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by Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake 

Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property that you are unrepresented. I tell you, on the contrary, that it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property. (English Chartist, Bonterre O'Brien, 1846, quoted in Elizabeth Wood, 'Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent transitions in South Africa and El Salvador,' Cup, 2000).

The displaced of Northern Lanka

Wars, including internal armed conflicts for ethno-national self-determination and representation are fought to change the power-property status quo. If a peace process fails to adequately acknowledge and address issues of economic and social inequality that structured the conflict, while balancing changes wrought in the war years against return to the pre-war power property status quo, it may result in an unsustainable peace that becomes a blueprint for renewed violence, years or decades later.

Thus, in a recent book published by the Washington-based United States Institute for Peace, titled, "Effects of Violence on Peace Processes," John Darby notes: "Of the thirty-eight formal peace accords signed between January 1988 and December 1998, thirty-one failed to last more than three years". Darby suggests that the reason for this state of affairs is that stopping wars is far more difficult than starting them, and that "when political violence is ended by a ceasefire it reappears in other forms to threaten the peace process". He suggests that a peace process must be forward looking and potential spoilers of the peace must be on board, for if not they may destabilize the peace process. In Sri Lanka this would include potential spoilers who may use local conflicts and social and economic inequality that are not directly related to the macro armed conflict between the LTTE and GoSL.

A number of studies of the 2 decades long armed conflict in Sri Lanka have noted that the war was not simply an "ethnic" affair, but rather a "complex emergency". The war was sustained and fuelled by a range of global and local actors and factors including rural poverty, unemployment, caste marginalization (particularly in Northern Tamil society and in the deep South). Additionally, in the last decade a 'war economy' that developed self-sustaining momentum emerged, as a number of trans-national actors and networks, from the diaspora to the military and humanitarian industry stabilized and sustained the conflict dynamic as the economy structured into a 'war economy'. While a range of political actors and elites made profits through corruption, terror and taxation the military became the leading employer of a class of marginalized youth from low-caste communities in the North and South alike. The majority of those who fought, died, and were disabled on both sides were drawn from the rural poor. Simultaneously, as professor Tudor Silva of the Centre for Poverty Analysis has noted, economic inequality and poverty cleavages tended to be ethnicized and politicised due to the circular dynamic of poverty and ethnic conflict (cf. Mayer, Rajasingham - senanayake, Thangaraja: 2003).

The connection between rural poverty and the sustainability of peace has been made in other studies of peace settlements. In "Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador", Elizabeth Wood suggests that peace processes that address economic re-distribution including land reform have a better chance of long-term success. Wood's arguments are relevant for Sri Lanka. Yet in the current post/conflict settlement discussion while the issue of power redistribution via a devolved and federated system has received high priority, issues of social and economic inequality is not being addressed in any systematic fashion.

The presumption of faith propounded by the Minister for Economic Reforms seems to be that the free market would take care of social and economic justice issues that fuelled the conflict a la the Washington Consensus (World Bank and IMF). There has been relatively little discussion of the political economic transformation to society that 20 years of war had generated. Debate on post-conflict reconstruction policy is largely framed by legal-bureaucratic considerations at the national level as to how power vested in a highly centralised state may be devolved to the regions? The public debate considerably influenced by global recipes for post/ conflict reconstruction focused on (neo-liberal) institution building and constitution design and the need for "good governance". In the context, it is not hard to see how economic hardship and social disaffection caused by spiralling costs of living, unemployment exacerbated by layoffs, a sealing on public sector hiring for structural adjustment programs (SAPs), and privatisation of essential services including public utilities (the standoff between the multinational gas duopoly Shell and Laugfs and the Consumer Protection Authority being exemplary), may be used by peace spoilers who have significant constituencies among those who bare the brunt of the current phase of economic restructuring which in most parts of the world had demonstrably increased socio-economic disparities and cleavages. (Cf. UNDP Human Development Report 2000).

In this context, the question may be raised as to why the GoSL and the LTTE have chosen or been impelled to chose the World Bank to be the custodian of the post/conflict fund? And on what basis?

Historically, the United Nations is the international organisation charged with and experienced in dealing with post/conflict reconstruction (East Timor being a recent example). Moreover the UN agencies despite numerous critics have a relatively open attitude to human security, local voices, priorities and knowledge systems, than has the World Bank since it is not so closely allied to international finance and corporate interests, and in the grip of what Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist and ex-Vice President of the World Bank, terms 'market fundamentalism' in his book 'Globalization and its Discontents'. Is the World Bank then a more or less neutral actor or will it ensure that the peace is structured to suit the agendas of international finance and corporate capital while making Sri Lanka vulnerable to fluctuating global financial markets as the world economy goes into recession (as occurred in Argentina)? As conflict, security and development are increasingly linked will it disburse funds to projects that have a less capital friendly and more social justice focus?

This question must be asked by the Sri Lankan public who support the peace process and wish to ensure its sustainability: there are other reasons for concern. A range of social conflicts have escalated in Latin American countries that undertook uncritical structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that made them vulnerable to fluctuations in global financial markets at the behest of the World Bank and IMF (riots in Argentina being a recent dramatic case). Likewise, historically, international finance capital, dictators and military juntas have been allied to safeguard their interests and deflect social justice issues embedded in complex conflicts. In this respect, the controversial analysis of violent conflict coming out of the World Bank research project led by Paul Collier on "the Economics of Civil War, Crime and Violence" is not encouraging. Collier claims that it is 'greed' rather than 'grievance', (as if these are not relational terms).

He suggests that the profits made by war lords and armed groups explains violence. He thus rules out economic grievance as a cause of violence. While this kind of analysis may explain the proposed Bush-Blair resource war on Iraq, it is telling in its misguidedness and ignorance of local issues, international political economic and global power/knowledge hierarchies that structure complex conflicts in the global South, and does not augur well for a sensibly theorised post/conflict reconstruction programme supervised by the Bank in Sri Lanka. If the World bank is to be the custodian of the post/conflict fund the question arises: will the peace dividend become available to those marginal communities and social groups that were most brutalized and instrumentalized by the war economy? In short, would a neo-liberal post conflict peace that exacerbates socio-economic disparities as SAPs and sector adjustment programs are pushed though along with post/conflict reconstruction, and the questionable promise of long-term economic growth despite the growing global recession enable a sustainable peace? Is this constellation of actors and interests a recipe for a new cycle of violence that may destabilize the peace process in Sri Lanka? To answer this question it may be relevant to look back on how almost two decades of armed conflict was represented and analyzed in the World Development discourse in Sri Lanka.

During the Second and Third Eelam wars (1990-2001), a public myth existed in the South of Sri Lanka that relatively high levels of economic growth could be sustained in the island while an expensive armed conflict was waged in the North-East provinces. As the People's Alliance government went ahead with structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and privatisation of various profitable and debt ridden government holdings just as the previous UNP govt. had done, the numbers of BMWs and Alfa Romeos that cruised the highways and bi-lanes of Colombo, the Southern capital were on the rise. Signs of a growing economy and a market for luxury goods were apparent in the larger cities and in the display of sophisticated weapons to and communications technology in the security sector. The Central Bank projected national growth figures of five percent, a figure that helped the ruling party to win local and national elections and attract foreign investment. International development organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, and UNDP projected similar growth figures.

The late nineties were years of converging national statistical percentages in Sri Lanka. While defence spending was 5 percent of GDP, donor assistance also hovered at around 5 percent GDP. That international aid might subsidize the armed conflict given fungibility of aid was not missed by a number of commentators. Yet if research staff in leading national institutions of higher education such as the University of Colombo could not use the Internet because the Ministry of Higher Education could not pay its telephone bills and the library could not buy books and journals due to the toll of the war economy on the education sector that was being restructured, the international financial institutions turned a blind eye to military spending despite widely known and rumoured corruption in military sector the Defence Ministry. (The author is an anthropologist and Senior Fellow at the Social Scientist's Association and ICES and a Fulbright New Century scholar, 2003 at New York University's International Centre for advanced Studies). (To be continued)

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