August 13, 2025
This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Saji Prelis, Search’s director of children and youth programs.
For some, non-violence is largely hypothetical, a concept to discuss or debate. For me, it is a choice I’ve made. A choice I have to keep making.
As a young boy in Sri Lanka, the eldest child in a large family, I knew a relatively privileged life. We had a home, food, entertainment, holidays, and most of all a close, loving family. As part of the Sinhalese majority ethnic group, I didn’t fear violence. Sri Lanka had a history of violent conflict, but it always felt far away—until the day it didn’t, until the day I watched as the smoke rising above the treeline inched closer and closer to my home. A civil war had erupted between the government and the Tamil ethnic minority who were seeking an independent state. Soon, no one could escape the violence.
Every day as I boarded the bus to school, every day as I returned home, I feared it would be my last. I watched buildings destroyed, people hacked to death, neighbors and friends tortured and burned alive on our street. When a Sinhalese mob killed my friend as I held his hand, I thought it was my end too. In fact, it was a beginning, a moment that would define the rest of my life. I faced a choice: to exact revenge against my friend’s killer, or to walk away.
If I had only that moment to draw from in making my decision, perhaps I would have chosen differently. But in fact, for years before that moment, I had been formed by my family and community to see human life as sacred, precious. I was taught never to lie or to kill, that doing evil to someone creates negative, karmic energies for a society and for the individual. These teachings ran through my mind in the days following my friend’s murder as I secretly weighed my choices, feeling such confliction. On the one hand, I felt shame and guilt at the possibility of doing nothing to avenge my friend’s murder. On the other hand, because I shared an ethnic identity with the killer, it felt as though I would be going against my own people if I caused him harm (and so much violence is defended as being on behalf of one’s “people”). Then, one day, in what I can only describe as a divine intervention, I had a vision: I saw my brother’s face in the face of my friend’s murderer. And I knew I could not kill him, that this was not about revenge or ego or pride—it was about humanity.
History—both ancient and recent—offers endless examples of dehumanization as a runway to violence. Genocide begins with the creation of an “other,” a supposed enemy, and once a person is seen as less than human, it is much easier to justify their death. This was true in Rwanda, in Bosnia, and it was true in Sri Lanka. At the same time, in each of these cases, there are numerous examples of people protecting one another, hiding and safeguarding their supposed enemy. I saw my own family do this as they helped protect Tamil friends and neighbors. I knew how easy it was in my own mind to recall the violence I had witnessed and to justify a violent response to it. I had to reject that path, and continue rejecting it.
For some, this may feel like passivity or inaction. In fact, it is about right action, which requires seeing the fuller picture. When I moved to the US in 1989 to study, I felt embarrassed, ashamed, angry about what my country had been capable of. It was through studying racism, power, and privilege in the US context that I could finally understand my own. I saw how the racism against Tamils had created inequities within Sri Lanka. Racism was built into our system, just as it was in the US. When I began volunteering with a gang prevention program in Los Angeles, I knew I had to understand the factors that led to members’ involvement in these groups. As I listened, I heard how for so many, a gang was the family they did not otherwise have. Where they felt exclusion in other circles, the gang enabled their inclusion. In one particular case, a 13-year-old girl had murdered a 14-year-old girl—a heinous crime. On one hand, if the girl were to enter the juvenile justice system, she would come out harder, angrier, and more resentful, likely returning her to the same gang activity. On the other hand, her actions had real consequences for others. Ultimately it was the victim’s parents who advocated for this young girl. “We can’t do anything to bring our daughter back,” they said, “but we want to do whatever we can to prevent our son from entering gang life.” The young girl not only was rehabilitated through the program, she was able to help 12 other children come out of violent gangs. Sometimes justice means addressing the conditions that enabled what you endured, so someone else never has to. This work is anything but passive.
Perhaps open war and mass atrocities feel far away from you, as they once did for me. You may never face the kinds of decisions I’ve faced. But if you do, you will draw from all the ways you have been formed to think and believe about others. And at this moment in time, the pool we each draw from has been poisoned by dehumanizing rhetoric—a trajectory that leads to violence. Want to take a simple but powerful step to reverse this? Think about the people with whom you disagree, the ones outside of your “group.” Underneath all of their labels and identities, see them as human beings. Refuse to perpetuate any dialogue that in overt or subtle ways creates an “other.” There is only “we.” We all suffer, and we all have the opportunity to alleviate suffering.
The vital signs of a healthy society show that we are in a diseased state. What will you do to bring healing?
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Want to hear more from Saji? Check out his recent interview with Jenna Arnold from The Land of AND.
