Imagine: reflections on peace – photo essay

The project is conceived to encourage discourse and conversation around peace-building and ending conflict. It is an initiative of The VII Foundation, which was established in 2001 to challenge complex social, economic, environmental and human rights issues through documentary non-fiction storytelling and education.

“When battlefield prowess and political manipulation are not enough to achieve peace through victory, we summon our best and brightest to negotiate an end; we celebrate peace settlements; and we give prizes, if not to victors, then to visionaries. We exalt peace as a human achievement, and justly so. But the reality of peace is flawed. The rewards of peace are elusive for the men and women who live in the post-conflict societies of our time. Why is it so difficult to make a good peace when it is so easy to imagine?”

Lebanon

• Palestinians fleeing massacre by Christian gunmen, Karantina, Beirut, Lebanon, 18 January 1976. Photograph: Don McCullin/Contact Press Images.

“I went running with the first wave. It was evening and raining hard. They all wore hoods. We stopped behind a low wall and watched people being shepherded out of a hospital for the insane. People came to the windows of one wing. One of the Falange fighters shouted and when he didn’t get a proper answer he shot a burst of automatic fire into the window. There was the same snip-snap of sniper bullets in the morning. Everyone seemed to have shrunk in the centre of Karantina. An old American truck, like a Dodge pick–up, was brought up with a huge 50mm machine gun mounted on it. The Falangist on top was pouring out fire indiscriminately. It was more than frightening, it was catastrophically fearful, like the dawn of a new dark age. I photographed, and went on photographing. I had pictures that would tell the world something of the enormity of the crime that had taken place in Karantina.”
Don McCullin

_{The Falangist on top was pouring out fire indiscriminately. It was more than frightening, it was catastrophically fearful, like the dawn of a new dark age.}

• Chamran Hamieh [left], Hamza Akel Hamieh’s son, goes through his father’s collection of images from the civil war, stored in old suitcases in his home in the the Bekaa Valley, Taraya, Lebanon

“In 2017 I travelled to Lebanon with writer Robin Wright to try and make sense of what peace means in a place so defined by conflict. As we met with former fighters and young creatives, I thought back to one of Aesop’s fables, The Oak and the Reed, and the countless storms this country has weathered without breaking. Peace here comes in shades of grey. It’s the reason to bend with the next wind, to endure, and to embrace the present despite the fire under the ashes.”
Nicole Sobiecki

Cambodia

• A Cambodian government soldier firing his outdated M1 carbine at the Khmer Rouge from a fox hole. Kien Svay, Route 1, Cambodia 1973. Roland Neveu

“In 1973, I was a student in sociology in Brittany and was very motivated to experience the ills of our world first- hand. During the summer break, a friend and I dreamed of getting to Cambodia to hone our skills as burgeoning photographers. We managed to fly into Phnom Penh a couple of weeks ahead of the end of the US B-52 bombing of the country. That for me was a revelation in covering a conflict, a big leap after trailing my camera along the student protests of the early 1970’s in France. It also became a jumping off point from university and the entry into a career as a photojournalist. Reporting that war became a passion, and with the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in April 75, it altered my life forever. Witnessing the tragedy of Cambodia over the years has taken me from the disembodiment of the country to the relatively prosperous time it has entered now. Peace has been a very long and tortuous road for the Cambodians, affecting many generations of its people.”
Roland Neveu

• During the heavy monsoon in September 1979, travelling in the forest of Western Cambodia with a group of Cambodian guerilla favourable to Prince Sihanouk. Photo by Roland Neveu. Right; Sophary Sophin, bomb disposal engineer. Photo by Gary Knight.

• Cambodian opposition political activists (left to right) Sin Chanpouraseth, Chay Vannak, Ney Leak and Douch Sovunth. Photo by Gary Knight.

“The story of peace – much like the story of war – is personal. Everyone who lives through it has a different experience, and the breadth of those experiences cannot all be expressed within a photo essay. In creating this work, I revisited places that I have been visiting since the war of the 1980s and 1990s when I started my career in Cambodia. I spoke to men and women of all generations and wrote down what they told me. Some had lived through the civil war of the 1970s and the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed. All of them had lived through the years of violence and deprivation of the post-Khmer Rouge period. All had expectations of the peace that followed. For many, the reality of that peace was desperately inadequate. There are people in Cambodia for whom peace has been a great benefit, such as the family members and associates of the political classes, the military, and the police. No one would argue that peace has been less favorable than war, especially that war – but sit on a stool next to a Cambodian villager and ask about the peace, and the stories of suffering and injustice will soon begin to flow.”
Gary Knight

Rwanda

“In 1994 as Rwanda was in the throes of genocide, I illegally crossed the Ugandan border to document one of recent history’s darkest events. I documented a broken country gouged, burnt, scarred and littered with corpses.

“Twenty-five years later, I revisited Rwanda and found a very different country. A country that carries the genocide with it in its collective memory but refuses to be defined by it. Instead, Rwandan people have been transformative and accomplished the impossible, turning the darkness of the genocide, into light.

• The Amahoro Stadium, Kigali, 1994. During the genocide the stadium was temporarily a “UN Protected Site” hosting up to 12,000 mainly Tutsis refugees.

• Alice Mukarurinda and Emanuel Ndayisaba. Ndayisaba admits to killing dozens of people during the genocide. Alice is one of his victims, left for dead in a swamp after he cut off her hand. Ndayisaba was imprisoned for his crimes, but under the laws of ‘Gacaca’; the local courts set up to encourage truth and reconciliation, he confessed to his murders and was released. He later recognised Alice and admitted to her it was he who had tried to kill her. In an unlikely partnership they have both reconciled and now work in a restorative group teaching reconciliation within the community.

“A country once gouged is now full, a country once broken is now whole and scars once obvious are fading. Rwanda’s transformation is squarely rooted in the Rwandan people’s unparalleled ability to forgive.”
Jack Picone

Bosnia

• Senad Medanovic, sole survivor of a massacre finds his home in ruins after the Bosnian army recaptured his village from Serb forces. He is standing on what is believed to be a mass grave of sixty-­nine people, including his family, 1995. Ron Haviv/VII

“What happens when 3.5 million people suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder for an entire generation? What happens when a whole nation – forged from an imposed peace agreement, with opposing sides forced to live together – can’t move beyond the past? Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country that continues to battle itself as it moves in a constant circle.

• A defaced photograph that was found by a Bosnian family when they returned to their home in a suburb of Sarajevo, Bosnia, March 17, 1996.

• Nedžiba Salihović, who lost her husband and son during the Srebrenica massacre, celebrates the conviction of Bosnian Serb General Ratio Mladic for his role in the genocide.

“Memorials litter parks and hilltops. Conversations turn to politics and at a moment’s notice back to the war. The political parties remain the same as those that brought the conflict to fruition. There is no agreed-upon history of the war taught in schools. Children learn old grievances from their parents, ensuring that for many the war will always be a dividing line. Stories from the 1990s now take their place alongside older tales of war, those from the 14th century to World Wars I and II. Repressed anger and hatred simmer just beneath the surface. The pressing question: how can we use memory to move past the loss and create one nation for all Bosnians?”
Ron Haviv

Northern Ireland

• Northern Ireland Derry, North of Ireland, 1996. Gilles Peress/Magnum/for Imagine:Reflections on Peace

“In 1994, the Irish Republican Army and the Combined Loyalist Military Command declared ceasefires on behalf of the predominant paramilitary organizations in the North of Ireland. Political conversations had dragged on for decades, but the ceasefires kickstarted a process that eventually led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the cessation of active hostilities. Another 25 years on, no one knows if this will be permanent: There have been similar pauses throughout the 800-year British occupation of Ireland, and even the 1994 ceasefires proved neither lasting nor universal. But something unquestionably changed.”

• 12th of July Parade, City Centre, Derry, North of Ireland, 1996.

• Short Strand, East Belfast, North of Ireland, 1994.

“The previous 30 years had been dominated by the Troubles, a conflict defined not by violence but by the tension between the necessities of everyday life and periodic, inescapable eruptions of violence precipitated by the British Army, by Loyalists, and by Republicans. During this era, dark and full of murders, Gilles Peress defined the structure of history as helicoidal. Nothing seemed to progress or regress; rather, each day became a repetition of every previous day.”
Gilles Peress (excerpt from The Battle for History, with Chris Klatell)

Colombia

• Residents of Ituango, Antioquia, a region that has suffered greatly from the armed conflict, converse outside a polling station on the day of the national plebiscite to approve or reject the peace treaty negotiated between Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) insurgents and the government. Stephen Ferry

“Colombia is a country where the Cold War combined with internal factors to create a human rights disaster, one which implicates all players in the Colombian armed conflict as well as United States foreign policy. I documented the Colombian conflict from 1997 to the signing of the Havana peace accords and then, of course, followed the peace process with great interest and hope.

• Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos shakes hands with Rodrigo Londoño, alias “Timochenko,” top commander of the FARC insurgent army, at a celebration for the completion of the FARC’s disarmament.

• Family members mourn during the funeral services for Wílmar Asprilla Allim, a FARC member who, after laying down arms, was participating in the organization of the FARC’s new political movement.

“It’s too early to know whether Colombia has found its way out of a cycle of brutal internal wars, but certainly the signing of the peace accords is a big step forward.”
Stephen Ferry

Syria

• Fighters with the Free Syrian Army fire at regime forces on the front line in Qastal Al Harami, a section of the Old City in Aleppo, Syria, on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Nicole Tung

“To step into the wake of the war against Isis was to enter a dystopian world. As the circle closed in on the terrorist military group, first in Mosul, then in Raqqa, and then in their last redoubt in Baghouz, I travelled between newly liberated villages and cities. I went to document that vital moment between the end of a conflict and peace – the space where life begins to emerge. At first, everything seemed a blur of rubble, like a dark, smudgy water colour of a never-ending nightmare about war and how it forever mutilates lives.

“But, very quickly, the streets buzzed back to life. I witnessed civilians, so utterly traumatized, do the only thing they knew how to do: go on and survive. It was dark, yet remarkable, to see the cautious hope among people who had lost everything. They know: peace is so incredibly fragile. Unless the marginalization of peoples in each country is addressed, unless resolution is brought to disputed territories, unless the systematic corruption that hinders everything from rebuilding to job creation is ended, peace can once again unravel with astonishing speed.”
Nicole Tung

_{The book is available through the website www.reflectionsonpeace.org and Waterstones}