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<text>
<title>
Men of the Year 1993: The Peacemakers
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Men of the Year
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
January 3, 1994
Men Of The Year
The Peacemakers
</hdr>
<body>
<p>To Conquer The Past
</p>
<p>By Lance Morrow--Reported by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, with other bureaus
</p>
<p> Low in the central brain lies the limbic system (hypothalamus,
hippocampus, amygdala), where the aggression seems to start.
</p>
<p> But there is a higher brain as well. If war originates as an
impulse of the lower mind, then peace is an accomplishment of
the higher, and the ascent from the brain's basement, where
the crocodile lives, to the upper chambers may be the most impressive
climb that humans attempt.
</p>
<p> In 1993 the traffic was heavy in both directions, from the world's
lower brain to the upper, and back down again. Gestures of statesmanship,
as lately in Northern Ireland, alternated with low-brain savageries:
the lashing tribal wars of Bosnia, Somalia, Kashmir, Afghanistan,
Angola, Burundi, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh...The list of
conflicts went on and on, like a vicious geography lesson. The
euphoria that had attended the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
disintegration of communism and the end of the cold war had
some seers announcing that amid instant global communications,
the "end of history" had arrived in the triumph of free-market
democracy. But the brilliant moment faded, and left a sinister
aftermath. The shadow was evident last week in Russia, where
the followers of the fascistically minded Vladimir Zhirinovsky
unexpectedly won 23% of the popular vote in the recent parliamentary
elections and became an ominous new power. Zhirinovsky's ascent
looked disturbingly similar in some details (anti-Semitism,
fanatical nationalism, anger and economic privation among the
people) to Hitler's rise in the 1930s.
</p>
<p> When incoming CIA Director James Woolsey testified before the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last February, he described
the realities of the new world order: "We have slain a large
dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering
variety of poisonous snakes."
</p>
<p> For years the conflicts in the Middle East and South Africa
have amounted to terrible local dragons in their own right,
with histories of deep hatred and the potential to erupt into
wider violence--even, in the case of the Middle East, into
nuclear war. These struggles were not ideological, like the
standoff of the superpowers. South Africa and the Middle East
worked at a nastier level, closer to bone and gene and skin.
They had, over the years, arrived at stalemate, a no-exit of
chronic hatred. The struggles (whether to liberate one's own
people, or to suppress the dangerous other tribe, or simply
to survive in the moral airlessness) became prisons.
</p>
<p> The Men of the Year of 1993--Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat,
F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela--did nothing more and nothing
less than find a way to break out.
</p>
<p> By tradition, TIME's Men and Women of the Year are those who
have most influenced history, for good or ill, in the previous
12 months. By that standard, Rabin, Arafat, Mandela and De Klerk
might be perceived as odd choices. Neither peacemaking deal
is complete. Extremists on all sides threaten to destroy the
arrangements, which look at times like fragile shelters being
nailed together in a high wind. The regions seem just as violent
now as they did before Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White
House lawn, and before Mandela and De Klerk locked into their
collaboration toward a new South African constitution.
</p>
<p> And yet...
</p>
<p> Peacemaking, like warmaking or courtship, depends upon exquisitely
balanced, mysterious and usually unpredictable combinations
of context, timing, luck, leadership, mood, personal needs,
outside help and spending money--all of these factors swirling
around in a kind of Brownian motion. Certainly one of the forces
behind peace in both the Middle East and South Africa was what
one observer called "a biological compulsion" in all four men
to reach a settlement. Mandela is 75, De Klerk 57, Rabin 71
and Arafat 64. "They were aware they did not have much time
left," says William Quandt, who was at the National Security
Council during the 1978 Camp David negotiations. "And if they
waited, history would write about them as people who had missed
a chance to end their careers with a capstone achievement."
</p>
<p> Beyond that, they were impelled, or at least strongly encouraged,
by new historical realities. The cold war left Arafat without
a Soviet patron; backing the wrong side in the Gulf War cost
him his wealthy oil-state sponsors. The Israelis were growing
weary of the economic and moral costs of the endless occupation.
In South Africa the white minority faced a catastrophe: a main
achievement of apartheid had been to inflict fatal damage on
the country's economy. As for Mandela's African National Congress,
it foresaw a descent into chaos and civil war that might destroy
any nation worth its inheriting. And so on.
</p>
<p> Some thought that South Africa and the Middle East proved what
might be called the Exhaustion Theory of Peacemaking--which
arises from the cynical, and accurate, observation that peace
is the last resort when all else has failed. True: if either
side had been able to conquer, it would have let victory dictate
the peace.
</p>
<p> All that said, the settlements-in-the-making in the Middle East
and South Africa were hardly involuntary, and they were far
from inevitable. Without Rabin and Arafat, the Israelis and
Palestinians would have continued down the same bleak, violent
road they have followed since 1948. Without Mandela and De Klerk,
blacks and whites would have descended into the bloodiest race
war in history. In 1993 Rabin and Arafat, Mandela and De Klerk
all rose to the occasion before them. Their common genius was
that they saw in the convergence of circumstances a ripeness
of moment--and that they acted.
</p>
<p> They worked in pairs at their two separate projects, even though
something inside each man came to the rendezvous reluctantly,
uncomfortably--faute de mieux, as if history had given him
no choice. Each needed his other, absolutely, in order to succeed--and each knew it. Each of the men was putting himself at
enormous personal risk in the enterprise--not now from his
long-sworn enemy but from those on his own side who would cry
betrayal. But each had the armor of his record in the struggle.
Just as only a longtime anticommunist like Richard Nixon could
convincingly make the opening to China, so only men with the
longevity in their conflicts of Rabin, Arafat, De Klerk and
Mandela had the credibility to make peace.
</p>
<p> None of the men much liked his partner. They were bound together,
two by two, as if in an impossible combination: they became
each other's steptwins. Their negotiations at times resembled
nothing so much as the conflict they were trying to resolve.
Mandela and De Klerk were at each other's throats even as they
accepted the Nobel Peace Prize together. Rabin could barely
stand to shake Arafat's hand on the White House lawn. Each of
the settlements-in-progress shows that peacemaking is often
as difficult and dirty, in its own way, as warmaking. The Men
of the Year sometimes seemed to be elaborating a variation on
Churchill's thought about democracy: peace is the worst mess,
except for the alternative.
</p>
<p> For all that, these four men reasserted the principle that leaders
matter: that an individual's vision, courageously and persuasively
and intelligently pursued, can override the rather unimaginative
human preference for war. If strong, focused leadership had
come from Europe or from Washington, might it have averted the
Bosnian bloodbath? If Jean-Bertrand Aristide were a Mandela--and if he had some equivalent of De Klerk as partner on the
other side--could Haiti have been saved? No one can quantify
a negative, but it seems obvious that the absence of leadership--the opportunities squandered or unenvisioned--costs the
world dearly every day.
</p>
<p> War is a profound habit--and sometimes a necessity. When Neville
Chamberlain declared "peace for our time" after Munich, he gave
peacemakers a reputation for fatuous optimism and appeasement
from which it took them years to recover. Philosophers of war
since Hiroshima have taught, hopefully, that the nuclear threat
has made armed conflict ultimately untenable as a Clausewitzian
instrument (foreign policy that happens to kill) useful in settling
disputes. But not everyone has absorbed the lesson. Among other
things, war has an archetypal prestige and bristling drama with
which peace has trouble competing: Milton's Lucifer in Paradise
Lost is much more interesting than Milton's God. War is rich
and vivid, with its traditions, its military academies, its
ancient regiments and hero stories, its Iliads, its flash. Peace
is not exciting. Its accoutrements are, almost by definition,
unremarkable if they work well. It is a rare society that tells
exemplary stories of peacemaking--except, say, for the Gospels
of Christ, whose irenic grace may be admired from a distance,
without much effect on daily behavior.
</p>
<p> Kant said that even a race of devils, provided they were intelligent,
would be forced to find a solution other than war for their
disputes. "Nature," Kant thought, "guarantees the final establishment
of peace through the mechanism of human inclinations." The race
of devils was busy in 1993, but the mechanism of human inclinations
was working as much in the uglier direction, toward war. The
global village is really a large, disorderly global city, with
many poor neighborhoods, a few that are rich and a number that
are terribly dangerous. But as the Balkans reminded everyone,
the global city has no police force. Bosnia has been a tragedy
of peacemaking turned against itself: the U.N.'s lightly armed
blue helmets became virtual hostages to the Serbs and an excuse
for Europeans and Americans not to use real force lest the peacekeepers
be hurt. The collapse of international law and civil behavior,
and the failure of the U.S. or Europe to do anything effective
to stop the killing, helped subvert the idea that the world
had made much progress toward the higher brain. The feckless
sighing and the elaborate international shrugs that masked themselves
as realism were somehow worse than plain indifference.
</p>
<p> It was against all the usual inclinations of the war devils
that these four men took what must be the first step in the
metaphysics of peace: they recognized the other's existence.
They crossed the line from the primitive intransigences of blood/color/tribe
to the logic of tolerance and, farther down the road, of civil
society. They asserted the power of the future to override the
past, a fundamental precondition of change. Few forces are more
intense than tribal memory and grievance, the blood's need for
vindication. The past wants revenge, like Hamlet's father's
ghost. Peace settlements in South Africa and the Middle East
will bury the bloody shirt, shut down the past as an imperative.
</p>
<p> The projects of Mandela-De Klerk and Arafat-Rabin are not yet
realized, of course. Leaders must bring followers along. Leaders
must exercise the visionary's gift. They must tell their people
a new story about themselves (in these cases, the story of themselves
at peace, to replace their older myth of struggle) and make
it plausible. Peace is a way of reimagining the world. Often
the peace must actually be made before people will embrace the
idea. We do not know--and may not know for months or years--how good these four will be as storytellers.
</p>
<p> Of course, it is possible that the year's peacemaking has merely
lit a couple of candles on an altar that has been dedicated
for centuries--and is still dedicated--to human sacrifice
on an Aztec scale. Blessed are the peacemakers, and few in number.
Still, in the words of Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the
French Institute of International Relations: "The fact that
Muslim and Jew, black and white, accept each other proves that
war between civilizations is not inevitable. This sends out
a global message of hope."
</p>
<p> Jean Cocteau remarked in his memoirs that stupidity is always
amazing to behold, no matter how often one has encountered it.
If war represents at bottom a kind of moral stupidity, the Men
of the Year were making their way out of that violent region
and toward a better part of the mind. That too was amazing to
behold.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>