New book mulls if peace pacts are effective

As failures of ethnic accords in India and in other parts of South Asia become apparent, peace audit exercises are gaining certain currency among scholars and social activists, with the accords being varyingly described as "scraps of paper" or "instruments through which the state imposes its will on the body politic", says a new book.

In spite of mankind's apparent preference for peace, the history of peace is shamefully tenuous to say the least, says the book 'Peace Process and Peace Accords'.

The ubiquity of conflict relegates peace into the footnotes of international relations, the book says. Brought out under the South Asian peace studies series, the book, edited by Samir Kumar Das of Calcutta research group, is a collection of articles by political analysts.

The essays included provide useful morphology of violence and conflicts. "Contrary to what grand narratives like clash of civilizations would have us believe, the fault lines of conflict are never clearly drawn. War and violence always push people to the margins. Caught in the crossfire between highly hardened positions, the hapless and unarmed people, in every instance, are called upon to bear the brunt of war and conflict," the book says.

Signing of an accord is celebrated as the end of conflict as much as the failure in signing is regarded as a continuation of its opposite.

The studies included in the book almost unequivocally point out how the very act of signing an accord could mark either the continuation of the same conflict or simply its metamorphosis.

Stating that the post-cold war era is internationally marked by a series of state versus community conflicts, so much so that it has been termed as a period of fragmentation, Paula Bannerjee of the department of South and Southeast Asian studies, University of Calcutta says that for want of an enemy outside, states seemed to be looking inward and revaluating the other.

Accords, instead of putting an end to the battle reflect its continuing nature. All accords, being texts agreed upon, are bound to be open-ended and polysemic. They leave ample scope for reading rather unforeseen and even unforeseeable political practices into them says Samir Kumar Das in his analysis of the accords in Northeast India.

Jehan Perera of Sri Lanka, however, says that after the dramatic signing of a cease-fire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE in February 2002, Lanka is being looked upon as a possible model of peace-making.

The South Asian region, which includes Afghanistan and nuclear rivals-India and Pakistan-is among the most unstable in the world. Sri lanka offers a beacon of hope that textbook approaches in peacemaking, with third party mediation, can be successful, he says.

Ironically, Sri Lanka has had a relatively long tradition of modern democracy stretching back to the British colonial period. But inability of the political elites belonging to different ethnic communities to share power equitably among them led to a series of broken agreements and to acute mistrust between the communities, Perera says.

The most outstanding instance was the agreement reached in 1957 between Prime Minister at the time Swrd Bhandaranaike and the leader of the largest Tamil party, he says.