Lessons of a conflict - Part 2

Ram Manikkalingam

Ceasefires and insistence on human rights protection may not help peace processes in strife-torn countries.

Continued from yesterday

Ceasefires are an integral part of all peace processes. How and when does a ceasefire help negotiate an end to violence and how and when does it hinder such a process ? While most mediators work to secure a ceasefire prior to political negotiations, they often find that the ceasefire becomes the focus of the talks, rather than the political settlement, itself. Mediators involved in resolving a conflict usually make an effort to secure a ceasefire agreement between the two parties before they do anything else.

The implicit assumption is that a ceasefire will be helpful both in humanitarian terms as well as in political terms.

In humanitarian terms, ceasefires lessen the daily pain and suffering caused by war. They allow people to go about their daily lives without fear and anxiety. They create a climate that enables freer travel between areas, movement of goods to markets and transportation of the injured, the infirm and the old for medical treatment. No one disagrees that no war is better than war from a humanitarian perspective.

Obviously, people prefer the peace and the right to go about their daily lives without hindrance over the pain and suffering that inevitably accompany war. This is true even when the respites from war are only temporary, since a temporary respite from war is better than no respite.

In political terms as well, ceasefires are considered to be helpful. The assumption is that ceasefires can contribute to a positive climate for negotiations by improving the lives of civilians and building trust between the two parties. In addition, a ceasefire, it is believed, helps insulate political negotiations from military fighting, and move the negotiations away from pressing military and humanitarian concerns to longer-term political ones. So many efforts to resolve conflict begin with mediators working out a ceasefire and proceeding to monitor parties’ compliance with it.

But the humanitarian and political desirability of ceasefires is not that clear-cut, and in many cases, can actually lead to the opposite - more adverse humanitarian consequences and less trust. For example, ceasefires can contribute to temporary respites that allow parties to re-arm and re-group and begin another phase of conflict with greater intensity, rather than to engage in political talks.

Respites from war that lead to intensified fighting may not be desirable on humanitarian grounds if the subsequent conflict results in even greater pain, suffering and loss of life. Furthermore, a ceasefire that enables parties to attack minorities or suppress dissenting political opinion within their own communities can also vitiate the humanitarian arguments in favour of it. All of these factors have had a perverse effect on the ceasefires in Sri Lanka - where children have been recruited, dissidents killed, and minorities expelled during ceasefires and more intense fighting has broken out after they have ended.

Ceasefires can also have a perverse impact on a peace process because they are not isolated military decisions to cease fighting that take place outside of a political context. Instead, in most conflicts ceasefires are expressly political decisions made in the context of political jockeying for power. When negotiations and ceasefires are linked, it is common to find the relative military strengths of the two conflicting parties on the ground affecting their decisions whether or not to support a ceasefire.

The party that is militarily gaining ground is unlikely to favour a ceasefire and vice versa.

Under these circumstances, for a ceasefire to lead to viable negotiations, the two parties must not only be in a strategic stalemate but it should also be a tactical one. They must feel that neither side is likely to win the war in the long term and that neither side can gain a tactical advantage in the short term that will strengthen its bargaining position at the negotiating table.

Ceasefires can also hinder progress in political negotiations, because parties will, in the absence of clarity about a permanent settlement, prepare themselves for a possible outbreak of conflict. This preparation can lead to increased suspicion among belligerents and lead them to focus efforts on addressing ceasefire violations rather than political problems. And ceasefires can reduce the political pressure on parties to a conflict to work out a settlement.

Finally, when ceasefires are a precondition for political talks, any violations, however small, can lead to parties dissipating political focus and effort on maintaining a ceasefire rather than proceeding towards tackling the longer-term political causes of the conflict. This can not only delay a solution, but also lead to the erosion of trust and goodwill.

This suggests that mediators/peacemakers ought to resist the instinct to negotiate a ceasefire prior to political talks. Instead, making efforts to de-escalate a conflict with steps to improve the humanitarian situation rather than a ceasefire may contribute to a more stable peace process. Several peace processes - such as the Salvadorean one mediated by the Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto and the Aceh peace process mediated by former Finland President Martti Ahtisaari - did not include a ceasefire.

Human rights element

We generally expect and would like good things to go together. When a conflict breaks out, human rights violations invariably take place. So we hope the opposite is true - that is, when we protect human rights, we can contribute to ending armed conflict. While this may be the case in many situations, it is not always so. In my experience in observing Sri Lanka’s conflict closely as well as in studying a number of other violent conflicts, efforts to protect human rights do not always contribute to efforts to promote peace. Sometimes in practice these efforts can come into tension with each other.

First, the good news - strengthening human rights can be good for resolving a conflict. Human rights can contribute to the long-term stability of a society. It can help identify causes of a conflict and potential mechanisms for its resolution. In a divided society, it can protect bridge builders between communities. It can provide a neutral standpoint for addressing contentious issues and it can generate international support for a peace process.

But strengthening human rights can sometimes be in tension with resolving conflict. This is particularly true at the initial phases of a peace process. Raising human rights violations with belligerents can reduce trust in a mediator. For example, the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government today are accused of widespread human rights violations.

Nevertheless, unless one or the other is decisively defeated, it is hard to imagine a serious peace process that does not involve these two parties. But it is also equally hard to imagine these two parties entering a peace process, if the first issue raised is their violations of human rights, because this is bound to make them anxious that they will have to face some form of justice and make them skittish about entering a serious process of peace.

Similarly, they will see protection for human rights as reducing their control over populations. And, finally, they may be anxious about the prospect of being prosecuted for war crimes. While these tensions between resolving conflicts and promoting human rights exist, they are not inevitable and can be reduced through institutional design and political skill.

These lessons can be summarised. Ethnic conflicts are not only about ethnicity. They are also about political parties seeking power and armed entities confronting each other militarily - who are not necessarily divided neatly along ethnic lines.

Starting with a ceasefire may not be the best way to resolve ethnic conflicts, even if this might give you a temporary respite from the armed conflict. Protecting human rights may not always help with promoting peace, though such tensions can be reduced with political shrewdness and strategic design. These lessons, I believe, are true not only for Sri Lanka, but for many countries struggling to go from a situation of war to one of peace.

The writer is a Visiting Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and an adviser to the Humanitarian Dialogue Centre in Geneva.

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