In Practice

By John Marks and Eran Fraenkel

Unlike nearby Bosnia, Macedonia has not erupted. Rather, Before the Rain is a cautionary tale, showing what might have happened in Macedonia if preventive measures had not been implemented.

The absence of war in Macedonia does not imply the absence of serious ethnic, economic, social, and political disputes. But, so far at least, Macedonia has avoided all but sporadic violence. In essence, the center has held, and extremism has been marginalized.

There are many reasons for this: The Macedonian government has carried out relatively sensible policies, and the international community has supported a series of preventive actions that have helped keep the lid on. And even potential extremists are acutely aware that ethnic tensions, if allowed to get out of hand, could lead to the kind of violence that has devastated Bosnia.

Our basic premise in this article is that the prevention of ethnic violence must include a full range of official and unofficial initiatives, carefully chosen and mixed together from the diplomatic, economic, social, military, psychological, and conflict resolution domains.

Since the end of the Cold War, ideological struggle and power politics less and less define the Western response to ethnic conflict. Today, political reality has changed to the point where policymakers faced with ethnic conflicts are much less interested in geopolitics than in saving lives and preventing wars from spreading. No sector - including international organizations, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) - has a monopoly on the wisdom or capacity needed to carry out effective preventive programs. In Macedonia and elsewhere, each sector has something important to offer. By coordinating these efforts, all can avoid working at cross-purposes and maximize the use of scarce resources. Each sector thereby increases the likelihood that prevention will actually work.

The overall aim of preventive action should be to create within a divided society a climate in which conflicts can be resolved peacefully. For the country to become peaceful, a system needs to be established - or expanded - in which negotiated settlements predominate and in which disputing parties recognize that enough of their interests are served by collaborative solutions that they are willing to eschew violence. Ultimately, the goal is to transform an adversarial culture to a nonadversarial culture of peace. (Indeed, UNESCO has a Culture of Peace program whose aim is to use peace education to build systems and inculcate attitudes that move societies away from adversarial behavior.)

The international contribution to preventive action requires a high degree of cross-cultural understanding. Whereas preventive experience gained in one nation may be useful in another, the techniques of prevention, at a minimum, need to be acculturated before being applied elsewhere. As a general rule, it seems that the more that preventive programs are tied to indigenous culture and are developed locally, the more likely they are to succeed.

It is obviously more effective in saving lives and less expensive in expending resources to act before violence erupts - as opposed to afterward when, for the most part, preventive action does not work. This is a fundamental aspect of prevention, based on common sense and articulated in such aphorisms as "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and "A stitch in time saves nine."

Domestic Political Will. When ethnic tensions surfaced in Macedonia after independence in 1991, both the Government and the international community acted prudently to keep the situation under control. Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov, a one-time member of the post-Tito collective Yugoslav presidency, did not allow the unfavorable negative stereotypes that Macedonians and Albanians hold toward one another to prevail across the society. Although the ethnic Macedonian majority is large enough to maintain democratic rule without sharing power, Gligorov formed a coalition government with the two leading Albanian political parties and named Albanians to several important ministries. In addition, his government made limited provisions to safeguard minority rights. Certainly, many of the primary Albanian grievances were not - and still have not been - resolved, but the government has largely avoided gross abuses.

In this climate, both the government and the Albanian leadership provided a precondition that is virtually indispensable for prevention to work: namely, political will. In Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia, by contrast, the political will never existed to prevent violence.

International Involvement. The Greek government has actively opposed the existence of a state called Macedonia because it insists that the name is an inalienable part of Greek history. Although Greek pressure prevented the United States, key European powers, and the European Union from providing formal recognition until 1996, the international community found non-diplomatic ways to provide support. In August 1992, President George Bush proposed that monitors from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), now called the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), be sent to Macedonia. The CSCE agreed and named Ambassador Robert Frowick, a just-retired U.S. diplomat, to head its mission. The aim was to prevent conflict in Serbia and Kosova from spilling over into Macedonia. Frowick was initially assigned a staff of one, a junior American Foreign Service Officer, who, like Frowick, was on detail to the CSCE and paid directly by the U.S. State Department.

Although nominally working for the CSCE, Frowick was personally dispatched by Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who had a special interest in Macedonia dating from 1963, when he went to Skopje to provide earthquake relief (and earned the nickname "Lawrence of Macedonia"). Eagleburger advised Frowick to "take a high profile" in making sure Belgrade understood that Macedonia must not be brought into the conflict. Frowick proved an effective envoy. He was the only ambassador resident in Skopje and became, in effect, the Western pro-consul. When he left after six months, the CSCE had expanded its resident mission to include a dozen Europeans, and Frowick's key internal mediating function was assumed by former Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel, the CSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities, operating from the Hague.

From 1992-96, the UN put in force economic sanctions against Serbia, which unintentionally resulted in severe damage to the Macedonian economy. Until the collapse of Yugoslavia, Serbia had been Macedonia's leading trade partner and provided its essential overland corridor to the rest of Europe. U.N. sanctions ended much of the legal trade. However, there were commodities without which Macedonia simply could not survive - electricity, for example. Even during the darkest days of Serb-backed atrocities in Bosnia, Macedonia continued to receive - and pay for - electricity from a grid shared largely with Serbia.

In 1993, Greece made Macedonia's economic problems even worse by imposing a trade embargo. The embargo, on top of U.N. sanctions against Serbia, almost completely denied Macedonia access to imported raw materials and prevented it from exporting finished goods. The results were even higher unemployment and a falling Gross National Product, thus increasing instability and reducing the country's ability to guarantee social welfare. The economic and social distress, coming in mid-transition from a centrally-planned to a market economy, aggravated both ethnic and class tensions.

Not wanting to confront the Papandreou government in Greece, the international community responded to the Greek embargo with little sense of urgency. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali did appoint a mediator, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and President Clinton appointed his own mediator, Matthew Nimetz, Vance's former Counselor at the State Department. After about eighteen months of intermittent negotiations, a settlement was reached on many of the symbolic issues that so infuriated the Greeks, and Greece consented to end its embargo and reopen the border. However, there still was no agreement on the country's name. As of this writing, Greece and Macedonia are reporting their intention to settle the name issue by the end of August 1997.

In 1993, the CSCE presence in Macedonia was augmented by a military force of about 1,000 UN soldiers, including five hundred Americans. These troops were given the role of averting and containing hostile events on Macedonia's international borders. Now called the UN Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP), they patrol the borders with Serbia, Albania, and Kosova. Although their mandate is to "observe, monitor, and report" potentially inflammatory incidents, their role is not entirely passive. They are credited with preventing the escalation of a number of small-scale confrontations between Macedonian and Serbian soldiers. While they have little credibility as a military force or even as a trip-wire, the presence of the two UN battalions has a calming effect on internal Macedonian politics. This has been demonstrated by the Macedonian government's repeated requests to have the UNPREDEP mandate renewed. If nothing else, these troops show that the United Nations - and the United States - have at least a limited commitment to the integrity of Macedonia.

Nongovernmental Organizations. In international affairs, the traditional role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is in food and medical relief, human rights advocacy, and development assistance. However, we, the authors of this article, work for a new and different type of NGO, dedicated to the resolution, prevention, and reconciliation of conflict - and ultimately to the transformation of conflict into cooperative action. Our organization, called Search for Common Ground, works in the Middle East, Bosnia, Burundi, Angola, Liberia, Ukraine, and the United States (looking for common ground on the abortion issue). Since 1982, we have developed a toolbox of methods to help defuse and prevent conflict. These include customary methods of conflict resolution, such as convening mediated round-tables and training conflicting parties in negotiating techniques. Our toolbox also contains less traditional methods, such as TV and radio production, community organizing, music videos, and cross-ethnic journalism projects. We are convinced that applying several tools at the same time increases their overall effectiveness. Thus, we carry out comprehensive, multi-pronged initiatives. The overall aim is to move a country away from an adversarial culture and to help build a culture that supports peaceful resolution of conflict and collaborative problem-solving. We call our field societal conflict resolution.

All our tools are based on the same strategy - articulated most clearly at one of our workshops in Johannesburg by Andrew Masondo, a top military leader of the African National Congress: "Understand the differences; act on the commonalities."

Although the tools of prevention, in Macedonia and elsewhere, can be applied separately, our experience shows they work much better when carried out in concert with governments and international organizations. When consultation and cooperation exist, synergy often occurs, and the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. The work of NGOs should be complementary, not competitive, to that of official bodies.

Some mechanisms for prevention - for example, those which include benign involvement in a country's internal affairs or which result in back-channel talks - are often best left to NGOs. We recognize that, in the end, only governments can make peace, but we believe NGOs can complement, supplement, and catalyze preventive action.

In early 1994, we launched an initiative in Macedonia to try to prevent escalation of ethnic conflict. We opened an office in Skopje, and our first resident executive director was the same Ambassador Frowick who had recently retired as the CSCE envoy to Macedonia. (After six-months with us, Frowick retired again to California but was called back once more by the State Department to become chief of the OSCE mission in Bosnia.) We replaced Frowick with Dr. Eran Fraenkel, an ethno-historian of the Balkans who speaks both Macedonian and Albanian.

In Macedonia, we have launched numerous projects designed to assist the country's ethno-linguistic communities to find mutually acceptable ways of dealing with sensitive issues - with support from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Soros Foundation, the Dutch, Swedish, and Swiss governments, and the US Information Agency.

Inter-Ethnic Roundtables. A fundamental premise in our work is that direct contact between adversaries in a safe setting can facilitate the trust-building and mutual respect on which collaborative problem-solving usually depends. Thus, from our first days in 1994 in Macedonia, we worked with other NGOs, both local and international, to bring together Macedonian and Albanian community, political, and religious leaders to discuss divisive issues. Since 1995, these roundtables have been hosted by the Center for Ethnic Relations, a research institute affiliated with the University of Skopje. Each session focuses on a specific topic, such as primary and university education, local self-government, or the role of women in society. These meetings go beyond traditional roundtables - usually limited to discussion - in that points of agreement reached by participants are referred to the appropriate government ministry for consideration. Participants tend to be motivated because they realize their ideas will go forward to policymakers. For example, a multi-ethnic roundtable meeting on educational issues recommended that Albanian students from the University of Skopje be given credit for certain courses attended at the University of Tirana, a measure that would help satisfy demands for higher education in the Albanian language. This proposal is currently under consideration by the Ministry of Education. (Obviously, if proposals emerging from the process are not adopted on occasion, participants will lose interest. So far, the record is mixed.)

Conflict-Resolution Training. Another of our premises is that the very existence of the field of conflict resolution in Macedonia - or anywhere - increases the chances that the country will resolve its conflicts peacefully. This premise has been well demonstrated in South Africa. To spread conflict resolution skills widely in Macedonia, we have concentrated on institutionalizing the field in the educational system. In 1994, we sponsored an initial series of training workshops for educators that presented a number of different approaches to conflict resolution. Unfortunately, these first workshops were not as successful as they might have been, mostly because they were too general and too closely tied to American cultural norms. We and our Macedonian partners were in a learning phase at that time, and together we concluded that the most effective training sessions needed to be more culturally targeted and pegged to specific issues. Thus, since 1995, we have been co-sponsoring with the Ethnic Conflict Resolution Project (ECRP), also of Skopje University, a series of workshops for students and educators on the teaching and application of conflict resolution skills in the Macedonian educational system. Initially, training took place at ethnically mixed elementary and high schools and at Skopje's Pedagogical Faculty, with the goal of providing both students and teachers an alternative to their traditional view of conflict as an invariably destructive process.

In 1996, we launched a pilot PeaceGame program for 4^th-grade students in twenty-five primary schools to train teachers and to sponsor instructive games for students. These programs have been so well received that the Macedonian Ministry of Education has permitted the ECRP to integrate them into the primary school curriculum across the country. In addition, we have produced several training handbooks in Macedonian and Albanian, as well as Macedonia's first book on conflict resolution, Conflicts: What They are and How to Solve Them (1995) by ECRP director Violeta Petroska-Beška. Additional conflict-awareness training sessions have been conducted for journalists and psychology, sociology and law students, with future sessions scheduled for social workers and leaders of domestic NGOs.

Inter-Ethnic Print Journalism. Since 1994, we have worked in partnership with New York University's Center for War, Peace and the News Media in supporting inclusive, noninflammatory print journalism in Macedonia. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the press in Macedonia faces critical issues, such as how to survive privatization, how to attract readers and advertisers, and how to act responsibly in a multiethnic, pluralistic society. Macedonia's media reflect the country's ethnic cleavages. Most media outlets publish or broadcast in only one language and reflect almost totally the perspective of one ethnic group. Thus, people rarely, if ever, learn much about any group but their own, and they generally feel misrepresented about how they are portrayed in other group's media. The result tends to be mistrust of the press and, often, worsening of inter-ethnic conflicts. The following represents our programmatic response:

• Training Seminars. We co-sponsored a series of training seminars for Macedonian journalists and editors from all ethnic communities. Emphasizing noninflammatory ways to cover conflict, we brought in Western journalists to talk about such topics as inclusivity, community-wide reporting, use of non-provocative language, and differences between reporting and editorializing. These seminars achieved some success in passing on Western standards and experience, particularly with younger Macedonian journalists at both state-sponsored and private media. We realized, however, that like their counterparts everywhere, Macedonian reporters do not relish being taught. The key result of the seminars seems to have been the establishment of trust between the journalists and us, thus providing a basis for launching subsequent, hands-on projects.

• Team Reporting. In June 1995, the NYU Center joined us in sponsoring a unique team reporting project. Building on contacts made during the training seminars, we negotiated with three leading state-run newspapers and a radio station - two Macedonian, one Albanian, and one Turkish - to assign reporters to a month-long investigative project. To be their editor, we brought in Denise Hamilton of the Los Angeles Times. Together, the team investigated and wrote a series on the impact of the economy on ordinary lives. Never before had journalists from Macedonia's different ethnic groups worked collaboratively and developed close relations. Their co-authored, three-part series appeared simultaneously in their respective papers and demonstrated that most Macedonians share similar concerns about the economy. The reaction was so positive that we produced three additional series, reporting on such subjects as the ailing health-care system, the state of the environment, and the role of women. We currently are involved in a monthly four-language women's project, using a Macedonian editor and reporters from the Albanian, Macedonian, Turkish, and Rom press. As a result of these multi-ethnic series, large numbers of Macedonians regularly have the chance to put themselves in the shoes of other ethnic groups.

Television. In 1994-95, we co-produced with A1-TV of Skopje, Macedonia's largest independent television station, a six-part TV series called Path to Agreement. As is true in most places, television in Macedonia normally stresses conflict. Our series was different. It aimed to show viewers there can be common ground, even on sensitive inter-ethnic issues. One program profiled the village of Nakolec, where Albanians and Macedonians have for centuries coexisted peacefully - and still do. The idea was to present a vivid example of ethnic communities living together amicably.

Next, we are developing, in association with Children's Television Workshop (producer of Sesame Street), a TV series for Macedonian children. The goal is to build and strengthen a culture of peace and understanding among pre-teens. Children in Macedonia spend much time watching television, and most of what they see features martial arts, violence, and war. Thus, the daily diet of programs reinforces the concept that disagreement leads inevitably to violence, an extraordinarily destructive idea in a multi-ethnic society. Our series, which will be a prototype for programming in other strife-torn countries, will use imagery easily acceptable to kids to inculcate tolerance-building and cross-cultural fluency.

Joint Environmental Action. Yet another of our basic premises is that relationships between conflicting parties can be greatly improved when the parties, instead of directly confronting each other, work together to identify and address shared problems - or super-ordinate goals. Thus, we have mounted two projects in Macedonia with twin aims of contributing to a cleaner environment and providing a positive experience of inter-ethnic cooperation.

• Adopt-a-Monument. We are working with nine schools in three cities to clean up litter around historical and cultural sites. Each school has adopted a particular monument. Once a month, an ethnically mixed group of 30-40 children makes a sweep through the monument grounds to gather refuse. In addition, there are weekly eco-patrols that monitor the state of the site and report to the patrol's faculty adviser, to the municipal sanitation department, and, if necessary, to the local media. The eco-patrols also produce a quarterly newsletter in four languages. In support of this project, we have compiled a workbook that provides concrete ways for students to get involved in environmental issues, and we are preparing a series of multi-lingual broadcast and print public-service announcements (PSAs).

• Lake Prespa. This project focuses on solid-waste management in two mixed Macedonian-Albanian villages in the Lake Prespa region. Since neither village has a waste-disposal system, much waste winds up in the local river. In March 1996, we organized an exploratory environmental impact assessment by a Macedonian and an American specialist. Their conclusion was that residents were eager to breach cross-ethnic lines to create an ecologically sustainable waste-disposal system. Thus far, we have successfully promoted one inter-ethnic clean-up, and we are currently working with local environmental groups to give additional concrete form to this project.

Conclusion. In the end, it is impossible to demonstrate conclusively which, if any, of the activities cited in this article have actually prevented violence in Macedonia. Validating prevention, as long as it is working, is like trying to prove a negative. The bottom line, however, is that Macedonia has not exploded. We believe the combined effort of the international community - including international organizations, governments, and NGOs - has made a real difference. At the same time, we are convinced outside efforts would have been in vain, if the political will had not existed within the country to keep Macedonia from becoming another Bosnia.