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Citizen Carter: The Statesman
What happens to Presidents after their term in office ends? Once voluntarily departed, or shoved out the door, do they spend long leisurely days by the leafy pond? Play endless rounds of golf? Covet high-profile memberships of corporate boards? Not so for former American president Jimmy Carter.
In June 1994 Carter could be found in Pyongyang holding intensive talks with Kim Il Sung, the North Korean dictator over a way out of a nuclear crisis with the United States. A few months later, Carter’s name was back in the news. This time he was part of a three-member delegation trying to mediate the departure from office of Haiti’s military rulers. By the end of the year, the former US president was trying to negotiate peace in Bosnia. As one American columnist described Carter, ‘He goes everywhere, doing good.’
The visit to North Korea was made under a cloud of scepticism, and even some opposition, back in Carter’s homeland. But there was more than grudging applause when the ex-President announced in a television interview a credible agreement with North Korea to ‘freeze’ the illegal nuclear programme, which President Bill Clinton had said publicly North Korea could not be allowed to pursue.
That deal effectively aborted a US campaign to press for international sanctions against North Korea. It also eased military tension between South and North Korea. In the same way - by talking, and attempting to find common threads for agreement - ‘Citizen Carter, the statesman’, as he has been described by the newspaper USA TODAY, pulled another rabbit out of the hat by brokering a deal that led to the United States calling off a planned invasion of Haiti.
The dramatic events in which Carter became involved in 1994 marked the culmination of an activist post-White House role the former President has carved out for himself since leaving office in 1981. Working through The Carter Center, a non-profit, privately run body based in Atlanta, which he set up with his wife, Rosalynn, in 1982, Carter has used the considerable weight of his office as former president to become one of the world’s most effective peacemakers. In sometimes last-minute visits to disparate parts of the globe, the trademark charm and a reputation for caring, have opened doors closed to others.
Carter was president of the United States from 1976 to 1980. He was succeeded by Ronald Reagan. During his time in office, he was a central figure in the historic 1978 Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel. But the popular perception in the United States is that his presidency was marked by the Iran hostage crisis, an oil embargo, high inflation, and the like.
Run in partnership with Emory University, The Carter Center has set lofty goals which underpin some of the very ideals that were hallmarks of a Presidency which pursued a foreign policy based on human rights considerations. Already, the Center’s work has erased some of the bitter memories of its founder’s presidential years. Its Mission Statement include promoting peace and human rights, resolving conflict, fostering democracy and development, fighting poverty, hunger, and disease throughout the world.
Carter Center programmes are wide-ranging: eradication of Guinea worm disease in Africa, India, Pakistan and Yemen; working to promote democracy and human rights; increase farm yields in the developing world; child immunisation; the prevention of river blindness. In the United States, the Center runs projects to erase the stigma of mental illness and improve access to and quality of services and treatment for Americans who experience mental disorders. It runs various youth projects as well as in preventive health care programmes.
In addition, Carter Center monitoring teams have overseen multiparty elections in Haiti, Ghana, Panama, Paraguay, Guyana, Suriname, Zambia, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. The Atlanta-based centre has assisted the strengthening of the economic and institutional foundations of emerging democracies.
Carter personally, and members of the Center’s International Negotiation Network (INN) -a 25-member conflict resolution body comprising Nobel Peace laureates, former heads of state, conflict resolution practitioners, representatives of international organisations, governments, and non-governmental organisations- have mediated many of the 30 major armed conflicts taking place somewhere in the world at any one time.
Described as an informal network of eminent persons, the INN is chaired by Carter, whose high personal profile tends to make less pronounced the contributions made by other INN members to activities undertaken by the Center’s Conflict Resolution Program (CRP) in Sudan, Bosnia, the Great Lakes region, Liberia, Ethiopia, the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere. INN also ran a successful project in the Baltics which brought together Estonians, Russians living in Estonia and Russians from Moscow, to discuss integration of the Russian-speaking community into Estonian society.
In the words of The Carter Center, ‘The CRP regularly monitors many of the world’s armed conflicts in an attempt to better understand their histories, the primary actors involved, disputed issues, and efforts being made to resolve them. When a situation arises where President Carter has a unique role to play and specific conditions have been met, the CRP directly supports his intervention.’
INN member Kumar Rupesinghe says non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as The Carter Center, being ‘unofficial organisations’, have the advantage of building trust and confidence between two sides and using their resources to work toward negotiation. ‘With no strategic or political motivations, NGOs have greater flexibility... in responding to the needs of people,’ says Rupesinghe.
But such is the profile given to The Carter Center by the man who founded it and who remains its driving force, that it is not likely to be perceived as just another NGO. In fact, at times the Atlanta-based body could be criticised for conducting a milder version of the Clinton administration foreign policy in North Korea and Haiti - supporting Washington’s policy doves over the more hawkish elements. Before visiting North Korea, Carter obtained President Clinton’s nod, although some officials in the State Department opposed to the trip. And while his initiatives in Haiti were undertaken in an unofficial capacity, the former President was thoroughly briefed beforehand and in turn reported on the outcome of his missions to Washington.
Others say by holding negotiations with Somalia’s Mohamed Farah Aideed, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, Haitian military ruler Raoul Cedras, and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the former President merely enhanced the reputations of despots. The more cynical view of Carter is that the ex-President is driven by a determination to erase the memory of a failed presidency, and restore his place in history, possibly by receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace.
| ‘The former president has carved out a unique role as diplomat
without portfolio, referee and preacher rolled into one.’ The Washington Post |
Not that such considerations matter to beneficiaries of the Center’s varied programmes, who will no doubt argue that the ends are justified by Carter’s high-profile and high-octane energy means. For it is the case that Carter’s status and reputation -the sheer weight of the name- have opened doors and forced parties at loggerheads to explore the possibilities of reconciliation. Gritty diplomacy and refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer, have been Carter’s hallmarks. And his approach have become so much an embodiment of the Center, there will doubtless be a big gap when he leaves.
‘He’s quite unusual,’ notes Erwin Hargrove, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. ‘Most ex-presidents write their memoirs and retire. But Carter has a tremendous amount of energy and a desire to do good.’
Away from the fanfare, Carter and his team, including wife Rosalynn, used various other devices to bring warring parties around the negotiating table, or at least to consider that as a course. One year after that sequence of headline-generating ventures in North Korea, Bosnia and Haiti, Carter sponsored a major drive among Central African nations to secure the return of two million refugees displaced by the ethnic bloodletting in Rwanda. Meeting in Cairo, leaders of Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda, agreed on various confidence-building and security measures in this regard. In the following year, the five leaders met again in Tunis, Tunisia to follow up their African initiative to promote peace, justice, reconciliation, stability and development in the Great Lakes region. In the Tunis Declaration on the Great Lakes Region, issued on March 18, 1996, the parties agreed on additional measures to meet commitments approved the previous year in Cairo.
Implementation of that initiative was subsequently overtaken by the pace of political events, including the overthrow of Zairian leader, Mobutu Sese Sekou, but focused world attention on the region, and galvanised involvement in efforts to deal with one of the major causes of instability. And the meetings secured, at the very least, a blueprint of commitments -pledges even- by Heads of State regarding improvement in the refugee situation, and reducing military conflict.
How does Jimmy Carter do it?
Writing in the New York Times in May 1995, Carter described the complexity of issues involved in the various conflicts raging across the globe and said they required ‘innovative and varied approaches.’
Carter always recognised that there are usually cases in which one party -or both- want peace.
‘However, most ruling parties resist any official intervention in their civil disputes. Without their approval, it is inappropriate for a foreign ambassador or the United Nations even to communicate with revolutionaries who are attempting to change or overthrow the government.’
All too frequently, Carter noted, the tendency was to impose sanctions rather than encourage communication. ‘Nations rarely achieve their goals this way and either give trade advantages to their competitors or alienate their allies who advocate different approaches.’
Preparing for the 1995 Cairo summit, Carter visited Uganda, Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi for consultations with presidents, other political and military officers, diplomats, church officials and representatives of international organisations and NGOs. ‘After some extremely difficult negotiations with sceptical leaders in Kigali and Bujumbura, they finally agreed to detailed agendas for our proposed conference,’ Carter said in a report on the trip.
Interesting about the Cairo meeting was that it was closed to leaders from outside the region. An unpopular decision, but this resulted in what Carter described as ‘totally unrestrained discussions of the most sensitive issues, old wounds were opened and mostly healed, and we all decided that a follow-up conference will be necessary, perhaps early in 1996, to include those who were excluded this time.’
They pledged in Cairo to prevent cross-border raids, remove intimidators from refugee camps detect and destroy the illicit and inflammatory radio transmitters; deliver persons indicated for genocide to the International Tribunal and urge others to do so.
Carter says he tries to convince participants in a conflict that he’s not taking sides, keep goals in sight, and not allow himself to be side-tracked. ‘I don’t have a portfolio...’ he told Washington Post while contemplating approaches to the Bosnian conflict in 1994.
That approach has led to Carter being branded an ‘innocent abroad’ disrupting efforts to toughen sanctions against countries considered hostile to the United States. But as the Atlanta Constitution notes, ‘Carter’s efforts seem to have contributed to easing some of the world’s most difficult and intractable problems’.
Feedback please to
j.verhoeven@euconflict.org