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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Lost in transition – the difficulties of nation building
“Belonging to a nation is not opposed to globalisation”
Latin America: Aiming for social cohesion
An ethics code for judges
Sri Lanka: The glue that keeps people apart
04/2005
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The glue that keeps people apart
Even during civil wars, there are always people willing to lend a helping hand. Extending such solidarity beyond one’s own group of people to “the others”, however, is a risky affair. Sri Lanka provides examples of destructive behaviour that results from an over-emphasis on collective identities.
[ By Una Hombrecher ]
“I have killed many soldiers, and I have never felt any guilt. I did it for our freedom,” the female warrior explains resolutely. We are sitting in Batticaloa on the east coast of Sri Lanka in an office of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It was opened after a cease-fire agreement in 2002. Tamils predominantly populate this province, which was the site of military conflicts between the Sinhalese governmental army and the soldiers of the LTTE. On the cover of the magazine on the table, a hand holding a gun reaches out of the ground.
Colonised by three European powers, Sri Lanka became independent in 1948. Since 1970, armed conflicts and political upheavals have devastated the island and killed more than 60,000 people. One and a half million people have become refugees. Valuable natural resources and infrastructure have been destroyed.
In development debate, theories stressing social capital are seen as torchbearers for the creation of better economic, social and political conditions. However, the example set by Sri Lanka shows that this approach needs to be refined. Concepts as elaborated by Robert Putnam and promoted by the World Bank do not fully explain the situation on the island and hardly serve as a basis for sustainable development.
Social capital
On its web site, the World Bank defines social capital (and, synonymously, social cohesion) as “the institutions, relationships and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s social interaction”. According to this line of thinking, the denser the network of relations, the less poverty there will be and the more human and economic development is to be expected. The World Bank makes a distinction between a narrow and a broad definition of social capital. The narrow definition refers to horizontal social networks (including their associated norms), while the second one includes both horizontal and vertical relations. The latter is similar to common definitions of civil society, which emphasise bridges to state institutions without any loss of autonomy or free will. In addition, the World Bank authors point out that social capital is not only the sum of institutions that support a society, but also the glue that holds it together.
Empirically, the distinction between the narrow and the broad definition of social capital is very relevant to Batticaloa, where there are many signs of social cohesion in the narrow sense but not the peace and economic progress typical of social capital in the broad sense. Within local communities in Batticaloa, people do help one another a lot – just as they also do in other areas of Sri Lanka. If someone gets sick, the neighbours will get medical help regardless of the time of day or the distance to the next hospital. Similarly, neighbours can be relied on for help in the case of floods or storms.
At major family events such as funerals or weddings, neighbours are on hand to make sure that everyone has enough to eat and drink. Neighbours also lend a helping hand when people are in dire straits. At the same time, neighbours are often relatives, not only in rural Batticaloa. People here often say: “All families in this part of town are more or less my relatives.” People live quite segregated according to cast, ethnic group and religion. As a result, social distinctions are also spatial ones.
Local borders
Many of the inhabitants of Batticaloa, however, have very little contact with those beyond their local networks and outside their own peer group. “I never have an opportunity to speak Sinhalese anymore. Hardly any Sinhalese live here,” one woman told me. “And if I meet one, for instance at a checkpoint, then I do not indicate that I speak their language.”
Vertical social relations (bridging and connecting various groups in the broad sense of social capital) have become dangerous affairs. The overlapping power structures of the state army and the LTTE have made them exceptional. “I had two brothers, one of whom works in a government office. The other one was killed by the LTTE,” an old fisherman told me. “If I had gone to the police to report the murder, the LTTE would have accused me of collaborating with the state army. I don’t talk to anyone there. We don’t trust anyone.” A woman told me about her experience with the LTTE: “They do what they want with us. No crime committed in this village will ever be heard of.”
The influence of armed forces can vary greatly in a small area. The “cleared areas” are under governmental control, while the LTTE command the “uncleared areas”. In “grey areas”, both sides compete for power. Social cohesion only exists within groups that are clearly distinct from “the others”. The threat of violence practically forces people to stay within their own group almost all the time. But long before dominant groups and local rulers can brutally enforce their supremacy, other mechanisms take hold. Discourse practices in day-to-day life lead people to accept certain identifications, which allow them to act but, at the same time, also limit their scope of action.
Only recently, academic consensus was that identity was the core of a person’s fixed, constant personality. It was thought to remain stable throughout a person’s life. Today, individual personality is seen more as something that develops without ever becoming finished or complete. Likewise, collective identities also change constantly and are renegotiated in discussions and social interaction.
Many layers of identity
Sri Lanka has a multicultural, hybrid past, in which Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Moors, Malays, and Veddahs shared a home. Today, people generally feel more allegiance to one of the two dominant ethnic nationalisms rather than to a multicultural country. Again and again, people in Batticaloa told me: “I am proud to be Tamil.” Repeatedly, I was told what the main elements of being Tamil were: the language, the culture, Hinduism, social habits and the landscape. Often, Tamils spoke of the obligation they felt to conserve the culture passed on to them. The LTTE sells its aggressive view of the world in street plays, paintings, posters, statues, print media and video films. People with a strong connection to their land innately understand images like the one of the armed hand reaching out of the ground as a promise of protection and security.
Individual identity is not constructed randomly. It depends on the options an individual has under given conditions. In Batticaloa, education increasingly seems to matter more than caste. The people I spoke to often made a clear distinction between the “educated” and the “uneducated”. That is how Tamil society defines hierarchy today. One important reason is that the LTTE rejects Hindu caste distinctions and has been quite successful at making them taboo. The goal was (and is) to strengthen Tamil unity and to mobilise for armed conflict. The success of this endeavour shows that definitions of cultural identity can and do change.
Furthermore, the concept of a single Tamil identity is cracking at the seams. Many Batticaloa Tamils make a clear distinction between themselves and the Jaffna Tamils to the north. “They always think they’re better and look down upon us. We are just canon fodder for them,” many people said. “They send their children overseas while ours are sent into battle.”
Even back in Colonial times, Jaffna was considered a haven of education with wealthy, industrious residents. In contrast, the Tamils in Batticaloa emphasise their “friendly, hospitable way” and the fact that they “rate social values higher than economic ones”. The resulting lack of economic and infrastructure development has been glorified as “pristine nature”. These dividing lines are the cause of strife within the LTTE. Despite the cease-fire, this split sense of identity has led to a series of murders among Tamils in the past 16 months.
Political loyalty can also call into question another institution that defines identity: the family. Family membership is a crucial aspect of Tamil culture. Every member is responsible for the well-being of other family members and their good reputation. But there are exceptions. For instance, one woman explained, “my grandson shot and killed his uncle, my son. He was a member of a different political party. That was the reason.” She even went so far as to explain this murder as an expression of family cohesion: her grandson could not bear to watch a family member stray.
But it is especially dangerous to make contact outside one’s own peer group. The lack of such bridges reinforces everyone’s dependency on group leaders. Nonetheless, people repeatedly try to overcome these gaps. For instance, I know a group of women peace activists that is part of a network with regional contacts and connections to Colombo as well as to India, Europe, and America. “It is extremely difficult to do our work,” one member told me. “Some people are going around saying that we are not decent women. They say we just hang around in bad places smoking cigarettes and don’t want to get married or have children.” Conservative potentates spread such rumours to put social pressure on the women, to remind them of their identity as Tamils and to restrict their scope of action.
A number of bloody disputes between the LTTE and the state army have taken place right at our activist’s front door – her brother and her father were killed. Governmental troops regularly pillage and rape as part of their military campaigns. “No one has ever dared to talk about what women in our village have to go through. Everyone is just too afraid that it will be them tomorrow night. I was only able to report what I saw through our network.” After the complaint was filed, the government rotated the troops in the village. Attacks on women dropped drastically. “Since the cease-fire agreement, we have been fighting against the forced recruitment of children by the LTTE. I have thought long and hard about whether I should report what is happening here in the village to the monitoring team. Finally, I gathered up all of my courage and resolve to do what had to be done. If I have to die, so be it,” this brave woman told me.
In Sri Lanka, Norwegian negotiators rely on monitoring teams to ensure that the cease-fire is honoured. “Our problem is that most victims do not dare come forward to report human rights violations and breaches of the cease-fire,” explains Father Miller, a monitoring team member. Moreover, militant identity-politicians continue to make conciliatory action hard. One of the network coordinators in the women’s peace group complained about the restrictions on their work: “We have to be very careful in dealing with both parties. An association of non-governmental organisations that has been infiltrated by the LTTE invited us to take part in a demonstration. In the meantime, I know when an invitation is a command. That is not what we had in mind. I’m going to have to leave Batticaloa.”
Prospects
The idea of “social capital” may have become popular because it fits in with the ideas of both economic liberals and proponents of participation and grass-roots empowerment. The advocates of “social capital” deserve credit because they have contributed to making development debate focus more on social factors.
However, the implicit assumption that social capital and civil society are positive and deserve support in and of themselves has proven to be problematic. In theory, the flip side of these social processes has been discussed. But that has hardly had an impact on policy. Civil society consists of a great variety of forces and organisations. It is not necessarily positive by its very nature. The “glue that holds societies together” is the same glue that enables people to kill and die for their group. This glue also marks the border that sets one group off from another. The connotations that social capital and civil society have for identity politics are too often overlooked in development debate. Group identities are created in everyday social discourse and can be manipulated for political purposes.
At the same time, there is no one identity in any pure form. Rather, people normally accept and combine various social identities. The simplified notion of a single identity is certainly one reason why conflicts have been deemed to be “irreconcilable” after decades of ethnic, national and religious differences. In such cases, essentialist collective identities are taken to be historical and anthropological units whose stability and permanence make it impossible to resolve conflicts.
The present depiction of a few, often contradictory identities, which are constantly being renegotiated in social interaction, makes this understanding of ethnic conflicts seem dubious. Instead, we see that boundaries can be called into question, thereby gradually shifting them. Contacts between groups play a large role in this process; but in regions where power structures overlap, it is almost impossible to create and maintain social capital as defined here. Rather, one could speak of fragmented and fragmenting social capital that helps hold together a group but does not serve as glue for all of society.
Una Hombrecher
works for “Brot für die Welt”, a protestant charity. She heads the international project “Overcome Domestic Violence”. The social-science data presented here were collected in Sri Lanka in the context of a PhD project at Heidelberg University.
u.hombrecher@brot-fuer-die-welt.de
For the World Bank definition of social capital, see:
http://www1.worldbank.org/prem/poverty/scapital/whatsc.htm
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