Stories
The Healer: Forgiving a Torturer
By Susan Collin Marks
One Thursday afternoon in October 1992, I witnessed forgiveness in action. I was working on the South African National Peace Accord, and I had organized a workshop in Cape Town for the police and a number of civil and human rights NGOs to clear lines of communication between the two groups.
It was two-and-a-half years since the historic release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison. South Africa was groping its way towards a new order, trying to weave together a highly diverse society that had been methodically torn asunder by centuries of ...
The Healer: Holding People Accountable in Order to Move Forward
The "Movement of Mothers from the Enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa" was established in 1998. In this government-independent Bosnian organization, headquartered in Sarajevo, more than 10,000 women are united together. They survived, severely traumatized, the collapse of the former UN Protection Zone in Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia on July 11, 1995. Most of the mothers lost their male relatives: 10,701 Bosnians disappeared according to the movement since the entry of Serbian troops. Among those missing were 570 women and more than 1,000 infants and children. The majority of ...
The Equalizer: Stopping Domestic Abuse
Sally was faced with an alcoholic husband, John, who turned violent when drunk. John had repeatedly broken his promises to stop drinking and he absolutely refused to undergo treatment.
In desperation, Sally resorted to an approach sometimes called an "intervention." She turned to others for help: his children, siblings, closest friends, and work colleagues.
They called a meeting with John. One by one they told him how much he meant to them and recounted specific incidents of violent behavior, dangerous driving, and personal embarrassment. Collectively they insisted ...
The Mediator: A Family Feud Settled
By William Ury
It was a family feud. Dan and Sally were in the middle of an acrimonious divorce. Sally's father Jim, who had employed Dan in his business, refused to pay him for work he had done. Furious, Dan sued his father-in-law to recover his lost wages. The judge, however, suggested that they try talking with a volunteer mediator first. I was the volunteer; it was one of my first mediation cases twenty years ago.
Dan, Jim, and I sat in a little room in the courthouse. Clearly a little uncomfortable, they would not at first even look one another in the eye. I ...
The Mediator: Crushing Grapes and Narrowing Rifts
Simona watched as a dark shadow crossed her grandpa's face. The conversation had briefly touched on Daniel, and the whole table grew silent. Then conversation picked up again with the nervous focus of people trying to change the subject. "Isn't this lamb wonderful?" and the conversation continued. Grandpa just glanced at the door. He was not one for many words so Simona and the others might never know what he was thinking.
Daniel, her father Augustin's brother and Grandpa's first son, had not been at the family table in 15 years. When communism was a reality in Romania, ...
The Bridge Builder: Seeing Things Differently
By William Ury
In the spring of 1996, I facilitated a private dialogue at a chateau outside of Paris between five Turkish and five Kurdish civic leaders whose peoples were trapped in a civil war that had taken twenty-five thousand lives and destroyed three thousand villages. The dialogue was confidential; people had been killed by their own side for talking to the other. Many of the participants had spent time in jail. One Turkish nationalist, Tarik, had been described to me by his friends as someone who would "just as soon shoot a Kurd as talk to one." The tensions ...
The Bridge Builder: Fish Hooks and Trust
It is not easy to build bridging relationships, particularly in conditions of actual conflict. That did not deter Sidney Frankel, a Johannesburg businessman who, in August 1991, invited Cyril Ramaphosa, a prominent young black leader in the African National Congress, and Roelf Meyer, a young white leader in the ruling Nationalist Party government, to his country cottage for the weekend. As Meyer and his family arrived by helicopter, they discovered that Frankel's ten-year-old daughter had fallen and broken her arm; so Frankel, his wife, and daughter took the helicopter to ...
The Bridge Builder: Sisterhood Under Fire
By Carole Frampton
Ida lives in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. She is the president of a women's neighborhood association on the outskirts of the city. Until a series of intercommunal massacres in 1993, the association included and supported women from both the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. The women owned some communal land and shared its harvest among themselves. When it became dangerous to live in mixed neighborhoods, the Hutu women fled the Musaga district to settle on the other side of the road, in Busoro. For six years, the association was split. Half the ...
The Teacher: Respect in Lucknow
In 1992, thousands of people died in Hindu-Muslim riots triggered by the destruction of a mosque at Ayodhya by a group of Hindu militants, yet in the state capital of Lucknow, only forty miles away from Ayodhya, there was not one casualty. The reason? In part, it was the influence on the local culture of the largest private school in the world, the City Montessori School. Founded in 1959, the school has over twenty thousand students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, it seeks to embue its Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim students ...
The Teacher: Heavy’s Transformation
"I don't know how smart Heavy was," says Michael Lewis, who taught him conflict resolution in a course given in a maximum-security prison. "He was just a moose of a guy who apparently had a very quick temper, and who in his earlier days had been very quick with his fists.
Sometime after Heavy got the training, a fellow prisoner told us, 'I can't believe it. Yesterday Heavy got into an argument and I thought he was going to drop the sucker right in his tracks. Heavy just kept talking to him!' The fellow prisoner was attributing it to the fact that Heavy had learned that ...