PRESS CONFERENCE ON WAR-TORN SOCIETIES PROJECT

Press Briefing

PRESS CONFERENCE ON WAR-TORN SOCIETIES PROJECT

Internal actors were the key to rebuilding a country and bringing about reconciliation, Matthias Stiefel, Director of the War-torn Societies Project (WSP), said this afternoon at a Headquarters press conference sponsored by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. People at the grass roots were more important than external actors and it was they who made countries survive in the midst of war.

Mr. Stiefel said that in north-eastern Somalia, a society and an economy were emerging out of nothing, in the absence of a State and after years of civil war during which there had been no Government. The same was true in Mozambique, where millions of refugees and internally displaced people had returned home. It was not so much the Government or the international community that had brought about that successful reintegration, but the local societies that had been able to absorb and reintegrate them naturally.

The first important lesson from the WSP's work was that there was something wrong about the hierarchy of actors as the world understood it, he said. The assistance of external actors was necessary, but they could just as easily do harm, because if their assistance was not well-focused and qualitatively designed, it could actually have a debilitating and divisive impact.

Another lesson, he said, was that the visible scars of war were not that important. The physical destruction of institutions and economic circuits was important, but those could be rebuilt. What was much more difficult to rebuild were destroyed relationships because people no longer trusted each other. They could no longer trust governments or authorities. The most difficult challenge was that of mending relations between people, between communities, between neighbours and between people and institutions. It was a very long-term exercise which was difficult to measure quantitatively.

He said that another important lesson was the difference between the operational reality of aid in the field and the policy declarations at headquarters. The WSP, by the very nature of the way it had been designed, moved constantly between field-level operations -- in Somalia, Mozambique, Guatemala and Eritrea -- and interactions with policy makers in Brussels, Geneva, New York and Stockholm. The WSP was already plugged into the reform of the basic policy mechanisms and the basic policy declarations on responding to war-torn societies.

At the same time the WSP had realized that while the policy moved very fast and political rhetoric supported it, at the field level, the operational reality did not change much, he continued. That was a major problem today. Progressive policy formulations, supported by political rhetoric, talked about strategic integrated frameworks, integrated approaches, participation and local ownership, but the reality in the field was all too often still an imposition of external projects which did not take political realities into

WSP Press Conference - 2 - 23 October 1998

account and did not know the very delicate interrelationships between groups. They could therefore just as easily have a conflict-promoting impact as they could have a peace-promoting impact.

He said the WSP had started discussing with its stakeholders -- the international community -- how to translate the lessons learned into operationally useful tools for reforming and improving external assistance. That had to be done at the "nitty-gritty" practical level. Recommendations were being worked out on how to improve the capacity and ability of international actors, be they multilateral or bilateral, to better understand the field, to understand the political dynamics and to understand the ways in which they could fuel conflict and those in which they could promote reconciliation.

He said that implied the need for not necessarily better-qualified people in the field, but differently qualified people -- people who could deal with and manage risk, who knew something about inter-group relationships and who were sensitive to very delicate changes in power balances. That was much more important than bureaucratic and administrative skills or Ph.Ds.

Mr. Stiefel said that another element was the whole problem of criteria for measuring success or failure. If one of the issues was to improve relationships between groups, how could that be measured? he asked. It was important to come up with new criteria, otherwise people in the field would revert to the old tendency of trying to promote physical results. Such results were not necessarily what counted and could actually be counter- productive.

The last area of reform that the WSP had started to work on was the whole question of how to help aid agencies to become much more responsive and more flexible, so that they could instantly respond to very quickly changing situations, he said. That should be obvious in a conflict situation, but big bureaucracies could not adapt fast.

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