AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

opportunities. There is the good thing in the bad thing, the New
Beginning. The people who have seen this most clearly are the
entrepreneurs, from State or Capital, who descend upon a war-torn
society very willing to profit from disaster (they may sometimes
even be suspected of having organized some of the destruction).
There is space for the private sector, for their capability, if
not always for their motivation. Leaving it all to them could be
to substitute economic for military invasion and structural
violence for direct violence.
What is needed is a national dialogue with general citizen
participation. Nobody has monopoly on defining the goal of
development; and everybody is entitled to participate in the
process. To paraphrase Gandhi: there is no road to development,
development is the road. That includes the human development
accruing to everybody who takes on the challenge of imaging the
society and the world after the horror; the social development
that comes to a society that has a collective dialogue about its
own future; the world development coming from a world dialogue,
and the cultural development that comes out of new conceptions.
This should not be confused with the populist notion that
people are always right, elites never. There is room for city
engineers and architects, but not for those unable to listen to
people who shall live in their cities and houses, taking their
concerns and ideas seriously, continuing the dialogue till there
is some consensus. In short, once again there is wisdom in the
old Chinese adage of turning a bad thing into a good; but never
letting that serve as an excuse for the horror that struck.
The task of the peace worker might be to serve as catalysts
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