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What are the lessons of SAFHR Peace Audit
Exercise?
South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) as part of the Peace Studies
Programme has conducted three public audit exercises of peace questions and
processes in the last four years. These three peace audits have deliberated
on four peace processes and settlements – Chittagong Hill Tracts, Naga
Peace Process, Peace Process in Sri Lanka, and the Peace Question in
Balochistan. The reports have subsequently come out in form of three Peace
Audit Reports and a long essay that laid down the fundamentals in the issue
of peace accords (SAFHR Papers 4, 5, 8, 16). See Publication.
By and large SAFHR peace audit exercises dealt with what is
conventionally known as "internal conflicts" involving the State
and the rebels, though external factors were also discussed in adequate
measure wherever they were relevant. In a way, these conflicts can be
designated again as conventionally, "ethnic conflicts". While
there are many more such conflicts in this region of South Asia, the
preceding four audits can be said to have brought out the general features
of such conflict as predicating their peace processes and settlements, the
characteristics of the dynamics of the peace accords, the nature of
participation of various actors in the peace process, the ways in which the
conflict and its concomitant peace efforts develop, and finally the
preponderant issues that mark all such peace attempts.
In this sense we can say that SAFHR peace audit exercise has thrown
light on one category of conflict and peace process, whose salient features
can be noted. We can also say in this connection that the peace audit
exercise has been able to formulate at least one set of audit guidelines
and methods, appropriate to the class or group of conflicts and issues of
peace the exercise has addressed. As a human rights group this was a highly
relevant task for SAFHR; for the benefit for the peace and human rights
community of this region and elsewhere, these features and methods, fifteen
(15) in number, can be now listed in the following manner:
- The
relative ineffectiveness of the early warning systems and methods, which
call for their radical overhaul, because these methods underestimate the
stake of several actors in conflicts and the stake of several other actors
in peace;
-
The
critical role of ceasefire in peace process; the determinants of a
ceasefire agreement, as well as the open-ended nature of a ceasefire
agreement; conditionalities;
-
Disarming
of non-state armed opposition and its relation with the agenda of
demilitarisation;
-
The
issue of land in peace settlement; autonomy and autonomous arrangements set
up as a result of peace accord;
- The importance of the human rights and the humanitarian
tasks, their links, and determining the stage in which they appear as
crucial elements in process; ways in which these two tasks meet, their
specifics and common points;
- The
open-ended character of a peace accord, its instrumental nature, and the
significance of this in framing public policy on peace; impact on what may
be called the "policy-fund";
-
Listing
of basic human rights and humanitarian issues;
- Peace
process and the patriarchal nature of military power; women's involvement
in peace process, the emergence of women as a critical peace constituency,
its implications;
- Peace
dialogues at several level; plurality of the peace question and the peace
process;
- What do exactly we mean by public voice, public media, and
public opinion in peace process – the constructed nature of this
"public", the manipulatibility of a plastic medium in the
interest of continuing conflict, militarism, and war;
- Nature
of the availability of legal and constitutional remedies to an acute
conflict, their inadequacies, the need for flexibility in juridical
thinking, plural dialogues, and the need for legal pluralism; conflict and
the constitutional deficit;
- Nature
of participation in the audit exercise; the structuring of the agenda of
audit, the nature of confidential "transparency"; method of
writing the report, victims' voices, the rights-language, making the audit
exercise a middle-ground for meeting of the minds engaged in
peace-building; and taking the report to the field;
- Making
concrete studies on the "third dimension" of a conflict/peace
scenario, which will involve examinations of various options of indigenous
conciliators / facilitators / outside mediators / interventions /
arbitration, etc and their specific mandates;
- Linking
the participants of the audit with other human rights and peace activities,
they will be come the natural leaders, as they will be endowed with
insights in to the extreme cases of abuse of human rights, situations of
vulnerability, victims turning into actors, and acute conflict-ridden
societies which have to muster their inner depths in defence of justice and
dialogic peace;
- Finally,
taking peace audit as an act of democratising peace by making
reconciliation "the middle ground", examining the dynamics of
reconciliation, and by practising through the audit exercise a politics
that is known as the art of the possible; the additional issue is therefore
- how to restore to politics of peace the virtues of common sense.
However, while most of these were clearly established as the
required goals, nature, methods, and objects of a public inquiry into peace
process, SAFHR will have to do more in order to develop the findings into a
general theory and programme of a democratic peace building exercise, make
it more interventionist as a political technique, and link peace audit with
other peace building activities. Also to build up a general theory of an
interventionist politics for peace to be pursued by the human rights
community, particularly of the ex-colonial countries, such as South Asia,
more varied cases will have to be taken up for audit – cases that involve
human rights activists engaged in other kinds of conflicts, such as
inter-state, regional, conflict involving direct issues of political and
economic injustice.
Publications;
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