Editorial


02/2005		  

Peace mission lessons

The world reacted with unprecedented eagerness to help after Boxing day’s tsunami hit the shores of the Indian Ocean. This internationally expressed solidarity is welcome and provides a ray of hope for the future of the global community – for instance, if we bare in mind the Millennium Goals. It remains to be seen, of course, whether all pledges will be honoured and whether the will to help those in need will prove long-lived (Interview with Germany’s Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, p. 48).

As for development policy, the catastrophe on the coasts of Southern and South East Asia is no reason to re-think established principles. The areas hardest hit by the giant waves were those with inadequate infrastructure, where people have scant access to education, health care, loans or any other social services. People who can hardly help themselves in normal life are particularly defenceless in the face of natural disasters (P. Sainath, p. 53).

Without doubt, the quality of local governments plays a crucial role. It is, therfore, unsurprising that the raging sea caused the most horrific damage in areas that are normally known for human violence. Where state structures have never done much for the welfare of the people and, moreover, have become undermined by armed conflict, the prospects for development are bleak. And that is why the issue of state failure stays on the agenda – in Aceh, for example, where the Indonesian government does not want foreign troops to stay involved in humantiarian relief in the long run.

Natural disasters are appalling events – but tectonic plates cannot be called to account. Where suffering is human-made, however, people are to blame. That makes the death toll even more horrifying, and presents the global community with an even greater challenge. In the past two decades, the United Nations and other supranational organisations have amassed a great deal of experience from military interventions aimed at ending murder and strife. And the first lessons are being learned – among them that not all objectives are attainable and that success or failure depends on diverse factors. Crucial aspects, according to high-ranking UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi (p. 56), include the security situation after an intervention, the pace of progress, the sense of legitimacy, and the degree of local involvement.

After a civil war, security is not just a question of tanks and guns – it is also a matter of water supply, hospitals and the prospect of regular incomes (Rudolf Adam, p. 60). If an intervention force is to be welcome for any length of time, progress needs to be fast and tangible (Clare Harkin, p. 63). Long-term acceptance of the new order yet to be created will, among other things, depend on early success stories.
Moreover, local perceptions of legitimacy need to be taken very seriously where war has ridden roughshod over law and order. The precarious dimensions that contesting ideas of legitimacy can assume are apparent in the case of Afghanistan. In that country, farmers have been growing opium since the 1980s as a strategy of survival which worked well in times of Soviet occupation and later civil strife. Internationally, drug cultivation is regarded as a criminal act – but strict law enforcement in Afghanistan is likely to lead only to a renewed escalation of violence (Conrad Schetter, p. 66).

It would also be a case of following the letter of the law rather than the example the rich nations set themselves. Significantly, Germany and other European countries have found that it makes sense to put harm reduction before prosecution. Waging a “war on drugs” along with the “war on terror” is unlikely to deliver positive results. Such a strategy would rather run the risk of creating dangerous new allies for the Islamist Taliban. As the most important markets for opiates are in rich countries, we face a globalisation problem of a special kind – one that can hardly be solved in Afghanistan alone.

To create stable states after civil wars, local communites need to be involved from the outset. The European Agency for Reconstruction (EAR) presents an interesting example of how this can be promoted (Richard Zink, p. 69). Based in the Greek city of Saloniki, the Agency has a mandate for several Balkan states. As an EU institution, the EAR does not represent individual member governments and their arbitrary whims. Rather, it is acting on behalf of supranational interests, which makes it easier to serve as a mediator and to demand adherence to universal standards.

What is more, EAR efforts benefit from the EU’s attractions as a prosperous, peaceful and multicultural community. It is precisely this multi-state union that the Balkan governments want to join. The EU operates on the principle that there is more to be gained from cooperation than from confrontation. That this is so was a valuable lesson that Western European governments learned – and this is sometimes forgotten – from the human-made disasters of the First and Second World War.



Dr. Hans Dembowski
Editor in Chief D+C
euz.editor@fsd.de