Ethnicity and conflicts

Ethnic Conflict & Secessionism in South & Southeast Asia: Causes, Dynamics, Solutions; Editors: Rajat Ganguly and Ian Macduff; Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2003; pages 292, Rs.495.

MOST social scientists agree that ethnicity is one of the most misunderstood and misused words in the study of politics. This is not surprising, given that it is easy to be confused when the subject is that of defining ethnicity. In the positive viewpoint, ethnicity is a warm, comfortable feeling, which gives a sense of belonging to a group of people. In this definition ethnicity is also about `shared memories' or `fake memories'. Leadership and trust within the ethnic group are benefits that are otherwise absent in multi-ethnic groups.

The volume under review is not about this dimension of ethnicity. It deals with the hard-headed instrumental approach to the understanding of ethnic conflicts in modern nation-states. With the birth of modern states, leadership went into the hands of an ever-expanding population of secular individuals eager to reinforce their legitimacy. However, when these potential bureaucrats moved to the metropolis to take up positions in the state, they found no room for themselves there and returned to their respective ethnic groups to lead, sometimes violent, ethno-political movements with strong overtones of secession.

The book deals with ethnicity, not as a primordial attachment that stems from the given of a social system but as something that can be created and recreated by the elite to suit certain economic and political circumstances. To find solutions to some of these conflicts it leans towards explanations that look forward to international assistance. Writes David Carment: "Evidence taken from other conflicts, such as those in the Balkans and Latin America, indicates that outside actors can limit the scope and intensity of secessionist ethnic conflict and in some cases set in motion the process of resolution of these conflicts through concentrated efforts at peace-building. Few of Asia's protracted conflicts have proven to be salient enough to attract major powers' interest beyond belated efforts at peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction (as in East Timor and Cambodia)." In this book ethnic conflict is not a remnant of autocracy or oppression.

Using case studies of countries in South and South-east Asia, the book emphasises how ethnic conflict in the political institutions of liberal democracy evolved after the post-colonial nation-building exercise. It emphasises that ethnic violence does not go with autocracy, imperialism and oppression but with popular rule, community, authenticity and self-expression.

The scope of the book is not limited to ethnic conflict. It discusses discrimination against minorities and the accommodations that minorities make in the countries of their residence. At times such accommodations are marked by ethnic conflict, but they seldom take the form of ethnic violence. In South-East Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, where the focus is on who gets the larger share of the pie, ethnic minorities survive without recurrent ethnic violence. The book focusses on case studies from Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka where ethnic conflict has led to violence and secessionist demands.

The book sketches when and how ethnic conflicts turn into ethnic violence with strong demands of secession. In its end analysis it tries to find some broad solutions for conflict management.

The importance of the volume lies in the fact that it takes up the South and South-east Asian situations together for study. What distinguishes these regions from the ethnically violent regions of Armenia, Croatia, Bosnia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Kosovo and Chechnya is that the demands of secession in South and South-East Asia cannot be put down to the collapse of communism. The argument that the structures of the state were weakened by democratic mobilisation does not hold good for these regions. When Marxism-Leninism collapsed, in the absence of effective and politically neutral police forces and courts, communities fell back on the simplest, most instinctive definition of political community - one based on identity that is different from the `other'.

In South and South-East Asia, as the book suggests, the emphasis needs to be on the nature of the post-colonial states that took birth in the hands of the elite, who believed in the principles of modernity. The book argues that because of the state elite's belief in modernity, the dominant view at the time of formation of nation-states, was that rapid socio-economic growth and development required the creation of stable and functioning political institutions, an effective bureaucracy, and a uniform sense of national identity. Hence the overall emphasis was on, as Rajat Ganguly says in the introduction to the volume, "assimilating and acculturating minority ethnic identities into the culture of the majority or dominant community". Such an effort backfired and led to `ethnic backlash'. Ganguly sees a solution to the problem of secessionist demands in the deconstruction of South and South-East Asia as a political space marked by highly decentralised nation-states with substantial degrees of provincial or regional autonomy and a pluralist sense of national identity.

The cases that are taken up in the volume are the Kashmir (India), the Tamil-Sinhalese (Sri Lanka), and the Mohajir-Sindhi (Pakistan) conflicts from South Asia, and the conflicts in East Timor (Indonesia), Mindanao (the Philippines), and Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) in South-East Asia. The chapters have been planned in such a manner that they clarify the issues at stake in the respective conflict. Colonialisation has been identified as the common cause that eventually contributed to secessionism. Peter Chalk identifies the ethnically discriminatory practices followed by the British in favour of the Tamils as the root-cause of the conflict in Sri Lanka.

In his chapter on secession of East Timor from Indonesia, Mark Rolls writes: "The origins of the ethno-nationalism that fuelled the conflict in East Timor from 1975-99, lay, as so often in Southeast Asia, in the experience of European colonisation." On the conflict in the Philippines, Syed Serajul Islam emphasises: "The American colonialism, thus, laid the seeds of contemporary Muslim separatist movement in the Mindanao-Sulu region."

Two case studies, - the Kashmir conflict and the Sindhi-Mohajir conflict trace the conflicts to the process of nation-building in India and state-building in Pakistan.

Vernon Hewitt emphasises the fact that Partition resulted in the Kashmiri identity getting embroiled in the vortex of "Indo-Pakistani nationalism, Islamist and so-called secular politics". Hewitt observes that a large part of the crisis is not simply because of the inflexibility of India and Pakistan over their claims to Kashmir, but owing to the overwhelming difficulty of defining a stable Kashmiri identity, either within India or Pakistan or within any future independent sovereign state.

Teesta Ghosh emphasises that the problem in Pakistan has been in the process of state-building. While discussing ethnic conflict in Sindh, she says: "The state inherited by Pakistan was a highly centralised apparatus created for the purposes of colonial rule. In the post-independent period the state proceeded from the assumption that creating a strong unified political system was the foremost objective. In the process the aspiration of the provinces were sidelined by the states." The book on the whole emphasises on the instrumental use of the word `ethnicity'. It searches for reasons for ethnic conflict in the set of political institutions adopted by post-colonial states.

However, the instrumental and institutional aspects of ethnic mobilisation leave several questions unanswered. Why do people respond to calls for ethnic mobilisation and violence? Why in some regions of South and South-East Asia ethnic violence has become endemic while in others it has remained sporadic? Why have Malaysia and Singapore reported different levels of ethnic violence than the Philippines and Indonesia? Some of the answers to these questions can be found if one reads and re-reads these scholarly articles written by leading social scientists over a period of time. However, it is not the scope of the book to answer all these questions.