Be With People - #Ukraine and Beyond

GET THEE HENCE

- Shakespeare, Henry V. The King shoos the French Herald Montjoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaVD3iBz7CU

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I am thrilled to be in Ukraine to chip in. I encourage people to “show up.” Just get here. Figure out how to chip in.

"Be with people."

"Meet them where they are."

Meet people in their space. ????????????????

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I have been applying this idea learned in Swaziland homesteads thirty years ago. People didn't visit enough, and so, people always appreciate the effort.

Show up. It means a lot.

I used it in Belgrade, as soon as the 78-day Kosovo conflict was concluded with an agreement. I hitchhiked from Kosovo with a Russian army convoy, past menacing Serbian tanks. The commanding officer questioned me a long time. He was high as a kite. The soldiers were drunk and stoned. But I didn’t feel threatened. Be yourself. These guys were just like any neighbors in Serbia on an assignment from hell. Russian soldiers were between 17 and 22. Kids, really. They got that convoy job because they could drive an uncomfortable truck for hours over awful roads without complaining a peep.

There were almost no cars on the road and no gas. After the Rooskies dropped me in Leskovac where they bivouacked (a little-known factoid, the Russian army resupplied in Serbia on the NATO-Plus Kosovo mission), I got a lift or a bus to Nis, one of the 4 great cities of Serbia, a country full of nice cities, with an old castle and park at the heart of town. No matter what, a few great restaurants where you feel welcome, cold beer, mashed potatoes, even in those days. I had a steak and kept going.

I persuaded a taxi driver to take me from Nis to Belgrade for 200 bucks. We were the only car on the road, a major highway. It was almost as if the dust and smoke were still in the air, how recent the conflict had ended. The driver moaned the whole way about how he had been forced to commit war crimes in Kosovo, and he just needed out. Could I get him to the USA, or Austria? He was in serious distress. He talked about killing himself, how badly he felt. He said he was ready to blow his brains out even while driving. I tried to listen and stay on his side, while worrying he might turn against me. I kept my hand on the door handle, hidden behind my knee, ready to pull and roll, in case things went badly at highway speeds. He was carrying a gun so I thought those odds better than getting shot at. Make note, right after the war, soldiers talked about their crimes and people they killed, because they were agonized. Soon enough – 6 months or a year – they buttoned up.

I was the first foreigner in Belgrade after Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finland President and Peace Envoy, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts. When people feel alone and isolated, you get a nice welcome and gratitude. Best hugs of my life. To this day, I can walk down the street and somebody will call out, “Mike, Legenda!” Perhaps needless to say, that shaped my views of conflict and solidarity to this day.

Same for Ukraine. Show up. Be there. I encourage all colleagues, comrades, friends, even rivals and displeasure-able personalities, show up anyway.

I learned that, too, in the death rattles of Apartheid in South Africa, and in hitting Mozambique right after the conclusion of the world’s longest civil war, from the 1970s through the early 1990s. I got to Bosna as soon as I could after the war (I was in Africa during the war).

Only later did I learn of this long tradition: others at Freedom House had done exactly that.

Freedom House board member Bayard Rustin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin) had trained the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolent strategies in Birmingham, 1955. A new Obama's-produced film about Rustin’s organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is due out this month. I hope A. Philip Randolph’s role is equally recognized.

Rustin and Freedom House President Leonard Sussmore were the only Americans to monitor Zimbabwe’s Independence elections in 1980 (prior to the Carter Center, IRI, NDI, and IFES). “Free on the day, not fair in the lead-up,” was Rustin’s trenchant conclusion. On an earlier visit to meet the lions of African independence in the 1950s, Rustin had met with student leader Kwame Nkrumah, later the first president of Ghana, and Nigerian student leaders (I know Nigeria less and can’t recall the leaders off the top of my head), concluding, “Africa can gain independence but miss freedom, due to nationalism and communism.” Prophetic words ring true seven decades on. Leonard Sussmore lived to 100 and I was lucky to hear him tell these tales in person.

Leo Cherne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Cherne) headed up Albert Einstein’s International Rescue Committee for four decades and was chair of the board of Freedom House. He was the first to go to Hungary on the heels of the Soviet invasion of 1956. He was also the first to go to Kabul, Afghanistan immediately in December of 1979 when the Soviets invaded. Talk about moxie. Which reminds me, I questioned whether I should go to Belgrade at all, and asked a Freedom House Fellow we were lucky to have on our team, Fred Whiting, a State Senator from South Dakota, Harvard Law, Fred was brilliant in all regards, just a wonderful guy. Senator Fred said, “You got the moxie. Go. You’ll figure it out.” With Fred’s encouragement, I pushed cars in a 4-mile line at the border into a country without gas. And once again yesterday, pushed a car into Ukraine, too, as the battery went dead.

I got lucky continuing that tradition without knowing about it.

Be with people.