I Remember - 19 May 2010

I REMEMBER – 19 May 2010

[Text originally spoken at Amnesty UK event in London, on 19 May 2010]

As we come together to commemorate the anniversary of the end of Sri Lanka’s long and bloody civil war, these are some of the things I remember:

I remember hearing reports in late January 2009 of UN workers and their families being shelled by government forces in the Vanni while hiding in bunkers and under UN trucks. I remember not quite believing these stories.

I remember the hospitals and medical centres shelled, and the patients and medical staff killed and wounded in what the Sri Lankan government was calling “no fire zones”. I remember later on meeting some of those who survived and hearing their terrifying stories.

I remember the extraordinary bravery and generosity of all the doctors, medical workers, and staff members of the International Committee of the Red Cross who served under terrifying conditions. I remember that some of them gave their lives saving others.

I remember seeing Gotabaya Rajapaksa on TV in February 2009 telling an interviewer that “there shouldn’t be a hospital or anything [in Puthukudiyiruppu] because we withdrew that. We got all the patients to Vavuniya, out of there. So nothing should exist beyond the no fire zone. …No hospital should operate in the area, nothing should operate. That is why we clearly gave these no fire zones.”

I remember seeing Palitha Kohona on TV claim “There was only one hospital that anybody had ever marked on a map in that whole area and we have got pictures to show that hospital was never targeted. … If a hospital had to be shelled … I know the way we took out LTTE officers, their camps, with such clinical precision – if we wanted to do that to a hospital we could have done that also. Why do a half-hearted job if you wanted to really finish it off?”

I remember Gotabaya Rajapaksa telling the BBC on 23 April 2009, “we are going very slowly towards the south of the no-fire zone to rescue the remaining civilians. Our troops are not using heavy fire power, they are using only guns and personal weapons.”

I remember Mahinda Samarasinghe announcing on 18 May 2009 that “All Tamil civilians have been rescued without shedding a drop of blood”.

I remember Rajiva Wijesinha claiming in the middle of March that there were only 70-100,000 people still traped in the fighting and criticising UN agencies for using inflated numbers in their appeals for aid.

I remember reading the reports and seeing the pictures of the more than two hundred thousand battered, scared, starved, and thirsty people, most of them children, women, or elderly, streaming into the military’s hastily built camps in April and May. There they would remain for months, unable to leave.

I remember the government chopping down thousands of trees and bulldozing hundreds of acres of land in Vavuniya to construct camps that were still too small to hold all the survivors humanely.

I remember all those the LTTE shot and killed as they tried to flee the fighting in 2009.

I remember all those killed and injured after being forced to dig bunkers and defend Tigers positions.

I remember all the children forced by the LTTE to fight to their death in the final battles.

I remember meeting young people recruited by the LTTE and now in government “rehabilitation” centres in Jaffna in 2002. I remember their hopes that some day they might find a normal and safe life.

I remember the scores of suicide bombers, convinced by their leaders to transform their own loss and rage and bodies into weapons to continue the cycle of pain and vengeance.

I remember watching artists – Tamil, Sinhala, Muslim, foreign – paint beautiful flowers and doves on the streets of Colombo in remembrance of those killed in political violence and to call for the preservation of the sanctity of life.

I remember the nearly one hundred Sri Lankans of all ethnicities killed and the more than thirteen hundred injured in the LTTE’s bombing of the Central bank i.n 1998

I remember all the Sinhalese farmers and their families killed, terrorised and forced from their lands by Tiger attacks in the eastern province.

I remember the Tamil and Muslim farmers forced from their lands in the north and east by the violence and threats from Sri Lankan security forces and homeguards and by the LTTE.

I remember the murder of Joseph Pararajasingham in St. Michaels church in Batticaloa on Christmas Eve 2005 – and all the Tamil MPs killed over the years.

I remember the murders of A.Armithalingam, Neelan Thiruchelvam, Rajini Thiranagama, Kandiah ‘Robert’ Subathiran and all the free-thinkingTamils killed by LTTE for betraying the Tamil nation. I remember all the Tamil militants killed by other Tamil militants in the name of liberation.

I remember all the Sri Lankan journalists beaten, killed, disappeared or forced into exile for their betrayal of the Sinhala nation and their commitment to the truth.

I remember Kethesh Loganathan, for his generosity and support to me, and for his courage to speak his mind to all the warring parties.

I remember the 80,000 or more Muslims expelled from northern province by the LTTE in October 1990. I remember their continuing struggles to return home and begin their lives again in the land where they were born.

I remember the seventeen workers for Action contre la faim killed in Mutur in August 2006.

I rember the five students gunned down in Trincomalee in January 2006.

I remember the ten workers massacred in Potuvil in September 2006.

I remember the government’s promises to investigate and the silence from the Commission of Inquiry and from the President’s office.

I remember families of the ACF workers pleading with me to help them leave Sri Lanka and find some peace from government harassment.

I remember the physical attacks on Sufi Muslims in Kattankudy who refused to accept the ideological rigidity of their Wahabi brothers.

I remember seeing the charred beds, chairs, bicycles and destroyed dormitories on a beautiful hill in the village of Bindunuwewa. I remember meeting Tamil families at the funeral of their sons whose bodies were so badly mutilitated that they remained unidentified, unburied and without death certificates for years.

I remember speaking to Sinhalese in Bindunuwewa whose families had been torn apart by the trauma, shame and financial cost of their loved ones being accused of murder.

I remember the pictures of SJV Chelvanayagam and other Tamil politicians beaten and bloodied after a peaceful protest in Colombo in 1956.

I remember the photographs of the Jaffna Public Library after it was burned by thugs sent by a Sri Lankan cabinet minister in 1981.

I remember visiting the restored Jaffna Public Library in 2002, beautiful in its gleaming white paint but still scarred by the absence of books and manuscripts that will never return.

I remember the thousands of Tamils killed in the pogrom of July 1983 and the hundreds of thousands forced to live in refugee camps and abandon their country of birth.

I remember the many brave and generous Sinhalese and Muslims who helped save Tamils from July’s crazed mobs.

I remember the tens of thousands of Sinahala youth murdered and disappeared by the government and the JVP in 1971 and in the late 1980s.

I remember the words from the Dhammapada: “Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal law.”

I remember hearing the news that the UN was withdrawing its international staff from their headquarters in Kilnochchi in September 2008. I remember seeing the photos of desperate civilians appealing for them to stay and protect them.

I remember the promise by the UN Security Council “to respond to situations of armed conflict where civilians are being targeted or humanitarian assistance to civilians is being deliberately obstructed”. I remember the failure of the Security Council to act in Sri Lanka.

I remember the visit to Sri Lanka in late April by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and French Foreigin Minister Bernard Kouchner and their call for a ceasefire and for the Tigers to lay down their weapons and allow the civilians to leave.

I remember the words of President Obama on 13 May 2009 calling on the Tigers to surrender and the Sri Lankan government to stop its indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and to allow the UN access to the tens of thousands still trapped. “The United States”, Obama says, “stands ready to work with the international community to support the people of Sri Lanka in this time of suffering. I don’t believe that we can delay. Now is the time for all of us to work together to avert further humanitarian suffering.”

I remember the government’s announcement of the killing of Vellupilai Prabhakaran just days later.

I remember all those detained and brutalized at Guantanamo Bay and Bhagram Airbase in the name of the war on terror. I remember all those kidnapped and “extraordinarily rendered” by the US government with the assistance of the British and other european governments, in defiance of international law and human decency. I remember the madness that took over my own country after September 11^th, 2001. I remember all those killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I remember the words of Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ban ki-Moon on 24 May 2009, whereby “Sri Lanka reiterated its strongest commitment to the promotion and protection of human rights in keeping with international human rights standards and Sri Lanka’s international obligations.” I remember that “The Secretary General underlined the importance of an accountability process for addressing violations of international humanitarian and human rights law” and that the Government promised to “take measures to address those grievances.”.

I remember Gotabaya Rajapaksa telling a BBC correspondent earlier this year: “Whether it is the United Nations or any other country, we are not – I am not – allowing any investigations in this country. There is no reason. Nothing wrong happened in this country. Take it from me. There will be no investigations for anything in this country”.

The Temptations of Evenhandedness

The Trouble with Evenhandedness: On the Politics of Human Rights and Peace Advocacy In Sri Lanka

[Written summer 2006; published early 2007]

Alan Keenan

Since the fall of the Soviet empire and the apparent global triumph of liberal capitalism, much hope has been placed in civil society and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as engines of liberalization and democratization throughout the world. Despite the existence of many persuasive critiques of the transformative power of civil society, especially in postcolonial (which are often also neocolonial) contexts, “civil society building” remains a popular goal and practice for international donors from the wealthy nations of the global north. This has been particularly true in situations of protracted civil conflict, especially during internationally sponsored peace processes or in the period of postconflict reconstruction. Foreign states and international organizations seeking to encourage political stability and integration into the global economic system are in need of organizations and institutions that can contribute to the range of activities that have come to be known as “peace building.” While civil society and NGOs have been asked to play important roles in numerous transitions out of violent conflict, the jury is still out on just how effective they can be as agents of lasting and democratic change.

This essay hopes to contribute to debates over this question. It is part of a larger study that examines the roles that NGOs and civil-society networks have played during the Sri Lankan peace process of 2002–6. The larger study seeks to understand what forms of political action and critique are open to various kinds of organizations within civil society and what approaches hold out the most promise for effecting sustainable and democratic change in situations of protracted identity-based conflict, especially during peace processes supported by foreign governments and international organizations. Of special importance to the pages that follow here is the question of what, if any, democratic political potential lies in the discourse of human rights. Claims that human rights have been violated obviously have great power as partisan political weapons, especially in situations of violent group conflict. It is less clear, however, that the discourse of human rights as a whole actually contains the potential for advancing positive democratic political change, especially in deeply divided societies. Is it possible for human-rights advocacy by NGOs and networks of activists to promote democratic practices in such a context? What would be required for such groups to be able to help transform the dynamics of violent conflict in sustainable and democratic ways?

Over the past decade, and especially over the past five years of intense international involvement to help resolve Sri Lanka’s twenty-year-old civil war, the political activities and interventions of liberal and democratic civil-society groups and activists in Sri Lanka have increasingly been shaped by the ideas and practices of conflict resolution. With the sponsorship and encouragement of international donors, the discourse of conflict resolution has brought with it a particular model of political transformation and conflict reduction. This model has been adopted by NGOs and other civil-society organizations with important effects on how they imagine their own political roles and possibilities and how others in society see them. As part of a larger professionalization, even bureaucratization, of civil-society political activity, Sri Lankan NGOs and activists have been encouraged to take up practices of “peacebuilding” and “conflict transformation” that are generally quite technical, even apolitical. However, they have rarely been encouraged to engage directly with the power structures and ideological formations that sustain Sri Lanka’s various violent conflicts.

As part of the increasingly hegemonic discourse of conflict resolution, the principle of remaining evenhanded with respect to the two main negotiating parties — the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers — emerged as a powerful influence on political discourse and on the interventions undertaken by many different actors in the Sri Lankan peace process, including foreign governments, multilateral organizations, international NGOs, and various Sri Lankan NGOs. Despite its obvious attractions in a situation of violent conflict, I argue that the ideal of evenhandedness has played a destructive role in Sri Lanka’s peace process. More specifically, I contend that the concern with being evenhanded with respect to the positions of the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers has contributed to a neglect of crucial human-rights protections. The neglect of rights has, in turn, undermined trust and security between different ethnic and political groups. Furthermore, the imperative to be evenhanded has weakened the democratic and transformative potential of Sri Lankan NGOs, civil-society organizations, and activists. Promising a nonpolitical — because nonpartisan — means of transforming violent conflict into peaceful relations, the ideal of evenhandedness has in fact involved such groups in interventions that are highly political, even if this political aspect is disavowed.

After examining the various factors that have made evenhandedness so counterproductive — both those factors specific to Sri Lanka’s peace process and those basic to the ideal of evenhandedness as such — I describe an alternative, more explicitly political model of engagement and critique that can be seen in the work of a small number of Sri Lankan human-rights activists. This approach, which I call “the politics of neither/nor,” allows allegiance to basic democratic rights and principles to guide nongovernmental political interventions, rather than the ideal of balance or evenhandedness. By actively defending human rights, these activists attempt to reclaim the fundamental right of average, unarmed citizens to speak freely and engage in independent political activities, against the deliberate destruction of political space by the violence and arbitrary rule of both the state and counterstate agents. A neither/nor approach, I argue, ultimately holds out the promise of better integrating human rights and conflict resolution efforts. For this promise to have a chance of being fulfilled, however, the neither/nor approach must be incorporated into a broader, democratized social movement of NGOs and other political forces within civil society.

Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflicts and the Crisis of the State

The violent struggle by the Tamil Tigers (officially known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE) to establish a separate state in the name of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka began in the mid-1970s. It had its origins in the failure of Sri Lanka’s postindependence political leadership to agree on a political system that would grant citizens of all ethnicities equal access to the resources and protections of the state. By the mid-1950s, Sinhalese politicians had discovered the power of a discourse that pledged to use the state to rectify what many average Sinhalese and Buddhists (roughly 75 percent of the population) saw as the humiliations and disadvantages they had suffered under British colonial rule. Their grievances centered on the loss of prestige accorded to Buddhism, the dominance of English as the language of the elite and of economic opportunity, and the disproportionate number of Tamils holding civil-service jobs and gaining entrance to universities. Exploiting popular conceptions of democracy as unrestrained majority rule and popular myths about the essentially Buddhist character of the island, Sinhalese politicians passed a series of laws — with regard to language, education, religion, and land use — that effectively defined the state as Sinhalese and Buddhist. From 1956 onward, nonviolent Tamil protests against their second-class citizenship were met with increasingly violent repression by government forces. Thus, original demands by Tamils for limited forms of political autonomy for the Northern and Eastern Provinces, where Tamil speakers (mostly Hindu, but also Christian and Muslim) combine to form a majority, eventually became demands for a separate state. Small-scale antistate violence by various groups of Tamil youth in the north exploded into full-scale war in 1983 after a Tamil Tiger ambush of an army truck triggered massive state-sanctioned anti-Tamil violence throughout the island.

The separatist war has since led to the deaths of an estimated seventy thousand people and displaced upwards of one million others, out of a population of less than twenty million. Atrocities have been committed by both the government and the LTTE, including LTTE violence against other Tamils. Even as the Tigers have fought the Sinhalese-dominated state, they have also been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Tamils aligned with rival political and militant movements. The Tigers’ claim to be the sole representative of the Tamil people has been enforced through violence and fear, including the assassinations of the most prominent Tamil politicians of the past three decades. Tens of thousands of Sinhalese were also killed in the course of two separate insurrections, in 1971 and 1987–90, by militants of the left-wing nationalist People’s Liberation Front, or JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna). The violence by both the state and the JVP was merciless in the extreme. Sri Lanka’s small Muslim population has also suffered violence at the hands of the Sri Lankan state, and, to a much larger degree, from the Tamil Tigers, who in 1990 forcibly expelled some ninety thousand Muslims from the northern Jaffna peninsula then under their control. The violent and unaccountable power of the Sri Lankan state, in other words, ultimately bred ruthless and totalizing forms of counterstate resistance, in the form of the LTTE and the JVP, both of which have gone on to sow further destruction and hatred along lines of ethnicity, religion, and class.
The past several decades have witnessed a series of attempts to find a negotiated settlement of political demands made in the name of the Tamil people. Various proposals for constitutional reforms that would grant some degree of self-rule to the Northern and Eastern Provinces have come and gone with no success, because they offered either too much autonomy to gain consensus among Sinhalese or too little to win acceptance from the LTTE. The Norwegian-brokered cease-fire of February 2002 is the longest-running cease-fire to date, though at the time of this writing, in mid-2006, it survives in name only. Despite close involvement by governments of the European Union, the United States, and Japan and promises of billions of dollars of aid for postwar reconstruction should a negotiated settlement be reached, talks between the Tigers and the government have failed to resume after the LTTE’s withdrawal in April 2003.

Thanks in part to the stresses of the peace process itself, including the many violations of basic human rights that have accompanied it, political divisions between Sinhalese parties and within the LTTE have effectively paralyzed attempts to restart negotiations. Tiger proposals for an LTTE-run interim administration in the north and east have to date not been discussed. Soon after its unveiling in November 2003, the fragile interparty cohabitation of the Sri Lankan government collapsed, which ultimately led to elections in 2004 that brought to power a new coalition of parties — now including the resurrected JVP — which took a much harder line on negotiating with the Tigers. Almost simultaneously, the LTTE suffered the defection of its Eastern Province military commander, Colonel Karuna. His initial defeat by the main body of the LTTE has been followed by guerilla resistance of increasing intensity, as the remnants of Karuna’s forces have benefited from increasingly strong assistance from the Sri Lankan military. Since the election in November 2005 of a new Sri Lankan president, who ran on a platform opposing any changes to the “unitary” character of the Sri Lankan state and any concessions to the Tigers, violence between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan military has escalated to dangerous levels, with civilians of all ethnicities being targeted from all sides.

Evenhandedness and Balance on the Sri Lankan Road to Peace

By the spring of 2006, with the Sri Lankan peace process on the verge of collapse into full-scale war, accusations of bias and a lack of evenhandedness — directed both at the so-called international community as well as at domestic political actors — had become central to Sri Lankan political discussions. This was especially true just before and immediately after the European Union’s decision — in reaction to repeated cease-fire violations and political assassinations attributed to the LTTE — to add the Tamil Tigers to its list of banned “terrorist organizations,” which prevents the Tigers from conducting any activities in EU countries. Even prior to this, however, the concern with being evenhanded and with revealing and criticizing “bias” and “partiality” on the part of others had been present on all sides of Sri Lanka’s complicated political conflicts.

The intuitive attractiveness of evenhandedness, especially in an environment riven by explosive human-rights charges, is not hard to understand. It is especially appealing for those who take up the role of mediators or for any outside party that wants to assist others to escape a destructive cycle of conflict. It would seem almost in the nature of their role to resist taking sides and instead to try to treat the various parties equally and impartially, without adding to the sense of disadvantage or insecurity generally felt by those in conflict. Indeed, the desire by outsiders to remain evenhanded is likely to be encouraged and intensified by the natural resistance of groups within a conflict to accounts of their activities that they deem unfair or biased, especially when such accounts take the form of human-rights criticisms that can be used as potent political weapons against them. The desire for evenhandedness would seem to flow directly from the obvious appeal — even to would-be peacemakers within the society in conflict — of a model of conflict resolution or transformation that seeks to get outside of the conflict and see (the truth of) all sides, none of which, so the thinking goes, is either entirely blameless or entirely to blame, since “there are always two sides (or more) to every story.”

In Sri Lanka, however, the desire to be evenhanded has in fact contributed to the slow, but steady collapse of the cease-fire. As I will argue below, the ideal of evenhandedness is a risky guide for political work in any situation of protracted violent conflict. In the case of Sri Lanka, however, the quest for evenhandedness became especially destructive because it accentuated certain underlying assumptions of the official Norwegian-facilitated peace process — assumptions that ultimately proved not only incorrect, but counterproductive. If one thinks of conflict-resolution initiatives as generally aiming to transform a zero-sum or either/or conflict between identity-based groups into a win/win, or both/and, process, the problems plaguing the Sri Lankan peace process had much to do with whom the both/and approach aimed to bring together and on what terms.

The basic design flaw in the peace process was its highly exclusive nature. That is, it brought together and aimed to satisfy the interests of both the Tamil Tigers and the government, each of which was presumed to adequately represent their “own” people: the Tamil minority concentrated in the north and east of the island and the Sinhalese majority concentrated in the south, center, and west. Left out of this limited and binary structure, and thus from any ideal of evenhandedness that followed its parameters, were other important constituencies whose acceptance of the process would be a crucial factor in the sustainability of any agreements between the warring parties. Those denied any meaningful role in the process included the Muslim minority, concentrated in the volatile Eastern Province, Tamil parties and activists that rejected the Tigers’ claim to be the “sole representative of the Tamil people” (including the renegade faction of the LTTE led by the Eastern Province military commander Karuna, who broke away two years into the process), and, finally, more strongly Sinhalese nationalist parties and others who didn’t feel themselves adequately represented by the Sinhalese-dominated government.

The second major problem with the peace process was that engagement in it involved no serious commitment on anyone’s part — not from the government, the Tigers, the Norwegians, or from other international supporters of the process — to transforming the antidemocratic activities of the two major antagonists. Whether with respect to the fundamental issues of constitutional reform at stake in the conflict or with respect to the ways in which each party governed its “own” populations, questions of justice — directed toward the past, the present, or the future — were off the table. Instead, the peace process was structured as a purely pragmatic deal meant to empower each entity in its current incarnation while preserving the balance of power between them. In effect, the two parties agreed that they would not challenge each other’s power and position for the time being, but made no promises about or showed much interest in a principled process that would transform either their long-term relationship or how they treated those under their political control. Instead of a process designed to move toward a just settlement based on meaningful democratic power sharing and accountable governance, there was a simple exchange: the government was to get the peace and quiet necessary for economic development based on international investment, while the Tigers were to get international recognition and investment, together with the consolidation and expansion of their military and political control over the Tamil-speaking areas they claim as their homeland.

Equally damaging was the fact that the peace process included no mechanisms designed to enable others to pressure the two major parties to change their modes of governance, to act as checks on their behavior, or to develop independent initiatives for reconciliation or accountability that might ultimately transform the larger political environment. Thus, the cease-fire monitoring mission, staffed by representatives of Nordic countries, was given no powers of enforcement or remedy in the event of cease-fire violations. Nor did the monitors or the Norwegian government show any interest in interpreting their mandate to include the prevention of human-rights violations against the civilian population. The Norwegian government and other foreign states involved in the process actively resisted calls to establish an independent human-rights monitoring mission that would have been less concerned with maintaining the confidence of the two parties involved in the cease-fire agreement. Nor was there any international support offered to those in Sri Lankan nongovernmental organizations who attempted to develop their own independent monitoring procedures.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the entire structure of evenhandedness between the two parties was built on top of a cease-fire agreement that in various ways allowed the Tigers to expand and deepen their coercive control over the north and east of the island, as well as over Tamils living in other regions. The cease-fire agreement required non-LTTE Tamil political parties to disarm, even as it allowed the Tigers to establish “political” offices for work in government-held territories. Yet it granted no reciprocal right for government forces or for cease-fire monitors to enter areas controlled by the Tigers. The result was the expansion and further entrenchment of Tiger control throughout the north and east, aided by a range of coercive methods: the assassination of hundreds of members of rival Tamil parties, the murder and harassment of Muslims who rejected LTTE control of the north and east, the forcible recruitment of thousands of underage fighters, widespread extortion from the civilian population, the manipulation of elections in 2004 and 2005, and the near-complete destruction of all independent political spaces in the north and east of the island.

In this context, in which the Tamil Tigers violated the cease-fire at will and exploited many opportunities available for the expansion of their rule through coercion and intimidation, the ideal of evenhandedness and the principle of balance between the two parties that underlay the whole process had devastating effects. Particularly damaging was the interpretation of evenhandedness that informed many people’s responses to cease-fire and human-rights violations. According to this view, one was only allowed to criticize the violations of one of the two parties (generally the Tigers) so long as the other party (generally the government) had committed equivalent violations. Given that each side was violating different rights to varying degrees — the vast majority, and certainly the most egregious, cease-fire and human-rights violations being committed by the Tigers — focusing on the violations of the Tigers was seen by many, both within Sri Lankan civil society and within the world of international organizations and the diplomatic community, to be “unbalanced” and therefore both unfair and destabilizing. (Many were afraid that highlighting Tiger violations would run the risk of scaring them away from the peace process.) As a result, for the first three and one-half years of the peace process, until the Tigers’ assassination of the Sri Lankan foreign minister in August 2005, only a handful of local and international groups were willing to speak out publicly against such violations.

The years of widespread Tiger violence and intransigence, especially in the context of a noninclusive process, ultimately provoked Sinhalese, Muslim, and even Tamil “spoilers” who felt disrespected, disempowered, and in many cases, physically endangered by the direction that the peace process had taken. Their growing resistance, both violent and nonviolent, to the terms on which “peace” was being offered has ratified the long-standing resistance of the Sri Lankan state to real reforms. That the Tigers were allowed to get away with murder not only weakened support for a peaceful and just settlement among Sinhalese and Muslims. It has also fueled a desire for righteous payback in similar currency by violent Sinhalese supremacists and their supporters in the Sri Lankan government, a government that has continued its long tradition of using violence to quell dissent and maintain ethnic and class hierarchies.

In other words, the closures and counterproductive forms of evenhandedness that characterized the Norwegian-led peace process, both with respect to the “balanced” structure of the formal process and with respect to how cease-fire and human-rights violations were downplayed, have merely ratified and legitimated impunity on all sides, with destructive effects in all directions. They have also undermined the legitimacy of the Norwegian facilitators among many Sri Lankans, who view their reluctance to criticize Tiger “terrorism” either as a sign of weakness or as evidence of their pro-Tiger bias and bad faith. Since democratic and liberal elements in Sri Lankan civil society have been discouraged from raising human-rights issues, both by the ideal of evenhandedness and by the direct instructions of their international donors, the job of denouncing such violations has increasingly been taken up by Sinhalese hardliners who have no interest in the reform of the Sri Lankan state. Their highly partisan use of human-rights language has had the effect of delegitimating such claims in the eyes of many. In the end, then, the lack of effective human-rights protections has meant that all constituencies — Tamil, Muslim, and Sinhalese civilians, government soldiers and police, LTTE fighters and anti-LTTE militants — have been made to feel less secure over the past four years. It is thus no surprise that violence of all kinds and from all sides has now escalated to the point that the cease-fire is effectively dead, even if it has not, as of this writing, been explicitly abrogated.

The Limits of Evenhandedness as an Ideal

The inadequacy of evenhandedness as an ideal for intervening in violent identity-based conflicts or for judging such interventions goes beyond the specific design flaws and mistakes in mediation that have undermined the Sri Lankan peace process. As I will show with reference to current Sri Lankan controversies, the danger of using evenhandedness as a guide to intervening in such conflicts, whether these are carried out by international or local actors, goes much deeper. Attempts to respect evenhandedness as a guiding ideal inevitably depoliticize fundamental aspects of a conflict, even as they necessarily depend on — and help naturalize — particular and contestable political interpretations of what the conflict is really about.
The idea that it is important not to be biased or partial as a mediator in a conflict would seem, on the face of it, to make sense. Avoiding bias or partiality presumably includes not ignoring the legitimate interests of one or more group or party to the conflict and not having the interests of only one party at heart. But given that one can never fully satisfy all the interests, needs, and concerns of all the parties involved in a conflict, respecting this principle requires one to make choices about which interests, needs, or positions to attend to, to determine whose claims seem important and whose not, which are legitimate and which excessive or mistaken. Making such choices, however, amounts to making judgments that are fundamentally political and go to the heart of the conflict(s) in need of resolution. In short, while trying not to be biased or partial makes sense, it can have value only as a negative injunction, as a reminder of the ease with which one’s interventions can be interpreted as favoring one side over another. When one attempts to give it positive content in the form of evenhandedness or impartiality, however, one is immediately forced to take a political stance on the conflict, a stance that is almost certain to appear less than evenhanded to one or more significant stakeholders or constituencies.

To put this point another way, the ideal of evenhandedness relies on a conception of balance. But imposing a balanced framework on a conflict that is certain to be unbalanced in multiple and incommensurable ways threatens to impose a particular vision of what the conflict is about and what its settlement should look like, precisely those issues that should be open for debate and discussion by all parties. Conflict resolution is certainly facilitated by recognizing that all parties and communities have suffered, that representatives of all communities have done terrible things in their names, and that the entirety of this suffering and violence, from all sides, needs to be recognized and taken into account. One can do one’s best to respect this form of impartiality, however, without in any way holding that responsibility for past or present injustices lies in equal measure or in any kind of measure that one can ultimately hold evenly in one’s metaphorical hands. Once again, then, the danger is that in the guise of a balanced, evenhanded, impartial intervention, a particular and contestable political vision is smuggled into conflict-resolution initiatives without public acknowledgment.

Asymmetries in Violations

A more specific form of this problem rests in the fact that the ideal of evenhandedness offers no resources for negotiating the basic asymmetries that exist between the parties, whether they be the different forms of rights violations that each party commits or their distinct modes of power and domination. Ultimately, the ideal of evenhandedness founders on the absence of a common standard for judging the urgency or importance of rights violations, injustices, and antidemocratic forms of power.

As mentioned above, the cease-fire violations that received the most publicity over the course of the Sri Lankan peace process, especially during its first three and one-half years, were those committed by the Tigers, which included political assassinations, the recruitment of underage fighters, extortion, attacks on rival political parties, election fraud and enforced election boycotts, and the forcible control over civil society. These are all violations of civil and political rights considered fundamental, such as the right to life, freedom of movement, the right to and property, and the right to vote, speak freely, and organize politically.
Although Tiger violations were publicly criticized to a limited extent, many Tamil nationalists and supporters of the LTTE responded by strongly arguing that other violations needed to be discussed alongside, and in some cases, instead of, Tiger violations. These LTTE supporters cited a host of other rights that they felt were of equal or greater importance and that were being violated by the government and ignored by many human-rights advocates and critics of the Tigers. Violations they cited included the continued existence of the Sri Lankan military’s so-called High Security Zones, which have displaced Tamils from their land and thus violate the property rights of tens of thousands of families; the right of internally displaced and war-affected people to humanitarian assistance and to longer-term rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts; the denial of socioeconomic rights, including the right to health care, education, sanitation, and housing, suffered disproportionately by Tamils in the Northern and Eastern Provinces; the continued denial of the language rights of Tamil speakers; and, most important of all, the denial of the right to self-determination that belongs to the Tamil nation, the demand for which is at the heart of the Tigers’ liberation struggle.

Unfortunately, the ideal of evenhandedness cannot help us work our way through these disputes. Even if one agrees that all of these violations — whether of property rights, language rights, the right to life, or the right to organize politically — are all of equal importance, which many would dispute, they simply cannot all be addressed in the same way, or at the same speed, or starting at the same time. The violation of most civil and political rights, for instance, can in principle be ended immediately, as long as the violating party has the will to change its behavior. But the same is not true of other kinds of violations. For example, returning the property of those with houses in army-controlled High Security Zones would require reciprocal and negotiated demilitarization by both sides or risk destabilizing the balance of military forces on which the cease-fire rests. While many of the rights to humanitarian assistance at issue should, in principle, be amenable to relatively quick practical interventions, the actual experience of the peace process revealed that serious progress on these issues can be achieved only through sustained cooperation between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government and the through establishment of new administrative mechanisms. With respect to violations of internationally recognized socioeconomic rights, this is a problem that plagues the whole of Sri Lanka, and it requires major institutional and economic changes in order to be overcome. Even in the (unlikely) best-case scenario, such reforms will take years, though they could certainly begin quite quickly, in part through attempts to address the especially high levels of poverty and lack of economic opportunities in the north and east. Finally, even if the right to self-determination of the Tamil people were accepted by all major parties as a legitimate claim — which is far from being the case — this right to self-determination would, by definition, require being elaborated and defined in institutional terms over the course of a long and complicated negotiating process. It is certainly not something that can be granted in any meaningful sense at the beginning of a peace process.

Trying to apply an evenhanded approach to disputes over the existence, value, and priority of the various rights said to be violated over the course of a given conflict is, then, ultimately destined only to provoke frustration and endless, unproductive debates.

Asymmetries of Power

Debates over the priority of different kinds of rights violations are particularly difficult to resolve, in part because they are generally informed by essentially political judgments about which entity, given its specific forms of power and domination, is the greater threat to justice and to peace — in the case of Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers or the Sri Lankan state.

On the one hand, the Sri Lankan state is formally democratic and preserves certain democratic features, such as regular competitive elections that produce changes in the ruling parties; freedom to organize politically, up to a certain point; media that are relatively free, though deeply — even ferociously — divided along ethnic and partisan lines; and a formally independent judiciary. The formal legitimacy of the Sri Lankan state thus garners it some degree of sympathy, along with material benefits, from fellow members of the international community of states.
Nonetheless, the Sri Lankan state has for the past fifty years effectively been an ethnocracy. Utilizing a definition of democracy as pure majoritarianism and dispensing with safeguards for minorities whose concerns are consistently outvoted, government policies have systematically favored the majority Sinhalese in both symbolic and material ways. Moreover, the Sri Lankan state has proven itself capable of the most terrible forms of extralegal political violence in defense of both the ethnic and the class hierarchies on which it is based. Maintained by an increasingly politicized and violent police force and a judiciary largely unwilling to challenge either elected authorities or powerful interests, the Sri Lankan state has proven itself able to resist all calls for legal accountability. In terms of its basic features, the Sri Lankan state and political system are effectively immune to political challenge and reform.

The political closures of the state, however, are matched, if not exceeded, by those of the Tamil Tigers, who are more ruthlessly and fully antidemocratic and are easily labeled as “terrorists” by foreign states and by local critics. More important than their use of standard terrorist forms of violence such as attacks on civilian targets is the terror produced by their desire for total control over the “Tamil nation.” This desire for control is evidenced by the human-rights violations committed over the course of the peace process, including the murder and exile of dissenting voices, the elimination of rival political groups, the forcible recruitment of child soldiers, and the effective control over the activities and statements of organizations ostensibly part of civil society. The University Teachers for Human Rights, Sri Lanka’s longest-lived and best-known human-rights group, which is composed of a small number of Tamil academics, describes LTTE violence in the following terms:

The terror [felt by members of Tamil political parties forced to align with the Tigers] is an object lesson in the LTTE’s methods of terror. Its terror has a dimension beyond being simply vindictive and irrational. One cannot play safe with the LTTE. The TULF MPs killed by the LTTE thought themselves to be playing safe. They all but acknowledged its totalitarian claims, never criticised it publicly and remained obligingly silent when their own colleagues were picked off by LTTE killers, one by one. People are thus driven to be cautious to the point of not risking doing anything that may be taken amiss by the LTTE. It is a degree of terror that a state cannot match.

And yet, many Tamils still see the LTTE as their best defender and their only source of political respect and leverage, especially since the Sri Lankan state continues to brutalize Tamil civilians with impunity. Many also argue that, if given the proper support from the international community, the LTTE could slowly evolve into a more legitimate and statelike entity, able either to rule “Tamil Eelam” independently or to share power with a democratized Sri Lankan state. Indeed, many Tamil activists are reluctant to criticize the Tigers publicly for fear of undermining their struggle against the Sri Lankan state, which is considered to be the greater threat to their freedom and dignity.

Judgments about the different modes of power of the warring parties and the dangers they pose, in other words, are inevitably influenced by the forms and strength of a given critic’s ethnic identification and by his or her particular ideological beliefs. With no procedure available for bracketing out such beliefs and forms of identification, it simply makes no sense to speak of an evenhanded accounting of the respective crimes and the level of danger posed by the different entities.
However much one might want to be evenhanded, the choices one makes about these issues, whether as an international or a local actor, will inevitably have uneven effects. One’s interventions, that is, can never be neutral, because they will inevitably affect the balance of power, whether symbolic or material, between the parties in conflict. Nor would there be any way of knowing in advance what it would mean to be evenhanded in the sense of applying equal pressure to all sides.
In the absence of a coherent and workable practice of evenhandedness, then, advocates of human rights, democracy, and peace are left with the task of challenging and attempting to transform the different modes of power of the parties on the basis of complex, contextual, and fully political judgments. Such judgments will be concerned with how the different forms of undemocratic and arbitrary power characteristic of the Tigers, the state, and other armed groups can best be engaged, in what contexts, and at what speeds. More specifically, one must judge how to tackle different forms of rights violations, determining which ones are more urgent, how to sequence them, which are more open to redress, and so on. Far from bringing our awareness to these questions, much less helping us develop better ways of addressing them, the ideal of evenhandedness ignores or downplays the tactical, contextual, contestable, and risky nature of all forms of pressure and political intervention in conflict situations.

The Costs of Evenhandedness to Democratic Civil Society

The dangers of attempting to follow an evenhanded or balanced approach are particularly acute for civil-society organizations — whether in the form of NGOs, popular movements, or small networks of activists — that seek the democratic and/or liberal transformation of society. The ideal of evenhandedness can easily undermine the ability of both local groups and their international allies to take an independent stand in pursuit of their own critical political agendas. Under the spell of the ideal of evenhandedness, liberal and democratic civil-society activists and organizations are easily tempted and at times actively encouraged by their donors to play the role of the mediator. In doing so, their central concern becomes balancing the interests and maintaining the confidence of the various negotiating parties, rather than holding them to account and trying to transform their methods.
Such has certainly been the case in Sri Lanka. Thanks to the influx of relatively large amounts of international funding, the Sri Lankan peace process saw the proliferation of peace and conflict-resolution initiatives. New organizations emerged, and established organizations expanded and/or redirected their work in support of “peace” and “conflict transformation.” From small-scale grassroots community organizations holding peace rallies and undertaking interethnic community-service projects to Colombo-based elite research and advocacy groups sponsoring workshops on various aspects of the peace process, activities in support of “peace” proliferated. The goal for international donors in encouraging and funding this work was to tap into the peace-building power of Sri Lankan civil society. The job assigned to Sri Lankan organizations was to build peace by supporting the Track One process, which advocated a top-level both/and approach to the conflict. Thus, in the initial years of the Sri Lankan peace process, most civil-society activities in support of peace and conflict transformation primarily took the form of advocacy in support of the peace efforts of the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government, who were assumed to be the only important players and whose efforts needed to be communicated and sold to the general public. The goal of these organizations was decidedly not to criticize either of these parties and their international sponsors or to articulate an independent political agenda of their own.

Unfortunately, these developments had a devastating effect on the work of human-rights activists and organizations. Most of the established organizations whose work had centered on the defense and promotion of human rights lost large amounts of their funding, as international financial support to civil society came to be directed almost exclusively to groups doing “peace-building” or “reconciliation” work of various sorts. Indeed, human-rights criticisms were particularly frowned upon by international donors and by many of the most prominent Sri Lankan civil society supporters of peace. Given that it was impossible to present a fully balanced list of charges against all parties in the conflict, the popularity of the ideals of evenhandedness and balance paralyzed critiques of human-rights abuses by making them seem unfair and/or destabilizing.

Had the two main warring parties shown real interest in changing their ways, one might argue that public advocacy and engagement with them in support of Track One negotiations — rather than active criticism and resistance — made political sense. Unfortunately, many donor-funded civil-society organizations were so wedded to a model of conflict resolution that gave pride of place to evenhandedness and to supporting the negotiating parties that they failed to shift tack even as these parties actively continued to destroy the space for independent political activity and to protect their ability to violate rights with impunity. This was most obviously the case with the LTTE, whose use of violence was blatant and relentless. But it was also true of the Sri Lankan state, which during the initial years of the process failed to criticize or try to prevent the LTTE’s violence and which actively worked to preserve its own impunity for its past and ongoing rights violations.

The lack of response to human-rights violations by those supporting the peace process, including civil-society groups, international organizations, and foreign states, had the effect of ratifying, in the name of peace, the underlying patterns of impunity with which the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government had been able to maintain their domination for decades. Failure to address their systems of unaccountable power not only seemed to endorse a very violent form of “peace,” it also helped to undermine security and trust on all sides of Sri Lanka’s multiple conflicts. Moreover, this lack of attention to abuses of power had the unintended effect of leaving the role of speaking in defense of basic human rights to Sinhalese supremacist groups. While they were legitimately outraged at the Tigers’ repeated cease-fire and human-rights violations, these groups nonetheless had little interest in a just settlement of Tamil grievances. Their increasing prominence in debates over human-rights issues has reduced the discourse of human rights to an arsenal of rhetorical weapons used by partisans who refuse to apply the same human-rights principles to each side.

The failures of the Sri Lankan peace process reveal, among other things, that human-rights protections are a necessary aspect of effective and sustainable conflict-transformation initiatives. The ideal of evenhandedness undermines the ability of civil-society activists to articulate human-rights concerns. By doing so, it can also cripple effective peace work, which requires weaning people from their identifications with the warring parties, or at least from their acceptance of militarist nationalism and antidemocratic violence. Ultimately, for it to be effective, peace advocacy needs to argue against militarism and exclusive forms of nationalism and in support of democracy and human rights.

From Both/And to Neither/Nor: Toward a More Fully Political Practice of Human-Rights and Peace Advocacy

From among a small, but increasingly influential number of Sri Lankan political activists, there has emerged a different, more critical style of political intervention, one that appeals to human-rights principles to support the development of deeper, more sustainable forms of peace. Articulated through overlapping networks of supporters inside and outside the island, rather than through established donor-funded organizations, a shared style of political critique may be found in reports by the long-established network of activists known as the University Teachers for Human Rights, the work of the recently established and increasingly influential Sri Lanka Democracy Forum, and the interventions by more ad hoc initiatives such as the Collective for Batticaloa, the Multi-Ethnic Coalition for Child Security, and the Coalition of Muslims and Tamils for Peace and Coexistence. Their shared approach abandons the ideal of evenhandedness in favor of more confrontational and more fully political forms of critique, adopting what might be called a neither/nor approach. As we have seen, the both/and approach of the Norwegians and other international supporters of the Sri Lankan peace process allowed the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state to define the two (and only two) “sides” that were in conflict and that needed to be brought together. In contrast, the neither/nor approach uses the language and principles of human rights to challenge the militarism and exclusive nationalism of both the Sri Lankan state and the Tigers. This approach also challenges other groups that are party to the conflict to the extent that they share these militaristic characteristics, such as the breakaway faction from the LTTE commanded by Karuna and the Sinhalese-supremacist JVP, which has a long history of brutal, terror-filled insurrections and continued militarist and antidemocratic practices.

Seeking to defend and expand the space “in between” the various warring parties and in solidarity with all those who are literally caught in the middle of the violence from different sides, the politics of neither/nor invokes basic principles of human rights so as to say “no” to all forms of arbitrary, unaccountable, and antidemocratic power. This politics demands instead that the people themselves be allowed to reenter and re-create the political space itself, enabling them to share power in nonviolent ways.

The central principle of the neither/nor approach is that in their distinctive ways, both the Sri Lankan state and the Tigers have violently usurped the constitutive power of the people to govern themselves and to determine their shared fate and common policies. The underlying claim is that the people themselves — of all ethnicities — have political priority over both the state and those fighting to create a new state of their own. Thus, proponents of the neither/nor approach have explicitly rejected the idea that either the LTTE or the government represents those for whom they claim to speak — “the Tamil nation” and “the Sri Lankan people,” respectively — and have rejected their right to monopolize the limited political space opened up in the name of “peace.”

The neither/nor approach is thus clearly not evenhanded with respect to the major protagonists or their particular acts of violence and injustice, since it explicitly aims to weaken and undermine their power according to whatever political means are available. It does, however, consciously aim to challenge all human-rights violations, regardless of the agent, particularly those that destroy the fragile political space through violence, fear, and the deliberate targeting of dissenting voices. It aims to expand and democratize the tenuous space “in between” partisans, making it more inclusive, more equal, and more open to question. Nonetheless, it recognizes how fraught, uncomfortable, and unstable this middle position is: it’s not the middle of evenhandedness or balance, but of being “caught in the middle” — as in, “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

The neither/nor approach, then, in its ideal form, would be a quintessentially democratic mode of nongovernmental politics to the extent that it would be an independent project aimed at defending the democratic rights of all citizens against arbitrary, abusive, and illegitimate power, whether that of the state or of counterstate entities, and at resisting the closure of political space. While such a political practice would not claim to be the sole legitimate approach in situations of violent, identity-based conflicts, its proponents argue that it is the specific task of at least some significant portion of civil society to challenge and ultimately delegitimate the warring parties by naming their modes of power as one of the primary sources of the collective crisis that must be addressed.

Such an approach is political in another sense, too. While it is grounded in respect for basic rights for all and in principles of political openness and plurality, its universalism is a minimalist one and doesn’t claim to offer neutral principles to resolve the dilemmas of democratization and peacebuilding. Instead, it consciously accepts the need to make strategic choices about which set of rights to defend and to emphasize at any given moment, recognizing that these choices will have political consequences that inevitably affect the course of the macrolevel conflicts, even as these consequences will be largely incalculable in advance.

The Promise of a Neither/Nor Approach

The argument here, then, is not that the neither/nor approach, through its attachment to basic democratic principles and to the fundamental rights to the political space, can overcome the problems and dilemmas that plague the ideal of evenhandedness. Indeed, the neither/nor approach is a more fully political practice precisely because it accepts and publicizes the inevitability of these dilemmas and the risks that come with having to negotiate them. The wager of this approach, however, is that such acceptance makes it possible to handle the dilemmas somewhat more effectively and thus offers an important resource for conflict transformation of a different, hopefully more democratic, sort.

How is this the case? First, a neither/nor approach helps define a minimal common ground of basic (democratic) rights that Sri Lankans from all ethnicities should, at least in principle, be able to agree on, given their shared vulnerability to arbitrary and violent forms of political power. In the case of Sri Lanka, as in so many other parts of the world, members of all religious and ethnic communities have suffered from — or are presently threatened by — abusive power from unaccountable political groups, both from their own and from other communities.

Second, a neither/nor approach aims to strengthen this sense of common rights by tapping into the power of political opposition that defines an “us” — Sri Lankan citizens and agents of democratic change — and a “them” — antidemocratic militarists, violent nationalists, and rights violators — that allows Sri Lankans to identify along new, political, differently ethnicized lines. The claim here is that any movement for political change requires a negative, critical edge that allows it to be against something, in part so as to clarify for people the deeper sources of their political suffering and in part to draw together otherwise divided constituencies. Citizens and agents of democratic change cannot re-create the political space destroyed through violence and fear without their own symbolic forms of negativity and exclusion. It is crucial to their political engagement to have an opponent that they want to defeat.

Third, a neither/nor approach offers a position from which to criticize, challenge, and perhaps transform the antidemocratic nature of governance in Sri Lanka, which is at the heart of Sri Lanka’s multiple conflicts, maintaining and aggravating polarized, violent group relations thanks to the universal impunity for gross violations of human rights. A neither/nor approach clarifies the nature of the political phenomena that need to be addressed for there to be a sustainable and just peace. By directly naming and challenging the violent and unaccountable modes of power characteristic of both the Sri Lankan state and its counterstate challengers — today, the LTTE — a neither/nor approach allows one to see more clearly the extent to which Sri Lanka’s ethnicized violence was originally a manifestation of state crisis and still is to a large degree. The ethnopolitical divisions and violence that dominate political discussions are the product of that crisis, at least as much as its cause. This is true even as the two strands have, in practice, become inseparable as polarized and exclusive communal identifications take on a power of their own in reaction to violence and social exclusion done in the name of one group or the other. In order to address effectively the specific role played by the dynamics of antidemocratic power and governance, a neither/nor approach offers resources that the both/and ideal of evenhandedness cannot.

Fourth, Where evenhandedness depoliticizes the nature of conflict transformation and operates on the terrain of good or bad faith, a neither/nor approach is more fully political and strategic; debates about how to pursue such an approach can follow accordingly. A neither/nor approach is rooted in a strong democratic project of reestablishing a political space freely and equally open to all and in a set of principles that are laid out as clearly and as persuasively as possible. Hence, a neither/nor political practice of human-rights advocacy makes considerations of how best to challenge and change undemocratic power the central criteria for doing their work and judging others’ interventions, rather than the balance, bias, or good faith of the intervener.

Finally, there are advantages that come from acknowledging that all political interventions, especially those in the name of basic rights, will have diverse consequences that can’t be predicted in advance, consequences that might, in some cases, benefit those whom one wishes to weaken — for example, when human-rights critiques of the Tigers embolden the Sri Lankan state and Sinhalese supremacist parties to continue denying the role each plays in perpetuating the systematic injustices suffered by Tamils. By acknowledging the open-ended, unpredictable, and risky character of political interventions, a neither/nor approach opens up the possibility of more honest and productive debates about the politics of human-rights and peace advocacy, debates that would be focused on the likely costs and benefits of different styles of human-rights interventions and of particular rights claims and critiques.

Reframing the Uses and Limitations of Evenhandedness

A neither/nor approach thus ultimately aims to use human-rights principles to achieve a distinct form of both/and politics in which Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims can struggle together to create and control their own inclusive, nonviolent, and democratic forms of politics in the space “in between” and in opposition to the various warring parties. Developing this form of political struggle, however, is necessarily a long-term and exceedingly complex process. In particular, it is only through the slow and careful working through of conflict dynamics within and between different organizations and political groupings within civil society that one can have any hope of successfully generating common political identifications in opposition to unaccountable, antidemocratic, and illiberal power. Building a shared sense of being equal members of the same political community united by a shared set of rights requires acknowledging and reconfiguring, to some degree at least, existing — at times competing — ethnic and ideological identifications.

By articulating a larger ideological and strategic framework within which LTTE and government violations of rights can be battled together and where this shared struggle is accepted as necessary to making progress with either group, an effective neither/nor politics both requires and enables a sharper attunement to conflict dynamics than has sometimes been the case among human-rights advocates over the course of the Sri Lankan peace process. Just as proponents of peace need to recognize that defending basic human rights is indispensable for the achievement of their own central goal, so, too, human-rights advocates and proponents of a politics of neither/nor need to learn from conflict-resolution practitioners. Despite its challenge to the dominant modes of conflict resolution work in Sri Lanka, then, a neither/nor approach can be successful only to the extent that its proponents — and human-rights advocates in general — are better attuned to the play of ethnopolitical identifications and conflict dynamics when making their critical interventions. As part of this, something that resembles a practice of evenhandedness and balance is indispensable.

For example, during the first three and one-half years of the Sri Lankan peace process, many Tamil political activists were inhibited from joining the small number of human-rights advocates who were speaking out publicly against LTTE violations. This was not only because of fear of LTTE reprisals or simply because of ideological allegiance to the LTTE, but also because many Tamil activists saw the dominant approach of human-rights advocates as overly fixated on the crimes of the Tigers and insufficiently critical of the Sri Lankan government and military and their deep ties to Sinhalese supremacist conceptions of the Sri Lankan state. From this perspective, many Tamils remained silent in the face of Tiger killings and child recruitment out of a desire not to provide further ammunition for the propaganda work of Sinhalese nationalists.

Irrespective of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the criticism that most human-rights advocacy was “unbalanced” in its criticisms, the widespread nature of that impression among many Tamils suggests that human-rights advocates would have done well to frame their criticisms of the LTTE more clearly in terms of a global, neither/nor critique of all forms of violent, exclusive, antidemocratic power, which would also have put the structural and specific injustices of the Sri Lankan government front and center. Making clearer and more forceful criticisms of the government and/or the state, even in a context where the Tigers were the more frequent and bloody violators, would have provided greater cover for Tamils who might have been tempted to add their voices to such criticisms. It would have done so in part by undercutting the ability of Sinhalese supremacists to interpret the violations of the Tigers as evidence of a “terrorist” threat so urgent that it obscures the necessity of reforming the state and addressing Tamil grievances.

A neither/nor approach to peace and human rights, then, doesn’t rule out all concern with evenhandedness or balance. Yet the evenhandedness at work here is different in important ways from the evenhandedness of the official peace process that was forced onto or adopted by so much of Sri Lankan civil society. Rather than aiming to respect the interests of the negotiating/warring parties, it aims to address the concerns of nongovernmental political activists across different ethnic and ideological identifications. This form of evenhandedness works to facilitate, rather than to shut down, criticisms of human-rights violations without any pretense of producing equivalent effects on the different parties. What appears as balance in this context is perhaps better understood as an attempt to expand the space in between the warring parties. By making clear the full range of those actions, institutions, and parties open to criticism in the name of democratic and human rights, a neither/nor approach better illuminates the historical and structural context for understanding specific violations. It aims, in short, to make it more possible for everyone, regardless of their present ethnopolitical identifications, to criticize all closures of political space.

In another sense, too, evenhandedness should not simply be ruled out from serving as a useful tactic. However clear the advantages of the neither/nor approach, the argument here is not that it could or should be the sole mode of intervention in situations of protracted identity-based conflict. Indeed, were one truly to accept the risky, contextual, and tactical nature of all interventions in the name of peace or human rights, one would have to recognize that in some cases the risks of adopting the ideal of evenhandedness might themselves be worth taking. In other words, the theoretical critique of evenhandedness sketched out above doesn’t require the rejection of evenhandedness as a political tactic. For some organizations or political actors, invoking the ideal of evenhandedness might bring important enough benefits for its risks to be worth taking. This would most clearly be true for those organizations for whom maintaining access to the various parties in conflict is especially important, for example, representatives of foreign states that might usefully maintain channels of communication necessary for negotiations between warring parties, humanitarian NGOs and development organizations that work on both sides of a cease-fire line, or even local NGOs or activists who take on the role of maintaining contact across conflict lines in particularly tense times or locations.
For this sort of political work, it is generally necessary to adopt a nonconfrontational posture and to convince the relevant parties in conflict that one’s interventions aren’t going to weaken them vis-à-vis other parties and that one recognizes their basic interests and has no interest in challenging or undermining their power. In such cases, the language and tactics of evenhandedness are clearly very useful.

For such interventions not to be counterproductive, however, it is important that evenhandedness be recognized as a particular tactic for intervention, rather than a goal that can actually be achieved. The idea and language of evenhandedness, that is, needs to be understood as a sometimes useful fiction, but a fiction that can be dangerous for all the reasons argued above. Its risks need therefore to be clearly understood by those who choose to adopt it for tactical reasons, and measures need to be taken to reduce those risks to a minimum. Equally important, evenhandedness must not be allowed to monopolize the political space and to present itself as the only legitimate mode of intervention (as happened with such disastrous effects in Sri Lanka). More confrontational and critical approaches must not be silenced.
Indeed, the argument here is that the risks of tactical evenhandedness are in fact manageable only to the extent that such interventions are placed in a larger, more political, and more critical framework. According to this framework, the overall aim of all those working for peaceful and democratic transformation of a given conflict — whether foreign states and multilateral organizations, international NGOs,[Query ] local NGOs, or small-scale networks of activists — should be to defend and expand the space for democratic, nonmilitarist forms of politics that can challenge the hold of warring ethnonationalisms and the unaccountable power of their various representatives. The neither/nor approach is a crucial means to attain this goal, but not the only one: attempts at tactical evenhandedness or at “constructive engagement” designed to work in a balanced way with the warring parties can at times assist in this quest. But such attempts at evenhandedness need to be carried out with the overall goal of expanding the possibilities for democratic politics clearly in mind and only to the extent that one’s best judgment actually holds that such engagement is necessary to and consistent with this goal.

Fulfilling the Promise: Democratizing the Institutional Conditions for Human-Rights and Peace Advocacy

Since the Sri Lankan cease-fire collapsed further into de facto war in late 2005 and early 2006 and the “peace process” has become more and more of a misnomer, there have occurred a variety of international and local human-rights interventions that follow the general contours of the neither/nor approach sketched out above. These have included various reports and interventions by local human-rights groups that challenge Tiger, government, and other armed groups’ killings and disappearances, as well as a long and detailed report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. The latter report clearly states that the purpose of political killings over the course of the cease-fire “has been to repress and divide the population for political gain. Today many people — most notably, Tamil and Muslim civilians — face a credible threat of death for exercising freedoms of expression, movement, association, and participation in public affairs. The role of political killings in suppressing a range of human rights explains why members of civil society raised this more than any other issue.”

While increase in human-rights interventions is encouraging, they continue to have very limited effects. The force of the neither/nor approach remains primarily at the level of critique, so far without tangible effects, either on the warring parties or in terms of increased public protest or expanded opportunities to express oppositional views in public or to act in ways that defy the warring parties. Interventions that follow neither/nor principles remain the work of a very small network of activists, largely without official support or endorsement from established local NGOs or prominent members of civil society.

For the democratic promise of the neither/nor approach to be fulfilled, it will have to move beyond this small band of activists and ad hoc networks and begin to shape the discourse and practices of the larger world of professionalized civil society concerned with political reforms along liberal-democratic lines. But for the neither/nor approach to be taken up by this wider range of organizations and for the transformation of their political discourse and political strategy, in turn, to have meaningful democratic effects on Sri Lankan society, professionalized liberal-democratic civil society must itself first be significantly democratized. Without more inclusive, representative, egalitarian, and contestable institutions and practices, Sri Lankan NGOs, intellectuals, and activists who invoke the principles of peace, justice, and human rights while pushing for liberal and/or democratic political reforms will remain cut off from the broader popular support base needed to give them their democratic energies and credentials. It is only by being in close physical, intellectual, and political contact with those actually caught in the space in between the warring factions that Sri Lanka’s liberal-democratic civil-society organizations can come to understand and identify with their concerns in such a way as to speak for and defend them effectively.

In its present form, the world of established liberal-democratic reform-minded civil-society organizations suffers from severe democratic deficits. Primarily staffed and controlled by Sri Lanka’s small, cosmopolitan, internationally connected, and English-speaking middle-class (read elite), this community of activists and organizations is neither socially nor politically representative of or very in touch with the experiences of the larger Sri Lankan public. Elite civil-society NGOs are also generally quite disconnected from the lower-profile, less professionalized, and more grassroots NGOs and popular movements that work on human-rights, justice, and governance issues outside of Colombo, as well as from the larger public with whom they work.

In part because of this lack of sustained social and institutional connections to non-elite Sri Lankans, established, politically reform-minded NGOs and activists find their primary sources of financial and ideological support in foreign states, multilateral organizations, and international NGOs, rather than in their own fellow citizens. This nondemocratic relationship at the heart of reform-minded civil society — a relationship of mutual, but unequal dependence between more and less powerful elites —helps undermine the democratic potential of Sri Lankan civil society in a number of interconnected ways.

Most obviously, it does so by giving international donors the power to set the overall political agenda of professional liberal-democratic civil society. Despite the rhetoric of and in some cases genuine belief in civil society as an independent source for transparency, accountability, and other democratic values, the financial leverage of donors means that much of the time, Sri Lankan NGOs function as the implementing agencies for policies devised elsewhere, without the knowledge or input of Sri Lankans. This instrumentalization of local civil-society organizations can take different forms. It can, at times, be fairly direct, as when NGOs are funded to perform specific tasks that they would not independently choose to pursue, or, as we have seen, when they are effectively restrained from being anything other than loyal agents of the donor ideology of evenhandedness and related models of peacebuilding.
The transformation of putatively independent NGOs and activists into instruments of nondemocratic donor agendas also takes place through the very form of the internationally financed projects they are funded to carry out. According to the implicit logic of such work, political change is imagined to come from discrete, short-term interventions carried out by Colombo-based elite organizations and shaped by the bureaucratic norms of proposal writing, budgeting requirements, monitoring and evaluation reports, reviews by consultants, and so on. But rather than aiming at or facilitating the long-term political organization and empowerment of marginalized communities or those who have suffered injustice, such projects generally seek to train or to produce knowledge about non-elite populations (refugees, farmers, child soldiers, etc.) so that their needs and actual or potential crises can be better managed by others (the Sri Lankan state, INGOs, or other international organizations). With their work shaped to a large degree by the imperative to produce and disseminate this sort of knowledge, and with the bureaucratic management and control it makes possible, local NGOs and activists have little room to develop or pursue their own democratic agendas, but instead find themselves incorporated into the larger apparatus of global governmentality.

Finally, the dependence of professionalized liberal-democratic NGOs on foreign support over the course of the violence-filled peace process has provoked an anti-NGO backlash among many Sri Lankans, most strongly from Sinhalese, but including those from all ethnicities and religions. Among many Sinhalese, there are grave and growing suspicions that NGOs are the covert agents of international forces designed to destroy Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity (by dividing the island along ethnic lines), to weaken its sovereignty (through forms of neocolonial economic exploitation), and to undermine its cultural traditions (through increased Christian conversions of Buddhists and Hindus). Unfortunately, the anti-NGO and anti-Western backlash from Sinhalese (and to a lesser extent Tamil) nationalists — born of colonial humiliation and half a century of majoritarian hegemony and now exacerbated by fears of loss of sovereignty due to economic globalization — has been misread and underplayed by international donors and their elite brokers in professional liberal-democratic civil society. This is in part due to an insufficient appreciation of the roles that Sri Lanka’s colonial legacy and resentment at class inequalities continue to play in Sri Lanka’s conflicts and in part due to the lack of social contact between elite Colombo NGO leaders and the proponents — and non-elite recipients — of anti-NGO ideology. This social and ideological gulf severely limits the ability of established liberal-democratic NGOs to reach out beyond Colombo to a larger audience of potential supporters.

For all these reasons, then, if they wish to do more than preach to the small world of the already converted, Sri Lanka’s elite, liberal-democratic, reform-minded NGOs must begin to open up space — inside their organizations, between different organizations, and between the world of elite NGOs and the rest of Sri Lanka — in which their institutional forms and political priorities are open to question and to change. They must begin to address directly the widespread suspicions about their foreign connections and elite status; they must diversify their staffs and actively seek greater contact with and support from non-elite NGOs and the wider public, in part through adopting different modes of political organizing and different forms of rhetoric and dissemination of information; and they must devise ways to challenge their donors to take seriously their own liberal-democratic ideals of transparency, autonomy, and accountability so that the specific political agendas of international donors, as well as the bureaucratic and governmentalized organizational forms they insist upon, are open to criticism and change.

It is only when these democratic deficits begin to be addressed that a politics of neither/nor and human-rights interventions more generally have any chance of gaining the political traction necessary to pose a real challenge to established modes of power. As it now stands, especially with violence and fear reaching ever greater levels, the most one can hope for is for the small community of activists already attached to a neither/nor approach to continue to plant their seeds of critique and challenge and to continue to make use of what remains of free political space and of democratic energies and habits to see their ideas and practices further accepted and institutionalized. The hope must be that someday, sooner rather than later, the political and organizational context will shift in ways that allow for the growth of something resembling a democratic neither/nor movement for social and political change, one that could increase the chances that Sri Lanka’s next “peace process” will be both peaceful and sustainable.

Final Report of the Review Mission for FLICT (Facilitating Local Initiatives for Conflict Transformation)

Final Report of the Review Mission for FLICT
(Facilitating Local Initiatives for Conflict Transformation)
Colombo, Sri Lanka

Review Conducted between 25 February and 15 March 2005
Report Completed 5 April 2005
Revised 28 June 2005

Head of Review Mission and Chief Author of the Report:
Alan Keenan

Members of the Review Mission:
Sunila Abeysekera, Dunja Brede, Wijaya Jayatilika, and Devanesan Nesiah


“There is no doubt that the war has given rise to a multiplicity of problems at the community level. Some of them need direct assistance. Certain types of intervention at community level can avoid the violence at societal level that often accompanies civil wars. There are prejudices, stereotypes at the level of society that need to be tackled. But the key question is, does the focus at community level allow such interventions to ignore the more powerful forces behind the conflict -- the ruling elite? Does it blur the links between ruling elites and social forces represented at community level including some of the NGO's? Fundamentally the focus on an amorphous category called the "community" ignores the power relations that underlie conflicts. In addition, when one looks at poor people caught in the middle of conflicts and trying to survive, it is not clear how justified is the demand for them to be leaders in conflict resolution.” “The most important step that donors need to make in order to get away from these liberal utopias is to recognize the specificities of histories of different societies. For example, there are numerous roads to capitalism, or democracy can and will evolve very differently in different societies. Secondly is the primacy of internal social and political forces in bringing about these changes. Internal processes become even more important in the case of objectives such as strengthening democracy or conflict resolution. Democracy cannot be designed through donor-supported projects, nor can plural values be inculcated by conflict resolution experts. These come through long term processes of change in social structures, socialization processes and values within such core elements of society like the family. In the context of such changes donor interventions can make a difference. Total transformation of developing societies is neither a feasible nor a legitimate objective for donor agencies. This means strengthening the capacity of agencies to understand the local context better and intervening where possible.”

From: Sunil Bastian, "Foreign Aid, Globalization and Conflict in Sri Lanka," in Mayer, Rajasingham-Senanayake, and Thangarajah, eds., Building Local Capacities for Peace (Colombo: 2003), p. 148 and 150.



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary

Immediate Priority Recommendations

Section I – Background

Section II – Findings and Analysis

1. Strengths of FLICT’s programming to date
a) Existing Programming
b) FLICT’s Project Unit
c) FLICT’s Unique Niche and Its Transformative Possibilities

2. Weaknesses of FLICT’s work to date
a) Organizational and Administrative Weaknesses
i. Delays and Excessive Negotiation
ii. Overly Complex Organization, Too Small an Administration
iii. Insufficient Local Knowledge
iv. FLICT’s Overly Technical and Perfectionist Approach
b) The Missing Pieces
i. Underdeveloped Vision(s) of Conflict Transformation
ii. Confusion of and within existing focus areas

Section III – Rethinking the Peace Building Possibilities of Civil Society

Section IV – Our Recommendations

1. FLICT’s Primary Challenges

2. Focus Areas
a) Refocusing the Focus Areas
i. Revised Focus Area One: “Supporting peace through transformative cultural
practices,” or, “Supporting culture(s) of peaceful coexistence”
ii. Revised Focus Area Two: “Promoting inter-ethnic linkages for conflict
management”
iii. Revised Focus Area Three: “Building democratic and pluralist forms of
governance”
b) Rethinking Focus Areas

3. “Capacity building for conflict transformation within and through civil society”

4. Recommendations with Respect to Collaboration with Other “Peace Funds”

5. Recommendations with Respect to Monitoring, Evaluation, and Impact Assessment

6. Recommendations With Respect to Decision-Making and Administrative Structures
a) Project Unit Staffing
b) Intermediaries
c) Consultant Pool
d) Advisors
e) Steering Committee
f) Donor Group

7. Recommendations with Respect to FLICT’s Response to the Effects of the Tsunami

Endnotes

Annex One: Some Examples of Promising Conflict Transformation Work Supported By FLICT

Annex Two: Further Thoughts On The Vexed Relationship Between Human Rights Protections and Conflict Transformation

Annex Three: Brief Comparative Analysis of Other Sri Lankan Peace Funds

Annex Four: Analysis of CONTACT “Proposal to Enhance the Capacity, Effectiveness, and Impact of Grass-roots Practitioners Engaged in Local Initiatives for Conflict Transformation”

Annex Five: Recommended Guiding Principles: Lessons Learned

Annex Six: Chronology of Meetings and Interviews Conducted by Members of the Review Team, (Not Including Meetings with FLICT Project Unit Staff) March 2005

Annex Seven: Review Mission Terms of Reference





Executive Summary

The evaluation that follows finds that the joint DFID-GTZ initiative known as FLICT – Facilitating Local Initiatives in Conflict Transformation – is a valuable, if highly imperfect endeavor, worth continued funding and support beyond the end of its initial three year funding period. However, FLICT still has a ways to go before it fulfills its promise of making a significant impact in support of civil society initiatives for non-violent and democratic transformations of Sri Lanka’s multiple violent conflicts. In the report that follows, we outline the strengths and the weaknesses of FLICT’s organization, its management and administrative style, its funding priorities, and its vision of conflict transformation. We find much that is promising about FLICT, some that is improving, but also much that still needs to change.

The review mission was happy to see that positive work is being done by a range of groups being supported by FLICT’s funds. The review team was also impressed with the dedicated and talented staff of the FLICT Project Unit and by the unique potential that FLICT contains as a fund and implementing organization oriented towards supporting the development of local level civil society capacities for conflict transformation.

However, the members of the review mission were also struck by the many difficulties that FLICT has had in reaching its potential. FLICT’s work with its partners and potential partner organizations has been hampered by a host of management problems that have often prevented the establishment of effective working relationships. This has been especially true with its would-be “intermediaries,” whose work with smaller, more grassroots organizations was to have carried much of the administrative workload of FLICT. A central cause of these problems was the inadequate number of staff that the FLICT Project Unit was initially given to work with. This was made worse by staff turnover and by FLICT’s inability to find a lasting National Coordinator. In addition, FLICT has, until very recent changes, been saddled with an unnecessarily complex organizational structure, which made the under-staffed Project Unit dependent on the decision-making powers of a small Steering Committee that met infrequently.

FLICT’s work has also been limited by the lack of a clear vision of what “conflict transformation” can mean and is best pursued in the present Sri Lankan context. This is one reason for the fact that the three main “focus areas” of FLICT funding remain less conceptually coherent, and less oriented towards clear objectives, than they should be. To the extent that there exists a vision of conflict transformation within FLICT’s work, it has tended to be overly technical, paying insufficient attention to the role that unequal relations of power play in producing and/or exacerbating even local level conflict, and how such dynamics often permeate the very civil society organizations attempting to mitigate or resolve such conflicts. This approach to conflict transformation is partly explained by the absence of deeply grounded and detailed knowledge of Sri Lankan conflict dynamics, which has been due in part to the absence of full-time, senior level, Sri Lankan staff. It is also a product of FLICT’s initial optimism about the potential of the Track One peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE, which imagined that civil society’s job would simply be to support and deepen an essentially sound process. This has not proven to be the case, as both the conflict transformative potential of civil society and the progress of the formal peace process have disappointed expectations.

In what follows, we make a series of recommendations designed to address these fundamental challenges to FLICT’s success:

• Based on an analysis of the present political situation and peace building needs of civil society organizations, we recommend specific ways in which the Focus Areas and much of the work being done under existing rubrics can be reorganized to be more conceptually coherent, more clearly linked to outcomes and impact, and more effective at addressing issues of power and inequality that underlie many conflict situations. We recommend that our proposed changes be discussed and adapted through a collaborative process that involves the FLICT Project Unit and FLICT partner organizations and that relies on principles of Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment.
• Given that our political and conflict analysis suggests the role of civil society actors should shift from supporting the track one peace process to strengthening conflict transformation capacities at track two and three, we recommend that FLICT make various forms of capacity building work central to its mission. This will involve strengthened organizational and conceptual capacity both for FLICT and for its partners. This means conflict transformation and organizational development trainings for FLICT partners, built along participatory and practice-based lines, rather than through the importation of technical knowledge. This organizational development work should also be oriented towards the internal democratization and conflict transformation within partner organizations. This form of work should function as learning processes for both FLICT and its partners, helping to build deeper connections between the various parts of the world of FLICT, and helping FLICT develop a deeper knowledge of local conflict, and conflict transformation, dynamics.
• We recommend that FLICT continue to work with those intermediary organizations it has recently established formal relationships with and pursue others when they seem to have potential. However, we think it is clear that the original concept of having intermediary organizations doing most of FLICT project management work is simply unrealistic. This means that FLICT will likely not be able to fund or manage as many projects as originally imagined, though it should eventually, through capacity building efforts, be able to build a pool of local level consultants who can assist partner organizations with project development, monitoring, and evaluation.
• We recommend that FLICT collaborate with other Sri Lankan peace funds on its capacity building projects, including the development of a pool of local consultants for project management, monitoring, and evaluation.
• We recommend that FLICT continue to develop its monitoring system in collaboration with a consultant with experience in working with NGO’s in developing countries on issues of monitoring, evaluation, and impact assessment.
• While we do not recommend that FLICT make any major changes to its programming in order to respond to the effects of the tsunami, we do recommend that its capacity and network building work should try to take account of the tensions and conflicts emerging within and between civil society actors emerging since the tsunami, including changing attitudes towards international donors and NGO’s.
• We strongly recommend that FLICT do all it can to hire a permanent National Coordinator, as well as a program officer dedicated to capacity building. If it continues to prove impossible to find a suitable National Coordinator over the next 3-4 months, we recommend that FLICT explore other ways to increase the local ownership and conflict knowledge of its Project Unit, for example through further conflict transformation skills training of the whole team and participatory management models that will increase the collective responsibility and authority of the local team members.



Immediate Priority Recommendations

To GTZ, BMZ, and DFID:

1. We recommend that the project be funded beyond the end of 2005. Given our suggested reconceptualization of FLICT as largely oriented towards sustained and sustainable capacity building, it is imperative that FLICT have at least an additional two years of support.

2. It is equally important that FLICT hire a national coordinator as soon as possible – one who before the end of the calendar year shows real evidence of being effective and committed to FLICT for the long haul.

To the FLICT Steering Committee and Project Unit:

1. It is important that a National Coordinator be hired as soon as possible – and that they be working well and fully integrated into FLICT’s operations by the end of the calendar year. If this simply proves impossible, serious efforts must be made to increase the conflict transformation skills and collective authority of the local programme officers.

2. Only slightly less important is that the program in capacity building be established as a priority. We would recommend that a consultant with experience in organizational development and in conflict transformation (or perhaps one of each), be hired to assist in the design of a practice-based training program in conflict transformation. They would work closely with the members of the CONTACT group, as well as in coordination with other peacebuilding funds and/or donors interested in assisting in the development of a locally based pool of conflict transformation consultants.

3. We also recommend that FLICT hire an additional program officer to coordinate their capacity building work.

4. Finally, we recommend that FLICT hire a consultant with experience in working with NGO’s in developing countries on issues of monitoring, evaluation, and impact assessment.

To GTZ, BMZ, DFID, and FLICT:

1. We recommend that the new terms of reference for the Steering Committee and the Donor Group be finalized and reconciled as soon as possible, along the lines suggested in Section III.4.e and f.

2. We recommend that a further evaluation be conducted within a month or two of June 2006, which should give enough time to judge how FLICT has been able to absorb and respond to our recommendations and the suggested re-orientation of its work.





Section I – Background

The original concept paper for Facilitating Local Initiatives in Conflict Transformation was completed in March of 2003, and implementation of the GTZ and DFID funded project began soon thereafter. It wasn’t until the end of 2003, however, that progress was made in operationalizing the concept, with projects being funded and getting off the ground.

The underlying concept and objective of FLICT has always been ambitious. Its original purpose was to “select and strengthen civil society groups who can help prevent conflict and build stability in fields critical for long term peace.” This ambition has always been FLICT’s greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. The hopes placed in the ability of a single internationally sponsored fund to make a significant impact over a relatively short period of time in a set of conflicts as intractable as Sri Lanka’s was always inspiring, but also unrealistic. In FLICT’s case, this was in large part, as we explain in the pages that follow, because FLICT was not given the organizational strength and staff levels necessary to get off the ground quickly and effectively.

As is recognized clearly in the Terms of Reference appointing this Review Mission, FLICT has been struggling to recover from its slow start and from a series of significant organizational and conceptual challenges. The members of the Review Mission were asked to focus on the following “challenges”:

• how does FLICT fit in with the other international donor funds for peace building and their approaches to supporting civil society organizations as agents of conflict transformation? Do there exist possibilities for coordination or collaboration between the funds?
• how useful are FLICT’s “focus areas” for conceptualizing and directing its work and the work of its partners? Do they need to be re-imagined and re-organized?
• does the concept of “intermediary” organizations, through which much of FLICT’s work was supposed to be managed, still make sense? Are there ways of re-conceptualizing how FLICT works with its “intermediary” organizations that would allow them to work more effectively? Are there other Sri Lankan organizations that could function as effective FLICT intermediaries?
• should FLICT consider reorienting its work in order to respond to effects of the tsunami and the new conflict dynamics it has brought in its wake?

The review mission was also asked to make recommendations with respect to FLICT’s program management and its policies and practices for monitoring and evaluation.

In order to tackle this large set of complicated issues, the members of the review mission spent two and a half weeks -- between the 25th of February and the 15th of March, 2005 – traveling and interviewing a wide range of stakeholders. Team members conducted four field trips to different parts of Sri Lanka to meet FLICT partner organizations and to get a sense of the context in which they do their work. Members of the team visited Jaffna; and traveled to the Vanni, to the Southern Province, and to the Eastern Province, all via Kandy and stopping at multiple destinations. The review team also met with a long list of people in Colombo – representatives of other donors, FLICT partners or potential partners, and representatives of NGO’s and research institutions working in the field of conflict transformation and peace building. (See Annex Six for a complete list of groups and individuals interviewed by different members of the review mission.) The review team was headed by Dr. Alan Keenan (Assistant Professor, Bryn Mawr College, USA) and included Sunila Abeyasekera (Executive Director, INFORM), Dr. Dunja Brede (GTZ Programme Officer for International Cooperation in Context of Crisis, Conflicts, and Disaster), Dr. Wijaya Jayatilika (Senior Lecturer, University of Peradeniya), and Dr. Devanesan Nesiah (Consultant, Centre for Policy Alternatives). Also joining the team for a number of interviews and discussions was Tom Beloe, Social Development Advisor for DFID and at the time of the review mission the DFID representative on the FLICT Steering Committee.

It is important to note the unique nature of the moment during which the review was conducted. The suffering caused by the December 26th tsunami and the massive efforts at relief have clearly changed the landscape in which FLICT and its partners have to work. Yet even prior to the tsunami, the decline in the fortunes of the “Track One” peace process and the rising levels of political violence and tensions and violence has produced a much more conflict-ridden social and political environment – very different than what existed when the concept paper was written and the organization established.

As for FLICT’s own history, it has been through a lot already, and most recently has made major changes in response to an organizational development study conducted in November 2004 by Richard Slater. This very useful study endorsed the hiring of three new programme officers and led to the reorganization of the Steering Committee and to a new division of labor between the Steering Committee and the Project Unit. These changes have been uniformly positive. Also encouraging have been the emerging relationships FLICT has established with a number of intermediary organizations.

The review mission was thus evaluating a FLICT in transition, showing signs of improvement, but also carrying a lot of “baggage,” and having to work within a society in great upheaval and facing a very uncertain future. These factors have posed significant challenges to the review mission, as has the sheer volume of material – documents, organizations, projects, history, personnel, locations, and contexts – that we have had to process in a very short time. We hope that the report that follows is useful to the various stakeholders that make up the rather large and complex world of FLICT.



Section II – Findings and Analysis

1. Strengths of FLICT’s programming to date

a) Existing Programming

With the assistance of FLICT’s project unit, the review mission conducted four separate field trips to meet FLICT-funded projects and other organizations working on peace and conflict transformation issues outside of Colombo. On these trips, and again at the partner days, the review team was pleased to meet a large number of smart and dedicated people doing conflict transformation work whose initial impact seems quite positive. (For a brief and necessarily incomplete sample of some of more promising groups we were able to visit, see Annex One.) Given how limited the team’s encounters were, and the early stage of most of the projects, it is impossible to make anything close to definitive statements about the impact of these projects. Nonetheless, in all the cases cited in our Annex, and in others as well, we could see that the local FLICT partners were responding to very real needs and desires of their communities. In all
cases, these were needs whose fulfillment would seem to promise significant conflict-reducing or mitigating efffects.

It is worth noting here the prevalence of two particular approaches to conflict transformation work in these different projects: one places community-level inter-ethnic encounters at the heart of their conflict transformation work; the other tries to mitigate or prevent conflict by bringing people together through their shared concern with addressing an immediate or mid-range development need of community.

Many FLICT-supported projects have clearly reached the stage of identifying important conflict related needs at the level of local communities. What FLICT now needs to encourage is the deepening and systematizing of this work, so that there are clearer connections between meeting these needs and producing longer term positive effects.

This kind of work would certainly be one of the chief tasks of the “intermediary” organizations that FLICT has begun to establish formal relationships with. These new relationships, the product of much hard work on the part of the FLICT Project Unit and the various organizations involved, contain much promise. Similarly, the emerging network of FLICT-supported partners that calls itself CONTACT shows much positive potential. (Annex Four discusses in detail the CONTACT proposal for a program in conflict transformation capacity building.). While each of these initiatives and networks faces significant challenges ahead, it is already an achievement that they have come into being, and it is important that they be given adequate support over the next few years so that their full potential can be known and realized.

At the level of FLICT’s own independent initiatives, Sunil Wijesiriwardena’s work on “internal transformation” is particularly promising. Early signs of its positive effects could already be seen in the animated discussion it provoked during partner day. While FLICT still needs to explain the idea of internal transformation in clearer and more practical ways, it is nonetheless obvious that the goal of internal organizational development along egalitarian and inclusive lines is of real importance for many people working in FLICT partner organization. Further developing this line of thinking and practice could help intermediaries do a better job supporting and learning from the local groups they work with, and would constitute a significant form of capacity building for both sorts of organizations (as well as for FLICT itself).

b) FLICT’s Project Unit

Despite the many different criticisms of FLICT’s work that the Review Mission received, we heard nearly universal respect for the unusual levels of dedication displayed by the FLICT Project Unit, especially by its international advisor, Dr. Stephanie Schell-Faucon.

The willingness of the Project Unit staff to reflect on their own practice and revise their practices in light of criticism and self-reflection is reflected in the progress that FLICT as a whole has already begun to make in reorganizing itself and strengthening its capacity to do effective work. The dedication and talent of the three recently hired Program Officers is another major asset for FLICT that it should do its best to make the most of.

c) FLICT’s Unique Niche and Its Transformative Possibilities

The Review Mission team was also convinced that FLICT has the potential to occupy a unique niche relative to other donor peace building funds and that this niche deserves further development (but also clarification). The emphasis within FLICT on building local capacities for effective conflict transformation – through network building, through direct training, and through its emerging emphasis on organizational learning and democratization -- is important and not presently matched by any of the other three peace funds (USAID-OTI, UNDP, CHA). (We discuss the possibilities for FLICT collaborating with the other funds on capacity building issues in Section IV.4.)

2. Weaknesses of FLICT’s work to date

Despite the progress FLICT has made and the potential it shows for increasing impact, the Review Mission encountered much evidence of systematic weaknesses in a number of crucial areas of FLICT’s work. While some progress has already been made in addressing these issues, much progress still remains to be achieved.

a) Organizational and Administrative Weaknesses

i. Delays and Excessive Negotiation

There was much frustration expressed by a large numbers of partners, intermediaries, and potential partners and intermediaries with the slowness and complexity of dealing with FLICT. Many complained about the length of time it had taken for FLICT to announce its final decision on funding. Particularly problematic were those cases where the FLICT Project Unit had engaged in extensive and time-consuming negotiations with a potential partner, only to end up rejecting their proposal – or, as in a number of cases we encountered, without yet having made a decision. A fair number of organizations we spoke with also expressed displeasure at the lack of follow up by FLICT after it had made initial contact – either in the form of direct, one-to-one contract, or through collective meetings like those held in Trincomalee and Kandy.

While it was impossible for the review team to verify each individual complaint, the large number of separate complaints is evidence that there has been a problem of some seriousness. Indeed, the first hand reports we received merely confirm what FLICT’s own progress reports and Richard Slater’s organizational study have already made clear. This seems particularly to have been the case with the various intermediaries with whom FLICT has been negotiating over the course of many meetings and multiple iterations of proposals. Here, the risks of protracted negotiation are particularly high, as an effective relationship between FLICT and an intermediary organization depends to a large degree on trust and reliability. It is encouraging to note, however, that functioning intermediary relationships have now been established with IMPACT and the UCDC-FORUPP coalition. There are also clear signs that with its three new Program Officers FLICT is now able to process funding proposals much more quickly.

ii. Overly Complex Organization, Too Small an Administration

Much of these and other difficulties have come from FLICT’s overly complex organizational design and its under-resourced administrative structure. From the beginning, the FLICT Project Unit was much too small to do the work of establishing a new and politically ambitious organization aiming to work in all regions of the country. On top of this, FLICT has not been able to hire and retain even its limited staff. The lack of a national coordinator for most of its existence, the present lack of both a national coordinator and assistant national coordinator, the coming and going of consultants working on key aspects of its strategic planning – all this would have caused serious problems for even the best designed organization working in the most propitious context. Even now, after the addition of three program officers, the FLICT Project Unit remains overburdened. These problems would have been less substantial had FLICT not faced such difficulty in finding effective intermediaries, which in the original FLICT design were expected to carry much of the organizational and administrative weight. Instead, FLICT has been bedeviled not only by a difficulty in finding intermediaries, but has also had to spend valuable staff time on the challenging task of defining their role and basic characteristics and how they might best interconnect with the other parts of the FLICT universe.

Finally, additional delay and confusion has come from difficulties coordinating between the FLICT Project Unit and the Steering Committee, whose approval has been needed for many matters better left to the Project Unit staff, and which has met too infrequently and with too few regular attendees. Virtually all of the Colombo based project administrators and donors whom we spoke with who were familiar with FLICT’s work expressed dismay at the overly complex and time-consuming nature of FLICT’s decision making process. We are happy that everyone involved in FLICT seems in basic agreement now that the old system was dysfunctional and that reforms were necessary.

iii. Insufficient Local Knowledge

Another, less remarked upon cause of delay has been the inadequate number of full-time FLICT staff members with deep levels of knowledge about Sri Lankan conflict dynamics. (This would have been less of a problem had the FLICT Project Unit found a lasting and effective National Coordinator and had attendance at the Steering Committee meetings been more regular.) Thus while FLICT was expected to be proactive in searching out possible partners and intermediaries, there simply weren’t enough FLICT personnel at any given time with deep knowledge of Sri Lankan politics and conflict issues to take up this task in an effective way. It is our belief that this lack of full-time (as opposed to occasional) local expertise has also contributed substantially to three other problems areas highlighted below: 1) the continuing conceptual uncertainty within and between the focus areas, 2) the absence of adequate conflict analysis to guide the work in the focus areas (only recently rectified to some degree with the various consultant reports for Media and Information Transfer and for Reducing Tension in Multiethnic Towns), and 3) the lack of overall strategic thinking about the various forms that “conflict transformation” might take in today’s Sri Lanka and how best to choose between them and apply them in given situations.

iv. FLICT’s Overly Technical and Perfectionist Approach

Perhaps partly as an effect of these overlapping problems – the overlying complex organization, the absence of effective intermediaries, inadequate numbers of staff, particularly full-time, long-term, local staff with political expertise – there seems to have developed a particular, and at times self-defeating, form of perfectionism within the FLICT Project Unit. A large amount of time seems to have been spent perfecting guidelines and criteria, and leading prospective partners through multiple meetings and exchanges to guarantee that their projects and thinking meet the criteria. As one person familiar with FLICT said to us, “FLICT gets too involved in micro-management. It’s almost as if the are trying to develop a ‘better civil society’ that can properly write proposals and deal with donors.” This danger of “losing the forest for the trees” – a phrase that a number of people used when referring to the Project Unit’s style of work – has been particularly evident in the work done trying to establish relationships with prospective intermediaries. (We have more to say about the issue of intermediaries in Section IV.6.b.)

More generally, the FLICT Project Unit seems to have approached the original concept paper as if it were a technical, even mathematical, blueprint, which it is the task of the FLICT staff to apply, or implement, in as technically accurate a way as possible – rather than seeing it as a living and imperfect document that needs to be constantly re-interpreted and made FLICT’s own based on a considered sense of Sri Lanka’s various conflicts and how best to engage with and transform them. This has contributed to an approach to funding decisions that many people described to us as “risk averse.”

b) The Missing Pieces

The problems of process sketched out above have seemed to be both the cause and the effect of two major substantive problems, which we sketch out below.

i. Underdeveloped Vision(s) of Conflict Transformation

Perhaps the most worrying weakness of FLICT programming to date is the apparent absence of a clear vision, or of work towards developing a vision – or visions – of what conflict transformation entails and how it can best be achieved. While the FLICT Project Unit has had some preliminary discussions about the nature of conflict transformation in some of its introductory workshops, the further development of a dialogue around what conflict transformation might mean in the present Sri Lankan context doesn’t seem to have become a FLICT priority.

There are certainly lots of different ongoing projects that are infused with good intentions and certain intuitive ideas about how to transform and/or reduce the negative aspects of violent conflict. But rarely do these projects seem to be informed by any rigorous analysis or clear strategy for resolving or positively transforming conflicts. In some cases, the groups doing work do have some past practical experience in conflict transformation (e.g., Sathyodaya’s stories of working with traders in the Kandy market in a successful effort to reduce violent conflicts), but there is little evidence to suggest how widespread these experiences might be, much less any documentation or FLICT-wide discussion of the lessons these examples might hold for other groups.

The unarticulated assumption that seems to lie behind the way in which “conflict transformation” is often discussed within the world of FLICT is to see it as a kind of socially and politically neutral technique that can be taught and learned in training workshops over a relatively short period and then “implemented” at the local level. The very use of the term “conflict transformation,” without any specification of the kind of transformation desired – e.g., democratic, egalitarian, economically efficient, non-violent, etc. – can easily be taken to imply that it is a technical, non-ideological, kind of work, a form of knowledge independent of local Sri Lankan contexts and at least potentially divorced from relations of power. It is doubtful that anyone among the FLICT Project Unit, Steering Committee, Advisors, or Donors would endorse such a viewpoint. Yet this is frequently the implicit vision of conflict transformation that circulates among FLICT’s partner organizations, both in their written materials and in the way they speak of their desire for conflict transformation “capacity building” trainings.

The tendency to imagine “conflict transformation” as a non-political technical skill is arguably encouraged by the lack of a strong focus within FLICT on the necessity of recognizing and engaging with relationships of power in order to transform conflicts in less violent and more just directions. To the extent that there is a dominant model of conflict transformation within FLICT – understood here as the totality of all the activities and writings associated with FLICT and its partners – it would seem to be a more psychological one that emphasizes the importance of bringing people together so as to undermine stereotypes, reduce fear, and open up space for new social connections. Thus there is relatively little emphasis placed within FLICT documents or within its partner’s project on learning how best to engage with issues of power, whether at the local level, or in relation to the peace process and questions of human rights.

This should, nonetheless, be an important objective for FLICT: to work patiently to begin a discussion about the variety of possible modes of engaging with power dynamics for those who work on peace and “conflict transformation”– and to learn from those groups and activists who have figured out ways – often very subtle and low-key ways – of engaging with such issues. (Such a goal would be particularly important for the kind of work that FLICT presently wishes to do under the rubric of “Reducing Tensions in Multiethnic Towns,” as well as for the work we recommend under the new rubric of “Building Democratic and Pluralist Forms of Governance.”) The emerging discussion around issues of “internal transformation,” which clearly raises issues of power dynamics at the interpersonal and intra-institutional level, might offer a way into discussions about how to address and ultimately transform unequal and unjust relations of power at the macro-political level.

One important area in which such questions of power need to be addressed in a more direct way concerns the proper response to the many serious violations of human rights that have occurred over the last three years of tenuous “peace.” So far in FLICT’s programming, human rights seem to play a relatively small, or at least unarticulated, role. And to the limited extent that one can determine the outlines within FLICT of a working definition of “conflict transformation,” the active protection of human rights – unless they are defined in a very broad way – doesn’t seem to be one of its essential aspects. Unfortunately, the history of Sri Lanka’s embattled peace process offers clear evidence that the failure to protect basic human rights can undermine the trust and security essential to successful negotiation and peace building. This is particularly true for the multiethnic Eastern Province, where human rights violations of various kinds have been undermining both inter- and intra-communal trust. It is thus not an accident that two of the few FLICT projects in which human rights protections play a significant role involve young Muslims in the Eastern Province: the collaboration between Beacon of the East and SIM-Sri Lanka, and the recently approved project by ERRO Lanka in Akkaraipattu. That these programs are being funded is an encouraging sign. They may well offer evidence and experience that can be useful to the process of incorporating human rights protections more fully into FLICT’s conceptualization of democratic, pluralist, conflict transformation. (For further discussion of the necessity and challenge of integrating human rights issues and questions of power into the work of conflict transformation, see Annex Two.)

ii. Confusion of and within existing focus areas

This lack of a clear vision, or plan for developing a vision, of conflict transformation helps to explain some of the problems with the existing conceptualization and management of FLICT’s focus areas. These problems extend beyond the obvious one that some of the areas in the original concept paper are generating very few or no proposals. Two important issues we see here are first, the fact that the focus areas are not clearly enough linked to objectives, or intended impact, and second, a lack of clarity about the relation of target groups being worked with (e.g., youth, or journalists) and the problems being addressed or the objectives being sought.

These problems are most clear in the case of the “Media and Information Transfer” area. Here, the emphasis on working with and training journalists has at times sat uncomfortably with the transformative goal of making use of the media and the arts to support the peace process and peaceful management of conflict. For instance, we received complaints from some journalists that they resented being placed together with more advocacy-oriented arts and cultural workers, especially as this seemed to work against their growing identity as professionals whose value lay in their ability to report objectively and without political affiliation. A related problem is evident from the reports of the two Media and Information workshops. There one can see so many different sorts of actors – journalists, artists and cultural activists, and NGO staff with an interest in media issues – with such different approaches and expertise that it is hardly surprising that the ambitious networks and shared projects they intended to develop have yet to come to fruition. This case offers a lesson in the dangers of network-building for the sake of network-building: enthusiasm for collaborative work across different organizations expressed during workshops funded by a donor should be not confused with the kind of independent motivation and dedication necessary to sustain an effective and lasting network. It is important to note that the difficulties facing the Media and Information Transfer focus area have been compounded by the change in political context from FLICT’s inception: given the lack of official level peace process for the past two years, there has been very little in the way of “information” that is to be “transferred” to the public.

In the case of the other two focus areas FLICT has ended up concentrating on – “Encouraging a Positive Role for Youth” and “Reducing Tension in Multi-Ethnic Towns” – there are related, though less serious, issues. In the case of the former, it isn’t clear what a “positive” role for youth would look like, or how working with and through the intended target – young people – is supposed to lead to “positive” outcomes. More precisely, it isn’t generally clear, at least from our limited investigations, the exact ways in which the “youthfulness” of youth contains any particular advantage for conflict transformation purposes, and thus why the activities being done under its rubric wouldn’t more usefully be included in other categories.

In the case of work done under the heading of “Reducing Tensions in Multi-Ethnic Towns,” the danger is that it includes so many different possible techniques, activities, and target groups, and is such a complex task and ambitious objective, that its usefulness as a focus area can easily be lost. The two reports on the focus area by Sumanisiri Liyanage, while full of fascinating details and useful reflections, suggest just how complex the task of reducing tensions in multi-ethnic towns really is, and how little is still known about the precise causes of such tensions and how best to reduce the risk of violence. This makes it an especially big challenge to design and implement projects that have a realistic chance of achieving such an objective.

Collectively, these weaknesses in the present conceptualization and configuration of focus areas are one important factor in why FLICT has so far not funded very many projects (relative to the funds at its discretion), why those it has funded have yet to establish very close connections with other groups working in the same focus areas, why the cumulative impact of the different projects seems underwhelming so far, and why there is no strong sense of direction to the overall package of projects that FLICT is presently funding.


Section Three – Rethinking the Peace Building Possibilities of Civil Society


Underlying many of FLICT’s organizational and administrative difficulties was an excessively ambitious vision of the transformative and peace building powers of “civil society.” The unrealistic assumptions, first articulated in the original concept paper, seem to have helped justify the overly modest resources devoted to organization and staff, as well as the insufficient amounts of local knowledge on which the organization was built and expected to function. If civil society forces were such a powerful resource for positive political change, so the implicit reasoning seemed to go, they should require only limited inputs to generate significant impact. As everyone involved with FLICT now knows, this was simply not the case.

This excessive faith in the politically transformative powers of “civil society” was in part the product of the particular moment that FLICT was born, when optimism about the peace process based on the government-LTTE ceasefire agreement was running high. In the positive scenarios then popular, the job of civil society was to disseminate information about and rally popular support for the Track One peace process, while also making the most of emerging spaces for mutual understanding, trust-building, and reconciliation across ethnic lines. In practice, however, there has now been a long-running stalemate in the national level peace process, coupled with a growing number of conflicts demanding urgent attention: the violent divisions within the LTTE, widespread and systematic political killings, bitter opposition among Sinhalese and within the ruling coalition to any compromises with the LTTE, religious tensions between Christians and Buddhists, and various conflicts over land, resources, and identity that have been (re)generated in the wake of the tsunami. Conflicts within the organized sphere of civil society have also emerged more clearly, not only over the central ethnic conflict and how to achieve peace, but also along other ethnic, regional, class, language, and gender lines. “Civil society” has thus turned out to be even more fractured and conflict ridden than the FLICT concept paper had imagined.

In this much less encouraging context, civil society peace building work should not primarily be aimed at supporting the macro-level peace process, nor about reconciling different communities relative to past conflicts and injustices. Instead, it must focus more on strengthening the abilities of civil society actors to manage democratically both existing conflicts and those emerging conflicts that the new, post-ceasefire, political space has helped bring into being. FLICT’s primary objective, then, must be to support the development of the conflict transformation skills of its civil society partners so they are better able to handle constructively the full range of today’s conflicts. Fundamental to this will be learning better how to address and transform violent and unequal power dynamics of all kinds: this will include the issue of human rights violations committed by national level political forces, the unequal and abusive relations of power that structure so much of every day social and political life, and the complex conflict dynamics evident within civil society and within NGO’s themselves.

This shift will necessarily have to be reflected in FLICT’s focus areas. We have attempted to suggest possible ways of doing so in our recommended changes to the “Media and Information Transfer” and “Reducing Tension in Multi Ethnic Towns” focus areas, and most directly in our suggestion for a new focus area on “Building Democratic and Pluralist Forms of Governance.” FLICT’s work in supporting its partners’ ability to respond to their own internal conflicts by developing more equitable and inclusive institutions will, in turn, require a complementary shift towards seeing capacity building and organizational development as conflict transformation. The overall aim of these interconnected shifts in FLICT’s foci should be to better enable civil society forces to set their own agenda of peace, equality, and inclusiveness, rather than simply following the agenda set by larger and more powerful forces.

As reflected in certain of our recommendations for changes in the focus areas, the more difficult environment for civil society peace work suggests the value of two other modest but important shift in emphasis: first, the value in actively promoting sustainable and reciprocal (non-exploitative) linkages between “grassroots” groups and CBO’s and larger, especially Colombo-based, groups; and, second, the value in developing connections between civil society groups and the more open and accommodating sectors of the Sri Lankan state (and to the extent possible, the LTTE).

These new challenges and requirements for effective conflict transformation also apply to the work of the other three “peace funds” established by foreign embassies and development agencies since the signing of the LTTE-Government ceasefire in 2002: the “Peace and Development” fund administered by the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies, the UN Development Program’s “Small Grants Fund in Support of Peace,” and the work of USAID’s Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI). All of the funds have similar general mandates – to support the role of civil society actors, more or less broadly defined, in building a more peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka. (For more details on the three other funds, see Annex Three.)

Despite the many difficulties FLICT continues to face, it would nonetheless seem to be particularly well-positioned, relative to the other funds, to attempt to respond to today’s particularly challenging environment for peace building. FLICT is the only fund that has all of the following: a relatively large amount of total funding, the ability to make relatively large grants, and the possibility of making capacity building and network building central to its work. While it is one of our central findings that FLICT has in its first two years been overly ambitious relative to its own funding and capacity, we nonetheless believe that its more ambitious vision of social transformation, when properly calibrated to the specific conditions in Sri Lanka today, offers potential for greater impact, over the long term, than the other funds. Nonetheless, as we suggest below in Section IV.4, there exist important possibilities for collaboration between the funds, and we recommend that FLICT make the most of these potential points of commonality.

Section IV – Our Recommendations

1. FLICT’s Primary Challenges

While FLICT certainly faces many challenges in its efforts to do more effective conflict transformation work, the members of the Review Mission team were pleased and encouraged to see that FLICT – in the form of the Project Unit, its advisors, and the Steering Committee – has already recognized a number of the problems sketched out above and already shows signs of working differently and more effectively.

Very serious challenges do remain, however. In this section, we will lay out our vision of a reorganized and strengthened FLICT, beginning with a general introduction to the kinds of reforms we suggest and how they are intended to address what we see as FLICT’s underlying challenges.

a) First of all, FLICT should no longer simply assume that civil society can do what is needed to be a major force in support of a peaceful transformation of Sri Lankan society. FLICT should instead take this as an open question – or rather as an important hypothesis that is worthy of being tested. FLICT, then, should consider itself as a multi-layered experiment designed to test the hypothesis, with an explicit commitment to documenting its work as closely as possible so that lessons can be learned, even from its inevitable failures, and then shared with others.

b) FLICT’s difficulties thus shouldn’t be seen only, or even primarily, as ones of technique – e.g., of report writing or administrative skills – either within partners or within FLICT, but rather as expressions of larger challenges involved in civil society becoming a force for positive social change, and in international donors supporting that process.

c) A crucial requirement, then, for FLICT to become more effective, is to develop a strategic vision of the possibilities of conflict transformation in the present Sri Lankan context. It is important, however, that this strategic vision be something that is arrived at over time, through experience, and in collaboration with FLICT partner organizations (who, in contributing to this process, will in fact become more like real partners).

d) An equally important part of FLICT’s strengthening will, however, have to involve a conscious effort to increase its own administrative and strategic capacity, with the chief goal being to increase the conflict transformation expertise of its Sri Lankan staff and its own Sri Lankan identity – something that was, from the very beginning, to be one of FLICT’s primary distinguishing marks.

e) FLICT’s final, but most important task – which can be successfully undertaken only to the extent that the four previous challenges are met – is to strengthen the conflict transformation capacities of its partners. This work of capacity building, however, must involve more than administrative or technical support. Instead, it should be in a form that sees sustainable organizational development as necessarily involving a greater awareness of conflict and power dynamics within one’s own organization, and that works to transform them in more inclusive and equitable ways. The development of organizational capacities, then, should itself be seen as a process that requires the kind of “internal” transformation that FLICT has already begun to make one of its priorities.

2. Focus Areas

a) Refocusing the Focus Areas

Our first major set of recommendations involves the reorganization of the focus areas for FLICT’s work. Part of the aim of this shift in focus areas is to make them more conceptually coherent and more clearly oriented towards objectives, rather than being built around specific activities or sectors that FLICT wishes to support. This reorientation should make it easier for both the FLICT staff and the members of the local organizations to tailor their work around a clear set of indicators and objectives. The shift should also enable FLICT to bring together those groups doing work in the different focus areas for more effective networking and sharing of experiences.

What follows primarily takes the form of a reorganization and reconceptualization of much of the work that FLICT-funded organizations are already doing. It is mostly an attempt to rework and strengthen the work that is already being done, rather than being a wholesale restructuring or offering a list of our ideal set of activities. However, the changes also aim to take into account the changed political context civil society organizations now must work within, and thereby to produce a more realistic set of objectives that will allow for more effective conflict transformation work. As suggested in Section III, this is most obviously the case with our recommendation for a focus area on “Building Democratic and Pluralist Forms of Governance.”

Before FLICT accepts or rejects the new categories, however, we strongly recommend that there be a process for broader consultation, involving the Project Unit, members of the Steering Committee, representatives of existing partner organizations, and staff from intermediary organizations. This should help insure the relevance of the focus areas to those who must work within them, as well as produce a greater understanding and sense of ownership of whatever schema is finally agreed upon. We would also recommend that at some point in this process FLICT involve their monitoring and evaluation consultant to assist the FLICT Project Unit, along with selected members of its partner organizations, to think the categories through more fully – so as to better determine what people are trying to achieve in each of these areas, how this can be measured through indicators, and how the impact can best be assessed and monitored.

i. Revised Focus Area One: “Supporting peace through transformative cultural practices,” or, “Supporting culture(s) of peaceful coexistence”

This focus area would include virtually all the activities presently contained within the "Media and Information Transfer" focus area. However, as presently constructed, the focus area covers too many disparate forms of activities with no clear or coherent objective. As suggested earlier, it has also been constrained by its initial, and not outmoded, focus on facilitating the “transfer” of information about the Track One peace process.
In its revised form, the focus area would support work that either promoted or enacted more plural, democratic, inclusive, and multicultural forms of culture. Examples could include: innovative linguistic practices, e.g., multi-linguistic theatrical productions; the writing and producing of peace anthems that celebrate Sri Lanka’s multiethnicity; multicultural dance productions; histories of Sri Lanka that emphasize its plural and hybrid past; and films that promote inter-ethnic understanding or challenge militarism.

In this new configuration of the focus area, support for interventions that work through what has come to be known as “the media” (film, radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines) would take two forms. One would use these media simply as the vector through which innovative cultural forms are produced and disseminated, as is now the case with FLICT support to YATV and to “peace supplements” in various newspapers. The other form that media-related initiatives could take would be, as is now the case, direct support for the training of journalists in basic professional skills.

With respect to this latter case, an argument can certainly be made that the changed forms of reporting and presenting the news that such training can promote will contribute over the long run to a more democratic and inclusive culture and society. Most of the review team, however, agrees with the recent finding of the Steering Committee (see page 5 of the minutes of the Steering Committee’s November 2004 meeting) that FLICT has already spent a disproportionate amount of its time and resources on these sorts of interventions, and we would not recommend a continuation of this particular mode of engaging with the media. Nonetheless, the review team also recognizes the value of such trainings for journalists in the north and the east, as they are desperately deprived of training and most other professional resources. Should FLICT choose to continue support for these journalist training programs, however, we would strongly recommend that it be done so under the rubric of a separate “target group” – in part so as to maintain the focus area’s overall focus on politically transformative cultural practices and thus prevent any confusion that journalists are being trained merely to be “peace propagandists.”

ii. Revised Focus Area Two: “Promoting inter-ethnic linkages for conflict management”

This focus area would include many of those activities and projects currently included in the focus area “Reducing Tensions in Multiethnic Towns,” though it also would include work presently included in other focus areas (both in “Media and Information Transfer” and in “Encouraging a Positive Role for Youth”). Examples of the kinds of activities that would fall under this focus area include: village or neighborhood peace committees; cross-ethnic shramadana work; inter-ethnic youth exchanges; cross-ethnic language training; cross-ethnic business linkages; and the "twinning" of Christian schools in Colombo with non-Christian schools in Tsunami devastated areas.

The Review Mission team was particularly impressed with the high levels of popular interest, practical value, and low costs of parallel Tamil-Sinhala language classes. Other possible forms of inter-ethnic linkage that might be supported by FLICT would exchanges among staff of tertiary educational and training institutions (e.g., cross registration of students between Jaffna and Peradeniya Universities, or loan of faculty for certain courses or a limited period of time) as well as the temporary mutual exchange of specialized cadres of civil society organizations (e.g., those engaged in psycho-social work in different areas of the country).
Support for activities in this focus area is based on the hypothesis that building personal and institutional links across ethnic divisions can be an important source for reducing the potential of violent conflict between members of different ethnic groups. However, much work remains to be done in order to better understand the exact effects that can be expected from these various forms of cross-community links. The aim of this re-organized focus area is to draw together a whole set of related activities, strategies, and tactics for inter-ethnic exchange and contact that are presently being used by different organizations, in different contexts, and without much knowledge of what others are doing. In particular, one of the goals of FLICT support for such initiatives should be to foster exchanges of information, experience, and expertise across the many groups in Sri Lanka that are doing variants of this kind of work, so as to learn more about the dynamics of inter-ethnic contact and the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches in different contexts, so as to know how best to develop whatever potential they might have. It is important to take seriously, however, the possibility that these sorts of projects might not really add up to much, for reasons, among others, such as those cited in Sunil Bastian’s opening epigram with respect to the limits of community based conflict resolution. Hence the importance of careful monitoring and impact assessment – with a special eye on local power dynamics and their links to larger national level conflict lines.


iii. Revised Focus Area Three: “Building democratic and pluralist forms of governance”

This newly constituted area of work is designed to allow FLICT to engage more directly with national and local level power relations, including questions of human rights, and thus to begin to develop a more complete notion, and more effective practice, of conflict transformation. Projects in this focus area might include lobbying for constitutional reforms for devolved forms of state power, advocacy on human rights issues with various parties, or monitoring state action and pressing for specific policy and legal changes in particular areas necessary to more democratic and pluralist governance (e.g., language policies at all levels).

Essential to this focus area is the assumption that groups and citizens outside of Colombo and its research NGO's are both interested in and able to lobby and monitor the state and counter-state entities like the LTTE with regard to basic democratic principles and principles of good governance. Average citizens need to be seen as potentially active participants in debating and proposing reforms and in holding officials accountable.

Projects in this category would be likely to require civil society frequently to address, and ideally work with, local, regional, and national state officials. Projects might also, to the extent possible, involve and encourage engagement with and/or critique of the LTTE's para-state institutions. With regard to the latter, however, it is crucial that it be done so in a way that works to increase the public space for democratic engagement -- critique, dissent -- without obscuring the LTTE’s system of authoritarian control. It is also important that the specific nature of the State’s and the LTTE’s power be understood. Each poses particular challenges to the democratic and plural values that FLICT aims to promote and it is important not to think the two forms of power are equivalent or run on parallel tracks.

This revised focus area would thus include many of the kinds of projects envisioned in two of the most neglected focus areas established in the original FLICT concept paper – i.e., key focus areas two and three: “Strengthening Democratic Space in the North/East” and “Policy Reforms for a Plural Society.” Attempting to expand FLICT's work in this area would thus involve a certain degree of risk, given the limited number of proposals made so far. Before developing this focus area further, then, it would be important to understand more fully why FLICT hasn't received many proposals for work in this area. To some degree, of course, it is by definition harder to operationalize these sorts of interventions than it is to imagine and produce the kinds of media or cultural interventions that generate so many more proposals. One of our recommendations, then, would be for the FLICT Project Unit and its advisors to take on the task of helping its partners think through and formulate projects in this focus area. Another possible way of encouraging proposals in this area would be to nurture links between non-Colombo groups and Colombo groups, which have more experience in this area, but have little political leverage in part because they have few links to non-Colombo constituencies.

For human rights work in particular, FLICT is obviously constrained by the fact that others must be willing to actually do the most difficult, and at times even dangerous, part of the work. But such people might be more easily found, or encouraged to come forward, if FLICT made it clear that this work was a priority that it took very seriously and was willing to put resources into. FLICT might, for instance, make a public call for proposals in this new focus. It might also conduct a series of public meetings, or brainstorming meetings, in order to reach out to and establish links to human rights activists in Colombo and beyond. FLICT could also initiate dialogue and debate, both among its partner organizations and with the wider public, on the various meanings of human rights in Sri Lanka today and how best to protect human rights during the peace process. One aim would be to expand the public discussion of what constitutes human rights and human rights violations, so that the discourse of human rights isn’t seen primarily as something with which to attack the LTTE. FLICT has already shown a willingness and ability to provoke useful public debate, as we saw with the productive discussion of Walter Keller’s photo exhibit sponsored by the NPC. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of this area of work. The public perception that the ceasefire agreement and the official Sri Lankan peace process – especially under the UNF government but even now under the UPFA – have been hostile to the protection of basic human rights is a very destructive one. It feeds a dynamic that plays into the agendas of those hostile to any negotiated settlement of the war. Anything that FLICT can do to re-connect peacebuilding initiatives and human rights advocacy would be very important.

b) Rethinking Focus Areas

i. As elaborated on in endnote 8 when discussing the challenges involved in working within the category of “Reducing Tensions in Multiethnic Towns,” there could be different kinds of focus areas. Some could be oriented towards objectives that allow for relatively easily formulated projects, while others like “Reducing Tensions in Multiethnic Towns” could be oriented towards objectives that require much more complex and multi-dimensional projects. As long as the Project Unit and the partners it was working with were clear about these differences, they shouldn’t pose any particular difficulties.

ii. There is also no reason why funded projects have to fall under a single focus area – they can, and often already do, include work that falls under different categories. They might also have a component that attempts to engage a specific target group. The more clearly focus areas are oriented towards objectives, however, the more clearly their component parts can be designed and monitored.

iii. The “refocused” areas suggested above are consciously designed to be distinguished from target groups (e.g., youth, journalists, businesses), but this shouldn’t be taken to indicate a desire to prohibit FLICT working with target groups. There is an advantage in separating work within focus areas from work with target groups, however: once it is labeled as such, target group work should force one to ask: Why this target group? What added value is there in working with this group, rather than another? One should be able to clarify this and answer the question convincingly if one is to work with target groups. One role for the target group areas, however, could be to bring together groups whose work was officially in different focus areas but who used similar techniques with particular target groups, in order to share experiences and learn together.

As far as our specific recommendations for working with specific target groups, we recommend maintaining the ongoing work with youth, especially since FLICT now has the advantage of an experienced programme officer in this field. Young people remain a potentially powerful constituency for peace building work. As mentioned above, the majority of the review team recommends a reduced focus on journalists as a particular target group. We do not recommend that FLICT place any special emphasis on business as a target group, given that the capacity of business groups outside of Colombo to function in any strong way in support of peace seems quite limited based on our field visits and on the consultant’s report and other materials we read. However, the review team recognizes that business groups do offer potential for useful forms of inter-ethnic exchange and might play a useful role at the national level were a stronger track one peace process re-emerge. Finally, we would like to give a strong endorsement to the importance of working with religious groups. We were particularly impressed with the potential for useful conflict transformation work by the Inter-Religious Peace Foundation and hope that their long-delayed project can soon be implemented. (Nonetheless, we wished that they had seen more clearly the ways in which their own pastoral and everyday community work already contains many lessons for conflict transformation work.) The member of our team who met the Ven. Batapola was quite impressed with his dedication to peace and multiculturalism and with his ideas about revising the curriculum of the Pirivenas so as to include conflict transformation skills and ideas. This was a topic mentioned by members of the IRPF, as well, and would seem to be something that FLICT should support, if a well considered request is made.

iv. Finally, it is important to emphasize that each of the three focus areas mapped out above should be oriented not merely towards the successful completion of projects but more towards the sustained development of organizations’ strategies for working on a given set of issues. This would involve a serious commitment to studying and monitoring the collective work within the focus area over the long term. And this process should involve both soliciting the opinions of members of at least some of the communities where the project work was done, as well as presenting the findings back to the communities and further soliciting their feedback.

3. “Capacity building for conflict transformation within and through civil society”

These first three focus areas would all be classically project-based. But for them to work, they will need to be supported by a fourth quasi-focus area on capacity building. This is an area that likely requires a greater number of direct interventions by FLICT, in part through its advisors and additional consultants – and ultimately with the help of its local consultant pool, once that has begun to take shape. In our proposal, capacity building would become even more clearly one of the central tasks of FLICT – both as a principle and a practice to be developed within each focus area and a separate area for programming of its own. However, as we will now try to explain, it will not take the traditional form of most capacity building work.
This focus area would involve a range of different kinds of work. a) First, it will need to involve some degree of organizational and technical capacity building – but this should be designed and implemented from the beginning in a form that is, as much as possible, integrated with what FLICT is now calling “internal transformation,” to be understood as a priority issue for all FLICT funded groups. One of the underlying assumptions of this new FLICT priority area is that organizational development, especially in situations of protracted social conflict, is best understood as being itself a form of conflict transformation. Thus, while FLICT would support some largely technical forms of organizational development – e.g., report writing, accounting, support for local organizations to develop impact assessment capacities, language training for uni-lingual staff working in multi-lingual areas – it would also aim at institutional transformation in the direction of more democratic and inclusive/diverse organizational structures. This work would involve supporting members of partner organizations to apply conflict analysis and conflict transformation skills to their respective organizations.
b) Another equally important area for this new integrated program of capacity building would be training in conflict transformation skills. This was something that virtually everyone among the FLICT partners that the review team spoke with expressed a great deal of interest in receiving. (This was also reflected in the responses to the Partner Day questionnaire.) However, the point of these conflict transformation trainings shouldn’t be to teach partners about conflict transformation understood as a technical skill that has been developed outside of Sri Lanka, but rather to assist in the development their already existing skills of conflict analysis and transformation based on their own local knowledge – in part through theories and practices learned elsewhere. Such training programmes can thus also help teach FLICT about the nature of Sri Lanka’s multiple conflicts and how different Sri Lankans imagine them. One aim of such trainings, in other words, is to respond to FLICT’s need for greater local knowledge. c) This kind of training can be used directly to help develop the pool of “consultants” that FLICT urgently needs to develop. Richard Slater’s organizational development study correctly identified this as a crucial way of responding to FLICT’s perpetual lack of human resources. However, the flaw in his proposal was to assume that a decentralized and regional consultant pool could be relatively quickly developed from existing personnel, once they were identified. The review mission team believes that much more work is needed in order to develop the pool (especially since the skills they need to have go beyond technical and administrative ones – which was the emphasis of Slater’s report – to include local knowledge in conflict dynamics.) We would emphasize the value of building on and strengthening relationships that FLICT has already established, and thus would recommend that, at least in the beginning, most, if not all, of those brought into FLICT trainings be already involved in the work of FLICT intermediaries and existing partners. This is one reason the review mission team was pleased to read the most recent version of the CONTACT group’s proposal for a year-long conflict transformation capacity building training programme. We would suggest the importance of more explicitly envisioning the CONTACT programme -- or something like it -- as the first step towards developing a longer lasting FLICT conflict transformation training “school,” rather than as a one-off training project to increase the skills of a limited number of locally based FLICT partners. (For more detailed analysis of the CONTACT proposal, see Annex Four.)

However, recognizing the importance of not putting all of one’s eggs in one basket, we would recommend supplementing a CONTACT-like year-long training program with another similar but independent training program that included non-CONTACT and non-FLICT related participants. This training program – which we would recommend to run according to the same basic set of principles as those articulated above – should ideally be organized and administered in conjunction with other funds, donors, or Sri Lankan organizations who face similar project management issues as those of FLICT. (Please see Section IV.4 for a more complete discussion of how this collaboration might work.)

d). In developing such a complex training program, it will be crucial for FLICT to have extensive discussions with those who have organized and led similar training programs in Sri Lanka.
e) Developing and administering the new capacity building quasi-focus area will require dedicated (in both senses of the term) staff. This requires hiring at least one additional programme officer, ideally teamed with an experienced local or international consultant (preferably neither GTZ nor DFID connected) who would be agreeable to a relatively long-term commitment – e.g., 2-3 years. This program of capacity building needs to be seen as – and has the potential to become – one of FLICT’s lasting and sustainable legacies. But only if proper care and resources are devoted to its development and sustenance.

f) FLICT should also develop a profile of skills that are essential for all its staff to be effective in an organization that deals with Conflict Transformation and facilitation so that the professional skills are at an optimum level. These may include not only training in the theory and practice of conflict transformation, but also in workshop facilitation, project proposal formulation and evaluation, public relations etc. Some efforts at improving the skills of the professional staff have already started, i.e. Tamil Language classes and one Program Officer following a diploma on Conflict Transformation.

4. Recommendations with Respect to Collaboration with Other “Peace Funds”

In principle, there would seem to be both the need and the opportunity for a significant degree of coordination and collaboration among the various peace funds, including FLICT, and their donor agencies. Despite significant differences in approach, there is clearly a large degree of overlap in their aims and targets for funding. The funds also seem to be facing some of the same challenges. (For details on the other three funds now operating in Sri Lanka, see Annex Three.)

It is thus not surprising that representatives of both CHA and OTI expressed interest in collaborating with FLICT on developing mechanisms and personnel for monitoring and evaluation. An OTI staff person also expressed their intention to expand their work on capacity building issues. UNDP’s coordinator told the review mission that they would like to develop an inter-organizational program for monitoring and that they, too, would support a project to develop a common pool of monitors in cooperation with other peace funds.

The benefits of such collaboration would seem to be obvious. However, it is important to be realistic about what to expect from donor coordination and how best to pursue it. Past experience, both in general and with respect to these particular funds and donor embassies, has shown just how difficult coordination, or even information sharing, can be. This was made clear when some of the review mission met with members of the “Donor Civil Society Support Group for Peace Building and Conflict Transformation,” an ad-hoc consortium of representatives of donors and peace funds that FLICT had been instrumental in first bringing together. However, it was clear from our meeting that the Donor Group was, at least at the time of our meeting, largely defunct. The fact that the Donor Group had not been meeting regularly in the absence of the FLICT consultant who had been instrumental in first establishing it suggests to us that donors’ desire for coordination is, while genuine, not a high priority. Trying to force coordination as a good in itself is likely just a waste of everyone’s resources and time.

However, this is not to say that collaboration on specific projects and interventions of mutual practical value wouldn’t be worth pursuing, so long as there is a clear commitment of personnel and resources on the part of those collaborating. Here, it would seem that there is a significant amount of interest among each of the funds in working together to develop a program to train local monitors and evaluators whose talents could then be shared across the different funds. One suggestion we liked was to team younger and/or non-Colombo monitors-to-be with established consultants or academics from Colombo, or Kandy, or Jaffna.

The review mission team would fully endorse this sort of collaborative project, so long as it takes into account the general ideas and principles laid out in our discussion of capacity building issues in Section IV.3. That is, such capacity building interventions should be seen as more than just technical or instrumental assistance designed to make one’s “partner” NGO’s and CBO’s more efficient implementers of donor-developed priorities. Rather than seeing monitoring and evaluation primarily as ways of enforcing discipline and detecting abuse of donor funds, the aim should be to integrate training in monitoring and evaluation with training in strategic thinking and project idea-generation. Any collaboration between donor funds on monitoring and evaluation should be designed as a cooperative endeavor with those being trained, and should provide room for trainees and their organizations to voice their concerns and input. For example, what counts as evidence of positive “impact,” and how much time local “partners” should spend generating it, should be open to debate and collaborative decision-making, not simply imposed by donors.

With respect to FLICT’s particular needs, there would seem to be potential for collaboration with CHA’s “Project on Promotion of Reconciliation and Peacebuilding.” Their program of “Advisory Services and Capacity Building for Peacebuilders” and their “Peacebuilding Toolkit” would seem to offer possible points of overlap and shared expertise with the kind of capacity building initiatives we are recommending FLICT pursue. As part of its expanded vision of capacity building and its renewed commitment to monitoring and evaluation, FLICT might also want to take the lead in organizing workshops or regular meetings with the other funds to review their work in similar domains – e.g., with youth, or with journalists, or with inter-ethnic “exchanges” of different sorts. Here, too, it would be important for these meetings to include representatives of groups they fund, rather than just being among donors themselves.

5. Recommendations with Respect to Monitoring, Evaluation, and Impact Assessment

It is clear that FLICT needs to do more work in this area, both with respect to monitoring and evaluating the achievement of its own overall objectives and with respect to the performance of its various partner organizations. The Project Unit is only just now completing a new design for the procedures and criteria it will use to monitor the impact of its partners work. Ideally the work of developing and then training FLICT partners in using the system will be able to be integrated into the kinds of capacity building processes we recommend above, with the aim of connecting project monitoring to larger organizational learning processes.

However, given that none of the members of the review have any particular expertise in the area of impact assessment, we have chosen not to go further down this line of analysis. Instead, we recommend that FLICT contract with a consultant with experience in working with NGO’s in developing countries on issues of monitoring, evaluation, and impact assessment. Her or his work can, ideally, build on the progress made at the GTZ-sponsored monitoring and impact-assessment workshop held in April 2005. As mentioned previously, we also recommend that s/he be involved in the consultations over the revisions to the focus areas.

While we fully endorse the importance of both FLICT and its partners thinking more deeply about how to measure the impact of their work and how their work can be designed to achieve larger and more sustained impact, we also have some worries about the effects of too much, or the wrong kind, of emphasis on monitoring and impact assessment. In particular, when pushing for the monitoring and evaluation of “partners’” projects, one needs to be very careful about losing the forest for the trees – i.e., having such a technical approach to “impact” that people aren’t really being encouraged to think deeply about the nature of their conflicts and how to transform them in useful ways.

In part for these reasons, FLICT needs to be careful and ask itself: who is it doing the impact assessment for? Who is the intended beneficiary? While it is certainly very important to get those who design and implement the projects to think rigorously about strategic objectives and impact, and about how best to determine them and design projects so they can be reached, the jury is still out on how helpful the time spent in thinking through these issues in highly bureaucratic terms is for those doing the projects. This is especially the case to the extent that those helping them design their impact assessment criteria will rarely have extensive knowledge of the local conflict and power dynamics that the project designers have to face. In short, impact assessments that distract FLICT partners with bureaucratic demands should be avoided; modes of assessment that help FLICT partners to think more clearly about how they can target their work towards realistic and impact-rich objectives are to be applauded.

6. Recommendations With Respect to Decision-Making and Administrative Structures

We see these issues as being very important, but we also believe that in the wake of Richard Slater’s report and FLICT’s response to it they have begun to be addressed in relatively clear and fruitful ways. With that said, we are worried that there is perhaps too much of a focus among donors and FLICT staff on the details of FLICT’s organizational structure -- perhaps because these are issues they can more easily and more directly control than the more long-term and challenging issues of capacity building and of devising and implementing a strategic vision for conflict transformation.

a) Project Unit Staffing

FLICT’s most urgent task is to hire a national coordinator as soon as possible. As this report has suggested above, FLICT suffers from a lack of local ownership and local expertise, and this is nowhere more apparent and damaging than in its lack of a national coordinator. We believe there is no point in continued funding of FLICT if a national coordinator is not hired and working effectively by the end of the calendar year.

It should also be emphasized how important it is to hire an additional program officer whose primary task would be to coordinate FLICT’s capacity building efforts. As part of this, s/he should also act as the main liaison with FLICT intermediaries, who need to have one primary FLICT staff member they engage with on a regular basis. Part of this task should include serving as the voice for partner organizations back to their respective intermediaries, who might otherwise be prone to ignoring the needs of, or imposing their priorities on, their local partners. The lack of anyone playing this role was a concern expressed to us by a number of local level CSO’s working with FLICT intermediaries.

b) Intermediaries

Intermediaries were central to the original design of FLICT and the early optimism about its chances of success. The fact that finding and developing appropriate intermediaries has proven so difficult has been one major factor in FLICT’s crisis of capacity. With respect to FLICT’s reliance on intermediaries, our basic general recommendation is that FLICT should support networks and partnerships as part of its basic way of doing business. But it should be careful not to force linkages that emerge only because of the availability of external funding. Networks that emerge spontaneously are to be supported; but they shouldn't be allowed to monopolize funding -- non-network groups should continue to be allowed to get FLICT funds. Indeed, we see the original 90%/10% division of funding as clearly unrealistic and counter-productive, even if the newly acquired intermediaries do develop into useful components of FLICT’s management structure.

While FLICT should work hard to develop the partnerships with IMPACT and UCDC-FORUPP and CONTACT, and to pursue others when they seem to have potential, we think it is clear that the schema in the original concept paper to have intermediary organizations doing most of FLICT project management work is simply unrealistic. This means that FLICT will likely not be able to fund or manage as many projects as originally imagined, though it should, through capacity building efforts, be able to build a pool of local level consultants who can assist partner organizations with project management. With that said, FLICT has an obligation to build up the capacity of those groups that they have already pushed to get together. The Review Mission is encouraged that the IMPACT and UCDC-FORUPP networks seem to be on their way to functioning well, and we believe that both show real promise.

To make the most of this promise, the FLICT Project Unit will have to show patience and flexibility in defining the terms of cooperation and areas of responsibility between itself and intermediaries. To date, FLICT has expended a lot of effort expended in trying to define what an intermediary is, so as to then come up with a single set of criteria for all intermediaries. A different approach might be to consider intermediaries as task- and context-specific entities, with which FLICT can connect in different ways in different situations, provided that the intermediary has certain basic competencies, has a commitment to basic FLICT principles and to principles of transparency, accountability, organizational development, and internal transformation. This would mean that the Project Unit will have to adopt a more ad-hoc and flexible approach to working with intermediaries, based on developing close relationships, with sustained and consistent involvement of FLICT programme officers.

As predicted in the Review Mission’s Terms of Reference, we heard a lot of worries expressed from both intermediaries and more local level partners about the dangers of intermediaries becoming overly powerful gatekeepers, with the dangers of conflicts of interest developing and of intermediary agendas being imposed on their grassroots affiliates. These are very real dangers. To its credit, the FLICT Project Unit is already aware of them and is working to mitigate them. Transparency and clear lines of responsibility are obviously important in limiting the perception of unfairness.

To the extent possible, we believe that intermediaries, and to a lesser extent non-network partners organizations, should be made more truly a part of FLICT. Ways need to be devised to take intermediaries on board in a deeper way, so as to make them a more organic part of FLICT: not just doing a job for them, but being an integral part of FLICT – their local eyes and ears and brain – and with the power to help shape FLICT priorities, rather than being restricted to implementing policies the FLICT Project Unit and Steering Committee devises on its own. Establishing this kind of relationship should become easier the more trust is build up over time. One possible mechanism for achieving this goal would be to establish an advisory board consisting of members of intermediary organizations and selected local partners, perhaps with a revolving membership so that it is not dominated over time by a limited number of personalities. The board could assist the Project Unit and the Steering Committee in considering either specific project proposals or larger strategic questions.

Greater trust among all involved – FLICT, intermediaries, local partners, and the public they are serving – could also be established through regular reporting and evaluation on each group’s experience with the other. Ideally, such reporting could in part take the form of public meetings, perhaps at the local level where projects are being implemented. The aim would be to establish habits of transparency and self critique as well as to build trust among all involved in each other’s honesty and commitment.

With respect to the relationship between intermediaries and a possible consultant pool, which is an issue FLICT’s Project Unit has been considering, we see no necessity to choose between the two options. Instead, FLICT should work with both. Indeed, one of FLICT’s central capacity building goals as we see it and have outlined it above should be to develop regional consultants from within the staff of its present and emerging intermediaries and partner organizations.
c) Consultant Pool

While the review mission team endorses the organizational analysis in Richard Slater’s report, as well as the broad outlines of his proposed solutions, including his idea for a decentralized pool of local consultants, we also worry that it tends to address FLICT’s challenges from a largely technical perspective, which can have the result of leading to solutions that are not grounded fully in Sri Lankan realities. This gap is likely one reason that the Steering Committee rejected his idea of a decentralized consultant pool, which is clearly not something that can operationalized immediately. Instead, the consultant pool should be seen as the product of FLICT's capacity building work, not what FLICT relies on for doing its work now.
The ultimate aim would be to develop a pool of people trained in basic conflict analysis, in conflict transformation, and in basic management skills, whose knowledge and experience could be drawn on by local FLICT partners (and other organizations as well) for any work where greater expertise is required. FLICT could also encourage an informal exchange of these personnel among the partners too. As we imagine it, the work of local level consultants should focus less on developing the technical know-how of partner organizations and more on working with partners and intermediary organizations to develop the underlying ideas for projects -- and to learn how to think through more rigorously the purpose, objectives, and indicators of success for conflict transformation projects. Thus while the consultants who are most needed would be those who work outside of Colombo and would be more accessible to local partners and intermediaries, we see no reason to maintain a clear demarcation between strategic, Colombo-based advisors and technical, local-level “consultants.”

Hence the series of recommendations on capacity we have mentioned earlier: 1) that a regional (e.g., South Asian) or international organizational development and conflict transformation consultant – preferably with some experience in Sri Lanka or similar parts of the world – be brought in to begin the work of devising a one to two-year training program to develop such consultants; 2) that training programs like that proposed by the CONTACT be pursued; and 3) that FLICT collaborate in such endeavors with other donors and Sri Lankan institutions.

d) Advisors

FLICT’s present use of outside advisors generally seems appropriate to us. We see now need for it to be further institutionalized, except to the extent that the advisors, together with local level consultants, could be invited to meet collectively every quarter or every six month for an open-ended discussion of FLICT strategy, political developments, and other challenges. This could be one way for local level consultants, who would generally have less exposure to national level policy discussions and less experience in strategic political and organizational thinking, to improve these skills. They might also, ideally, serve as a local sounding board and reality check for Colombo-based opinion.

e) Steering Committee
Here we would like to endorse fully the organizational restructuring presently under way as laid out Richard Slater's organizational review. It is clear that there were major problems for both parties in the former relationship between the Steering Committee and the Project Unit and that they were hampering FLICT’s overall effectiveness. Ideally, the Steering Committee would receive regular (more than quarterly) reports from the Project Unit on important developments within focal areas, on the basis of which they could engage in wide-ranging strategic discussions. This would allow the Steering Committee members to make use of their political judgment, their extensive local knowledge, and their experience in doing civil society conflict transformation work, while letting the Project Unit concentrate on the more technical and administrative issues. Steering Committee members could also assist FLICT in networking at the regional, national, and international levels.

With all this said, one important function of the Steering Committee would be to assist the Project Unit in making decisions on politically controversial proposals, on particularly expensive proposals, and on the establishment of intermediary relationships.

We would urge that the Steering Committee draw up its revised Terms of Reference in time for consideration at end of April meeting, along with Donor Group's Terms of Reference.
f) Donor Group

We endorse the basic thrust of the draft Terms of Reference for the Donor Group. However, we are somewhat worried about the vagueness surrounding the Donor Group’s powers of veto and variance of Steering Committee decisions. These powers should be clearly understood to be reserved for extraordinary situations. Indeed, the decision to invoke such powers would clearly either do grave damage to the Steering Committee-Donor relationship and/or be a sign that significant deterioration had already set in. Exactly which situations would legitimate the use of these powers should be clarified as part of discussions with the Steering Committee as it, too, finalizes the draft of its terms of reference. We further recommend Donor Group meetings with the Steering Committee (along with senior Project Unit Staff) every six months. Here the Donor Representatives and the Steering Committees can discuss the implications of overall FLICT strategy and focus areas – and how this relates to Donors’ policies and country strategies. With respect to the entry of new donors into FLICT, we recommend that this happen only on the condition that the new donor accept fully the principles of FLICT and offer “basket,” or non-earmarked funds. We thus endorse the Steering Committee’s decision along these same lines. Earmarked funds, even if they fit in to FLICT's principles, would skew the proportions of FLICT funding across its different focus areas, and would effectively allow other donors to use FLICT as an implementing agency, which would reduce FLICT’s local character and autonomy, even if this wasn’t anyone’s conscious intent. Finally, we recommend that it should be the Steering Committee that first decides whether to accept a new donor into FLICT, after which the existing members of the Donor Group can express their will.

7. Recommendations with Respect to FLICT’s Response to the Effects of the Tsunami

While FLICT and its partner organizations would do well to take into account the new and reawakened lines of conflict that the tsunami has brought in its wake – including growing hostility towards international donors and the NGO’s they fund – the review team doesn’t think it would be wise, or particularly productive, for FLICT to reorient its activities in any particular way to respond to the effects of the tsunami. FLICT’s main mission should be to get better at doing what it already does rather than to enter into significantly new lines of work. With that said, FLICT is already working with a number groups in the Eastern Province who are well placed to respond to conflict dynamics developing out of the tsunami. In addition, the reworked focus areas would enable many tsunami-related conflict issues to be addressed by future projects, without FLICT needing to create a special focus area for such work, or to otherwise reorient its work along specifically post-tsunami lines.

ANNEX ONE: Some Examples of Promising Conflict Transformation Work Supported By FLICT

* Peace-Promoting Women near Kandy, whose Tamil language instruction for Sinhalese and Sinhalese for Tamils and Muslims was in heavy demand by villagers and seemed to respond to both a practical need for multilingual skills and a desire for more contact and understanding between ethnic groups.
* Sathyodaya’s “16+” youth group, whose enthusiasm and public spiritedness were infectious and seemed effective at building at least initial bridges between Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim young people. Sathyodaya’s long history of working for the rights of Upcountry Tamils is quite impressive, as is its open and participatory organization. (While FLICT did not directly fund the 16+ groups, the groups work closely with their original “sponsor,” Sathyodaya, which has also begun to function as a FLICT intermediary.)
* The Bradford University/SSA peacebuilding course seems to have tapped into a real desire among LTTE cadre and other younger local officials in Kilinochchi to have a chance to read and write and learn about peacebuilding practices and concepts, and to establish relationships with lecturers from the south and from overseas. This seems a particularly promising, if limited, form of “constructive engagement” with the LTTE.
* Jana Karaliya’s multi-ethnic and multi-lingual theatre programming, with the democratic and inclusive spirit in which it will travel throughout the island, seems an exemplary case of using the arts for peace building and politically transformative purposes.
* The tsunami relief work of the Women’s Development Center and ERRO-Lanka – was impressive for its relatively high quality and for the positive relations each group seemed to have with those in the camps.
* Child Rehabilitation Centre in Ampara seems to have made a real, if so far limited, impact in bringing together Tamil girls and young women from LTTE areas with Sinhalese girls and young women. That the young people’s lives had been changed for the better by the experience of cross-ethnic exchange was clear – how long it will last if the political winds shift is another question.
* The very fact of an amicable collaboration between Beacon of the East and SIM-Sri Lanka, a Tamil and a Muslim group in Valaichchenai, one of the most tense towns in all of Sri Lanka, was itself a hopeful and promising sign.
* The excellent productions by YATV and other media projects promise to influence at least some minds in positive ways.



ANNEX TWO: Further Thoughts On The Vexed Relationship Between Human Rights Protections and Conflict Transformation

The focus area in which human rights issues are most obviously – but problematically – relevant is that of “Strengthening Democratic Space in the North and East.” The prevailing assumption within FLICT seems to be that attempting to reach this objective requires one to work with the LTTE or with LTTE controlled organizations (Steering Committee Minutes, Sept. ‘04, p. 2). Thus the comments in the SC minutes (also in the Progress Report for June-August ’04, p. 10) that says real work on these issues will have to wait until the international community has effectively pressured the negotiating parties, and especially the LTTE, to accept some degree of binding human rights norms, thus opening necessary space for civil society democratization efforts. Ironically, this same logic has endorsed the only two projects funded under this rubric – the Center for Peace and Human Rights of Jaffna Catholic Diocese’s Justice and Peace Commission, and the SSA-Bradford University Diploma Course in Kilinochchi. While each can be said to contain some liberalizing and democratizing potential, it is an open question whether it outweighs the potential each project also has of legitimating the LTTE’s anti-democratic rule. There is perhaps no way of judging either of these effects conclusively, and certainly not in the short run, but it would be valuable if these questions could be placed more clearly on FLICT’s conflict transformation agenda.

What seems missing from FLICT’s approach to the human rights question in the peace process is consideration of the possibility that civil society groups might themselves push an independent agenda of human rights and democratization in the north and east. Supporting such work would be very difficult, especially under present circumstances. The difficulties would begin with finding appropriate and effective agents of change. Unfortunately, these difficulties were borne out in FLICT’s unhappy experience with the proposal, under the auspices of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, for a human rights fact-finding project in the Batticaloa district (which came to be known as the Collective for Batticaloa).

A number of people the Review Mission team met with raised this case, which seems to have left some bitterness among certain people within the small community of human rights activists. While the FLICT Project Unit had expressed initial interest in the project – though with certain justifiable methodological reservations – it ultimately refused funding for the project after reading the published report based on the initial fact-finding visit. One early worry expressed by the Project Unit had been that the project might provoke mistrust on the part of the LTTE. Upon reading the report, FLICT was critical of the limited space given to the voices of average people in Batticaloa, and especially the complete absence of any views that weren’t congruent with the already established political opinions of the project leaders.

While the work of the Batticaloa Collective was seriously flawed – failing to substantiate adequately some of its claims and failing to present its findings in a way that could engage those not already convinced of their strong criticism of the LTTE – it was also a rare and valuable civil society intervention. If ever there were an imperfect project proposal that was deserving of FLICT’s careful methodological mentoring, this was it. To simply reject it was to lose a valuable opportunity to develop civil society human rights and peace building skills, as well as to develop FLICT’s own knowledge and skills for dealing with such issues.

The manner in which FLICT rejected funding also raises its own significant methodological questions. The worry about alienating the LTTE seems to be understanding the principle of “multipartiality” in an ultimately self-destructive ways: it seems to imply that the communities one must be multipartial towards are defined by their self-proclaimed and weapon-wielding “representatives” (e.g., the Sri Lankan Army, or the LTTE), rather than being internally complex and open to multiple definitions. Indeed, it’s not clear why a project that raises important criticisms of the LTTE in a less than fully nuanced and evenhanded way is not worthy of support, while a project that exclusively criticizes the government and not the LTTE – as is the case with the Justice and Peace Commission’s Center for Peace and Human Rights – does receive funding. Perhaps in situations as polarized as Sri Lanka’s multipartiality needs at times to be understood to recommend funding a plurality of less than fully balanced perspectives? Given the small number of human rights related projects FLICT has funded, and given the general perception among those whose primary focus is human rights issues that international donors have privileged funding “peace” and “conflict transformation” over “human rights,” it is probably not surprising that FLICT’s rejection of the ICES Batticaloa Collective provoked the somewhat disproportionate and negative reactions that it did.

ANNEX THREE: Brief Comparative Analysis of Other Sri Lankan Peace Funds

FLICT is one of four “peace funds” established by embassies and development agencies of foreign governments since the signing of the LTTE-Government ceasefire in 2002. The three other funds are: 1) the “National Program for Peace and Development by Civil Society,” which is administered by the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA) and funded by the governments of the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Denmark; 2) the “Small Grants Fund in Support of Peace,” administered by the United Nation’s Development Program (UNDP) as part of their program on “Strengthening Information Capacities for the Peace Process;” and 3) the program for “Promoting the Benefits of Peace” run by the Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

All of the funds have similar general mandates – to support the role of civil society actors, more or less broadly defined, in building a more peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka. There are, however, important differences between them at a number of different levels.

a) Objectives and Focus Areas

CHA’s Program for Peace and Development aims to provide “resources for national civil society organizations to invest in peace and development.” The fund seeks to support work that focuses on protecting and promoting cultural diversity, on human security, on equalizing development opportunities for vulnerable people and communities, and on protecting and regenerating the physical environment.

UNDP’s “Small Grants Fund in Support of Peace aims to increase public support for the continuation of the peace process in Sri Lanka. It does so by facilitating civil society partners to promote peace building and disseminate information on the peace process to the general public. This aim no doubt reflects the origin of the fund as a means of supporting the work of the Government and LTTE peace secretariats. However, when one examines its specific focus areas, one can see that it defines its aim broadly: in addition to information dissemination and feedback about the peace process, it also supports projects to provide CR skills to groups and individuals so as to broaden and strengthen civil society participation in conflict transformation, to promote inter- and intra community exchange and dialogue, and to assist general community mobilization in support of peace. To date, according to its national coordinator, the fund has concentrated on supporting the work of very small CBO’s and grassroots groups

The work of USAID’s Office of Transitional Initiatives is designed to “promote the benefits of peace” and to “build constituencies for peace.” This explains OTI’s particular emphasis on providing material benefits at the local level that can be visible signs of the much-promised “peace dividend”: e.g., improving livelihoods, rebuilding local infrastructure through community self-help projects, and skills-trainings. But OTI also aims to encourage inter-ethnic and inter-religious cooperation -- in part through community self-help, but also more directly. Thus when one looks at the lists of the kinds of projects OTI is interested in funding and has actually funded, one sees a larger range of projects and a greater emphasis on civil society organizations and CBO’s as agents of change: e.g., support to local peace committees, human rights trainings for local authorities, training in negotiation skills, and multi-ethnic exchanges of various sorts. (Based on their most recent literature on their website, which was not available at the time of our mission’s field work, OTI’s focus now seems to have broadened even further.)

b) Decision-Making Structures

The three other funds use different mechanisms for choosing which projects to fund. CHA’s Peace and Development fund devolves the first stage of project proposal assessment to District Review Boards, which are composed of the GA or District Secretary, a representative of the local NGO consortium, and a CHA staff person. The local board reviews proposals and make recommendations, which then must be approved by a Grants Committee made up of CHA staff, following general policy guidelines set by the members of the funds’ National Consultative Board.

UNDP’s fund, in contrast, are reviewed and approved by two separate national level steering committees, one for the North and one for the South. Given that the fund was established as part of UNDP’s work with the Gov. and LTTE Peace Secretariats on “Strengthening Information Capacities for the Peace Process,” the steering committees of the Small Grants Programme also work through the two existing peace secretariats, along with civil society representatives. (A third steering committee that would work through the Muslim Peace Secretariat had not begun to function at the time of our review mission.)

OTI has district level offices, but the decisions on funding seem to be made by its Colombo staff.

c) Levels and Forms of Support

CHA’s Peace and Development Program funds primarily very small, project-based, grants, up to a maximum of Rs. 150,000. (However, they also have made four national level grants, of up to Rs. 3 million.) As of early March 2005, it had approved 53 grants out of a total of 220 proposals. (The exact amount of funding is hard to calculate exactly. The fund began in November 2003 with an original promise from the Dutch government for a three year program. Since then, the fund has been joined by AUSAID for a year at 50,000 dollars; DADECO for Rs 17 million (1 million Kroner) for a year; and SIDA two years at 1 million SEK/year.)

The UNDP small grants fund has different targets for each of its two steering committees. The Steering Committee based in the government’s Peace Secretariat aims for proposals around Rs. 500,000, while the Steering Committee based in the LTTE Peace Secretariat invites proposals around Rs. 150,000. Having begun in June 04, the UNDP fund has supported about 40 projects. Their total budget is USD 180,000.

USAID’s OTI takes a very distinctive approach. They offer their grantees short-term (generally six-months or less), project-based assistance, but only “in-kind” – that this, OTI itself purchases and delivers materials and services to the grant recipient, rather than offering them case. Over its first two years of operation, beginning in March 2003, OTI has disbursed 366 grants worth about $9.5 million, which would calculate to an average grant of roughly Rs. 2.5 million (though figures on the size of individual grants were not available).

d) Implicit Visions of Civil Society

While it is difficult to make authoritative judgments based on our very limited analysis and interaction with the different peace funds, one can nonetheless discern certain basic choices each fund has made about the role of civil society in peace building and the best ways that donors can support such work.

UNDP and CHA seems to be mostly focused on small-scale “grass-roots” groups. The director of UNDP’s Small Grants Fund told us that they deliberately simplified the procedures for making and approving proposals so as to make it easier to for smaller, less institutionalized, CBO’s to receive funding, and that program staff and Steering Committee members help such groups with proposal writing when necessary. OTI, on the other hand, has funded a broad range of actors and organizations, including national and local government bodies, media organizations, and business groups, though the bulk of their funds still seems to go to local-level NGO’s and CBO’s.

The support from all three funds takes the form of relatively short term, project-based funding. This seems at least in part due to the fact that all of the funds began primarily as efforts to support the official peace process happening at “Track One” – either by showing people the benefits of peace or by using civil society to disseminate information about and in support of the peace process. Thus the funds all seem to take a largely instrumental approach to the organizations they fund, rather than offering deeper, longer-term support for the creation of civil society organizations and networks that can play an independent role in shaping Sri Lanka’s political life and agendas. This seems particularly true of OTI’s work: given how its support to civil society is structured – short-term, in-kind, entirely project-based – it would seem less interested in or able to help develop the power and capabilities of civil society as such.

It is also relevant to note here that both UNDP – by working through the LTTE and Government Peace Secretariats – and CHA – by including local level government officials on its District Review Boards – have granted the state, and the counter-state entity the LTTE, an important role in shaping the work of civil society. Whether this has any significant impact on the content or independent spirit of the projects approved is impossible to say without much more research. But it is a point to consider.

e) Shared problems and challenges

Even with this relatively limited vision of the kind of role that civil society groups can play in conflict transformation work, all three funds have encountered difficulties. According to the program’s recent literature (from March 2005), CHA has had difficulty recruiting research and monitoring staff, generating usable proposals from Jaffna, Kilinochchi, and Mullaitivu Districts, and getting its District Review Boards up and running quickly. UNDP’s representative explained that their reliance on Steering Committees composed of a small number of overburdened, relatively well-established figures, has presented some problems for speedy decision making. (Hence their plans to expand the Steering Committees to include more and younger, less established, members.) OTI seems to have faced not unrelated staffing problems when setting up their district level offices.

(It is important to note that our analysis of these other peace funds is based on quite limited research: interpretation of their public documentation, one interview with at least one director or program officer of each fund, and one group interview between members of the Review Mission and members of the “Donor Civil Society Support Group for Peace Building and Conflict Transformation,” which included staff members from two of the funds and representatives of a number of the donors contributing to the funds. The review team apologizes in advance for any inaccuracies that might have resulted from such limited research.)





ANNEX FOUR: Analysis of CONTACT “Proposal to Enhance the Capacity, Effectiveness, and Impact of Grass-roots Practitioners Engaged in Local Initiatives for Conflict Transformation” (as of March 2005)

This is a fascinating and potentially very useful program. It contains very much the kind of collaborative, practice-based, learning processes that the review mission team recommends for FLICT supported conflict transformation training programs. While we very much recommend that it be funded and supported wholeheartedly, we also have the following concerns and recommendations. These are especially worth mentioning as many of them go to the heart of some of the basic challenges of conflict transformation.

1. Duration and Sustainability:

a) The pace of work and training envisioned seems rather hurried. It may well be too much to accomplish, even over the course of a year. This is especially likely given the lack of a central office which will coordinate the group’s work. Such a collaborative project with collaboratively written documents is going to be a real challenge to complete under such conditions.

b) In part for these reasons, the program might better be understood as a pilot project – the first attempt at what will ideally become an annual conflict transformation “school”. The documents produced during the first stage of the project should be seen as first drafts which are then to be revised and improved over multiple editions through the involvement of future practitioner-participants.

c) To the extent that the training program does become something like an annual “school,” it should consciously choose its “students” from the pool of grassroots practitioners, and not become something that young people looking for employment credentials can take without having been working in a conflict transformation related group, preferably outside Colombo.

d) With regards to sustainability, it should be more clearly stated as an objective that some of those who are trained by this program should later go on to consult with FLICT and FLICT partner organizations, as well as being part of future version of CONTACT course.
2. Impact of Knowledge Produced:

a) There should be a more clearly articulated plan for using the knowledge produced by the project: the training module and field manuals shouldn’t just end up lying around in NGO offices gathering dust. This might be the most important indicator of positive impact: is the knowledge the project produces actually useful and actually used by groups in the field? To make sure that this is the case is one major reason to continue the project over the course of multiple years.

b) The project should consciously plan on how to insure that the knowledge gained by its participants – both that which is written down and that which is stored “within” – is in fact shared with and useful for their own organizations, and not simply set aside or monopolized by the few organization leaders involved in the training program.

c) The list of resource documents isn't particularly wide-ranging or impressive. It also seems rather too management and impact-assessment oriented. We would recommend that a wider range of texts, with a less technical focus, be used as resources. Determining these would be something that an outside consultant could assist with, in consultation with CONTACT members. It is also worth asking what role the recently completed CHA peacebuilding toolkit might play. Will it be used? How are CONTACT documents produced going to be different?

3. Group Dynamics and Political Considerations:

a) One needs to be careful that the CONTACT project ultimately expands beyond CONTACT group members, given how conflict transformation trainings – like all such capacity building training programs – are both a status good and a potential economic resource. This is especially true to the extent that the CONTACT trainings produced a pool of consultants who will be hired by FLICT and other organizations. Such a program, then, is an employment training project as much as anything.

b) It is crucial that the “external” resource people – whether they are Sri Lankan or international – be able to recognize and work with (and against) the power dynamics within CONTACT and between CONTACT members and their respective groups. Without taking these into account, the project will simply not be sustainable. It is encouraging that the CONTACT proposal does mention these dynamics as a potential risk factor. One strategy for addressing them would be to apply the conflict analysis skills participants are learning about to their own group, thus connecting to FLICT’s emerging discourse of “internal transformation” While these power dynamics will, on the one hand, be personal and internal to organizations, they will also, at times, be related to local and national power dynamics – e.g., the phenomenon on display during Partner Day debates of Sinhalese participants speaking up faster and louder than those from the North and East.

c) Finally, one must be careful to avoid the simplistic idea that people don't have conflict transformation skills only because of a lack of training. This lack of knowledge is also a product of politics and power dynamics. In other words, the CONTACT project needs to think more about the difficulty of doing truthful and useful conflict analysis in Jaffna, or in Trinco, or in Batti, or even in the hill country. How possible is it for people to speak openly and usefully about the role of the LTTE, or Karuna, or the STF, or Sinhala Weera Widana in maintaining and exploiting local level conflicts?



ANNEX FIVE: Recommended Guiding Principles: Lessons Learned

Underlying many of the concrete recommendations we make above are a number of basic principles that we believe emerge directly from what is good about FLICT and its objectives, as well as from the lessons that can be learned from its difficulties to date.

a. The fundamental lesson that should be learned and made use of as a guiding principle is that less can be more. FLICT needs to be careful not to continue to take on too much: underlying much of what we are recommending is the idea that for FLICT to do a better job at reaching its objective, it is better to go deeper than wider. In very simple terms this means that we would recommend that FLICT resist funding a large number of new projects. It would be wiser to spend time looking closely at those that FLICT has already been funding and to re-fund those that are working well or show real promise.

b). One reason it is crucial for FLICT to go deeper rather wider is that this better enable FLICT to know what it is doing and to learn how to do it better (or even whether some of what it is doing shouldn’t been done).

i. In practical terms, this applies directly to FLICT’s strategy for evaluation: meaningful monitoring and evaluation of what is being done by FLICT-funded projects will require digging deeply into the specific details of the given project and the local context and personalities involved. Evaluation that can actually teach FLICT and its partners and their communities something useful is not something that can be done quickly.

ii. In order to know what it is doing and to learn from it, careful documentation of FLICT projects is crucial. And just as it is important for FLICT to know what it is doing and to learn from it, so it is important to share that knowledge. Here, too, documentation, in the form of published materials of various sorts is very important.

c) Public documentation is also important for building relationships – and that’s the second reason that in the case of FLICT, less can be more. Building relationships – with its partners, with its intermediaries, with other funds and Colombo-based organizations – is central to FLICT’s work, and it requires careful and slow nurturing.

i. For FLICT to build strong and lasting and useful relationships with its partners, it is important that its decision-making be as transparent as possible – and that it encourage its partners and intermediaries to adopt a similar strategy as a means of institutionalizing values of democratic openness.

ii. Similarly, building good relationships requires that feedback and follow-up are integrated as basic practice with all existing and potential partners. The review team heard numerous complaints from partners and prospective partners in all parts of the island about FLICT’s lack of follow up after its introductory workshops (e.g., in Kandy and Trinco) and initial contact with other potential partners (e.g., Sarvodaya). Of course, following up becomes harder the more you take on – hence the principle that less might be more.

iii. Building relationships will also require some more considered forms of pro-active information sharing. This would involve better communication with the world of already established FLICT partners and intermediaries – perhaps in the form of a news letter or other user friendly publication written for the partners and grass roots target groups. It could also consist of short texts of various sorts that would document and analyze its work and the work of its partners. For more in depth studies, FLICT might consider working in tandem with Berghof or CEPA, or other such research institutions, since it simply doesn’t have the person-power to do so on its own.

iv. With respect to capacity building, the lesson is that it can’t be done on the cheap – it takes time and effort, both because the skills that FLICT partners and staff need to learn are difficult ones, and because much of the “capacity” that needs to be “built” is that of being able to make and sustain relationships. Thus our recommendation above that Project Unit staff receive training not only in the theory and practice of conflict transformation, but also in facilitating workshops, in networking, and in political organizing.

d) The final principle we would suggest that FLICT consider as a lesson learned is to understand your context. This principle could take many forms, but two in particular struck the members of the review team as being especially important based on our investigations.

i. First, for ideas and practices of “conflict transformation” to be meaningful to Sri Lankans, they must in many cases be linked fairly directly to their felt needs. Given that the majority of Sri Lankans are near or below the “poverty line,” conflict transformation initiatives may at times
have to address basic needs in an innovative and imaginative manner so as to motivate sustained involvement in projects that also have conflict transformative potential. One approach would be to offer limited funding for development efforts so long as they constituted a small component of an overall conflict transformation project and could be shown to contribute to bringing people together for purposes of conflict management. (E.g., the contribution of a small amount of money to assist in the rebuilding of a local well that can be shared by villagers from different ethnic communities – provided that there also is established a fair and open mechanism to insure that the well is shared equitably: otherwise it threatens to become a source of greater conflict.) A second approach would be for FLICT to come to a working partnership with other donors to address conflict issues while the development donor supports the poverty mitigating activities.
ii. Finally, given our recommendation that FLICT make capacity building much more central to its programming, it is important to add the following related warning. Training programmes of any sort are a social, and potentially an economic, resource. They can lead to greater social status and to more or better employment opportunities. They are therefore a potential source of conflict, and they needed to be managed carefully. FLICT needs to think carefully about ways in which the opportunities arising within and out of the CONTACT training program and others like it can be distributed through a fair and equitable process.


ANNEX SIX: Chronology of Meetings and Interviews Conducted by Members of the Review Team, Not Including Meetings with FLICT Project Unit Staff, March 2005

Abbreviations of team members' names:
SA - Sunila Abeyesekara, INFORM
TB - Tom Beloe, DFID
DB - Dunja Brede, GTZ
WJ - Wijaya Jayatilaka, University of Peradeniya
AK - Alan Keenan, Bryn Mawr College
DN - Devanesan Nesiah, Centre for Policy Alternatives
SS-F – Stephanie Schell-Faucon, FLICT

Date Interviewee(s) and Organization(s) Location Member(s) of Review Team
28/02/05 Sunil Bastian, Development Consultant, FLICT Steering Committee Member Colombo WJ, DN
02/03/05 Fr. Bernard, Centre for Peace Jaffna and Human Rights, Justice and Peace Commission of Jaffna, Catholic Diocese Jaffna DN
02/03/05 Senthivel Arulselvan, Consultant to UNESCO, attached to Media and Resource Training Centre (MRTC) Jaffna DN
02/03/05
03/03/05 Mr. Vijayaratnam, Shantiyaham Jaffna DN
03/03/05 Walter Keller, Journalist, FLICT advisor Colombo AK
03/03/05 Representatives, Chambers of Commerce and Industry Jaffna DN
04/03/05 Mr. Ingolf Dietrich, German Embassy Colombo AK, WJ, SS-F
05/05/05 People’s Council Meeting Hatton DN
05/05/05 Representatives, Sathyodaya Legal Aid Centre Kandy DN
05/05/05 Pushpa Balakrishnan, Lalith, Harshana, Sathyodaya Kandy AK
05/03/05 Members, Sathyodaya, 16+ Youth Group Yalugahawela (Crigengeld Estate), Kandy AK
05/03/05 Fr. Paul Casperz, Indrani Gamage , Pushpa Balakrishnan, Ajith Rupesinghe, IMPACT Kandy DN, WJ, AK
06/03/05 Officers and Representatives of Partner Organizations, Forum for Uva for Peace and Prosperity (FORUPP) Hali Ela WJ
06/03/05 Staff and Representatives of Partner Organizations, Uva Community Development Centre (UCDC) Badulla WJ
06/03/05 Members, Peace Committee established by Partner Organization of UCDC Bindunuwewa, Bandarawela WJ

06/03/05 Representatives of Peace Provoking Women, and Sinhalese and Muslim Women Students of Tamil Language Classes Kallachiyagama and Nelligama, Anuradhapura DN
06/03/05 Representatives and Participants in Programs of Voice of Youth, Kebethigollewa and Kahatagasdigiliya, DN

06/03/05 Mannikavasagam, Journalist Vavuniya DN
06/03/05 Chamila Kotagoda, Child Rehabilitation Centre Amparai AK
06/03/05 Participants, Tamil-Sinhala Young Women’s Group, Facilitated by CRC Amparai AK
06/03/05 Br. Huxley Siriwardene, Ex. Secretary, NGO Consortium and Director of Local YMCA Amparai AK
06/03/05 Mr. Salim, Mr. Savarajah, Mr. Tilak, and Mr. Wasantha, Mixed Media Forum Amparai AK
07/03/05 Ven. Siyamabalgaswewa Vimalasar Thero, Chief Sanganayaka, North/East Province Vavuniya DN
07/03/05 N. Newton, District Director, Sewa Lanka Vavuniya DN
07/03/05 Mr. Rasanayagam, Government Agent Killinochchi DN
07/03/05 Saman Dissanayake, “Friends Media Foundation” Amparai AK
07/03/05 Mr. Lathan and Mr. Alexander, SWOAD Akkaraipattu AK
07/03/05 Staff Members, Women’s Development Centre and ERRO Lanka Akkaraipattu AK
07/03/05 Soornalingam, Development Consultant and Staff of Sri Lanka Development Foundation (SLCDF) Near Kalmunai AK
07/03/05 Mr. V. Kamaladhas, Mr. U.L.M.N. Mubeen, S. Santhalingam, and ONE OTHER ???, Foundation for Co-Existance Batticaloa AK
08/03/05 Mohammed Faleel and Selvi, Students of the Peace Studies Diploma Course Killinochchi DN
08/03/05 Irreneus Selvin, SIHRN (?) Killinochchi DN

08/03/05 Mr. Charathsandara and Mr. Sutharaesan, Batticoloa Chamber of Commerce Batticaloa AK
Mr. Kumarasingham, Beacon of the East and Mr. Hakeem, SIM-SL Valachchenai AK
07/03/05 Representatives of various Partner Organizations and Peace Committees, UCDC Moneragala and Buttala WJ
08/03/05 Representatives, RCDF Matara? WJ
08/03/05 Representatives, Matara Chamber of Commerce and Industries Matara WJ
08/03/05 Ven. Batapola Thero Matara WJ
09/03/05 Rev. Dr. Rienzie Perera, Rev. Dudley Attanayake, Sister Placida, Maulavi Cassim (Members, Inter-Religious Peace Foundation), Rev. Duleep de Chickera, Anglican Archbishop of Colombo Colombo SA, AK
09/03/05 Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, H.G. Nishanta Preethiraj, and ??? Sarvoydaya Ratmalana SA, AK
09/03/05 Nilan Fernando, Asia Foundation Colombo SA, AK
09/03/05 Mr. Wijetunga, Ms. Dushy, and Mr. Sri Lanka Center for Development Facilitation (SLCDF) Colombo AK
09/03/05 Dr. Norbert Ropers, Berghof Foundation Colombo SA, TB
10/03/05 Mr. Sarath Fernando, MONLAR Colombo SA, AK
10/03/05 Mike de Sisti and Mr. Mark Silva, USAID, Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI) Colombo WJ, DN, TB
10/03/05 Mr. Devanand Ramiah, Coordinator, UNDP Small Grants Program Colombo DB, WJ, AK
10/03/05 Mr. Jeevan Thiagarajah, Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies, Peace and Development Fund Colombo SA, TB, DN
10/03/05 Mr. Sunil Wijesiriwardena, FLICT advisor on Media and Information Transfer Colombo AK, TB
11/03/05 Dr. Markus Mayer, University of Colombo, FLICT advisor Colombo AK
11/03/05 Mr. Waruna Karunathilake, Free Media Movement, Mr. Keith Bernard, Sri Lanka College of Journalism (SLCJ), and Mr. Johan Romare, advisor to SLCJ Colombo DB, AK
11/03/05 Mr. Chandru Pararajashingham, Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (TRO) Colombo DN, TB
11/03/05 Mr. Kumar Rupesinghe, Foundation for Co-Existance and Mr. Bernard Perera, and Mr. Vasantha, National Anti-War Front, and Mr. Igbal, Sewa Lanka Colombo SA, TB
11/03/05 Mr. Devanad Ramiah, UNDP, Ms. Sheila Richards, SIDA, Mr. Nihal Atapattu, CIDA, Elizabeth Hedin, Swedish Embassy, AND SOMEONE FROM NORAD, Colombo TB, SA, AK
12/03/05 Mr. Singham, SEED Colombo AK
12/03/05 Ms. Yoga Perera, former Programme Officer, FLICT Colombo AK
13/03/05 Mr. Kethesh Loganathan, Centre for Policy Alternatives Colombo SA, WJ, DN, AK
14/03/05 Mr. Roland ????, Country Director, GTZ, Mr. Ingolf Dietrich, German Embassy/BMZ Colombo TB, AK





ANNEX SEVEN: Review Mission Terms of Reference


Terms of Reference
For the whole team of the Review Mission


Basic information about FLICT
After 20 years of civil war, a new space is open for Sri Lanka and its people to end the ethno-political conflict that ravaged its economy, polity and culture. At this stage, involvement of all sectors of society and their participation at all different levels is sought for achieving peaceful coexistence of all Sri Lankan communities.
FLICT aims at strengthening the capacity of Sri Lankan civil society to contribute towards conflict transformation, particularly at the local level. This initiative is jointly supported by the HYPERLINK "http://www.dfid.gov.uk" Department For International Development (UK/DFID) and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (FRG/BMZ). HYPERLINK "http://www.gtz.de" German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) is responsible for the implementation on behalf of the two donors.
The overall goal is to support - on a countrywide approach – civil society to play a more effective and influential role in contributing towards a lasting and positive peace. FLICT expects to achieve this by supporting local initiatives in the implementation of projects and by providing services to strengthen and develop their capacities further.
The implementation of FLICT started in 2003 and should be seen as a process. Over the duration of the Project it engages in each of altogether eight focus areas with a diversified partner structure mainly focusing on civil society institutions. FLICT builds up a network of partners. Various bodies of intermediaries are strengthened making them responsible to engage with the local initiatives in the medium and long term.
The FLICT structure was mainly composed of a small Project Unit (PU), a Steering Committee (SC) and an Advisory Pool.
It is hoped that the FLICT programme will attract more donors through time – indicative arrangements are being made for DANIDA to be joining the programme in the short term.

Challenge
There are a number of challenges that FLICT faces in operationalising the project concept of FLICT. Some key challenges that have been identified by FLICT staff and steering committee are listed below, but there may be others not included:

Supporting the role of Civil Society in Conflict Transformation –
Several donors have brought forward their long-term strategies to fund civil society initiatives. Many shared interests, overlaps and the need for coordination between the different donors became evident. Besides FLICT and the OTI small grants programme of USAID which both started its activities in 2003 two other civil society support funds exist since 2004:

Peace and Development Fund (implemented by the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA) and funded by the Netherlands, AUSAID, SIDA and DADECO)
Strengthening Information Capacity for the Peace Process (implemented in cooperation with the two Peace Secretariats by UNDP)

The following questions have to be raised:
What are the underlying assumptions of donors to fund civil society?
Whom do the different donors refer to as civil society? How is this reflected in their funding/ partners?
How do different donors coordinate their support to civil society in ways that maximize impact on peace building and conflict transformation?
What are the lessons learnt of the different funds so far?
Are there any concepts that enhance the cooperation of civil society with other stakeholders of society?
What are the consequences for the concept and implementation of FLICT?


2. Using FLICT Focus Areas to determine the strategic direction of support to civil society in conflict transformation

FLICT has eight Focus Areas and to-date emphasis has been on three: Media & Information Transfer, Encouraging a Positive Role for Youth and Reducing Tension in Multiethnic Towns.

FLICT has received a great number of proposals that fall under these three Focus Areas. This might lead to the assumption that they are the most urgently needed interventions. However, the following questions need to be raised:

(a) How well aligned are the the main challenges and issues identified in the concept document and the recommended focal areas?
-Are there challenges not being directly addressed within particular concepts of focal areas?
-Are there emerging challenges from political developments that need to be addressed? Such as: Initiatives to transform the structure and identity of the State
Management of economic policy to mitigate any negative impacts on the peace process
Building political consensus for peace, good governance and cultural tolerance
In the light of political developments in Sri Lanka since the concept document was prepared these issues and challenges have become even more relevant for the peace process given the current political composition of Parliament.

Are the Focus Areas still appropriate and how did they evolve so far? How do the Focus Areas overlap and in how far is this of advantage?
Whilst some focal areas represent key objectives in the peace process others are more concerned with target groups that in practice need to cross cut all focal areas. For example, reducing Tension in Multiethnic Towns is a Focus Area and goal that presently funded projects predominantly try to reach through information transfer, journalist trainings, youth work, peace committees, exchange between communities (often initiated through joint development work and “shramadana”) and participation in a dialogue about peace building issues. In short, this work could fall under other Focus Areas as well.

How can we explain the fact that we have received no proposals in the Focus Areas “Policy reforms for a pluralistic society and their implementation” and “Building Academia’s role”?
Are they less self-explanatory and need much more proactive work by the PU? Also, one can ask in how far NGOs – so far the main group of organizations which contacts us with proposals – are really able and appropriate to work in these fields?

What else could or should be important Focus Areas of FLICT?
Proposals that fall under the category “others”, mainly refer to exchange programs, trauma work/psycho-social support, capacity building in conflict transformation and conflict sensitive development work/bringing communities together through development work. It is not quite clear in how far other donors are covering these fields. Is the support of a link of between development work and conflict transformation needed and what should it look like. Is there a role for FLICT here and if so what is it?


3. Intermediaries
FLICT has not yet succeeded in operationalizing the concept of Intermediary Bodies. This is - to a certain degree considered to be due to the fact that organizations working with wider networks are not a common feature in the Sri Lankan civil society. The Project Unit and the Steering Committee have recognized the Intermediary concept as evolving and Intermediaries will be encouraged to emerge in the process of project implementation.

This challenge has had major impact on the FLICT structure. The workload has expanded for the staff of the Project Unit and a need for clearer division of tasks between SC, PU and Advisory Pool has become apparent. A recently conducted assessment of the organizational set-up of FLICT has led to alterations in the originally proposed management structure. From February onwards, the Steering Committee will be composed of 9 Sri Lankans who will be responsible for the strategic development of the project, the donors will meet separately. The detailed Terms of References of both groups will be drafted early January.

Another reason why it appears to be difficult to put the Intermediary concept in practice is the hesitation and resistance of the civil society organizations themselves. Interestingly, not only local initiatives have doubts and anxieties about this concept. Also some of the potential Intermediaries fear the role. The mistrust in civil society is very high. Intermediaries can easily be perceived by the local initiatives either as a powerful donor-organization (i.e. in the negative sense of a donor being alien to the local context, following a political and hidden agenda and its own organizational interests) or at least as foreign donor’s gatekeeper controlling the distribution of resources. So far the Project Unit could think of three strategies how to address these concerns:

Intermediaries will have to be built up very slowly. They assist in the appraisal of proposals and organizations but do not take final decisions. Later on one forms a joint Board with them perhaps including representatives of the local partners.
Further development of the idea of an Advisor Pool that is mentioned in the concept paper could be discussed. There could be advisors for the different Focus Areas as well as for different regions. A mixed group of them would be asked to screen, recommend and perhaps also decide on proposals.
One could also imagine of some sort of combination of these two strategies.

It is suggested that some of the assumptions in the concept paper have to be reassessed and perhaps revised:

Is it possible for FLICT to “concentrate on higher-order tasks of capacity building” (concept paper) whilst pursuing the identification and capacity building of intermediary organizations (which are so hard to identify)?. Delegating certain tasks of the PU to intermediaries with limited capacities may nopt be possible – will this mean developing intermediaries will actually result in an expansion of the tasks of the PU?.
Is the concept of intermediaries really solving the problem of sustainability of organizations? Is it possible to “build long-term resilience of intermediary organizations” (concept paper)? So far the experience has shown that organizations tend to be interested in the intermediary concept to secure their long-term funding. They might turn out to be just as dependent on donor funding as all the other local initiatives that follow the project approach. The dependency would only be replicated on a higher level. What are realistic mechanisms to avoid such a situation? Connected to this question is the issue of “cost-effectiveness”? Are intermediaries likely to result in saved costs for FLICT?
Who could be a potential intermediary beyond the NGO community?
Apart from some preliminary discussions with the Business for peace Alliance (a group of regional chamber representatives facilitated by International Alert and UNDP) only the NGO community has come forward to apply as intermediary. Are there any other partners FLICT should consider? If yes, what is there particular potential and interest? If no, how viable is the intermediary concept?

What are the implications of taking a new approach to intermediaries? Will it impact on the overall purpose of the FLICT programme? Will it alter the timeframe in which FLICT is expected to deliver specific outcomes in Sri Lanka? Are these outcomes clearly defined enough?

4. The impact of recent events associated with the 26th December Tsunami – what is FLICT’s role? As a result of the tragic events following the tsunami in Sri Lanka donors and civil society organizations have re-directed and increased their resources for relief and rehabilitation work on the coastline of Sri Lanka. How has this affected the peace process and, in particular, civil society’s role in conflict transformation? How do civil society organisations respond to the new context? Does this affect FLICT’s role or the role of other civil society support funds?


Tasks of the Review Mission
Conduct a comprehensive analysis of the FLICT concept and its challenges (both those highlighted above and any others that arise from discussions), the impact and progress of FLICT funded projects in relation to the FLICT programme objectives and identify any gaps that FLICT may need to address vis-à-vis any untapped potential and resources of civil society. (NOT QUITE SURE I UNDERSTAND THIS FINAL POINT ON UNTAPPED RESOURCES… ,MAY NEED CLARIFYING) Make recommendations for the further development of the project - based on feedback from stakeholders. This assignment will include the following tasks:
Study the concept and implementation progress of FLICT (review of concept paper, organizational development study, progress reports to the Steering Committee, minutes of the Steering Committee meetings, overviews/tables of currently funded projects/partners etc.)

Meetings and discussions with
Project Unit members
Steering Committee members
Representatives of DFID and GTZ
Other donors/ funding agencies
Consultants/ Long-term Advisors of FLICT
Representatives of every (potential) intermediary of FLICT
Representatives of various FLICT funded NGOs/Local Initiatives
Other civil society representatives (not funded by FLICT)

Recommendations with regards to the relevance and next steps concerning
Underlying donor assumptions of civil society support for building peace and its consequences for FLICT
Further development and/or adjustment of the Focus Areas
The pursuit of the Intermediary concept
Future intermediaries/ contact partners (beyond the NGO field)
Further development and/or adjustment of the Consultant Pool
Networking and cooperation of FLICT partners
Incentives for the coordination and cooperation of civil society

Recommendations with regards to FLICT program management in light of recommendations from the OD review in 2004. Particularly review of efforts to take forward recommendations from the report and any further perspectives from FLICT partners on current management systems – e.g. is the application process clear and accessible, is feedback on proposals adequate.

Recommendations with regards to Monitoring and Evaluation:
Overall programme monitoring and evaluation processes – with particular attention to FLICT’s objectives – are they SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound?) and are indicators for measuring progress in place?
FLICT mechanisms for communication of lessons learnt and policy influence


Timing
Altogether, the mission should be conducted between the 25th of February and the 15th of March. The report should be finalized by the 25th of March.

The international consultant will work 13 days in Sri Lanka from 03.03.-15.03.05 and accomplish the necessary deskwork in 6 days. Three local consultants will work between 10 and 18 days in the period of 25.02.05 -15.03.05 (depending on their individual availabilities)

A representative each from GTZ and DFID will join the mission in the period from 9.03.-15.03.05.

Management and distribution of the tasks among the consultants
1. The mission will be led by Mr. Alan Keenan. He is responsible for the overall management of the review mission. This includes particularly the following tasks:
Development of a common fact finding strategy for the whole team (guidelines for field visits and interviews with FLICT partners and resource persons)
Ensuring that all relevant stakeholders are consulted
Coordination of the inputs and recommendations of the Sri Lankan consultants and the GTZ and DFID representatives
Presentation of the results to GTZ, DFID and FLICT Project Unit and Steering Committee members on the 15th of March
Submission of the final report

The Sri Lankan consultants are mainly responsible for
meeting partners of FLICT (conducting field visits and attending the partner day) to assess their past involvement with FLICT (strengths, weaknesses and challenges of their work and their cooperation with FLICT)
meeting with various Sri Lankan civil society representatives
submitting written reports of their findings to the leader of the mission
meeting with the whole team and discuss recommendations

The Project Unit will assist the team of the review mission with scheduling of meetings and prepare the partner day. The Programme Officers are prepared to accompany the consultants on their field visits in different regions in the period of the 5th to the 8th of March. The FLICT Secretary is responsible for all the travel and accommodation arrangements.


Output
Report of maximal 20 pages plus annexes
The report should include an executive summary with the major recommendations.