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The Rediff Special/Colonel Anil Athale (retd)

The worldwide failure of peace process

The Middle East peace lies shattered on the streets of Jerusalem. The Hizbul Mujahideen sponsored cease-fire in Kashmir collapsed in a short time. Sri Lanka has ended the Norwegian peace effort. Why is peace so difficult to achieve in internal conflicts?

The end of the Cold War has rid the world of the perpetual menace posed by the nuclear weapons as the two powers that could carry out world destruction are no longer antagonistic. But at the other level, the passing away of the 'balance of terror' has freed the world from restraints that were operative throughout the Cold War on lesser conflicts. A rash of 'score settling' conflicts has broken out. Many of the ancient conflicts are internal revolts by restive minorities or attempts to correct perceived historical wrongs.

Unlike international conflicts between nations, internal conflicts are multi-dimensional. Economic, political, social and psychological causes, in a dynamic relationship, lie at the root of it. While superficially a conflict may appear to be a religious one, in-depth analysis may bring out the conclusion that its roots lie in socio-economic issues. In Northern Ireland for example, the conflict is widely regarded as sectarian one between the Catholics and Protestants.

But it is simplistic to reduce the problem to this level, for the relative poverty amongst the Catholics in Belfast is noticeable. It is difficult to assert that poverty and unemployment do not play a role in violence, be it by the Irish Republican Army or the Skinheads sitting in pubs in the Pimlico area of London. It is difficult to say that the violence in Palestine is purely based on religious antagonism and has no input from the relative economic deprivation of the Arabs.

In the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only one superpower was left in the world arena, the United States of America. The accumulation of military and economic muscle in a single state is unprecedented in the history of the world. This sense of power soon translated in the US assuming a peacemaker role worldwide. The Middle East peace accord, the Irish cease-fire and Bosnian agreement were concluded at the American initiative and with American backing.

This epidemic of 'peace accords' has a parallel in India. In the first two years as prime minister, the late Rajiv Gandhi went on a similar accord signing spree. First was the Rajiv-Longowal accord on Punjab, closely followed by the Assam and Mizo accords. The last of the peace initiatives was the Sri Lanka peace accord of 1987.

In less than a few years, all except the Mizoram peace accord were in shambles. Sant Longowal was assassinated and Punjab saw renewed violence that ended only in 1992-93. Even the most partisan of analysts have not dared to credit peace in Punjab to that agreement. Peace continues to elude Assam even ten years after the Assam agreement and Sri Lankan peace fell apart by October 1987 and saw the Indian army in a bloody conflict with the LTTE. A conflict that cost nearly 2000 casualties, a number that is greater than the combined losses in the 1962 Sino-Indian and the 1971 Indo-Pak conflict.

The peace process in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland has been shattered by violence and stands balanced on a knife's edge.

Fatal Flaws

The failed Indian attempt under Rajiv Gandhi and America's equally doomed approach to the peace process, have striking similarities. The first and foremost is the primacy of the 'Top-Down' approach. The peace process has concentrated excessively on the leadership of rival factions to agree on a compromise to the total exclusion of the masses. There has been very little attempt to get people involved in the discussions/debates that preceded the accords. As a matter of fact, most negotiations were carried out behind closed doors and in secrecy. This is a poor recipe for generating the popular support so essential to make the accords stick. In this format it is easy for the rivals within the movement or nation to accuse the negotiators of a 'sellout'.

But an even greater mistake has been to ignore 'peace making' as opposed to the much preferred 'peace keeping approach'. The crucial difference between the two is that while the first is a holistic approach that includes peace keeping while at the same time tries to tackle the social, political or psychological factors that lie at the root of the conflict. Peace keeping, on the other hand, is heavily dependent on military force that acts as a virtual referee in keeping the two combatants separated. Even in this limited role, the absolute neutrality and fairness of the peace keeping force is extremely important. Any hint of suspicion of partisan behaviour, can blow up the peace. This is precisely what happened in Sri Lanka in 1987 when the LTTE saw Indian peace keepers as no longer neutral but as favouring the Sri Lankan government.

In Bosnia the US peace keepers found themselves in position similar to the Indians in Sri Lanka. It is then only a matter of time before they have to turn to 'waging war to keep peace'. Even the supposedly neutral United Nations has not been above blemish on this count. In the Somalian mission, by targeting General Aideed and his faction of gunmen as the enemies of peace, the UN mission in Somalia had an in-built mechanism of failure. It is seldom realised that the armed forces play a very minor role in the peace process, that of countering the violence. By itself that can neither ensure peace nor the resolution of the underlying conflict.

The record of the UN in peace making in the last 50 years is a dismal one. With the possible exception of the Congo operations in 1960s, in all other peace making missions, UN presence has merely frozen the conflict, never resolved it. This is true of Kashmir, the oldest dispute on the UN agenda, Cyprus, the Middle East, Angola and even Kampuchia.

The reasons for this failure by India, the US or even the UN is that while a great deal of attention is paid to the logistics and military calculations, there is virtually no authentic research input that goes into decision making. The peace keeping has been mainly confined to treating the symptoms as in absence of research, the 'real', as opposed to the perceived, cause of the conflict remains illusive as ever. It is a situation of blind men searching for a black cat in a dark room at night. The UN has no institutional mechanism to carry out this search while in the US, the dozens of think tanks that exist have failed to generate a theory of peace making. The American failure is primarily due to the intellectual arrogance of its strategic analysts who many times mistake their nation's power for some special aptitude for themselves.

In India, the situation is hilarious, howsoever macabre the consequences for the nation and its soldiers. Here we have a situation of personal secretaries, department hopping generalist bureaucrats and at times even film actors, constituted together in an 'adhoc' crisis management group. These extra-constitutional centres of authority with no responsibility and accountability for consequences of their actions, then proceed to land the country into one mess after another. Although with a change of crew.

In this situation of drift, a global phenomenon, the military aspect of the peace process acquire larger than its share of limelight. Soon the means themselves become ends and 'military victory' becomes the goal of the peace process. Obsession with body count during the Vietnam war or Indian obsession with the number of arms captured and numbers of militants killed thus become the yardstick to judge success. Peace making takes a back seat and the military gets stuck in a quagmire.

Understanding Violent Insurgencies

Conflict, reduced to the basics, is a dynamics of interaction between violence and counter violence. Peace process is the systemic model to affect mass behavioural change in order to shift the conflict from violence to a non-violent level. The process is akin to industrial dispute resolution but the difference is that counter violence has a legitimate role in it.

All conflicts have unique features due to cultural, racial and historical differences. Yet there are commonalties like the basic human emotions of fear, greed, yearning for the good life and factors like fear of threat to survival and identity, are universally present. A cross cultural study in a radically differing environment can yield a theory of peace keeping that can provide at the minimum a basic understanding of the peace process. This in turn can form a sound basis to evolve guidelines and specific strategies to deal with the problem at hand.

Insurgencies are like common cold. Treated, it takes seven days, un-treated, a week. The internal revolt has a time frame of 20 years or one generation. A generation that loses everything. In two decades the leadership grows old and wants to see the fruits in its own lifetime and the common people become weary of strife. It is thus an unfortunate fact of history that two decades is the minimum period that has to pass before the antagonists become malleable enough to be ready for compromise.

The writer is former joint director, war studies and a retired colonel who has visited and studied insurgencies in Mizoram, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and Northern Ireland.

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