Promoting social integration in post-conflict situations

Palais des Nations - Geneva -29.06.00

Speaking Notes of Emma Bonino

I have read the report on "Promoting social integration in post-conflict situations" with great attention: I fully agree with the content and the conclusions, especially the invitation to national governments, and in general to all parties involved in defining and applying post-conflict humanitarian action, to consider social integration as a strategic objective in itself that goes beyond the sum of the various measures aimed at poverty alleviation and employment provision.

I believe, however, that we should aim even higher. The title of our panel runs: Basic Social Services for All. We all know that no two post-conflict situations are the same; that every intervention aimed at healing the divisions that armed conflicts open up in the societies involved must be "made to measure". My experience as the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Action has taught me, however, that all interventions of a social nature have something in common: the need to be part of an overall project of a political, institutional nature, aimed at giving (or restoring) to the societies concerned the foundations of the Rule of Law. Some people might judge this goal to be over-ambitious and Utopian. It seems to me, however, to be the minimum objective to be pursued: on condition, of course, that the interventions are not merely stop-gap measures to reduce suffering between one war and another, but structural measures capable of consolidating peace and also of offering the victims of conflicts a better an

d fairer situation than before.

Allow me to mention some concrete examples. In post-conflict situations, would it not be true to say that no question is more delicate and more difficult to resolve than the return of evacuees and refugees to their homes and their native lands? We know why: because civil cohabitation between different groups - different in terms of culture, religion or politics - can only be guaranteed by the existence of fair rules and of institutions capable of imposing the respect of such rules. It is no coincidence that the most serious humanitarian crises are those which arise from large-scale violations of international law and human rights, sometimes from genuine crimes against humanity. In the wake of such disasters, no form of cohabitation can be restored (or established) without new rules based on justice and on new institutions legitimised by the consensus of the populations involved. The process is long and difficult, but absolutely necessary.

One encouraging example comes from Croatia, where the right to return for refugees belonging to the minorities devastated by the civil war has finally been recognised. We have had to wait for the birth of a fully democratic government, legitimised by popular elections, for the adoption of a measure that seems to the new Croatian leaders to be sacrosanct: that cannot wipe out the memory of violence and crime, but that drastically reduces the unresolved ethnic tensions and material claims that have so far hung over the future of Croatia.

And as for Bosnia Herzegovina, could the international community have come up with any way of saving - to some extent - the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the country without offering the various communities the instruments to establish the Rule of Law?

The Balkans also provide us with the example of Kosovo, a region I know extremely well due to my experience as a leader of the Radical Party, as a European Commissioner, and now simply as a member of the European Parliament. I recently visited the post-conflict Kosovo, and what struck me was the imbalance, the different speeds of the process of social and economic reconstruction on one hand, and the process of political and institutional reconstruction on the other. In Kosovo the international community is certainly not lacking in resources. The aim to provide social services for all has been virtually achieved. The economic reconstruction plans are proceeding apace. I can safely affirm that although they have experienced a war and mass deportation, the Albanians in Kosovo are better off than the Albanians in Albania, who have not been subjected to air attacks and deportation. What is still lacking in Pristina, however, is a political and institutional framework capable of fulfilling the expectations of thos

e (including me) who backed the military intervention, hoping not only to prevent the great programme of ethnic cleansing begun by the chauvinist Belgrade regime, not only to give the deportees the right to return to their homes, but also to offer all the inhabitants of Kosovo - Albanians, Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews - better rules of cohabitation and institutions than those imposed by Milosevic.

I am not so ingenuous as not to understand that this is an arduous task, but I believe it would be easier if the United Nations, when it assumed responsibility for the administration of Kosovo, had identified the excessive power and the violence of the Albanian troops as the main obstacle to cohabitation between the Albanian majority and the various minorities. And if it had consequently dealt with Albanian extremism by disarming such forces.

Speaking of Kosovo, our mind is taken back eight years to December 1992, when 30,000 American soldiers landed in Mogadishu as part of the Restore Hope operation - the largest humanitarian intervention in history, it was called - to liberate the civilian population of Somalia who for almost one year had been suffering from the raids, massacres and pillaging of the local warlords. I was among those who feared that the operation would be a failure right from the beginning, when the civilian and military heads of the American expeditionary forces captured two of the most dangerous warlords - Aidid and Ali Mahdi - and asked them to collaborate as partners rather than neutralising them and calling on them to answer for their crimes. In other words, they asked the executioners to help them to save their surviving victims. I have been to Somalia in more recent times, and have seen that every form of state government and justice has been completely cancelled in this most unhappy of countries. Somalia is a black hole,

both on the map and in our consciences, with which the world will sooner or later have to come to terms.

In Africa there are many wars but very few post-wars. I have been involved in two conflicts - Mozambique and Mali - which can be considered as resolved, which were followed by processes of reconciliation within their respective societies, of the healing of wounds that were extremely deep. This was possible because, beyond the material resources employed by the international community (which were massive in Mozambique, but very small in Mali), in both cases the former adversaries agreed to switch from the politics of weapons to the weapon of politics, first negotiating an honourable compromise and then agreeing to pursue their respective claims in an institutional and democratic context based on the Rule of Law. And in both cases, the re-establishment of definite rules enabled one of the most difficult objectives of reconciliation - the return of refugees - to be achieved.

Things went very differently in Rwanda after the genocide in 1994 and the exodus of over two million refugees caused by Hutu extremism. The international community assumed responsibility for this enormous mass of refugees - 1.2 million in Zaire and 700,000 in Tanzania - with great generosity in terms of resources but with similarly great political and diplomatic indifference. The humanitarian action managed in a relatively brief space of time to provide Basic Services For All in the vast refugee camps that had grown on the borders of Rwanda. Some of us joked about the "four-star camps" we had managed to create in Tanzania. But since there was nothing comparable to a Rule of Law in Rwanda, and since the camps were controlled politically by the génocidaires and their armed forces, there was consequently no serious prospect of an end to the conflict and therefore of reconciliation, tasks that are in any case the responsibility of politicians and diplomats and certainly not of humanitarian workers. In short, the

enormous efforts of international solidarity served only to postpone the continuation of the conflict.

I belong to a political force which, many years ago, under the slogan "No Peace Without Justice", began the international campaign for the establishment of a Permanent International Criminal Court for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The administration of justice is perhaps the most important task assigned to the State in those countries whose societies are marked by tensions of all kinds. The administration of justice in all its forms (civil, penal, administrative) is, in my opinion, the only certain way to prevent embryonic conflicts and the most efficient way to end conflicts that have already exploded. For this reason, I believe that no programme of social integration in post-conflict situations can work on its own if it is not accompanied by, or subordinated to, a programme of institution building, that is the creation of an institutional edifice able to provide fair rules and to make sure they are respected.