Accord Lebanon: an international review of peace initiatives

(Vatican Radio) Lebanon's Christians, Muslims and Druze from across the political and cultural spectrum put aside their differences in receiving Pope Benedict XVI when he visited Lebanon last month. But will the temporary truce hold?

The U.K. based peace and reconciliation think tank, Conciliation Resources is calling for a review of peace initiatives in Lebanon. Bordering on Syria and Israel, the country has repeatedly been drawn into regional conflicts and is still recovering from 17 years of a civil war which formally ended with the Taif Agreement in 1989. Recent clashes in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli testify as to just how easily a conflict like the one now in Syria can have repercussions on its smaller neighbour.

Conciliation Resources focuses on seven conflict-affected regions around the world, taking an in-depth look at specific conflict and peace-building themes through their “Accord” serial publications.

The latest report in the Accord series, “Reconciliation, reform and resilience: positive peace for Lebanon” suggests a “fundamentally different approach is needed to transform negative and precarious stability in Lebanon into positive and resilient peace.” A wide range of representatives from different sectors of Lebanese society plus experts from outside the country contributed to the report.

Accord editor Alexander Ramsbotham says most of the Accord projects are more than a year and a half in the making, and information for its publication on Lebanon was gathered before the upsurge of violence in Lebanon related to the on-going Syrian conflict.

Researchers however, he says, found that since the Taif Agreement, the nation “has been very much stagnated…and the peace process hasn’t really progressed.”

Ramsbotham told Vatican Radio’s Tracey McClure that the report offered the opportunity to pose questions like “how is the peace process going? What’s been working well; what’s been working badly? Are there experiences from Lebanon which could suggest a way forward that would enable or facilitate progress?”

The report offers important messages such as ‘the Lebanese are responsible and capable actors in determining a peaceful future for their country’ and ‘domestic priorities should include reconciliation and political reform.’

But, Ramsbotham notes that researchers found that one of the biggest challenges to any sustainable peace in Lebanon is what they call the country’s “collective amnesia” regarding the past.

Listen to the interview:


The Accord series are available to download at www.c-r.org