Dictator
You take me to task because a man has died.
I ask: do you think I can just forget?
Know this: to protect what’s left to protect
I won’t stop short of murder when required.
We won’t return to unreaped harvests, heads
bent over crippled stalks; the awkward shapes
in stiff repose; the thrice-abandoned space
bereft of you, the slaughterers, the dead.
Democracy will wait until I fear
no more the clattered landing of the crow
in silent farmland, nor that salt-sweet smell.
In quiet moments now, the sounds I hear
are not the cries of twenty years ago –
but their foretokened echoes, should I fail.
(Published by Pennine Platform, 2016)
My weather girl
Tonight you told us our tomorrow will
be changeable, though starting dry.
You spoke with all the confidence instilled
by science and facts – but I could see
anxiety alive behind your eyes.
They spoke of unslept nights, of the debris
and disarray of home where dawn
no longer gracefully unfolds but bleeds
a crimson warning to the day;
of weather fronts where storm clouds follow storm.
The data show that winter’s here to stay,
but you persist with your forecast
of early spring, where daffodils display
above the snow, proof of the heat
still stored below. It will not come to pass:
your husband’s love affair with self-defeat
ensures that every sign of thaw,
however mild, is just one more deceit
before the sky turns dark again
and elements resume their climate war.
His voice, as you drive home in sheets of rain,
reveals he’s turned once more to face
the buffets of the private hurricane
he mocks and dares to do its worst –
from his retreat within the sham embrace
of grape or grain. You close your phone and curse.
Your stomach seeps with acid fear,
uncertain if the threatening clouds will burst
upon the night ahead. I share
your dread, and drink my numbness deep and fast,
to be inert when you reach here.
(Published in the Kent & Sussex Poetry Folio, 2016)
The pallbearer
Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling,
but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes,
but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end. – John Donne
The bell falls quiet; the horses’ shoes collide
with cobbles; music floats; the priest appears.
we measure off our height in equal pairs,
absorb the coffin’s weight and, eyes downcast,
in tentative half-march, proceed inside.
June’s brightness filters limpid through stained glass
into a cool obscurity. Song climbs
from choir to fill the space, and all combines
in Dean Donne’s Equal Music, Equal Light,
to ease us, leaving but two questions at the last.
What makes a well-lived life good, in our sight?
The mourners praise her as a wife, her art,
the way she raised her children, her kind heart.
Was that enough, how do we set the bar?
Had she done more, might they still more delight?
And what is left of us, when what we are
dissolves? A pigeon perches in the beams,
and causes quite a stir, her soul it seems
ascending – mumbo jumbo, surely: wings
as apt to rouse, as raise her to a star.
The vicar sprinkles holy water, sings
the final phrases as his curate swings
the censer, then we shoulder her again.
I’d swear she’s lighter now than when we came –
not by the weight of her departed flame –
but since to pray together strengthens us within.
(Published in the Kent & Sussex Poetry Folio, 2015)
Flax
…through generous fields of flax, their overlapping
flowers a gentle gentian; tangled mats
of chamomile among the wheat; to trapped-
in, hedged-in meadows, hemmed by sunken tracks
and spreading oaks, with you – so closer to
the past than I – I felt the touch of those
whose baulks of timber dragged these lanes, who knew
the cloying scent of mayweed, clover, drove
the horses pastured in these intimate
enclaves to till and sow. I wondered how
this path we trod began, saw William on
his horse lean forward to negotiate
his needs: their right to walk and rent and plough
the land he’d won, with those he’d won it from.
(Shortlisted and commended in the Ealing Magna Carta competition, 2015)
The wind
This moon, two days past its fullest, must be
shining, blue like here, on stumps and
shattered remnants of the copse I
strode through nightly seeking confirmation
of your love.
The images and spirits I once dodged,
flinched at: are they shattered too, their
shelter wrenched away – are they thus freed? Or
is their story bitterer still than ours?
Did you breathe that mushroom smell, scuff
leaves with your boots as you
scavenged: one pocket for chestnuts
and cobs the squirrels lost, the other
for ceps, and wooden whorls or shapes that
anyone else would miss?
Or did you miss all that, as I am now,
away on ventures new: not bound in life
to that small wood as you are in
this memory of you?
When the wind came, did you scream and freeze
like Hollywood? Or was it over before
it began – Bang! Breath hurled out
of your lungs to join the assault?
Even before, in the time of my nightly walks,
there were things I failed to protect you from: people,
mostly; one in particular. But that
night of the wind – what could I have done but
reach my hand for yours in unfinished
gesture of need and fear?
And now the moon shines; nights are colder.
Stumps, jagged and torn – ripped. And silence.
(Published in Other Poetry).
9.23 pm
A precious moment splits your smile
From when your face begins to slide.
Eleven minutes splits that breath
From when the ambulance arrives.
An hour and forty minutes pass
Before a nurse is at your side.
With tenderness she takes your pulse,
Looks at her watch. And then you died.
In measurement of time and space,
Your passing lacks a feather’s weight.
Abu Rakham
Soft
Atlantic
rain
kisses my scalp –
a thousand kisses –
though we are miles from any sea.
Frogs fill the night with their
machine‑gun love song,
drowning the
mosquito hum.
Gentle swish,
benign,
of raindrops on sapling leaves, old
thatch and
fresh grass,
moon only guessed at,
hidden
by motionless cloud.
All these – all
you –
people,
asleep on crooked beds,
not hearing the
creak of the wheel, but
turning with it
through sleep and
the changes it brings.
Tonight I learned I’ll leave this place:
suddenly I love it.
(Published in Other Poetry)
Metro-man
This was published on Open Democracy
Violent conflict is on the rise. According to the Global Peace Index 2017 published last month, the last decade has seen the highest decline in world peace since the Cold War. The World Bank has also noted that two billion people live in ‘fragile states.’ That’s more than a fifth of the world’s population.
By contrast, only one comprehensive, major peace agreement was signed in 2016, between the Colombian government and FARC rebels. This was an inspiring example of diplomacy, compromise and determination in action, but less than a year later, some commentators are already casting doubt on whether the deal has sufficient support in Colombia to survive.
Sadly, history shows that half of all peace agreements collapse very quickly, roughly within five years of signing. Why is this, and how can countries like Colombia avoid the same fate?
The problem with many peace deals is that they seldom if ever address the underlying causes of the conflict. In reality, every peace agreement is no more than a ceasefire, designed to stop the fighting for now. Important though such agreements are, what really matters is what happens afterwards.
After a lid has been put on the fighting, peace needs to be carefully nurtured and encouraged to evolve in subsequent years to deal with the issues that caused the conflict in the first place—such as inequality, poverty and historical grievances—and slowly building trust between the different sides. But the mechanisms and support required to do this are often lacking, especially on the most sensitive and hardest issues—the ‘higher hanging fruit.’
Peace deals also often result from external pressures rather than from a genuine coming together of opponents whose own analysis tells them that now is the time to seek a non-military solution. Such externally brokered peace deals can be particularly tenuous.
A big risk to peace also comes from third-party ‘spoilers’—leaders or parties who feel that the emerging peace threatens their interests or excludes them. Meanwhile, geopolitical factors such as changes in policy by major players like the USA can shift the circumstances and render the agreement no longer valid.
Current discussions around whether the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement will be undermined by Brexit or the recent UK general election is one example of how susceptible peace can be to apparently unconnected events. The peace that was brought by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement is now widely accepted, but as the Irish scholar Eunan O’Halpin has said, there are still unresolved tensions and bitterness.
This is why peace deals must, first and foremost, be won and sustained locally.
Among countries where agreements did not hold is South Sudan, where dissatisfaction among elites over access to political and economic power led to the resurgence of rivalries and violence soon after the country’s independence in 2011.
And in Rwanda, spoilers played a part when some Hutu leaders rejected the Arusha Peace Accords in 1994, less than two years after signing, fearing that returning Tutsi rebels would have too much power, and contributing to the genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of people in less than three months.
In all of these cases, the peace agreement did not resolve the underlying political and economic grievances that pre-dated it, resulting in renewed violence. What could have been done differently? Agreements that have stood the test of time thus far include South Africa’s National Peace Accord (NPA) of 1991, which supported the peaceful transition from apartheid rule and brought an end to the long-term conflict between the ANC and the state.
While not perfect, this process created structures that helped to contain violence, address injustices and create mechanisms for peace, including local conflict monitoring and mediation. This was partly achieved by establishing local and regional peace committees, which brought together religious and political leaders, business people, security forces, and others. And, while encouraged by outsiders, the accord was the result of political calculations made by the South African parties themselves.
Stronger peace deals like this one are developed over a period of years. They are hard to achieve, and usually have mechanisms built in to monitor the peace by interested international parties, helping to ensure that the process delivers real peace dividends and continues to evolve.
Examples include Nepal, which last year celebrated a decade since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. It has taken a long time and much discussion to deliver key elements of this agreement, particularly the much disputed new constitution that sets out a new, federal state. Much remains to be done, but so far the fact that the process has not been rushed is probably an advantage.
Or take Lebanon, where the Taif Agreement ending the long-lasting sectarian conflict was signed in 1989 and has held ever since. A crucial element in this case was the inclusion of a mechanism to ensure that all sectarian groups are represented in governance—essentially reserving parliamentary seats and ministerial positions for particular groups
Nevertheless, no peace agreement is foolproof, and the Lebanese and Nepalese still have to manage their peace every day. In Nepal, the complex new constitution is yet to be fully implemented. And in Lebanon, the political system will no doubt need to evolve to be able to deal with new tensions and realities such as changes in demography and regional conflict dynamics—for example, the refugee crisis emerging from the war in neighbouring Syria, which is putting pressures on the Lebanese population and public services.
The contexts vary, but the need to continue the work of peacebuilding after a deal is signed is universal. In Colombia today, the challenge is to ensure that every party fulfils their commitments and that all Colombians see advantages in the peace process, and get behind it. For a peace deal to last, it must be achieved and maintained by people right across society. These efforts must continue long after the ink on a peace agreement has dried.
Building stability overseas – one brick at a time
This post was also published on International Alert’s website.
Earlier this year a new guidance document was finalised outlining five building blocks and five shifts for the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and its work on building stability in fragile states and societies.
The document, titled the Building Stability Framework, has not yet received much publicity – but it should: it has much to commend it, and I hope the new UK government to be formed after the June general election makes more of it.
It could also be useful for other governments and organisations – not least in this year when the UN is reviewing how it can improve its performance in building and sustaining peace.
Background
In 2011, the then UK government published its Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS). This was much heralded, and was welcomed by peacebuilding organisations. We liked that it was cross-governmental, developed jointly by the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and DFID; that it was based on the idea that addressing instability and conflict overseas was both morally right and in the UK’s interest; that it was holistic, linking prevention, early warning and crisis response; and that it was premised on a long-term notion of stability, or ‘positive peace’:
‘The stability we are seeking to support can be characterised in terms of political systems which are representative and legitimate, capable of managing conflict and change peacefully, and societies in which human rights and rule of law are respected, basic needs are met, security established and opportunities for social and economic development are open to all. This type of “structural stability”, which is built on the consent of the population, is resilient and flexible in the face of shocks, and can evolve over time as the context changes.’
It therefore clearly marked out its territory as that of progressive change: not the kind of stability which the UK had so long supported in places like Egypt under repressive autocrats, but the kind of stability more typical of liberal democracies.
Essentially, it supported what political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls “getting to Denmark”, or creating stable, peaceful, and inclusive societies. It might almost have been written by an NGO like ours, such was its ambition for the transformation of fragile societies. And therein, unfortunately, lay the seeds of its own fragility.
BSOS is still government policy, and was integrated into the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review. But look a little closer and it is hard to see where the strategy is genuinely being implemented as it was written. There are two main reasons for this.
First, Whitehall – at the political level, at least – still interprets ‘stability’ in the old-fashioned way, as the lack of upheaval and violence, rather than in the way quoted above. And since “getting to Denmark” involves an immense amount of change, and thus a risk of upheaval and instability, at least in many policy-makers’ minds, BSOS seems internally contradictory. They settle for the status quo, though it falls far short of Denmark. To paraphrase St Augustine, they pray for Denmark, ‘but not yet’.
And the second reason is that it is genuinely difficult for the UK government to figure out how to support progress towards stability in practice. It is all very well to agree that Denmark is more stable than Somalia, but how does one navigate from the latter to former? And as we know only too well, it’s a journey that’s fundamentally non-linear and hard to plan or predict, especially within the short-term planning timeframes with which the UK is cursed by its electoral cycle and bureaucratic habits.
Good news, therefore, that DFID, recognising this challenge, has been quietly developing new guidance, which was approved by ministers earlier this year in the form of the BSF.
Five building blocks
The key difference between the BSF and BSOS, it seems to me, is that the former is less prescriptive, and written with a more practical application in mind – a short, easy to read document which offers a variety of examples where civil servants have opportunities to support improvements in stability, through instruments already to hand.
It thus tries to make building stability more practical, tangible and real, and crucially it recognises that progress is likely to be incremental at the best of times, and that there are always going to be setbacks along the way.
BSF sets out five building blocks – one might rather call them ‘colours’ that can be applied to enhance the picture of stability on the canvas before them. These are:
- Fairer power structures;
- More inclusive economic development;
- Better mechanisms for resolving conflict;
- More effective and legitimate institutions; and
- A more supportive regional environment.
No wonder peacebuilders like this, as these are all areas on which we also focus our efforts. And – like the BSF – rather than seeing these as norms to be achieved come what may, we see them more simply as areas in which to try and make an incremental difference, where possible.
I feel the BSF might have gone further in some respects: I think ‘power distribution’ a more accurate label for the first building block; that global factors – including some on which the UK is quite influential, such as money laundering and climate change policy – could be more evident; that although this is much more down to earth than BSOS and other earlier policies, it still risks being misinterpreted as implying that DFID has more power to address ‘root causes’ of instability than it really has; and that limiting this policy to DFID, leaving out other departments, is a big gap.
But I also know that this enterprise of figuring out how a small island nation in western Europe can help increase stability elsewhere remains – quite rightly – a work in progress, and this document is a very useful step along the way.
Five shifts for DFID
With this same perspective in mind, the BSF ends with five pieces of advice for DFID – and by implication other UK government departments, and other international actors, we can assume – with which I wholeheartedly concur. Indeed, they form part of the advice my organisation International Alert and others have been giving the UK government for years:
- Put politics first: Make sure what you do is grounded in an understanding of politics and power.
- Think and act beyond the state: Stability is influenced as much by society, and by external factors, as by the state.
- Integrate stability throughout the DFID portfolio: Look for where you can have an impact on the five building blocks through any and all aid programmes – in humanitarian, health, education, livelihoods, infrastructure, business development, etc. – not only in the more obvious governance and peacebuilding programmes, important as those are.
- Be flexible in your choice of instruments and approaches, and be explicit about the need to recognise a high level of investment risk in pursuing critical, yet hard-to-achieve and hard-to-predict results.
- Pay more attention to staffing – get the right people in the right places, with the right partners and networks, don’t rotate staff so often, and thus base programming on a granular understanding of the realities on the ground.
The BSF does not make the mistake of providing a prescription: it is broad level guidance which aims for a balance of theory and practice.
We recommend it to other UK departments and other international agencies, as a good starting point for understanding how, humbly, to make gradual changes to the peaceful co-existence and development progress of people living in fragile societies.
Download the Building Stability Framework.
Phil Vernon 