San Diego (special) -- The Catholic-sponsored University of San Diego is building a new peace center directed by a Jewish woman who helped former U.S. President Jimmy Carter negotiate a ceasefire in Bosnia in 1994 and the restoration of diplomatic relations between skirmishing Uganda and the Sudan in 1999.

The exact mission of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice is being mulled even as steel girders are beginning to reveal the imposing outlines of the on-campus building in which the center will host conferences and scholars' offices.

The executive director is Joyce Neu, who spent eight and a half years at the former president's peace center in Atlanta, Ga., before accepting the job in San Diego. A California native, whose parents still reside in the Los Angeles area, Neu recently told HERITAGE that the combination of returning to her home state and being able to fashion a peace program from scratch made for an irresistible opportunity.

While some peace centers focus on specific geographic regions of the world, others adopt thematic approaches to building peace, Neu said. As she develops recommendations for what niche the IPJ--Institute for Peace and Justice--should seek to occupy, Neu is weighing some intellectually exciting options.

One possibility, she said, would be to concentrate on how to build peace after two warring sides stop shooting at each other. "Once a war is over, people have to come together and rebuild, and nobody knows really how to do that; in many cases it is very ad hoc," Neu said. 

"Everyone agrees that five years after signing the Dayton Peace Agreement, for example, Bosnia is not a real stable society. And Bosnia is just one example. Look at Angola, which despite its agreement never had peace, went back to war almost immediately. Similar things have happened with Haiti and Cambodia; it has been very difficult to stabilize the situations."

Neu said one possible focus for the Kroc Center could be to concentrate its resources on developing answers to the questions "How do you build peace? What goes into peace-building? What would a good model of peace-building look like? What works? How do you get sustainable agreements? How do you get justice with peace?"

Another thematic possibility for the IPJ might be to focus on border issues. "There are a lot of border issues that cause conflict," she said. "So there isn't any reason why we couldn't look at border issues in terms of our own (U.S.-Mexico) border and other borders that have caused conflict and look at why, and how does one address these?"

Such an approach might delve into questions like "where should the border be?"

"Countries have to agree on where the border is, and that is not always clear," Neu said. "In many countries, there are problems because the actual geographic or political border is not the real border in terms of the people. You can often have a border that cuts across ethnic groups who belong together."

An example of this, she said, is the Kurdish nation. "I believe there are 40 million Kurds," Neu said. "There are so many countries, so many states, that don't have 40 million people in them, and yet here are a people of 40 million without a state." Another issue is that "you have a lot of different groups who are within states who believe they should be their own state. That is what we have with Kosovo, and it looks like the U.S. government is changing its policy for Kosovo. It may in fact become its own state."

A third possible niche "that has a lot of appeal, especially given what is happening in the Middle East right now, is the link between the grass roots and the leadership. How do you create a culture of peace with the grassroots to the extent that they do not allow violence to recur?"

Neu posited that "a sustainable peace requires people from all levels of society to stop demonizing the other." She said Israelis and Palestinians made such efforts but obviously they were insufficient to prevent the onset and continuation of the second intifada.

"What usually happens is an outbreak of violence is followed by a rejection of that violence by all sides and a recommitment to the peace process, but in this case that didn't happen right away," Neu said.

Among the methods for transforming a conflict from violence to peace is to attempt to develop a consensus on a variety of topics. For example, "you have historians from the two sides meet with historians from outside the region to talk about the textbooks. 'What are we teaching the kids? How do we create one text? How do we create one history for our region, which all view as fair?' That is a process that has been gone through in many societies.... You can't educate youth to believe that the people who live across the street from them, or who are their neighbors, are dangerous."

Neu said such efforts were made in Estonia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, and are now occurring in Bosnia. "It is not something that is real common yet, but it is something that is acknowledged as a real need."

Psychologists are another group of people who should be brought together in peace-making, Neu said. Psychologists from both sides, or the several sides in cases of multi-party conflicts, can be brought together "to talk about trauma. 'How do we get our people through this?' You have a country basically that is unable to make decisions because the people are traumatized by the conflict. One of the symptoms of trauma is the inability to make rational decisions."

Neu said in conflict areas throughout the world, "you have leaders who have witnessed atrocities, who have had people close to them killed. 

"Therefore, are they making decisions in the best interest of their people, or are they making decisions out of hatred for the other? "

Whichever niche the IPJ settles upon will help to determine what kind of "scholar-practitioners" it will seek for its faculty, Neu said. "The institute is not going to be an ivory tower," she said. "My vision for this institute is that we will have people who are scholars and really very fine researchers but who are interested in applying their research skills to practical problems."

So, for example, if IPJ chose "borders" as its focus, it would try to attract specialists in that field, who could not only teach a class, but who could help arbitrate border disputes. Similarly, if it chose "peace building," scholars with that expertise would be sought.

"The institute will basically have three basic branches or components," Neu said. "There will be an education program. We will offer a master's degree in peace and justice studies, and that will begin in Fall 2002. The educational program will most likely also provide other kinds of educational outreach. A possible example may be working with the military here in San Diego to provide conflict-resolution training, or basic understanding of human rights, especially for military forces involved in peacekeeping efforts."

Research in peace studies will be the second component

The third component will be to provide the IPJ building as a center for actual peacemaking and conflict resolution. "The institute is being designed with the notion that we would bring in high-level people" from nations experiencing conflict, Neu said. "We would be inviting people to come to what is a very peaceful, lovely environment to be able to speak honestly and outside the media's gaze, because San Diego is not a Washington or a New York. ... I view the institute as helping to provide a safe space for dialogue."

Philanthropist Joan Kroc donated $25 million for construction of the 90,000-square-foot IPJ building, which will include "an auditorium that will seat 300-350 people, and have break-out rooms for smaller groups," Neu said. 

"It will have state-of-the-art conference rooms, like a board room area which will seat 30-40 people. The technology through the entire building will be sophisticated. It means that there won't be any wires visible, the tables will all be wired (for sound and electricity). As far as I know we will have a production studio at the institute so we can do live satellite broadcasts. We will also have booths for simultaneous interpretation."

Neu said the IPJ also will maintain a residence that could house three or four visiting dignitaries. "If delegations came in, we would put them up at a hotel."

In addition to the IPJ, various USD academic departments which are now short of space will also be housed in the center's building. Neu doesn't anticipate that the IPJ will need too much space for its own faculty's offices. "Probably in the first three years, if we get up to 10 people (including support staff) it would be wonderful," she said. Part of her job will be to raise funds for operating expenses. The Kroc grant was for physical infrastructure.

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Although Neu's residence while growing up was Redondo Beach, where her parents had helped to found Temple Menorah, the family also lived in other cities. In 1960, when she was nine, the family moved to Brussels for two years because her father, a consulting chemical engineer, was retained to develop an agent for filtering beer. "Belgium was the largest beer drinking country per capita in the world."

While many American diplomats and military personnel in Belgium stuck together as part of an American colony, "we weren't part of that group .. Business people were completely excluded," Neu recalled. "I think my parents were not included in any of the social activities of the Americans overseas." The pattern was reflected in the American school, where Neu felt like such an outsider she asked her parents to let her attend a regular Belgian school, even though she didn't yet know how to speak French. "No one in our school spoke English. ...It was a good experience because my friends were Belgian kids, except for one Danish girl."

After graduating with a major in French and English literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Neu volunteered for the Peace Corps. She was sent in 1972 to Senegal, a French-speaking country in West Africa, where she taught English as a second language in the northern city of St. Louis.

"While I was there there were three Senegalese professors who were physically dragged off and put into jail with no charges brought," she recalled. "I visited one because he taught English like I did... He was in there for three months without charges brought. We were all terribly distressed at the injustice of all this, but none of us had a clue what to do. We didn't know how to take action.

"So that was one incident, and then there were instances of injustice with the students. They weren't getting the money; there was corruption. We were tremendously aware of how U.S. foreign aid was being wasted. 

"You would go to a market place and you would find huge sacks of grain that would say 'Gift of the people of the United States of America' and the market ladies would be selling them," Neu recalled. "They had cut open the bags and were scooping out grain and they would sell it to you. I doubt that they knew it wasn't supposed to have been for sale; it was a gift. But somebody at the docks got hold of it and sold it to somebody else."

There were also many positive experiences. In particular, she recalls her transfer to the Senegalese capital of Dakar and going to a market place and asking a woman sitting on the corner how much the tomatoes were. The woman did not answer her at first, instead saying pointedly, "Hello!" 

"They would teach you that they weren't going to sell you anything until you went through the greetings. In the Wolof language, the greetings are quite elaborate. You don't know these people, but you would ask about their family, and afterwards you could ask them how much the tomatoes were. Once you would go through that, people would know you and it would be a lot of fun."

Neu drew from the experience the lesson that 'negotiation wasn't only about the money; it was also about 'I am a person, acknowledge me. Don't just come to buy my tomato or cloth. Let's have some kind of exchange here.'"

Following Peace Corps, Neu worked for six years in the United States, including at an employment agency which placed workers in a variety of blue-collar jobs. "I remember thinking I never want another job where I watch the clock."

In 1978, Neu enrolled as a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Southern California. She did her doctoral dissertation in "socio-linguistics-- the use of language in a social context, looking at language as part of who you are. The focus of all that was to look how people talk in negotiations. What makes successful or unsuccessful outcomes in negotiations? I had outcome measures which included how much money people would make on a deal, but also other measures like how happy you were with the person you were talking to; would you want to see that person again?"

In studying negotiations, she discovered that some "very commonsensical rules" apply: "Things like interruptions are unhelpful, while listening- including the asking of questions for clarification--is helpful," she said. Questions for clarification "are perceived as someone is actually paying attention and listening. Another thing that was important, but surprised me a little bit, was that it was important to actually respond to a question. I was surprised how often people would ask a question and the other person either wouldn't hear them or wouldn't respond. That was a very big surprise to me in the data."

After receiving her doctorate from USC, she taught English as a second language at UC Irvine, then joined the faculty at Penn State, where in 1986 she helped to found the Center for Negotiation and Conflict Resolution.

In 1991 she joined the Carter Center, which is housed at Emory University. Her experiences in conflict resolution and serving in the Peace Corps in Africa were considered real pluses by those who interviewed her for the job as associate director of the conflict resolution program.

"President Carter's main interest (since leaving the Presidency) was in Africa and still is in Africa -- Ethiopia, Liberia, Sudan have been really primary focuses for him," Neu said.

She'll never forget the day she started her job. "I came on a day of a big conference that my program was sponsoring, and it included the entire International Negotiation Network, which was based at the Carter Center and was chaired by President Carter and included Desmond Tutu, Oscar Arias, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Andrew Young, Cyrus Vance and a lot of other eminent people. I sat at dinner with Desmond Tutu; he was my dinner partner. So I had no regrets about leaving Penn State."

Although she interacted with Carter on numerous occasions -- and has hanging in her office a framed letter from him and his wife Rosalind complimenting her work -- "you work closely with him and you don't, in the sense that you are not actually face-to-face with him very often. He prefers to have communication done via memo. ... We communicated with him 90 percent of the time via memo, and he would respond 'yes' or 'no.' The memos had check-offs, so it would be, for example, 'I recommend you call President Clinton.' And there would be boxes for 'I agree, yes' or 'no' and he would check. That was the way he communicated. President Carter spent about a week a month at the Carter Center. He was very busy while he was there. He had a very tight schedule. It was not like you could sit down and chat."

Everyone on the staff was familiar with Carter's autobiographical book Why Not the Best in which he told about working for Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was considered a very hard boss. Carter, like Rickover, "is a very demanding man, and he demands the same of himself," Neu said. "So when you do a particularly good job it is unusual for him to comment on it. He just expects it. He expects it of himself and he expects it of you. Every now and then you would get a 'good' on a memo, or 'I agree.'"

The first major project in which Neu became involved was "in late '94 when we went to Bosnia to negotiate a cease fire in that war and to try to get everyone back to the negotiating table. ...It was one thing negotiating a cease fire, but then we had to see that it was implemented. So it meant we were on the phone every single day, sometimes calling State Department people, explaining why the Serbs had violated the agreement yet again, or being told by the United Nations in Sarajevo that the Serbs were violating the agreement, so could we please call our Serb friends and get them to comply."

President Carter had been invited to Bosnia by Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, to talk about a ceasefire. Carter then informed Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic "that we had been invited to do this and would not accept, unless he agreed," Neu recalled. "Then because we didn't trust Karadzic to keep his word, we gave him five things he had to do within 48 hours to indicate his sincerity in actually doing something. I don't remember all five conditions; we worked them out in the back of the van, but one of them was that there were 17 U.N. humanitarian convoy trucks that were being prevented by the Serbs from getting to Sarajevo. One of those conditions was that those trucks had to be moved. Another condition was that there had to be a cease fire in Sarajevo. Another was that they had to release all Muslim prisoners of war under the age of 19. ..."

The conditions were met by the Bosnian Serbs, with whom the United States was not on direct speaking terms in December of 1994, although the U.S. did interact with them as part of a five-nation Contact Group. "President Carter has a belief that as long as people are causing destruction and killing people, you have to talk with them. Even if they don't keep their word, you have to talk with them. So we went in and President Carter negotiated a cease fire agreement between Karadzic and Izetbegovic. It was not perfect. There was one word that was different in the two versions of the agreement....One (favored by the Bosnian Serbs) implied that they would be starting from scratch; the other (favored by the Bosnian Muslims) implied they would start with the Contact Group plan...."

The Carter-brokered ceasefire was subsequently subsumed under a United Nations ceasefire, which later broke down. But eventually an agreement was forged in 1995 at the Dayton Conference.

In April of 1999, the Carter Center received invitations from President Omar Al-Bashir of the Sudan and President Yoweri Musevini of Uganda to help the neighboring countries reestablish diplomatic relations. Each country had been supporting rebel groups in the other, although there was not parallelism, Neu said. 

"The rebel group is southern Sudan (backed then by Uganda) is a legitimate opposition movement with an ideology, and popular support of the people although it doesn't always have good tactics and had done some horrific things," Neu said. 

"On the other side you had a Ugandan group, based in Sudan, which was a fundamentalistic Christian group, whom Rights Watch did a whole book about," she said. "UNICEF estimates that they have abducted up to 15,000 children. They terrorize their own people and burn their own villages, and it not clear that they have any popular support. It was a difficult negotiation because it was not a quid pro quo."

Neu was dispatched by Carter as head of a team to lay the groundwork for an agreement by which the two countries resumed diplomatic relations and pledged to stop supporting each other's rebel groups.

"This is still something that is ongoing and I am still following it every day in the news because it hasn't been resolved," Neu said. "We did get an agreement signed," but it still has to be implemented.

Neu said Carter "knew that I put myself in physical jeopardy" in Uganda and the Sudan. "The night that he concluded the agreement, I got a call saying he wanted to have a drink with me, which was very unusual--not to have a drink, but the notion that he would think about it. I asked if I could bring the team and he agreed, and I brought the whole team. There were maybe eight of us, and he toasted them, congratulating them, which was really something."

The IPJ director said resolving the Uganda-Sudan conflict is a piece in a much larger effort by the Carter Center to bring an end to the civil war in Sudan. She described that conflict as one of the bloodiest wars in history, with up to two million people killed. The Uganda-Sudan agreement helped the Carter Center to establish its credibility with the Sudanese, she said. Perhaps next, it will be permitted to broker peace in the larger Sudanese civil war.

Although there are numerous peace centers around the world , including another one named for Kroc at Notre Dame University -- the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies -- Neu said it is an unfortunate fact that there is more than enough conflict in the world to keep all of them busy.