Beyond Mediation, Negotiation and Negative Peace:

Towards Transformative Peace in Sri Lanka

Jayadeva Uyangoda

Introduction

A new phase of direct negotiation between the government of Sri Lanka, now partially headed by the United National Front (UNF) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is underway. 1 In Sri Lanka's present political configuration, there is a slightly confusing dimension with the President, as the Head of State, representing one political coalition, the People's Alliance, and the 'government' and the Cabinet made up of another, rival coalition, the United National Front. From 1994 to December 2001, when the People's Alliance was the ruling party, it controlled both the Presidency and Parliament. In the present context in Sri Lanka, the term 'government' refers to the United National Front administration which has the parliamentary majority. The United National Party is the main component of the UNF coalition which was formed a little before the parliamentary elections of December 2001. The talks, mediated by the Norwegian government, began in September 2002 in Thailand. The first round of talks, that took place on September 16 and 17 in Sattahip, Thailand, produced a constructive working relationship between the Sri Lankan government and the secessionist rebels. Among the main areas of agreement the two sides reached in the first round were: continuation of talks through Norwegian mediation, immediately addressing issues of normalization of civilian life in the conflict areas, setting up of joint institutional mechanisms for resettlement, rehabilitation and reconstruction work, and the continuation of the present cease-fire agreement. Other than these immediate issues, the first round of talks in Thailand did not focus on any of the so-called 'core issues' of Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict. Focusing on immediate issues on the ground, and not on difficult core issues, can be seen as a deliberate strategy of process designing preferred by the Sri Lankan government, the LTTE and the Norwegian mediators. This approach to negotiation in the present phase of Sri Lanka's peace process is supposed to stabilize the conditions for continuing political engagement between the two sides by creating and consolidating what has been termed as 'ground conditions' in the peace process.

A surprising development that occurred in this first round of talks in Thailand is the announcement by the leader of the LTTE negotiation team that the LTTE would seek a political solution to the ethnic conflict in a framework of regional autonomy. When this announcement was made by the LTTE at the press conference following the formal talks, it was the first time that the LTTE, which had been waging a war for a separate ethnic state, publicly stated its willingness to settle for a non-secessionist goal. In conceptual terms, the LTTE, with this shift in goal, has also begun to re-interpret the notion of self-determination to mean 'internal self-determination' not amounting to secession. In the third round of talks held in Oslo, Norway, the LTTE negotiators went another step ahead by announcing that their movement was committed to finding a federalist solution to the ethnic conflict. According to the LTTE's new conceptualization of its goal, the idea of a separate state is posited to be the strategy of the last resort, the latter being defined as the context when the Sri Lankan government continues to oppress the Tamil minority without granting their political rights within a united Sri Lanka.

Although critics are quite skeptical about the LTTE's new turns and shifts, the present negotiation process in Sri Lanka indicates some crucial dynamics of intra-state conflicts, which students of political transformation cannot easily ignore. For example, ruling elites of Sinhalese society have come to accept the inevitability of a political settlement to the ethnic conflict and the validity of power-sharing arrangements in a settlement framework. Their conviction that the unitary state structure of Sri Lankan needs a pluralist re-orientation is one of the most significant developments that have occurred in the course of Sri Lanka's conflict. Similarly, the gradual weakening of the secessionist project in the Sri Lankan Tamil society as well as the willingness on the part of radical Tamil nationalist forces to re-examine the relevance of a protracted armed struggle to achieve autonomy/secessionist objectives are profoundly significant transformations that the protracted war seems to have set in motion. Against this backdrop, a simple question that many would ask about Sri Lanka would be: would there be peace this time, at last? An answer to that simple, yet difficult question would require answers to some more questions. For example, what are the conditions of a possibility for resolving a protracted internal conflict in a context where domestic and global circumstances have reconfigured the political trajectories of the conflict? What are the transformative possibilities that the conflict itself might produce, ultimately giving rise to new processes of conflict de-escalation and settlement? In what way can a space for conflict transformation be utilized for emancipatory politics in a society in deep conflict? This paper is concerned with examining these three questions. In discussing them, I will also examine in some detail the unfolding political debate in Sri Lanka on the negotiation-peace process in order to capture the dimensions of complex discursive processes that appear to exist side by side with the structural processes of political change.

Contexts for Negotiation in Intra-state Conflict

Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict can be characterized as a protracted ethno-political conflict that has remained militarized for almost two decades. Protracted internal conflicts are not easily amenable to negotiated settlement and this point has been made in numerous empirical studies on contemporary intra-state conflicts (Zartman, 1995, Kaufmann: 1996, Hampson: 1996, Stedman: 1996, Walter: 1997 and 1999, Hartzell: 1999). Many recent studies on conflict settlement share Zartman's observation: "Internal conflicts - civil wars - are the most difficult of conflicts to negotiate" (Zartman, 1995:3). There are profoundly daunting reasons for this difficulty. Stedman (1996:343) identifies four reasons as to why civil wars are 'more difficult' to negotiate than inter-state wars. First, political settlements in civil wars require the parties to disarm and form a single army and government. This, as Stedman notes, creates intense security concerns in the sense that the parties will face "worrisome military vulnerabilities" (Stedman, 1996:343). Second, civil wars are often 'total wars' in which combatants come to believe that the only way to end the war is by eliminating their opponent. This creates'survival stakes' for the combatants, who fear that defeat will mean death. Third, civil wars are often fought by leaders who would accept nothing less than complete victory and complete control over the country, or region, in question. Fourth, even if the parties are fighting for limited aims, the rhetoric of total war increases risks and fears.

The difficulties involved in bringing internal armed conflicts to negotiated ends do not indeed make negotiation irrelevant to conflict resolution processes. While defining the contexts of settlement efforts, they also compel the practitioners as well as advocates of negotiation and mediation to recognize why internal conflicts are "so obdurately resistant to negotiations" (Zartman, 1995:3) and explore ways to bring about successful negotiation outcomes. Perhaps there are three crucial phases through which the possibility of negotiation in internal conflicts could be seen as moving, each phase constituting incentives as well as critical barriers to further progress. The first phase concerns whether the parties, locked in war, are ready to opt for a negotiation option and if so, whether the conditions and circumstances that might make such a strategic shift in conflict behavior is possible to sustain. In the second phase, parties having begun negotiations might find reaching a settlement intensely problematic. The overcoming of barriers to a settlement agreement is no guarantee that the third phase in the process could be less problematic. In the third phase, implementation of the settlement agreement could bring about added pressure on the process, even threatening the sustainability of what has been agreed on by the rivals through negotiation.

Among themes that the contemporary comparative literature on civil war negotiation and settlement possibilities has highlighted, there are three that have a direct bearing on the context of conflict-negotiation and peace trajectory in Sri Lanka. They somewhat correspond to the three phases of incentives and barriers in the negotiation process which we identified above. They are: (i) conditions that make negotiation possible as well as feasible to emerge in rare conjunctures of objective conditions as well as actor perceptions ('conflict ripeness' and 'overcoming structural asymmetry"); (ii) the vision, the framework and limits of the ethnic conflict settlement ('possible and impossible solutions'); and (iii) implementation complexities of settlement agreements or complexities concerning the peace process ('settlement stability').

Most of the contemporary academic literature on the processes of negotiation, mediation and settlement in internal conflicts that provide useful insights into an understanding of Sri Lanka's present conflict settlement exercise and its possible trajectories is largely inspired by the neo-realist paradigm of international relations theory propounded by Kenneth Waltz (1979) and his colleagues. The realist understanding of intra-state conflicts holds the assumption that the dynamics of intercommunal conflicts within nation-states are fundamentally similar to the dynamics of inter-state relations in an anarchic international system. This view is derived from the realist premise that as there is no central authority to enforce rules or contracts in the anarchic international system, individual states seek to acquire more power and capabilities to gain an extra margin of safety. However, measures taken by one state to strengthen its own security may endanger the security of another state. This leads to what the realists call the'security dilemma' of nation-states. Inter-state cooperation through negotiation and agreement is the way to address this dilemma.

Drawing from this realist insight, some scholars have attempted to explain internal armed conflict processes as ones that generate security dilemmas for civil war combatants. In the anarchic system of civil war, as the realist argument posits, groups and individuals living in a constellation of anarchy are usually concerned about their security. They are concerned with the possibility of being attacked, subjected, dominated or annihilated by other groups and individuals. They strive to secure security from such attack and are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the power of others. This generates a distinct dialectic of insecurity, making the others more insecure and compelling them to prepare for the worst. The security dilemma in turn generates dynamics of conflict re-production and protraction, making combatants incapable of managing the conflict on their own. Even when objective conditions for conflict management or war-termination emerge, the security dilemma does not disappear because the cost of settlement may be seen as far exceeding the cost of conflict continuation. Parties, confronted with the high cost of continuing conflict, need to be persuaded to alter their conflict behavior by an outside agent who can provide incentives to end violence and address security dilemma of the combatants. Negotiation through third-party mediation is one such measure that has gained much currency in the post-Cold War intra-state conflicts. In some other instances, direct military intervention has also been proposed as a measure to end violent political conflict. Thus, the 'realist' literature on resolving internal conflicts, in both its 'hard' as well as'soft' approaches, presupposes a crucial role for external actors in conflict settlement through mediation and/or intervention. Indeed, the realist approach to conflict settlement is built on the premise that the security dilemma constitutes a main cause of inter-communal conflict giving rise to "collective fears of the future" (Lake and Rothchild, 1996:41). The process of conflict management and resolution thus necessitates external inputs, either in the form of using coercive power in order to establish and maintain a stable balance of power between rival ethnic factions (hard realism), or in the use of soft power that includes mediation, exchange of information, negotiation and policy alternatives that are sensitive to the dynamics and processes of the conflict (soft realism).
Zartman (1995:20) exemplifies the soft realist advocacy of external mediation when he proposes that "civil wars, more than many external conflicts, need a mediator". In his analysis, it is the structural dynamics of the conflict itself that provides space for a third party as mediator. In Zartman's view, internal conflicts are marked by intensity and commitment and they lock the parties to opposition as well as hostilities. Therefore, the parties "cannot reach a turning point of perception and find a way out by themselves;. They are unable to think of a solution that could be attractive to the other side as well as themselves; unable to turn the zero-sum conflict into a positive-sum solution." Kaufmann (1996), on the other hand, presents the 'hard realist' case for international involvement. Since stable resolutions of ethnic wars are possible "only when the opposing groups are demographically separated into defensible enclaves," the international community "must abandon attempts to restore war-torn mulit-ethnic states" and instead "facilitate and protect population movements to create true national homelands" (Kaufmann, 1996:137). Kaufmann's proposal is for the international community to intervene in ethnic wars with a clear agenda of re-demarcating state boundaries on the premise that "defensible ethnic enclaves reduce violence with or without independent sovereignty." Kaufmann, we may note, is particularly reacting to intense ethnic violence and ethnic cleansing that occurred in the last decade. In his view, restoring civil politics by brokering political power - sharing arrangements in multi-ethnic states shattered by war is impossible because "the war destroys possibilities for ethnic cooperation" (1996:137). There are indeed softer versions as well, of the hard interventionist approach. They advocate humanitarian intervention, peace-keeping and peace-enforcement in post-settlement conditions.
Concerning configuration of circumstances that define negotiation dynamics, Zartman (1995), working within the soft realist paradigm, has drawn attention to two conditions of 'conflict ripeness' and'structural asymmetry'. Structural asymmetry is a characteristic of internal conflicts that makes negotiation processes complex. Asymmetry relates to the unequal power relations that exist between the state and the anti-state insurgents. When an internal rebellion begins, one party, the government, is strong and the other, the insurgents, is weak. The dynamic of the conflict in its early face is such that the rebels try to redress the power asymmetry, because the government has legitimacy, sovereignty, allies, armies and access to resources. The insurgents have to fight for all these from a position of inferiority. Thus, the rebellion becomes a "dual protracted struggle, striving for both ends and means: a struggle for attention, redress and legitimacy, inseparably interwoven with a struggle for the power to pursue these ends" (Zartman, 1995:7).
In Zartman's view, negotiation under conditions of asymmetry, or asymmetrical negotiation, is a paradox, because the negotiation process, as empirical evidence suggests, "functions best under conditions of equality" and only take place when the parties have "some form of a mutual veto over the outcome" (1995:8). Whereas the conditions of asymmetry are "generally unconducive to negotiation," the other dimension of the paradox is that while asymmetry negates possibilities for negotiation, attempts to redress it "only further complicate the negotiation process" (Zartman, 1995: 3-4). Thus, symmetrical conflicts are more open to negotiation. The negotiation space can be created by a perception of what Zartman calls 'mutually hurting stalemate' that constitutes conditions of 'conflict ripeness' (Zartman: 1985 and 1995). Conflict ripeness, in Zartman's theorization is both a structural condition and a perception. It is both structural and perceptual at the same time. A conflict which is ripe for 'resolution' is associated with two different sorts of intensity which Zartman describes in topographical metaphors - 'plateaus' and 'precipice'. These two conditions of conflict intensity produce two different dimensions of pressure to combatants 'deadlocks' and "deadlines' (Zartman, 1985:267). In Zartman's scheme, a plateau and its deadlock begin when one side is unable to achieve its aims, to resolve the problem, or to win the conflict by itself, and is completed when the other side arrives at a similar perception. Each party must begin to feel uncomfortable in the costly dead-end into which it has gotten itself. Meanwhile, a plateau must be perceived by both sides not as a momentary resting ground, but as a "hurting stalemate, a flat, unpleasant terrain stretching into the future, providing no later possibilities for decisive escalation or for graceful escape" (Zartman, 1985: 268).
Suppose there are structural conditions of conflict ripeness - a moment of plateau and precipice - and its realization by the parties to a civil war. Does it ensure a move towards negotiation and settlement? Zartman suggests that the success of the negotiation process leading to a settlement agreement is dependent on the availability of an international mediator, because internal conflicts "so lock the parties into opposition and hostilities that they cannot reach a turning point of perception and find a way out by themselves;. Thus civil wars, more than many external conflicts, need a mediator" (Zartman, 1995:20). Mediators offer parties to intra-state conflicts policy-tracks and alternatives. The mediator's task is to "deflect the parties from competing attempts to impose unilateral solutions; and into a joint search for a bilateral solution"(1995:269).

Even if international mediation brings the conflicting parties together, would the warring ethnic factions be able to envision and design a common political future in a framework of pluralism? Literature on constitutional alternatives for deeply divided societies, offer power-sharing arrangements as the most plausible option (Horowitz: 1985; Lijphart: 1977 and 1984: Ghai: 2000). The idea of pluralizing the state structures through devolution and federalism has attracted the attention of many political and constitutional thinkers who see the political inadequacy of unitarism and the mono-ethnic state. In a recent intervention in the debate, Kaufmann, 'a hard realist,' has argued that solutions to ethnic wars "do not depend on their causes" (Kaufmann, 1996: 137). Kaufmann's premise is that in ethnic wars, hypernationalist mobilization rhetoric and ethnic atrocities harden ethnic identities to the point that cross-ethnic political appeals are unlikely to be made or even heard. To prevent resultant security dilemmas for ethnic groups living in multi-ethnic contexts that can further intensify violence and ethnic cleansing, ethnic groups need to be'separated'. Against backgrounds of intense ethnic violence, restoring civil politics in multi-ethnic states shattered by war is impossible, because the war itself has destroyed the possibilities of ethnic cooperation. Stable solutions, Kaufman argues, of ethnic civil wars are possible, but "only when the opposing groups are demographically separated into defensible enclaves." Kaufmann's proposal offers a direct role to the international community that "should abandon attempts to restore war-torn multi-ethnic states" and instead "facilitate and protect population movements to create true national homelands." In this scheme, sovereignty is secondary. What is paramount is the creation of "defensible ethnic enclaves" that are more likely to reduce violence with or without independent sovereignty.
