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The Creation of a New Dignity Work Force Building Peace After Conflict

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The Creation of a New Dignity Work Force Building Peace After Conflict Building Peace After Conflict “Envisioning Hope” . A Proposal for UNDP: The Creation of a New Dignity Work Force For Post Conflict Development and to Create a Culture of Peace Based on Lessons Learned in the Last Decade by Barbara C. Bodine December, 2010 " If the international community wants to restore hope in a country or region emerging from violent conflict by supporting and nurtiring a peaceful resolution, it will have to pay special attention to the long-term prospects of the military and the warlords who are about to lose their livelihoods. Supporting a demobilization process is not just a technical military issue. It is a complex operation that has political, security, humanitarian and development dimensions as well. If one aspect of this pentagram is neglected, the entire peace process may unravel." —Dirk Salomons, "Security: An Absolute Prerequisite," Chapter Two in Post Conflict Development: Meeting New Challenges, edited by Gerd Junne & Willemijn Verkoren (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2005), p.20. Introduction: Sharing a Sense of Mission with Local Communities Empowering local communities and governance for the design and implementation of post conflict development models is at the core of success. How stable locally-based governance mechanisms are can often be determined by the concurrent parallel ways that national and international governments support their efforts. These very real and practical problems demand open communication and the ability to work with local knowledge. State building at the grassroots level through district offices and centers may be the best place to start up new development models. Within villages and districts, tribal groups and ethnic alliances, the access to local population and thoughts are more direct and immediate. From these districts and centers of outreach, recruitment, pre-training and proposed Post Conflict Academy certification, Training Centers, new postwar recovery models can emerge and sustain. What is needed most often is the long term need to view, to reach, empower, train and sustain local communities, connection to a global network of support. All aspects of a New National Post Conflict Development program must be integrated ultimately into a broader National Recovery Plan that will ultimately build national capacity and create a collective new sense of a shared mission and hope for all of its people. Building national capacity and striving for a sustained long term donor plan that will appeal to all segments of public, private, corporate and NGO leadership is key. The following rough draft proposal seeks to build on these fundamental principles—in an effort to enhance fair funding and shared donor benefits. Most of all it is a Plan of Action that will engage all members of the UN culture (UNESCO, UNDPKO, UNDP, UNICEF, UNHCR, etc.) and will profile, track and access the risk and needs of the recent disarmed and demobilized former child combatants. Also for the disabled, women and all family, provide professional long-term child protection and recovery services through a National Program of Reconciliation and Recovery. At the core of this effort is the recognition that the dignity and rights of all children, especially those in transition to full and complete recovery, is the mission to be shared and we, in the international community and ready to deploy, equip, monitor and support all future activities of vulnerable nations emerging from war. In a sense, we all stand at the borderline between war and peace. Now is the time to stand united. 1 2 The concept of a New Postwar Dignity and Development Workforce was conceived to answer a need to access grassroots/community provide a sense of pride and ownership in the dignity of work and create a new model that will demonstrate in action the many ways that local governance, national governance, NGO’s, corporate and private sector citizens along with the UNDP and World Bank can deliver more effectively a cluster/collaborative to recognize and honor the duty to accept personal responsibility for the protection and prosperity of the general population. Civil society’s needs must now come first, after years of seeing preventable tragedies unfold, trying to work with corrupted leaders, and making few funds legitimate, we are learning that true peace in postwar conflict will always belong to and will be maintained by a public citizenry that has a legitimate “buy into” the process and a new mechanism of engagement that is incorporated up front and early into the national recovery plan. With this understanding in mind, all efforts and resources applied can be given more equitably to the people, with transparency, accountability, access and action to demonstrate real change and that real people are making it. The DDR program must be grounded on that reality—postwar youth as the emerging new leadership. Regardless of having to face the stigma of former warriors, the challenges and rewards of reintegration and work along with psycho/psychological recovery—support demonstrates the remarkable the resilience of youth. Some of the most violent former child soldiers can be properly retrained to “Disarm with Dignity” and “Build a New Future of Hope” as leaders in a new overall comprehensive recovery plan. With DDR, full recovery and rehabilitation is a required step to full reintegration and the creation of a new blended work force model is key to the rapid implementation of that goal. The proposed new Dignity Works Model recognizes that youth in postwar society, whether combatants or victims, can and must play a critical and transformative role. What is lacking as we seek to apply the lessons learned in the last decade is a totally new mechanism for the rapid mobilization and workforce training of disengaged youth. This represents the greatest threat to peace and are an ever present threat of return to war. Therefore if properly trained, employed, maintained, tracked and evaluated—we can see the benefits of focusing first on society’s most vulnerable youth, while providing new work and jobs for the general citizenry. At the same time it is wise to remember that local grassroots structures put into place at highly vulnerable post conflict periods and times of fragmentation are often shaky without legitimate local government to support it. And we have seen 3 the complexities of timing and sequence of funding and events, both political and practical, can unravel even the best of plans. Every nation struggling to rebuild and survive after conflicts faces common and predictable challenges such as first providing the critical emergency response (see Operation Restore Hope as a Model), the establishment of calm, putting local and national government rule on how and when a long-term system DDR recovery package—each with its own sense of timing, circumstances, international community and perplexities of multiple levels of urgent priorities and key agencies. Still, it is the integrative model that best demonstrates in effective action how to access risk, effectively and swiftly apply emergency aid and create new pillars of progress and development with a shared vision and a National Plan of Action and Recovery that will best lead its people from war to peace. Success when postwar conflict development is in progress will always be determined by the empowerment of the local people and the vision of hope they hold for the future. Work, education, healthcare, security of psycho/social support will create hope. Introducing a New Job Creation and Work Development Model Employment, and the expectation of a job must be considered crucial to engaging the local people, gaining trust and providing long term work. At times of DDR, asking a soldier to law dwn his arms is impossible without giving him or her something new to lift up. A job that creates a new genre of dignity and purpose is the work that can transform lives. One of the efforts to create a more viable community participation model in East Timor was the Community Empowerment and Local Governance Project, “an interorganizational collaboration between the UN and the World Bank that supported local authority to insure local participation in the reconstruction of a country. To reduce poverty as a key goal, the integrative approach incorporated development, state building and democratization all during the actual postwar emergency period.” Putting this model into rapid action insured that local populations were built into the long-term plan to rebuild up-front, and engaged in a plan to recover and restore a hopeful and prosperous future for all. Far too often we have seen so-called “nation building” tumble because the strategic rush into place pillars of progress will not stand without the people who can build, maintain, protect and preserve them at times when a return to war threatens to demolish all the good will, long 4 after the UNICEF trucks leave and good will of the international community runs dry. There is very little time to turn a war-traumatized nation towards a new future of hope, but at the wheel of this transitional moment must be someone driving a fair and equitable plan for the people, and a wider mechanism to provide access, action and engagement of citizenry. Their dreams, driven by their dignity and sense of purpose and hope for the future will spell success that sustains and invites donor support. “To Serve with Dignity” By addressing the MDG’s with a new structure to combine the United Nations Development Program with a coordinated response to meet the needs of civil society. The new DWF is proposed as a UNDP United Nations Dignity Works Program that can be applied in many nations to rapidly engage postwar traumatized communities to advance postwar peacekeeping. It has a pilot proposed POA—Plan of Action to launch the DYC—Dignity Youth Corps, with a proposed in-school pilot program titled “Peacekeepers in the Schools” (see sample models enclosed).
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