- Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
India and Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka,
North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea.
The armed conflicts involving those countries went on
for years and involved extensive diplomatic negotiations
to come to some sort of peace accords.
But before those more formal negotiations could take place,
the groundwork had to be laid by individuals working
often in secret and certainly out of the attention
of the press.
And now we're going to call attention to at least one
instance of extensive negotiations on a more
individual level.
My guest is Joe Elder.
He's the Professor of Sociology, Culture, and Languages
of Asia at the UW-Madison.
And welcome to University Place.
- Thanks, Norman, glad to be here.
- It's going to be a fast-paced conversation, I think,
given all the experience you've had.
And I gather some of it, though it took place years ago,
coming relatively recently to light.
Why were you, in specific, involved in these negotiations?
- I think a series of things that I had done
and then a series of historical events I had
no control over.
I became interested in India right after college.
The first job I had after finishing Oberlin College
was to go to Madurai, South India, and teach English,
for which I was totally unqualified.
I had no preparation, knew no Tamil language,
but in the two years I was teaching English there
I became fascinated by India and decided that whatever,
whatever degree I got I wanted to focus on India.
I decided on sociology
because that's what I'd already started.
Then I decided if I'm going to specialize in India,
I'd better also learn the North Indian language, Hindi,
which is much more widely used.
So I was lucky to get a grant from the Ford Foundation
to study a foreign language throughout my graduate career.
I ended up spending two years in a village in North India
with my wife and two kids living in a tent,
in which case there was nobody in the village
who spoke English so my Hindi became quite good.
Came back, got my degree.
First job was teaching in Oberlin College, which was fine.
It was my alma mater.
But in a small liberal arts college, I was allowed to teach
only one course on India and the rest was sort of
standard stuff.
At that point the University of Wisconsin received a grant
to become a research center for South Asia.
And I had a phone call from Henry Hart in the
Political Science Department, and he described heaven to me,
which proved to be true.
So I came here in 1961 in two departments,
Sociology and, at that time, Indian Studies.
And ever since I've had this great focus on South Asia
and also sociology.
So that got me set up in the field.
I became a Quaker during the war with Korea.
I had to decide was I going to enlist or be drafted.
And I had seen what happened during wars when I was a kid
growing up in Iran.
My parents were missionaries.
And I said I can't be trained to kill anybody,
so I said this was something I couldn't do.
So I either would go to prison or I would do something else.
My draft board was very kind and said okay,
we won't send you to prison, but do something else.
That also got me involved with the Quakers.
They have a long history of being opposed to wars
and refusing to use violence.
So as a Quaker South Asia specialist,
that's where everything sort of came together.
I was here.
I was chair of the department.
A war had broken out between India and Pakistan in 1965.
An ugly war, it lasted about two weeks.
A lot of officers were killed on both sides.
Pakistan conquered some Indian territory.
India acquired some Pakistan territory.
And then a cease fire was called, but there was no peace,
it was just a temporary halting of fighting.
So that went on from September, October, November
with no ultimate resolution to it.
And now the fact that I was an India specialist
entered in because during the struggle for independence
when Gandhi was working against the British,
he used Quakers to carry messages.
- [Norman] Did he?
- Here were Quakers who were Englishmen or Englishwomen
and they could carry messages to the viceroy.
Then the viceroy could write a letter,
and they could carry it back to the prisoner, which he was.
So there was this sort of odd dialogue with Quakers
who were sympathetic to Gandhi and Gandhi's non-violence
and also British citizens.
So it occurred to the British Quakers that since this
has worked a little bit in the struggle for independence,
maybe there was some goodwill there that the Quakers
could use to get in touch with Pakistanis and Indians
and see if there was something useful that could happen.
So they came up with the idea
why don't we send some Quakers?
They wanted both British and American.
They found two British senior Quakers,
both well-experienced in India.
They were looking for an American Quaker who knew
something about India.
Bing, okay.
- They didn't have to look too far.
- So I had the phone call, and they said
Joe would you be interested in going on
a fact-finding mission to India and Pakistan with two
other Quakers sort of following on the legacy
of the Quakers and Gandhi?
And I said, you know, I would love to,
but I'm chair of the department, the budget, this, that,
and the other, so realistically I can't possibly do it.
And I hung up.
I turned to my secretary,
and I said I just turned down a fantastic offer.
And she said what was it?
And I said the chance to go to India with these two Quakers
and see if there was something we might do
that might be helpful.
And she said why did you say no?
And I said well, I'm important.
I have to sort of take care of.
And she said three wonderful words: who needs you?
[laughing]
I said what do you mean?
She said look, two other people have been chair
of the department, they'll be happy to step in.
Call those guys back.
So I got on the phone.
Within 15 minutes I said is the job offer still open?
And they said yes.
So within two weeks I was in Washington meeting
the Indian ambassador and the Pakistani ambassador
and explaining to them what was going to happen.
And then as soon as winter break came, I flew to England
and met the two other Quakers.
So that's how I sort of got launched on this thing
because I was not necessary back on the Madison campus.
- It helps, I suppose.
- Who needs you?
- But now you mentioned, Joe,
that you spent all this time in India.
- [Joe] Yeah.
- Did the Pakistanis have any qualms about you being biased
at all or are you just carrying messages?
- The key thing, it was interesting.
They were angry.
Both sides had different attitudes towards British
and Americans, which was kind of cute.
It meant that when we were in Pakistan, they liked America,
so they would speak to me and ignore the two Englishmen.
In India they'd ignore me and speak to the two.
- Now okay, I can see why they would ignore the English
because of the colonial history involving both India
and Pakistan. - Right.
- But why would the Indians be antithetical to Americans
at that point?
- At that point the US was sort of allied with Pakistan.
We had arms treaties and stuff like that.
So it was kind of bizarre to have this thing
where they turned their backs and they're talking to you
not to them.
But what impressed us most was, we arrived early in January,
and in the interim, the Soviet Union had decided to play
a broker on this operation.
They called the president of Pakistan and the prime minister
of India to Tashkent.
And they worked out a Tashkent declaration,
which essentially said let's return the prisoners,
let's let the civilians get back together,
let's restore things to normal,
let's end this cease fire and have a peace treaty.
So the peace treaty was signed as we were on our way
to India and Pakistan.
The day after it was signed, Prime Minister
Lal Bahadur Shastri from India had a heart attack and died.
So there was this treaty that had been signed
by President Ayub Khan of Pakistan
and Prime Minister Shastri from India that now was sort of
hanging in the open.
Each of them had promised not to yield to the other.
They said we're not going to give up an inch of territory,
our sons died fighting for this.
So they both had to sort of go back and face
a hostile audience.
And the question was would this thing even hold out?
So that was the moment in which we arrived.
We went to Karachi first, which was in Pakistan.
Very quickly, remarkably quickly, when they heard
the word Quaker they let us, gave us access
to various people who often worked with Quakers
when India was a single country.
And then within less than a week we had an invitation
to meet President Ayub Khan.
So this was going from being three people who were
sort of can we find something to do to go meet the president
of Pakistan who was suffering the humiliation
of having to come back and go back on his word.
But it was, in a sense, the only that thing he could do.
Go ahead.
- The difference between India and Pakistan
is primarily religious?
- Yes.
At the time of India's independence,
about 20% of the population were Muslim and 80% Hindu,
give or take.
And the Muslims were concentrated in the northwest
and the northeast, so for a long time Gandhi had hoped
that they could all stay together,
but as independence approached, the Muslims in the northwest
and northeast felt less and less comfortable.
That once it's independent we're going to begin
losing power, they'll ignore our wishes, and so on.
And when Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
the spokesperson for the independence of Pakistan,
stepped in and said the only solution to this is going to be
an independent India and an independent Pakistan
in two sections, it was something that Nehru agreed to
with great reluctance,
and Ghandi was extremely sad and had no choice.
Said this is not at all what I've been working for.
So on Independence Day, Gandhi actually fasted.
He was not at all celebrating the fact
that this was cut into two.
The two governments looked a lot like each other.
Their constitutions are almost identical.
In Pakistan, the president had to be a Muslim and, I think,
the governor general had to be a Muslim.
But that was the only sort of reference to Islam.
The rest was the secular laws and voting
and cameral legislation and all the rest.
So there wasn't that much difference.
And then the Army had to be divided into a Pakistani Army
and an Indian Army. - Sure.
- So often you have people who have gone to the cadet school
together and had been same camp together
and now opposed to each other. - Opposing sides.
- And this was fairly complicated.
Actually, one thing that we saw while we were there
on this first trip was the generals' meeting to settle
the question of returning prisoners of war.
We had no idea how spooky that was because keeping records
in a war is pretty chaotic.
The International Red Cross had come to supervise this,
and these were three civilians from Switzerland.
And their job was to make sure that every name of a prisoner
the Pakistanis had went back to India, and every name
the Indians had went back to Pakistan.
And very quickly they discovered each side
was hiding people.
- [Norman] Hiding people?
- These were officers that they just wanted
not to let go back.
So there was this spooky world where they were saying
we think there are two or three people that India
has not told us, and if you tell us of two or three people
you are hiding, we might be able to get them loose.
But they had this feeling that when it was done,
there could be somebody who would be forever left
in some sort of prisoner of war camp.
So they were doing that while we were there.
We also watched the two generals meet to sign
whatever the document.
And ironically, the Pakistani general was a Muslim,
and India sent a Muslim general too.
- Oh, did they?
- So you had two Muslim generals,
one from India and one from Pakistan.
- Pakistan, though, when you say it was divided,
it was East--
- [Joe] East Pakistan and West Pakistan.
- And separated by a big chunk of geography.
- By 900 miles, that's right, yeah.
And eventually East Pakistan became a separate country.
It became Bangladesh.
- Yes, right. - A decade or so later.
- Were you at all involved, then, in visiting prisoners
of war or anything like that,
or were you reserved strictly for abstract negotiations?
- Not on that case, no.
It was mostly carrying messages back and forth.
We were impressed that President Ayub Khan even gave us
the time, but was clear he was very serious about this.
And then he said something which I hadn't really realized.
He said you know when countries go to war, the first thing
they do is to break off any way of communicating.
You shut your embassies.
You close down your high commission offices.
- [Norman] With your opponent.
- With your opponent, and then there's nobody to talk to.
So you hear the barrage of hostile things from
the other side and you're depending upon spies
and all sorts of things.
And you're making decisions based on flawed information.
And the fact that you could go on the other side
and carry a message or something I deeply appreciate.
And could come back with messages from that side.
So we realize that sort of inadvertently we were there
at a good time when he did want to leave a message,
have a message sent to India.
Ironically, when we first met him,
India still didn't have a prime minister.
Lal Bahadur Shastri died and there was a sort of struggle
for who would become the next prime minister.
And then lo and behold it was Indira Gandhi,
Prime Minister Nehru's daughter.
So when we went from Pakistan to India on our first trip,
he'd asked us to meet whoever the prime minister was.
And there was Indira Gandhi.
And Indira Gandhi remembered the Quakers.
Remember, it was Horace Alexander who carried messages
for her father and so on.
So we had a very friendly meeting with her.
And I will never forget that meeting.
We went into the prime minister's office.
And there was a table with, you know, Life Magazines,
and they all had Indira Gandhi's picture on them.
- [Norman] Sure, sure.
- And then in she comes.
Okay, we've seen you before.
- So if you compare these two leaders,
the Pakistani and we'll say Indira Gandhi,
I get the impression from what you said so far, Joe,
that they were both rather warm and cordial
and reasonable people.
- Certainly to us they were, yeah.
In fact, at one point one of the other Quakers said
it seems to me that the higher you go, the cooler the heads.
You have the people down below who have to look tough
and argue, but up at the top these are people who know
how complex the situation is, know that if things don't
work out lives will be lost and a lot of damage will occur.
So they're looking for ways around the situation
which may seem intractable.
And here if they can get in contact with the other side,
recognizing they also realize that there's a lot of bluster
and a lot of bluff.
We're not gonna give an inch, and so on,
but when it comes to the real world,
if we work something out we'd much rather do that.
- Yeah, history has plenty of examples of that, doesn't it?
Kind of 54 40 or fight kind of thing, you know.
- Right, yeah, and it's down here, the guys.
Ah, we're not gonna give an inch.
And the others come on, let's just cool it.
Let's be realistic about it.
- So in the sequence of events, there was a cease fire
in place when you went over---
- That's right. - To convey these messages.
Then the Soviets brokered a peace treaty.
- Yeah.
Then there was the implementation of the treaty.
- So you were helping to implement it
as much as anything else.
- Mostly just get the dialogue going,
and it was going already.
In fact, then could the head of Pakistan communicate with
the head of India during this process of replacing
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
with Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri who'd died.
So there was this sort of non-junction of what was going on.
- So did it hold?
- It did, not forever.
There was another war before long.
- We're talking about what, 19--
- This was '65. - '65, right, okay.
- And the next war wasn't until '71.
So we'll take our breaks as they come.
- And you from the distance of six years
and now several thousand miles being back in Wisconsin,
I assume, how did you react to that?
What were you thinking when the 1971 conflict started?
- '71 was not directly related to the Kashmir issue,
which had been the trigger in the first one.
There was this section that Pakistan said
Kashmir's ours, India said Kashmir's ours.
And the war was over that.
- And if you see that on a map, I remember as a kid,
it would be striped.
One country would be green and the other might be white,
and Kashmir was green and white stripes.
- Each one claims.
- Yeah, big claim.
- I had a cartographer friend of mine who published
a book of maps in the area,
and he had a terrible time getting the book shown
in either Pakistan or India.
That line is not right.
And he'd say this is the cease fire line.
No, no, no, that doesn't count.
It's all of ours, it's all of ours.
- So '65 was about Kashmir.
What was it about in '71?
- It was Bangladesh trying to become independent,
East Pakistan becoming independent from West Pakistan.
It needn't have happened, but your comment that there were
900 miles between the two meant a lot of things.
The people in the East spoke a completely
different language.
It was Bengali, they didn't speak Urdu.
The official language was Urdu.
The Bengalis had a long, proud history of literature
and culture.
And as the economy worked, the West became
the economic powerhouse and the East became where you sold
rice and sugarcane and took the money
from there to the powerhouse.
So as the years went on it got more and more strained.
We're being exploited by the West.
And so finally, there was an election.
The East technically won.
The West said forget it, we're not gonna let your party
run us, and a civil war broke out.
It broke out in March of '71,
and it was a horrible thing, this war.
10 million people from East Pakistan fled
because it was going so awful.
India entered to help the Bangladeshis in a sort of
two-week war and defeated Pakistan
and created a new state, Bangladesh.
Then India did something pretty impressive.
They said we're only going in to solve this problem,
we're not going to take Bangladesh over.
And within two months, they left Bangladesh holding
something like 80,000 prisoners,
which they weren't gonna let go for a while.
So the prisoners remained for a couple years
until it was sorted out,
and Pakistan officially apologized to Bangladesh.
But that was a whole sort of different issue.
For a while, the Quakers asked if I would be prepared
to go into that situation, but it happened so quickly
and ended so quickly that there was no entry point.
But it could have been an issue if it had taken longer.
- Well, there was another long-standing conflict
that India was involved with in a place that
we don't think of every day as we do Pakistan, and that's
what used to be called Ceylon and now is Sri Lanka.
- Sri Lanka became independent about the same time
India did, one year later.
A long colonial history.
The Dutch were there, the British were there.
The majority of the population in Sri Lanka are Buddhists,
but once again geography becomes important.
There is a section of Tamil-speaking Sri Lankans.
Okay, you have India here with the Tamils in the south
and Tamils in the northern part of Sri Lanka.
They're Hindu mostly.
And during the British period, the Tamils
were kind of intrigued by the British culture.
They went to the colleges, they became the lawyers,
they became the journalists, the academics.
Whereas the Sinhalas, the Buddhists,
kept a little bit apart,
continued studying the Buddhist traditions.
So when Sri Lanka became independent, very quickly
this minority group of Tamils were sort of running things.
And tensions began to emerge as to who's going to get into
college and who's going to be paying, getting elected,
and so on.
And the Sinhalas, being the majority,
they finally decided enough is enough.
We're gonna say if you don't speak our language,
you're gonna be second-class citizens,
we're gonna restrict the number of Tamil kids
getting into college so the Sinhala kids
can get into college.
So a series of provisions went in there.
Now the Tamils, who had been kind of the upper group
but the minority, said this is impossible,
we can't go on forever and ever.
So war broke out in 1984
with the militant Tamils setting up a group
called the Tamil Tigers.
- Right.
- And they became a guerrilla movement fighting against
the Sri Lankan government.
Ironically, India tried to be the bargain maker here.
India said, look, this is terrible.
So for a brief period of time, the Indian Army sent
a peace-keeping force to stand between the Tamil Tigers
and the Sri Lankan government.
Within two months, they were being attacked by the Tigers
and by the Sri Lankans.
Nobody liked them, and it was the worst defeat
in India's history up to that time because they were losing
soldiers from both sides.
And finally they just had to withdraw.
It wasn't working out.
So what they hoped was going to be a fairly quick cease fire
or settlement went on and on and on into the 2000s
before it was finally ended.
- And this is, in case you missed it,
Sri Lanka is an island.
- It's an island off the southern tip of India.
- Yeah, some distance from India.
- Yeah.
- So a thing unto itself in a way.
- Right, its own history and long heritage.
Actually the Buddhists there feel about Sri Lanka
almost like Jews feel about Palestine.
The story is that Buddha, who was teaching in North India,
sent a prince and a group of colonists to settle
in Sri Lanka and make it a Buddhist country.
Now whether it's accurate or not is an open question, but--
- [Norman] That's the way they feel about it.
- Yeah, but Sinhala is a North Indian language,
it's an Indo-European language,
and Tamil is a Dravidian language.
So there seems to be some basis in the fact that this is
a group of people that came from the north
to found a Buddhist country.
So when the tensions began to build up,
the Sinhalas sort of said to the Tamils
if you don't like it here, go back to India
- Sure, sure. - Where you came from.
It was centuries later.
They got very, very ugly.
In 1984, there was one of these horrible moments
when the city goes crazy.
The city of Colombo was the capital, and the Tigers
had attacked a vehicle full of Sinhalese soldiers
and killed them all.
And the government of Sri Lanka decided to have
a royal funeral for these young men who lost their lives.
And that led to a riot, which then led to a pogrom
against the Tamils.
For four or five days, it was any Tamil living in Sri Lanka
was in great danger himself.
So it was at that time a year later, the Quakers in Britain
once again said why don't we see if there's some way
we can move into this.
So since I was now an experienced message carrier,
they got in touch with me, and I said sure.
So there were two of us who went, a British,
a very thoughtful, very experienced British Quaker,
Adam Curle, and myself.
We went to Sri Lanka to see if there was anything
we could do, drawing upon the Indian experience.
We now kind of had a premise that we could lay
before people, saying we've done this in India.
It seems that when things fall apart,
it's very hard for people to speak to each other,
so if you do want us to speak to each other we are happy
to carry messages.
We don't write anything.
We will do this if both sides want us to carry messages.
We won't become an advocate for one or the other.
- When you say you won't to write anything.
You won't write anything down,
or you won't distribute anything to the press?
- We won't write any messages.
- [Norman] Really?
- There's nothing they can take from us.
So here is something.
It was, you know, just whatever we knew.
- You had to be pretty sure you had your facts straight
in your head. - That's right.
Right, and it's very useful to have two people.
- Yeah, to compare notes. - We'd sit down afterwards
and try to go back over how did you interpret that.
And it is eerie how you don't quite hear the same thing
even if you're both listening.
So the provision was we'll carry messages to the other side
and bring them back, provided both sides want to do it.
The minute either one says they don't, we're going to stop.
The other is you must promise us absolute confidentiality.
You can't tell anybody you're with us,
and we aren't going to tell anybody because the minute
that becomes public and the press is watching
and you're caught and people are asking you trick questions.
So as far as I know, we carried messages from 1984
till 1996, which is 12 years, periodically, you know.
I was in India and Sri Lanka on university business,
and various British Quakers came to join me, so there was
sort of a team of us who would meet and intersect.
- What do you do, just kind of quietly slip away
to do this work?
- Well, it's winter vacation.
I was in charge of the College Year in India program
for many years, which meant that every January I had to go
to India to see how the students were doing.
- But once you're in India.
- You're just practically there.
- Right, sure.
But I mean, you say, well, you know, I've got to go
have dinner with somebody else, see you tomorrow.
- I'll be off for a week or so, I would say.
- Always have to be kind of vague?
- Yeah, I'm going to Sri Lanka to check up on things
or something like that.
As far as I know, we only were aware of one time
where somebody, the story went that somebody at
an embassy party had blurted out that there were Quakers
moving around.
But we were never stopped or asked about it,
so we were happy to meet and keep our heads as far down
as we could.
And we met at the most incredible places.
The first trip we made, 1984.
It was the anniversary of the '84 massacre.
It was 1985, and there was fear that this pogrom
might break out again.
A lot of tension.
So Adam Curle and I arrived, and there were a lot of people
who were concerned about trying to get the dialogue going
but no connection.
They were having peace vigils and candles and stuff,
but nothing intrinsic.
And then somebody said, you know, the deputy minister
of defense studied in Britain.
He might be worth talking to.
So we arranged a meeting,
and it was one of those incredible breakthroughs.
He was the voice of attack on the Tamils.
He had these radio programs where,
as undersecretary minister of defense he would say
Tamils, give up, we are getting new weapons.
The Israelis have given us a new boat.
We know where you are.
Surrender before you lose anything more, you're doomed.
So this didn't seem like the greatest guy to be--
- Not the greatest to start with.
- So we met him, and he starts right off by saying
look, I know Quakers.
I stayed in a Quaker dormitory when I was in England.
And I would love to have you carrying message to the Tigers.
And this is the message:
I know they can't beat us.
I know we can't beat them.
So we got to talk.
- That's great, very different isn't it?
- Right, enormously different from the official position.
So we said are you serious?
I'm realistic, I can't beat them.
They're a guerrilla force.
They can keep going on and on more or less indefinitely.
And I want them to know it.
So we did arrange to go to Madras,
where the Tigers were organized, and met.
There were actually, at that time, five different groups
of Tigers.
It gets very complicated, leadership and policy and so on.
And two of them would not meet with the other three.
- [Norman] I was wondering, yeah, competition among them.
- Who is the voice of the Tamil Tigers.
The building we met in for the three that agreed to meet us
had had a mortar attack the day before,
so there was some sort of hole in the ceiling as we came in.
And the person we wanted to speak to was the head
of the Tiger group, a guy named Prabhakaran.
And they said Prabhakaran is, it's very difficult
to meet him, but they kept looking at the ceiling.
Okay.
So we said could you pass back to him the message
we're carrying from the deputy minister of defense,
whose name was well known by everybody because he had
this very hard-line position he was taking.
So we had this dialogue with the eyes keep going up
to the ceiling where we,
Prabhakaran probably keeping his ear.
And they were thunderstruck.
Did he actually say he can't beat us?
We said yeah.
Well we knew he couldn't, but we didn't think he realized.
You can't beat guerrillas if they're in a setting
with the people and invisible from--
- But on the other hand.
- We can't beat them.
So at some point you're going to sit down and talk.
So that began the dialogue, and that continued on and off
for nearly 12 years, with each side still saying
they wanted us to carry messages.
- They were fighting all this time?
- Yeah, sporadically.
The line kept shifting between where.
But it was a weird thing because the Tigers controlled
the northern section of Sri Lanka.
So you almost had to get a visa from the Tigers
to cross over to this area.
There was a kind of weird no man's land.
Then you had to get your Sri Lanka visa to get in here.
But it meant that everything we did, we had to inform
the Sri Lankan government of what we were doing
and get clearance from them and the military people.
And we had to get to work with the Tigers.
There were various places where we would contact the Tigers.
So there were some pretty odd moments there where
you're sort of in no man's land.
- Was this conflict aimed strictly at the military
or did it have a component of ethnic cleansing to it?
- It was very much an ethnic cleansing kind of thing.
- It was. - The Tamils maintained
that they were forever gonna be an oppressed minority.
Look at what had happened in the past.
They needed a separate.
Tamil Eelam is what they call the Tamil land.
And the middle-of-the-road people said
couldn't we give you a region?
Couldn't we give you someplace where you have
your own language, your own police force?
- Sort of a semi-autonomous thing?
- Let's work this thing out.
And that was sort of,.
We had the policy of never having a Quaker position.
We weren't going to say this is our position
because the minute a flaw is discovered in it
then you're lost.
Our job is just to carry messages between you two.
But personally, we hoped there would be some reasonable way
where a region, a Tamil region, could be established.
And there were Tigers we met who said
sure we could work this thing out.
But Prabhakaran was a hardliner,
and we never met Prabhakaran.
He was always the next person, he was in the next room,
he was in the next building.
We'd speak to the lower-level Tigers and they were,
some of them were extremely reasonable, very well educated.
And they'd say we'll speak to Prabhakaran.
Then we'd meet them the next morning and they'd say
well he says no.
So this sort of thing went on and on.
That finally ended when there had been an attack
on the president of Sri Lanka,
and she lost sight of one of her eyes.
And she said enough is enough.
They're just playing games.
They're not serious about this.
So I was in Sri Lanka at the time with an English Quaker.
We had clearance, and we were all set to go,
then we got the word: no, no.
They're just playing games.
So I never went on that last trip in to speak
with the Tigers.
- How did it resolve, then?
- It was horrible.
The worst possible ending.
It went on until about, I guess,
2011 or 2012,
when the Tigers were bottled up in a corner of Sri Lanka,
and then Prabhakaran refused to surrender.
And so the Sri Lankan government just shelled the area
where these people were.
And it was a grim massacre where nobody knows how many
people lost their lives, most of them civilians.
And eventually, Prabhakaran was killed, but his body
was still clearly, it had a very visible face.
So his corpse was carried around to show that
he really was dead.
Since then the war ended with the Sri Lankan army
winning and the Tigers losing,
and it's not been a happy scene.
It's inching toward maybe a little better
the last elections, but the Tamils have been sort of told.
You were treacherous at one point.
We don't trust you at all.
There are probably seeds of Tigers still around,
so we're not gonna give you the sort of breaks
that you would need if you wanted to be really friendly.
- So you would sort of have mixed feelings
about your experience brokering peace between Tamils and--
- There were moments it could've worked, yeah.
There were several times.
The Indians, first of all, did actually arrange for
a meeting in Bhutan of the spokespersons of the two sides.
- [Norman] Very far afield.
- And that looked like it might work out,
and then somebody did something terrible.
A slaughter of Tamils or slaughter of Sri Lankans.
And then both sides broke away.
Another time was even funnier where they were both opposed
to India's presence, so for a while they were in dialogue
with each other, working out a major hotel in Colombo.
And this is very strange because at times we met them
in bunkers, we met them in houses with holes in the roof.
This time we met them in something like Holiday Inn.
And they had locked off a floor, so you had to have guards
with weapons and all the rest.
But to arrive and talk to our Tiger friends.
What can we offer from the bar, they said.
We'll ring it up.
This is a little weird
But before long, that fell apart, and then we were meeting
in bunkers or hotels or wherever we could arrange to meet.
And for them, along with the fact that they were using
precious time to talk to us, to some extent
they were risking their lives.
They were exposing themselves because at no point
did the Tigers have any control of the air.
If there was anything flying,
it was the Sri Lankan air force.
So if they were moving to meet us at some point,
they were vulnerable.
So we recognized that.
They would show up with their weapons and then post people
around so that if they were attacked,
they were not left defenseless.
- Speaking of defenses, did you ever feel in danger
in these situations?
- Not seriously.
There were probably three or four mornings when I said
if I can wiggle my toes tonight, I can be pretty happy.
But that was mostly because we were traveling on roads
that we knew had landmines or trigger mines.
The Tigers-- - So nothing personal.
- Nothing personal.
Just you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There was a time when we were delivering an ambulance,
and we thought that might look a little like
we're taking sides because there is a vehicle
and it depends who's being put into it.
The Tigers would run wires under the road,
and then somebody would be sitting maybe two or three
football fields away in the woods.
Simply wait till they see something touch
the two wires together and blow up
whatever was there.
So that was the closest we came to feeling any serious risk.
The only time somebody said stick 'em up
was with the Indian army.
We were on our way going through the Indian territory,
and they stopped us and were checking with our papers.
And this young Indian with a weapon sort of pointed to me
and said hands up.
And I'm like this, the old cowboy movies.
I put my hands up, don't shoot.
That was even funnier because in that particular trip,
this is when we were delivering an ambulance,
we had a very attractive Dutch nurse coming with us.
And when they stopped us, we were told by the Indian
authorities to be very careful because we were surrounded
by a hostile group.
They had their observation post under a bush
that was shaped like a hut.
And then you went under the hut and there was a table
and a chair and all the rest,
and this sort of young Indian major.
When he saw the young Dutch nurse, he insisted we get out
there and take pictures with our arms around each other.
So somewhere there's a picture in front of this tree
in a dangerous area.
These two Quakers and a young woman,
with the Indian army protecting us or whatever it was.
- How did you get involved in the negotiations
between North and South Vietnam, which were notorious
for their complexity and their kind of arbitrary resistance
to each other?
- That emerged from, again, a sort of Quaker philosophy
that's evolved over the centuries,
which is when wars break out, the people who suffer most
almost always are civilians.
And the effort that's made and the money that's spent
is typically on the military on both sides.
So as soon as the war in Vietnam became clearly a civil war,
the Quakers looked about what they could do
for the South Vietnamese.
And they set up a hospital for taking care of amputations
and burns, the two things that the civilians
were suffering from most.
Napalm was a terrible sort of thing.
- [Norman] Sure.
- And then a lot of arms blown off and legs blown off
with the booby-traps and all the rest.
So they were doing that.
They had a staff of people, and they worked throughout
the war in this especially, exclusively for civilians.
But what do you do about the victims in North Vietnam?
That's hard to get to.
And the Quaker leaders approached them and said
we'd like to do something, but what can we do
since we're American?
And they said obviously there's not very much you can do.
- It's so politically charged.
I mean, anybody, any American just going to North Vietnam.
If you got any kind of press coverage,
which of course I know you would avoid,
but I mean the notorious Jane Fonda.
- That's right, got a lot of press publicity,
which was very awkward in the end.
So in the summer of '69,
I had agreed to spend the summer in Southeast Asia.
President Nixon had come in and said the war was gonna end.
He had a peace plan.
It took six years before it happened, but anyway.
- Yeah, he was a little vague about it.
- The plan was that Quakers were always too late-thinking,
so let's get ahead.
So I was sent, going to go to Thailand and look at
the Mekong River project, which was an international,
inter-cultural project to link up the river,
Communist, non-Communist, and then plan
what the Quakers could do when the war ended.
So I was on my way to Thailand with another group of Quakers
who were meeting in Stockholm with a delegation
from North Vietnam.
Since we were the biggest delegation,
there were five Quakers, there were other peace groups,
we were sitting with Madame Binh, the Foreign Secretary.
And the executive secretary of the Quakers said
Madame Binh, can you think of any way in which we could
do something for the civilians of the North?
And she said yes, I think the time has come.
If you would send somebody,
we could probably work something out.
So he reaches over and says here's our man.
I suddenly changed my plans for the summer.
I was not gonna go to Bangkok and do
the Mekong River Project, but I was going to go into
North Vietnam and see what we could do.
So I arranged it, went to Paris, got a visa.
Well, started to get a visa, went to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.
And there's this weird world where some countries
are neutral and some countries aren't.
Very often hostile.
And got my visa to go into Hanoi.
So I flew into Hanoi the end of June.
- That had to be rather weird.
- It was a bit weird, yeah.
- Because you didn't know, you know, at what point
the Americans would be attacking.
I mean, they certainly had bombed Hanoi and Haiphong
and all kinds of points in North Vietnam.
- Right.
- Was that coordinated at all?
I mean, did you have any idea where they would be?
- We had no idea where they were going to be,
but we had kept the State Department informed
of what we were doing because this was all illegal.
- There'd be some trickle-down?
- Somebody would say.
In fact, my job was if possible to check in
with the ambassador of the countries, saying here I am,
a Quaker, we're doing this sort of thing.
And it was very funny with the ambassador in Vientiane,
the capital of Laos, where I was talking with
the ambassador's wife over lunch.
And she said how can you be an anti-war activist?
You're so nice.
So you know, interesting world.
We also met the ambassador in Saigon to let him know
what we were doing, but all the time it was in a sense
of purpose being there are civilians who are hurting
that we're concerned about.
So I spent a week in North Vietnam as a guest
of the country.
There was a committee of people who were with me
all the time, translators and a person from
the Communist Party.
And at the end of the week, they gave me a list
which blew my mind.
It was all in French and it was a list
of open-heart surgical supplies and equipment.
Nobody had said anything about open-heart surgery at all.
- But they were requesting?
- They were requesting.
We had raised $35,000, Canadian Quakers
and American Quakers, to do something for the civilians,
and so I said how would you like us to spend this?
So there was this strange request,
and they had the catalogs from which they had gotten them.
They obviously had somebody who knew what they were doing.
So I came back to Philadelphia and said this is what
they want, puzzled by the request but committed
to getting it.
There was a fair amount of publicity when I came back
because there weren't that many people in and out
of North Vietnam.
I did meet a number of senators and folks who were
curious about it.
I met Henry Kissinger a couple of times in connection
with what we were doing.
And then I went back in to try to deliver the supplies
in August.
Had a weird experience.
I got to Vientiane with all these boxes with heart valves
and sphygmomameters and all the stuff that was needed
because when you have open-heart surgery,
you had to have something taking care of moving the blood
while you're doing the operation.
And I got a visa to fly in from Vientiane to Hanoi.
The plane got halfway there, turned around and came back
and said bad weather.
That happened three times or something.
And each time you had to get another visa, haul the boxes.
- Sure. - And all the rest.
Also on this trip, I was carrying letters from relatives
of men who had been shot down who might be alive
or might not be alive.
So I had all the medical stuff and then several boxes full
of letters and parcels.
Sometimes they sent medicine for their loved ones
or just cards and stuff.
So about the third time it didn't work out,
I went back in to the North Vietnamese embassy in Vientiane
and they said Mr. Elder,
could you do something for about a month?
Sure I could.
They said well, because it's going to be very difficult
for us to get you a visa for a while.
I still had no idea what was going on.
So at this point, since I was on that part of the world
and the students were arriving in India,
I turned around and went to India for a week or two
to check up on the students in India.
Flew back to Thailand, I was in Bangkok,
and as I sat in the airport waiting for my plane,
I saw the headlines: Ho Chi Minh Died.
- Oh, so they had to rethink everything.
- That explained everything.
He was dying, and they wanted to be ready for a funeral,
and a Quaker coming around trying to deliver supplies
didn't make much sense.
- [Norman] We're a little busy right now. - That's right.
At that time, the Chinese and the Soviets weren't getting on
with each other so there had to be a Soviet delegation
to mourn and a Chinese delegation to mourn.
So I appreciated the complications of life.
So I went to the embassy in Vientiane and signed
a sort of condolence book and said I am leaving stuff here.
I have to go back because I'm teaching.
I'd love to come back, but some other Quaker will do it.
So it's here, and when you're ready.
So I came back.
Classes started, and then in October of '69,
a message came that they were ready to have somebody
come take it in.
And if I could come in the second time, that would be great.
So I found colleagues who would cover my classes
for about a week and a weekend and flew back
and delivered the supplies.
And now the big question was
what are you doing with open-heart surgery?
And I learned a lot.
Well, among other funny things,
I carried a big book on thoracic surgery
with me as reading for the plane, so I didn't have to worry.
I also carried an unabridged American dictionary
because the English translators are trying to figure out
the words being used.
There was something called a moratorium.
And they were what's a moratorium?
Their books didn't make any sense.
After I delivered these two big books,
they turned to moratorium, and you read it,
and it still doesn't make any sense.
It's a hold of an economic process
or some kind of delay.
But that was part of the fringe of going in there.
So I saw the open-heart equipment that they had.
I was photographed with it.
They were clearly doing open-heart surgery,
but what made sense until I got there and talked with them.
I couldn't see why open-heart surgery.
There's a lot of
heart disease among young people
that leaves them virtually crippled in that part
of the world.
And it makes an 18-year-old into about an 80-year-old.
And so the notion was that these are people who,
if you could take out the deteriorating valve
and replace it with one of these artificial valves,
they probably could live a reasonably healthy life
for another two or three or four decades.
- And they have the time to do this throughout a war.
- They have the time to do it.
They have the machinery.
Hanoi wasn't bombed much during the war at all.
- Right. - Bombed all around it.
But I went to the hospital where the installation was,
where they took the pictures, and I talked to the surgeons
who were doing it.
And they seem to know exactly what they were doing.
So I was pleased to come back and say that we were helping
civilians and we were improving the lives of people
who otherwise couldn't have been helped
because they didn't have the sort of supplies and stuff.
- So you weren't directly related to the later frustrations
having to do with, this would be what,
1973 and subsequent years?
Arguing about the shape of the conference table
before they sat down to talk about things?
- No, that was Henry Kissinger and the other side.
- [Norman] It went on and on.
- I was glad it was happening, but our hospital
in South Vietnam kept going all the way up to the end.
And then we were able to get a few more supplies in,
but mainly that was the one trip that I took in 1969
with the open-heart surgical stuff.
Now since then, since the Vietnam War ended,
this has been something which I've started work
with Quakers here in Madison.
We set up a project called Madison Quakers, Inc. in My Lai
where the massacres were. - Sure.
- And with the help of generous people here,
we've built three schools in My Lai,
and there's a park there that sort of commemorates
what happened there.
And so that sort of leaves you with a little bit of a better
feeling about the way in which the war has gone on.
My Lai is in what used to be South Vietnam.
- Yes.
- And so that's an ongoing project that I've been
involved with.
And a veteran named Mike Boehm, who's a Madison resident,
sort of his a full-time job is raising money for that.
- Another one of these situations that has gone for years,
like since 1953 when ostensibly there was
a peace treaty signed, or at least a cease fire
between North and South Korea.
And those two seem like utterly intractable enemies,
more so as each year progresses.
- Right.
- How did you get involved with that situation?
- That was 1990.
It was a time when.
There's always been a risk of a nuclear war there.
And the possibility of missiles being launched
and all the rest.
Things were getting a little tense.
People were sounding like there might be an invasion,
the North might invade the South, if that happens.
- The North in particular is always saber rattling.
- That's right, yeah.
When you look at the map, there's not a lot of distance
between the cease fire line and the capital,
- Right.
- So these things could happen.
So there is particular concern that a lot of talk
was going on.
And by then there was a Quaker who had been
in the Peace Corps in Korea and spoke Korean well.
So we were asked by the American Quakers to go together
and see if were any way in which the tensions
could be reduced if there was talk between people
in the North, people in the South, and people in Washington.
So we went, getting a visa
is a real trick. - Well, yeah.
- We had to negotiate something which began in Saigon,
and then we went to Beijing and then we flew into
the North to get to.
- Phnom Penh.
No, not to Cambodia, to Pyongyang.
- Pyongyang, yeah, so going in there.
And we were treated very, very well by all sorts
of high representatives and heard their conversation
about the way in which they felt the constant threat
of the Americans saying, you know, we could.
Sort of the other side of the coin where you're being told
that they could be attacked and wiped out very quickly.
Then there were these maneuvers being carried out
with the navy on the east side of the sea there in Korea.
And every time that happened, it could to be a matter
of just deciding well now we're going to bomb
because we have all the equipment up there.
So the notion was to keep the temperature down.
Why don't we not have these maneuvers off the coast
and to keep the temperature down?
Why don't you remove nuclear missiles from South Korea?
The fact that they are, once again,
just raises the temperature.
So to the extent there was a request made.
Could you, you know, we're not getting on well
with each other, but if you could ease these things
that make the flames hotter, that would probably help.
So we did carry that message from North Korea
to South Korea too.
At that time Ted Kennedy was a major figure.
They felt Ted Kennedy was interested in working out
something there.
We never met Ted Kennedy himself,
but we did meet his representative.
And could tell them that we met Ted Kennedy's
staff person.
- Did you have any sense in North Korea of
how the people really felt, especially about the leadership?
- You can only guess.
It was eerie to be there because what the public saw
was so restricted.
There was a gigantic painting in a downtown mall
of the leader of North Korea standing there
lecturing to the intellectuals of the world.
There was a crowd of people from Africa and the Soviet Union
and the United States taking notes as Kim Il-sung
elucidates Juche Socialism.
And then there was the central library.
The central library had the collected works
of the Great Leader in 35 languages
or something like that.
So all the evidence you'd get there was of
a gigantic intellectual who is leading the world.
And we are all that wisdom is.
Then you get into the countryside or look at the machinery.
The buses were derelict almost.
Tractors that no one would be riding here
they were in such bad shape.
And then you see soldiers out there working the fields
because there weren't enough people out there
to help with the harvest.
So it was clear that this was not something where people
were doing exceedingly well.
The military were a large part of the population,
which is part of, again, building up this notion we have
of a very large defense force which will protect us
if the South decides to do something or the US
decides to do something.
- Are they really that paranoid?
Where do they get these ideas?
- I think these generate among themselves.
And they certainly pick up statements from the rest
of the world that this is something,
what the North Koreans are doing is unacceptable
and we have to prevent them from doing it.
Preventing could be dropping a nuclear weapon
on the capital city or wherever.
So it's certainly encouraged by the dialogue.
You hear the threat from the other side.
We can say we're not seriously thinking of wiping out
their civilization, whereas they could say
but you certainly sound like that.
And then they launch a missile and we say
you're threatening the world.
We may have to do something serious.
And it generates itself.
- Did you ever have a conversation with a North Korean
that you felt wasn't, you know, scripted or orchestrated
or controlled or watched?
- My friend who spoke Korean well would speak to cooks
and people like that.
And no, they could certainly not express anything
other than general support for what was being said
because they could see who we were,
and we were almost always with somebody who could translate
what was going on, so no.
It was bizarre because we were in a hotel that looked like
every modern hotel you'd have here,
again a Holiday Inn-type thing
with menus and multiple choices.
There'd be Canadians there.
There would be people from all over the world,
businessmen talking.
There was even a hotel, the hotel we stayed in,
that went to a restaurant that rotated in one hour
so that you could see the great view of the city
of Pyongyang.
Funny thing there, the music that was being played
was brilliant and accurate and very sort of
World War II-ish.
There was Moonlight in Vermont.
- [Norman] Oh, really.
- And some of these old songs.
And it was so accurate.
I got to find the piano player who is doing this.
So I took a break from dinner to wander around
and see where this was.
It was a player piano,
and there were all the keys doing their own.
- Somehow that just seems like a fitting way to end it, Joe.
- It's playing perfect piano music, Pink Panther.
- [Norman] All of it lockstep.
- Lockstep, right, yeah.
- Well, Joe Elder, it's been a great pleasure hearing about
your experiences as an international peace broker
kind of in the shadows and laying the groundwork for,
you know, larger negotiations that followed.
- And again the impressive thing is at the top
people often have to sound belligerent,
and when they have a quieter moment and realize
they may be able to convey a message to somebody
on the other side, they often are more reasonable
than one would think.
And the fact that they kept giving us time.
They're busy people, and to stop and talk to three Quakers
who have no power at all always impressed us.
- Well, it's an impressive dossier that you have, Joe,
as a diplomat and as a messenger.
And thanks for sharing those experiences.
- Thanks for inviting me.
- I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me next time
around for University Place Presents.