[Norman Gilliland, Wisconsin Public Radio, Host, University Place Presents]

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 U.W.-Madison. And welcome to University Pace.

[Joseph Elder, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Thanks, Norman –

[Norman]

– Place

[Joseph Elder]

– glad to be here.

[Norman]

It’s going to be a fast-paced conversation, I think, given all the experience you’ve had. And – 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?

[Joseph Elder]

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. [laughs] 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 sort of 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 – during the war with Korea. I had to decide was I going to, you know, 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 – 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 –

[Norman]

Yes.

[Joseph Elder]

– 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. And it was – 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?

[Joseph Elder]

Here were Quakers who were Englishmen or Englishwomen, and they could carry messages to the viceroy. Then he could – 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 – 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.

[laughter]

[Norman]

They didn’t have to look too far.

[Joseph Elder]

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 with 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.

[Norman laughs]

And she said three wonderful words, Who needs you?

[laughter]

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 – 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.

[Norman]

It helps. It helps, I suppose.

[Joseph Elder]

Who needs you?

[Norman]

But now you mentioned, Joe, that you spent all this time in India.

[Joe Elder]

Yeah.

[Norman]

Did the Pakistanis have any qualms about you being biased at all or are you just carrying messages?

[Joseph Elder]

The key thing, it was interesting. They – they were – they were angry. The – 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.

[Norman laughs]

[Joseph Elder]

In India, they’d ignore me and speak to the two.

[Norman]

Now okay, I can see why they would ignore the English because of the colonial history –

[Joseph Elder]

Thats right.

[Norman]

– involving both India and Pakistan.

[Joseph Elder]

Right.

[Norman]

But – but why would the Indians be antithetical to Americans –

[Joseph Elder]

Well, they felt –

[Norman]

– at that point?

[Joseph Elder]

– at that point the U.S. 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 say 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 – 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 – lets 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.

[Norman]

Right.

[Joseph Elder]

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 at 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 humility – 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.

[Norman]

The difference between India and Pakistan is primarily religious?

[Joseph Elder]

Yes. The – 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 Gandhi was extremely sad and had no choice. He 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.

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

So, often you have people who had gone to the cadet school together and had been same camp together and now opposed –

[Norman]

Opposing sides.

[Joseph Elder]

– to each other. 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?

[Joseph Elder]

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 [laughs], 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 –

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

– 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.

[Norman]

Oh – oh, did they?

[Joseph Elder]

So-

[Norman]

That was ironic.

[Joseph Elder]

– you had two Muslim generals, one from India and one from Pakistan.

[Norman]

And Pakistan, though, when you say it was divided, it was East –

[Joseph Elder]

East Pakistan and West Pakistan.

[Norman]

– East – and – and separated by a big chunk of geography.

[Joseph Elder]

By 900 miles –

[Norman]

Yeah.

[Joseph Elder]

– that’s right, yeah. And – and eventually East Pakistan became a separate country. It became Bangladesh.

[Norman]

Yes, right.

[Joseph Elder]

A decade or so later.

[Norman]

Were you at all involved, then, in visiting prisoners of war or anything like that, or were you –

[Joseph Elder]

Not on that –

[Norman]

– reserved strictly –

[Joseph Elder]

Not on that case, no.

[Norman]

– for abstract negotiations?

[Joseph Elder]

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.

[Joseph Elder]

With your opponent – and then there’s nobody to talk to.

[Norman]

Yeah.

[Joseph Elder]

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.

[laughter]

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, Illustrated Weekly, –

[Norman laughs]

[Joseph Elder]

– and they all had Indira Gandhi’s picture on them.

[Norman]

Sure, sure.

[Joseph Elder]

And then in she comes. It was sort of, like, Okay, we’ve seen you before.

[Norman]

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 sort of rather warm and cordial and reasonable people.

[Joseph Elder]

Certainly, to us they were, yeah.

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

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 it doesnt – if things don’t work out lives will – 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 –

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

– and so on, but when it comes to the real world, if we work something out, we’d much rather do that.

[Norman]

Yeah, history has plenty of examples –

[Joseph Elder]

Examples of that.

[Norman]

– of that, doesn’t it? Kind of 54 40 or fight kind of thing, you know.

[Joseph Elder]

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.

[Norman]

So, in the sequence of events, there was a cease fire in place when you went over –

[Joseph Elder]

That’s right.

[Norman]

– to convey these messages.

[Joseph Elder]

Then there – then there was the peace treaty.

[Norman]

Then the Soviets brokered the peace – peace treaty.

[Joseph Elder]

Yeah.

[Norman]

And –

[Joseph Elder]

Then there was the implement – implementation of the treaty.

[Norman]

So, you were helping to implement it as much as anything else.

[Joseph Elder]

Mostly just get the dialogue going –

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

– and it was going already. In fact, then could the head of Pakistan communicate with the head of India during this process with 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.

[Norman]

So, did it hold?

[Joseph Elder]

It did, in for – not forever.

[laughter]

[Joseph Elder]

There was another war before long.

[Norman]

We’re talking about what, 19 –

[Joseph Elder]

This was ’65.

[Norman]

65, right, okay.

[Joseph Elder]

And the next war wasn’t until ’71.

[Norman]

Uh-huh.

[laughter]

[Joseph Elder]

So, we’ll take our breaks as they come.

[Norman]

And – and you from the distance of six years and now several thousand miles being back in Wisconsin, I assume –

[Joseph Elder]

Yeah.

[Norman]

– how did you react to that? What were you thinking when the 1971 conflict started?

[Joseph Elder]

’71 was not directly related to the Kashmir issue, which had been the – the trigger in the first one.

[Norman]

A big piece of geography.

[Joseph Elder]

There was this section that Pakistan said, Kashmir’s ours, India said, Kashmir’s ours. And the war was over that.

[Norman]

And if you see – see that on a map, I remember as a kid, it would – it would be striped.

[Joseph Elder]

It is, yeah.

[Norman]

One country would be green and the other might be white, and Kashmir –

[Joseph Elder]

Each –

[Norman]

– was green and white stripes.

[Joseph Elder]

Each one claims.

[Norman]

Yeah, big claim.

[Joseph Elder]

I had a cartographer friend of mine who published a – a book of maps in the area, and he had a terrible time getting the book shown in either Pakistan –

[Norman laughs]

[Joseph Elder]

– 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, you know, all of ours, or it’s all of ours.

[Norman]

So, ’65 was about Kashmir. What was it about in ’71?

[Joseph Elder]

It was – Bangladesh trying to become independent – East Pakistan –

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

– becoming independent from West Pakistan. It – it needn’t have happened, but your comment that there were 900 miles between the two meant a lot of day. 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 are 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 one of these horrible things where 10 million people from East Pakistan fled because it was so – was going so awful. India entered to help the Bangladeshis in a sort of two-week war and – and defeated Pakistan and created a new state, Bangladesh.

And then India did something pretty impressive. They had 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 still, [laughs] which they weren’t gonna let go for a while. So, the prisoners here 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 – no entry point. But it could have been an issue if it had taken longer.

[Norman]

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 –

[Joseph Elder]

Thats right.

[Noman]

– and now is Sri Lanka.

[Joseph Elder]

Mm-hmm.

Sri Lanka became independent about the same time India did; it was 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 where now the Tamils, who had been kind of the upper group but the minority, now said, This is impossible, we can’t go on forever and ever. So, a war broke out – 1984 with the militant Tamils setting up a group called the Tamil Tigers.

[Norman]

Right.

[Joseph Elder]

And they became a – a guerrilla movement fighting against the Sri – 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.

[Norman]

And by the others.

[Joseph Elder]

Right. Nobody liked them, and it – 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 200s – 2000s before it was finally ended.

[Norman]

And this is we, in case you missed it, Sri Lanka is an island.

[Joseph Elder]

It’s an island off the southern tip of India.

[Norman]

Yeah, some distance from India.

[Joseph Elder]

Yeah.

[Norman]

So, a thing unto itself in a way.

[Joseph Elder]

Right, its own history and long heritage. And 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.

[Joseph Elder]

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 on 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. You know, Thats where you came from. [laughs]

[Norman]

Sure, sure. Yeah, we were here first kind of thing.

[Joseph Elder]

It was centuries later.

[Norman]

Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

They got very, very ugly. The – there was – in 1984, there was one of these horrible moments when a country – 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 by – 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 [laughs], they got in touch with me, and I said, Sure.

So, there were two of us who went, a British, a very, 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. And we now kind of had a – 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 –

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

– so, if you do want us to speak to each other – 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. And –

[Norman]

When – when – when you say you won’t write anything. You won’t write anything down, or you won’t distribute anything to the press?

[Joseph Elder]

We won’t – we wont – we wont write any messages.

[Norman]

Really?

[Joseph Elder]

There’s – theres nothing they can take from us.

[Norman]

I see.

[Joseph Elder]

So, here is something.

[Norman]

Oh, uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

It was, you know, just whatever we knew. And –

[Norman]

So, you had to be particularly sure you had your facts straight –

[Joseph Elder]

That’s right.

[Norman]

– in your head.

[Joseph Elder]

Right, and it’s very useful to have two people.

[Norman]

Yes, sure –

[Joseph Elder]

We’d sit down afterwards –

[Norman]

– to compare notes.

[Joseph Elder]

– 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. And 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, you know, 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 and would join me, so there was sort of a team of us who would meet and intersect.

[Norman]

So, what do you do, just kind of quietly slip away to do this work?

[Joseph Elder]

Well, it’s winter vacation.

[Norman]

Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

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.

[Norman]

But once you’re in India.

[Joseph Elder]

You’re just practically there, you know.

[Norman]

Right, sure. But I mean, you say, Well, you know, I’ve got to go have –

[Joseph Elder]

Ill be –

[Norman]

– dinner with somebody else, see you tomorrow.

[Joseph Elder]

I’ll be off for a – a week or so, I would say.

[Norman]

You just have to be kind of vague?

[Joseph Elder]

Yeah.

[Norman]

Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

I’m going – Im going to Sri Lanka to check up on things or something like that. [laughs]

As far as I know, we only were aware of one time where somebody, the story was 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, okay, 1984. It was – 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 a 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.

[laughter]

[Joseph Elder]

So, this didn’t seem like the greatest guy to be –

[Norman]

No, not the greatest to start with.

[Joseph Elder]

So – so, we met him, and he starts right off by saying, Look, I know Quakers. I stayed in Quaker – 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.

[Norman]

That’s great, very different, isn’t it?

[Joseph Elder]

[laughs] Right, enormously different from the official position.

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

So, we said, Are you serious? You know, I’m realistic, I can’t beat them. They’re -theyre – theyre 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. [laughs]

[Norman]

I was wondering, yeah, competition among them.

[Joseph Elder]

Who – who – who – is the voice of the – the Tamil Tigers?

The building we met in for the – the three that agreed to meet us had had a mortar attack the day before, so there was still 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, Well, could you pass back to him the message we’re carrying from the deputy minister of defense, whose name was well – well-known by everybody because he had this very hardline position he was taking. So, we had this dialogue with this – the eyes keeping going up to the ceiling where we –

[Norman]

Waiting for the next one.

[Joseph Elder]

– Prabhakaran probably keeping his ear. And they were thunderstruck. Did – did he actually say –

[Norman]

What is it?

[Joseph Elder]

– 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 – in, you know, a setting with the people and invisible from the rest of the people –

[Norman]

But on the other hand.

[Joseph Elder]

– We can’t beat them. So, at some point you’re going to sit down and talk down.

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. There was some –

[Norman]

But they were fighting all this time?

[Joseph Elder]

Yeah, sporadically. The – the line kept shifting between where. But it was a weird thing because they – the T-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 Lankan 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 Tiger. 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.

[Norman]

Was this conflict aimed strictly at the military or – or did it have a component of ethnic cleansing to it?

[Joseph Elder]

It was very much an ethnic cleansing kind of thing.

[Norman]

It was.

[Joseph Elder]

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, Could we give you a region? Could you have someplace where you have your own language, your own police force?

[Norman]

Sort of a semi-autonomous thing?

[Joseph Elder]

Your own flag. Let’s work this thing out.

And that was sort of – we never – we – 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 – youre 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 this thing could be worked out. 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 the next room, he was 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 – to speak with the – the Tigers.

[Norman]

How did it resolve, then?

[Joseph Elder]

It was horrible. The worst possible ending. It went on until about, I guess, 2011 or 2012, when the Tamils were – 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, many of them – 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 had – was dead. And then, since then, there was – the war ended with the Sri Lankan army winning and the Tamils losing, and it’s not been a happy scene. There – 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.

[Norman]

So, you would sort of have mixed feelings about your experience brokering peace between Tamils and –

[Joseph Elder]

There were moments it could’ve worked, yeah.

[Norman]

Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

There were – there were several times. The – the British – I mean the Indians, first of all, did actually arrange for a meeting in Bhutan of the spokespersons of the two sides.

[Norman]

Very far afield.

[Joseph Elder]

And that looked like it might work out, and then somebody did something terrible. There was a slaughter of Tamils or slaughter of Sri Lankans. And then both sides broke away.

Another time was even funnier [laughs] where the – they were both opposed to India’s presence, so for a while they were in dialogue with each other, working out of a major hotel in Colombo. And this is very strange because at times we had met them in bunkers, you know, we met them in – in houses with holes in the roof. And this time we met them in something – a Holiday Inn or something like that.

[Norman laughs]

[Joseph Elder]

And they had locked off a floor, so you had to have your guards – 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.

[laughter]

[Joseph Elder]

We’ll ring it up.

[laughter]

[Joseph Elder]

This is a little weird.

[Norman]

Yeah, full of surprises.

[Joseph Elder]

But before long, that fell apart, and then we were meeting in bunkers or hotels or sort of wherever – 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. I mean, they were exposing themselves cause at no point did the Tigers have any control of the air. If there was anything flying, it was the Sri Lankan air force. And so, if they were moving to meet us at some point, they were vulnerable. So, we – we recognized that. And they would show up with their weapons and then post people around so that if they were attacked, they were not left defenseless.

[Norman]

Speaking of defenses, did you ever feel in danger in these situations?

[Joseph Elder]

Not – 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 –

[Norman]

So, nothing personal.

[Joseph Elder]

Nothing personal. Just you’re – youre 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 – 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 sort of feeling any serious risk.

The only time somebody said, Stick ’em up was with the Indian army.

[Norman]

Oh, really.

[Joseph Elder]

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 thought this – its like this [raising his hands up], the old cowboy movies.

[laughter]

[Norman]

Yeah, right.

[Joseph Elder]

But Ill put my hands up if thats what you want.

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

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 – their observation post under a bush that was shaped like a – 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 – young –

[Norman]

Dutch nurse.

[Joseph Elder]

– nurse, he insisted we get out there and take pictures [stretches his arms out] with our arms around each other.

[Norman laughs]

[Joseph Elder]

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.

[Norman]

How did you get involved in the negotiations between North and South Vietnam, which were notorious for their complexity and their kind of arbitrary –

[Joseph Elder]

Yeah.

[Norman]

– resistance to each other?

[Joseph Elder]

That emerged from, again, a sort of Quaker philosophy that’s evolved over the centuries, which is when – 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 – a hospital for – for taking care of amputations and burns, the two things that the civilians were suffering from most. Napalm –

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

– was a terrible sort of thing. 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?

[Norman]

Yeah.

[Joseph Elder]

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 for the while.

[Norman]

It’s so politically charged. I mean, anybody, just any American just going to North Vietnam.

[Joseph Elder]

Youre – youre –

[Norman]

If you got any kind of press coverage, which of course I know you would avoid, but I mean, the notorious Jane Fonda incident.

[Joseph Elder]

Thats 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 [laughs], but anyway.

[Norman]

Yeah, he was a little vague about it.

[Joseph Elder]

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. And at – 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, Yeah, 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.

[Norman laughs]

I suddenly –

[Norman]

Drafted!

[Joseph Elder]

– 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 the visa, went to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. And there’s this weird world –

[Norman]

Yeah.

[Joseph Elder]

– where some countries are neutral, and some countries aren’t.

[Norman]

Some are off limits –

[Joseph Elder]

Very often hostile.

[Norman]

– to Americans.

[Joseph Elder]

And got my visa to go into Hanoi. So, I flew into Hanoi the end of June.

[Norman]

That had to be rather weird.

[Joseph Elder]

It was a bit weird, yeah.

[Norman]

Because you didn’t know, you know, at what point the Americans would be attacking.

[Joseph Elder]

Yeah.

[Norman]

I mean, they certainly had bombed Hanoi and Haiphong and all kinds of points in North Vietnam.

[Joseph Elder]

Right.

[Norman]

Was that coordinated at all?

[Joseph Elder]

We – we –

[Norman]

I mean, did you have any idea where they would be?

[Joseph Elder]

We had no idea where they were going to be, we – but we had kept the State Department informed of what we were doing so that – cause this was all illegal.

[Norman]

Hopefully, there’d be some trickle-down? [laughs]

[Joseph Elder]

Somebody would say. In fact, my job was as – 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.

[laughter]

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.

[Norman]

But they were requesting?

[Joseph Elder]

They were requesting. We had raised $35,000, Canadian Quakers and American Quakers, to do something for the civilians, and so I came, How – 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 cause there weren’t that many people in and out of North Vietnam. I did – did meet a number of senators and folks who were curious about it. And we 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 sphygmomanometers and all the stuff that was needed cause 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. Plane got halfway there, turned around and came back and said, Bad weather. That happened three times or something. [laughs] Wait a minute, this is – and each time you had to get another visa and haul the boxes.

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

And all the rest.

Also on this trip, I was carrying letters from relatives of men who were – who had been shot down –

[Norman]

POWs.

[Joseph Elder]

– who might be alive or might not be alive. So, I had all the medical stuff and then several boxes full of – 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 into the North Vietnamese embassy in Vientiane, and they said, Mr. Elder, could you do something for about a month? [laughs] I thought, This is odd, Im here! Sure, I could, but - They said, Well, cause 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 [laughs] a – 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.

[Norman]

Oh, so they had to rethink everything.

[Joseph Elder]

That explained everything. He was dying, and they wanted to be ready for a funeral, and a Quaker coming around trying to deliver supplies –

[laughter]

[Joseph Elder]

– didn’t make much sense.

[Norman]

We’re – were a little busy right now.

[Joseph Elder]

That’s right.

We got – 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 their life. [laughs]

So, I went to the embassy in Vientiane and signed a sort of condolence book and said, I – I am leaving stuff here. I have to go back and start teaching. I’d love to come back, but some other Quaker will do it. So, just, it’s here, and when you’re ready. So, I came back; classes started. And then in October of ’69, the 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?

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

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 weigh it. I also carried an unabridged American dictionary cause the English translators are trying to figure out the words that are being used. There was something called a moratorium.

[Norman]

Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

And they were, What’s a moratorium? Their books didn’t make any sense. After I delivered these two big books, they turned to, you know, moratorium, and you read it, and it still doesn’t make any sense.

[laughter]

It’s a hold of an economic process or some kind of delay.

[Norman]

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

But that was, you know, part of the – the – 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?

[Norman]

Right.

[Joseph Elder]
There’s a – a lot of heart disease among young people that leaves them virtually crippled in that part of the world.

[Norman]

Hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

And if – it makes an 18-year-old into about an 80-year-old. And so, the notion was that these are people who, with the – 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.

[Norman]

And they have the – sort of the time to do this throughout a war?

[Joseph Elder]

They have the time to do it. And they have the – they have the machinery. Hanoi wasn’t bombed much during the war at all.

[Norman]

Right.

[Joseph Elder]

They bombed all around it.

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

But I went to the hospital where the – the installation was, where they took the pictures, and I talked to the surgeons who were doing it all. 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.

[Norman]

So, you weren’t directly related in the later frustrations having to do with the, this would be what, in 1973 and subsequent years? Arguing about the shape of the conference table –

[Joseph Elder]

No, I was out of all that.

[Norman]

– before they even got – sat down to talk about things?

[Joseph Elder]

No, that – that – that was Henry Kissinger and the representatives of other side.

[Norman]

It went on and on.

[Joseph Elder]

I was glad it was happening, but the – 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 has 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.

[Norman]

Sure.

[Joseph Elder]

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. Thats – My Lai is in what used to be South Vietnam.

[Norman]

Yes.

[Joseph Elder]

And so that’s an ongoing project that I’ve been involved with. And a veteran named Mike Boehm, who’s a Madison resident, its sort of his full-time job is raising money for that.

[Norman]

Another one of these situations that has gone for years, like since 1953 when ostensibly there was a peace treaty signed –

[Joseph Elder]

Right.

[Norman]

– or at least a cease fire between North and South Korea.

[Joseph Elder]

Mm-hmm.

[Norman]

And those two seem like utterly intractable enemies, more so as each year progresses.

[Joseph Elder]

Right.

[Norman]

How did you get involved with that situation?

[Joseph Elder]

That was 1990. It – it was a time when – there’s always been a risk of a nuclear war there.

[Norman]

Yeah.

[Joseph Elder]

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. Nuclear weapons –

[Norman]

The North in particular is always saber-rattling.

[Joseph Elder]

That’s right, yeah. We – we – were in – and when you look at the map, there’s not a lot of distance between the cease fire line and the – the capital.

[Norman]

Right.

[Joseph Elder]

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. [laughs]

[Norman]

Well, yeah.

[Joseph Elder]

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 –

[Norman]

To – to Phnom Penh. To – no, not to Cambodia, to –

[Joseph Elder and Norman simultaneously]

– Pyongyang.

[Joseph Elder]

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 – 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 – in the navy on the east side of the – 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 [laughs] off the coast and to keep the temperature down? Why don’t you remove nuclear missiles – nuclear missiles from South Korea? The – 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.

And at that time Ted Kennedy was a major figure. They felt Ted was – Kennedy was one who was interested in working out something there. And we never met Ted Kennedy himself, but we did meet his representative. And there was – and could tell them that we met Ted Kennedy’s staff person.

[Norman]

Did you have any sense in – in North Korea of how the people really felt, especially about the leadership?

[Joseph Elder]

You can only guess. To – it was eerie to be there because the public – what – what the public saw was so restricted. There was a gigantic painting in the downtown mall of the leader of North Korea standing there lecturing to the intellectuals of the world. And there was a crowd of people from Africa and the Soviet Union and the United States sort of taking notes as Kim Il-sung elucidates Juche – Juche Socialism.

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

And then there was the central library. The central library had the collected works of the – the Great Leader in 35 languages or something like that. So, all the evidence you’d get there was – this is a gigantic intellectual who is leading the world.

[Norman]

Mm-hmm.

[Joseph Elder]

And we are – we are all that wisdom is.

Then you get into the countryside or look at the machinery. The buses were derelict almost. See tractors that nobody would be riding here they were in such bad shape. And then you see soldiers out there working the fields cause 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 U.S. decides to do something.

[Norman]

Are they really that paranoid? I mean, where do they get these ideas?

[Joseph Elder]

I think they – they generate among themselves. And they certainly, you know, pick up statements from the rest of the world that this – this is something, what – what the North Koreans are doing is unacceptable and we have to prevent them from doing it. And preventing could be, you know, dropping a nuclear weapon on capital city or, you know, wherever. So, it’s certainly encouraged the way – by the dialogue. You – you hear the threat from the other side. And we can say we’re not seriously thinking of – of wiping out their civilization, whereas they could say, But you certainly sound like that.

[Norman]

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

And then, you know, they launch a missile, and we say, You’re threatening the world. We may have to do something serious. And it generates itself.

[Norman]

Did you ever have a conversation with a North Korean that you felt wasn’t, you know, scripted or orchestrated or controlled or watched?

[Joseph Elder]

My friend who spoke Korean well would speak to cooks and people like that. And no, they – they could certainly not express anything other than general support for what was being said cause they could see who we were, and – and we were almost always with somebody who could translate what was going on, so no, no.

It was bizarre because we were in a hotel that looked like every modern hotel you’d have here, the – 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 sort of in one hour so that you could see the – the great view of the city of Pyongyang.

Funny thing there, the music that was being played was brilliant and accurate and very, very sort of World War II-ish. There was Moonlight in Vermont.

[Norman]

Oh, really.

[Joseph Elder]

And some of these old songs.

[Norman]

So, a lot of Big Band music and that kind of thing. Uh-huh, a little behind the curve.

[Joseph Elder]

And it was so accurate. I got to find the piano player who is doing this.

[Norman]

Uh-huh.

[Joseph Elder]

So, I took a break from dinner to wander around and see where this was. It was a player piano –

[Norman laughs]

[Joseph Elder]

– and there were all the keys doing their own.

[Norman]

Somehow that just seems like a fitting way to end it, Joe.

[Joseph Elder]

Thats right. It’s playing perfect piano music, Pink Panther.

[Norman]

But all of it lockstep.

[Joseph Elder]

Lockstep, right, yeah.

[Norman]

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 –

[Joseph Elder]

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, theyre – 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.

[Norman]

Well, it’s an impressive dossier that you have, Joe, as – as a diplomat –

[Joseph Elder]

Well.

[Norman]

– and as a messenger. And thanks for sharing those experiences.

[Joseph Elder]

Thanks for inviting me.

[Norman]

I’m Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me next time around for University Place Presents.