Social and economic recovery does not take place in a political void. The post-conflict state may need a new structure and maybe new borders, in particular if ethnic or religious divisiveness and the risk of renewed conflict continue to exist, as is frequently the case. Also, the nature of the political process needs to be decided, implying a choice between top-down dictatorship and bottom-up democracy, or, in practical terms, the choice of a judicious mixture of the two. This chapter addresses these issues.
The primary causes of new or renewed armed conflict are political more than economic, as we saw in Chapter 2. Ethnic conflict in a weak political system is the dominant cause of civil war, and many international wars are really a continuation of civil wars that left important issues unresolved. It is thus clear that one of two approaches must be adopted if an outbreak of new or renewed armed conflict is to be prevented: partition of the country in question along dominant ethnic and religious lines, or a rapid strengthening of the political system. Both approaches, of course, are fraught with difficulties.
The dominant ethnic group generally opposes partition, but there are exceptions: the dominant Russians accepted the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the Czechs let the Slovaks go there own way. Furthermore, the major international powers don’t like partition: all five permanent members of the UN Security Council are against it, either for historical reasons (Russia and the US) or because they see it as a threat to their status quo - Russia seeking to keep Chechnya, China seeking to keep Tibet and to regain control of Taiwan. The frequently used argument that the small countries resulting from partition are not economically viable is not supported by evidence. On the contrary, small countries with well-managed open economies do in general quite well, much better certainly than larger less well-managed countries, and countries that are being artificially kept together while being economically and socially divided. Bosnia and Kosovo (as part of Serbia) are in this latter category of countries where freedom of movement of people and goods is de-facto limited and the economy is stagnating.
In spite of powerful opposing forces, partition of countries did happen and will probably happen again. That makes it important to be aware of the classic pitfalls of partition and to give thought to how they can be avoided.
Ethnic conflict arises because one group tries to dominate and exploit another group, or, vice versa, one group does no longer want to be dominated and exploited by another one. Consequently, the dominant group resists partition and, failing that, a fair and equitable settlement, by trying to keep control of contested, ethnically mixed areas and of important assets such as maritime access and natural resources, and by refusing to grant full recognition and protection of their rights to minorities. If that happens, as it frequently does, it is improbable that partition will lead to a mutually acceptable, stable arrangement without the interference of a powerful third party that can impose its will and that is genuinely interested in a stable settlement. That third party will frequently be a supranational authority such as the UN or the EU or NATO.
These matters have been handled very haphazardly in recent years and third party intervention only came about after a conflict had broken out or run its course, as seen in Bosnia, East Timor and Kosovo. Moreover, the solutions adopted were sometimes unstable, as in Bosnia where partition was rejected, or preliminary arrangements were made without a timetable for final settlement, as in Kosovo. It is quite obvious that this present state of affairs is far from satisfactory. Much work will have to be done if the international community wants to successfully intervene in emerging ethnic conflicts, mainly by reaching a modicum of consensus on methods and objectives and by creating a permanent structure to handle these issues. The recent creation of the International Court of Justice has demonstrated that progress can be achieved in matters like these, which until recently were considered unmanageable.
If the international community rejects partition of an ethnically divided post-conflict country, preventing recurrence of open conflict comes at a very large cost for peacekeeping. The occupying peace-keeping force in Bosnia numbered initially close to 50.000 men and women, or more than one person per 100 inhabitants. In the much smaller Kosovo the ratio was even higher and still is so after four years. Thanks to this massive effort, peacekeeping has been relatively successful in both places, but far from perfect. Both countries suffer from very high crime rates, much of the crime being ethnically motivated or motivated by greed under the cover of ethnicity. The ratio of one occupying peacekeeper to 100 residents can therefore serve as a plausible benchmark to establish the minimum size of a successful peacekeeping. Additionally, the peace-keepers should be authorized and instructed to use their arms to actually keep the peace and not only defend themselves as is the unfortunate rule under UN- led peacekeeping operations.
The case of Afghanistan provides additional support for our argument: partition of the country between the two dominant ethnic groups was ruled out after the last war by the U.S. and its allies, but so was provision of an adequate peace-keeping force which in this case, given size and population of the country, would have numbered at least 200.000 men and women. Instead, a force of less than 10.000 peacekeepers was put in place. The predictable result is nothing short of disastrous: the newly established central government controls only the capital, Kabul, and its immediate environment, and that only at daytime. The rest of the country and Kabul at night are ruled by local chiefs with their militias and by criminal groups. Reconstruction and economic recovery don’t seem to make much progress under these circumstances, except for the production of opium which has rapidly grown back to pre-Taliban levels, making Afghanistan again the world’s number one supplier.
Reconstruction of Iraq poses a very similar dilemma: divided between three hostile ethnic groups, the Shiite, Sunni and Kurds, and of similar size and population as Afghanistan, it would require a peace-keeping force of at least 200.000 people to stabilise the country within its current borders. Autonomy and auto-determination to the three ethnic groups would alleviate the problem.
Adding up these numbers, it would take for just these four countries -Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq- an occupying peace-keeping force of half a million people during several years to ensure a reasonable level of stability as a basis for socio-economic recovery and development. That additionally assumes that there are no important radical groups trying to de-stabilise the occupying regime with little regard to their own lives as in Iraq. However, forces of this size are simply not available in the western world: the Anglo-Americans, who dispose of large forces, will probably want to keep their forces freely available for future interventions of the Iraq type, and the continental Europeans with their low military budgets don’t dispose of any significant numbers of armed forces. They would roughly have to double their military budgets from about 1.5% of GDP to the US/UK level of about 3% of GDP to be able to project power similar to the US/UK scale. That is highly improbable, given the strong attachment to the expensive social status quo of their electorates and the enormous power of trade unions in the major countries on the European continent.
Moreover, peacekeeping is not a short-term assignment: ethnic tension is frequently transferred from one generation to the next, in many cases with the encouragement and financial support of a wealthy diaspora, requiring a continued presence of a reduced, but still meaningful, number of peacekeepers. Increasing the use of peacekeepers from non-western, developing countries is still in its infancy and its viability as an option remains to be seen. Experience to date has been very uneven.
Does that mean that partition of ethnically divided countries is the only affordable avenue toward stability and avoidance of future armed conflict?
Isn’t there a middle road between partition and massive, unaffordable occupation for long periods of time, resembling closely a new era of colonisation?
A decentralised, federal system of government is widely seen as the solution to this dilemma. References to the “Swiss model” as a sort of panacea occur regularly in this discussion. However, these references miss a central point: while Switzerland is ethnically divided and politically decentralised, all citizens of Switzerland see themselves as Swiss first, and only thereafter as members of one or the other ethnic group or Canton. That is why violent ethnic conflict on a large scale never occurred in Switzerland. Quite the contrary to that is the situation in most ethnically divided post-conflict countries, where the majority of people continue to see themselves foremost, if not exclusively, as members of an ethnic group, a perception re-enforced by strong social pressures and transferred from one generation to the next by parents and educators. This is one reason why relatively well-integrated multiethnic societies exist basically only in immigrant countries such as the United States, Brazil and Canada. Switzerland and Belgium are the exceptions to that rule.
Large multiethnic, multi-religious non-immigrant countries seem to depend for their continued existence on a strongly authoritarian government, if not outright dictatorship: the break-up of India, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia followed immediately the weakening of central authority. Nigeria, another large multi-ethnic country, is being kept together by the army in collusion with the leaders of the three main ethnic groups who share the spoils of the country’s oil wealth, much to the detriment of the majority of the people who sink deeper into poverty year after year: not an example which one would recommend to follow.
We conclude that a federal system in a multi-ethnic or multi-religious country can function only with strong and mature democratic institutions, with today’s India probably being just barely above the threshold of maturity. The alternative of a strongly authoritarian but decentralized government does not exist: dictators are centralists, not federalists.
Since supporting dictatorship is now generally considered to be against the best interest of western democracies, and since mature democratic institutions need a long time to develop, western democracies would be well advised to re-visit their negative attitude toward partition.
When considering partition of a chronically unstable country on ethnic-religious lines, four principal areas of concern must be addressed: how to protect minorities; what to do in areas with mixed population; how to ensure for each part free access to international trade routes; and how to ensure a fair sharing of the profits from the exploitation of the country’s natural resources, mainly minerals.
Even after partitioning a country into two or more parts, it is highly unlikely that any of the new countries will be ethnically and religiously “pure”, and the minorities in the new countries must be given constitutional guarantees of their essential rights: equal political representation, uniform taxation, free use of the minority’s language, free exercise of religion, etc. For these guarantees to be credible, there must be legal recourse, both national and international, against any violation, and there must be a powerful guarantor of minority rights, such as the E.U., the U.S., or a strengthened U.N., who is willing and able to enforce an end to a violation of minority rights. Elements of a system of this kind are currently in use in parts of former Yugoslavia, and could easily be adapted for general use.
Areas with genuinely mixed population where intermarriage between ethnic groups occurs frequently are relatively rare. An example was Bosnia before 1992, where about one third of marriages were mixes ones, and not only in Sarajevo which was one of the few integrated multiethnic cities of this world. Now, of course, this is no longer the case, and the Bosnians have paid a terrible price to achieve something close to ethnic purity in the respective parts of the country. Similarly, India and Pakistan have paid dearly for fighting over Kashmir for half a century. Quite obviously, partition accompanied by massive expulsion and relocation is not an acceptable answer to prevent ethnic conflict in mixed areas. People in genuinely mixed areas will have to learn to peacefully live together, as did the Bosnians until the governments of Serbia and Croatia decided to put an end to that and claimed parts of the country for themselves. The real tragedy of Bosnia is that the international powers, Europe and the United States, let the war and the expulsions go on for more than three years before they decided to intervene.
One must hope that the civilised world has learned a lesson from the Bosnian tragedy and will not again procrastinate when a similar situation arises somewhere in the world.
The two remaining issues of partition –access to trade routes and sharing of mineral wealth- are much more amenable to practical solutions. Land-locked countries exist on all continents except, of course, Australia, and most of these countries have unlimited access to international trade and deep sea shipping at reasonable cost, except in times of war or where major infrastructure is in an advanced stage of disarray. Thus, creation of new land-locked countries through partition does not by itself constitute a problem of access to international trade routes, assuming a minimum of goodwill by the parties involved. Various models of international treaties for customs-free transit are available for the parties to choose from.
Reaching agreement on how to share the wealth of natural resources is a more delicate issue, even more so as competition for those resources may have been at the origin of past conflicts.
There are two types of natural resources: minerals; and others, such as rainfall, soil quality and the few remaining timber reserves. For the second, non-mineral type of resources, the new countries emerging from partition will probably be unevenly endowed, and there probably isn’t much one can do about it. The more poorly endowed part will have to accept that fact as part of the price for its newly won independence.
Important mineral resources, where they exist, are an entirely different matter. They may be located predominantly or entirely in one of the countries that would be created through partition, and the other country or countries to be created would hardly accept the loss of this source of wealth, even after a defeat in civil war. Thus, a formula must be found to share mineral wealth in a way that probably makes nobody happy but is acceptable to all. There is a variety of formulas that could be used, but the simplest, most efficient and most transparent one seems to be the creation of a National Minerals Company, modelled on one of the national oil companies or, to take an older, successful example, the Moroccan “Office Cherifien des Phosphates”. The big issue is of course the allocation of shares in the new company to the newly created countries. The most acceptable formula is probably the allocation of shares in proportion to the population of each of the new countries, with a corresponding representation on the company’s board. This gives the country where the mineral resources are located a significant advantage with regard to employment and income generation, both primary and secondary. However, without such an advantage the country where the resources are located may simply not agree to any deal of this kind.
On the other hand, fairness and transparency in accounting and taxation must be agreed in the statutes of the company (e.g., by stipulating a set of accounting rules) and by international treaty between the shareholding countries. If these subjects are not properly dealt with, then the writing is on the wall for future conflict between the shareholders over special taxes, fees, inflated cost etc., all designed to distort the allocation of benefits in favour of one or the other shareholder, mainly the one on whose territory the minerals are located.
To conclude, partition of countries that are prone to internal armed conflict is a feasible option and sometimes worthwhile, assuming there are no important areas of the country with genuinely mixed populations as shown by the frequency of mixed marriages.
However, a fair and durable resolution of the issues arising from partition can probably only be achieved, and thereafter maintained, if the international community in one of its incarnations takes an active part in settling the issues and thereafter guaranteeing the adherence to the agreements that were made.
No reasonable person expects a post-conflict country to become overnight a properly functioning democracy. That fact is frequently being used as an excuse to govern from above without much involvement of the governed, because, at least in the short term, governing from above is so much more convenient and hassle-free. While that may be true as long as there is no armed resistance to the new local or foreign dictatorship, it is also true that convenience and expediency, even if used with the best of intentions, do not provide a solid foundation for a stable future. The people want to participate in deciding their own future and, more often than not, have very concrete and specific notions of what they want in the three most important areas: the system of government, the rights of the people, and the economic system.
The litmus test of governance is the process by which a new constitution is formulated and put into force. At its most democratic -rarely if ever practiced- the people would elect the members of a constitutional convention, and the result of the convention’s work would be subject to a referendum. At the other extreme is the formulation and approval of Bosnia’s new constitution, which was prepared by American lawyers at Dayton, attached as an annex to the Dayton agreement, and brought into force as part of that agreement, to the considerable surprise of the local population who had virtually no involvement in the process and has very little attachment and respect for a document which they cannot consider as their own.
Constitutions of the Bosnian variety are not without value. At a minimum, they set the rules of democratic governance and respect for human rights. However, being imposed from outside, or above, they contribute little to preventing a return to tribal warfare and the extermination of minorities. Clearly, a post-conflict country would be better off with a less perfect constitution if it represents a consensus of the majority of the governed as a result of lengthy and sometimes painful discussions and negotiations. Here, as in other areas of socio-economic recovery and so-called “nation-building”, shortcuts come at a price.
For example, an economic recovery program may be drafted by some experts in the reclusion of their offices, but, before becoming an official blueprint, it must be widely discussed with competent and interested local people. This, again, may be lengthy and at times painful, but the eventual result will be better in many respects than the initial draft, and it will have local support, giving it a much-improved chance to succeed.
Being credible and not being perceived as trying to fool the people are of paramount importance. The people may grudgingly accept a new local or foreign dictatorship if it is perceived as reasonably benevolent, efficient, and transitory. However, the same people will profoundly distrust a so-called interim authority or quasi-government composed of local elders that is transparently being used as a front to cover and protect the real seat of power. Instead, clearly defined authority has to be given to the newly created local authority, even at the risk of being confronted with unpleasant decisions.
Following this line of argument, one must conclude that the establishment of an interim presidency with full authority to govern was the right decision for Afghanistan, where nearly everything else has been mishandled. Equally, the French approach to the emerging civil war in the Ivory Coast – separating the warring parties and establishing a local coalition government – was probably the best possible solution under difficult circumstances. On the other hand, the local puppet governments of Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq are visibly ineffective and counter-productive.