An Interview with Mr. Afif Safiyeh, the former Palestinian ambassador in England, Russia and the Vatican

Safieh to our team of interviewers:

• ·      I belong to a tragic generation many of whom were stuck abroad.
• ·      We need a wonderful debate to be a platform of interaction between us.
• ·      Your generation should show intellectual curiosity.
• ·      Do not allow my generation to colonize the future of your generation.
• ·      We need to recreate all the components of Palestinian cohesion.
• ·      In politics we should value the battle of ideas and resort to the means of persuasion and not coercion.
• ·      We shouldn’t reinvent the wheel; this is why the study of history is important.

 

In an exclusive interview with the distinctive writer, former Palestinian ambassador in England, Russia and the Vatican and the veteran graduate of Collège des Frères School, Afif Safieh, we held a dialogue addressing several issues including his work as an ambassador and his contributions as an active diplomat who played an important role to gain sympathy for the justice of our cause. The dialogue also touched on the different stations of his long experience in dealing with one of the most important diplomatic files in the major Western capitals. The following is the full text of the interview:

 

 

The Best School in Jerusalem

Q. Let us start by thanking you for allocating your time to enable us to get to know you better and share your thoughts regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

A. I believe that we have suffered historically from this questionable notion of Palestine; “the Promised Land”. I see through you that we can make Palestine the promising land.

Q. We would first like to ask you about your school days, we have been privileged to know that you have attended Collège des Frères and we would like to enquire about your school years and how they shaped your life as a diplomat later.

A. Well, I believe that one’s years in school are decisive in the formation of his personality, intellectual curiosity and outlook towards the world and its horizons etc.

I believe the Frères has been historically the best school in Jerusalem and we, all my generation, were privileged to be at the Frères. One of the assets of this school was that it taught 3 different languages: Arabic; our mother tongue, English and French. It was and still, as I guess, a French institution preparing the pupils for an English program, GCE. So, being brought up in a multilingual cultural environment was in my opinion an asset; we were also privileged to have fantastic professors and I had no great inclination towards physics, chemistry or mathematics, my aim was always to just succeed but I had a fascination with history and I still remember several of our professors in this subject, mainly professor “Awwad” who triggered my fascination in the trajectory of mankind, the evolution of society regionally and internationally. I remember my father at dinnertime would ask me and tell me something about Bismarck, then he would ask me just to animate the evening dinner, who contributed most to the unification of Italy Cavour , the prime minister of  Piedmont or Garibaldi, the leader of the mass popular movement. So we had a very challenging and fascinating environment, I remember our teachers in English language and English literature professor Sarkis and professor Dickranian and I remember graduating from school having read most of what is called the classics of the English literature, arriving in university at age 16 and I was mentioned in the works of the Vatican: The President of my university, the Catholic University of Louvain (Leuven), made an intervention saying “according to our comparative study, the youngest student, Afif Safieh, is from the Holy Land and arrived at the university at the age of 16”. I had no need to feel any inferiority complex because I was equipped with an intellectual luggage from school to cope with the level and the standards.

I would always invite your generation to look at things from a universal approach, the macro approach and not the micro one. Tomorrow you will be on the world’s stage competing with students of your age who have graduated from Scandinavia to California to Australia, you are not competing with St. George or Al-Ibrahimieh, all of your generation from all those schools, will be competing on the universal “world” stage and this school is supposed to give you the intellectual equipment and artillery to cope with the challenges and opportunities. So I have great memories of that era and I believe that my generation was tragic in a way, we were 36 graduating from school in 1966 and I believe that out of the 36 only 3 are still in Jerusalem and 33 are scattered in the four corners of the world, in a normal situation you would have found 33 in their hometown and 3 for personal or professional reasons abroad. Our pyramid also in that level is unique and specific; what has happened was the following: my generation of Palestinian students, those who graduated and went abroad for university because then except for Birzeit which had a sophomore and freshman program we went abroad mainly to Europe or some to the Arab countries and we were not here when the 1967 War occurred and the Israelis as you know immediately annexed and conducted a census and those who happened not to be there became legally none existent. My father then had a sentence which I think is painfully accurate, he said:“?? ??? 1948 ????? ?????? ??? ??? 1967 ????? ??????” which means “In 1948 we lost our land, and in 1967 we lost our children”. I happen to belong to a family of 3 children, luckily my sister had been to France and England for her university studies was back already but my brother and I got stuck abroad and became the wandering Palestinians, only capable of coming back as tourists with foreign passports in 1993 after what so called “the breakthrough of Oslo”.

So I belong to a tragic generation many of whom were stuck abroad and that was the Israeli policy of decapitating of potential future Palestinian intellectuals because, unfortunately, they were more aware than our society about the importance of the educated in the functioning of any society.

Painful Moment

Q. After your 27 years of involuntary exile, what did it feel like coming back to your hometown, Jerusalem?

A. To tell you frankly, we are a closely knit family of five; my father and mother and their 3 children- 3 were inside, in Jerusalem and 2 were abroad, the interaction was extremely intense and you might be surprised that when I came for my first visit back home 27 years later, everything was new and I was aware of every possible change that has occurred, my first visit was from the airport to the Notre dame Hotel where my family and all our friends had gathered to have a collective breakfast and  from there immediately I went to the cemetery to visit my father who had died in the meantime and that was another painful moment because the cemetery where my father is buried has been transformed into a wall with- like- drawers and I could see all the family names of Jerusalem, the names that I have grown up with.

 It’s painful because most of those families had almost evaporated form Jerusalem during the last 5 to 6 decades, so I was disconnected and I became a wandering Palestinian around the globe, but having kept my family ties here we come to the importance of the family cell unit, I was aware of the settlements that I will be struck with the arrival towards Jerusalem. I knew that Jerusalem would be mutilated in deliberate decline. Yet my dream was how to help reawaken the city and give it back its political, cultural, economic and intellectual centrality. I dreamt of abandoning politics, coming back to Jerusalem, starting an English Weekly which I wanted to title “The Palestinian”. I had worked on a feasibility study and how to make it viable independently because we need independent media vehicles. We need a wonderful debate to be a platform of interaction between us: the Palestinian insiders and outsiders but also between us and the Israelis, between us and the world because as you know Jerusalem is a city of great symbolism, it’s important to us because it’s our future capital, it’s the centre of our intellectual thinking but it is also of significance to the entire world so I wanted a magazine from Jerusalem, unfortunately the Israelis in two months’ time asked me to forget about it saying “you will not be authorized to come back to Jerusalem, if you are to come with your political colleagues, you can come to Ramallah, Jericho or  Gaza, but Jerusalem never”.

They were afraid of creating a precedent and unfortunately in two months’ time and  many friends, very prominent friends, from around the world wrote to protest or to enquire about the negative response and they had a standard letter that I still remember by heart where it said that they would send to people who have protested or inquired: “we process in priority cases of minors or spouses” obviously I was no more a minor and it was a “distant” relative who had asked for me, my mother, who in the meantime had died, so according to those who today set the rules of the game, I’m supposed not to have any connection to anymore Jerusalem or any legitimate claim even though my family goes back in Jerusalem as far as the archives exist and that’s not my unique case; it’s the case of an entire society that has been dislocated.

Q. Do you think that your political background could be a reason to prevent your coming back to Palestine?

A. I believe our tragedy is that we are undesirables in our homeland; the Israelis want the geography without the demography. To put it in one sentence, even if I wanted to come back to retire in Jerusalem, to just walk around strolling and enjoying the Old City and the new one, I would have been undesirable unfortunately and for me it would have meant four persons to return: my wife and my two children would have come back and that is the way society has been suffocated. It’s the way society is being decimated. My family today is proliferating in Europe and in Brazil and evaporating from Jerusalem and that’s the political purpose , history is always undecided and we should always behave in a way where we are the subjects of our own history and not the objects of history and we have through our activity to help history make the right choice. Tomorrow is ours, that’s the way we should believe and that’s the way we should operate.

Today the status quo is revolting, unacceptable nauseating and inadmissible.

We have to turn this country into the Promising Land and we should abandon the mentality of losers, the psychology of defeat and failure, we should abandon what I often perceive in our society that some of us have elevated pessimism as the criteria of measurement of one’s patriotism, only the optimists make history but not naïve optimism, realistic optimism, creative optimism.

And I believe on your generation, on your fragile shoulders so many burdens and expectations are being invested.

Sort of Equilibrium

Q. How can we, as youth, make our country the promising land?

A. By imagination, creativity, through a sense of responsibility and a spirit of initiative, we have to get rid of uncreative, uninspiring patterns of behavior; we have to unleash imagination but also responsibility creativity, all that together.

I believe we are in a moment in our history where our society should do a lot of soul searching, one should not be afraid of questioning accepted ideas, I believe that your generation should show intellectual curiosity, this is why I started by saying, for example, that we used to learn 3 languages and well, languages are an art opening your horizons, giving you access to the world, to other cultures, other societies, other civilizations, other patterns of thinking and today I’m not saying something new. Language is not only knowing it, it’s like an envelope and what’s important is the message or the letter that lives in; what was called the planetary village, today we live in a shrinking world; today we live in the era of the quickness of communication.

You are an important component of society, you should have a say what world you want to live in today and tomorrow. The future is yours but always bear in mind that in any collectivity in any society you need the optimist and the pessimist; you need the adventurous type and the prudent type.  Do not allow my generation to colonize the future of your generation.

Q. We would like to know about your early life, what triggered you to study political science and international relations at the university? And could you tell us about your educational journey?

A. As I told you I was fascinated with history, from ancient times, the rivalry between Persia and emerging Greece, the rivalry between Greek city-states, Sparta and Athens.  I was fascinated with Mesopotamia, Contemporary Iraq and Pharaonic Egypt. I was fascinated by how Palestine was located in the middle of three major continents: Asia, Africa and Europe, which were the three major continents of international interaction, the emergence of the Roman Empire and what it symbolized and meant then. So I liked history and international relations as a young pupil, now for my generation of Palestinians we also perceived politics as the necessary evil and one of our slogans then in the second half of the sixties was “if you don’t take care of politics, anyway politics will take care of you” and not necessarily in the way you would like it to take care of you, so you’d  better take care of it or else it would take care of you, so I had an inclination for political activity and it was a necessary evil because it shaped and determined our future.

I studied as I told you in the Catholic University of Louvain which was in Belgium and was the oldest catholic university in the world established in 1425 and for my postgraduate studies I went to Paris.

I think I’m the only Palestinian who was president of 2 different branches of the general union of Palestinian students; the Belgian at age 19 and the French at age 24 in 1974-75.

 I invite you to have that dynamic involvement in the student  movement, thus you learn the respect of yourself and the respect of the topic you discuss, the respect of your interlocutor and you learn that you might not necessarily be always right and that what the others are saying might have some truth in it and here you learn to be dialectical and dialectical does not mean necessarily a Marxist, it is rather the idea of thesis, antithesis and synthesis that you always have to absorb the ideas of others, integrate them in your own approach and come up with a better theoretical framework to understand realities.

So student life for me was fascinating, you make friends from around the world, you don’t live in your national ghetto, it’s then that we had networks of contacts with Latin American students, African students, European students, so you become familiar with realities that you have not physically visited, it was the golden era of the student movements then in that part of the second half of the sixties; the student movement was vibrant from Belgium to Berkley in California, from Paris to Prague, you might remember in reading, the spring of Prague; the student movement was bursting with energy. One of our favorite authors then was Marcuse, a German, and if you have a look at my book, there’s a lecture I gave at the London school of economics in 1995 on the occasion of their centenary and I titled my lecture as the song “those were the days” speaking of how it was 25 years earlier. Marcuse had a theory that the major factor and actor of change in any society is the student community.

 

 “Breakthrough to Breakdown”

Q. What can you tell us about your book “The Peace Process from Breakthrough to Breakdown”?

A. This book as you have seen is a selection of lectures I have given between 1981 of last century and till 2005 which was my farewell speech in London. I believe it’s a book that covers a lot of scope and it covers a Palestinian analysis of the unique nature of Zionism; it covers a Palestinian look at the domestic dynamics within the Israeli society; it has lectures that deal with the Palestinian internal situation; it has lectures that deal with Palestinian-Arab relations as there are lectures that deal with Israeli-American relations; it covers the itinerary of the Palestinian national movement and its evolution; it traces the evolution of the Palestinian national movement and I believe it covers the era when we were still negotiating pre-negotiations then pre-negotiating negotiations, then it covers the breakthrough of  93 and almost the immediate disenchantment that followed and up to the breakdown. So I believe that it’s a wonderful tool for many categories, I know the excitement it has aroused within the Palestinian Diaspora communities, many persons whom I know said that they are recommending it to the new generation of Palestinians born abroad, not living day to day Palestinian reality and if parents want to recommend to their children one book there has been a proliferation of production of  books, and if they want today to recommend one book to their new generation to read that would be the one. It’s provoking or arousing a lot of interest within the academic community, many professors are now having it on their list of recommended readings and it’s not by accident that two of the major professors of Oxford  University, Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan have recommended it and in America now the book would be distributed starting from April and the first initial indications are extremely encouraging, it’s arousing a lot of interest within Jewish communities in Europe and America and it’s not by accident that Haaretz and the Jewish Chronicle in London had excellent book reviews of the book. I m working on another book now but which would take probably two years to prepare titled “the Anatomy of Mission” where I will go into detail and analyze the function of a diplomat, a Palestinian diplomat, which by itself again is a unique experience and I for one happen to have had the privilege of having been the head of mission in London, Washington, Moscow in addition to the Holy See “the Vatican”.

In normal diplomatic services one doesn’t have time materially to be head of mission in those three major capitals of the international system, materially one is an ambassador in one of those capitals and probably number two in another of those, I had the privilege of being head of mission in those three capitals. I’ll try to translate my experience in the upcoming book, but it’s a two year plan and I m entering a phase in my life where I’m allowing myself some well deserved laziness, now when I speak of laziness I’m speaking of 14 hours a day of work.

 If I had one piece of advice to the next generation, discipline in the usage of one’s time is an extremely precious approach, to be disciplined, I remember Edward Said telling me that he woke up very early every day at around 5 in the morning, did most of his writing and productive intellectual work before 9.00 when others become operational and then he had a usual day.

I’m not inviting everybody to wake at five but discipline in one’s life is extremely important and one should always allocate time for reading; digesting new things or else you stagnate.

When I was a student my purpose was besides attending the courses and all the rest was to read a minimum of hundred pages a day, so I invite you to be voracious readers.

Q. How was the peace process different from self-determination?

A. Unfortunately, and this is why we are in a period of soul searching, we and everybody else around the world have had more process than peace the last 20 years, which is a shameful thing, and I believe diplomats around the world should be ashamed, for they have allowed that process not to come to any fruition; it became a meaningless tragic farce. In my lecture a few days ago in Bethlehem at Al-Sabil Conference where 220 internationals were there plus all the locals, I advocated a new idea, since at the negotiation table we have explored every possible scenario and every alternative and their opposite. May be we need today to have peace without negotiations, there is no more any need for them, because the world knows what is needed and I said in matters of war and peace in the international system, the international will should prevail on a national whim, and I said today since we have respected all our commitments to the international community, today it is the international community that has to respect its commitments to our Palestinian people, either by the quartet or the Security Council to tell both sides in the most unequivocal manner what the world expects of them; it’s not up to the Israelis to decide that if I vote for Barack I give them back 70%, if I vote for Netanyahu I give them 50%, and if I vote for Lieberman I can afford giving them a kick in the back.

History is Always Undecided

Q. But what is the international law doing?

A. That’s the battle and it has been an uphill battle, but we are on the verge of winning and we are born winners, we should create the mentality of winners. We should abstain from the mentality of losers, defeat and failure.

 I believe Israel is also in trouble, we are a suffering society but they are a society in crisis and trouble. Having lived in America and Europe I can see how Jewish Communities around the world see Israel’s behavior as a source of embarrassment for them, unlike the sixties where I could see the unanimous excitement and enthusiasm around Israel. Today to the contrary there is this feeling of shame and embarrassment. I believe in America a majority of public opinion is in favor of Palestinian aspirations, ending the occupation and the birth of a state. As I told you history is always undecided; we have to help it and this is why in the Palestinian society where I perceive some masochistic tendencies, and some suicidal propensities, we should overcome those wrong inclinations, recreate the national cohesion that is needed and never forget that there is the primacy of politics. If you take the experiences of South Africa and Algeria, the ANC in South Africa was defeated militarily by the apartheid regime, the Algerian FLN was defeated by the French army on the military level yet both peoples prevailed on the political arena, to give you an idea on the primacy of politics.

What we need is again to recreate all the components of Palestinian cohesion, Palestinian perseverance and marginalize all the negative elements that our society has suffered from without entering into details. So cohesion and perseverance and a sense of purpose and never to forget the primacy of politics and we should again send to the world an unambiguous unanimous message on what we all agree about, instead of always projecting the image of a dislocated society, cacophonic society, we have to be a harmonious orchestra rather than a cacophonic noise.

Q. Well, as you have said the mass hoarding of people in squares and streets, etc. But there hasn’t been such a serious progress in the wake of Mubarak’s departure. We have seen a new era beginning in Egypt but what are the next steps, what strides can be made in order to begin something new?

A. I wouldn’t be as gloomy as you suggest. If we look at Egypt, yes there were hundreds of casualties and fatalities that could have been spared had the regime not resorted to repression through its force at the beginning, but the army’s none usage of violence was a welcomed phenomena; what we have today is a promising future. There is a constitution committee of very prominent individuals, all competent in constitutional law working and maybe by now they have finalized their work; they are working on the amendments to the constitution in the right direction. Secondly, I believe that all the political parties that exist in Egypt would be legitimized and legalized and they all have the feeling that they have to introduce new blood and a fresh breath, because unfortunately the situation of fossilization and stagnation had not only infected regimes in the Arab World but has also infected oppositional parties, for years my friend I would say, and not thinking of particular situations in the Arab world we neither have the regimes we deserve nor do we have the oppositions we need. Today the political parties are trying to reinvent themselves which is another welcomed phenomena.

The youth that has emerged as a decisive player on the political stage, up to now we are not organized institutionally but they had their own flexible fluid network through Twitter and Facebook, which is superb, to mobilize technology at the service of ideas. But I believe today many of them would be entering into already existing parties or creating new ones, I personally have always consistently been in the favor of the following:

I’m in favor of constitutional pluralism and I believe democracy is not a western idea, it’s a universal achievement, the West has contributed to it but still it’s a universal idea.

We need to inculcate the respect of the idea of pluralism, the rule of the majority and the respect of the minority because today’s minority can be tomorrow’s majority and vice versa. In politics we should value the battle of ideas and resort to the means of persuasion and not coercion, let’s try to live up to those high standards.

 

 

Factors of Cohesion

Q. That isn’t the case of neither Libya nor Yemen, so what are your projections of the Middle East and what is your vision of Palestine in the near future?

A. first of all nothing is to be ruled out in those countries, as I told you, you can’t say that history should be made in a week and if by then it didn’t give a final verdict then you can’t say history has failed us, history is always in the making, politics is the confrontation of wills; sometimes it is done in a civilized manner through peaceful protests and absence of physical repression, and sometimes unfortunately the regime resorts to instruments of power and repression they have at their disposal.

A regional integration and economic cooperation are what we may need, we must learn from others, we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, and this is why the study of history is important, therefore one can see how other regions have increased, enhanced, broadened and deepened their regional cooperation. We can’t copy but take advantage, let me tell you, when I was a student, Hegel the German philosopher, whom I liked a lot had a pessimistic yet very important sentence which goes like “the only thing we learn is that we learn nothing from history”.

I think we should hope to prove him wrong and I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded if we could do so.

Q. How do you see the recent development in North Africa and other countries in the Middle East will impact the peace process?

A. it’s too early to say, but a region where governments are more legitimate and more representative of their own public opinion will behave on the international arena with more national dignity, than we have seen in the past. I’m in favor of this concept of national dignity to be honest.

Hence, I believe that with having more legitimate representative accountable governments, those units in the international system will behave with more national dignity and their opinions will be taken more in consideration.

 Q. You were the representative of the PLO office delegate in Moscow, London and Washington. What are now the drawbacks in the Palestinian diplomacy?

A. I think that we are a small people numerically and statistically and we have a highly motivated society, but any small population needs to have a fantastic impeccable diplomatic instrument. The Palestinians are people with a cause, but also because our country and society are central to three continents, we are condemned or blessed with the need of having an impeccable and large diplomatic instrument. I have lived the period and the era when we were ostracized, ghettoized and marginalized by the international system because of the strength of the Israeli lobby and the Pro-Israeli lobby.  

I’ve lived from 1974, after the October War of 1973, all the successive breakthroughs from Yasser Arafat appearing on the international stage of the UN in New York with his fantastic speech saying “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”  Gradually we became mainstreamed and accepted.

Unfortunately, the world is very unfair; there is a security council with certain countries enjoying the questionable privilege of vetoes, but I believe that from total marginalization and the perception as us being a collection of terroristic subversive elements to the projection of an adorable society, history has maltreated and should render justice to all this tremendous sacrifice and great achievement. So there’s room for improvement. Helmut Schmidt, the former Prime Minister in Germany, used to say “The biggest room on earth is the room for improvement”.

Nostalgic Pilgrimage

Q. Can you share with us some memories or the way you feel when you visit the school you studied in and graduated from? What goes in your mind and heart?

A. For me, it’s a sort of nostalgic pilgrimage into my past and before we had this discussion I had a superb encounter with the director of the institution, Dr. Suleiman Rabadi, who informed me about the goals and targets of the future projects. Three days earlier he presided over the discussion I had with “Al-Sabil” conference and we also had another exchange and I explored with him an idea that I believe that he, the institution, and you as seniors of this institution would play an important role in its achievement. I believe the ‘Collège des Frères’ as I told you earlier, is the best school in Jerusalem and will be. I believe there is now a historical necessity for somebody taking the initiative of making a conference for the Jerusalem Diaspora around the world. Jerusalem suffered demographically a lot in 1948. People forget that West Jerusalem was also Palestinian and that there were eight residential neighborhoods from where people were kicked out; some moved like my family from West Jerusalem to East Jerusalem but others moved to Western California, American West Coast, Scandinavia and Australia. I believe that we should not lose this Jerusalem Diaspora and we should interact with them and somebody here, preferably an NGO, and maybe a partnership between Collège des Frères and Faisal al Husseini Foundation for an example could convene a conference soon and this could be done within the coming six months for the Jerusalem Diaspora. Can you imagine the potential of such an initiative of 400 to 500 people for the first conference coming to Jerusalem from all over the world, from Scandinavia to California to Pennsylvania to Australia, and buses taking them to visit (Al- atamon, Al-bak’a, Al-tambieh..Etc), then going to the Old City of Jerusalem to visit the mosques and the holy places? Can you imagine the interactions? I have seen in America the committees of Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Der Dibwan in action. Every such conference that takes place in America results in 4/5 marriages, which is beautiful, what is better than the intermarriages between Jerusalemites from Jerusalem and those who live abroad, we can make agreements with either Collège des Frères or the University of Jerusalem to have every year a one month summer project where Arabic and history are taught. We can have all the NGO’s coming and giving their brochures so that the children of our Diaspora can volunteer and I like voluntary work on which my generation was built. This is the beautiful gift you can give to any cause. Can you imagine the interactions that can happen when hundreds of the children of Diaspora come every summer to work in the NGO’s in Jerusalem and Ramallah donating their time?

 

We are a society, here again we come back to our multilingual nature; a lot of our successful Palestinian diaspora can subcontract and have partners from Palestine. We live in the media age; we can have companies established in Jerusalem for the dubbing, subtitling, and translation as we have people fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, etc. Can you imagine how much work can be created? Maybe 50 of our young actors can be involved in that, if you want to do the subtitling, so many of our translators can be involved and the sky is the limit. I believe we should unleash Palestinian creativity. Let’s put imagination in power. Unfortunately, we live in a very uninspiring moment. You can be the breath of fresh air for the future.

Ideas are Nobler than Institutions

Q. As a prolific writer, do you regard downloading your saved books and articles as a violation of your intellectual property or as an infringement of copyright?

A. As long as it’s always mentioned, on the contrary, a person who believes that he is at the service of an idea, he would like to have his intellectual production as democratically shared as possible. I take it as a tribute and a compliment. I have devoted all my life for the Palestinian cause on the framework of the PLO and I’ve always said the following: ‘I believe the PLO is in the same time an idea and an institution, if a few thousands work in the institution, then the eleven million other Palestinians are the vehicles of the idea, and ideas are nobler than institutions. In politics on the contrary, having one’s article or lecture distributed and circulated is a very positive thing as that was the purpose to begin.