‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbours’

Imagine that your country is recovering from nearly 20 years of civil war: a bitter, no-holds barred conflict in which over 60,000 people have died in a brutal struggle between the army and a determined, well-armed liberation movement. An internationally brokered ceasefire has been signed, but talks aimed at negotiating an end to the dispute have been stalled for almost a year following a breakdown in ‘final status’ peace negotiations. Little progress – bar an absence of armed hostilities – has been made in relation to realising the ‘peace dividend’ promised to the population as a result of the termination of the fighting. With general elections scheduled for April, the threat of a return to violence hovers on the horizon.

Where, you might ask, does the idea of reconciliation fit into the equation in such a conflict? This was precisely the question put to participants in a series of workshops convened by IDEA in Sri Lanka on 24–28 February in cooperation with local partners – the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies, the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and the Jaffna Peace and Justice Commission.

Using Sinhalese and Tamil translations of a Policy Summary of the IDEA Handbook Reconciliation After Violent Conflict as a starting point for discussions, the workshops – held in the Tamil heartland of Jaffna and the national capital, Colombo – provided a forum for representatives of a range of community-based organizations from the north and the south to assess the relevance of the practical tools for achieving reconciliation outlined in the IDEA Handbook in regard to their own situation.

As discussions at both workshops revealed – along with a later forum aimed at communicating the outcomes to national and international policy-makers – the very concept of reconciliation is not without its problems. Viewed as a moral-ethical imperative to ‘love thy neighbour’ and to forgive former enemies for past wrongs – a perspective undoubtedly underpinning much discourse on the subject – many workshop participants found it hard to see how the notion of reconciliation could be usefully applied to the current situation in Sri Lanka.

This perspective was particularly evident among representatives of the Tamil community, who stressed popular concern with, among other things, the continuing heavy military presence in the north and east of the country, official failure to make much headway on the return of internally displaced persons to areas – ‘High Security Zones’ – occupied by the army during the war, and, perhaps most critically, the palpable absence of a tangible ‘peace dividend’ for the majority of people in both communities.

More pragmatically, however, reconciliation can also be viewed as a way of building trust and confidence between former enemies, the goal being to replace step-by-step deep-seated patterns of intolerance, prejudice and hate with practical structures and processes intended to promote mutual acceptance, tolerance and co-existence. Significantly, this more practical, process-oriented approach to reconciliation – the one firmly advocated in the IDEA Handbook – found far wider resonance than previously anticipated among workshop participants in the north and south alike.

A thorough process of reconciliation appears to be neither timely nor feasible in Sri Lanka today. But what the Handbook describes as ‘interim reconciliation measures’, focused on practical initiatives to promote ‘good neighbourly’ relations, may be a different story – in this instance between the country’s majority Sinhala and minority Tamil and Muslim populations. The need for intra-ethnic reconciliation was also raised in this context.

In coming months, in dialogue with local partners, IDEA will be assessing next steps in relation to efforts to support the development of a national – and, most crucially, a nationally-owned – agenda for reconciliation in Sri Lanka. In this regard, the idea of interim reconciliation measures may prove to be vital building blocks in the continuing design of a more durable and stable peace process. In the meantime, it is worth noting the comment of one Tamil participant in the northern workshop: ‘Being neighbours are fine, but let’s not forget: good fences make good neighbours’.

Mark Salter
Democracy Building and Conflict Management Team
International IDEA