MOEED YUSUF - Sri Lanka realises that ending a war doesn’t equal peace
OF late, I have been
studying Sri Lanka’s war experience. The country has fascinated students of
comparative politics like me as it defies virtually all conventional wisdom
about peace and conflict within societies.
Unlike the rest of
South Asia, it checks several boxes typically associated with relatively
peaceful outcomes for nations. It boasts a 90-plus per cent literacy rate. It
is now formally a middle-income country — even when it wasn’t, it didn’t suffer
from the kind of abject poverty typical of South Asia. Also, Sri Lanka has an
aging population. The worry about scores of youth floating idly and turning to
bad things wasn’t as pertinent, at least on paper.
Finally, the country’s
majority is Buddhist — a pacifist religion at its core. Yet, it experienced
brutal violence lasting decades. The LTTE-inspired insurgency introduced
suicide bombing to the modern world and killed thousands. Less known but
equally violent insurrections took place in the south of the country.
Sri Lanka’s experience
throws out any number of lessons for peer countries, including Pakistan.
First, as significant
as the conversation about quantity and quality of education is, Sri Lanka’s experience
highlights a slightly different dimension: the bureaucracy and management of
the education sector. The Sri Lankan education sector has produced three siloed
youth cohorts by running parallel school systems catering to Sinhala, Tamil,
and English-speaking kids. This represents both a linguistic and an ethnic
faultline: the majority-Buddhist Sinhala who have ruled Sri Lanka since its
independence vs the Tamil minority (mostly Hindus) who feel discriminated
against by the Sinhala vs the English-speaking urban (mostly Colombo) elite.
The result is that
most of Sri Lanka’s young are mono-lingual and have grown up within their
respective echo chambers. The literacy rate is combined with inherently
polarised mindsets that live off stereotypes about the ‘other’, with no
opportunity to form more informed opinions by interacting across these divides.
Second, hardly any
other case provides a more obvious correlation between the politicisation of
religion and its direct effect on societal discord and violence. As if
Buddhism’s pacifist nature didn’t matter, Sri Lankan governments linked Sinhala
nationalist chauvinism with a ‘Buddhism under siege’ mentality. Soon, it was
none other than the Buddhist clergy leading the charge, justifying an
anti-minority rhetoric, even violence, through scripture. Political violence
was made holy, in a way not much different than much of the Muslim world.
Third, Sri Lanka
provides an interesting insight into the socioeconomics and violence
connection. Literature on the link between poverty and extremist violence is
split, with most prominent voices still holding out on accepting a strong
correlation. Yet, when one interacts with policy practitioners involved in
counterterrorism in developing countries, one recognises their conviction that
poverty is the number one driver of extremist violence.
In Sri Lanka’s case,
absolute deprivation was lower than several other peer counties. But the island
had serious disparities across its geographical regions, and its minority Tamil
and Muslim communities harboured a sense of collective deprivation compared to
the Sinhala-majority parts. It wasn’t as much about individual poverty and
helplessness as it was about young men and women from minority communities
feeling relatively deprived vis-à-vis the majority on behalf of their communities.
Finally, Sri Lanka is
realising that ending a war doesn’t equal peace. It only represents a window of
opportunity to begin to address the above-mentioned and many other deeper
structural problems that caused the war in the first place.
Here is another
fascinating reality. As I examine comparable cases, these trends quickly
emerge as common themes across countries, including in South Asia. Pakistan is
no exception. Our debates and solutions on education still tend to be more
conventional than not. Lost amidst all the worries about extremist mindsets is
the stratification of the education system and the acute disdain youth from
across the elite private vs public vs madressah schools tend to have for each
other.
Never do children from
across these systems interact constructively with one another. The focus is on
Islam’s role in statecraft rather than on calling out the gross misuse of
religious dialect for an ultra-nationalist agenda. The question is how to get
the majority to stop using faith as a tool to impose its will on the minority.
It’s the same for us, the same for Sri Lanka, and the same for any other
country with this problem.
Next, we need to
examine the sense of collective deprivation across societal fault lines rather
than only seeing these as anti-patriotic, externally inspired law-and-order
problems. Finally, we must
recognise that while we have done fairly well in terms of cutting the
Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan to size militarily, it is the performance on the
non-kinetic aspects of the National Action Plan that will determine whether or
not Pakistan can achieve sustainable peace.
