BIPPI
B's Independent Pro-Peace Initiative

Description of the project
 

Introduction

I. The project: motivations and content

A. Where does the idea come from?
B. Public opinion and correct information
C. Why did I start this project?
D. Bruno’s Independent Pro-Peace Initiative: BIPPI
E. Working in international teams
F. What makes this project unique?

II. General information about a thematic camp

III. Plan of the project

I. The project: motivations and content

A. Where does the idea come from?

After the First World War some Christian activists started to organize international voluntary workcamps with Swiss, French and German people to promote reconciliation between the Nations. This was the start of a huge movement which sought to affirm the fundamental causes of lasting peace. After more than 80 years this movement is called today Youth Action for Peace (YAP).
Thanks to this first impulse, workcamps are organized today by hundreds of NGOs everywhere in the world. They work through the twin tools of no-formal education and collective life “towards human justice and peace through support of cultural, socio-economic and political freedom”. They are a fantastic tool to build peace among the peoples based on the idea that people learn how to respect each other when they share daily life and tasks.

Since 2000, some leaders of international voluntary workcamps have regularly tried to approach discussion on international politics as a free time activity during their workcamps. The goal was to push the volunteers to concern about issues like war and peace, the role of the international institutions such as UN and EU, to know about the Millennium Development Goals, and to build and exchange their own opinions on such topics.
The experiments were totally successful, since everybody in the camps could improve their knowledge and freely show their opinions. Youngsters from any corner of the world, from different backgrounds and political ideas, from different life experiences and projects could exchange information and points of view about politics and conflicts in a relaxed atmosphere of mutual learning.

Still, these experiments were isolated. They were not part of a larger systematic program of work with the young generations to improve their involvement in political issues, about peace keeping and peace building. Many people in the world think that this work should be done. In Europe and worldwide, some organizations discuss about this possibility and are ready to support projects about it. Many tools exist to be used, among them the “All Different All Equal education pack” published in 1996 in more languages by the Council of Europe.

B. Public opinion and correct information

In a well-known letter of protest addressed to US President George W. Bush at the start of the second war in Iraq, the objector and famous writer Paulo Coelho said:
“Thank you for having achieved something that very few have so far managed to do in this century: the bringing together of millions of people on all continents to fight for the same idea, even though that idea is opposed to yours.
Thank you for making us feel once more that though our words may not be heard, they are at least spoken – this will make us stronger in the future.
Thank you, because, without you, we would not have realised our own ability to mobilise. It may serve no purpose this time, but it will doubtless be useful later on.
Thank you for allowing us – an army of anonymous people filling the streets in an attempt to stop a process that is already underway – to know what it feels like to be powerless and to learn to grapple with that feeling and transform it.”

By his words, whether we agree with him or not, he pointed out the power of public opinion, which is a fact.

What Coelho didn’t say is that the public opinion can be easily manipulated pro or against something or somebody. In 2002, the one-million-people demonstration for peace in Paris easily became an anti-American and anti-Bush event (“Bush Blair assassins” was the main slogan that was shouted out and it was before the war!) .
While many people were down in the streets in a peaceful way to show their democratic disagreement to what they considered an unfair war, in the same streets many largely organized groups were attacking America. They used violent slogans and panels, showing shocking pictures of murdered children, advocating death for the American leaders and destruction for the American interests in the world. These shows and a demonstration for peace don’t go together. This is also a fact.

Here is the danger; many leaders in history ‘filled the streets’ against their adversaries, pushing masses here and there at their pleasure. Many dictators did it as well as many ‘democratic’ leaders. People are manipulated through campaigns of false information, through lack of knowledge, through slogans and shocking images.

In an article that appeared on www.opinione.it in June 2002, Sergio della Pergola (professor of demography at the Jewish University in Jerusalem) and Miriam della Pergola (director of the bulletin Kol Haitalkim) listed 13 methods currently used by the most famous Italian newspapers to manipulate information, giving out several examples of it.

Mr. Olaf Kondgen from Konrad Adenauer Foundation affirms: “To all politicians and decision makers in post war Germany - across the political parties - it was clear that a lack of knowledge and consciousness about what democracy really meant had strongly contributed to the catastrophe of the so called Third Reich. This was not to happen again.”

In one of the 4.040 articles we could find in 2004 on www.google.com at the voice “manipulation of the public opinion”, we can read: “The American journalist and political scientist Walter Lippmann has observed that there has been a tendency in democracies to make a mystery out of public opinion but that there have been skilled organizers of opinion who understood the mystery well enough to create majorities on Election Day.”

Always some “so-called neutral” information evidently supports one of the parts in a conflict. This "discovery" highlights the importance of having really neutral, diffused, complete and honest information on the conflicts in the world. It can serve as a tool to work on their resolution. Informing people about wars is a fundamental part of the way towards peace.

C. Why did I start this project?

Well, this is the short story of my life.

After many experiences as journalist, teacher and animator for youngsters, I studied and worked for a long time in my hometown, Naples in Italy, as a designer and architect. At the same time I was volunteering on ambulances with the Italian Red Cross and other smaller organizations.
In 1998 I started to travel abroad and learn from different cultures and societies.
After being for one year vice-director in a 64 rooms hotel, in 2000 I entered Solidarités Jeunesses (SJ), French branch of Youth Action for Peace (YAP), first as a volunteer and afterwards as an employee in a local development project where I worked with international volunteers and disadvantaged people.
Since that till 2004 I have taken part in 20 international voluntary workcamps, the half of them as camp leader, the majority of which in France.
I have even taken part in several different projects in France, Spain and Germany, with several European organizations.
During these years I was in touch with people coming from any of the five continents: I learned so much from them. I even learned how to speak and write English, French, Spanish and some German.
All this gave me the opportunity to bring up many exchanges about war and peace. So I started to ask to myself what I could do to be a more active part in building a better world.
As not anybody has the skills to enter politics and fight directly against wars, I don’t feel like I have these skills. On the other side I could work much better at the base of education for a culture of peace in providing anybody the means and the information to become actor and not spectator in this changing world. Many don’t believe in true information which probably doesn’t exist. But I strongly believe in honest information, as honest and as complete as possible. So, thanks to the help of a German friend, Micha, I put on a project in which I feel comfortable and give to it all my energies, using my personal skills and what I learnt during my life.
The project shown in these website is called BIPPI as my nickname on internet. BIPPI is the acronym of Bruno’s Independent Pro-Peace Initiative. Then, as I want to share this project with all the volunteers who will wish to, I decided to eliminate my own name from the name of the project which became B's Independent Pro-Peace Initiative.
BIPPI fits perfectly with my skills and knowledge, with the omnipresent wish to engage myself in the struggle for peace and equality, with the diffused feelings of this ‘new age’ and with the religious/agnostic roots of my own personality.

Today BIPPI exists thanks to the support of many volunteers from everywhere in the world.

D. B’s Independent Pro-Peace Initiative: BIPPI

BIPPI is a no-profit independent initiative.

Recalling that:
peace is not definitively achieved in Europe;
war is still a terrible scourge in the whole world;
we must all completely refuse war as a way to solve conflicts;
we all should work hard to “win the peace”;
consciousness and knowledge are at the base of a true democratic power;
we are all responsible of our common house, the planet Earth,
BIPPI’s aim is to work with young people and older people on education for a culture of peace.

BIPPI’s goal is to build up a free access internet website presenting dossiers about every conflict in the today world, with original documents, history, interviews, links and everything that can help to go deeper and deeper into the knowledge of any conflict, by a neutral and fair approach. This site is to be translated from English to the most important European languages, plus Russian, Arab, Chinese and Swahili. It will be linked to all the subjects working for peace-building and peace-keeping on the planet.
Everybody in the whole world can visit the website, inform himself about a conflict and understand the reasons of both the parts on the ground, escaping from any kind of manipulation; so everybody can "easily" get a personal conscious knowledge of the topic.

BIPPI’s means to achieve the goal are mainly thematic international meetings to be organized everywhere in the world, in partnership with local organizations.

BIPPI’s main work is collecting information, documents and interviews through internet, newspapers, cable TV and personal contacts with people worldwide.
Group leaders are trained with the aim to lead workshops and meetings with international volunteers. By these activities dossiers will be worked out of the topics.

BIPPI is simply the response to the fundamental need of correct, neutral and complete information to diffuse knowledge and consciousness about the existing conflicts, in a world in which the contacts among people become faster and faster, in which everything can be said and can easily join everybody. In a world in which everybody can easily repeat a lie so many times to make it become a truth!
Truth is the first casualty of war!

E. Working in international teams.

After experiencing dozens of international voluntary workcamps everybody can be conscious of the big potential that lies in a group of international young people. Youngsters come from everywhere in the world to meet with each other, to discover and experience the diversity, to show their own culture and to learn about the others. They have energy and will, ideas and resources, time and curiosity. They have “voluntas”, which means they engage themselves voluntarily to achieve the aim, without being chosen or forced to. They will join the project enthusiastically, after they pick it up in the huge net of voluntary international projects in the world, through brochures or specialized websites.
Their different origins and backgrounds will guarantee an honest approach to every topic and the opportunity to divulgate the results of any work in more languages, to reach the biggest possible number of people

F. What makes this project unique?

Internet sites about history and conflicts already exist. Why to make one more?
Everybody can easily find information about everything on the net, but where does this information come from? Can we be sure that it is the truth? Being the internet a cultural and economic issue, could all the ideas have the same space, the same quantity of pages, the same possibility to be found and read? In which language, by which rate of knowledge?
In the recent Italian political history, for example, the debate on pluralism of information, independence of press and ‘par condicio’ (equal conditions) is very diffused.
There are several reason to consider BIPPI a unique project.

• BIPPI will be easy to consult, written in a simple language, made even for people that don’t have big knowledge about history.
Youngsters and people from different countries and backgrounds will write the dossiers together. Everybody will bring her/his contribution and everybody will work to guarantee simplicity, according to her/his own sensibility and capacity of comprehension.

• BIPPI will be independent, not corrupted by propaganda and wrong information.
Youngsters and people from different countries and different political ideas will write the dossiers together. Everybody will bring her/his contribution and everybody will work to guarantee an honest and complete research of the truth.

• BIPPI will be complete.
Little by little dossiers will be made about every conflict in the world. All listed under a unique homepage. It will become a sort of encyclopedia about conflicts, their causes and their solutions, a start point to go deeper in any question concerning war and peace.

• BIPPI will be impartial and fair.
Youngsters and people from different countries and different political ideas will make sure that all the parts involved in the conflict will have enough place to explain their own reasons. The history of the conflict will be written by international groups using these criteria and links will be assured with associations and organizations supporting both sides.
Of course, much attention will be put on ‘extreme’ ideas (religious fundamentalism, terrorism, political extremism, racism and so on), by the fundamental criterion that this initiative is to support peace processes among the parts in conflict.