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| MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE |
People talking together realize they can solve their problems without killing
Excerpt by Carolyn Bennett
From Amitabh Pal interview with Mairead Maguire
As a person of peace, she travels all over the world: the
Congo, Argentina, Iraq (before and after the 2003 war), Afghanistan, Israel and
the Occupied Territories. “When I saw the situation on the ground,” Mairead
Maguire said, “how the Palestinian people were suffering, I was absolutely
horrified. Then I started going on a regular basis.
“
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I was very interested in the West Bank and the nonviolent
movements there, which you never hear much about. Palestine has a very strong
nonviolent movement, and we started going every year to support people in
Palestine who were calling for a nonviolent solution and an end to the
occupation.”
MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE (1944- ): Northern Irish global peace
activist and co-founder of Peace People (Community of the Peace People), a
grassroots movement of Roman Catholic and Protestant citizens dedicated to
ending the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. She is a Nobel Peace laureate
(received in 1976 with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown) and joint
founder (2006 with fellow Nobel Peace
Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams, Wangari Maathai, and Rigoberta
Menchú) of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.
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| Others too Called for dialogue Syria |
Talking, determined nonviolence resolves conflict
“We have to start from the fact that there are always
alternatives to violence,” Mairead Maguire said in her interview with Amitabh
Pal.
“
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We mustn’t start off with the idea that there’s only
militarism, invasions, and occupations.
“We really have to look: What are the alternatives here?
That’s what we were saying in our community in Northern Ireland when we were
faced with death threats, when our cars were destroyed, and paramilitaries were
after us.
“We were saying, ‘no’ to bombing and para-militarism.
“That [bombing and para-militarism] wasn’t justice. That
wasn’t solving our problem. We were moving around in circles for seven years
and people were dying every day. It was getting worse. So, we had to find
another way of trying to solve our problems.
You talk to your enemies. You sit
down and talk to them and say, ‘Why are you so angry?
Where’s your problem coming from” And
we’ll work this out together.’
We were not against anybody; we
were for life, for respect, for change.
“We mobilized for six months. Our approach was to try to
bring down the fear in the community and to come together to say, ‘How do we
build a Northern Ireland identity? ‘How
do we work together to have a bill of rights and shared political structures?’
“We went to communities that had a great deal of violence
and set up discussions and provided platforms for people who otherwise would be
committed to the armed struggle or to the loyalists.
“
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We had them coming together on the same platform to talk.
That was very important—step by step—for bringing together people to realize
that they could solve their problems without killing each other.
“We had rallies throughout Northern Ireland every Saturday,
and also throughout Ireland, in England, and in other parts of the world. The
point was to try to bring down the fear between the two communities.
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We were trying to see how we could connect.
“That worked because in the first six months of the peace
movement there was a 78 percent decrease in the rate of violence. And it never
went back up again.”
M
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artin Buber (philosopher b. 1878- d. 1965) said:
“Love is responsibility of an ‘I’ for a ‘You’: in this
consists what cannot consist in any feeling.”
“[While] dialogic is not to be identified with love, love
without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other ─
the love remaining with itself is [as a] Lucifer [Diablo].”
There are three principles in [the being and life of humankind]: the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action.
The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow[s] is that I do not say what I mean and I do not do what I say.
Sources and notes
“Mairead Maguire” Amitabh Pal, Progressive March 2013 Issue with
Mairead Maguire
http://www.progressive.org/mairead-maguire-interview
MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE (1944- ): Northern Irish peace
activist and co-founder of Peace People (Community of the Peace People), a
grassroots movement of Roman Catholic and Protestant citizens dedicated to
ending the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. Nobel Peace laureate (1976 with
Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown), joint founder (2006 with fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates
Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams, Wangari Maathai, and Rigoberta Menchú) of the
Nobel Women’s Initiative.
http://www.pressenza.com/npermalink/nobel-peace-laureate-says-nox
http://www.peacepeople.com 13.4.2012
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