On the 8th May Ian Munro recounted some highlights of the Rotary International Presidents Peace conference that he attended in Sydney during March 2018.
This was one of a series of six Presidential Peace Building Conferences held around the world during the 2017-18 Rotary year and had some 500 attendees. Its purpose was to explore economic and community development as it relates to peace. This meant looking at the underlying causes of conflict: which are seen as poverty, disease, lack of water and food security and lack of education.
The Keynote speaker was Professor Muhammad Yunus, Nobel peace prize winner, founder of the Gareem Bank of Bangladesh and pioneer of Micro-credit and Microfinance.
Fourteen other speakers discussed human trafficking and modern day slavery, on-line hate, the Rotary Peace Centre and Peace Fellowships, UNICEF, and the role of the military in peace-keeping. A young man described how he alone in his family managed to escape the Uganda genocide.
Another keynote speaker who helped set the scene was an Australian, Steve Killelea founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace and twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Institute is a think tank that prepares each year the Global Peace Index, Global Terrorist Index, the Corruption Index.
The Institute also produces an Annual Positive Peace Report reporting on the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies.
The reporting framework their Positive Peace reporting is underpinned by 8 Pillars of Peace
- Well-functioning government
- Equitable distribution of resources
- Free flow of information
- Good relations with neighbours
- High levels of human capital
- Acceptance of the rights of others
- Low levels of corruption
- Sound business environment
They have found that high levels of Positive Peace are associated with:
- Resilience – they can respond well to natural disasters for example
- Happiness
- Lower inflation
- Higher per capita income
- 2% higher GDP growth per annum
- Better environmental outcomes.
The address of the Key Note speaker, Professor Yunus was essentially economically-based around the dangers to peace that are looming and was essentially a challenge to Rotary and Rotarians and related back to threats to the 8 Pillars of Peace.
How can you have peace when 1% of the population holds 99% of the world’s wealth? The growing wealth gap brings a concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands and fewer and fewer nations – down to half a dozen countries. History tells us that there can only be one eventual outcome as the have-nots seek to have - armed conflict, domestically and internationally.
Today’s failure of national political authority derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. Vast amounts of money are transferred offshore by corporations or corrupt political leaders. When governments had substantial control over money flows, taxes from it were used for education, healthcare, welfare, infrastructure and so on.
And some more facts
- Human trafficking is the third largest global criminal activity. 45.8 million people are in slavery. 20% of these are children.
- A number of countries now only appear whole on maps (Libya, Syria, Sudan, the Congo, Ukraine).
- Since 1989 barely 5% of the world’s conflicts have taken place between states – national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million recorded war deaths since 1989.
- 65.6 million people on this planet are refugees fleeing from war, injustice, and persecution, and wanting something better for themselves and their families. That’s 1 in 113 people! A refugee stream bigger than 1945’s 40 million following the second world war.
But there is good news. Rotary’s on to it
And the following speakers and panel discussion covered Rotary’s international involvement in addressing many of these issues and making a difference in many areas of the 8 Pillars. In:
- Advocacy and policymaking
- Education, literacy and capacity building
- Disease prevention
- Improved water and sanitation
- Maternal and child health
- Peace and conflict resolution – Peace fellowships
- Economic development and integrated water management
- A wide range of collaborative partnerships
- Climate change issues and protection of srare species
- Youth development
- Social inequality.
But there were also some challenges for Rotarians nationally.
- We may need to become political domestically. Are we as Rotarians ready to challenge inequality wherever it is found at the highest levels locally and nationally?
- Are we prepared to fearlessly point out corruption? To lobby for the disadvantaged?
- To become political would mean we would need a restructured organisation with a national spokesperson.
- We will need to work even harder to ensure our own communities are strengthened and resilient.
- Are we prepared to facilitate the setting up of social businesses, tackle climate change issues?
- We will need to consider whether, in focussing huge amounts of money on the last few polio sufferers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we’re neglecting the hundreds of thousands of workers in Indian sweat shops – we would do so at our peril.
As individual Rotarians what are our answers to these sorts of questions? Personally:
- do we buy ethically produced goods for ourselves and our businesses?
- Do we pay our employees a living wage?
- with eyes and ears in our own communities:
- do we turn a blind eye to modern slavery by not asking the supplier of immigrant labour to our vineyard about what they’re being paid, how they’re accommodated and if they have legitimate work visas? Or do we report them?
- do we give our custom to restaurants and other businesses run on slave labour or do we report them?
- do we actively support businesses embracing sustainable practices?
- Do we just “like” a great idea on Facebook and think no more about it?
Prof Yunus believes that we are fortunate enough to have been born in an age of great possibilities – of amazing technologies, great wealth and limitless human potential. Solutions to many of the great problems like, hunger, poverty and disease, that have plagued mankind since the dawn of history are within our reach.
He sees our peaceful future as being in the hands of what he calls 3Megapowers – Young people, Technology, and Good Government and Human Rights
The question then is, will we see it as all too hard and just sit back, waste the tremendous power Rotary does have to make a difference, and just let the inevitable outcome of greed and overwhelming power in the hands of a few happen?
Will we watch democracy, always a fragile concept, be destroyed from the top and undermined by powerful money and vocal interest groups as our freedoms of speech, of religion, of association, and so on are gradually whittled away? Once our democracies descend into chaos what is left for us - let alone the rest of the world?
Will we be surprised when that time bomb explodes?
Or will we act?
We’re on a knife edge but we have a wealth of creative power and talent in our global membership, in youth, in technology and in our democracies to address all these issues. But there’s going to be greater and greater demand and even more fearless pursuit of these goals required both internationally and domestically.
World peace starts here in each Rotary club. And it behoves us to make each of our clubs more active, more visible and more effective. The future of World Peace is in our own hands.