Chai Brady
Fr Patrick Devine SMA Chai Brady speaks to Fr Patrick Devine SMA about tackling conflict in Africa
Conflicts caused by religious extremism are on the rise across Africa and are more difficult to deal with than violence between tribes, according to an Irish missionary priest who established a charity focused on peace-building and reconciliation.
Fr Patrick Devine SMA had been serving in Africa for decades before deciding he didn’t want to deal solely with the symptoms of conflict and poverty, but also tackle root causes.
The native of Co. Roscommon received an award in 2013 for his ongoing conflict resolution and reconciliation work in Kenya through the Shalom Centre for Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation (SCCRR). Previous recipients of the award include the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Senator George Mitchell and former US president, Jimmy Carter.
Speaking about his time working in several leadership roles in Africa, Fr Devine says: “In my time particularly with the religious superiors, because there was orders working in so many diverse areas, I had so much interaction with conflict and killing and maiming and displacement. I became aware I didn’t want to spend another 25 years just dealing with the symptoms, the band aid treatment, where there was hunger giving food, we needed to address the underlying issues.”
Dislocation
This led him to establish the SCCRR in 2009 in the wake of persistent widespread violence and dislocation across northern Kenya, and in the aftermath of the disputed Kenyan elections.
The centre has mainly dealt with conflict between different tribes, this includes conflicts along the border of Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda, Northern Kenya and veering over towards the Somali population in Eastern Kenya. However, extremism connected with religion has become an increasingly serious issue.
“For the last number of years we were very conscious of this issue of religious ideological extremism and how much that was influencing the philosophy of organisations like Al-Shabaab, so it was necessary to develop the skillsets in terms of analytical skills and peace building techniques to try and address issues of religious ideological extremism,” Fr Patrick explains.
He cited two major attacks in recent years. The Westgate Mall shooting, which was an attack by the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab Islamist militant group on a shopping centre which saw 67 people killed. The other was an attack on the Garissa University College in 2015. Almost 150 people were killed. Muslim students were allowed to leave while Christians were targeted. Some of the victims were forced to call their parents before being executed.
“Around Nairobi there is huge slum areas. These slums are considered to be areas where there are breeding grounds of Al-Shabaab cells, for planning attacks and all that. That’s the nature of Al-Shabaab’s presence in eastern Africa,” says Fr Patrick.
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He has written a paper on radicalisation and extremism in Eastern Africa. In it he sets about distinguishing the different terminology used to describe a person’s path from “tolerance to terrorism”.
This continuum starts with a tolerance to other people’s fundamentally different beliefs. It then morphs due to a “negative radicalisation” that leads from fundamentalism, to non-violent extremism and finally to a further radicalisation which manifests itself in violent extremism operationalised in terrorist acts.
“Everyone is aware here of what’s gone on with ISIS. People are aware further back of Al-Qaeda, then you have al-Shabaab, you have Boko Haram, then across the Sahel from West Africa over to East Africa, south of Libya, Tunisia, that’s a real breeding ground at the moment too for religious ideological extremism,” Fr Patrick says.
“It was in the last 120 years really that development, modernisation has taken place south of the Sahara and institutions are still weak and institutions of course are very important for helping people meet their basic human needs and actualise their potential.
There was an attack in the village and the bodies were splayed out. I had two guys with me from the tribe that had attacked…these guys weren’t involved but as soon as they saw them they wanted to kill”
“A lot of these countries are at very early stages of development and there’s huge areas that are still not developed and education is very, very important for people to counter issues of bad ideologies and so on in any society.
“Religion itself it has to be looked at, because in my opinion anyhow, religion isn’t the underlying cause of conflict but it becomes a major factor when the institution becomes more important than the message, the values of the message.”
He says that when peace, truth, justice and mercy are sacrificed for the sake of protecting institutions, or for other institutional goals, and when the divine revelation isn’t lived out in all its fullness, “then religion becomes a major factor” in conflict. “Because that’s really what’s underpinning a lot of the religious ideological extremism, the drive in it,” he adds.
“The rationale for setting up Shalom was that in African conflict environments, where people are killed and maimed and displaced persistently, social and religious values could not take deep route.
“People couldn’t live normal lives or experience true peace, neither could you have any sustainable development in those conflict environments because periodically schools and religious institutions and hospitals and other development projects, they became inoperable. So where we forever going to keep pouring the money through the sieve addressing the symptoms, or do we tackle the underlying causes? This has been the challenge all along. To really transform those conflicts from manifest violence first of all to negative peace, which is only the stopping of the violence. That’s what we got in 1998 in Northern Ireland – that’s all it is.”
The negative peace, he says, must then be transformed to a positive peace, “where all sides become mutually interested in the development, security and well-being of each other and that really is what reconciliation is about”.
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He describes the work that SCCRR does to bring about reconciliation as “extremely dangerous”.
When he was starting the SCCRR he was “caught behind the lines one time”.
“There was an attack in the village and the bodies were splayed out. I had two guys with me from the tribe that had attacked,” Fr Patrick says.
“Now these guys weren’t involved but as soon as they saw them they wanted to kill them there and then.
“So I got them into a little room with the help of a man and his wife from that village, but the mob that was in front of them… particularly families that had lost their husbands and sons and all that, it was very, very tense.
“It took an hour and a half, two hours, and then a woman came out of the crowd and she helped me and explained that they had been attacked because they had attacked another village four of five days early. So we got the two guys saved anyhow.”
He says that last week he received a message from some colleagues who had met the two men who were saved, one had become an assistant chief and the other became a chief and a catechist.
Fr Patrick says no one who works for SCCRR has ever lost their life on the job. “We are very careful too in a sense, we don’t cross lines, we sometimes have to go in convoys. If we see in real danger we have to pull out our personnel sometimes. They’re in dangerous situations so fortunately we haven’t lost anyone in Shalom.
“Over the years I have witnessed priests killed in other circumstances. I went out during the night to one of my colleagues who was from Co. Clare and he had been killed during the night.”
Danger
However, it’s not the interethnic or intertribal conflicts that he believes to be the most difficult and dangerous to tackle.
“It’s more dangerous working with religious ideological extremism,” he explains, “because it’s not as apparent. You’re dealing with very secretive organisations. This is where an organisation like Shalom – because it has very highly qualified people – can do something as distinct from a lot of organisations that are just into development projects, without addressing the conflict issues.”
Fr Patrick says that all SCCRR staff have Masters Degrees in peace studies, development, political science, comparative religion and associated education. Their first method is to “insert” qualified staff into communities where there is conflict and build up trust with influential members of that community. This could be the chiefs, elders, warriors, women and youth leaders and more.
Secondly they enter the community with an attitude “that you are in the process of empowering them” – the local influential opinion-shapers – to be the architects of their peaceful future of co-existence, he says.
This means training them with the analytical skills on what’s causing the conflict and the peace-building techniques, and even though they may have to work with people who have a very limited education, their intelligence is not to be underestimated. Fr Patrick explains: “They already have assets that no one from the outside can ever bring in, because they are in the fibre of the communities.”
Then the SCCRR worker is tasked with doing research into what is causing the conflict, which is expected to stand up to any rigour of academic interrogation. “An awful lot of pseudo analysis goes on,” says Fr Patrick, “stuff that’s done just to suit organisational needs or to suit the management’s interests of NGOs just to justify their existence and that can often be a problem. I think it’s an issue that has to be addressed.”
He says it’s very important for development organisations to do their analysis well before they enter into a region. They must look at the whole religious, socio-economic, political situation, and not ignore the cultural traditions and cultural traditional conflict management.
If a charitable organisation doesn’t do this and decides to build a well, he says “the water source may become the biggest centre of killing, maiming and displacement and inter-ethnic conflict tension, because they’re fighting for the water”.
“So you really have to have your analysis done well, set up the systems, the governance and the mechanisms for dealing with conflictual issues that may arise.”
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Last year the charity report, among other achievements, completing 106 conflict transformation and peacebuilding workshops. Over 60 school educational projects emerged where they agreed to interethnic and interreligious education. Almost 3,000 men and women were equipped with conflict transformation and peacebuilding skills and techniques through SCCRR workshops and 219 community facilitators were trained to support the charity’s peace forums in 28 project areas.
“Sometimes you’re building classrooms, sometimes you’re just rehabilitating, sometimes you’re just helping the institution to get on a more firm footing, but it has to be agreed on by everybody, that’s the secret,” Fr Patrick says.
Those who have the reins of power have the greatest opportunity to be tempted into corruption”
“It’s the same as with Northern Ireland, you’re dealing with issues of dissidence and then there’s issues of spoilers who have an interest in the conflict from a different perspective and then you have the commercialisation of conflict in the sense that people have political-economic interests in the conflict.
“Even interethnic conflicts, you’re looking at the commercialisation of cattle raiding, the commercialisation of gun-running and the proliferation of small arms.
“It’s at a local level but of course it has to have antenna out to the suppliers and how they’re crossing the borders, and most borders in Africa are porous, there’s always larger interests at play. They’re trying to control the proliferation of small arms around the world, but of course most of these arms originate in developed countries of course.”
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He says during his time working to prevent conflict, he has never met a parent who didn’t want a better future for their children, adding that the majority of people want to have peace.
“People often forget that these countries are really struggling to develop and they’re carrying the baggage going back to colonialism, they’re carrying the corruption within their own countries, but corruption is always only a symptom of weak institutions,” says Fr Patrick.
“It’ll be the same here in our country or any other country if the institutions can’t stop it. Those who have the reins of power have the greatest opportunity to be tempted into corruption, because they understand the symptoms, the methodologies so that’s always the problem. International institutions are being set up as well, regional institutions, all trying to bring about security and peace and governments are trying as well.
“We often talk about structural violence. You have manifest violent conflict, which is the physical, direct, the visible, but then the structural violence exists in the lack of structures and institutions to help people meet their basic human needs, the inequity the disparity, the discrepancy in the distribution of resources and even knowledge to help people address those needs.”
Last year Fr Patrick made a submission to the public consultation on the Irish Aid White Paper mirroring many of the points in this article. He believes the UN and Irish Aid would be more effective if there is more of a focus on conflict transformation and peacebuilding, and that in the coming years this is where they will put their focus.