Possible, p.13
Possible, page 13
Listening to Dennis Rodman and his insights that day encouraged me to devote the next two years to working on the North Korea conflict. Months later, in a meeting with a top expert in the White House, I asked if anyone in the government had ever talked to Rodman, the only American who had gotten to know Kim. The answer was no. He had been written off as unserious. Yet I found my conversation with him psychologically revealing and highly insightful.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un insulted each other heartily in the summer and fall of 2017. Trump labeled Kim “Little Rocket Man” and threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” In return, Kim declared, “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.” But to the surprise of almost everyone—except perhaps Dennis Rodman—the two adversaries became friends a year later at their first, historic meeting in Singapore.
While the three summits between the two leaders did not yield a peace agreement, they did change the psychology of the conflict. Although the conflict was far from resolved, it was transformed. The risk of nuclear war decreased dramatically, from as high as 50 percent, according to expert opinion, to less than 1 percent. I found myself sleeping more peacefully at night.
My experience with Dennis Rodman reminded me of the value of persistence in seeking to understand the other’s needs and dreams. Who could have foreseen the unlikely friendship that later developed between Trump and Kim? Trump was ridiculed when he talked about the “love letters” he had received from his new friend Kim. But they made a certain psychological sense to me, thanks to my conversation with Rodman.
This kind of listening is a bit like detective work. We are trying to get to the bottom of the story. Keep digging and listening until you hit gold—their dreams and fears. That is how you can begin to build a golden bridge.
LISTEN TO CONNECT
In conflict, we naturally start with where our mind is, what our position is, what we think is right. Deep listening means leaving where our mind is and starting the conversation where their mind is. It means listening from within their frame of reference, not just ours.
In deep listening, we listen not just for what’s being said but for what’s not being said. We listen not just to the words but to what’s behind the words. We listen for the other person’s feelings and perceptions. We listen for their wants and needs, fears and dreams. We are genuinely curious about them. We listen to connect.
I learned this lesson of listening to connect perhaps most vividly during my first meeting with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, eight months before the tumultuous midnight encounter I described earlier.
It was March 2003. In Venezuela, there was widespread fear of a civil war. Former president Jimmy Carter had asked me to meet with Chávez to explore ways to avert violence. I was anxious not to lose that precious opportunity to influence the country’s leader. I told myself that I might have only one chance and likely I would be granted only a few minutes of his time. What was the best advice I could offer? I began to think hard and started rehearsing what I would say.
А week before the meeting, I was visiting family in Brazil and, in the rainforest, heard someone sing an old song with a line that struck me like a flash:
“Do not offer advice to those who do not want to listen.”
The more I reflected on that little piece of indigenous wisdom, the more it resonated: Offer advice only if invited. Drop whatever agenda I had and just go into the meeting ready to listen. Be present and listen for where Chávez’s mind and heart were. Listen for the possibilities that might show up only in the moment. Accept the risk of losing the one chance I would have to get my prepared ideas across.
Dropping my agenda did not mean not preparing. If anything, it meant the opposite. To be attentive to all possibilities in the moment, I needed to research the man. I read up on Chávez, delved deeply into his speeches, trying to learn from his life story, listening for his drivers and dreams. Understanding Chávez as much as possible would help me meet him where his mind was.
The morning of the appointment, I took a moment to sit in the garden in front of the guesthouse where I was staying. The natural beauty helped calm my anxious mind and its rapid chatter.
An hour later, as my taxi approached the gates of the presidential palace, protesters blocked the way and pounded loudly on the hood. It startled me. Emotions of anger and fear were running high in the crowd, but eventually the taxi was let through.
Upon entering the palace with my friend and colleague from the Carter Center, Francisco Diez, we found a long line of petitioners in the corridor, citizens waiting for a moment with el presidente. It seemed as though our meeting might be just a quick courtesy call, over before it began. As Francisco and I waited for our turn, I took another moment to pause and clear my mind. I wanted to be ready to listen as deeply as I could and focus my full attention—to be able to meet the moment.
After waiting for an hour or so, Francisco and I were ushered into a vast ornate living room where the president was receiving visitors. He greeted us with a big smile and a firm handshake and motioned us to sofa chairs next to him. He looked at me expectantly.
“President Carter sends his warm regards,” I said.
“Gracias. Please convey mine to him.”
“I will, with pleasure.”
I paused and looked at him. “I understand we both have daughters who are five.”
“Ah, yes, Rosinés.” He smiled as he said her name. “And your daughter?”
“Gabriela. We call her Gabi. Aren’t they a joy at that age?”
“Si,” he agreed. “A big joy.”
“As I came in,” I continued, “I saw many paintings of Simón Bolívar. I’ve been reading an excellent biography about him. What a visionary and courageous leader!”
Chávez perked up. As I knew from my readings about him, the great nineteenth-century liberator of the Spanish colonies in Latin America was his idol, the leader he mentioned most with fervent admiration. Chávez’s dream, I sensed, was to be a modern-day Bolívar.
“My favorite painting of him is right here,” he exclaimed animatedly as he pointed to the giant portrait of Bolívar looking down at us.
“Do you know that is why I’m here?” he asked. “Back in 1992, when I was a colonel, I received orders to crush with force the people’s protests at rising food prices. Simón Bolívar warned, ‘Never open fire on your own people.’ So I organized an uprising and ended up in prison. And when I was released by popular demand, I started running for president.”
Chávez proceeded to tell me stories from his life in the military, the reprimands he received in the barracks for reading books on economics and politics, his time in jail, and his political campaign for the presidency. Almost an hour went by.
When he finished his story, he finally turned to me and asked me with curiosity:
“So, Professor Ury, what are your thoughts about our conflict here in Venezuela?”
That was my cue. I would offer advice only if asked.
“Señor Presidente, I have worked as a third party in many civil wars. Once the bloodshed starts, it can be extremely difficult to end. I believe that you, as leader of this country, have a great opportunity. Perhaps only you can prevent a civil war before it happens.”
“How would I do that?” he asked.
“What about starting a dialogue with the opposition?” I suggested.
“Talk with them?”
His face flushed, his eyes flashed with visible anger, and his tone of voice grew sharp and loud.
“They are traitors who tried to mount a coup against me and kill me less than a year ago right here in this room!”
He motioned with his hands to the very spot in the corner of the room where he had been detained. I paused and took a breath, not knowing quite how to respond. Rather than try to convince him, I simply reflected back what I had heard.
“I understand you perfectly. Since you can’t trust them at all, what possible use could there be in talking with them?”
“Exactly!” he replied.
Then an idea began to form in my mind.
“Since you don’t trust them one bit, let me ask you: Is there any action they could possibly take right now that would send you a credible signal that they were ready to change?”
“Señales? [Signals?]” he asked as he paused to consider the unexpected question.
“Sí.” I nodded my head.
“Well, for one thing, they could stop calling me a mono [monkey] on their TV stations.”
He gave a bitter laugh, contorting his face into a grimace as he pronounced the word mono. Clearly, he took it as a racist allusion to his part-indigenous ancestry.
My ears perked up. I had observed elsewhere how feelings of humiliation significantly increase the chances of escalation into violence.
“That’s utterly unacceptable,” I said. “It needs to stop, of course. Is there another signal like that they could send?”
“Well, they could stop putting uniformed generals on television calling for the overthrow of the government. That’s treason!”
Chávez began to warm to the idea of signals. As our conversation drew to a close, he designated the minister of the interior, sitting off to the side, to work with Francisco and me to develop a list of practical actions that each party could take to build trust and de-escalate the crisis. He asked us to return the next day to report on our progress.
A window of possibility had just unexpectedly opened up.
As I said goodbye to the president, I glanced at my watch. Two and a half hours had passed. I am convinced that had I followed my first idea to begin the meeting by offering my recommendations, he would have cut the meeting short after a brief hearing. Instead, because I had listened to connect with him, the meeting had gone on to be productive and became the first of many. A relationship developed. The gamble had paid off.
President Carter called me later to report that he had heard back from Chávez that he had really enjoyed our meeting. Carter seemed surprised—as was I. After all, I was a yanqui, and Chávez was known to be suspicious of Americans. I was an academic without any power, and he was a powerful political leader. It was an unlikely human connection.
It was a big lesson for me. Before the meeting, I had made the all-too-common mistake of focusing on what I could say to him, not on how I could listen to him. That is the conflict trap we all too often fall into, particularly in today’s times.
The wisdom of that song from Brazil reminded me of the futility of offering advice to those who don’t want to listen. It did not mean taking a passive stance—on the contrary, it meant that I would have to work to prepare the other person to want to receive my advice. If I wanted Chávez to listen to me, naturally I needed to begin by listening to him.
This experience, perhaps more than any other, taught me to take a risk and let go of my prepared agenda, as hard as that might be. Only then, I learned, could I hope for a breakthrough.
DROP YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS
One of the biggest barriers to our understanding the other side is our preconceptions. In situations of conflict, we feel threatened and naturally go into a defensive posture. Our thinking becomes limited, and we easily descend into stereotypes. We judge the other.
Putting ourselves in another’s shoes calls on us to suspend our judgment and drop our preconceptions. It is a lesson that, even as an experienced mediator, I find myself having to learn again and again.
In 2012, I began working on the Syrian civil war with my colleague David Lesch, a distinguished American historian specializing in the politics of the Middle East. He had written an insightful biography of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The war had been raging for a year, and David was lamenting to me about the utter absence of dialogue between the warring parties. They had almost no understanding about how the others perceived the situation and what they really wanted. David had tried to organize an informal confidential dialogue, but fear, suspicion, and animosity had gotten in the way.
So I proposed to him an exercise in indirect listening. He and I—and other colleagues—would listen to knowledgeable and well-connected leaders on all sides of the conflict. We would ask them the same set of a dozen or more questions: Why had the conflict started? What were their concerns and fears? What were their dreams and aspirations for the future? We would collect all the answers and then convey back to the leaders what we had learned. While the exercise would not replace direct dialogue among the parties, we hoped it might help increase mutual understanding as a prelude to future negotiations.
As part of the exercise, David, his colleagues, and I came together for a week just before Christmas 2012 outside the Turkish city of Gaziantep, a few miles from the Syrian border. The war was raging, with thousands of people dying and millions of refugees fleeing in every direction.
We had arranged to interview a dozen Syrian rebel commanders and opposition political leaders. They would literally step out of the battle to be interviewed, only to return afterward to a living hell. The atmosphere was heavy with the daily loss of lives. One rebel commander we spoke with had just lost his wife and children in the fighting. I felt a heaviness in my chest and my gut roiling as I listened to the accounts of bloodshed and violence.
On the last day, our interviewee was a young man in his late twenties, heavyset, with a beard. A commander of more than three thousand men, he had been introduced to us as a Salafist jihadist.
I observed my own stereotypes coming into play, remembering the tragedy and trauma of the 9/11 attacks. As I looked at him, I decided to deviate from the standard questions and try a more personal approach to delve beneath the surface:
“What was your occupation before the war?”
“I was in university.”
“Oh. What were you studying?”
“Poetry.”
“Poetry?” I was surprised.
“Yes, I was studying poetry. I come from a family of poets. In fact, I won first prize in a national poetry contest.”
He recited, half singing, a couple of lines of poetry in Classical Arabic. It sounded beautiful, and I found myself moved.
“So how did you end up as a fighter?”
“When I was sixteen, I wrote a poem that made an allusive reference to the political situation here. The authorities found out and took me in for interrogation. In prison, I was tortured.”
“Tortured?” I repeated, feeling shocked.
“Yes. I was tortured three times. Last year, when the revolution started off, it was peaceful. But then the security forces opened fire, and I saw my friends and fellow protesters being slaughtered in front of my eyes. I had no choice but to join the rebels.”
I could not help but feel a wave of instinctive empathy.
“I understand. If I may, I’d like to ask you another question. I am curious about your personal dream. After the war, what would you like to do?”
“Well, I am not likely to survive. But if I do, I met a young woman in Egypt, and I’d like to marry her and have a family. That’s my dream.”
He had a gleam in his eye as he spoke. We then turned to his fears and hopes:
“What are you most worried about when you think about the future of your country?”
I was imagining he would name his political enemies—inside and outside the country. Instead he said:
“What I worry most about are the extremists.”
I was startled. I had classified him as one of them in my mind.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I’m in favor of sharia law, of course. But I don’t believe in imposing it by force. I’m worried about those who are fighting with us who want to impose it by force. That would really divide our country.”
Finally, I asked him:
“Tell me, is there any personal message you would like us to bring back to people in the West?”
He paused for a moment.
“Yes, when they watch the news about Syria, they see us as numbers. Just ask them to imagine that your child, your wife, is one of those numbers. Every single one of us has a life and a soul. We all have souls. Just tell them that.”
I found myself speechless for a moment, humbled. The negative preconceptions I had brought to the conversation dissolved. Through listening with curiosity and empathy, I was able to get out of my shoes and place myself in his. It didn’t mean agreeing with his views; it meant understanding him as a human being.
Who knows? If I had been born in his shoes, in that same gut-wrenching situation, would I have followed the course he had? Who could honestly say?
As we said goodbye, the young commander said something telling: “You know, other Westerners—journalists and diplomats—have come to speak with us. But you are the first ones who really listened.”
It was an important lesson for me, underscoring that if I wanted to truly listen, I would have to drop my preconceptions. It is hard to do in conflict situations, but an attitude of open-minded curiosity helps. In that unlikely conversation, with each successive question and answer, my understanding and empathy deepened.
I was reminded of an old saying: the longest distance in the world is the distance between the head and the heart. It doesn’t mean giving up our rational faculties. It means using both our heads and our hearts to tap into our full potential.
TO LISTEN IS TO RESPECT
I sometimes ask people in conflict this question:
“Can you recall a moment when someone important to you didn’t listen? How did it feel to be unheard?”
I hear answers such as:
“Disrespected.”
“Unseen.”
“Angry.”
“Diminished.”
“Lack of trust.”
“Excluded.”
“Now recall a moment when you felt truly listened to. How did it feel to be heard?”
People answer:
“Valued.”
“Like I belonged.”
“Included.”
“Respected.”
In my conflict experience, I have long noticed that the cheapest concession you can make, the one that costs you the least and yields the most, is to listen and thereby offer a little respect.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un insulted each other heartily in the summer and fall of 2017. Trump labeled Kim “Little Rocket Man” and threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” In return, Kim declared, “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.” But to the surprise of almost everyone—except perhaps Dennis Rodman—the two adversaries became friends a year later at their first, historic meeting in Singapore.
While the three summits between the two leaders did not yield a peace agreement, they did change the psychology of the conflict. Although the conflict was far from resolved, it was transformed. The risk of nuclear war decreased dramatically, from as high as 50 percent, according to expert opinion, to less than 1 percent. I found myself sleeping more peacefully at night.
My experience with Dennis Rodman reminded me of the value of persistence in seeking to understand the other’s needs and dreams. Who could have foreseen the unlikely friendship that later developed between Trump and Kim? Trump was ridiculed when he talked about the “love letters” he had received from his new friend Kim. But they made a certain psychological sense to me, thanks to my conversation with Rodman.
This kind of listening is a bit like detective work. We are trying to get to the bottom of the story. Keep digging and listening until you hit gold—their dreams and fears. That is how you can begin to build a golden bridge.
LISTEN TO CONNECT
In conflict, we naturally start with where our mind is, what our position is, what we think is right. Deep listening means leaving where our mind is and starting the conversation where their mind is. It means listening from within their frame of reference, not just ours.
In deep listening, we listen not just for what’s being said but for what’s not being said. We listen not just to the words but to what’s behind the words. We listen for the other person’s feelings and perceptions. We listen for their wants and needs, fears and dreams. We are genuinely curious about them. We listen to connect.
I learned this lesson of listening to connect perhaps most vividly during my first meeting with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, eight months before the tumultuous midnight encounter I described earlier.
It was March 2003. In Venezuela, there was widespread fear of a civil war. Former president Jimmy Carter had asked me to meet with Chávez to explore ways to avert violence. I was anxious not to lose that precious opportunity to influence the country’s leader. I told myself that I might have only one chance and likely I would be granted only a few minutes of his time. What was the best advice I could offer? I began to think hard and started rehearsing what I would say.
А week before the meeting, I was visiting family in Brazil and, in the rainforest, heard someone sing an old song with a line that struck me like a flash:
“Do not offer advice to those who do not want to listen.”
The more I reflected on that little piece of indigenous wisdom, the more it resonated: Offer advice only if invited. Drop whatever agenda I had and just go into the meeting ready to listen. Be present and listen for where Chávez’s mind and heart were. Listen for the possibilities that might show up only in the moment. Accept the risk of losing the one chance I would have to get my prepared ideas across.
Dropping my agenda did not mean not preparing. If anything, it meant the opposite. To be attentive to all possibilities in the moment, I needed to research the man. I read up on Chávez, delved deeply into his speeches, trying to learn from his life story, listening for his drivers and dreams. Understanding Chávez as much as possible would help me meet him where his mind was.
The morning of the appointment, I took a moment to sit in the garden in front of the guesthouse where I was staying. The natural beauty helped calm my anxious mind and its rapid chatter.
An hour later, as my taxi approached the gates of the presidential palace, protesters blocked the way and pounded loudly on the hood. It startled me. Emotions of anger and fear were running high in the crowd, but eventually the taxi was let through.
Upon entering the palace with my friend and colleague from the Carter Center, Francisco Diez, we found a long line of petitioners in the corridor, citizens waiting for a moment with el presidente. It seemed as though our meeting might be just a quick courtesy call, over before it began. As Francisco and I waited for our turn, I took another moment to pause and clear my mind. I wanted to be ready to listen as deeply as I could and focus my full attention—to be able to meet the moment.
After waiting for an hour or so, Francisco and I were ushered into a vast ornate living room where the president was receiving visitors. He greeted us with a big smile and a firm handshake and motioned us to sofa chairs next to him. He looked at me expectantly.
“President Carter sends his warm regards,” I said.
“Gracias. Please convey mine to him.”
“I will, with pleasure.”
I paused and looked at him. “I understand we both have daughters who are five.”
“Ah, yes, Rosinés.” He smiled as he said her name. “And your daughter?”
“Gabriela. We call her Gabi. Aren’t they a joy at that age?”
“Si,” he agreed. “A big joy.”
“As I came in,” I continued, “I saw many paintings of Simón Bolívar. I’ve been reading an excellent biography about him. What a visionary and courageous leader!”
Chávez perked up. As I knew from my readings about him, the great nineteenth-century liberator of the Spanish colonies in Latin America was his idol, the leader he mentioned most with fervent admiration. Chávez’s dream, I sensed, was to be a modern-day Bolívar.
“My favorite painting of him is right here,” he exclaimed animatedly as he pointed to the giant portrait of Bolívar looking down at us.
“Do you know that is why I’m here?” he asked. “Back in 1992, when I was a colonel, I received orders to crush with force the people’s protests at rising food prices. Simón Bolívar warned, ‘Never open fire on your own people.’ So I organized an uprising and ended up in prison. And when I was released by popular demand, I started running for president.”
Chávez proceeded to tell me stories from his life in the military, the reprimands he received in the barracks for reading books on economics and politics, his time in jail, and his political campaign for the presidency. Almost an hour went by.
When he finished his story, he finally turned to me and asked me with curiosity:
“So, Professor Ury, what are your thoughts about our conflict here in Venezuela?”
That was my cue. I would offer advice only if asked.
“Señor Presidente, I have worked as a third party in many civil wars. Once the bloodshed starts, it can be extremely difficult to end. I believe that you, as leader of this country, have a great opportunity. Perhaps only you can prevent a civil war before it happens.”
“How would I do that?” he asked.
“What about starting a dialogue with the opposition?” I suggested.
“Talk with them?”
His face flushed, his eyes flashed with visible anger, and his tone of voice grew sharp and loud.
“They are traitors who tried to mount a coup against me and kill me less than a year ago right here in this room!”
He motioned with his hands to the very spot in the corner of the room where he had been detained. I paused and took a breath, not knowing quite how to respond. Rather than try to convince him, I simply reflected back what I had heard.
“I understand you perfectly. Since you can’t trust them at all, what possible use could there be in talking with them?”
“Exactly!” he replied.
Then an idea began to form in my mind.
“Since you don’t trust them one bit, let me ask you: Is there any action they could possibly take right now that would send you a credible signal that they were ready to change?”
“Señales? [Signals?]” he asked as he paused to consider the unexpected question.
“Sí.” I nodded my head.
“Well, for one thing, they could stop calling me a mono [monkey] on their TV stations.”
He gave a bitter laugh, contorting his face into a grimace as he pronounced the word mono. Clearly, he took it as a racist allusion to his part-indigenous ancestry.
My ears perked up. I had observed elsewhere how feelings of humiliation significantly increase the chances of escalation into violence.
“That’s utterly unacceptable,” I said. “It needs to stop, of course. Is there another signal like that they could send?”
“Well, they could stop putting uniformed generals on television calling for the overthrow of the government. That’s treason!”
Chávez began to warm to the idea of signals. As our conversation drew to a close, he designated the minister of the interior, sitting off to the side, to work with Francisco and me to develop a list of practical actions that each party could take to build trust and de-escalate the crisis. He asked us to return the next day to report on our progress.
A window of possibility had just unexpectedly opened up.
As I said goodbye to the president, I glanced at my watch. Two and a half hours had passed. I am convinced that had I followed my first idea to begin the meeting by offering my recommendations, he would have cut the meeting short after a brief hearing. Instead, because I had listened to connect with him, the meeting had gone on to be productive and became the first of many. A relationship developed. The gamble had paid off.
President Carter called me later to report that he had heard back from Chávez that he had really enjoyed our meeting. Carter seemed surprised—as was I. After all, I was a yanqui, and Chávez was known to be suspicious of Americans. I was an academic without any power, and he was a powerful political leader. It was an unlikely human connection.
It was a big lesson for me. Before the meeting, I had made the all-too-common mistake of focusing on what I could say to him, not on how I could listen to him. That is the conflict trap we all too often fall into, particularly in today’s times.
The wisdom of that song from Brazil reminded me of the futility of offering advice to those who don’t want to listen. It did not mean taking a passive stance—on the contrary, it meant that I would have to work to prepare the other person to want to receive my advice. If I wanted Chávez to listen to me, naturally I needed to begin by listening to him.
This experience, perhaps more than any other, taught me to take a risk and let go of my prepared agenda, as hard as that might be. Only then, I learned, could I hope for a breakthrough.
DROP YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS
One of the biggest barriers to our understanding the other side is our preconceptions. In situations of conflict, we feel threatened and naturally go into a defensive posture. Our thinking becomes limited, and we easily descend into stereotypes. We judge the other.
Putting ourselves in another’s shoes calls on us to suspend our judgment and drop our preconceptions. It is a lesson that, even as an experienced mediator, I find myself having to learn again and again.
In 2012, I began working on the Syrian civil war with my colleague David Lesch, a distinguished American historian specializing in the politics of the Middle East. He had written an insightful biography of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The war had been raging for a year, and David was lamenting to me about the utter absence of dialogue between the warring parties. They had almost no understanding about how the others perceived the situation and what they really wanted. David had tried to organize an informal confidential dialogue, but fear, suspicion, and animosity had gotten in the way.
So I proposed to him an exercise in indirect listening. He and I—and other colleagues—would listen to knowledgeable and well-connected leaders on all sides of the conflict. We would ask them the same set of a dozen or more questions: Why had the conflict started? What were their concerns and fears? What were their dreams and aspirations for the future? We would collect all the answers and then convey back to the leaders what we had learned. While the exercise would not replace direct dialogue among the parties, we hoped it might help increase mutual understanding as a prelude to future negotiations.
As part of the exercise, David, his colleagues, and I came together for a week just before Christmas 2012 outside the Turkish city of Gaziantep, a few miles from the Syrian border. The war was raging, with thousands of people dying and millions of refugees fleeing in every direction.
We had arranged to interview a dozen Syrian rebel commanders and opposition political leaders. They would literally step out of the battle to be interviewed, only to return afterward to a living hell. The atmosphere was heavy with the daily loss of lives. One rebel commander we spoke with had just lost his wife and children in the fighting. I felt a heaviness in my chest and my gut roiling as I listened to the accounts of bloodshed and violence.
On the last day, our interviewee was a young man in his late twenties, heavyset, with a beard. A commander of more than three thousand men, he had been introduced to us as a Salafist jihadist.
I observed my own stereotypes coming into play, remembering the tragedy and trauma of the 9/11 attacks. As I looked at him, I decided to deviate from the standard questions and try a more personal approach to delve beneath the surface:
“What was your occupation before the war?”
“I was in university.”
“Oh. What were you studying?”
“Poetry.”
“Poetry?” I was surprised.
“Yes, I was studying poetry. I come from a family of poets. In fact, I won first prize in a national poetry contest.”
He recited, half singing, a couple of lines of poetry in Classical Arabic. It sounded beautiful, and I found myself moved.
“So how did you end up as a fighter?”
“When I was sixteen, I wrote a poem that made an allusive reference to the political situation here. The authorities found out and took me in for interrogation. In prison, I was tortured.”
“Tortured?” I repeated, feeling shocked.
“Yes. I was tortured three times. Last year, when the revolution started off, it was peaceful. But then the security forces opened fire, and I saw my friends and fellow protesters being slaughtered in front of my eyes. I had no choice but to join the rebels.”
I could not help but feel a wave of instinctive empathy.
“I understand. If I may, I’d like to ask you another question. I am curious about your personal dream. After the war, what would you like to do?”
“Well, I am not likely to survive. But if I do, I met a young woman in Egypt, and I’d like to marry her and have a family. That’s my dream.”
He had a gleam in his eye as he spoke. We then turned to his fears and hopes:
“What are you most worried about when you think about the future of your country?”
I was imagining he would name his political enemies—inside and outside the country. Instead he said:
“What I worry most about are the extremists.”
I was startled. I had classified him as one of them in my mind.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I’m in favor of sharia law, of course. But I don’t believe in imposing it by force. I’m worried about those who are fighting with us who want to impose it by force. That would really divide our country.”
Finally, I asked him:
“Tell me, is there any personal message you would like us to bring back to people in the West?”
He paused for a moment.
“Yes, when they watch the news about Syria, they see us as numbers. Just ask them to imagine that your child, your wife, is one of those numbers. Every single one of us has a life and a soul. We all have souls. Just tell them that.”
I found myself speechless for a moment, humbled. The negative preconceptions I had brought to the conversation dissolved. Through listening with curiosity and empathy, I was able to get out of my shoes and place myself in his. It didn’t mean agreeing with his views; it meant understanding him as a human being.
Who knows? If I had been born in his shoes, in that same gut-wrenching situation, would I have followed the course he had? Who could honestly say?
As we said goodbye, the young commander said something telling: “You know, other Westerners—journalists and diplomats—have come to speak with us. But you are the first ones who really listened.”
It was an important lesson for me, underscoring that if I wanted to truly listen, I would have to drop my preconceptions. It is hard to do in conflict situations, but an attitude of open-minded curiosity helps. In that unlikely conversation, with each successive question and answer, my understanding and empathy deepened.
I was reminded of an old saying: the longest distance in the world is the distance between the head and the heart. It doesn’t mean giving up our rational faculties. It means using both our heads and our hearts to tap into our full potential.
TO LISTEN IS TO RESPECT
I sometimes ask people in conflict this question:
“Can you recall a moment when someone important to you didn’t listen? How did it feel to be unheard?”
I hear answers such as:
“Disrespected.”
“Unseen.”
“Angry.”
“Diminished.”
“Lack of trust.”
“Excluded.”
“Now recall a moment when you felt truly listened to. How did it feel to be heard?”
People answer:
“Valued.”
“Like I belonged.”
“Included.”
“Respected.”
In my conflict experience, I have long noticed that the cheapest concession you can make, the one that costs you the least and yields the most, is to listen and thereby offer a little respect.
