In the first of a series of profiles of people with ideas big enough to change the world, Haydn Shaughnessy talks to a peacenik with a difference.
In 1982 Scilla Elworthy, a former student at Trinity, Dublin, stood with a million people on a New York pavement calling for global disarmament. The UN was hosting a special conference on weapons-control. The world's peace movements, in response, organised the biggest peace rally ever held to underline their own emphatic message - disarm now. Scilla was at the conference as an official observer. She went back into the conference hall and what she witnessed that afternoon changed the direction of her life. The opinion of a million people on the street made no difference to any of the countries attending.
Scilla's activities over the next two decades led to Peace Direct, a charity that supports practical conciliation measures in the world's conflict zones.
The route to Peace Direct was low-profile and hands-on. Her first venture, Oxford Research Group, has become an influential peace-broker by organising meetings and seminars that typically bring together parties to major conflicts, or significant leaders in potential trouble spots. One highlight was in 1998 when she arranged for a British admiral, air vice-marshal, and general to visit China to meet the Chinese leadership and discuss nuclear weapons policy.
Today she supports Sami Velioglu, an Iraqi who settled in Britain but who has gone back to his home in Kirkuk to open an advice and representation centre. For Scilla, the idea is simple. Let other people campaign in the streets; Peace Direct supports people on the ground, people like Sami, who are willing to risk their own safety to take the small steps necessary to turn a persisting conflict into a durable peace.
"There is no work for people in Kirkuk," Sami says. "The oil industry is at a standstill because of terror attacks. People are poor and the situation is appalling ... going from bad to worse."
Kirkuk typifies post-war Iraq in the sense that this conflict, on top of Saddam's ruthless regime, has brought dislocation, looting, rape and other crimes. Sami's team of interviewers are there to listen to the victims and to represent their complaints to the local Iraqi leadership, US and other foreign troops.
Sami and the people who work in his advice centre live with the threat of violence but the direct threats are receding, he says, as the advice centre wins trust among the local population. The centre has campaigned for local justice and for work. As a result, the coalition authorities began employing Iraqis to clear the debris and rubble left over from the battles that formerly raged there and that resulted from post-war terror attacks.
As a student in Iraq, Sami, like most students in the early 1980s, trained to be a soldier and he believes he is mentally and physically strong enough to endure the threats and uncertainty. While Scilla was observing at the UN, the Iraqi government was training men like Sami to fight the Iran-Iraq war.
Sami fled rather than fight. He spent five years on the move between Iran, Turkey and home, before settling in Britain. First among his many problems back in Kirkuk was establishing in the eyes of local people that he was independent of the foreign military presence. He believes he has succeeded.
"Our interest is in using the Kirkuk centre as a model for the rest of Iraq," says Elworthy. "What Sami is doing is defining what people need in Kirkuk and Iraq. We can't do that for them and nor can the western authorities. Having deposed Saddam we have this responsibility, though. We need to support local people to take positive steps. We want to make the point that peace calls for as much courage as fighting does."
Kirkuk though is like no other trouble spot in Iraq. Saddam Hussein Arabised the traditional oil-rich Kurdish region and now the Kurds are back, camped in their thousands outside the city. The next few months are critical to Kirkuk's future with Kurdish nationalists divided over an all-or-nothing strategy or compromise in Kirkuk.
Sami's promise to the people there is: "Your voice will be heard." The next few months will tell who listens. In the meantime, Sami and Scilla have taken one small, but indispensable, step forward.