With peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention being a particular interest of mine, and building on my recent posts about the role of professional soldiers and the issue of sovereignty and UN standing forces, I've decided to embark on a series of posts on this subject. The series as yet has no plan, but I hope that by working through some of this issues, I will reach some conclusions with regards to the current problems with international peace-support operations and uncover some possible avenues through which to improve current practice.
I came across a quote in a book this week from Andrew Thomson, a medical doctor who worked in various war-zones for the UN in the 1990s, 'If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.' (Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson, Emergency Sex and other desperate measures, Miramax Books, 2004). One of the key lessons learnt from the disastrous consequences of some of the UN's peacekeeping operations in the 1990s was that you should never promise people protection unless you are fully willing and able to provide it. A further lesson learnt is that there are major differences between the way governments react to the dangers faced by their soldiers on peace-support operations when compared to more traditional military operations relating to more traditional national interests. While these lessons have been learned, the dilemmas they present have never truly been resolved.
One way in which some of the more militarily powerful states have sought to address this problem is to change the way in which they engage with the UN when it comes to such operations. The effect is that European states are behaving like the US always has when it comes to UN operations. In the case of Kosovo, NATO member-states bypassed the UN's legal processes when they deemed them incapable of providing them with the authorisation and mandate that they required. In Sierra Leone, the UK government worked with the UN, but elected to work unilaterally with multilateral authorisation, rather than seek to lead a multilateral operation. In situations where no one state can be expected to provide the whole force, or the vast majority of the force, required, the major military powers have avoided involvement beyond logistical support and the provision of expertise. This dynamic is one that we are currently seem to be seeing played out with regards the proposed 'hybrid force' for Darfur. There is one exception, namely Afghanistan, but this is a NATO operation authorised by the UN, and as such bares more similarity to Kosovo than Bosnia. Similar structures are under development within the EU, but the process is slowed by conflicting loyalties and priorities.
With regards the less militarily powerful states, those that were involved in UN peacekeeping operations in the 1990s have largely continued to do so. The biggest contributors to UN peacekeeping operations are Asian states, with India and Pakistan almost competing to contribute the most. This is by no means because they have suffered less from poorly executed operations. The greatest single loss of UN peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993 was not the 18 US soldiers killed during the so-called 'Black-Hawk Down' incident, but the 24 Pakistani soldiers killed in an ambush on the 5th June. There are undoubtedly greater incentives for poorer and less powerful states to contribute to UN operations. Due to the extremely low wages paid in some militaries, being placed on an internationally funded mission can be the difference between a soldier's children going to school or not. Further, when militarily powerful states fulfil advisory roles on such missions, the soldiers of the states providing the bulk of the manpower can return better trained than when they departed, with obvious benefits for their governments in the future.
The downsides to this international division of labour are fairly clear. With powerful states failing to contribute significant resources to mainstream UN operations (such as recentlty in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), when they do become involved in peace-support operations their supposed humanitarian motives are immediately and consistently questioned. The public relations effort that accompanies these operations paints those involved as humanitarian heroes, intervening selflessly and with significant risk to their own well-being. Those operations involving the developing world workhorses of the UN receive little publicity, despite their participants facing much more danger due to the much less sophisticated support that they receive. So who are the real humanitarian heroes among peacekeepers? Those that arrive to a fanfare under the cover of modern weapons systems and a shield of intricate analysis of the risks and benefits, or those who regular answer the call of the UN, albeit with personal financial gain and otherwise unlikely access to high quality training?
Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Friday, 24 August 2007
Honour and Duty: The role of the professional soldier
Whilst driving today I heard the sad news on the radio that 3 UK soldiers have been killed by a bomb dropped from a US jet in Helmand Province, Afghanistan (see news.bbc.co.uk, 24.08.07). Hearing this led me to thinking about a British army Captain that was killed defending a dam in Afghanistan some weeks ago, who's parents were friends with some relatives of mine. British operations in Afghanistan have often been criticised as being under resourced and extremely risky for the soldiers involved. As I understand it, this particular operation had been criticised for using the soldiers as sitting ducks, drawing out the Taliban to fight. Which brings me to the question I'm considering in this post; Are the risks faced by British soldiers in Afghanistan, due to the strategy imposed by their military and political commanders, acceptable?
Firstly, I feel it is important to outline my basic opinion on the war in Afghanistan. For me, the decision to join the US in war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was broadly just. My reasoning is as follows. For all the misinformation and propaganda coming from all sides in the so-called 'War on Terror', you have to get pretty far out into the world of conspiracy theories to find people who do not agree that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th 2001. In the fog of the debacle in Iraq, deliberate attempts in Washington to change the nature and definition of human rights, and the sometimes disgraceful way that certain US politicians have dismissed the opinions of the UK government and peoples in the past 6 years, it is easy to forget that the US has been, certainly in military terms but also most likely in political terms, the UK's greatest ally for the past 90 years. Although attempts were no doubt made to blur the distinction between Taliban camps aimed at fighting an internal civil war and al-Qaeda terrorist training camps, and without dismissing the issue of the term 'al-Qaeda' being used to cover such a range of groups and networks that it is starting to become almost useless, the fact is that the Taliban allowed their territory to be used as a shelter for Osama Bin Laden and the central structure of his terror network. Although the UK itself was not attacked by al-Qaeda until after the 'War on Terror' was underway, it is hard to deny that the UK was already, through its involvement in the Gulf Crisis (1990-91) among other issues, intricately linked with the US in the mind of violent jihadists. Finally, with the Taliban’s ideology being firmly based in violent Jihad, and with them having accepted the residence of Osama Bin even after his presence had drawn air strikes against Sudan, it was fairly clear that room to negotiate was minimal at best. So, to summarise, with the mainland of the UK's greatest ally having been attacked by a group that could be expected to hold violent intentions towards the UK and which was being sheltered by a government operating in an easily identifiable sovereign territory that could not be expected to be open to negotiation, I feel that, regardless of which political party or prime minister was in power at the time, the decision to go to war was the only realistic option.
Secondly, it is important that I briefly summarise my general view on the role of professional soldiers in modern warfare. It is clearly preferable that the UK has a fully professional army. Conscription, while having been potentially necessary in the past when the UK mainland was under threat, is in general morally questionable. Professional armies are not only more effective, in that they achieve greater results with less expense and fewer casualties, but tend to behave in a more ethical fashion when in the field. The key to the moral difference between a professional soldier and a civilian is that professional soldiers (more so in some militaries than others) have (for a variety of reasons) generally chosen to be involved in warfare, whereas civilians have not. A key feature of the 'Just War' tradition (much of which was developed before fully professional armies became common during wartime) is that the lives of soldiers must never be prioritised over the lives of civilians. In fact, in more developed concepts of 'Just War', soldiers are expected to put themselves in situation of significant danger in order to ensure the safety of civilians. This is, unfortunately, a concept that has been followed more in words than in deeds. From the carpet bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, through to the decision of NATO planners to launch an air campaign rather than a ground invasion in Kosovo, the lives of soldiers have consistently been prioritised over those of civilians. The fact that the vast majority of casualties of war since 1945 have been civilians should be a point of significant shame for all of mankind. In my opinion, if those states and their militaries who seek to assert that they act for the moral good made efforts to redress this balance and shift the risk back away from civilians it would hugely add to the legitimacy of their causes, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, then, my feelings are as follows. The decision to got war in the first place was just, and now that the UK has assisted in removing the Taliban, the only acceptable reason to leave before the Taliban is defeated would be if that was the best thing for the Afghan people. On the other hand, there has to be a conceivable exit strategy for British forces, otherwise their presence would simply be a sort of involuntary colonisation. The Taliban, I suspect, would be happy to sit back and wait for the NATO forces to leave before launching an attempt at regaining power. The one thing that is stopping them from doing this is that they recognise that if they allow Afghanistan to develop whilst under occupation into a state much better able to provide for its citizens, the people would not support them in their attempts to return and their chances would be slim. They have no choice then but to try to hold areas of territory from which to launch attacks aimed at disrupting development efforts. In order to prevent this strategy from being successful, British and other NATO forces must protect the development projects and not allow the Taliban to feel safe enough to build their strength in the territories in which they are mainly based. This strategy is currently the best available not only to the British army but, crucially, to the civilian population of Afghanistan who were terrorised when the Taliban were in power, and could expect the same on their return, worse so for those thought to have collaborated in their downfall. The strategy holds risks for British soldiers, and they should be supported in every way possible, but we should not forget that those in the field chose to accept a career that holds this particular combination of honour and duty.
Firstly, I feel it is important to outline my basic opinion on the war in Afghanistan. For me, the decision to join the US in war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was broadly just. My reasoning is as follows. For all the misinformation and propaganda coming from all sides in the so-called 'War on Terror', you have to get pretty far out into the world of conspiracy theories to find people who do not agree that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th 2001. In the fog of the debacle in Iraq, deliberate attempts in Washington to change the nature and definition of human rights, and the sometimes disgraceful way that certain US politicians have dismissed the opinions of the UK government and peoples in the past 6 years, it is easy to forget that the US has been, certainly in military terms but also most likely in political terms, the UK's greatest ally for the past 90 years. Although attempts were no doubt made to blur the distinction between Taliban camps aimed at fighting an internal civil war and al-Qaeda terrorist training camps, and without dismissing the issue of the term 'al-Qaeda' being used to cover such a range of groups and networks that it is starting to become almost useless, the fact is that the Taliban allowed their territory to be used as a shelter for Osama Bin Laden and the central structure of his terror network. Although the UK itself was not attacked by al-Qaeda until after the 'War on Terror' was underway, it is hard to deny that the UK was already, through its involvement in the Gulf Crisis (1990-91) among other issues, intricately linked with the US in the mind of violent jihadists. Finally, with the Taliban’s ideology being firmly based in violent Jihad, and with them having accepted the residence of Osama Bin even after his presence had drawn air strikes against Sudan, it was fairly clear that room to negotiate was minimal at best. So, to summarise, with the mainland of the UK's greatest ally having been attacked by a group that could be expected to hold violent intentions towards the UK and which was being sheltered by a government operating in an easily identifiable sovereign territory that could not be expected to be open to negotiation, I feel that, regardless of which political party or prime minister was in power at the time, the decision to go to war was the only realistic option.
Secondly, it is important that I briefly summarise my general view on the role of professional soldiers in modern warfare. It is clearly preferable that the UK has a fully professional army. Conscription, while having been potentially necessary in the past when the UK mainland was under threat, is in general morally questionable. Professional armies are not only more effective, in that they achieve greater results with less expense and fewer casualties, but tend to behave in a more ethical fashion when in the field. The key to the moral difference between a professional soldier and a civilian is that professional soldiers (more so in some militaries than others) have (for a variety of reasons) generally chosen to be involved in warfare, whereas civilians have not. A key feature of the 'Just War' tradition (much of which was developed before fully professional armies became common during wartime) is that the lives of soldiers must never be prioritised over the lives of civilians. In fact, in more developed concepts of 'Just War', soldiers are expected to put themselves in situation of significant danger in order to ensure the safety of civilians. This is, unfortunately, a concept that has been followed more in words than in deeds. From the carpet bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, through to the decision of NATO planners to launch an air campaign rather than a ground invasion in Kosovo, the lives of soldiers have consistently been prioritised over those of civilians. The fact that the vast majority of casualties of war since 1945 have been civilians should be a point of significant shame for all of mankind. In my opinion, if those states and their militaries who seek to assert that they act for the moral good made efforts to redress this balance and shift the risk back away from civilians it would hugely add to the legitimacy of their causes, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, then, my feelings are as follows. The decision to got war in the first place was just, and now that the UK has assisted in removing the Taliban, the only acceptable reason to leave before the Taliban is defeated would be if that was the best thing for the Afghan people. On the other hand, there has to be a conceivable exit strategy for British forces, otherwise their presence would simply be a sort of involuntary colonisation. The Taliban, I suspect, would be happy to sit back and wait for the NATO forces to leave before launching an attempt at regaining power. The one thing that is stopping them from doing this is that they recognise that if they allow Afghanistan to develop whilst under occupation into a state much better able to provide for its citizens, the people would not support them in their attempts to return and their chances would be slim. They have no choice then but to try to hold areas of territory from which to launch attacks aimed at disrupting development efforts. In order to prevent this strategy from being successful, British and other NATO forces must protect the development projects and not allow the Taliban to feel safe enough to build their strength in the territories in which they are mainly based. This strategy is currently the best available not only to the British army but, crucially, to the civilian population of Afghanistan who were terrorised when the Taliban were in power, and could expect the same on their return, worse so for those thought to have collaborated in their downfall. The strategy holds risks for British soldiers, and they should be supported in every way possible, but we should not forget that those in the field chose to accept a career that holds this particular combination of honour and duty.
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
Navigating Sovereignty: The UN versus private military companies
On a recent research trip to a war-torn African state I was kindly invited to stay at the house of a senior UN official. The large house was not owned by the UN, but privately rented by the official, although certain features of the house were designed to comply with UN regulations for foreign staff. Metal shutters were fitted to all the windows and a heavy-duty security door separated the ground and first floors, all of which had to remain locked at night. The third notable feature was the 24 hour provision of security guards. In fitting with the rules governing UN security guards all over the world, the guards were unarmed. This is as true of UN headquarters in New York as of any other UN building.
Some would say that this is due to the necessity of the UN remaining neutral, but anyone with a basic understanding of the UN's role in conflicts knows that the UN does not always seek to remain neutral. For me, there is one very clear reason why UN security guards, as with any other staff directly employed by the UN, are unarmed. Arming such staff would constitute a global UN armed force. The consequences of this would be the same as those which prevented the creation of UN standing forces when they were called for from certain quarters in the 1990s. Despite the huge body of international law, and the expanding selection of regional organisations, which now exist, sovereignty still clings to its status as the primary principal of the international system. The existence of an officially recognised and widely supported armed force that was not directly commanded by the government (be it civilian or military) of a sovereign state would be criticised as undermining this primacy.
There is one major problem with this reasoning against arming the UN. One of the states which could be safely expected to oppose arming staff answerable only to the UN, the United States, openly allows and supports the creation of heavily armed forces, operating internationally, which are governed only by their private owners. Private military companies are big business in modern conflict. In researching a recent book about one such company, the US-based Blackwater, writer Jeremy Scahill discovered that publicly available figures do not exist to indicate how much of the US military budget goes on services provided by private contractors, but that some members of congress estimate it to be around 40%, with over 1000 PMC operatives estimated to have died in Iraq, although, again, no official figures are kept. More worryingly, continuing congressional investigations into these companies have discovered that those operating in Iraq are subject to neither Iraqi law, US military law nor US domestic law. Further, as Americans they are protected by the policy of the US government, spanning multiple administrations, to exempt its citizens from international law. In short, they are answerable to nobody except themselves while taking part in operations that involve regular heavy combat both alongside US forces and independently.
So here is the world we find ourselves in; the UN, an organisation made up of 192 sovereign states, is (rightly or wrongly) consistently denied the opportunity to build armed forces of any sort, no matter how small, for the purposes of protecting its staff and conducting peace support operations, while private companies are allowed to build up heavily armed forces of mercenaries, subject to no existing laws, in order to increase their profits.
Some would say that this is due to the necessity of the UN remaining neutral, but anyone with a basic understanding of the UN's role in conflicts knows that the UN does not always seek to remain neutral. For me, there is one very clear reason why UN security guards, as with any other staff directly employed by the UN, are unarmed. Arming such staff would constitute a global UN armed force. The consequences of this would be the same as those which prevented the creation of UN standing forces when they were called for from certain quarters in the 1990s. Despite the huge body of international law, and the expanding selection of regional organisations, which now exist, sovereignty still clings to its status as the primary principal of the international system. The existence of an officially recognised and widely supported armed force that was not directly commanded by the government (be it civilian or military) of a sovereign state would be criticised as undermining this primacy.
There is one major problem with this reasoning against arming the UN. One of the states which could be safely expected to oppose arming staff answerable only to the UN, the United States, openly allows and supports the creation of heavily armed forces, operating internationally, which are governed only by their private owners. Private military companies are big business in modern conflict. In researching a recent book about one such company, the US-based Blackwater, writer Jeremy Scahill discovered that publicly available figures do not exist to indicate how much of the US military budget goes on services provided by private contractors, but that some members of congress estimate it to be around 40%, with over 1000 PMC operatives estimated to have died in Iraq, although, again, no official figures are kept. More worryingly, continuing congressional investigations into these companies have discovered that those operating in Iraq are subject to neither Iraqi law, US military law nor US domestic law. Further, as Americans they are protected by the policy of the US government, spanning multiple administrations, to exempt its citizens from international law. In short, they are answerable to nobody except themselves while taking part in operations that involve regular heavy combat both alongside US forces and independently.
So here is the world we find ourselves in; the UN, an organisation made up of 192 sovereign states, is (rightly or wrongly) consistently denied the opportunity to build armed forces of any sort, no matter how small, for the purposes of protecting its staff and conducting peace support operations, while private companies are allowed to build up heavily armed forces of mercenaries, subject to no existing laws, in order to increase their profits.
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
Return to the Brink?
There's been some worrying events in the world of military affairs recently. Following a deterioration in relations between Moscow and London/Washington over the proposed missile defence shield and the Alexander Litvinenko affair, what began as diplomatic battles have turned into the beginnings of military brinkmanship.
First there was the news that British jets had intercepted Russian bombers over the North Atlantic (timesonline, 18.7.07), then that Russian military planners had chosen to revive the Cold War practice of using flyovers of Allied bases as exercises, a policy announced when US jets scrambled to intercept Russian bombers over the Pacific island of Guam (worlpoliticsreview.com, 10.08.07).
It is not just with Russia that developments are of concern, however. Sino-American relations have taken some knocks recently, with the long-running issue over currency valuation accompanied by tit-for-tat banning of food and other imports (NY Times, 15.7.07). China is known to be developing a 'blue-water' naval capability and chose to demonstrate the extent of this in a very dangerous way. During US naval exercises in the Pacific Ocean in November, a Chinese Navy submarine surfaced in close proximity to the oldest aircraft carrier in the US fleet, the USS Kitty Hawk (news.bbc.co.uk 14.11.06). This was followed in January by a succesful test launch of a missile against a Chinese weather sattelite (cnn.com, 19.1.07). That China might be developing the ability to strike at space based sattelites is of huge concern to the US as it strikes right at the heart of the US military dream of 'full-spectrum dominance'.
Some have tried to play down these incidents, but their danger is all too clear. When, in 2001, Chinese jets tracked a US military spy-plane, the resulting collision caused the spy-plane to crash land in China and caused a major diplomatic incident. How much more major an incident would have occurred if the Chinese submarine had been noticed before surfacing as an unidentified alien vessel incurring into a US military exercise?
The flashpoints exist, Washington's defence pact with the Chinese-claimed territory of Taiwan has long been a source of tension, and wrangling between the Atlantic powers and Russia over Georgia and the Ukraine has the potential to escalate. What is required is a return to the extensive dialogue and cooperation between governments and their militaries which ended Cold War brinkmanship in the first place. There are those who will tell you that we 'have no choice' but to enter into an arms race, or that 'nuclear deterrance' will carry us through just as they believe it did through the Cold War. The fact is that we can choose dialogue and cooperation, that the world avoided the 'mutually assured destruction' (aptly abbreviated to MAD) that is inherant in 'nuclear deterrance' by the skin of its teeth, and that, while civilians from the Cold War powers mostly avoided the horrors of its wars, millions died by proxy.
First there was the news that British jets had intercepted Russian bombers over the North Atlantic (timesonline, 18.7.07), then that Russian military planners had chosen to revive the Cold War practice of using flyovers of Allied bases as exercises, a policy announced when US jets scrambled to intercept Russian bombers over the Pacific island of Guam (worlpoliticsreview.com, 10.08.07).
It is not just with Russia that developments are of concern, however. Sino-American relations have taken some knocks recently, with the long-running issue over currency valuation accompanied by tit-for-tat banning of food and other imports (NY Times, 15.7.07). China is known to be developing a 'blue-water' naval capability and chose to demonstrate the extent of this in a very dangerous way. During US naval exercises in the Pacific Ocean in November, a Chinese Navy submarine surfaced in close proximity to the oldest aircraft carrier in the US fleet, the USS Kitty Hawk (news.bbc.co.uk 14.11.06). This was followed in January by a succesful test launch of a missile against a Chinese weather sattelite (cnn.com, 19.1.07). That China might be developing the ability to strike at space based sattelites is of huge concern to the US as it strikes right at the heart of the US military dream of 'full-spectrum dominance'.
Some have tried to play down these incidents, but their danger is all too clear. When, in 2001, Chinese jets tracked a US military spy-plane, the resulting collision caused the spy-plane to crash land in China and caused a major diplomatic incident. How much more major an incident would have occurred if the Chinese submarine had been noticed before surfacing as an unidentified alien vessel incurring into a US military exercise?
The flashpoints exist, Washington's defence pact with the Chinese-claimed territory of Taiwan has long been a source of tension, and wrangling between the Atlantic powers and Russia over Georgia and the Ukraine has the potential to escalate. What is required is a return to the extensive dialogue and cooperation between governments and their militaries which ended Cold War brinkmanship in the first place. There are those who will tell you that we 'have no choice' but to enter into an arms race, or that 'nuclear deterrance' will carry us through just as they believe it did through the Cold War. The fact is that we can choose dialogue and cooperation, that the world avoided the 'mutually assured destruction' (aptly abbreviated to MAD) that is inherant in 'nuclear deterrance' by the skin of its teeth, and that, while civilians from the Cold War powers mostly avoided the horrors of its wars, millions died by proxy.
Monday, 20 August 2007
On Motivation
A personal question has been recurring in my life recently. First occurring at a family meal, then during a conversation with my girlfriend, again while writing a job application, and finally, today, in my own head while reading. The question seems at first simple, but has actually been harder to answer than I would have thought; What motivates you?
For those trying to build a career in international relations and conflict it is a question that should always be considered. The world is tainted by the legacy of those who entered this field in search of power, money and vengance. Those of us who believe that we have different motivations must ensure that this is so.
For me there are two sources of motivation. Firstly, there is the excitement. Its important to acknowledge this, although some might say it is inapropriate for someone who claims to seek an ethical career. For me there is no contradiction in the fact that I enjoy being involved in attempts to seek protection and justice for those inoccents caught up in international conflict while still holding my second, and prime, motivation, my personal responsibility to protect.
I don't bare illusions of grandeur when assessing my contribution to the protection of civilians. I am not travelling to Spain to fight a hopeless war against fascists, hiding Jewish families in my house in the Third Reich or sitting in front of bulldozers in the Gaza Strip. This motivation is, however, real.
Some of my earliest memories of concern over international conflict are of the war in Bosnia in the early nineties. I was not old enough at the time to really understand what was happening, but I was old enough to want to make it stop, not for acclaim, but to protect those innocent civilians caught in the middle. People have a right to peace, for themselves and for their loved ones. When I consider the question of what is my motivation the image that is in my mind is that of Mostar Bridge crumbling into the River Neretva.
For those trying to build a career in international relations and conflict it is a question that should always be considered. The world is tainted by the legacy of those who entered this field in search of power, money and vengance. Those of us who believe that we have different motivations must ensure that this is so.
For me there are two sources of motivation. Firstly, there is the excitement. Its important to acknowledge this, although some might say it is inapropriate for someone who claims to seek an ethical career. For me there is no contradiction in the fact that I enjoy being involved in attempts to seek protection and justice for those inoccents caught up in international conflict while still holding my second, and prime, motivation, my personal responsibility to protect.
I don't bare illusions of grandeur when assessing my contribution to the protection of civilians. I am not travelling to Spain to fight a hopeless war against fascists, hiding Jewish families in my house in the Third Reich or sitting in front of bulldozers in the Gaza Strip. This motivation is, however, real.
Some of my earliest memories of concern over international conflict are of the war in Bosnia in the early nineties. I was not old enough at the time to really understand what was happening, but I was old enough to want to make it stop, not for acclaim, but to protect those innocent civilians caught in the middle. People have a right to peace, for themselves and for their loved ones. When I consider the question of what is my motivation the image that is in my mind is that of Mostar Bridge crumbling into the River Neretva.
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