Understanding peace within the context of overcoming poverty. Colloquium 2012:” Extreme poverty is Violence. Breaking the Silence. Searching for Peace” at UNESCO House 26th January 2012

I start with a challenging question: Isn’t peace within the context of overcoming poverty rather a rare and precarious phase, which depends on many conditions? I come to this disturbing question, because I have in mind the holistic vision of the Hebrew – and Christian – “shalom”, which comprises material, relational, institutional, psychological and spiritual dimensions of goodness and fulfillment. In what sense shalom is possible, a peace which gets incarnated as the overcoming of poverty? In order to answer this question I refer to my experience and tell you examples of peace within the context of overcoming poverty. Doing this, my aim is to find out factors which contribute to walking towards the direction of peace:

My first example shows that peace requires the contribution, the individual activity of the persons affected by exclusion and poverty: In a Bavarian detention center I visited an African refugee who on his travel back to Italy was controlled just close to the German border and was put in jail because he had no papers, no residence permission. In prison he had to live among “criminals”, was locked 23 hours per day in his cell and could be visited only one hour per month. He fell ill because of the culturally unusual prison diet, and in hospital he was even observed when going to the toilet. In spite of all this hardship and the uncertainty whether he would be able to proof that he had a legal status in Italy, I always found a serene smile in his face: his cheerful peace stemmed from having deeply, spiritually accepted these more than four months in prison, his peace came from forgiveness and active patience.

But according to my experience, this African refugee is an exception. In most cases the individual strength in coping with exclusion and finding peace within situations of poverty has to be complemented by other factors. This becomes visible in my second experience which is about four Sinti – Sinti are a group of “gypsies” -, who as children in the age of five to nine years had been put to concentration camps by the Nazis – simply because they were “gypsies”. There in winter they had to stand still outdoor for hours and suffered from hunger. After their imprisonment they got long-term diseases, which hindered them performing their jobs properly, so they got or stayed poor. Nevertheless, these Sinti are now reconciled with the Germans. Why? Their peaceful attitude is partly fruit of their individual coping-efforts and partly a result of a strong mutual support within their families and ethnic groups; but this peace is also an outcome of a long political struggle for recognition: The umbrella organization of the Roma and Sinti finally “convinced” the German government to pay compensation for the years in the concentration camps, and this – though small, “symbolic” – rent (some 450 € per month) also helped these Sinti to overcome bitterness and old-age-poverty, and to find peace.

This way to peace, the political struggle brings me to a related point: In Germany institutional factors – laws and the behaviour of civil servants – are crucial in overcoming or not overcoming poverty: A young Roma single-mother living from social aid and without any formal school-degree, ardently aspired to attend a training course in order to become beautician, but the civil servant in the labour office refused to finance this course. Only with the financial help of a friend she could attend this training secretly, and then by means of a lawyer she won a trial against the labour office which then had to pay the course. Also in the case of refugees pending deportation it is the lawyers paid by the Jesuit Refugee Service which the most urgent “cases” to get out from detention.

In Germany, it is typical for ways out of extreme poverty, that they are often very complex and require the long-term patience and co-operation of many actors in civil society and in state institutions. As an example I cite my experience in the fight for the basic rights of undocumented migrants (“sans papiers”). For some 15 years at federal level a “non-public” coalition of church agencies, welfare organizations, labour unions and selected members of parliament has been working to convince the Home Ministry that the rights of the undocumented to get basic medical treatment and to be saved from exploitation in the labour market, and the rights of their children to attend school, are inviolable human rights and that a small change in the aliens’ laws is needed in order to implement these rights: We patiently advocated in order to remove a provision which compels all public authorities (also in hospitals and labour offices) to report to the aliens’ office when they learn to know about the existence of undocumented persons – with the effect that the aliens’ office could deport them. In some semi-public spheres, like in church contexts, we could frankly speak out this issue of undocumented migrants, in other, more adverse circumstances we secretly negotiated with the authorities.

To sum up my presentation: According to the situations of extreme poverty, there are several conditions which contribute to overcoming poverty and finding peace: the spiritual strength of the individual to cope with poverty; the mutual support of those being affected by poverty; the support by friends and by lawyers; long, patient fights of broad coalitions of civil society; the co-operation of civil servants and and, last but not least, adequate state rules.

I end up with two disturbing questions: Firstly – as we have heard in the last days: poverty destroys humanity, that is: poverty destroys irreversibly parts of the personality and the basic capabilities of the poverty-affected. How then a pathway to peace can happen?

Secondly, how is real peace in the relations between rich and poor countries is possible? Reality and awareness develop in the opposite direction: The more the poverty gap between the human beings in the global South and North is growing, the stronger the power of the Northern institutions develops, the less the populations in the North takes an interest in the fate of their co-inhabitants in the global South. This is the real challenge: How to bridge the global gap between North and South?