BY VERENA DOBNIK | Seventeen-year-old Julia Frazier of Fort Lee has an indelible memory of summer camp: She’s standing on a large seesaw, 10 people balancing at each end, with a glass of water teetering at the fulcrum. The exercise was meant to show the teenagers, who came from around the world, what it takes to negotiate a peace between warring factions. When one person moved, all the others had to quickly shift in response.
“If everyone took even a tiny step, it would upset the balance. We had to choose one person to take that step, support that person, and balance as a team. “Every person matters—big or small,” said Frazier, a high school senior who attends the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
The seesaw test was staged in the woods of Otisfield, Maine, as part of a summer camp run by Seeds of Peace, a private, non-profit organization founded by the late author and journalist John Wallach. Since 1993, Seeds has brought together about 2,000 youths from warring lands—Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, Cypriot Turks and Greeks, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, tribal members from Afghanistan.
Two events this month reinforce its international reputation: Aaron David Miller, the U.S. State Department’s senior adviser for Arab-Israeli negotiations, was named president of the New York-based organization. “Seeds of Peace reflects the type of effort so desperately needed in the Middle East,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said in announcing Miller’s departure.
Comedian Janeane Garofalo was the host of a benefit auction in Manhattan, where former President Bill Clinton noted that there have been 120 Middle East suicide bombings in the past two years. The Canadian pop band Barenaked Ladies was given the first MTV Seeds of Peace Award.
Seeds members have been touched directly by both war and peace. Asel Asleh, a 17-year-old Palestinian, was wearing a Seeds of Peace T-shirt when killed by Israeli soldiers during a rock-throwing protest in Israel two years ago. Similar shirts were worn by Seeds members invited to the White House in 1993, when Clinton hosted the signing of a Middle East peace accord between Israel’s then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat—a pact that did not endure.
Growing up in Fort Lee, Frazier planned to study marine biology or the environment. But her two weeks at the Seeds camp, as one of four American delegates, changed all that—inspiring her instead to seek out colleges with strong programs in international relations and conflict resolution. “Now I want to do everything in my power to solve problems between people—especially one on one,” she said. “Seeds has changed my idea about college.”
At the Maine camp, between competitive sports, music-making, and arts courses, she learned about centuries-old ethnic hatreds. Frazier was assigned to mediate discussions of the conflict in Cyprus, the Mediterranean island nation where Greeks and Turks coexist in an armed truce that periodically erupts in violence.
“Before the camp session, I knew nothing about that country, except that it was somewhere near Greece. And I thought, how can I possibly contribute anything?” Frazier said. Suddenly, she was living in a Spartan lakeside cabin with Greeks and Turks, one of whom had lost his grandfather in a political revenge killing. During intense face-to-face sessions called “Coexistence,” she listened to Cypriot youths lay out their island’s tortured history since it was granted independence by Britain in 1960: ethnic Greeks and Turks fighting for their respective rights; a CIA-sponsored coup and a 1974 invasion by Turkey; and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Greeks from their homes.
“After, they turned to me to ask what I thought. I was able to give them a kind of bird’s-eye view, because I wasn’t partial to either side, and I was sympathetic to what I was hearing—I spoke from the heart,” she said. “I said, ‘You are justified in having your own point of view. But you aren’t going to get anywhere if you’re just trying to prove that you’re right.'”
Frazier sees similar forces at work in social and family issues in her own country. “Conflicts have the same human roots, whether it’s East Coast-West Coast gang rivalry or family problems—everybody wants to be right,” she said.
Wallach, a son of Holocaust survivors, founded Seeds after years as a foreign correspondent covering the strife and failed diplomacy of the Middle East, hoping the camp could help bright young people from the region find the keys to peace. Seeds alumni “go home very, very different from when they arrive. I think they now know the enemy. … The enemy is now human,” Wallach said before his death last July.
Frazier understands that. “Not reacting with anger can be really lonely, but I’ve made the connection to Seeds: How you deal with your personal life determines how you deal with the world.”