From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY VIOLENCE AND CONFLICTviolence where both Muslims and Christians see themselves aseconomically and politically marginalised, former militants fromeach community encouraged 20 senior religious leaders to sign adeclaration of peace. Since then, these leaders have been credited withhelping to restrain violence during state and federal elections, andhave intervened in disputes in Kaduna schools, preventing minorarguments from turning into major incidents. 152Similarly, Christian church leaders in the DRC province ofManiema led their communities in calling on fighters to demobiliseand disarm, helping to ease tensions between the communities andex-combatants born of numerous instances of abuses during thefighting. Councils of respected community members, both men andwomen, designed reconciliation processes using traditional ceremonies.Medical and therapeutic help for women who had been raped, and thedistribution of seeds and tools to revitalise the local economy, alsohelped to heal the scars of war.While communities must act to protect themselves, the primaryresponsibility for addressing violence and armed conflict and foralleviating the suffering it causes rests with national governments. In aculmination to a decade of discussions, the UN agreed in 2005 thatevery government had a ‘responsibility to protect’ its population fromgenocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.That responsibility ‘is held, first and foremost, by national authorities’,it stressed, before going on to outline the international community’srole when states fail to comply (see Part 5). 153Governments are more likely to want to fulfil this duty, and to beable to do so, if they are accountable to the victims of conflict. Unlikefamine, war has taken place in modern democracies, when irresponsibleleaders exploit grievances for political and economic gain, or when thelure of ‘simple’ solutions overwhelms common sense. Yet democracyand an active citizenry can be an effective antidote to war, since theyencourage leaders to find political rather than military answers todifferences. 154In Colombia, which has been dogged by conflict and human rightsabuses for the past 50 years, human rights activists have risked theirlives by consistently challenging the government in the courts and themedia, and have won some notable victories. The Constitutional283