Simpson, G. (1997). Reconstruction and Reconciliation: Emerging from transition. In Development in Practice Vol. 7, No. 4.
Graeme Simpson
In Development in Practice, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 475-478, 1997.
Graeme Simpson is a founder and former Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
I wish first to address some of the simplistic myths about solutions to social conflict, and then reflect on problems that I have experienced with aid efforts organised by the international community, through the UN. In this, I shall focus on Bosnia rather than on Africa. Bosnia, as part of Europe, did not suffer the apathy that characterised international responses to events in Rwanda and Burundi before 1994. The second part of my presentation will address what I see as the flawed assumptions that often underlie the emphasis on economic reconstruction in the wake of war and conflict.
Transition: result or process?
My first and obvious point is that war, or intense and violent conflict, affects a society: it causes massive social dislocation, and taints or destroys social relations – from national political relationships to very basic human interactions – whether through racism, violence against women, or destruction of families. And it also destroys economic infrastructure. But so much international aid for the recovery or reconstruction process seems almost blind to this social dislocation and to the vital and basic need to rebuild social relationships. It appears obsessed with the assumption that if we can reconstruct economies, and create wealth and jobs, the problem of social conflict will go away. This is very clear in South Africa, where human-rights organisations in particular now contend with the perception that after the 1994 elections, and the establishment of a formal constitution and many "paper rights", the process of transition has been sealed. In fact, it has only just begun. This misperception has resulted in international donors (and particularly bilateral agencies) moving rapidly towards the "normalisation" of government-to-government relations, and setting the conventional aid machine in motion. Now they want to talk about development, and to stop talking about human rights, the building of a culture of human rights, or the restoring of a social fabric. This shift in funding priorities towards "hard" development, economic reconstruction, the delivery of basic social services – critical though these be – is in danger of masking the need for comprehensive social reconstruction.
Integration and change
To answer the question of how we reconstruct societies that have been seriously damaged by conflict, two basic things need to be acknowledged from the outset. The first is that we must adopt an integrated approach, which is premised on a recognition of the fact that economic reconstruction, or redress for past economic inequities, is inextricably linked with social development: with political and human empowerment. To understand social conflict, whether we label it political, ethnic, or class-based, we must understand the dynamic and intimate relationship between social, political and economic interests. To start looking at conflict resolution in a way that detaches these inter-linked interests from each other is to create a recipe for sustained conflict and violence. We can rebuild economic infrastructure, but political upheaval will destroy it again overnight. We can rebuild the social fabric and negotiate political settlements; but unless we meet people's economic needs, those agreements are worth very little.
The second thing to recognise is that conflict is not static. The sources of social conflict shift over time, taking on new forms and manifestations. In this sense, there is no such thing as "post conflict". The question is how we manage conflict, and whether we can ensure that it does not translate into violent confrontation. But if we fail to recognise that conflict changes in shape and in form – as evidenced by the slide between political and criminal violence in societies that are undergoing dramatic political change – then our approach to conflict management is likely to amount to little more than window-dressing.
The UN in Bosnia
The UN's role in Bosnia gives us a striking illustration of how not to reconstruct a society. The following anecdote will illustrate my point. A man who had a broken watch eventually found a shop with a window display full of watches. He went in, and asked the white-coated assistant whether he could have his watch repaired. The reply was, "I'm sorry, we don't fix watches". "Oh", said the would-be customer. "Well, what do you do?" "We neuter cats", was the assistant's response. "Pardon me", said the man, "but why then do you have watches in your window?" The assistant smiled and said, "If your job was to neuter cats, what would you put in the window?" The art of window-dressing, in this case, is to display one thing, while actually doing something else.
The UN's involvement in Central Bosnia is ostensibly about putting up a military shield to keep warring factions apart. There is an irony here, in that the ultimate objective is to bring these people together. But it is also a shield behind which much is supposed to be happening – though most of it is simply not taking place. This dividing wall is quite effective, though not always in ways intended. In one village that had previously depended on the timber trade, the local authorities explained to me that the "shield" had separated the saw-mill from the woods: the result was that both sides were unemployed. Since the second aim of UN involvement is to ensure a decent level of welfare on all sides, this means that people are forced to survive on hand-outs, rather than on their own productive labour.
The most troublesome aspect of this, in my view, is the vacuum between military "peace-keeping" (not peace-making) intervention, on the one hand, and a huge humanitarian assistance programme on the other. Hardly anywhere to be seen was any assistance in the process of rebuilding social relations, bringing people together, breaking down the barriers and prejudice which had played such a part in generating social conflict in the first place. There were "civil affairs officers", who were supposed to be facilitating a process of discussion between local government officials on both sides. But they all wore UNPROFOR uniforms, which linked them directly to the widely discredited military effort. A number of international NGOs were actively involved, primarily in relief work, but also in modest (and largely unsupported) local reconciliation efforts.
The substitute for direct intervention at the local level to take full account of the consequences of war and its impact on social relationships and human development has been an internationally brokered peace agreement: a diplomatic initiative based on the idea that peace can be made by getting government leaders to talk with each other. The irony here is that the peace agreements have effectively consolidated the gains made through war. Worse, it was peace-brokering which masqueraded as constitutional negotiation. It generated not a federal constitution – as has been claimed, for instance, by Washington – but a constitutional arrangement which did more to entrench ethnicity as the organising principle of politics in the Balkans than even the war itself has done. What it did was to create a vehicle for compromise in the federal constitution, but one which also lent itself to compelling interpretations. For one side, federalism meant integration; for the other, it meant the consolidation of regional power bases and was potentially a route to ethnic segregation.
While this is clearly not the entire picture concerning international involvement in Bosnia, there are nevertheless some lessons that might be taken into account in considering the role of NGOs in Southern Africa, and how we shape our views and our relationships to external intervention and facilitation. This is an issue that absolutely must be addressed in trying to deal with transition in any society. Further, the way in which the peace agreements are internationally brokered, and the content of such accords, may play a fundamental role in shaping the nature of present and future conflict.
Economic reconstruction and social conflict
The idea, described earlier, that economic reconstruction and growth will bring about an end to social conflict is flawed for several reasons. The first is that it fails to deal with the residual issues of identity, which have often been intrinsic to the history of social conflict. Once mobilised, ethnic or religious identity, for example, is nearly impossible to demobilise. To substitute economic growth and economic development, or to insert it on the assumption that it will automatically overcome those social fissures, is to base such efforts on a myth.
The second reason is that economic development generates its own forms of social conflict. Since much social conflict has concerned access to scarce resources, especially for impoverished communities, it is very obvious that if resources are injected into such a context, they will in all likelihood fuel any existing conflicts, rather than the reverse.
There is a good example of this from CSVR's work in Alexandra township, just north of Johannesburg. Through a process of warfare, there had been a cycle of displacement in that community. Migrant labourers from the single-sex hostel invaded an area of the township and drove people out of their homes and into the overgrown and under-resourced informal settlements. Meanwhile, rural poverty was driving more people into the hostels, thus perpetuating the cycle. The government then came up with a very creative response, within the framework of the priority now given to housing. A building project was designed for the township. But who would get the houses? The first thing the developers had to do was to fence off the area in which houses were to be built, to ensure that the building materials were secure. Even assuming that the houses were successfully built, how could "invasions" be prevented without the threat or use of force? What was actually needed was a social compact: some kind of agreement on the criteria to be applied in allocating the new houses. This is a process that must be properly managed. The assumption, therefore, that economic development will not generate such conflicts is very dangerous.
The third reason to challenge the primacy of economic development is that conflict may change its shape, but it will not go away. In South Africa, for example, there has been a tendency to blur the dividing lines between political and criminal violence. A serious warning is the prevalence of well-organised criminal activity, very often associated with high levels of violence, in societies going through major transition. Some of the processes associated with transition may themselves encourage this. Demobilisation does not equal demilitarisation. Unless alternative incentives are offered to members of a society in order to demobilise them and remove them from formal or politically-oriented military activity, then they are not going to discontinue their militarised interventions. And people are creative. The systematic marginalisation of black youth from South African society was met by them with immense creative energy. These are people who were economically disempowered by apartheid, they were politically voiceless, they were under-educated, they were totally rejected by the dominant culture in society. They therefore found an alternative "home" within the political organisations, which provided a new identity for them. It gave young, black South Africans a stake, and allowed them a central role as the "shock troops" of liberation. The irony about the shift from the struggle in the streets to the negotiating table is that it compounded the marginalisation of those people. The Party had given people a new uniform, a new language, new songs of liberation, but now the criminal gangs offered ready-made alternatives. Membership of these gangs provides an identity, social clothing, a language of its own, and the added advantage of providing some alternative forms of wealth creation.
We need to recognise the subtle shifts in the ways that social conflict manifests itself, for, if we fail to do so, the social deficits that generate it will be left intact.
The fourth problem with economic reconstruction alone is that it does not inherently redress past inequity. It does not necessarily deal with war crimes, nor with the history of human rights abuses, and the lasting impact which this has on people. It does not necessarily deal with gender inequality, or with the dispossession of land. Indeed, very often economic growth and wealth generation are built upon inequity in society, and cannot then address poverty in and of themselves. If such inequity is the root of social conflict, then economic growth may serve to reinforce rather than to overcome it.
Lastly, we need to recognise that reconstruction in a society that is undergoing profound transition is as much about building democracy and democratic institutions as anything else. And economic reconstruction offers no guarantees for transforming State institutions, nor the potential to render them accountable, transparent, and empowering. In a sense, what I am saying is that these concerns should define our agenda.
As NGOs in Southern Africa, we should feel proud to advocate a "bottom-up" approach to reconstruction: an approach that is not about humanitarian aid alone, is not about diplomatic intervention alone, and is certainly not about military intervention at all. What it is about is a recognition of the simple thing that was said to me in Central Bosnia when we were interviewing teachers, religious leaders, police chiefs, judges, and women's organisations. Their voices were not being heard. They were saying, "This divide is not of our making. We want one education system. We want one system of policing in this society. This arrangement is simply not functional for any of us." And it is to these concerns that we should be relating when we talk about social reconstruction, about filling the gap, about rebuilding the social fabric.
To conclude, I am not suggesting that economic reconstruction is not vital to the social reconstruction process, nor that we can afford to ignore the phenomenal capacity of global forces to derail local-level initiatives: to do so would be naive. What I am saying, however, is that NGOs and other components of civil society need to be far clearer about the nature of the contribution that economic reconstruction may make, and more assertive in staking out the space for social, political and human empowerment.
© Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation
CSVR is a multi-disciplinary institute that seeks to understand and prevent violence, heal its effects and build sustainable peace at the community, national and regional levels.
