As a 20-year-old, Jerry White, a student of Brown University, took the third year of college off to go study Hebrew and Arabic in Jerusalem in 1984. "I was hiking in Golan Heights with two American friends on a break from studies and we went in an unmarked minefield. Then the earth exploded," recalled White in front of a packed auditorium at Techno India in Sector V.
The explosion changed White's life, dismembering one of his legs. He spent the next six months recuperating at a Tel Aviv hospital, learning how to walk again without his right leg.
Since 1995, the 59-year-old worked relentlessly to rid the world of the scourge of landmines. "These are anti-people weapons which don't care about civilians. They are illegal, according to international law,” he said.
White was an integral part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a collected campaign of 1,200 organisations in over 120 countries. “There is power in numbers and civil society by grouping together can become a superpower. That's what we did in the 1990s. We stood up to America, Nato and Russia. And we won.” The Mine Ban Treaty was signed in 1997.
The same year the Nobel Prize for Peace awarded to ICBL and White shared in it. “The only people still using landmines would be those like the Isis in Iraq or Russia in Ukraine,” he said.
Techno India Group co-chairperson Manoshi Roychowdhury hands over a dokra souvenir to Jerry White at the Sector V event. Sudeshna Banerjee
That year, he worked with Princess Diana, who was an active campaigner against landmines. “She was a picture of beauty, compassion, resilience and courage. She had a healing capacity,” White recalled, showing a photograph of Diana with Mother Teresa, who were great friends and died within days of each other. He asked the students to think of the qualities that they reminded them of, compassion and peace being some answers he received.
At Techno India, White stressed on three scourges, which were on the rise. “Religion-related violence or ‘religicide’ is the fastest growing type of violence in the world today while domestic and interstate violence are on the wane.” Another scourge, he said, was ‘facticide’ — the spread of misinformation or outright lies online through communities. “It is important to keep asking questions,” he stressed. The third is ‘ecocide’ — destruction of Mother Nature. “We must counter ecocide by regenerating our land and water.”
He has recently joined an organisation, United Religions Initiative (URI), as executive director. “We all have to stay prepared for what’s coming. In my own country, it is said we have raised the least resilient generation of all time. Religion or spirituality is the no. 1 source of collective resilience that the world has seen and the no. 1 antidote to anxiety. I am not advertising religion but I am asking you: where do you find this quality. We must build a community that has social resilience,” said the author of the book Religicide: Confronting the Roots of Anti-Religious Violence, published in 2022.
“At URI, we work on (the United Nation’s) sustainable development goals at a local level. We have cooperation circles which are small volunteer groups — interfaith people meditating together and sharing poetry.”
The organisation’s website, Uri.org, lists how its eastern India cooperation circle is bridging boundaries between faiths. To receive help, each family must also give help to a family of a different faith tradition, the website says.
“Each of you have the seed in you to grow peace, as do we at URI,” he urged the students.
saltlake@abp.in