In 1968, a leadership training course for young people took place at the conference centre in Caux – a precursor of the scores of similar programmes which have followed, culminating in today’s Caux Peace and Leadership Programme.

One of those who took part was a 21-year-old law student brought from Beirut, Lebanon, Ramez Salame. He had encountered Moral Re-Armament (MRA, now Initiatives of Change) earlier that year, and embraced the practice of inner listening. ‘These quiet times were the occasion for God, in whom I had lost all faith, to appear in my inmost self,’ he says. ‘I started having thoughts of real care for people around me.’

One of these thoughts was to take his two sisters to the cinema: at that time they could not  have gone on their own. ‘It was a first victory over the total self-centredness in which I had been living. This brought a deep joy into my life.’

In Caux, Ramez continued his exploration. ‘My roommate challenged me that if I wanted to build a new world I had to “scrape my heart”. In a period of reflection, I noted down things which I needed to put right; my relationships with my father and brother and with some friends I had betrayed, and a book I had stolen.’

It was a first victory over the total self-centredness in which I had been living. This brought a deep joy into my life.

He wrote letters of apology to his father and friends, and gave back the book. ‘The most difficult thing was apologizing to my younger brother and confessing my jealousy; but, yielding to the inner urge, I was finally able to do so. When I did that I was a free person. Old habits and resentments disappeared.’

Seven years later, in 1975, civil war broke out between Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim communities. Ramez joined a Christian militia. ‘One day, in a moment of prayer, I perceived that God had a more important battle than the one I was fighting. I gave away my gun. Later I had a thought to go across the dividing line in Beirut and meet Muslim friends I hadn’t met for a long time because of the war.’ It was so dangerous that he didn’t tell his wife what he was doing.

One day, in a moment of prayer, I perceived that God had a more important battle than the one I was fighting. I gave away my gun.

Ramez and his Muslim friends launched a series of dialogue meetings which brought together influential people from the various communities and parties. He brought scores of young Lebanese to Caux during those difficult years. ‘I shared a room with one of them,’ remembers Ulli Ott Chanu. ‘She spoke French, I spoke English, so it was really hard to communicate. But she gave me a wooden icon which I still have. Whenever I see it I think of her and Lebanon. This is what Caux does to people – opening up the world and bringing people into your heart.’

The dialogues continued after the war ended. Ex-combatants from both sides took part, renouncing the atrocities they had been involved in. One of them was Assaad Chaftari, a former leader of a Christian militia. Today these former enemies work together as ‘Fighters for Peace’, co-founded by Chaftari, to help younger Lebanese to discover ‘what we realized too late – that in a civil war everyone loses’. They speak in schools and universities, organize summer camps, reach out to families who have lost relatives, using dialogues, theatre and an online library of personal stories.

‘The rebirth of my personal faith could have merely made me a self-sufficient and proud Christian believer,’ says Ramez. ‘But IofC has constantly challenged me to go beyond this: to reach out to others – particularly my Muslim compatriots – and to work with them for a renewal that must start first in our own lives, on the basis of our shared need for each other.’

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Watch Ramez Salamé's interview on What dialogue requires to be fruitful (Innerchange documentary)

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Photo top and video: Inner Change
• Photos on terrace in Caux: Initiatives of Change
• Photo Mediterranean Dialogue: Christoph Spreng
• Photo Assaad Chaftari: Initiatives of Change

Teame Mebrahtu came to Caux in 1967, five years after his homeland of Eritrea was annexed by Ethiopia. The liberation struggle – which was to continue for three decades – was gaining momentum. Resentment against government policies had led to a student strike, which closed all secondary schools.    

As a lecturer at the Asmara Teacher Training Institute, Teame Mebrathu had met members of an international group of Moral Re-Armament (MRA, now Initiatives of Change), who were touring the country with the film Freedom. He recognized the values portrayed in the film as part of his own spiritual upbringing as a Coptic Christian. But the concept of change at a global level was new to him.

His time at Caux was a revelation. He was struck by the mix of countries, cultures and religions represented and by the experiences people shared. He began to see that, if he was to help Eritrea, he needed to lose his bitterness against the Ethiopians and against the Americans based there, who had treated him badly. He decided that, as a teacher, he had a responsibility to bring about change but had first to change himself. It was a liberating experience.

His time at Caux was a revelation. He was struck by the mix of countries, cultures and religions represented and by the experiences people shared.

Back in Eritrea, which was still in the grip of the student strike, Teame began to work with the MRA team. He decided he had a duty to negate the mentality of thinking ‘I can’t do much about the problems’, and that change does not come from silence.

He was a speaker at a mass rally which persuaded the striking students to go back to their studies – an act which is likely to have prevented bloody clashes with the Ethiopian Army. Later some of the students told him that they had been swayed by his comparison of them to an aircraft which had run out of fuel and was trying to land on a runway planted with nails.

Teame went on to become director of the Asmara Teacher Training Institute and then Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Asmara. After the murderous Mengistu regime seized power in 1974, his life was threatened and he sought asylum in Britain.

As a refugee, Teame declined welfare support and borrowed from relatives to support himself and his family. ‘I felt it was important to be a contributing citizen just as I would be in the society I came from.’ As a first step, he went to 100 schools in the south-west of England to teach the children about Africa and promote international understanding.  

You can’t solve problems through the barrel of a gun.

He went on to a distinguished career at the Bristol Graduate School of Education, teaching and mentoring students from all over the world, many of whom became leading educators in their own countries. He was and is still passionate about using education as a tool to bring change in a divided world: ‘You can’t solve problems through the barrel of a gun.’

One of his proudest achievements was a major conference in Bristol on multicultural education, which focused on improving  schooling opportunities for ethnic minorities and making all children aware of a world outside their borders.

He also continued to work to improve education in Eritrea. Between 1986 and 1988, while the fighting still continued, he travelled to the liberated zone of Eritrea to conduct workshops for students and teachers, gathered under trees as Ethiopian MIG jets flew overhead. After independence in 1991, he set up a partnership between the University of Bristol and Eritrea, training educators and education officers.

Now aged over 80, he holds to his conviction that everyone has a personal responsibility to shine a light, however small, on the injustices of an imperfect world. Small chinks of light can become beacons of hope. ‘It’s immaterial where I live,’ he says, ‘it’s immaterial who I am: what is important is the part I play.’

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Watch Teame Mebrahtu speak at a conference held at the Westminster Theater, London, 1977, in the film Choice for an Impatient World from our archives (16'01" - 16'28")

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Top photo of Zero School in liberated Eritrea: Jenny Matthews 
• Eritrean: Across the Bridge, Mike Lowe, For A Change Magazine, 1987
• Film Choice for an impatient world: Initiatives of Change

In 1966, a senior Sudanese politician, Buth Diu, presented the London headquarters of Moral Re-Armament (MRA, now Initiatives of Change) with spears and a hippotamus leather shield, as a token of his desire to end tribal and regional warfare in his country. ‘We can use our spears on fish instead of on each other,’ he said.

Buth Diu’s intentions had not always been so peaceable. He grew up in the Nuer region of what is now South Sudan, and started paid work as a house servant of the British District Commissioner in the years before independence. With no formal schooling, he taught himself to read, write and type. He won the prized post of interpreter, founded a political party, and was elected to parliament in Khartoum.

In 1956, Sudan gained independence from its British and Egyptian rulers. The South Sudanese (who finally achieved a separate state in 2011) resented the domination of the Arab North Sudanese. In their turn, the North Sudanese had a saying: ‘a Nuer next door is a fire next door’. Buth Diu’s fiery speeches in parliament bore out this apprehension.

It was in Caux at the conference centre of Moral Re-Armament, in 1958, that Buth Diu’s commitment to reconciliation was born. Then Minister of Works, he was part of a delegation of politicians sent by the Prime Minister. Buth Diu was amazed on his first morning when his room-mate, an Englishman, cleaned his shoes. Later he commented, ‘I felt MRA must be a revolution.’

He pledged himself to work for reconciliation.

He was enthralled by the film Freedom (see 1955) and conferred with the Africans who had written it. At a plenary meeting, he apologized for his hatred of the North Sudanese, and for his domineering approach to political rivals in the South. He pledged himself to work for reconciliation. Back home a new joy came into his family life, and he named a newborn son after one of the Northern Sudanese who was at Caux with him.

The next years in Khartoum were tough. A military government swept away parliament, and civil war escalated in the South, a devastating setback for the whole country. Buth Diu brought Northern and Southern Sudanese together in his home, where he often showed them Freedom or other MRA films. 

When democracy returned for a few years, Buth Diu became Minister of Animal Resources. In 1966 he won cabinet approval for Harambee Africa, a musical revue created by young Africans inspired by MRA, to give two weeks of performances in Sudan as guests of the government.  

Over the years a close rapport developed between him and Dr Mohammed El Murtada of the Ministry of Labour, who was applying MRA’s formula of ‘not who is right but what is right’ to industrial disputes.

At the time, Buth Diu was building a new house. One evening he and Murtada sat at a table in its shell, and jotted down some ideas on how the North-South war might be resolved. Next day they took them to the Ministry of the Interior. The following year, some of their ideas resurfaced in the peace agreement of 1972, which brought 10 years of intensive fighting to an end.

Some years after Buth Diu’s death in 1975, Mohammed El Murtada became Director of the Ministry of Labour. When he attended the annual International Labour Organization conference in Geneva he often visited Caux.  In 1983 he wrote: ‘I learned from Buth Diu’s example that the settling of problems does not depend primarily on technicalities and formal approaches.  Basic solutions come from a cure to the weaknesses of human nature – pride, fear, hatred and suspicion. These can be replaced by forgiveness, love and common targets for the wellbeing of a nation, as individuals find the courage to obey God’s guidance.’

In the years since, Sudan’s history has been turbulent. Caux has continued to receive groups working for reconciliation, both from the North and from the South, before and since its independence.

I learned from Buth Diu’s example that the settling of problems does not depend primarily on technicalities and formal approaches.

Mohammed El Murtada

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About the author

After a deep personal change on meeting Moral Re-Armament during his studies, Peter Everington switched to Arabic for his last year at Cambridge. He was 23 years old when he went to Sudan for the first time, teaching English for eight years with the Sudan Ministry of Education. In more than twenty return visits since, he has kept up support for the peacemakers of North and South. Peter was awarded Sudan’s highest decoration for services to education.

Read more about Peter's experience in Sudan.

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Watch the film from our archives on the musical show "Harambee Africa"

Harambee Africa from IofC & For a new world Archives on Vimeo.

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Photo top: (left to right) the Marquis of Graham, Buth Diu, Ahmed el Mahdi and Rajmohan Gandhi in Khartoum in 1966, credit: Peter Everington
• Photos Khartoum, Buth Diu's son: Peter Everington
• Photo Harambee Africa: Jürg Kobler
• Photo Buth Diu in Caux and with shield and spears: Arthur Strong
• Photo Murtada: Initiatives of Change