News Network
Displacement, Identity and Violence
ICAR News Network: 9/17/07
As Iraq grows more violent, there is less attention paid to how the ongoing violence affects how people live, eat, sleep and even breathe. There are discussions about allocating the resources, remapping the borders, making new borders between sectarian groups, displacing people, putting troops here and training Iraqis there, giving money to these groups and cutting money from those and so on. These tactics were employed since the beginning of the war and it is apparent now that they were not so successful. In fact, there are alternative ways to soften the conflict in Iraq without
perpetuating sectarian violence.
The New York Times article by Sabrina Tavernise [September 17th, 2007] covers the rather untouched fields of the Iraq conflict. One can conclude that dividing an entire country neighborhood by neighborhood not only causes trauma in the population, it also makes people associate with a sectarian/ ethnic identity they regarded little before. Ripping Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds from their homes and giving them new neighborhoods to live only increases the lack of communication between groups and thus augments a more radical in-group bonding and a more radical out-group hatred. This will only result in an unfortunate but predictable increase of violence.
A perfect example of the magnitude of violence that can result from separating and displacing people was found not so long ago in Rwanda. To understand how similar the conditions in Iraq are to Rwanda, one needs only to read Tavernise’s stories about people being killed by their neighbors and the hatred generated by such events. The violence in Iraq has already cost tens of thousands of lives while affecting, both physically and psychologically, many more in Iraq and the US. As anger and hatred accumulates in displaced communities, the magnitude of the violence may grow bigger as time passes.
What, then, can be done, in order to sooth the trauma and slow down this process of increasing violence? People need to be reminded that they are facing or opposing those who used to be their neighbors, friends, classmates and teammates. The worst way to organize this kind of a reminder, however, is to bring people together without any catalyst and expect them to communicate verbally. Perhaps, starting on a grassroots level, connecting people through schools, sports and through other means of social exchange can offer an eventual healing process.
In Bloodlines, Vamik Volkan gives an account of how an Egyptian and an Israeli confronted each other during a meeting. When the Israeli psychiatrist mentioned to the Egyptian historian that she was scared, the historian did not believe that an Israeli could harbor the same emotions, or could tolerate sharing a sense of victim-hood (Volkan, 1997). This surfaces the known paradigm of dehumanizing and humanizing the other. But rather than a cliche response to severe hatred and violence among groups, this paradigm tells us how important it is to know that one can share certain feelings with an out-group, such as victimhood, fear, glory and accomplishment. Social activities thus can serve as a catalyst for the sharing of these kinds of feelings and perhaps heal deep scars and reduce ongoing violence.