Divining peace
“All too often it is innocent men, women and children who pay the price of war. We cannot ask them to pay the price of peace.”
Report of the Secretary-General on peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict, United Nations
This morning, as I was writing this column, I noticed a strange pattern of tea-leaves amongst the dregs of satiation. The pattern suggested that the Chief Executive’s term in office was out of his hands and largely defined by filial ambition. The languid leaves also suggested that the boundless aspirations of the gods of war physically closest to him posed the greatest danger to his legacy and life to boot. Alarmed at such a bleak future and the danger it posed to our Executive Übermensch, I poured myself another cuppa. The damned pattern remained essentially the same, though just near the stem, a few leaves foretold an increasingly violent clampdown on dissent erasing any real threat to the government’s prospects over the long-term. Depressed, I switched to coffee, but have preserved the tea-leaves for production in court as evidence that the company responsible for its production is an agent of the LTTE. Evidently, what the LTTE could not win through violence, they are now clearly attempting to subliminally suggest through Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. Perhaps existing travel advisories to Sri Lanka must be revised to caution that shamans, soothsayers, psychics and astrologers stand the risk of arrest, interrogation and production in court if they see a future even a shade less luminous than government.
When I first got to hear from a friend of the arrest of an astrologer in Sri Lanka for daring to suggest a future that unsettled the regime, I thought it was a joke. This is a new low even for a government filled to the brim with humourless heroes. More than white vans, this arrest suggests something more sinister – that the government will viciously clampdown on any narrative, any dissent, no matter how trivial or disconnected with telluric realities. And this is the same government that asks us to place our confidence in its ability to engineer peace.
We’ve been here before.
The UNF’s disastrous design of a peace process, defined by a political leadership unable and unwilling to communicate meaningfully with voters in the South resulted in unmet expectations of economic prosperity that eventually contributed to the rise of violent Sinhala nationalism in opposition to the CFA and subsequently the government’s demise. Memories of voters are short lived. To constantly relive 12th May 2009 suggests the essential insecurity of a regime that cannot, and will not, move past its crowning moment. To do so is to enter the unfamiliar and uncomfortable domain of peacebuilding.
The very term peacebuilding suggests that peace exists in a state of siege or not at all. But the hardest part of peacebuilding is explaining what it means, and must entail, to polity and society that for three decades have had their lives and imagination conditioned by war, emergency rule and normalisation of violence. Such societies unthinkingly peg peace to violent foundations, either in their support for terrorism or in their support for war against terrorism. Existing literature on conflict resolution deals very badly with an example like Sri Lanka, for it does not capture or offer any meaningful answers to the vexed problem of a government adopting, without care or concern, the very tactics of the terrorists they are fighting against in order to defeat them.
In a column that irked, among others, the Government’s Peace Secretariat during the war, I called the Chief Executive and his inner cabal of war architects “murderous brutes”. I see no reason to revise or retract this statement today, because it is precisely why we won the war against the LTTE so quickly and decisively. It is entirely possible, and obviously very desirable, that such people change for the better. But the challenge of peacebuilding and conflict resolution practice and theory as they stand today is to deal with a regime that does not after war’s end. The recently released UN Report of the Secretary-General on peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict is interesting reading in this regard.
Being a typical UN document, it is turgid, full of platitudes and needlessly long (though the “Please Recycle” notice on the front page suggests the UN is now more acutely conscious of how much of paper it wastes). It offers no new thinking or real innovation, and contains plenty of recommendations and proposes more studies. Yet it’s value lies in its reiteration to UN member states that peacebuilding after war is a tremendously challenging task especially for victors. It cautions that the post-war context brings significant challenges to political leadership and civil society, and that “threats to peace are often greatest during this early phase”. The report notes the value of coordination and collaboration between domestic, regional and international actors, “since no single actor has the capacity to meet the needs in any of the priority areas of peacebuilding”. A point that captures the UNF’s failure to embed the value of the CFA in the minds of the voter in the South warrants a fuller excerpt, for it is a set of challenges facing the incumbents in power today to a much greater degree (since the Prime Minister of the UNF was never seen as a god),
The end of conflict… tends to create high expectations for the delivery of concrete political, social and economic dividends. Building confidence in a peace process requires that at least some of these expectations are met. Equally important is effective communication and an inclusive dialogue between national authorities and the population, not least to create realistic expectations of what can be achieved in the short run.
The full participation of women in policy making is stressed, as well as the inclusion of civil society and those who have been socially, economically and politically marginalised. The report courageously notes that post-war, “some of the national actors with whom the international community must engage may be implicated in past human rights abuses or significant atrocities”. Disappointingly and unsurprisingly, the report does not go on to explain how the mechanisms of such engagement with regimes charged with war crimes can be fashioned. In line with the government’s post-war priorities, the report notes that “jump starting economic recovery can be one of the greatest bolsters of security and provides the engine for future recovery.” On the other hand, it stresses the importance of the safe and sustainable return and reintegration of IDPs, strengthening the rule of law, reforming the security sector, promoting inclusive dialogue and reconciliation. Juxtapose this basic common sense with the propaganda and actions of the Rajapakse regime during and especially after the end of war. No astrologer is needed to predict what is evident upon sober reflection of facts suggesting the hubris, insensitivity, arrogance and violent exclusion that defines governance and government.
In his Nobel Peace Prize address in 1998, John Hume noted that,
“All of us are asked to respect the views and rights of others as equal of our own and, together, to forge a covenant of shared ideals based on commitment to the rights of all allied to a new generosity of purpose.”
Where is this generosity of purpose today? Instead of it we have sprawling IDP camps, sarcophagi of hopelessness and destitution, where success is measured not by standards of human dignity and decency but by comparisons to what we think their lives must have been under the LTTE. The sheer absurdity and considerable violence of such comparisons are lost to many, perhaps on account of the greater farce of attempts to secure peace by abducting journalists and arresting recalcitrant astrologers.
In one sense though, the government’s avowed design for peacebuilding in Sri Lanka is heavenly, for it is certainly like nothing on earth.
Media in Sri Lanka
For over three years, I have discussed media and conflict resolution at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) in Colombo in classes with high-ranking officers in active service from the intelligence community, Police, Army, Navy and Air Force as well as staff from NGOs, university students and ordinary citizens. My fundamental emphasis in these classes was to suggest that all citizens in Sri Lanka today own or have access to tools and technologies that allow them to produce, disseminate and consume news and information beyond traditional media coverage. Few disagreed with this thesis.
This is not a technocratic argument, or one based on and reflective of some privileged social or political class, an elite not unlike those who control the media we consume today. We already see how mobiles have changed the way we get and transmit news – from tsunami warnings and road closures to the latest cricket scores. As research by the Colombo based telecommunications policy think tank Lirneasia highlighted recently, there are already more phones in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Thailand than radios at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) – the largest and poorest socio-economic group in these countries. In Sri Lanka, over 70% of BOP households have a telephone, either fixed or as is increasingly the case, mobile. We are looking at what I call an addressable humanity in less than a decade. Everyone, wherever they are, will own or have access to a number that connects them to the rest of the world. In many cases, this will be a mobile phone. Think about it – affordable, ubiquitous voice and data connectivity for everyone. How will the use of and access to communications at this scale impact human rights and governance? Will this level of borderless addressability realise Francis Fukuyama’s end of the nation-state, or conversely, will it strengthen movements for internal self-determination? Do we embrace this future or do we seek to violently stymie its realisation? Essentially, why are these developments and questions so important for professional journalism?
One reason is because these new tools and technologies are re-organising the power around, the perception of and respect towards traditional media. Strip away all the highfalutin hype and well-known pitfalls over the practice of citizen journalism and examples of new media and you still have historic changes in content creation, by and for citizens, unprecedented since Gutenberg’s movable type 560 years ago. This is not content that necessarily needs, or uses, the enabling architecture of traditional media to get read, seen or heard. And this is precisely what bothers our senior journalists. As renowned BBC journalist Nik Gowing recently noted in The Guardian,
Too often, the knee-jerk institutional response continues to be one of denial as if this new broader, fragmented, redefined media landscape does not exist. Yet within minutes the new, almost infinite media dynamic of images, video, texts and social media mean the public rapidly has vivid, accurate impressions of what is unravelling. Overall, the time lines of their institutional power and the new media realities are increasingly out of sync. This creates what a few enlightened officials or executives concede is the new fragility of their power in a crisis. Institutional assumptions of commanding the information high ground in a crisis are from a different era. The instant scrutiny created by the new digital media landscape subverts their effectiveness and leaves reputations more vulnerable than ever in a crisis. It usually does so with breathtaking speed.
Emphasis mine. For my sins as a scholar, I have been forced to interact with opinionated journalists who are overwhelmingly less knowledgeable about new media than most students I have encountered my classroom, including many from our defence establishment. There is perhaps a simple explanation. Senior journalists, much like our government today, think they alone know the truth and thus over time come to believe their own fiction as fact. As a result, many see no reason to engage with alternative viewpoints and facts emerging from citizen produced content. Readers remain consumers, journalists remain producers and the news flows out from the newsroom. It’s a simple worldview. My students, on the other hand, are interested in ways they can manipulate existing media and create their own. Both groups, perhaps unequally, are fascinated and frustrated by new media. Fascinated because they find that media production for a global audience is now as simple as a few strokes on a mobile device. Frustrated because with this knowledge comes the realisation that it is no longer possible to control information flows opposed to, or that question, one’s own opinion.
How does this impact on media production and consumption in Sri Lanka? The re-activation of the Press Council is a good example. The government’s decision to reactivate it was ostensibly on the basis that salaries and rent were still being paid to maintain its membership and offices respectively, even though it was dissolved a few years ago. The manic lunacy of the Rajapakse government sadly survived the war. My observation however was that not a single press release or media report on the reactivation of the Press Council acknowledged the elephant in the room – deep and enduring divisions within traditional media in Sri Lanka that undermines media freedom. But we already know this. Just recently, a prominent member of the Editors Guild itself, commenting online, supported the reactivation of the Press Council and bringing to book producers of content that, in this instance, highlighted clear examples of the defamatory use of online sources and plagiarism in a leading newspaper. While media freedom remains under severe threat from government, the defence establishment and armed parastatals, the significance of senior journalists themselves undermining the professionalism, independence and impartiality of their profession is a topic that is simply not talked about openly.
Why is this important for us, the consumers of media? For starters, we now can talk back to journalists and comment on their content, even if they refuse to feature or publish us in their own media. This makes many senior journalists feel deeply insecure and vaunt to respond to new media in the same manner as the Pope would if you asked him when he last had sex. This is unfortunate. All that really differentiates traditional and new media today is their ability to create or strengthen value. Progressive newspapers like the Guardian in the UK show how value can be added to traditional journalism by engaging readers as participants in news-making through the web. In opening up an investigation into the expenses of UK MPs, the Guardian recently invited readers to categorize 700,000 pages of information, transcribing the handwritten expenses details into an online form and alert the newspaper if any claims merit further investigation. Professional journalists who bring to bear their experience, training and impartiality to investigate claims made by the general public greatly enhance the value of news. This is a participatory culture of news-making radically different to old models of production and consumption.
Value creation also works the other way around. Given the flagrant violation of codes of conduct and ethics drawn up by media organisations and senior journalists in Sri Lanka, citizen themselves will increasingly hold media accountable to a higher standard. In Tamil, Sinhala and English, citizens – from youth to a number of progressive and well-known journalists who blog anonymously – are using new media to produce content that interrogates government, governance, private enterprise and increasingly, traditional media. They are also producing content that reveals war casualties, IDP camp conditions and alternatives to what the government and pliant traditional media would have us believe is the only truth. Senior editors in Sri Lanka may rant and rave about awards won and copies sold, but the hard reality – whether they choose to accept it or not – is that their reputation and integrity competes against and is scrutinised by a media model beyond their control.
How must students of journalism and activists committed to the freedom of expression respond to this new weltanschauung of media production and consumption? I would argue for engagement and innovation, but here again we face a significant problem. Many of the institutions, free media movements and colleges of journalism today are hostage to a close association with and coloured by the parochialism, unprofessionalism, essential dishonesty and bias of senior journalists, including many leading Editors and owners of news organisations. This is a systemic problem. How then can we construct a more progressive movement towards professionalism in a context of continuing violence against independent media? Again, I see no other option but mutually strengthening symbiosis – of traditional media embracing the potential of new technologies and citizen journalism embracing the values of professional media as it should be, not as it is.
As I was writing this column, the death of Michael Jackson was first communicated and then confirmed – before AP, CNN and the BBC – via my friends on Facebook. I passed on the message through Twitter and Facebook itself, potentially reaching, through the friends of friends and so on, thousands around the world in a matter of minutes. This is news production today. The visceral video of Neda Soltani dying on the streets of Tehran at the hands of a regime our own government calls a friend is another example. You may have seen this haunting video, shot on a mobile and now online where Neda – a young girl who was not even part of the demonstrations against Ahmadinejad – is shot and locks eyes with the camera as she bleeds to death. How can trained, professional journalists use these same new technologies and methods to help us understand and shape the world we share? How can civic minded citizens create media of their own to cover issues and places traditional media are not interested in, choose to ignore, or cannot cover because of rising costs? These are challenges and questions central to post-war media development in particular and the restoration of democracy in general. A bastion of ageing, and worse, pompous journalists commanding what Nik Gowing calls news regimes from a different era pose a challenge to media freedom equal to the government’s censorship and repression.
Conversely, voters unable or unwilling to realise and leverage the potential of mobiles, PCs, the web and Internet to strengthen democracy will get the media and government they deserve.
Published in The Sunday Leader, 28th June 2009
The anxious society
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
Three years ago almost to the day, 65 children, women and men in Kebithigollawa were killed by a LTTE claymore attack as they were travelling in a bus. The resulting scenes of chaos and trauma galvanised public opinion in the South of a peace that could only be established through war. Less than two months after Kebithigollawa, 15 aid workers were killed in Muttur, military execution style. It was the bloodiest attack against the humanitarian aid community after the 2003 Canal Hotel bomb in Baghdad. Post-war Sri Lanka would be welcomed and seen very differently for the families of the victims in Kebithigollawa and those of the aid workers. Because of this and more, with the end of war and the crushing military defeat of the LTTE, one expected some acknowledgement from government of the shared trauma of war amongst all communities. Instead, and overwhelming brave yet isolated voices of progressive reconciliation in government, we now have manifestations of a witch-hunt against new enemies of the State, a new minority who patriotic credentials are suspect and therefore eligible for incarceration or worse.
There is a memorable passage in James Blinn’s Gulf War novel The Ardvaark goes to War. In it the hero is asked what makes him feel anxious. His answer is a telling commentary of Sri Lankan society today:
What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of everything. You think war scares me? Is that what you think? Well, it does, it scares the shit out of me. I’m afraid of my ignorance. I’m afraid of things I can’t see, things I don’t even have words for… But the main thing that frightens me is fear.
Sigmund Freud, in his definitive 1920 essay Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) looked closely at fright, fear and anxiety, suggesting that it was a mistake, as many did, to use each word as a synonym for the other. Fright, he noted, refers to the state we fall into when suddenly confronted by a dangerous situation for which we are unprepared. Fear presupposes a definite object of which we are afraid. Anxiety refers to a state of mind when we prepare for a danger we know we may not be able to avoid. If fear defined our lives during war, anxiety endures after its end. If the LTTE was what we were fearful of a few weeks ago, its demise brings new enemies, new concerns of internal displacement and new threats to civil society. This insecurity and anxiety is not limited to post-war Sri Lanka. Developed countries in the West share some of our insecurities precisely because their greater material wealth is, post-9/11, the new target of terrorism in the age of asymmetrical warfare. Anxiety in these societies stems from the fear of terrorist attacks that suddenly deny citizens the good life they feel entitled to in societies where there is otherwise little or no risk of social, economic, cultural or political violence.
It is also a sense of entitlement by the Sinhala Buddhist majority in polity and society that underpins anxiety in post-war Sri Lanka, for a few within this community and greater numbers in minority communities. The economic manifestation of this sense of entitlement is not too different from the peace dividend promised by the UNF during the CFA, the simplistic assumption being that when guns are silent, greater public spending and economic confidence augments the quality of life and prosperity. Severely undermining any immediate peace dividend today are plans to increase the numbers of active service personnel in the armed forces, the global financial crisis, our national debt crisis, the cost of first developing the infrastructure for and then maintaining a large standing army, and above all, the massive redevelopment and reconstruction needs of the war ravaged North and Eastern Provinces. The political manifestation of a sense of post-war entitlement starts with the Rajapakse family, extends to the Commander of the Army and then beyond to the armed forces, Police and all those who unequivocally supported the decimation of the LTTE and the murder of a few thousand Tamil civilians in the process as unavoidable and necessary collateral. For these people, sacrifices made during war require, nay demand immediate and enduring dividends – social, economic and political – they alone can first enjoy and choose to share selectively. To wit, they are completely closed off to any suggestion of the need to think beyond a victor’s justice framing the future of Sri Lanka. The marked lack of any consultative approach to post-war development, the animosity against civil society, a confused and confusing new foreign policy that sees us befriend regimes that, like ours today, clamp down on human rights, the retroactive witch hunt against institutions and individuals perceived to be partial to and supportive of the LTTE in the past, the allegations made against independent journalists of being in the pay of the LTTE, the continuing censorship and clampdown on the freedom of expression, the hidden hand of the defense establishment dictating post-war development and diplomacy all suggest that Sri Lanka is still what renowned sociologist Ulrich Beck would define as a risk society, unable to express or define itself without reference to some sort of threat, from within or without, to territorial integrity and national security. As Brad Adams, Asia Director of Human Rights Watch notes,
“Rajapaksa and his advisers, staunch Sinhalese nationalists, appear to believe the western world, including the UN, have been plotting against them. Virtually anyone who had any contact with the LTTE, whether Sri Lankan or foreign, is now a suspected LTTE sympathiser. Sri Lanka appears headed for a McCarthyite period where the government believes – or cynically acts as though it believes – there is a Tamil Tiger under every bed.”
Just as fear clouds judgement, anxiety fuels the fiction that all will be well eventually. This is a dangerous and delusional fiction to guide post-war Sri Lanka’s future. A statement by Rt. Rev. Duleep de Chickera, Bishop of Colombo issued last week after he visited the Jaffna peninsula provides a stark counterpoint to the rosy picture of post-war Sri Lanka painted by the Sri Lankan government.
“The predominant and recurring feeling amongst all classes and ages however was that the Tamils are an isolated and constrained Community. On the Peninsular, the people feel they are marooned; physically, psychologically and politically. The Youth in particular are restless and search for answers to difficult questions. Many will migrate if given the opportunity. Options for study and employment are few and restricted. Yet only the desperate or daring will think of travelling to the south in search of better prospects. Stories of inconvenience and some ridicule and harassment experienced in travel, abound. In the south there is severe hardship in finding suitable lodging as even friends and relations are reluctant to take them in. State sponsored Youth hostels which will also provide an opportunity for the integration of our youth of all communities, are non-existent. There was little enthusiasm for elections. A feeling prevails that change must come now; as a preparation for and prelude to elections.”
This is systemic violence against minorities – violence wholly invisible to many Sinhala Buddhists because they are both born into and immune from the entrenched racism that defines public life and transactions with the State. It is the same violence that gave rise to the LTTE. It is the same violence that makes even the Tamils opposed to the LTTE now fearful of a triumphalist, jingoist government. It is the same violence that will bedevil our sustainable development, political stability and reconciliation.
Can we then meaningfully capture this historical moment, beyond all the frenetic flag waving and public jubilation, to design and implement a process of peacebuilding and reconciliation that avoids the terrible pitfalls of majoritarianism and triumphalism?
I don’t have all the answers to that question. The Rajapakse regime would like us to believe it does, when in fact it does not and cares little for such questions anyway. Perhaps you do? The question then becomes whether you can, without any fear violent retribution, articulate and champion your thoughts and ideas respectively in public fora today. Upon the answer to that question rests our real prospects for peace and reconciliation. The quote at the beginning of this article is from Albert Einstein and rings true for Sri Lanka. It doesn’t take a genius however to realise precisely how the Rajapakse regime intends to make and keep the peace in post-war Sri Lanka.
Published in The Sunday Leader, 21 June 2009
