EHL WORKSHOP IN SOLFERINO

By Sylvie Girard 

Getting ready

As the facilitators for the Exploring Humanitarian Law (EHL) workshop converged on Solferino the evening before the event, they knew a big challenge lay ahead. They would need to condense 30 school hours into four yet still manage to convey the main messages of a programme designed to teach secondary school children not only the basic rules of IHL but, maybe more importantly, to develop their critical thinking and sharpen their sense of civic responsibility.

By 10 a.m., most of the 42 participants who had put their name down for the workshop were eager to start. Normally, the maximum number of participants per workshop was 40, but a few sessions, including the EHL workshop, were oversubscribed. Asked what he expected from the exercise, Michael Baxter, from the British Red Cross, explained: "I teach EHL through my National Society, so I'm interested in learning new ways of teaching it. The British Red Cross is in the process of deciding how to integrate EHL in the citizenship programme and I'd like to contribute to that process."

The 220-volt obstacle Michael and the other participants were very surprised when they found the entrance to tent 12 blocked by... a strip of transparent tape stretched 1m70 above the ground across the whole front of the tent. Darko, Gunvald, Katarina and Valentina greeted them with the following instructions: "That's 220 volts up there. To enter the tent you're going to have to go over that tape without touching it. There are more than 40 of you and you're going to have to come up with a plan to help each other make it to the other side. Make sure you do it safely and here's one piece of advice - think hard before just launching into it so that you leave no one behind."

Amel is helped over the obstacle.

It was interesting to see how natural leaders quickly stepped forward and began organizing a strategy. It became clear almost half-way through the process that some of the stronger men would have to be helped to the other side in order to receive the others. As the group discussed among themselves and literally joined hands to carry teammates high over the tape, values such as leadership, teamwork, trust and tolerance for others' opinions were prominently displayed. Well into the exercise, when most of the strongest men were already on the other side, a very large latecomer arrived, expecting to join the workshop, not to be met with a literal hurdle! The facilitators addressed the group: "You have a dilemma here. You can choose to accept this latecomer or not." After a short discussion, the group decided almost unanimously to take him in and carry him over. Once safely on the ground, Wassim Shmayssani, from the Lebanese Red Cross, exclaimed: "I really want to thank you all. I know I am big and heavy, but I must say I was surprised to feel so safe as you carried me over."

When it was the turn of Amel Emam, a young woman from Egypt, she addressed the group: "This is a great opportunity to learn how to accommodate different cultures and sensitivities. As a Muslim woman, it isn't suitable for me to be carried over lying down. You've got to adapt and learn to think outside the box. I'd like to go over in a sitting position and have mostly women touching me."

When everyone was safely across, participants shared their impressions: "I didn't know any of you when I arrived this morning, and I still don't know your names, but now I feel we're like a team after what we've been through", commented 17-year old Andreas Brubakken from Norway. Another added: "When I saw how high the tape was, I thought it was impossible. But it just goes to show that if you're a group and you have the same goal and you put your mind to it, you can achieve almost anything!" What Amel liked most about the exercise was that "every idea was welcome. People were open-minded; no idea was turned down. Also, some people were small and agile, others were big and heavy, others strong. The exercise taught us to use people's differences to everyone's advantage." Valentina, the facilitator from FYR Macedonia, summed it up: "I've done this exercise with students dozens of times but the tape was never this high. I didn't think they would manage it because it was against the laws of physics! I think they learned that nothing is impossible and that you can at least try. They also learned about leadership, teamwork, listening to others and about trust."

Learning the basic concepts

The workshop proper began with a series of concepts that participants were asked to explain, based on their own experience. These included the notions of dilemmas, human dignity, the bystander, social pressure, rules of humanitarian law, war crimes, sanctions and humanitarian action. The same questions were asked at the end of the workshop to measure the knowledge acquired.

Participants were then asked to discuss a story in which a bystander is faced with a dilemma. In the story of the "brave vendor" a shopkeeper takes a risk to protect the life and dignity of a teenager pursued by a group of assailants. The group related their own feelings and experiences around that story and discussed the different ways people might react to the same situation and why.

Miming a blindfolded captive.

Another exercise consisted in getting a group to physically portray a photograph of a blindfolded captive threatened by several men wielding machine guns. Participants were asked to create a living sculpture with their bodies, some portraying the blindfolded captive, others the gun-toting men and yet others the gun itself. They were surprised by the results. The person pretending to hold the gun remarked, "I felt I was in control; I felt I had the power to kill someone." The person playing the blindfolded captive added, "I didn't know what would happen next. I had no control." The exercise helped bring home at a fundamental level the fact that war can be a very different experience depending on which side of the barrel one finds oneself.

Participants were also asked to imagine themselves in a situation where armed men attacked their village, killed their family, burned the houses and poisoned the wells. How would they react? Those who said they would apply the Geneva Conventions or call the International Committee of the Red Cross were immediately disqualified. Those who were more realistic explored the mechanisms leading to a chain of consequences in which one violation of IHL brought on another. A discussion ensued in which participants came to the conclusion that people who violated IHL were not necessarily "monsters". They also realized that an "us" versus "them" mentality, in which "we" are the heroes who wouldn't think of committing violations and "they" are the war criminals committing atrocities, did little to advance the cause of international humanitarian law. "I really liked the realistic approach-not preaching idealism but talking about ordinary people's reality", commented Ivana Marincek, of the Macedonian Red Cross.

As the day unfolded and participants had a taste of the different issues raised by the EHL programme, the whole process came full circle as the group discussed how to mobilize young people to contribute to humanitarian action and understood the link with the first concept they had explored: the bystander's dilemma. Darko told the story of a 14-year-old girl, Suzana Tomasevic, from the Bosnian village of Orasje. After having been involved in the EHL programme at her school, she decided to raise money to equip her village with a playground - she had been struck one day by the sight of a small child playing in the dirt with an animal bone, bloodied gristle still clinging to it. Before raising the money to buy the equipment, she wrote a questionnaire, made 100 copies and went herself from door to door asking residents whether they felt their village needed a playground and whether they were ready to contribute. Some 80% of them contributed financially. After obtaining permission from the school to use a small plot of land, she bought the equipment and then hired local people who had been laid off from a nearby factory to erect the structures. Asked how she had managed to carry forward such an ambitious project, she replied: "Everything became easy once I realized that nothing was impossible."

Creating a non-verbal drama

The second part of the day was devoted to acting out the concepts explored during the morning. Participants learned a few non-verbal drama techniques, including how to create the illusion of a complex machine by getting a person to physically portray a mechanical movement. Gradually, other actors inserted themselves into the "work in progress" with a mechanical movement of their own - the trick of course being that each new "movement" had to fit like a cog in the overall construction.

Once the group had grasped the techniques, the time had come to choose an original story to be acted out by the whole group. Wassim, from the Lebanese Red Cross, raised his hand: "I've got a story. It's about a seven-year old Lebanese boy called Ahmed. One day he went out to the playground near his home. He found a brightly coloured ball and picked it up. He was blown to pieces." A pregnant silence and then: "Ahmed was my cousin." Wassim explained how his extended family was torn between leaving the country and doing something to prevent cluster munitions from killing other innocent children.

Ivana stood out as a natural actress during the non-verbal drama. Asked what she felt after the exercise, she replied enthusiastically: "The non-verbal drama was so powerful! It allowed us to use our emotions as well as our cultural and life experiences." Twenty-two year old Eero Rämö, vice-president of the Finnish Red Cross, confided: "This workshop was totally different from anything else I attended during the week. I suppose people were expecting to learn more about the substance of IHL. Instead, the workshop was strong on methodology." For Valentina, the English teacher from Macedonia, "the methodology used in the workshop was one of the reasons participants were so enthusiastic. The non-verbal drama was so powerful and they managed to put it together in such a short time. Normally, this exercise takes a whole day and they did it in two and a half hours. What an exceptional group!"