{"id":6041,"date":"2013-12-12T11:59:37","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T15:59:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/?p=6041"},"modified":"2014-08-11T14:47:41","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T18:47:41","slug":"compassion-should-be-our-starting-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/2013\/12\/compassion-should-be-our-starting-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Hizkias Assefa: Compassion should be our starting point"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\ufffcProfessor<\/a>
Professor Hizkias Assefa (right) with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2008 in Kaliguni, Kenya: \u201cWe were strategizing mediation during the post-election violence,\u201d recalls Assefa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The reason Hizkias Assefa<\/a> has two law degrees, two master\u2019s degrees, and one doctorate is not because he loves living buried in university libraries.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s because he had to leave his home country of Ethiopia when his friends and relatives were being killed or imprisoned during the Derg\u2019s 13-year military dictatorship.<\/p>\n

He got to the United States on a student visa in 1973 and kept plowing through a succession of degrees while his parents were telling him: \u201cStay out. Stay where you are, or you will be killed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\ufffcAssefa<\/a>
Assefa worked amid soldiers in an impromptu mediation in 2006, addressing a confrontation between the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army on the South Sudan border.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Assefa was able to return safely to Ethiopia in the early 1990s. By then he was married to a U.S. citizen, with two daughters.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, Assefa treasures the breadth and depth of his formal graduate studies \u2013 law, economics, public management, and international affairs. \u201cThe more I learned, the more it whet my appetite to learn more,\u201d he told Peacebuilder<\/em><\/a> magazine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized the benefit of this broad background when writing my dissertation. Every discipline gave me a different lens for looking at conflict and peace, and it was most useful to integrate them together and come up with a multi-disciplinary approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before coming to the United States, Assefa practiced law briefly in Ethiopia. \u201cThere was not a lot of integrity in the profession. It was competitive, and I felt like I was a hired hand for the elite. I felt co-opted into the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later in Chicago, when he again was part of a law firm, he felt the same discomfort. \u201cThe lack of integrity wasn\u2019t as blatant as it had been in the Ethiopian judicial system \u2013 it wasn\u2019t as crude \u2013 but it was there.\u201d These experiences weren\u2019t a waste \u2013 he believes studying and practicing law sharpened his analytical capacity and enriched his later work in the peace field.<\/p>\n

Assefa turned to economics, earning a master\u2019s degree in the field, in an attempt to understand poverty. He found economists have \u201cfantastic ideas\u201d \u2013 \u201cgreat insights\u201d \u2013 but offered little in terms of addressing poverty. If one tries to understand \u201ceconomics without politics, it\u2019s like clapping with one hand,\u201d he says. \u201cYou need to understand politics to understand the role of power in economic systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside of formal graduate programs, Assefa has delved deeply into psychology, philosophy and religion, subjects he needed to \u201cput it all together.\u201d As the \u201cicing on the cake,\u201d Assefa turned to studying peace and conflict transformation, plus practicing in the field, for 30 years now.*<\/p>\n

\u201cThe kind of knowledge needed to be a peacemaker is not easy to define \u2013 I feel it more than I can talk about it. I think we have to start by reclaiming our humanity. Who are we as human beings? What is our place in the universe? What is life itself?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuman beings are not separate from everything in our environment. We cannot treat our environment as a group of objects to be used as we wish. We are part of an interdependent whole. If we can come to recognize this reality \u2013 that our survival, our well-being, derives from the healthiness of this interdependence \u2013 our attitude will change towards other humans, indeed towards all life and every aspect of living in this world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\ufffc\ufffcIn<\/a>
In the company of \u201cBlue Berets\u201d \u2013 peacekeeping soldiers under the authority of the United Nations \u2013 Hizkias Assefa arrives in Ithuri in the Eastern Congo for the start of a mediation process in 2009.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Assefa gropes for words to describe the lack of awareness among humans about their place in the web of life, he explains that the English language limits his ability to articulate his feelings on this subject. \u201cI am writing a book in Amharic now \u2013 though I stopped using it [his native language] 40 years ago \u2013 because it lets me touch on ideas that I can\u2019t explain in English well. It lets me be less inhibited, less apologetic for exploring [in his book] the non-cognitive aspects of life and being that go beyond regular social science academic discourse.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of what I want to say is beyond<\/em> the intellect \u2013 in fact relying on the intellect alone can become a hindrance. It is part of the problem with discourse in the Global North: the main framework is intellectual, with very little room for the affective and spiritual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assefa says there is wisdom in the perception of some indigenous elders that the so-called developed North tends to function as an immature child within the family of humankind, acting impulsively and without much self-reflection. \u201cI hope the family will survive the growing-up stage of the child,\u201d Assefa says wryly, adding that socio-economic and military practices of the so-called developed world underlie much suffering in the world today.<\/p>\n

When Assefa feels tempted to succumb to despair, he calls to mind miraculous, heart-to-heart moments, like a time in 2006 when he was one of two with whom Joseph Kony agreed to meet in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kony, known to have used tens of thousands of children as soldiers and sex-slaves, had been indicted the previous year by the UN\u2019s International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter being lured into the bush, we were surrounded by armed people. I thought we were being kidnapped,\u201d says Assefa. But when he finally met Kony face-to-face and spoke gently with him, Kony met Assefa\u2019s eyes and said, \u201cI never knew my father. Can I call you my father?\u201d The question touched Assefa to his core \u2013 not that it diminished the enormity of the harm that Kony had set in motion for millions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt moved to see a flicker of humanity and vulnerability in this incredibly cruel and overtly invincible human being,\u201d says Assefa. \u201cIt made me realize that compassion ought to be the starting point for peacework. The work of peacemaking is to nurture these little glimpses, however faint, and bring them out so that they can shine more and light up the darkness in our humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

# # # #<\/p>\n

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* From his base in Nairobi, Kenya, Hizkias Assefa<\/a>, LLB, LLM, MA, MPA, PhD, has been a mediator and facilitator of reconciliation processes for decades, functioning amid civil wars and humanitarian crises in Africa, Latin America and Asia. He has worked as an attorney and a consultant on conflict resolution and peacebuilding matters in association with the United Nations, European Union and international and national NGOs. Assefa was a founding faculty member of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding<\/a> and has taught in its Summer Peacebuilding Institute <\/a>every year since 1994.<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The reason Hizkias Assefa has two law degrees, two master\u2019s degrees, and one doctorate is not because he loves living buried in university libraries. It\u2019s… Read more about Hizkias Assefa: Compassion should be our starting point<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":6046,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1073],"tags":[1039],"issues":[1234],"class_list":["post-6041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","tag-hizkias-assefa","issues-fall-2013-14"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6041"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6553,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions\/6553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6041"},{"taxonomy":"issues","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/peacebuilder\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issues?post=6041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}