Common Ground Newsletters-Winter 2003-2004

Fall 2004

Dear Friend of Search for Common Ground,

Unfortunately, the gap between the US and the Islamic world appears to be widening. There are profound differences over both policy and perceptions. On both sides, most people seem unable to comprehend the worldview of the other - and to move beyond ignorance and stereotyping. Without assigning blame, we feel there is an urgent need to transcend mutual resentment and encourage a sense of common humanity.

Partners in Humanity
In 2002, in partnership with Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, we established Partners in Humanity. The idea was to launch a two-way process for sharing culture, technology, and moderate values. As Prince Hassan said,

Those who promote hatred are energetic and organized. We can be more energetic and more organized than that enemy. We must become more proactive, may I say aggressive, about moderation. We must enhance what is universal and cultivate respect for our differences.

Concrete Action. In July 2003, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Partners in Humanity convened 60 leaders of NGOs, government agencies, international organizations, and the media in Amman, Jordan. Participants recommended a list of activities, which we are currently implementing:

• News Service. We are expanding our Common Ground News Service (CGNews), which originally focused on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, to include the whole Islamic world. CGNews distributes solutions-oriented, tolerance-building articles to newspapers, websites, and 11,000 individual subscribers. Over 1,200 of its articles have been reprinted by leading publications.



• TV Production. Common Ground Productions produces television programming that helps build consensus. Examples include: The Shape of the Future, a four-part documentary series, to be broadcast this fall in the Middle East, that shows agreements are possible in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without threatening either party's national existence; and Nashe Maalo, a dramatic children's TV series, aired in Macedonia for five years, that promotes understanding between Christian Macedonians and Muslim Albanians.



• Training. Radio and TV talk shows usually have a polarizing impact. However, we believe that talk shows can also be used to bring people together, and we train journalists in how to do this. Recently, with funding from the US State Department, we sponsored two five-day trainings for Middle Eastern talk show hosts and producers, one at Al-Jazeera's training center in Qatar and one in London. We also have sponsored similar trainings for Palestinian journalists on the West Bank and in Gaza.



• Connecting Youth. In partnership with Solis, an NGO that combines technology and bridge-building - and with funding from the Compton Foundation - we are sponsoring a project to use electronic media to promote dialogue between students in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Qatar and their counterparts at US universities. The students engage in facilitated video-conferencing for a semester and produce short video segments about divisive issues. These video clips are then exchanged and distributed through the internet, TV, CGNews, and the Common Ground Film Festival.



• Boarding Schools. The Western press often refers to Islamic boarding schools in Indonesia, called pesantren, as places where extreme views are taught. We have started a pilot project on the island of Madura to promote peace education in pesantren. We work in partnership with local educators to encourage a non-zero-sum approach to religion, and we hope to replicate this project elsewhere.



• World Economic Forum. We have formed a strategic partnership with the World Economic Forum, the Davos, Switzerland-based organization that regularly convenes top world leaders. Specifically, we are providing a secretariat to support concrete measures for Islamic-Western cooperation. Shamil Idriss, who previously did extraordinary service as our Chief Operating Officer, and Oussama Safa, who headed our Morocco project, are directing this effort for us.

Soap Meister
This spring, we passed a milestone when we produced our 2,000th episode of radio soap opera. We believe that soap - radio drama - is a highly effective way to reach mass audiences with themes of non-violent conflict resolution.

Shifting Consciousness. In Burundi we have produced Our Neighbors, Ourselves since 1996. The series tells the story of a Hutu family and a Tutsi family who, in 616 episodes, so far, have succeeded in resolving their disputes peacefully. Burundi is a small media market, where polls show the series reaches 87% of the population. Indeed, the impact has got to the point where our fictional characters have become part of national folklore, and we are, in effect, defining Burundian archetypes. Roger Conrad, an official with USAID, our principal funder, describes the impact thusly:

You have introduced the vocabulary of peace and reconciliation to the national conversation at all levels, where previously only words of hate and mistrust were heard.

Cleaning Up. In Sierra Leone, our daily soap, called Atunda Ayenda (Lost and Found) has run 683 episodes. The fictionalized characters focus on disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration and on the profound social issues involved in rebuilding a shattered nation. The impact can be seen in the following incident: In the capital city of Freetown, there has long been extremely poor garbage collection, and our scriptwriters have regularly called attention to the problem. We hoped that corrective action would be taken, but nothing happened. So finally, we sent a producer to talk to the Public Relations Officer of the Ministry of Health. But the PR man kept avoiding the producer. Our local production team, committed to peaceful dispute resolution, came up with a creative approach. They aired an episode that portrayed the Public Relations Officer as a mute and asked the question of why should a person who cannot talk be assigned to such a job. The very next morning when our office opened, the PR Officer was literally waiting on the doorstep. He wanted to make a statement about how to improve the sanitation problem. Shortly thereafter, the government reorganized the sanitation department, and the situation has improved markedly.

Local Content. Bukavu in Eastern Congo is one of the more difficult places where we work. Still, our Congolese team produces a weekly soap, now in its 93rd episode, called Jirani ni Ndugu (My Neighbor, My Brother). The series addresses issues that are very much on the minds of listeners:

• The idea that politicians serve all the people, instead of their own ethnic group



• Illegal road taxes (usually shakedowns) demanded by the army



• Families whose children were seized by armed groups during the war



• Land disputes between neighbors (In at least one case, a longstanding local conflict was settled by the exact same process used in an episode of the soap.)

Common Ground Film Festivals
Like all media, film has the ability both to inflame and defuse conflict. Unfortunately, few filmmakers use their immense power to portray peaceful conflict resolution. For our part, we try to encourage and honor filmmaking that does this. Since 2001 we have sponsored annual Common Ground Film Festivals in Washington. This year's Festival will be held October 19-22 at George Washington University's Elliott School. In addition, we have sponsored Festivals in India, Indonesia, Guyana, and East Africa, along with university film series on such campuses as Columbia, Harvard, Missouri, Tufts, and Wisconsin.

This Year in Jerusalem. In June, in partnership with the Jerusalem International YMCA, we held a Common Ground Film Festival. The gala opening featured Monsieur Ibrahim, the story of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper (Omar Sharif) who befriends a Jewish teenager in Paris in the 1950s. The standing-room-only audience seemed to enjoy the film, but beyond that the Israelis, Palestinians, and internationals present were clearly glorying in the atmosphere of coexistence. Many people lingered at a reception that lasted well into the night as they ate food prepared by Chefs for Peace and got a sense of how life could possibly be different in Jerusalem. Funding came from the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv, the Dutch Representative Office in Ramallah, the Francophone Community of Belgium, the Office of Public Affairs of the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, the Office of Public Affairs of the US Consulate General in Jerusalem, and USAID.

Ukraine: Restorative Justice
As conflict resolution practitioners, we are interested in finding ways to transform wrongdoing and injustice. The goal is to heal the harm caused by destructive behavior - while at the same time, assuring that offenders accept responsibility for their misdeeds. Justice that restores can often be more effective than justice that punishes or exacts revenge. On the individual level, victim-offender mediation can be used to make a victim whole. On a societal level, truth and reconciliation commissions, like the one that operated in South Africa, can help restore equilibrium in a society damaged by wrongdoing.

Institutionalization. In Ukraine, with funding from the Institute for Sustainable Communities, the UK Government, and the European Union, we have launched an initiative to develop a locally based restorative justice model and to train a cadre of specialists to apply it. In May, our team in Kiev, led by Roman Koval, scored a major success when Ukraine's Supreme Court adopted a resolution that recommends the use of restorative justice by Ukrainian courts and urges them to work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), like us, "that aim to achieve reconciliation."

Impact on Policy
Cheyanne Church, our Director of Institutional Learning and Research, and Mari Fitzduff, Director of the Master's Program in Coexistence and Conflict at Brandeis University, have edited a new book, NGOs at the Table: Strategies for Influencing Policy in Areas of Conflict. The book describes the activities of a number of NGOs that have successfully influenced both policy and program development in conflicts throughout the world. One chapter by Susan Collin Marks, our Executive Vice President, and Amr Abdalla, Dean of Academic Programs at the University of Peace in Costa Rica, describes the impact of our Great Lakes Policy Forums in Washington, DC and Brussels.

Individual Investment
We have established a vision-based fundraising program to raise awareness about our work and give individuals an opportunity to contribute. At the heart of this program are short introductory events which supporters host in their homes and offices. To date the response has been overwhelmingly positive, as guests share their frustration about world events and their desire to help create a safer future. The actress Kathleen Turner and her husband Jay Weiss hosted such an event in July. Other events will take place in New York on October 5 and 6 and Washington on October 28. These meetings will be followed by our annual fundraising events where people will have an opportunity to invest in SFCG. These events are scheduled for New York on November 16 and Washington on November 18. If you are interested in attending or hosting an event, please contact Shannon Greenspan at sgreenspan@sfcg.org.

THANK YOU. We are able to do the work that we do because people and institutions see fit to invest in our work. We are extremely grateful for what we receive.

With best wishes,

John Marks
President