INAUGURAL SESSION

INAUGURAL SESSION

The session started at 09:30hrs and was concluded at 10:30 for a tea break. The proceedings started with a welcome note by the chair of the session, Prof. Dr. Imtiaz Ahmed, Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka.

Prof. Dr. Imtiaz Ahmed during his inaugural speech said we have come to discuss a very important topic in the sense that the whole of the South Asia needs Early Warning and Early Response System and that people really need to sit down and think together. He said the program is basically a brain storming session on Early Warning and Early Response (EWER) and would not deal with natural disasters such as earth quacks, tsunamis and floods etc. because the meeting is basically on social and political issues. He thanked Program on Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution (PPSCR), Department of International Relations at the University of Karachi, Regional Center for Strategic Studies and Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflicts for organizing such a valuable meeting in the biggest city of Pakistan.

He invited the participants and requested them to freely discuss the issues to be covered in the meeting. He later on briefly introduced other resource persons of the session including Dr. Moonis, Ahmar, Prof. Dr. Amal Jayawardene, Dr. William Tsuma and Dr. Farhan H. Siddiqi. Prof. Amal Jayawardene, Executive Director, Regional Center for Strategic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka on behalf of his Center extended a very welcome to all the participants of the program and informed the audience that the decision to hold this workshop in Karachi was taken in Colombo at the regional steering group meeting of GPPAC. He was very thankful to Prof. Moonis Ahmar for volunteering for this workshop. He thanked Dr. William Tsuma, Program Manager Prevention Action, GPPAC/ECCP, the Netherlands and said Dr. Tsuma has a vast experience in this field and is an expert in conceptualizing and modelizing the civil society response for the Conflict Prevention. He assured fullest support for his work at GPPAC as a program manager in his organization. He also welcomed distinguished delegates from Pakistan and other SAARC countries.

During his opening speech Prof. Amal Jayawardene said GPPAC is a global network of civil society organizations. It believes that conflicts can be predicted and therefore they can be prevented. If prevention is possible it is necessary to prevent conflicts before the escalation of the conflict to the level of violence rather than reacting to the situation after the event. Now the focus has been shifted from action to prevention. Presently, South Asia is a region full of conflicts because it has many inter-regional and intra-state conflicts. Many regions of the world have started this program two or three years back but unfortunately South Asia has not implemented this program. Hence, this is the first time that we are talking about EWER program in south Asia. In that context it is a historical meeting.

He made following observations:

There are a number of conflict areas in South Asia and Dr. Moonis Ahmar, in his concept paper, has listed some of the areas of possible conflicts; these may include human rights violations, ethnic or caste base tensions and persecutions and several other areas but we cannot deal with all these issues. Therefore in this meeting we have to decide what issues are we going to take up. For example the Central American region has selected the issue of drugs because it is a major issue in Central America. Like that we have to decide one or two issues and this is one of the objectives of this meeting. He hoped that the deliberations in the meeting would also focus both structure and proximate factors relative to assessing early warning mechanisms and signals and also generating early responses and finally the brainstorming session of the meeting would serve as a precursor of a more detailed enquiry to theoretical and imperial questions and investigations related to early warning mechanisms and signals in the future. He further said that we have regular parliamentary elections in South Asia and violence is a common phenomenon. However violence in elections can be selected as an issue. In South Asia there are many observers such as Commonwealth Observers, EU observers, SAARC country observers etc. He highlighted some of the other programs being worked upon at GPPAC; these include for example Network Building, Knowledge Generation, Interaction and Advocacy. He advised the participants that it is therefore imperative that we should select an issue where we can make an impact on other programs also. Finally, he said, as we know GPPAC is a network of civil society organizations and through networking, we can make an impact in order to create a culture of prevention with the help of civil society organizations. He hoped the meeting would come up with very important recommendations and conclusions at the end.

Dr. William Tsuma, Program Manager, Prevention Action, GPPAC/ECCP, the Netherlands in his keynote address briefed the audience about working of GPPAC. He said Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict is a global civil society-led network which seeks to build an international consensus on peace building and the prevention of violent conflict. It was established in 2003 in response to the call made by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for an international conference of civil society organizations working in the field of conflict prevention in his 2001 report on Prevention of Armed Conflict. He explained the concept of Conflict Prevention in the context of South Asia. He said, one of the issues that were of a huge concern is that the conflict dynamics are incredibly changing and the dynamics are just not changing, they are continually expanding and bringing new dimensions in them. So today conflicts are not only regional; they can have cross border dimension. He said these sort of conflicts need not only have societal response but we need to put together strategic alliance representing bureaucrats, civil society, policy makers and NGOs. Conflicts are not that simple and linear. They are very complex in nature and their manifestations are wider and some time global and they need a global partnership to address. Second, if the magnitude of a conflict increases, the impact of the conflict becomes very wide, he stated. During his presentation he explained his idea of a civil society that is beyond the NGOs. He said the concept of civil society is very misleading, and one can take the concept of civil society in a very broader sense. He believed that civil society is a broader public domain that brings together many groups of people, the media, the civil society as it works. Role of civil society is increasing and today the civil society is playing a major role in contributing to the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

Another area of great concern for him was conflict prevention. There are increasingly vast experiences of early warning and a big concern today is of a very limited action. He explained the concept with an example of Alarm system of private security agencies. He said now that we have an increasing influx of private security to secure homes, secure banks, and we would find that having an alarm system is good enough. The fact is that the system scares away the threat. But effectiveness of the Alarm system is that it is connected to a ready response system. So when we choose a private security firm we ask what is your effective response system? Without a response Alarm is of little use.

As far as Preventive Action in Conflict Prevention in EWER is concerned, however, we must realize that we have a vast experience of early warning that is still to lead towards a Preventive Action. What is our response mechanism? That is the question we should deliberate and discuss in this platform. His submission was that responses in many cases were too late and they were little and reactive in nature. At times the conflicts are very complex; levels of engaging biases are something we can deliberate and put in the context of any particular region. He explained the framework that is being worked upon at the GPPAC to prevent such conflicts. The process involves a lot of regional and international consultations that is to continue discussions to bring together civil society and to start negotiations in the regions. The idea is to come up with a Regional agenda, guided by the regional action plan, then one can go for the development of strategies and plans and preventive actions for preventing armed conflicts in that particular region. Furthermore, regional agenda is to contribute to global action and agenda. In its essence, amalgamation of regional approach and regional strategies for preventing armed conflicts cannot be undermined. Right now GPPAC is at the stage where there is continued evolution and strategic group planning with strategies. And this summarizes what Prof. Amal says that there is conscious effort to promote acceptance of ideas of conflict prevention and there is an attempt to mobilize the civil society and early warning response system chose to prevent conflict with an attempt to promote policies and structures for conflict prevention to build national capacity to conflict prevention and finally to disseminate knowledge and exchange it within the region.

He presented the Prevention Action Frame Work with the GPPAC perspective. According to him, within the Preventive Action Plane Frame work we, according to him, begin with assessment and we try to go beyond conflict analysis and conflict management. And that is where EW gets its critics and there is a lot of cynicism as far as EWER is concerned. Particularly from local communities and from the international community the regional parties also matter. The problem here is that what can we do with our assessment? We develop specific action plans. The question that we should have is an action plan to be able to avoid a recall of the same situation. Within our framework we say that we need to mobilize after developing an action plan on the basis of their assessment. We need to mobilize civil society. I define the Civil Society in a broader sense. Some define civil society as NGOs. I put it as a very multi faceted, multi-sectoral approach, where it brings the key players because we all play a role, as a social actor, with our decisions influencing others. And with a strong partnership with other institutions, the private sector, other NGOs, the policy makers and take a holistic view of the problems that we face. When we identify challenges we go for preventive action and mobilize civil society for that action. And then we need to advocate for action. We need to be able to monitor the situation. After doing all the assessment and action planning, mobilization, and advocacy, we need to monitor as well. Some one would be able to say this is what we have been doing and that is what we have achieved through it. Behavioral changes are a very important aspect for prevention work and actions must have to be recorded on the basis of this we would be able to monitor the situation and evaluate it again. This process of monitoring and evaluating is a very key aspect for preventive action frame work. It would be important to extract the lesson from all this process. What were we watching, what is that we need to build upon, what have we learned so far and what are the biggest challenges we are facing right at the moment? We need to position ourselves to the regional realities. This particular frame work is within the new strategy and it is not a fixed approach. No one says you have to follow it like it is written here. It is only a guideline so we can start thinking the process.

Dr. Imtiaz Ahmed, Chair of the session, while making concluding remarks at the end of the session said selecting only one topic for further discussion is difficult as one topic may involve various levels of discussion such as policy, states etc. He referred to the philosophical implications of the issues relating to the EWER and said Gandhi’s idea of prevention is the best one who said “have no property and have nothing and no thieve would come to you.” Referring to the civil society in various parts of the world he said civil society in South Asia and other parts of the world are very much polarized and violent. And the reason is because of the colonial legacy it was civil society which took the responsibility of displacing the colonial power from South Asia. Even the universities were engaged in displacing the colonial power and we have not solved this particular issue as yet. The civil society in this part of the world is more complex than the popular notions about it in the West. Where Oxford and Cambridge never have to raise the flag of any country but the students of Dhaka University actually did. Oxford and Cambridge have no such experience at all. On the issue of private security, he pointed out that at one level it tells you a story of failure of the state. If the state is strong you need not to have a private security agency. In this sense, emergence of private security agencies in a country, it is an early warning that the state is getting weaker. On the issue of assessment, he thought assessment requires knowledge, and knowledge requires imagination, and if you go back to Einstein’s understanding that imagination is more important than knowledge, so you can have all the information, but somebody has to give you some intuition to make sense out of the information. Some of the issues are philosophical and some of them are methodological. So it has long tradition. I would say that it has to be brought in that how culture and tradition plays its role in EWER.

Dr. Farhan Siddiqui, Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations, University of Karachi in his vote of thanks said that early warning is a very important issue in Pakistan and also in South Asia and in the meeting today we hope to address some of the very important theoretical and empirical questions of various aspects of this very important theme. The application of early warning system is an uphill task and it requires effective coordination of both the state and civil society actors, as we as part of the civil society need to do a bit in engaging with the concept and discussing what we can do with the conflicts and their Prevention. We hope that the deliberations today also focus both structure and proximate factors relative to assessing early warning mechanisms and signals and also generating early responses. Finally, I hope the brainstorming session today will become a precursor of a more detailed enquiry to theoretical and imperial questions then investigations related to early warning mechanisms and signals in the future.

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