| Book
Review
 
Into heartlands of
conflict
V. R. RAGHAVAN
| Critical examination of current peace processes in five
flashpoints of ethno-national crisis |
CONTESTED LANDS: — Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia,
Cyprus, Sri Lanka: Sumantra Bose; HarperCollins Publishers, 1 A
Hamilton House, Connaught Place,
New Delhi-110001. Rs. 395.
The post-colonial era has witnessed conflicts
that have protracted into the post-Cold War period and seem likely
to continue into the future. There are longstanding conflicts, which
even after large scale human slaughter show no signs of resolution.
An attempt to find a common ground of cause and effect in such
conflicts was long overdue. Such analysis can show the way to build
peace processes on scientific and empirically-proved principles.
Territory
As the title of the book underlines, ethnic conflicts are all
about sub-national or national identities seeking territory as the
foundation for security. There are peoples who consider themselves
nations and want statehood, even as there are states which have yet
to become nations. Sumantra Bose, with considerable academic
credentials to analyse such conflicts, has attempted to find the
common ground. He does this by analysing the examples of Jammu &
Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Israel-Palestine and of Bosnia. He
offers an objective and crisply written resume of the history of
these conflicts. In fact there is hardly anything comparable to
these short histories to be found in one volume anywhere.
The common ground in these “intractable but not insoluble”
conflicts as Bose calls them is of territory. The contestants in the
conflicts believe, not unreasonably, that security is assured if
territory is possessed. That drives the demands and the conflicts
for redrawing boundaries and redefining sovereignties. This brings
the modern state into an existential crisis of dismemberment. The
colonial expedient of partition, which was applied in many states,
palpably failed to find peace either for the states or their
peoples. States, which in turn, applied the colonial remedy of
military force to stem the tide of ethnic demands suffered the
inevitable consequences of the conflict taking the form of
insurgencies. The
way forward
The way forward, according to the author, lies in finding
solutions that move away from territoriality, towards assured
political and economic returns for the contestants by making them
stakeholders in the nation-building and state-making process.
Towards this end a strong emphasis is laid on the role of third
parties as instruments of change. The author argues in favour of
third parties with the capacity to both persuade and pressure the
contestants, to first accede and later abide by the terms of the
solution. History does not offer encouraging evidence of third
parties succeeding in this.
In J&K, a credible role for the third parties remains an
aspiration that has remained unfulfilled for five decades. This is
more due to the capacity of the contestant states to withstand third
party initiatives and pressures. In Israel-Palestine it is the
ability of one party to defy third party (read U.N.) prescriptions.
In Cyprus, pressures to find middle ground floundered on the mutual
needs of Greece and Turkey to win the larger battle for a place in
the European Union. In Bosnia, conflicting interests of third
parties, i.e. the E.U., the U.S. and former Yugoslav states, put
paid to possible solutions. In Sri Lanka, the Norwegian attempts at
peace brokering and the capacity of aid donors to influence the
peace process were not sufficient to obtain a positive outcome. It
can also be said that an “honest broker” is a rarity amongst third
parties. The role of donor states as motivators to a peace process
has also come into some doubt.
Another important assessment in the book relates to the
importance of time in finding solutions to such long-standing
conflicts. The author favours speed in finding a solution over a
slow process. An incremental and step-by-step approach is seen by
the author as permitting “spoilers” enough space, to subvert or
disrupt the peace process. It can however be argued that speed in
finding a solution would require greater coercion or economic
disincentives from third parties. This would invariably be seen by
parties to the conflict as imposing a solution. Sri Lanka is a good
example of all these failures. Peace measures
If, as the author rightly states, territorial issues are the
central challenge of peace processes, it is equally true that
homeland for one group creates conflicts for minorities within the
same homeland. This applies equally in J&K (Hindus in the
Valley), in Sri Lanka (Muslims in the North & East) in Cyprus
(Turks and Greeks), in Israel-Palestine (the right to Palestinians’
return) and also in Bosnia. A federal system in Sri Lanka,
transcending the LoC in J&K through freer movement of people
across it, a sovereign Palestine state alongside Israel, and similar
methods in Cyprus and Bosnia are the means to “make borders into
bridges rather than barriers” between people. On this conclusion of
the book, there can be no disagreement, even as these conflicts
continue to outlast the generations that started them.
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