Right. So I'm going to take you two very different worlds theory on the grassroots level.
And I'm in the report and some data that I collected in 2007 on what the communities have to say,
six communities in Sierra Leone on this combattants, integration and reconciliation.
My Toppenish interest when I went to see all these poises scenes and reconciliation after massive violence.
So really, what I wanted to do was to look at the micro determinants of social integration of the former combatants in a post-conflict
country that shows us by case study the integration of former army of rebels into civilian life in Sierra Leone.
I say a bit more about why is that? And that's such a natural cause.
My work down into the research question we've read rather long.
In what way is notions of reconciliation, forgiveness, justice, revenge and punishment intersect with the integration process, taxes and other rights?
So why did I choose Sierra Leone? And what is comment from these first two points of crime?
I was looking for a country with a relatively long civil war and a war that has
been conducted with considerable brutality against the civilian population.
And my my thinking behind that was to sort of have a post-conflict phase where you have a sharp
difference between those who have committed violence and those who have endured violence for a long time.
So that's basically why I chose Sierra Leone, also a country that's not very good.
But I won't have the time now to go in to sort of the case as such.
I'll say something small about the root causes of the war.
Very shortly, if you boil it down, my understanding of who wants to Leone is that there was an economic,
social and political marginalisation of the majority of the population who basically
to transition once were exclusionary governance structures at the community level.
So conditional authority chiefs, elders suppressing and abusing their power within the majority of young people.
And then secondly, you had a failing and eventually stringent punishments to say what William Rehaan on called the privatisation of the state.
That just wasn't there before. So the dominant actors in driving violence, confrontation with the system, with the social system,
the political system where you were people were below 30, 35, and they were the ones that started the war.
And it was started from the east of the country with an insurgency of already like the Revolutionary United Front rebels backed by Charles Taylor.
Some of Charles Taylor's fighters. Right.
You know, let's be shocked, if not the kinds of questions to that.
So two years ago,
I went into the field and I showed the quality of the framework of methods and the structure of interviews and focus group discussions,
which I conducted in six different places to sort of groups with differences within the ethnic communities in Sierra Leone.
But also the war sort of spread slowly over the years to these different slides.
And I wanted to know whether the length of time that you cut spending worked meant anything for or.
For peacebuilding in total. I interviewed one hundred ninety respondents in a non representative sample.
So mobile in need of of tackling.
And I responded. But still, I think gave me quite a good overview.
And who did I target? Mostly I talked with Exit from Bamako.
Are you up the rebels? And then on the other hand, you mentioned that have not been affiliated with any of the fighting forces.
As for the roundup, that that sounds like talk with Whitehall and leaders.
Those are police chiefs, teachers, politicians.
So for people who need the community but also have somewhat of an overview of community life.
Right. What I'm going to do now, quickly, is to work in the precepts,
go through my data first to comment on the achievement of peaceful coexistence in Sierra Leone, which has been.
Regarded as a special piece of this building, then I asked the question,
which factories are responsible for this integration success at the micro level?
And the second question will be, what are the characteristics of the state of integration in Sierra Leone and problematise this peaceful coexistence?
This is it. And then I'll end up with our conclusions.
So if you talk with people in Sierra Leone overall, you get a very positive view of peace of a country that's been through a harsh war.
But people actually read the positive view of coexistence.
So I'm one of the focus group discussions.
I had people there told me. Well, there's no armed with U.S. combat and some have their families here or living in the farm.
We're working hand in hand. Sometimes they're quarrels.
But with the help of a youth, they're put in place to live in peace because without outside help.
We do it ourselves. We dream to share ideas.
I can go to their house and eat with them and share ideas with them and so on.
So very positive. And even I talked to some others.
They said, well, you know, the U.S. is reintegrated. Lost. The are you a flavour?
People can actually try to integrate, integrated. They're part of the community.
And one person, the chairman of youth organisation, he told me, you know, the festival is this.
If you ask me about a group of people who are sitting outside,
I won't be able to tell the difference between those two attacks from bars and those who are not.
So obviously, my question was, given the Sierra Leone history, which are the factors that are responsible for this integration success?
And what are the characteristics of this of the state?
So question one, what are the factors responsible? And the main main point I want to make here.
What I call the price we pay for peace. Namely, that what's really striking is how people were longing and desperate for peace and the sort of in the
final year of the war and how they really were desperately longing for the resumption of normality.
So she told me as long as covered with blood has stopped.
The sound of the barrel. We are happy for that. When the barrel was captured, there was nothing to do but to save our lives.
So integration, as I see it, is a Trade-Off for peace. And that's the threshold in the broad question of northern Israel will make a point.
One thing I'm speaking generally, if someone has committed an atrocity at any time,
when you see that person at any time, you will remember what they have done.
And any times that I know it does not feel good, but we're doing that for peace.
So my interpretation is that reintegration rests on a rational basis rather than an emotional lives.
And fighters were accepted into community to Abels with integration and transition to sort of a long sought peace.
So integration is price people would place for peace.
Now, this transition was also supported by what I call components of peace.
I'm not going to go into them, but just list them.
If there is the absence of ethnic cleavages which make the integration process
a very individualised process rather than sort of to organise people there.
There is a long standing tradition of social ties and family integration.
People are very religious in Cerillo, so they look up short to do justice in the end.
And then, of course, there were a host of different institutional interventions on the local and on the international level.
Which party could still be. Over the last seven years.
Right. So we have a state of peaceful coexistence.
But what does it really look like? Right. What is there going to look at?
Conditions for peace. Then I'm going to look at the emotions people presented to me,
and then I'll look at interactions between ex combatants and noncombat economic numbers.
So what do I mean with conditions for peace? They're basically three conditions that in the country presently.
That would qualify peace.
First is what I call spatial discrimination, where fighters cannot settle in those communities where they actually committed large scale atrocities.
So you have a lot of fighters from the east who were born in east, living in the north.
Now, a lot of fighters from the north now living east. And it's really this sort of trade off places that people can maybe settle in a community.
And everybody knows there are a. But the cancer community, what they've done in fashion.
So this limits the freedom of movement, a source of residence for ex combatants.
Secondly, their daily circumstances. I was in Sierra Leone during the time, as did presidential and parliamentary elections.
Nobody really knew what was going to happen. Everybody was very tense.
It was likely and if it didn't happen, that the opposition party actually overpumping topple the government.
Nobody knew if the incumbent government would go along with that. Would the military intervene?
It was a very sort of you was a very tense time.
So during that time of people showed up at police stations pouring gasoline,
telling the police constable, you know, going over those people work with who are you?
They're having trouble. They're likely to be the ones who are causing the trouble.
People were pointing at them on the street saying, like, you know, you you say they like we were walking.
Right. We've seen you if there's trouble. And this is sort of the cycles of tension here in those two.
You always see it when there's tension. That's the balance and singled out.
And lastly, and sort of not very surprisingly, obviously,
their individual experiences and you see a very clear pattern of those who have been victimised
more and more brutally during the war of displaying a larger rejection to integration.
So this Martinus woman in the told me if I had the power to ask them out, I would ask them out.
They have done that. They cross all the suffering here, killed my husband and my brother.
We're living together now. There is no other thinking. But really, I do not want their talk.
I do not want to live with them. People who had to confess that they didn't they weren't that this was my work.
I actually had a much more. Yeah, much more.
Much more open to oppression. So those are the conditions for peace from individual feelings now about sort of coming from the victimisation question.
My next question was how how do you feel about these people? What's what's the emotional state of community members?
And at the same time, I was trying to explore local means of reconciliation and the term I want to introduce here.
But the concept I want to use here is that a cool heart, warm heart, which is sort of this year alone in way of putting reconciliation.
Hobart to win the hearts, which is considered the centre of the feelings, but also thoughts and intentions.
So when that is cool, it's not angry or resentful in any way wishes would be warm.
And it's really a personal condition that needs to be able to have proper relationships in the community with somebody else.
Now, to achieve before or after an incident has made your heart very warm.
It requires what is called forgetting and forgetting is a process by which you contain memories,
by which you sort of suck the emotions out of memories. And youth chairman of the Miami Village.
Explain it to me saying is very difficult to forget because the signs of war are all around as long as remembering is not backed up with violence.
People forget step by step. Forgetting is when even if they think of more war, there are no emotions.
So remembering these Cirilli in context has a very emotional connotation and it
returns a person to the state of the sea where they were the one part was created.
And I really went through that in my interviews with people screaming, shouting, crying.
It really it really gets them very upset when they return from the war.
So how you. She's forgetting. Well, sort of the two major ingredients are of call.
These are materials. And while the politics obviously from from the rubble, from those big farm, it's here.
It's this was a bit of a hard, isn't it? Let's move on.
That lets you build a new life, which will take you away from the stage where it will calm you down to.
The problem is still around right now is that it has been a big block.
Our absence of a home from the side of the fires and the handing out of compensation has been basically non-existent.
And even the economics for the construction development isn't really going at a very quick pace.
So maybe you still harbour a warm heart. And if you ask these people about integration,
they will actually reject the integration which calls for punishment that's put together for answers that are collected in two parts of the country.
One woman, very young lady, said, When I see them, my mind goes back to what those guys are.
You have quite literally at an early stage. Now that you can see right now, other women now other people are actually even my family.
When I said I love them. I don't ever say good bye to myself. And then so I develop a warm heart when I see them.
They have extraordinary profits. You burn down my house because I do not have the power to revenge and suppressing my anger and not happy with them.
Another woman told me, I'm not happily living together with them.
I no longer want to stay with them. Let them put them all into a tight place where I never put eyes on them again.
And the last was the most vocal. She said I was the first.
They were punished in the same way that I'm suffering and should be punished as their punishment.
So a lot of emotions going around these communities and these suppressed,
sort of suppressed anger and dissatisfaction really surfaces in a very systematic
discrimination of the banks and the economic as well as in the social sphere.
So this goes to the point is marriage even is handed down to the children of the banks.
Now, the consequences are very real. That means a lot of ex combatants are even more than the average poor person in Sierra Leone.
But what I find most very worried is that they're very open and very vulnerable to abuse by political elites who draw
them in as either Uphoff thugs in in their conflicts with other parties or as a regular security of party militias.
And obviously, also the crime rate is both high amongst both those criminal.
Ah. Ah. A lot of remorse and that's that.
So in 2007, I left a field started with the conclusion that there was peaceful coexistence in Sierra Leone.
On the surface, it was based on the trade off between integration and peace.
That was my understanding. And some components of peace. But that below the surface, integration is really incomplete and peace and very in schedule.
A lot of people were harbouring negative emotions. And there was discrimination against and against Hamas.
I just returned from Sierra Leone last week and mean some of the things I've been seeing there are really painting a very good picture.
There are increased living costs. I mean, food and fuel prices have almost doubled in the last two years.
Obviously, comfortable income, unemployment, underemployment is unchanged.
High corruption is rampant in the governments.
So much so that a lot of donors have been pouring out their money. The system looks like millennialism is still working.
So it's not merit based.
Whether it's got a job for which networks or in and more worryingly, the crime rate has gone up significantly and violent crime.
So armed robberies are crimes is going up. Political violence has been going up.
We've seen that six weeks ago. Clashes on the streets of Freetown. And it's mainly violence between the two major parties.
And I think in dealing with this violence, there is a. Partiality of the police force and the degree to me on this one, governor.
So since meeting my conclusions, I have.
Yes. Maybe three of them want to change you, Grace.
So I see immigration as a very long term process. It's not a project and it's handled as a project for me.
She always delivers. So integration really requires a long term monitoring and process and a repeated and repeated
and very flexible interventions to go into communities through different stages of integration.
I would say at least a decade after a war, this has ended.
Also integration, I see as a continuously negotiated process within communities.
And I'm one of the things I've been thinking about is to interpret this kind of discrimination that's going on in the community level.
And what I've come up so far is that I see discrimination as sort of a form of subtle punishment and some form of social justice within the community,
within a society that is totally overwhelmed by the request that the government has put forth in the international community,
has put forth people different. And so these discriminate discriminatory acts are sort of pathway's venson feelings.
On the other side, if you look at the reaction of former come back and skip towards this is discrimination,
they're actually accepting a lot of the quiet things out of that.
And so I've interpreted that as subtle acts of repentance and the.
Towards reconciliation. My conclusion is that we need to be really careful when we look at the surface of things and consider Sierra
Leone as a peace building success because the surface hides a lot of tensions and potential for violence.
We need to understand the grievances that are under the surface, need to look at local parts of reconciliation.
Understand such concepts as Koolhaas. And then effectively design interventions.
And in the case of Sierra Leone, it has a lot to do with me past where apologies are giving, where the past is confronted with.
People can hear what they think about the past. But we also need material assistance, not only for the reasons that Paul and I could review,
but also because it's fixed within the cultural framework of how people think about peace, building up how people principle that Kohlhaas you want.
And lastly, we can look at stability and reduce violence, in my understanding, the peace in Sierra Leone.
It's found it very, very much on a rejection of the past. People have very bad memories of the war.
But these memories are very transient. You have a very, very young.
Societies who are within a generation that turnover and the forgetting of history is going with this.
So the current situation shows a resurgence of violence in the society.
And it's very was very, very worrying that recruitment of violence, gangs, political violence is along.
Old man lines, which actually suggests that there is you can see demobilisation from the war.
Lastly, the post-conflict phase is always filled from the population with very high
expectations of change and progress to address not only what the war has destroyed,
but also why the war started. So the grievances from before the war and those root causes are still within Sierra Leonean society.
They haven't been addressed right now.
So what you see right now is really growing integration and patience, not only on the side of the X.com battle, but on both sides of the population.
Laughs And I'm sorry. And that's not so positive note.
And thank you for.