Sri Lanka, the serendipitous isle off India's southeast coast, is savaged by civil war. Although Sri Lanka was largely peaceful during British colonial times, after independence in 1948, the majority Sinhala intensified patterns of state-sanctioned discrimination against the minority Tamils. Since the fanatical Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam began battling the government in 1984, more than 60,000 Tamils have died, and thousands more have been internally displaced.
The WPF Program and the Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka jointly sponsored a large, well attended meeting in 1997 at Harvard University to seek answers to the problems besetting the islands and to think of solutions.
In late 1999 the Brookings Institution Press published Creating Peace in Sri Lanka, edited by Robert I. Rotberg. It was dedicated to Neelan Tiruchelvam, one of the book's contributors and the co-organizer of the first phase of the project. Tiruchelvam, a leading Sri Lankan moderate, was killed by a car bomb in July 1999. The book includes chapters on the ongoing Sri Lankan civil war, on the Sri Lankan economy, and on prospects for peace. The authors are Sri Lankan and American and represent the best of modern thinking on how to end the war and start a process of sustainable peace.
MEDIATING DEADLY CONFLICT
The end of the Cold War has made us much more conscious of the many "small" wars and internal conflicts that extract a frightful toll of lives and resources. We are also more aware of the tireless roles of some individuals in attempting to bring these conflicts to a peaceful resolution.
Is it possible to generalize from these efforts at mediation? What durable lessons can we draw from them that might help the international community in future efforts to intervene in intrastate, ethnic, religious, or communal conflicts? Among the many questions that might contribute to an effort to reach conclusions regarding the roles, strategies, and tactics of outside negotiators are the following: Should outside mediators be uncompromisingly neutral facilitators, or should they come to the table with solutions in mind? Under what circumstances are these alternative postures appropriate? Does it matter if mediators have ties to governments? Or should their independence be evident? Again, do circumstances dictate one or the other of these alternatives? At what stages during negotiations does it make sense for brokers to fix rigid deadlines, threaten to leave for home, make more substantive threats on the part of one or more governments or, indeed, the entire international community, and so on? Can we specify some of the kinds of carrots and sticks that should be employed by mediators?
A meeting to discuss these questions was held at Harvard in September 1997. The participants included Lincoln Bloomfield, Ronald J. Fisher, Donna Hicks, James O.C. Jonah, Brian Mandell, William Weisberg, Diego Cordovez, Howard Wolpe, Ambassador Herman Cohen, Ambassador Pete De Vos, Robert Pastor, Lawrence Susskind, Herbert Kelman, Eileen Babbitt, Dana Francis, and Robert I. Rotberg.
Dana Francis' edited transcript of the discussions at the meeting was published in 1998 as WPF Report 19: Mediating Deadly Conflict: Lessons from Afghanistan, Burundi, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Haiti, Israel/Palestine, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka.
courtesy:World Peace Foundation