Disaster politics or disaster of politics? Post-tsunami conflict transformation in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia

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in Sri Lanka and Aceh, IndonesiaDisaster politics or disaster of politics? Post-tsunami conflict transformation

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Disaster politics or disaster of politics? Post-tsunami conflict transformation in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia

Nicole KlitzschSchool of Politics, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

AbstractRecent conflict research acknowledges the long-ignored intertwined nature of social conflict and environmental vulnerability; findings show that natural disasters affecting conflict regions can catalyse pre-disaster conflict developments. It is, however, unclear why disasters sometimes contribute to conflict escalation and sometimes to mitigating conflict. Drawing from the contrasting post-tsunami experiences of Sri Lanka and the Indonesian province of Aceh, this article investigates the tipping effects and asymmetrical impact of international relations, political participation and economic sustainability on post-disaster peacebuilding. Evidence shows that the domestic capacity for peacebuilding critically depends on the nature of international support. While Sri Lanka and Indonesia have many similarities, the latter’s major geopolitical relevance guaranteed sufficient, credible and targeted peacebuilding support, while the former received limited support and faced competing internal demands from Tamil and Sinhalese areas, thereby further restricting the potential for effective peacebuilding.

KeywordsAceh/Indonesia, disaster diplomacy, protracted social conflict, socio-environmental vulnerability, Sri Lanka

Introduction

If disaster happens in regions of violent conflict, this is widely seen as a hapless coinci-dence. At the same time, conventional wisdom says natural disasters create space for political and humanitarian action that can help bridge cleavages between antagonistic social groups. In fact, sometimes the massive commotion of circumstances caused by a natural disaster affecting regions of protracted conflict can be used for political rap-prochement; however, in other cases, violence escalates.

Corresponding author:Nicole Klitzsch, Southeast Asian Studies, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Senckenberganlage 31, D-60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.Email: [email protected]

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2 Cooperation and Conflict

Due to climate change the number of severe environmental hazards is increasing per-sistently (see Cruz et al., 2007: 472). Two-thirds of the people killed by ‘natural disas-ters’ from 1991–2005 were in developing countries – often in regions of intrastate conflict.1 This article responds to the urgent need to explore how natural disasters and violent conflict interact, considering factors behind the success or failure of conflict transformation in regions with high disaster risk.2 ‘Natural disaster’ is here understood as an ‘event involving the combination of a […natural hazard…] and a population in a socially and economically produced condition of vulnerability’ (Oliver-Smith, 1998: 186). Thus, disasters are not natural events.

It is moreover striking that the most powerful players of international politics tend to get interested in intrastate conflicts only due to possible undesired effects on their own security (Duffield, 2001: 9) – not due to their causes. Even post-disaster conflict trans-formation does not generally take the inevitable socio-environmental interdependence into account. The protracted social conflicts in the Indonesian province of Aceh (1976–2005) and Sri Lanka (1983–2009) are particularly instructive examples due to their con-trasting developments: intensified diplomatic efforts in the shadow of the tsunami disaster of December 2004 led to a peace agreement in Aceh, but failed to bring peace in Sri Lanka.

Research in diplomatic endeavours for peacebuilding in the political climate of a humanitarian emergency (‘disaster diplomacy’) indicates that in intra-state and interna-tional conflicts, ‘disaster-related activities can have a short-term impact on diplomacy but, over the long-term, non-disaster factors have a more significant impact’ (Gaillard et al., 2008: 523; Kelman and Koukis, 2000). Harris’ Aceh case study makes an interest-ing example. He considers the 2004 tsunami disaster as a factor that ‘provide[d] the path to the “way out” of the [mutually hurting] stalemate’ (Harris, 2010: 390). Harris suggests that the likelihood for successful external mediation of intra-state conflicts is higher if the parties in conflict redefine their objectives – on the insurgents’ part from secession to self-government, on the opposing government’s part from defeat of the insurgent move-ment to its containment. In his view, this critical redefinition was encouraged by the tsunami disaster. However, discussing a possible catalyst effect of disaster events on conflict trajectories, it remains unclear how the catalyst effect builds up, and what role international factors play in that process.

Therefore, unlike most disaster diplomacy literature,3 this article does not focus on the effects of the disaster event on conflict, but shifts the focus to the long-term interaction of the causal processes of disaster and conflict. This allows a better understanding of the conditions necessary for sustainable conflict transformation. This article aims to illumi-nate the causal mechanisms that entailed the contrasting outcomes of disaster diplomacy in Aceh and Sri Lanka. In this endeavour, it is grounded in the growing body of disaster diplomacy research, especially pioneering studies of conflict dynamics affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 (e.g. Gaillard et al., 2008; Kelman, 2005; from the angle of political geography Le Billon and Waizenegger, 2007; and politics of humanitarian-ism, Hyndman, 2009; Waizenegger and Hyndman, 2010). In particular, it responds to seminal research by Le Billon and Waizenegger (2007) that provides deep insights in the criticality of the reshaping of governable spaces in the aftermath of disaster for conflict transformation.



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The present study enhances the understanding of international factors’ complex effects on the scope for domestic problem-solving of both protracted social conflicts and disasters. In so doing it complements existing studies that consider external involvement in conflict transformation. For example, Höglund and Svensson discuss the important question about how influence strategies in international relations are best applied in internal armed conflicts. They examine the constructive potential of the intervention of external parties in Sri Lanka, ‘whose actions complement and strengthen incentives and disincentives’ for the conflicting parties to commit to conflict transformation (Höglund and Svensson, 2011: 170). However, they do not accommodate the fact that the interven-ing parties may play a critical role in the complex causes of the conflict and increased disaster risk, for instance through their involvement in the conflict-torn societies’ (politi-cal) economies. The present study therefore addresses this research gap, and aims to grasp how external forces factor in the lacking problem-solving capacities showing in the deeply divided societies of Aceh/Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

In order to reveal critical junctions and linking mechanisms between conflict and disaster-related developments, this study starts calling to mind that all economies effec-tively depend on natural resources and that therefore economies have to be understood as subsystems of the environment (e.g. Daly, 2000). This is particularly true of former colo-nies with long histories as ‘inexhaustible cash cows’ to powers who have exploited their resources regardless of local consequences (Danner, 2010).4 Unlike industrialised coun-tries, developing countries lack the means to externalise the environmental and social costs of unsustainable economic activity. Consequently, they undermine their natural resource base to generate foreign investment and revenue, thereby degrading the natural protection mechanisms inherent to intact ecosystems.5

Against this background, I hypothesise that, firstly, the availability of resources and, secondly, the region’s geo-strategic relevance for the world’s dominant nations is deci-sive as to disasters’ catalyst effect. The first critical juncture regards the replacement of traditional (sustainable) forms of production with (industrialised/unsustainable) produc-tion for export (which entails dependency on foreign investment, and curtails the capac-ity of developing countries to deal with hazards); the second regards the foreign politico-economic commitment to solving the underlying conflict issues. Investigating this enriches the understanding of international actors in regional disaster diplomacy: whereas disaster diplomacy literature commonly discusses the (ambiguous) role of inter-nationals as potential facilitators of peace and aid donors, this study draws attention to their long-term role in the degradation of socio-environmental protection mechanisms and thus for disaster and conflict risk.

The Indonesian province of Aceh and Sri Lanka serve as a useful starting point for this discussion. They are export-dependent developing economies, dependent on foreign donors. Their socio-political tensions are rooted in colonial politics. In addition, both the Acehnese and Tamil insurgencies were fought by locally recruited armed groups against overbearing, yet internationally dependent, central governments, set against the back-drop of the US-led ‘war on terror’. In both regions, the tsunami disaster of December 2004 was of an unprecedented scale, attracting massive international attention, and induced intercommunity cooperation. However, the separate conflicts had reached dif-ferent stages in December 2004: the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka




(GAM)) and the government of Indonesia had already paved the way to resume peace negotiations;6 in Sri Lanka, despite a (constantly violated) ceasefire agreement still in place, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who had pulled out of talks with the government in 2003, had been preparing a military offensive for early 2005. Furthermore, in Indonesia the catastrophe primarily affected war-torn Aceh; in Sri Lanka, all commu-nities were affected.

Despite those differences, the tsunami disaster seemed to open a window of opportu-nity to resume earlier peace processes in both regions. In Aceh, despite the planned resumption of peace negotiations, the Indonesian security forces tried to use the ‘oppor-tunity’ to eliminate the Acehnese guerrilla (Kingsbury, 2006: 65). Yet the peace talks continued and, in August 2005, the Indonesians achieved a peaceful settlement. In Sri Lanka, possibly because of the shared experience of disaster, the emergency initially cre-ated a sense of solidarity across the communities, but the LTTE and the government soon returned to violent intransigence.

Exploring the causal mechanisms decisive in Aceh’s and Sri Lanka’s conflict develop-ments, this article applies the process tracing method of historical sociology to analyse causal processes across space and over time, since disasters (as manifestations of socie-ties’ vulnerability) and conflicts potentially have a long and complex history (Tilly, 1997).7 I investigate the tipping effects and asymmetrical impacts of: (1) the domestic political environment; (2) the mode of resource governance; and (3) of international interests in Aceh/Indonesia and Sri Lanka on the conflicts’ development. These broad parameters allow me to respect the complex interaction of socio-political, economic and environmen-tal developments across local, national and international levels.8 At the same time, non-linear effects (e.g. world economy on local social organisation), critical junctions and linking mechanisms between conflict and disaster-related developments can be identified (Homer-Dixon, 2000: 112ff). I trace economic, environmental and socio-political pro-cesses in the causal chains leading to disaster and/or conflict.9

The genealogy of disaster

Before turning to the case analyses, a short introduction to the genealogy of disaster is in order. Based on the above definition of natural disaster as an ‘event involving the combination of a […natural hazard…] and a population in a socially and economi-cally produced condition of vulnerability’ (Oliver-Smith, 1998: 186) one can say that ‘disaster potential’ is constituted by ‘complex interactions between human social organization, material culture and the natural world’ (Oliver-Smith, 1998: 182). The dynamic relationship between these elements implies a flexible degree of human adaptability to external threats, i.e. to build up resilience (see Hewitt, 1998: 83). ‘Vulnerability’ can thus be understood as a lack or ‘failure of protection mechanisms’ (Dombrowsky, 1998).

Natural conditions (e.g. regional climate, vegetation, soil quality) are co-determinants of societies’ exposure to natural hazards, such as extreme weather events (Cutter, 2006: 78). However, these supposedly ‘natural’ conditions are changed by human interference (Hilhorst, 2004: 53), such as unsustainable forms of resource extraction. Given rapid structural globalization and anthropogenic climate change, ‘[t]oday, many local



Klitzsch 5

problems, including disasters, may have their root causes and triggering agents – and, possibly, their solutions – on the other side of the globe’ (Oliver-Smith, 2004: 24).

Protracted social conflict typically features limited political and economic participa-tion of parts of society (Azar, 1990); at the same time, unequal access to resources and unequal distribution of social and environmental costs caused by the economy entail unequal exposure to existential risk. The capacity to protect society’s natural resource base and protection mechanisms provided by ecosystems is undermined by exclusive politico-economic structures. Marginalised groups are exposed to particular risk since physical violence debilitates cultural (and possibly environmental) protection mecha-nisms (Homer-Dixon, 1999). Further, it acts as a clear disincentive to invest in long-term projects. Short-term profits, however, tend to be sought without wasting much thought as to the future availability of the exploited resource (e.g. Collier, 2008). In the context of protracted social conflict, this undermines local communities’ security in the short-term (e.g. through direct military violence or warfare indirectly hindering traditional liveli-hoods) and in the long-term (by degrading the basis for local livelihoods and natural protection mechanisms). On principal, denying the recognition of communities’ basic human needs, these economic activities reiterate and reinforce the underlying causes for protracted social conflicts.

This reveals that the causes of conflict and disaster overlap: unequal access to resources suggests political and socio-economic inequality and thus allows for resource over-exploitation at the expense of the politically marginalised. The latter become increasingly vulnerable since cultural (i.e. also political) and environmental protection mechanisms are degraded. The marginalised are deprived of their ‘security […] and effective participation in the processes that determine the conditions of security and identity and other such developmental requirements’ (Azar, 1985, according to Liyanage, 2008: 8); notably, the denial of these basic human needs (Burton, 1990) indicates under-lying sources of protracted social conflict. This suggests that the best outcome from peacebuilding efforts that exclude the causes of socio-environmental degradation is shifting the lines of conflict.

Conflict and disaster risk in Aceh

To understand the causal mechanisms that relate to conflict and disaster in Aceh, one needs to acknowledge critical socio-environmental dynamics: Aceh is exposed to a vari-ety of natural hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and the extreme weather events of the tropical climate, all of which challenge human adaptability. Natural protection mech-anisms are provided, amongst others, by intact ecosystems (Tomascik et al., 1997: 1242), but in Aceh these have been degraded by human-induced ‘development’, especially dur-ing colonial involvement. Although colonial powers never succeeded in defeating the Acehnese resistance, in the 19th century, the Dutch triggered a dramatic social and eco-nomic transformation (Reid, 2006: 103). Their socio-environmental legacy included explorations in mineral resources and an export-orientated plantation industry (Sulaiman, 2006: 123).

When the Indonesian struggle for independence succeeded in 1945, thanks in large part to the Acehnese’s unflinching comradeship-in-arms, Aceh became a province of the




Republic of Indonesia. However, many problems impeded Indonesia’s political and eco-nomic stabilisation (Christie, 1996), especially when world market prices for its export-commodities dropped in the 1950s. Amongst other things, Aceh’s leaders were disillusioned by the fact that the constitution-making process did not deliver a special status for Aceh (Sulaiman, 2006: 130). Jakarta could however quell their revolt in 1961 by offering Aceh ‘special status’ with greater autonomy (McGibbon, 2006: 319).

That notwithstanding, President Sukarno (1945–1967) and, even more intensely, President Suharto (1968–1998) increased the centralisation of power and capital in Jakarta, ostensibly to develop and modernise Indonesia – objectives the powerful Western democracies encouraged. Given their interest in the stability of Indonesia as an anti-communist safeguard in Southeast Asia, they sponsored Suharto’s pro-Western develop-mentalism and simultaneously his authoritarian regime (e.g. through the Intergovernmental Group for Indonesia).

International interests in Aceh/Indonesia

To allow ‘development’ of Indonesia’s so-called underdeveloped regions, from the 1960s on, vast forested areas were destroyed; with this, the Aceh region lost its natu-ral protection from soil degradation, floods, landslides and fires. In addition, local communities were deprived of their land and livelihoods and excluded from the development process, as skilled work on agricultural and industrial estates was mostly allocated to (mainly) Javanese settlers (Tiwon, 2000: 98), encouraged to migrate to Aceh under the national transmigration programme (Ross, 2005: 41f). Particularly relevant to the escalation of the conflict was, however, the discovery of huge natural gas reserves in Aceh (1971), extracted by the state-owned company Pertamina and the TNCs Mobil Oil and Jilco. A ‘Transnational Corporation’ (TNC) by definition spreads its operations in many countries. Consequently, it is in the position to raise capital in host countries and export the profits. Due to major structural differences in its global playing field, this may result in the exploitation of natural resources and workforce in regions with weak protection mechanisms (such as environmental law and human rights enforcement). This industry boosted Aceh’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP); according to Robinson’s sources, this amounted to ‘282 percent of the national average’ (Robinson, 1998: 134f). However, Aceh’s massive resource revenues escaped the control of Aceh’s population in favour of Indonesia’s politico-economic elites (McLeod, 2000).

In response to Jakarta’s increasingly suffocating rule in Aceh, in 1976, GAM formed to fight for Aceh’s independence from neo-colonially governed Indonesia; in the 1990s its membership grew into the thousands when military atrocities were committed in the course of Indonesian counterinsurgency operations (Ross, 2005: 36). The tensions were aggravated when Mobil Oil ‘agreed to hire members of the TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia/ Indonesian National Armed Forces) as private security personnel’ (Clarke, 2008: 3). Moreover, under the rationale of ‘defending’ Indonesia’s ‘national interests,’ the armed forces removed local small farmers from their landholdings and ‘protected’ the industrial estates against the ‘risk’ posed by GAM. Clearly, the internationally spon-sored development had considerable scope.



Klitzsch 7

In the context of the Cold War, Suharto’s anti-communist regime (1968–1998) received generous financial assistance from the West for securing Indonesia’s unity (stability) and furthering its industrialisation. Systematic corruption, collusion and nepotism flourished; a ‘middle class that was dependent on military and political patronage’ (Canonica-Walangitang, 2007: 248) guaranteed Suharto the loyalty of the technocracy and security forces. Success in business during Suharto’s autocracy required buying oneself into Suharto’s ‘franchise system’ (McLeod, 2000). While TNCs and Indonesia’s politico-economic elites were busy making their fortunes from Aceh’s resources, Aceh became the fourth poorest province of Indonesia (World Bank, 2008: 12).

Against this background it becomes obvious that, although the Aceh conflict was not a straightforward resource conflict, unequal (barred) access to justice, regional resources and thus politico-economic participation clearly impeded satisfying basic human needs and thus reproduced the sources of protracted social conflict. The conflict in Aceh could be resolved only by system change (Aguswandi and Zunzer, 2008).

Conflict transformation through domestic political change?

The end of Suharto’s regime in 1998 can be considered a necessary, yet clearly insuffi-cient, condition to resolve the underlying sources of conflict. Reform-minded politicians struggled with the lack of rule of law, a politically strong and under-funded military, and the fear that Indonesia might disintegrate once freed of an all-controlling central power. This legacy thwarted legal and negotiated approaches to conflict resolution undertaken by successive post-Suharto governments,10 and a 2002–2003 peace process facilitated by a Swiss non-governmental organisation (NGO) collapsed.

The peace talks were sponsored by the Western donor community who, after the end of the bipolar world order, the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998) and Suharto’s failure to guarantee politico-economic stability, had an urgent interest in stabilising the region. Therefore, the victory of ex-General Yudhoyono in the presidential elections of autumn 2004 was welcome: his political agenda included economic growth, establishing the rule of law and peace in Aceh. Moral issues notwithstanding, his interest in a political solu-tion has to be seen against the background of serious military overspending on the ‘Aceh problem’ during the period of martial law (2003–2004) (Mißbach, 2005: 112).

Economic vulnerability and ‘tsunami diplomacy’

When the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami disaster on 26 December 2004 took the lives of at least 170,000 people in Aceh and Nias and left a further 500,000 homeless, Indonesia’s dependence on external assistance was undeniable. Indonesia was still highly indebted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (McCulloch, 2005: 31) and Aceh’s economy was destroyed (Brusset et al., 2006: 12). Unprecedented media coverage, plus the geo-strategic importance of a stable Indonesia in a post-9/11 world urged interna-tional decision-makers to commit to a high level of economic and political assistance. A poor performance in disaster-aid could backfire on international relations and security, especially as Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world.




Since adequate humanitarian aid in a ‘closed region’ is impossible, the international community had an interest in ending the regional violence. Virtually all Indonesian victims of the tsunami were in the contested region; failure to reach the tsunami-survi-vors in Aceh would have equalled a total failure of disaster response. The EU, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and international high-level diplomats supported the peace talks facilitated by Martti Ahtisaari’s Crisis Management Initiative (a Finnish peace NGO), and provided an Aceh Monitoring Mission (Aspinall, 2005: 19, 34).

The prospect of international assistance in re-building Aceh probably encouraged an end to the violence (Harris, 2010: 389), since only this assistance would allow Aceh’s long-term reconstruction. Tragically, without reconstruction, there was little left to gov-ern. This insight probably helped the achievement of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (MoU). Most substantially, the MoU provided for self-government in Aceh (including a regulation of resource governance and the establishment of local political parties). The unique level of international involvement in the region’s re-development also ensured that the implementation of the regulations were closely observed by the international community.

Nevertheless, there was no reason to take successful peacebuilding for granted. Although the end of violence allowed long-needed investment, it also invited old franchisees and new (international and national/provincial) elites to fuel their busi-nesses (Aditjondro, 2007). Moreover, Aceh’s shadow economy thrived on the recon-struction business: ‘deforestation levels have skyrocketed, rising […] to over 130,000 ha per year in 2005–2006’ (Eye on Aceh, 2009: 5). Sand and rock mining industries expanded as a result of the construction boom: ‘[m]ost of this is in the upland areas that had remained relatively intact during the conflict years’ (Laxman et al., 2008). This obviously gets in the way of restoring the livelihoods of the local population who depend on renewable resources, such as agriculture and non-timber forest resources (World Bank, 2007). Solely because the people of Central Aceh did not complain in the immediate post-tsunami period, this injustice did not jeopardise the peace negotiations.

The situation was, however, complicated by continuing violence between (for-mer) GAM and anti-GAM militias in these regions. Thus, where the perception of the new peace as an elite project and ethnic differences in Aceh overlapped, the new (predominantly ethnically Acehnese) provincial government was soon repudiated as yet another neo-colonial power, entailing community conflict and claims to separate regions from Aceh (Schiller, 2008: 22). If these processes are not contained by politi-cal means, there is a serious risk of continued violence and protracted social conflict along different lines. These dynamics surfaced when friction grew between the coastal tsunami victims and the population of the central highlands who did not ‘qualify’ for tsunami aid (initially the only foreign assistance allowed in the region) (Waizenegger and Hyndman, 2010). It seems, then, the peace agreement between the Free Aceh Movement and the government notwithstanding, the politico-economic structures that recreate the underlying causes of protracted social conflict are far from resolved.



Klitzsch 9

Vulnerability and disaster of politics in Sri Lanka

As to Sri Lanka, the question is why in this case the opportunity for disaster diplomacy could not be seized. The tsunami disaster ‘affected two-thirds of the coastline of Sri Lanka, over 1,000 kilometres in total’ (United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Regional Resource Centre for Asia and the Pacific, 2006: 58). A total of 35,000 people died – yet unlike in Indonesia, not exclusively in the country’s contested regions (in the north and northeast). Communities on both sides of the conflict between LTTE and the government, as well as Muslim communities (disproportionately hard hit on the east coast (Hyndman, 2009: 91)) were devastated by the tsunami, complicating disaster response and conflict transformation.

The Sri Lankan conflict is widely identified as an ‘ethnic conflict’, with the main feature of the country’s largest ethnic minority, the Tamils, struggling with a Sinhalese majority for access to power in a post-colonial state. Even so, it cannot be understood without appreciating other interrelated violent social conflicts troubling Sri Lanka. Many Sri Lankans are struggling for access to economic means, land, livelihoods and justice (see Goodhand and Klem, 2005: 25) – a situation which encourages zero-sum thinking with regard to other (‘competing’) social groups.

Patterns of political participation and problem solving capacities

Many of the social, political and economic conditions that co-determine Sri Lanka’s disaster risk and conflict development have their roots in British colonial rule. Britain’s ‘primary goal’ was advancing the ‘plantation agriculture for export’ (Herath, 2002: 31). To this end, the native population was expropriated in favour of the plantation sector, concentrated in the Kandyan highlands. Large-scale immigration of Indian Tamils com-menced to provide cheap labour on the (foreign) elite’s plantations (De Silva, 1986: 19). The Sinhalese masses felt increasingly deprived of access to land and livelihoods; the Ceylon Tamils, traditionally living in the dry zone and, ‘thanks’ to early colonization, with a head-start in English education, were soon perceived to be in a ‘privileged’ posi-tion. Thus, the groundwork for multiple domestic rivalries was laid.

Inter-group competition intensified when the old political elites, who had profited from the colonial economic structures, tried to secure their power-positions after inde-pendence (1948) by winning over the support of the Sinhalese majority. The Official Language Act (1956) made Sinhalese the only official national language,11 and a ‘state-sponsored land colonisation policy’ (from the 1930s onwards) ‘changed noticeably the demographic landscape, especially in the Eastern Province’ (Liyanage, 2008: 45). Both had disadvantaging effects on Tamils and Muslims. However, unequal access to life opportunities was not confined to Tamils and Muslims; it was country-wide, causing poverty and upheaval among ethnic groups.

Economic vulnerability and problem solving capacities

In Sri Lanka like in Indonesia, problems were endemic to an economy over-dependent on the export of plantation crops; in the mid-1950s, even the most basic aliments had to




be imported as well as ‘almost all of the required investment goods’ (Pieris, 1997: 43f). Although Sri Lanka’s governments diversified industry and tried to secure national inter-ests in the Non-Aligned Movement, they did not escape Sri Lanka’s dependence on international finance capital and issuing economic policies such as ‘import liberalization […], promotion of “green revolution” technology in agriculture and some readjustment of “welfare expenditures”’ (Lakshman, 1997: 7).

It speaks volumes that ‘after more than two decades of liberalized policies more than a quarter of the population still live under the poverty line’ (Bastian, 2005: 37); this is particularly striking as from 1983 on, trade and banking in the Northern and Eastern provinces were so severely disrupted that they were not even counted in the national data (Liyanage, 2008: 183). The problem was clearly not merely lack of financial means: the liaison of radical market liberalisation, clientelism, and extreme centralisation of power exacerbated the effects of unequal politico-economic opportunities. Nevertheless, the conflict between the government and the LTTE became the centre of attention as concern with structural issues troubling Sri Lanka was silenced since Sinhalese anti-government campaigns were violently crushed by the state (e.g. killing over 60,000 youths in 1989–1990).

International interests affecting Sri Lanka’s problem solving capacities

With these impressions as to the deeply unequal entitlement, empowerment and socio-environmental resilience of Sri Lanka’s population in mind, it is interesting that the neo-liberal economic policies of the United National Front (UNF) electoral coalition government actually seemed based on the idea that economic growth will have a positive effect on inter-group relations. After the economic crisis of 2000–2001, it rekindled and intensified its 1977 efforts to attract loans from international financial institutions; this paved the way for ‘overwhelming dependence on three donors […] – the Asian Development Bank, Japan, and […] the World Bank’ (Bastian, 2005: 31). In 2002, the UNF government asked Norway to facilitate negotiations with the LTTE in order to strive for a ‘liberal peace’, accepting the ‘parity of status’ with the LTTE (Rupesinghe, 2006: xvii).12 Apart from the question of whether economic growth actually facilitates peace, in Sri Lanka, the translation of ‘growth’ into ‘peace’ and thus a peace-dividend ignored the separation of the North/East from the main Sri Lankan economy.

Failure to achieve peace, violations of humanitarian law, attacks against the interna-tional Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission and the deterioration of the situation for Tamils did not stop the flow of financial aid from abroad (Bastian, 2007: v). This once more attested the international donors’ crucial interests to be: security (stability) and market liberalisation as the keys to Sri Lanka’s ‘integration into the world economy’ (Bastian, 2007: i; Duffield, 2001). Cynically put, measured by these criteria, Sri Lanka’s develop-ment was good.

However, the tsunami disaster changed things; it posed new and extreme challenges to both domestic and international actors. Aid needed to reach people of all communities. That notwithstanding, as an aid worker pointed out to me, for the government it was out of the question that aid in the contested areas go through the hands of the LTTE; mean-while, the LTTE wanted to control incoming aid and take credit for it (ISL-14).13 This rift



Klitzsch 11

caused severe difficulties for humanitarian organisations distributing aid in contested regions. At the same time in the South, the northern and north-eastern constituencies were perceived as ‘receiving a disproportionate amount of assistance’, which exacer-bated existing inter-ethnic tensions (Goodhand and Klem, 2005: 59).

To counteract conflict over aid, the government and LTTE sought to establish a joint Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS) in which government, LTTE and Muslim political parties would be represented and cooperate (exclusively) to ensure fair, swift and smooth distribution of aid to all communities (P-TOMS MoU signed June 2005). Even though the international donor community stressed the indis-pensability of such an arrangement, international opinion leaders – the USA first – were not ready to support it financially, as they feared the LTTE (blacklisted as a terrorist organisation) might benefit. Once again, ‘funding decisions [are] based on governments’ foreign policy, not on what is needed on the ground’ (ISL-14). With the responsibility for the institution of the P-TOMS left to the Sri Lankans (instead of using the donors’ lever-age), the P-TOMS became subject to party-political manoeuvres and was finally ren-dered unworkable by the politically corrupt ruling of the Supreme Court (International Crisis Group (ICG), 2009: 25).

With that, large parts of the population have been denied political and economic par-ticipation once again, a situation tolerated by the international community. Local peace activists perceive this as a stab in the back and another missed opportunity for inter-community confidence and peacebuilding (ISL-8). With the most powerful Western democracies displaying such little commitment to the ideals ostensibly driving their aid, the government was fairly certain that nobody would intervene when they ‘solved’ their problems with the LTTE militarily (September 2008–May 2009).

How much of a paper tiger the western donor community has become to the Sri Lankan government became evident with the GSP+ (Generalised System of Preferences) negotiations. When the European Union (EU) made the improvement of Sri Lanka’s human rights record a condition of their loans, it must have realised it had lost both its opportunity for money politics and its credibility in Sri Lanka’s conflict transformation. Sri Lanka has found other, Asian, donors who are unlikely to make human rights an issue. In this climate, the position of (national and international) non-governmental organisations working for non-violent conflict transformation and democratic civil and human rights on the ground is becoming increasingly difficult.

Discussion: Tipping effects

As to the ‘negative’ tipping effect on Sri Lanka’s disaster diplomacy, it became evident that Sri Lanka depended on international donors. One could expect some leverage of aid offered under the condition of cooperation between LTTE and government in a joint aid mechanism. However, this option was ignored by the self-interested western democra-cies who chose not to strengthen the LTTE and not to alienate their more important regional partners; as for the latter, Pakistan and India had as little interest in strengthen-ing the LTTE’s de facto rule in the North and northeast as the Sri Lankan government itself (Liyanage and Rathnapriya, 2009). In other words, in Sri Lanka, humanitarian aid was subject to foreign policy aims. Consequently, post-disaster rapprochement was made




impossible by the unchallenged domination of nationalist politicians and judges inter-preting their scope of action within the Sri Lankan constitution according to a national-ist-chauvinistic agenda.

In Aceh, as in Sri Lanka, the commitment of local actors to systemic change was (and is) indispensable to achieve peace; however, the case of Aceh also shows that, had the internationally dominant powers not striven for regional stability, supported monitoring and provided money for development, the reform-orientated political forces in Aceh/Indonesia would have been in a much weaker position. Solving the problems of the local population in an unsustainable and internationalised elite economy poses great challenges to peacebuilding in Aceh. The sustainability of peace in the province seems to depend on the development of a strategy to allow for fairer and sustainable access to resources.

Apparently guided by this insight, Aceh’s first elected governor (2007–2012), former GAM-commander and environmentalist Irwandi Yusuf was promoting a ‘Green Economic Development and Investment Strategy for Aceh, Indonesia’. This ‘Aceh Green’ framework aims to improve Aceh’s sustainability and to accommodate the prob-lems poverty poses to social peace in ‘post-violence’-Aceh, especially given the antici-pated future conflicts over access to limited resources. As such, it can be considered an attempt to secure the recognition of the basic human needs of Aceh’s population without revolutionising Aceh’s export-dependent economy. Paradoxically, it is precisely this (unequal) compromise between environmentalism and economic growth-orientation that secures the international support necessary to implement at least some critical measures to protect Aceh’s environment by way of ‘ecological modernisation.’14 International self-interest in the recovery of Indonesia’s stability motivated international donors to re-finance the negative effects of resource-overexploitation, for example via MDF-sponsored environmental projects.15

This points to the long-term role of international actors in the achievement of social peace in the regions. The political and economic landscapes of Sri Lanka and Indonesia have been forged by colonial powers and their successors: in both, traditional self-suffi-cient agricultures were converted into export-oriented industries, going along with the expropriation of the local population and degradation of their natural resource base; tra-ditional livelihoods were thus destroyed; related migration programmes added to the social tensions. The colonially induced late integration into international capitalism gen-erated unequal trade relations; dependence on foreign capital entailed economic policies such as tax holidays for TNCs and curtailing people’s rights and access to politico-eco-nomic participation. Solving the problems arising from an unsustainable elite-economy represents a peacebuilding challenge in countries dependent on foreign donors.

The interest and quality of commitment of the world’s dominant nations have dif-fered substantially in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Due to Indonesia’s size (political grav-ity; abundance of resources) and ‘geostrategic’ location, keeping the fragile colossus stable and on-side was crucial to western powers during the Cold War. To this end, they sponsored Indonesia’s anti-communist dictator. In the changed international context, the same objective motivates them to re-finance the negative effects of their politico-economic activities. In contrast, the interest of the western democracies in Sri Lanka’s peace process appears largely mediated through the relationships of these nations with India and Pakistan. Although Sri Lanka’s economy is securely locked into capitalist



Klitzsch 13

dependencies, the state has fostered eastern relations as well. This weakens the political leverage of the western democracies and, in turn, curtails the political and economic gains they can expect from committing to solving Sri Lanka’s underlying structural conflict issues. Their inability to take a consistent stance towards the LTTE and the government further complicated this commitment: unlike the comparatively weak GAM, the LTTE thwarted the western democracies’ security interests (manifest, for example, in the ‘war on terror’).

Conclusions

In a bid to identify conditions for sustainable peace in divided developing societies, this article illuminates the causal mechanisms of the contrasting post-tsunami experiences of violence in Sri Lanka and Aceh/Indonesia. It shifts the focus from the effect of disaster events on conflict (prevalent in disaster diplomacy research) to the long-term interaction of causal processes for disaster and conflict. With that, it responds to seminal studies showing that while ‘non-disaster factors have a more significant impact’ on conflict development than disaster-related activities, the latter can catalyse pre-disaster conflict developments (Gaillard et al., 2008: 523; Kelman and Koukis, 2000).

Acknowledging the complex socio-environmental relationships across local and global dimensions, we analyse the asymmetrical impacts/potential tipping effect of the domestic political environment, the mode of resource governance, and international interests on the conflict. By tracing processes of socio-environmental degradation over time and across space (different political arenas) (Tilly, 1997), we find common causal mechanisms behind ‘natural disaster’ and violent conflict: as all economies depend on natural resources, replacing sustainable (agricultural) livelihoods by resource over-exploitation for export ingrains unequal access to (natural/economic and political) resources into the transformed society. Locked firmly into the world economy by societies’ dependence on foreign rev-enue, unequal access to political and economic participation results in resource over-exploitation at the expense of those least powerful, laying the ground for protracted social conflict and unequal exposure to disaster risk (Azar, 1990; Oliver-Smith, 2004). It under-mines societies’ natural resource base and hinders the functioning of political participa-tory institutions. In short, it reduces societies’ problem-solving capacities.

As Le Billon and Waizenegger (2007) argue, disaster events entail reshaping govern-able spaces in the affected regions. And as Harris observes, domestic political will in Aceh/Indonesia was indispensable for peacemaking. The Indonesian government changed its objectives towards containing GAM instead of militarily defeating it, and GAM moved its objectives from Aceh’s secession towards self-government (Harris, 2010: 396). However, the factors allowing for the improved problem-solving capacity can only be understood in context.

This study shows that the change of the domestic politico-economic system necessary for mitigating conflict and disaster risk critically depends on supportive international conditions. However, the case studies indicate that international actors often provide support according to a geopolitical-economic rationale, confirming the hypothesis that the region’s market- and geo-strategic relevance for the world’s dominant nations is deci-sive as to disasters’ catalyst effect on the pre-disaster conflict development.




As the process tracing procedure shows, long before the disaster, the most powerful international actors started to push for Indonesia’s democratisation, creating a politico-economic environment that worked as an indispensible incentive for the domestic politi-cal will to form. The same cannot be said for the Sri Lankan case – although the joint western commitment to make progress in the peace process a condition for issuing aid seems to indicate otherwise (Höglund and Svensson, 2011: 172). Analysing the actual flow of donor monies reveals that this commitment remained lip service and has in fact never been enforced.16

The world’s most powerful nations had no vital enough interest in changing Sri Lanka’s politico-economic system, as the ‘liberal peace’ approach to conflict resolution since 2002 had secured market liberalisation and economic recovery. Thus, tragically, the Norwegian approach to peace negotiations in Sri Lanka complemented the most powerful western democracies’ lack of commitment to actually engage with underlying structural conflict issues in favour of ‘restoring’ a dubious stability. The study thus affirms the hypothesis that post-disaster peace is not only a matter of disaster- and conflict response, but essen-tially an object of international politico-economic power- and interest politics.

This forces us to consider the role of international powers in disasters affecting deeply divided societies of the global South, like those in Haiti or Pakistan. International interest-politics (which includes maintaining an intrinsically unfair world economy based on resource over-exploitation) continually undermine developing countries’ problem-solving capacities. This suggests that, if the dominant players do not change the rules of the politico-economic world system, protracted social conflicts in export-dependent developing countries can only be displaced, not solved. Thus, international actors play a decisive role in the causes for disaster and conflict in ‘developing countries’ that overshadows any involvement in (disaster- or non-disaster) diplomacy.

Moreover, the fact that the international powers do not take the mutuality of social and environmental developments into account augurs global risks for the future. Increasing the pressure on seemingly remote ecosystems and populations by ‘stabilising’ politico-economic inequality goes hand-in-hand with the ‘denial of basic human needs’, and reit-erates the underlying sources of protracted social conflict. Renewed violence – possibly along displaced conflict lines – will degrade societies’ disaster resilience even further, thereby increasing the probability that disasters will affect conflict regions. Given this, and with the long-term conditions for peace in mind, future research in disaster diplo-macy should explore mechanisms that allow societies to generate space for sustainable livelihoods ‘unlocked’ from the growth-orientated economy and engage the wealthy international civil society in this endeavour.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Neophytos Loizides, John Barry, my interview partners in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Funding

I thank the MacQuitty Charitable Foundation for its generous funding of my field research in Aceh and the Department for Employment and Learning (DEL) for their support through a PhD studentship.



Klitzsch 15

Notes

1. According to United Nations and International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR, 2008), from 1991 to 2005 960,502 people were reported killed by ‘natural disasters’, 630,106 of them in developing countries.

2. For an excellent review of different literatures dealing with this question see Pelling and Dill (2008).

3. The majority of such studies focus on the immediate aftermath of disasters. Important excep-tions are Gaillard et al. (2008), Le Billon and Waizenegger (2007) and Ganapti et al. (2010).

4. Examples are Haiti, the Philippines, Maldives and – with some important differences – Myanmar.

5. An interesting counterexample is Costa Rica which successfully attracts foreign investment in a ‘green economy’. However, Costa Rica’s success is based on ‘exceptional’ preconditions: by nature mountainous and poor in minerals, it has not so much attracted resource-(over)extraction. Wherever TNCs commenced industrialised plantation-growth, Costa Rica also suffered from the inability to externalise the social and environmental costs.

6. After an ‘unaffordable’ escalation of the war, the government’s attempts to renew talks with GAM were successful only when ‘a trustworthy international third party’ (the Finnish Crisis Management Initiative) became involved (Aguswandi and Zunzer, 2008; Kingsbury, 2006: 15).

7. See Sandal and Loizides (2009) for an insightful consideration of ‘process tracing’. 8. A reductionist approach attempting to reduce the level of complication, e.g. through narrow-

ing down the parameters, would therefore distort the interpretation of complex systems. 9. Accounting for specificities of the cases requires occasional asymmetrical treatment; how-

ever, this reveals important linking mechanisms between alternative explanations. For instance, there are complex relationships between the local and the global. While human action may directly change a particular social system and/or its environment, it also starts processes that develop auto-dynamically and show unforeseen effects across space and time.

10. See, for example, the Special Autonomy Law for Aceh in 2001 (compromised scope and implementation); a referendum on Aceh’s independence, though initially supported by Indonesia’s President Wahid, was ‘averted’.

11. Tamil was granted equal status to Sinhala in an Amendment to the Constitution in 1987. Yet this did not entail adequate measures to reflect this in social practice.

12. For an illuminating discussion of the limits of third party peace initiatives, see Uyangoda (2005).

13. The author conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with humanitarian and political actors involved in tsunami reconstruction, post-conflict reintegration and political representation during field-research in Aceh/Indonesia (2 August–28 September 2009) and 15 in Sri Lanka (1–16 October 2009). To preserve confidentiality, these were anonymous (coded as I-A/I-SL respectively).

14. For a critical discussion of this conceptualisation of sustainable development, see Barry (2007).

15. For example, the ‘two main cornerstones’ of ‘Aceh Green’, Aceh Forest and Environment Protection (AFEP) and Community Climate and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), audited Aceh Avoided Deforestation Voluntary Carbon Program (AADVCP). The ‘Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias’ (MDF) was a partnership of the international community, the Indonesian government and civil society for socio-economic recovery from the effects of the earthquakes and tsunami (operating from 2005 to 2012).

16. According to data from the Central Bank of Sri Lanka Annual Report 2003, the total amount of ‘aid’ increased from Rs. 17.2m in 2002 to Rs. 62.2m in 2003; quoted in Bastian S (2006): 251.




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Author biography

Nicole Klitzsch was awarded her PhD by Queen’s University Belfast, School of Politics. Her research interests focus on relations between political economy, sustainability of resources and protracted social conflict. She has published a book on the Philippine ‘Moro conflict’ [Muslimische Rebellen in den Philippinen. Politische Strategien zwischen Djihadismus und Verhandlungstisch] (Hamburg: IFA, 2006) and contributed to Conflict in Moro Land. Prospects for Peace? Edited by Arndt Graf, Peter Kreuzer and Rainer Werning (Penang: USM Press, 2010).


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Documents

Disaster politics or disaster of politics? Post-tsunami conflict transformation in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia