Tribute for Ira William Zartman, better known as Bill

I was deeply saddened by the news of the death of Bill Zartman on 28 July. I first met Bill in the early 1980s  when I began my association with the Washington think tanks, beginning with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the US Institute for Peace and then the Brookings Institution, where I established and directed the Africa studies branch of the Foreign Policy Program for 12 years.  My connections with other institutions in the Washington area, including Bill’s programme at the School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS, followed, while I concurrently carried out the responsibilities of my UN assignment on internal displacement until I moved to  the UN headquarters  in New York in 2007 as under-secretary general and the secretary general’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide. 

Throughout that entire period, I worked very closely with Bill. We co-authored or co-edited volumes and I contributed chapters to books he edited and gave talks to his classes. When I was the first permanent representative of the newly independent nation of South Sudan to the United Nations, I invited him and Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, another close scholar-friend, to address the Africa Group of Ambassadors at the UN on the difficulties of conflict management. 

I was pleased and honored when Bill asked me to write the foreword to his 2019 seminal volume of his scholarly and professional work as a pioneer in conflict management and area studies.  I titled my foreword, A Partnership of Ideas, but Bill combined working on ideas with action. He and I, along with colleagues, were invited as resource persons in the peace initiative of the countries of our sub-region, the Inter-Governmental Authority for Development, to end the war in Sudan. Bill and I, with a couple of colleagues, were also invited to offer advisory services to former president Jimmy Carter in his peace initiative in Sudan. We chose Bill to be our spokesperson.

The more I got to know Bill, the more I became increasingly impressed by his kindness, decency and readiness to help others. I was particularly struck by his combination of his intellectual rigor that did not easily suffer fools, dishonest or lazy minds, with contrasting gentleness, patience, kindness and empathy toward colleagues, especially his students. He was both an entertaining and enlightening teacher and mentor. His ideas on conflict prevention, management and resolution, with such concepts as ripe for resolution and mutually hurting stalemate, have influenced scholars and peace makers around the world. 

Bill was a master of titles. There was an occasion when we  agonised  with colleagues, debating how to approach the normative issues covered in our co-authored volume, focusing on my preoccupation with the need to reconcile national sovereignty with state responsibility in Africa, I had published articles on the subject, including Reconciling Sovereignty with Responsibility, and Frontiers of Sovereignty. Amid a contentious debate over whether the volume should directly relate to sovereignty, to my pleasant surprise, Bill resolved our differences by coming up with the title for our volume, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa. No one questioned his decisive choice of the title, a mark of authoritative intellectual leadership. 

That title, which summed up the principal issues of my concerns, became the guiding framework of my UN work on internal displacement and genocide prevention. It has since contributed immensely to the evolution of the debate on the themes of international protection of human rights and the prevention of mass atrocities. It was recast by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty as the Responsibility to Protect.

I was touched when Danielle, Zartman’s widow, said without hesitation, that Bill was a truly great man, to which I now add the words, kind, thoughtful, helpful and with inexhaustible generosity of spirit. In our indigenous African religious belief system, immortality comprises the continuation of the life hereafter in the same form it was lived in this world, with what in our vernacular is dubbed “Keeping the head of the deceased standing upright” in this world. This means ensuring the continued presence and influence of the deceased through the memory of the living, including family members, wider circle of relatives, friends, professional colleagues and all those whom the deceased had touched in a profound way. Bill was a devout Christian, which ensures for him a place in the Christian concept of heaven for the virtuous. In the African concept of immortality, he will also continue to live in the unknown world of the dead, with the continuation of his identity and influence in this world of the living.

Dorothy and our family join me in extending our heartfelt condolences to Zartman’s loving wife of 65 years, Marie-Daniele, their son Alex with his wife Susan, and their children Matthew and Grace. May God Almighty rest Bill’s soul in eternal rest.

Dr Francis Mading Deng is a Sudanese scholar, diplomat and statesman. He served as ambassador and minister of foreign affairs of Sudan and was the first permanent representative of South Sudan to the United Nations. He also served as the UN secretary general’s representative on internal displacement and special adviser on genocide prevention.