The Art of Accompaniment
Peace Brigades International volunteers observe and protect in world trouble spots

Tom Peacock

It is sometimes hard for volunteers working with Peace Brigades International to measure the value of their work - they don't build schools, they don't dig wells, and they certainly don't act as gun-toting, tank-driving peace-keeping policemen.

PBI volunteers act as defenders of human rights, but they are decidedly hands-off in their approach. In places like Colombia, Guatemala, Indonesia and Mexico, they make their presence known. But in an effort to maintain objectivity, the Peace Brigades volunteers leave the actual work of building and rebuilding societies to the local human rights workers they are trying to protect.

Peace Brigades International operates on the belief that it is inappropriate for outsiders to influence decisions made by local groups. For their mission to succeed, it is essential that the volunteers play a non-partisan role. Observe and protect, that is all.

That said, PBI's volunteers will accompany those who are under their protection into some very difficult situations. It's the sort of work that is not easily defined by directly tangible results, but is nonetheless valuable, since it opens up spaces that might otherwise have stayed closed to those seeking justice.

Most often the presence of the volunteers, wearing their beige vests bearing the green PBI logo, acts as a deterrent. Nothing happens, and the volunteers know they've done their job.

"The idea is that we're supposed to prevent things from happening," says Ward, a 25-year-old volunteer from Red Deer, during a recent interview from her base in Guatemala.

"We can't always prevent things from happening, but we hope we can reduce the possibility."

From 1983 until 1999, Peace Brigades International maintained a presence in Guatemala. It was here that the organization first developed its practice of international protective accompaniment.
During those years, the political situation in Guatemala gradually improved, and in 1999, three years after the end of the 36-year-long civil war, PBI closed its ground-breaking project there.

Recently, however, the situation has deteriorated once again in the Central American country. Human rights abuses began to occur in greater numbers, and PBI started to receive more and more requests for their accompaniment teams. In the summer of 2002, PBI decided to reopen the Guatemala project.

The organization has a team of six people on the ground in Guatemala, including Ward. The team ranges in age from 25 to 42. They hail from varied professional backgrounds - librarian, computer technician, banker, Ward who doesn't know what she wants to be - and they came to Guatemala from all over the world.

Ward first visited Guatemala in 2002, as an intern working with a peasant community organization. Her eight-month stint was sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency.

"I always had it in the back of my mind when I came down here that I didn't want to go home,' she says. "Even when I got onto the plane to go home, I knew I was coming back. If I could just do something to contribute, I wanted to do that."

Ward found her opportunity with PBI, and less than a year later, she was back in Guatemala. Her situation and her role this time around couldn't have been more different. During her first trip, Ward was living with a Guatemalan family, working within a Guatemalan community organization, and participating in workshops for indigenous women.

This time, she's working with an international organization, living together with her five international co-workers, and observing Guatemalan society from her objective standpoint as a PBI volunteer, rather than participating directly in the activities of the community.

"We are not imposing ourselves. We provide accompaniment. We open spaces for people already working on human rights - basic human rights, or other rights, such as access to land. We accompany them, so they can work without fear or intimidation," she explains a little hesitantly, admitting she's still getting used to the PBI approach.

One of the sites where the PBI team is working is a finca, a small farming community of about 80 families. The community was kicked off its ancestral land last April. Half of the families stayed on the land, as they had nowhere else to go. They endured daily harassment from members of the army who have a training centre nearby.

Recently, the country's judicial system ruled that the expropriation of the finca land was illegal, and the families have started reclaiming their plots. Ward says life on the finca has improved, largely thanks to the presence of the PBI volunteers.

"They are more comfortable, and more comfortable with us," she says. "There are fewer things that the army can do to try to intimidate people."

Ward recalls walking across an area of the finca supposedly under community control. "Soldiers were there gathering wood, but as soon as they saw the volunteers from PBI, they left. Maybe they wouldn't have left otherwise, but just our presence made a difference. It's small things like that."

Small things, intangible things, but things that may make a world of difference for people living in places where their basic rights as human beings aren't respected.

Another important part of the accompaniment work of PBI in Guatemala is protecting teams exhuming mass graves, so that the thousands of victims of Guatemala's civil war can have proper burials.

"Over the past three decades, tens of thousands of Guatemalans, the overwhelming majority of them indigenous people, were "disappeared" or extra-judicially executed by security forces personnel, and hundreds of villages were completely destroyed," states a report by Amnesty International.

One national widow's group PBI is accompanying, called CONAVIGUA, is working hard on the exhumation projects, and on the difficult work of establishing the fate of the victims, but they face constant challenges.
Amnesty International says that, "since [CONAVIGUA] was formed almost a decade ago, its members have been the target of repeated death threats, intimidation and physical attacks."

Government officials and members of the security forces are reluctant to allow the unearthing of the country's violent past, since many of them were directly involved in carrying out mass abductions and killings.

But the force of change is strong, and Ward says the exhumation movement is growing in strength.

"Before it was really clandestine and quiet. And now there are two major forensic organizations undertaking the exhumations."

Ward explains that for the Mayan community in particular, having a relative buried somewhere far from their home, far from their relatives, means their souls are not at rest. Undertaking the exhumations and carrying out proper burial ceremonies is part of the healing process.

Members of the PBI team have accompanied three separate exhumations so far and they are waiting for another one to start. The work is demanding and is becoming more and more dangerous.

The PBI volunteers have begun meeting with officials in the Quiche province, or department as it is called in Guatemala. "This is the department with the biggest history of violence," Ward says. "It's hard to be there, and it's tough talking to the army about what we're doing."

Many of the communities in Quiche suffered massacres, and the PBI team is going there to accompany those carrying out the exhumations of mass graves. To say the work is sensitive would be a major understatement.

"We meet with the officials to tell them we're there, and who we are. It's complicated, but they seem fairly open. That's their job," Ward says.

The PBI volunteers aren't there to interfere, "so they can't really see a problem with us being there," she adds.

With their highly visible vests and an openness to dialogue, the PBI volunteers work hard to establish a high-profile presence. Through long experience in many countries, the organization has determined this is the best way to ensure access and allow the volunteers to carry out their accompaniments and observations.

Peace Brigades International provides a neutral presence, but it also provides essential information for organizations who don't enjoy the same sort of access to trouble spots.

"It's still not a passive role. We hold meetings with authorities, collect information and report to certain individuals, organizations and governments," explains Erika Zarate, co-coordinator for PBI Canada.
This is a vital part of PBI's efforts to encourage democracy and respect for human rights. In this respect, PBI stands its ground. In 1998, for example, PBI was forced to leave Sri Lanka because the organization refused to allow the government to censor its reports.

What does it take to become a PBI volunteer? Zarate says the most important assets are probably an ability to think on your feet, to analyze a given political situation and to understand how a human rights organization functions.

She explains that the largest part of the final training session for candidates involves putting them in a difficult situation and seeing how they manage.

"The candidate must be astute, resilient, and must also be diplomatic," Zarate adds. "It doesn't matter if someone's gone to university or not." Although, she adds, it does help if they're well-schooled in the politics and culture of the country where they want to work.

Unlike many NGOs, PBI's approach means that its volunteers are not involved directly in the day-to-day activities of communities working to secure their rights. But their presence in many of the world's trouble spots has far reaching effects - both for the groups they are protecting and for prospective human rights violators - quietly asserting that the world is indeed watching.