
1 ORAL HISTORY OF UTAH PEACE ACTIVISTS UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY OREM, UTAH INTERVIEW WITH BONNER RITCHIE 06/06/2007 Orem, Utah Interview Conducted by Dr. Kathryn French 2 Interviewee: Bonner Ritchie Interviewer: Kathryn French Date: June 6, 2007 Subject: Utah Peace Activists Place: Orem, Utah KF: This is Kathy French interviewing Bonner Ritchie in my office, June 6, 2007. Describe yourself. BR: Oh, dear. I’m a person who loves to get involved in controversial issues. I always have been. I’m not a goal-oriented person; I’m a process-oriented person. I go with what’s fun, exciting, stimulating, at the moment, and don’t work it into a long term goal or a long term objective of some sort. My education has been the same way. I never decided to get a Ph.D. I just loved to study and loved school and finally ended up with one. Being process-oriented when there is something that violates a process like injustice or discrimination or exploitation or violence or manipulation or abuse, of some sort, that’s a process variable that’s interfering with a human dignity of someone. Then I get incensed and I want to take action. I define myself, in professional terms, as an organizational philosopher. I try and understand the forces that operate an organization, the way organizations evolve, the way they change, the way they fail, the way they manipulate or defend or abuse, and therefore, try to work the other side to make them more humane, more supportive, more helpful, more respectful of people rather than to abuse and use people. Early on in my career as a professor of organizational behavior I think my goal was helping people protect themselves against organizational abuse that comes from any source, a government, a supervisor, a teacher, a parent, whatever, to help people protect themselves from any abuse that comes through the use and abuse of power. So that’s kind of my framework. My background is sort of curious. I grew up on a farm in Heber City, Utah, and when I was twelve years old my father came home one day and said, “We’re moving to San Francisco.” My mother said, “What? What are we going to do?” He said, “I don’t know but we’re moving.” He was tired of rural Utah, and tired of farming, and tired of sort of a parochial world, I think. He never said that but I know he was tired of the farm work and those things. So we moved to San Francisco when I was twelve years old, and San Francisco is different than Heber City. It’s a big city. It’s diverse, it’s multicultural, and a vibrant place, and I loved it. Of course I went to school with all these kids who were very different than I was, and I decided at that time that I had been very biased, very racist, very bigoted, in my limited orientation. I didn’t have much opportunity to demonstrate that with respect to a minority person because there were none in my sphere of activity, but there were in San Francisco. So I started to learn about people. This was the end of WWII and I became concerned about a group that I barely knew about, that was getting some press, and that was the Japanese-Americans who had been put up and put in camps during WWII. A lot of them came from San Francisco. A fair number of Japanese and Chinese were from the city and people were talking about it, and I decided this was 3 troublesome. As a boy I would look out and see the Golden Gate Bridge, and I decided I wanted to build a bridge someday like that, a bridge to Tokyo so we wouldn’t have another war. That was my vision of what I wanted to do. So I became a civil engineer. I went to school to build bridges. Then I found myself in Germany commanding a nuclear weapons unit, in between 1959 and 1963, when the Berlin Wall got built. At that point, when we armed our nuclear weapons to blow up the Soviet Union, I decided there had to be a better way. That was not a good way to solve problems. If you read the accounts of the Soviet generals, they came very close to war as did the US. I think it’s a miracle that we didn’t have an all-out war. This was the height of the Cold War. I decided I needed to do something different, so I went back to school to try and understand behavior and conflict and power. I couldn’t find a place to do it. I tried psychology and sociology and political science and all those things, and I finally ended up with a degree in economics, a Ph.D. in economics, with an emphasis in labor issues on conflict negotiation and bargaining theory. And then I went to Michigan to teach and was fortunate enough to be part of the beginning of the field of organizational behavior, the applied social science. Again my focus became helping people protect themselves against abuse and make the world a more humane place. Then I came out to BYU in 1973 and retired in 2000. In the meantime I had visiting appointments all over, Stanford and other universities in the U.S., and several times in the Middle East, at the University of Jordan, and other places. KF: How did you first get started in the Middle East? BR: That’s a fun story. I was walking down the hall one day of the administration building at BYU and Bill Evenson was the Associate Academic Vice President who was responsible for the BYU Jerusalem Center that had just been finished in 1989. Bill said, “How would you like to go to Jerusalem?” I said, “Oh, sometime that would be fun,” not thinking too much about it but I said, “That would be fun sometime.” A few weeks later I got a fax from the director saying, “We’re delighted to learn that you and your family will be moving to Jerusalem this year.” This was in about April of 1989. I went back to Bill and said, “You were serious.” He said, “Weren’t you?” I said “Yeah, but not now. It’s not a good time.” He said, “Well, think about it some more. Let’s talk some more.” So we talked and, actually, we had a meeting in Salt Lake with some of the members of the Board of Trustees who said, “We need you to go to Jerusalem to build bridges to the Palestinians.” So that was it. In the fall of 1989 my family moved to Jerusalem for a year, and I started working with Palestinian groups. I did training programs and various things but I got acquainted with a lot of people, including Yasser Arafat, and most of the PLO leaders, and the Israeli leaders, Sharon Peres and Ehud Barak and others were very involved. I really worked hard to try and facilitate the process. I worked with the PLO in preparation for the Oslo peace negotiations in Tunis. A lot of things worked reasonably well but then as time goes on one thing breaks and then another. It is very disappointing and very frustrating to see all your work sort of be—It’s not for naught, but you just don’t accomplish all the things. But that’s how I got started in 1989. Then as a result of the contacts and involvement there I’ve spent about six full years since 1989 living in 4 Jordan or Jerusalem or working in Lebanon or Egypt, and all around the Gulf: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait. KF: When you say there were some disappointments, what difference did your work make? BR: One thing that was kind of fun is on the Christmas following the negotiations that were in 1994, I guess, I got a Christmas card from the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. He sent me a card. He’s not a Christian, he’s Muslim, but he sent me a card. It’s a picture of Bethlehem on the cover, of Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity where Christ was born. He sent me a picture of that and put a little note in it that said, “Thanks for all your help. We couldn’t have done it without you.” The reference was I helped them change their paradigm, their framework of thinking. This came to me in kind of a funny way. I had been working with some Palestinian groups and some Israeli groups and realized that for fifty years, since the creation of the state of Israel in 1947-1948, at that point the Jews accepted the state of Israel and the Arabs all rejected it. For the Arabs it was all or nothing. “It’s all our land.” For the Palestinians, “It’s all ours. The Jews are welcome to live here but we will not accept the Jewish state, the state of Israel.” I said, “It’s interesting you had an all or nothing strategy and the Jews had an incremental strategy. They’d take whatever they could get and see what would happen later.” I said, “So their strategy is incremental, yours is all or nothing. It’s fifty years later, they have all, you have nothing. Maybe you need a new paradigm, and maybe you need an incremental paradigm rather than an all or nothing.
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