, failures by the UN peace-keepers who did not intervene to prevent massacres, and finally the efforts to end the violencewhich included bombing government buildings in Belgrade in Serbia, ……the major question after the cessation of violence was and still is: was their justice for the victims…..and what kind of peace was achieved? In justice and peace circles we have always worked on the basis of the theme: “if you want peace, work for justice!” In fact, one of the most difficult challenges after negotiations to end war and atrocities is how to avoid a trade-off between the goal of achieving an end to a war through the signing of a peace agreement, and justice for the victims of gross human rights violations and even war crimes in that conflict. After prolonged war and violence, sometimes those who have suffered grievously, the victims, feel that, in their ongoing experience of suffering and deprivation, justice has been sacrificed on the altar of ending the war and getting a peace agreement signed – and then, nothing really happens after that, nothing really changes for them.
A poignant example – one among several I could share with you. In the many years I have worked as a member of the international Catholic Peace Movement, Pax Christi International, one of my missions was in support of a network of civil society organisations whose objective was to organise a Regional Truth Commission for the former states in Yugoslavia after the war ended, especially Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzogovina. In my visits to Croatia in particular, I met groups of the mothers of the disappeared. It was heart-rending to see their tears, their deep pain when, years after the conflict ended, they still had not found the remains of their sons and daughters – why? Because the mass graves had not been identified, and until the former combatants came forward to a Truth Commission or some other structure to make known where those mass graves were, those mothers would continue to suffer.
Extending the example, there was the infamous massacre by Serbian army troops of patients in the hospital in Vukovar in Croatia. I visited the simple memorial in a field – small, green bushes for about a hundred bodies that were found, but about 60 have not been discovered. No, life has moved on, and the mothers and people have been forgotten; for them there has been no healing, no restitution, no justice, no peace.
It was the same for many others like the families of over 8300 Muslim men and boys massacred by the Serb Army in Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzogovina, with over 20,000 women and children deported and abused - a wound which still festers in that society, especially as over 1000 of those bodies of Muslim men have not been found. Was the so-called peace agreement achieved at the expense of justice – even though the Serb Army commander, General Ratco Mladic, was eventually caught and is on trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague? And what about the relationships between people and societies in that region now; have those relationships been healed and restored? From what I saw, there is a long way to go – precisely because achieving a peace agreement should be but the first step in a long process of justice, healing, reconciliation and development. Otherwise the seeds of future conflict may lie dormant in the unresolved problems which remain.