| by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne
( February 15, 2013, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) One of the United Nations achievements has been in post conflict reconstruction, especially in its relatively successful missions of the early 1990s in Namibia, El Salvador, and Cambodia. Jacob S. Kreilkamp, in his article “UN Post Conflict Reconstruction” states:
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The politicians cited above may be considered devious and perhaps even clever. But can they also be perceived as self-serving? What about individuals and businesses that have been noticed exploiting a post conflict or post crisis situation?
“In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the United Nations engaged in a series of reconstruction missions—in Namibia, Cambodia, and El Salvador—whose perceived success generated a great deal of enthusiasm about the capacity of the United Nations to assist in post conflict reconstruction. The methods and approaches of these missions help illustrate the consent-based model of U.N. reconstruction that we are seeing again today in Afghanistan. The central factor in all of these missions was the consent and cooperation of local actors. “Consent” is a slippery word, however, and its meaning in contexts like these often runs counter to any generally accepted colloquial sense of the word”.
When one speaks of “local actors” one thinks of businesses and civil society. Beatrice Pouligny of the Center for International Studies and Research – Sciences Po, in Paris, France, in her article “Civil Society and Post-Conflict Peace Building: Ambiguities of International Programmes Aimed at Building ‘New’ Societies” states:
“there is no universally accepted definition of ‘civil society’. It is generally considered as referring to the arena of voluntary – uncoerced – collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power”.
Then we have the businesses. Lindsay Alexander, Canan Gündüz and DB Subedi, in their Report entitled “What role for business in “post-conflict” economic recovery? - Perspectives from Nepal” state:
“ The phenomenon much discussed as “war economies” in many other conflict contexts, which has highlighted the role of war profiteering and illicit activity in perpetuating violence, does not end with the signing of a peace agreement….. Business conduct itself can be problematic, particularly in relation to sinister connections between licit and illicit business, corruption and violence…. This includes the building of monopolies and syndicates, and irregularities around tendering processes at the district level. Today, the latter is having increasingly violent ramifications with, for example, some district-level construction companies colluding with political party youth wings, armed groups or criminal gangs to physically prevent competitors from submitting their bidding documents. In some instances, this has led to violence between opposing groups around bidding processes. With more development funds flowing for district-level projects, these tensions will likely increase unless business conduct and security provisions are improved. In order to refrain from fuelling tensions and to minimise negative impacts, the business community needs to steer clear of illicit practices, show a commitment to doing so, and collaborate with others in support of eradicating them where possible”.
Exploitation of post war trauma by unscrupulous elements for personal benefits is now identified within the parameters of what is called “The Shock Doctrine”. A key determinant of current politics is the shock factor. In economic terms this phenomenon can be attributed to Milton Friedman, the reputed Nobel Laureate of the University of Chicago School of Economics of the 1950s, who was the father of the phrase: “it is shock, real or perceived, that starts real change”. Friedman’s doctrine was based on the recognition that the free market has to be distinguished from the State and function separately and independently. Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Alfred A. Knopf: Canada, 2007) takes this a step further by building on the theory that the dependence of free market forces on the power of shock has spawned a shock culture, which she calls the “shock doctrine”. This doctrine is based on the premise that people who are devastated by a disaster look towards rebuilding what they lost whereas free market forces look for exactly the opposite – to start with a clean slate by exploiting the disaster to their advantage. Klein extends this doctrine to political leaders and cites the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 as having given the Chinese political leaders the opportunity to convert much of China into a gigantic export zone. A similar line of action is attributed to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom who is reported to have used the 1982 Falklands War to divert the country’s attention so that she could quell the coal miners’ strike which was happening at the same time.
The politicians cited above may be considered devious and perhaps even clever. But can they also be perceived as self-serving? What about individuals and businesses that have been noticed exploiting a post conflict or post crisis situation? Examples cited in Naomi Klein’s book are the critical phases of the war in Iraq, where Shell and BP claimed the country’s vast oil resources; the outsourcing of the “war on terror” immediately after the 9/11 attacks to Halliburton and Blackwater; and the auctioning off of beaches that had great potential as tourist attractions to various tourist resorts in Southeast Asia in the post Tsunami period of 2004-2005.
The shock doctrine helps people manipulate and exploit the public’s disorientation immediately after a catastrophe by introducing and establishing questionable economic measures. Also called “disaster capitalism” this trend gives, according to Friedman, an administration six to nine months in which to achieve major changes, after which time the opportunity may vanish without ever emerging again. This is consistent with the Machiavellian philosophy that “all injuries must be piled on top of each other at the same time”. Klein cites the instance of post Tsunami Sri Lanka under President Chandrika Kumaratunga where :
“The penance hit immediately. Just four days after the wave hit, her government pushed a bill through that paved the way for water privatization, a plan citizens had been forcefully resisting for years. Of course now, with the economy still swamped with sea water and graves not yet dug, few even knew it had happened”.
One commentator called this measure “the second tsunami”.
There is something distinctly immoral about exploiting society at its most vulnerable moment. It is in fact a blatant exploitation of a human right, not to be used or exploited for another’s benefit. Modern legal philosophers such as Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University regard welfare rights - also known as economic rights - that require the provision of education and protections against severe poverty and starvation – intrinsic to group rights of people.
A right is something due to a person by just claim, legal guarantee or moral principle. It is a power, privilege or immunity accrued to a person by law and is a legally enforceable claim that another will do or will not do a given act. It is also a recognized and protected interest, the violation of which is wrong. Therefore, the starting point should be in the words “just claim” “legal guarantee and “moral principle”. These claims and guarantees based on moral principles should be justiciable. In a world full of wrongs, rights of the human have never been so important to us. They are often analogous to our health and loved ones. We tend to take them for granted until they are taken away or endangered and we appreciate them most when we are in danger of losing them. However, the question is, if human rights were to be recognized on the basis of injustice, how could one identify injustice in the absence of a paradigm of justice? The answer would lie in the fact that although one could not pinpoint justice, any decent and intelligent human could recognize injustice when he sees it. Examples are the Holocaust during World War 2, the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Examples can be seen in literature where one sees dystopias such as George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Franz Kafka’s The Trial.
Rights ensure liberty, equality and fairness and should be constantly innovated to counter wrongs. As Dershowitz says, “Because there will always be wrongs, there must always be rights”. This should be the raison d’etre of any democratic society.
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