Daily Times
Published Date: Mar 6, 2013
Leaders vow to control violence among communities
Local
leaders hailing from various districts across Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab vowed to control violence and promote peace in their
communities through collaborative and result-oriented approaches.
The
five-day training workshop on peace building, which started on February 1,
concluded on Tuesday. The workshop was jointly organised by Sustainable
Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and Search for Common Ground, Pakistan
(SFCG). The training aimed to enhance the capacity of Pakistan’s local leaders
to explore issues affecting them through a constructive approach that is geared
towards reconciliation and peace building.
Sixteen
participants, including local political leaders, tribal elders, religious
scholars, Jirga members, district government officials and representatives from
civil society organisations and the private sector, attended the workshop.
These trained leaders for peace would also participate in the forthcoming
district-level dialogue forums, where they will engage in constructive
discussions on peace building and democratisation processes. SDPI Executive
Director Dr Abid Suleri said that conflict transformation implies finding a
common ground between conflicting parties, which essentially creates a win-win
situation for everyone. The participants learned successful negotiation skills,
including establishing common goals, focusing on interests and not positions,
separation of people from the problem, inventing options for mutual gain and
openness to third-party assistance, through the workshop.
“We are standing at a point in Pakistan’s history when there is an urgent need
to localise the concepts of peace and security,” said SFCG Country Director
Ammara Durrani. “Our local communities have indigenous solutions and a genuine
social will to resolve conflicts through creative collaborations. We need to
explore and harness this tremendous social capital,” she added.
The
SFCG country director and SDPI executive director distributed certificates
among the participants of the workshop in the end.