Berghof Foundation: 50 years of conflict transformation

Interview
Inside
the Intra-
Afghan
Conference
for Peace
Basir
Feda
Head of Unit
Afghanistan
and Central/South
Asia at the Berghof
Foundation
The article on the previous page describes the Intra-
Afghan Conference for Peace, which you facilitated.
How did you experience it personally?
I had been assigned the role of a facilitator
at the very last minute and, to be honest, I was
neither prepared nor ready. Our Afghan partners
and the German Federal Foreign Office put an
enormous amount of political capital and trust into
this conference, which made this an extremely
daunting task.
But while pressure and responsibility were
high, the reward was even higher. The outcome
statement in which all participants agreed to reduce
violence and identified conditions and cornerstones
of a roadmap for peace was, of course, a huge
achievement, but what was even more valuable and
rewarding was to witness what happened in the room.
Participants opened up and shared their grievances
and pain — sometimes quite emotionally. They
started humanising each other and realised that they
had a lot more in common and that no single party
had a monopoly over religion or politics. This is the
essence of a dialogue.
The Intra-Afghan Conference was a historic first.
What made it possible, in your opinion?
First and foremost, trust: the parties’ trust
in each other but also the participants’ trust in the
conveners of the dialogue. This allowed us to take
away the right of self-selection from the various
groups and parties and put together a somewhat
unusual list of participants. While past attempts at
convening Afghan actors for a dialogue have been
very elitist — and unsuccessful — we tried to be more
inclusive in our selection of participants and invited
people from different constituencies and various
segments of society.
Even though there was criticism, which I
believe is inevitable in such highly contested contexts,
the dialogue and the way participants were selected
received a lot of public support, which made it hard for
anyone to openly and seriously undermine it.
You mention trust as a central prerequisite for
dialogue and mediation support work. How did you
manage to establish that trust with the different
parties in Afghanistan?
I believe that this is mainly due to our longstanding
engagement with all stakeholders. When we
began our activities in Afghanistan in 2012/2013, we
only worked with the High Peace Council. Once we got
a better picture of all the actors and their interests and
relations, we gradually expanded our engagement
and started to provide capacity-building and technical
support to a variety of actors, including the Taliban.
The latter was a particularly risky endeavour
at the time, both for us as an organisation and for
me personally, as I have family living in Afghanistan.
But it is only through this technical support and the
appreciation thereof — paired with my personal
relationships and networks in Afghanistan — that we
managed to build a relationship and develop trust with
our Afghan partners.
The dialogue in itself was successful. To what extent
did it also advance the peace process as a whole?
The dialogue conference and its outcome
document were an opener for the formal intra-Afghan
peace negotiations that started in September 2020.
They provided a roadmap that paved the way to the
current negotiation process and set an example of
what can be achieved if outside actors do not interfere
with Afghan ownership and Afghan leadership of the
process.
We must do everything to ensure that
these principles are also adhered to in the current
negotiations. Just like the dialogue conference, the
peace process will only succeed if it is truly Afghanowned
and if there is no interference or distraction
from impatient external actors driven by their own
domestic politics.
Would a peace agreement also mean the end of
Berghof’s engagement?
Irrespective of what is achieved, we will
provide our support as long as it is requested,
keeping in mind that a peace agreement is only one
step on a long and difficult path towards sustainable
peace in Afghanistan. It is for this reason that we
are increasingly focused on peace infrastructures.
The aim is to turn the negative peace secured by
an eventual agreement and characterised by the
absence of violence into a positive peace that brings
about a sustainable transformation of the conflict.
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