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Completed Projects |
| Creating Peace in Sri Lanka | Haiti Renewed: Political and Economic
Prospects NGOs, Early Warning and Preventative Diplomacy |
Sri Lanka, the serendipitous isle off India's southeast coast, is savaged by civil war. Although Sri Lanka was largely peaceful during British colonial times, after independence in 1948, the majority Sinhala intensified patterns of state-sanctioned discrimination against the minority Tamils. Since the fanatical Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam began battling the government in 1984, more than 60,000 Tamils have died, and thousands more have been internally displaced. The WPF Program and the Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka jointly sponsored a large, well attended meeting in 1997 at Harvard University to seek answers to the problems besetting the islands and to think of solutions. In late 1999 the Brookings Institution Press published Creating Peace in Sri Lanka, edited by Robert I. Rotberg. It was dedicated to Neelan Tiruchelvam, one of the book's contributors and the co-organizer of the first phase of the project. Tiruchelvam, a leading Sri Lankan moderate, was killed by a car bomb in July 1999. The book includes chapters on the ongoing Sri Lankan civil war, on the Sri Lankan economy, and on prospects for peace. The authors are Sri Lankan and American and represent the best of modern thinking on how to end the war and start a process of sustainable peace.
The end of the Cold War has made us much more conscious of the many "small" wars and internal conflicts that extract a frightful toll of lives and resources. We are also more aware of the tireless roles of some individuals in attempting to bring these conflicts to a peaceful resolution. Is it possible to generalize from these efforts at mediation? What durable lessons can we draw from them that might help the international community in future efforts to intervene in intrastate, ethnic, religious, or communal conflicts? Among the many questions that might contribute to an effort to reach conclusions regarding the roles, strategies, and tactics of outside negotiators are the following: Should outside mediators be uncompromisingly neutral facilitators, or should they come to the table with solutions in mind? Under what circumstances are these alternative postures appropriate? Does it matter if mediators have ties to governments? Or should their independence be evident? Again, do circumstances dictate one or the other of these alternatives? At what stages during negotiations does it make sense for brokers to fix rigid deadlines, threaten to leave for home, make more substantive threats on the part of one or more governments or, indeed, the entire international community, and so on? Can we specify some of the kinds of carrots and sticks that should be employed by mediators? A meeting to discuss these questions was held at Harvard in September 1997. The participants included Lincoln Bloomfield, Ronald J. Fisher, Donna Hicks, James O.C. Jonah, Brian Mandell, William Weisberg, Diego Cordovez, Howard Wolpe, Ambassador Herman Cohen, Ambassador Pete De Vos, Robert Pastor, Lawrence Susskind, Herbert Kelman, Eileen Babbitt, Dana Francis, and Robert I. Rotberg. Dana Francis' edited transcript of the discussions at the meeting was published in 1998 as WPF Report 19: Mediating Deadly Conflict: Lessons from Afghanistan, Burundi, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Haiti, Israel/Palestine, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka.
WAR AND PEACE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA This project met in Johannesburg in mid-1996. It focused on interrelationships and roles of the following factors in the peaceful development of southern Africa: regional trade, migration, crime, drugs trafficking, policing methods, demobilization of armies, and regional peacekeeping -- thus encapsulating in one meeting many of the themes of Foundation activities. The project continued the Foundation's long interest in the political and economic evolution of southern Africa and its cooperation on such projects with the South African Institute of International Affairs. South Africa's Institute for Security Studies was another co-sponsor of the 1996 meeting. Participants in the meeting came both from Washington and Pretoria, and from Lilongwe (Malawi), Lusaka (Zambia), and elsewhere in southern Africa. In addition to senior government and international officials, academics and practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean contributed to the written and oral product of the conference. The American participants included a former big city police commissioner, a former Deputy Attorney General, and an Assistant Secretary of State. WPF Report 13: War and Peace in Southern Africa: Crime, Drugs, Armies, and Trade by Greg Mills, and a book of the same title edited by Robert I. Rotberg and Greg Mills were published in 1998.
BURMA: PROSPECTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC FUTURE Several WPF projects have been concerned with the post-peace reconstruction of states that have overcome internal conflicts or have at least some prospect of doing so. The Burma meeting in late 1996, sponsored by the Foundation and the Harvard Institute for International Development, provided an opportunity to craft policy responses capable of advancing the cause of democracy and economic development in this troubled and complex Southeast Asian state. The participants in the Burma meeting were tentative in their conclusions, summarized in WPF Report 15, Burma: Prospects for Political and Economic Reconstruction by David I. Steinberg, but they were surprisingly hopeful about the likelihood of a non-confrontational transition from military to democratic rule. Yet that transition, however accomplished, would still leave the National League for Democracy (NLD) and Aung San Suu Kyi with enormous problems. It and she would have to manage (perhaps in a Chilean manner) the retreating military. They would inherit a Burma that has suffered nearly three decades of disinvestment, not least in the human resources domain. The country's educational and health deficits are very large. So are its infrastructural needs. Then there is the vast illegal drug trade, with its great potential for corruption and exploitation. Associated with that trade are ethnic-based insurgencies. About 35-40 percent of Burmese are non-Burman, and many ethnic antagonisms smolder despite recent accommodations with the State Peace and Development Council. A transition to democratic rule in Burma, most participants agreed, was thus not an end in and of itself, but a means to the achievement of a better future for all Burmese. Burma: Prospects for a Democratic Future, a book covering all of these issues, edited by Robert I. Rotberg, was published in 1998.
HAITI RENEWED: POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC PROSPECTS In 1995, the Foundation held a large meeting in Puerto Rico on post-peace reconstruction in Haiti. Participants included Haitian government officials, Haitian-American scholars and advocates, officials from Washington, Puerto Rican academics and writers, and mainland U.S. scholars and journalists. The results of the Haiti meeting were summarized in WPF Reports 10 and 11, Haiti: Prospects for Political and Economic Reconstruction and Haïti: perspectives d'une reprise politique et économique (both 1995). A book, Haiti Renewed: Political and Economic Prospects, edited by Robert I. Rotberg (Brookings Institution Press, 1997) contains chapters on almost all aspects of Haitian political, economic, and social reality. In 2002, Robert I. Rotberg published another report, WPF Report 32, Haiti's Turmoil: Politics and Policy under Aristide and Clinton.
NGOS, EARLY WARNING, AND PREVENTIVE DIPLOMACY In early 1995, about forty-five leaders of non-governmental organizations, academics, journalists, and other practitioners convened at Harvard University to examine how local and international NGOs working in troubled states could effectively sound the bells of early warning and thus contribute to preventive diplomacy in areas like Sri Lanka, Rwanda, and the Sudan. WPF Report 8: Non-Governmental Organizations: Early Warning, and Preventive Diplomacy, by Emily MacFarquhar, Robert I. Rotberg, and Martha A. Chen, summarized the discussions of the meeting. Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), Vigilance and Vengeance: NGOs Preventing Ethnic Conflict in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1996) subsequently appeared, several chapters of which were derived from papers presented to the meeting and number of which were written afresh. This book includes chapters on international preventive action, and on the cases of Guatemala, Macedonia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, the Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi. The book's conclusion assessed the role of NGOs in early warning and early action. In part, the book reported that early warning was not as easy or as obvious as it sounded. Nor was preventive diplomacy straightforward. Preventive action, preferably early, was essential, but such action is more easily described than achieved. The role of NGOs in sounding the tocsin of alarm in situations of incipient intrastate conflict, especially in ethnically divided societies, was generally problematic, contextually specific and determined, and fraught with unanticipated obstacles and tactical traps.
THE MEDIA AND HUMANITARIAN CRISES The Foundation's project on the role of the media in improving policy responses during complex humanitarian emergencies led to a wide-ranging meeting in late 1994. The conferees concluded that close cooperation between international relief agencies and the media was essential to prevent and contain the many humanitarian emergencies that threaten to overwhelm our logistical and emotional capacity to assist and to care in the post-Cold War period. The conferees agreed that future Bosnian, Rwandan, and Somalian humanitarian crises could be avoided if there were more and better-targeted sharing of information between the media and relief agencies. Although public opinion too often reflects the latest capsule summaries of distant conflicts as they are portrayed on television, that same public opinion, well-informed or not, influences decision-making in Washington and other capitals. In an oversimplified sense, television images of starving Somali forced the U.S. to send troops, and equally dramatic shots of Somali attacks on American soldiers compelled Washington to withdraw. The media, if their efforts can be focused and sustained by collaboration with humanitarians, can decisively alter both public attitudes and the actions of policy makers. It should thus be possible to augment the tensile strength of the international humanitarian safety net protecting the suffering. Those and other results of the meeting were discussed in The Media, Humanitarian Crises, and Policy-Making, WPF Report 7. Revised chapters arising out of the conclave and its far-ranging dialogue were published in Robert I. Rotberg and Thomas G. Weiss (eds.), From Massacres to Genocide: The Media, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Crises (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1996). The Thomas G. Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University co-sponsored this project.
REFORMING THE UNITED NATIONS SYSTEM In 1996, the Foundation sponsored (along with the Thomas G. Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University) a study of the United Nations system, and how it could be pruned of obsolete and ineffective organizations in order to save significant sums of money. Leon Gordenker wrote that study, entitled The UN Tangle: Policy Formation, Reform, and Reorganization. The report was reviewed during meetings at Brown University and the United Nations and released to the press in late 1996 at the UN. Gordenker's study suggested that the United Nations could cut its regular budgetary costs by half (and devote those funds to peacekeeping) if it pruned its system of obsolescent, inefficient, redundant, wasteful, and corrupt branches. The report provides many illustrative examples of intergovernmental treaty organizations (like the International Labor Organization), inter-organizational entities (like the Global Environmental Facility), and many more that soak up funds, sometimes solely in order to keep an outdated bureaucratic bloat in business. Gordenker acknowledged the very great difficulty of reforming the UN, particularly since the UN system has grown programmatically and functionally since 1946, but without apparent design. There is a formlessness which "even the sloppiest spider would reject," he wrote. Nevertheless, relieving the UN of nodes that duplicate the work of other sections, or overlap in jurisdiction, would be a start; so would the elimination of those bodies that are widely judged to be inefficient, ineffective, or produce work of poor quality. |
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