BY RAJESH JAGANATH | Indian and Pakistani high school students lived, ate, and played together for three weeks this summer at a camp in Maine as part of a program to enhance understanding between the youths of both countries.
This summer marked the first time that Indian and Pakistani youths met each other to discuss their lives and their futures. The summer camp was organized through the Seeds of Peace Program, an organization dedicated to conflict resolution. Its young participants came from societies that have recently experienced conflict.
John Wallach, the founder of Seeds of Peace, explained that his program was designed to “humanize conflicts that have been deliberately dehumanized.” The young people explored their own beliefs, assessed what their respective media have told them, and examined other influences on their lives.
U.S. and foreign officials greeted the Indian and Pakistani students along with other youths from the Middle East and the Balkans, on Capitol Hill on July 17. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, Christina Rocca, addressed the teenagers, praising their effort to “look at a traditional adversary in a new way, to begin to break cycles of violence.”
Among those attending the event were Tariq Ali, Embassy of Pakistan, and India’s Ambassador Lalit Mansingh. Both diplomats shook hands and praised the Seeds of Peace campers.
Akanksha Gandhi, a 14-year-old Indian participant, talked about her Seeds of Peace experience in interacting with Pakistani students. She said that she came to realize that “they’re just like us, exactly like us. They think like us and they talk about the same things we do. If we are so similar, we have nothing to fight about.”
Her comments were echoed by Sana Shah, a 15-year-old Pakistani girl, who said, “it doesn’t matter if you think differently because we have learned to accept one another with those differences. They can think differently and that’s not wrong.”
“I have just heard the Indian viewpoint. I had never even thought of the Pakistani viewpoint. You don’t just accept it and you might not agree with it, but the point is that you understand their view,” Shyam Kapadia, 15-year-old Indian student remarked.
Fareed Yaldram, 15-year-old from Pakistan, said that this summer helped both Pakistani and Indian youths to dispel negative stereotypes that they had grown up with. He, along with other participants, gave credit to their parents for their support in attending this program.
Seeds of Peace was founded in 1993 by author and journalist John Wallach to bring together Israeli and Palestinian youth to foster communication, understand the other side, and discuss how to achieve the peaceful future they both hope for. Since its inception, the Seeds program has grown from 50 to 450 participants yearly and has expanded to include other countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and South Asia.
Like many children in strife-ridden countries, the Indian and Pakistani youth were not yet born when the roots of conflict were planted. Yet countless of them have inherited the bitterness and anger erupting from the 1947 partition of the two nations.
Through the Seeds of Peace experience, the participants interacted in the comfort of a recreational setting in the woods of Maine, sharing cabins and meals, playing sports, and participating in art and music activities. Punctuating the program were special “coexistence sessions,” chances for the youths to express their frustration and confusion, free from the stifling environment they often find in their home countries.
Assistant Secretary Rocca, while praising the teenagers for their commitment to peace, cautioned that “ending cycles of violence is not the work of a summer or even of a decade. It takes more time, more persistence, more patience, and more courage than any of us could imagine.”
The most important part of the Seeds program is that it does not stop when the summer ends. Many of the teenagers plan on keeping in contact through the Internet, specifically through the Seeds of Peace ‘SeedsNet’. Several of the students said that they wanted to visit each other’s country and hoped to visit their new friends’ families and homes.