Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding on the Ground: Victims and Ex-Combatants (Law, Conflict and International Relations) (7 page)

“Peacebuilding” as a term was not defined as part of the PBC’s creation, but has continued to develop along with emerging policy and practice. Though there are wide-ranging definitions of the word “peacebuilding,” according to a working definition adopted by the UN Secretary-General’s policy committee in 2007, it “involves a range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict, to strengthen national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the foundations for sustainable peace and development.”
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The UN is quick to emphasize that such measures “should comprise a carefully prioritized, sequenced, and therefore relatively narrow set of activities aimed at achieving the above objectives.”
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Even while emphasizing the importance of “national ownership” of peacebuilding initiatives, it is hard to overlook the fact that the principles of non-interference and non-engagement with internal governance have long been abandoned in practice.
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The shift over time from first to
successive generations of peacekeeping, with increasing incorporation of elements of peacebuilding, culminating in the creation of the PBC, would appear to represent a growing institutional commitment to the idea of building “positive peace,” rather than simply maintaining “negative peace,” to use Galtung’s famous terms.
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This commitment is further reflected in the other components of the UN’s new “peacebuilding architecture”: first, a Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO), which acts as a secretariat to the PBC, and serves the UN Secretary-General in coordinating United Nations agencies in their peacebuilding efforts; and second, a Peacebuilding Fund (PBF), administered by the PBSO, intended to address immediate peacebuilding needs in countries emerging from conflict and thereby fill a critical gap in post-conflict project financing. Taken together, the PBC’s innovative structure and mandate are designed to allow it to bring together the pillars of the United Nations—peace and security, development, and human rights—into an integrated approach to peacebuilding.

The PBC in its First Five Years

Since its creation, the PBC has focused its attention on relatively small countries that might otherwise be ignored by the international community. In its first year, the PBC added two countries to its agenda, Burundi and Sierra Leone, and its efforts in both countries have since been centered on the elaboration and monitoring of strategic frameworks for peacebuilding, which are intended to bring together governments and partners, both national and international, around a shared set of peacebuilding objectives.
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In this, much of the PBC’s value added has been political, in terms of its ability to convene key stakeholders, increase available donor funding, and help set a “big-picture” agenda. Subsequent countries to come to the PBC’s agenda, at the individual country’s request, include Guinea Bissau, the Central African Republic, and Liberia.

While the PBC’s function as convening body and think tank are important, actual implementation of peacebuilding programs at the United Nations, including implementation of any of the strategic peacebuilding frameworks elaborated by the PBC, is the work of many UN agencies, ranging from the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Thus, while the PBC may work to help set a larger agenda for peacebuilding in a given country, the complex work of day-to-day implementation falls to a host of institutions, greatly complicating the task of integration and coordination in practice. The coordination, direction, and implementation of the vast majority of on-the-ground peacekeeping missions across the world is done by DPKO, and many such missions have significant peacebuilding components.

It should also be noted that, although the UN is often the major player, the larger post-conflict peacebuilding picture is far more complicated than those UN
agencies most directly associated with peacekeeping and peacebuilding, and includes the international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank; key bilateral donors, such as the USA, the European Union, and Japan; national governments; civil society actors; and various local constituencies. Indeed, the ultimate success of the strategic frameworks for peacebuilding elaborated by the PBC will depend on all of these actors, both inside and outside of the United Nations system. Post-conflict peacebuilding is a pot with many cooks, using many different recipes at the same time, a fact which presents significant challenges for any institution tasked with coordination and integration. The PBC’s task of getting these varied actors to “work from the same page” is also complicated by the stovepiping, territorialism, and overlapping mandates of many of the agencies within the UN system, to say nothing of the bureaucracies of major institutions outside of the UN.

A UN high-level five-year review of the PBC’s work has emphasized that the modalities and intensity of engagement for individual countries can and should vary based on the needs of each country, and it appears that stand-alone integrated peacebuilding strategy documents may be merged with other high-level planning documents such as the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) in order to avoid imposing an unnecessarily cumbersome planning process on fragile states.
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It remains to be seen whether this evolving practice will diminish the focus and value added of planning documents with an exclusive focus on peacebuilding priorities. The same review stressed the need for greater “national ownership” of the peacebuilding process, a leitmotif in most PBC documents. Given that the PBC is not an implementing agency, and much of its work takes place far from the countries that fall on its agenda, emphasis on the concept of national ownership seems sensible in principle, even if ill-defined in practice.

Some five years after its creation, the PBC is still working to find its optimal strategic niche and value-added role. No one can object to the need to develop better-coordinated approaches to post-conflict peacebuilding. Moving beyond that truism, however, to make integration a reality presents a number of challenges, requiring the PBC to manage historic tensions and step over discursive, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries. Coordination and integration must also be done without unnecessary duplication of efforts, no easy task given the tangle of UN and non-UN actors already focused on various aspects of post-conflict peacebuilding. Complicating the task still further, as an advisory body, the PBC has no direct authority over the actors it hopes to coordinate and inspire to more integrated action and cannot impose strategies upon a country.

Outside the UN, many of those evaluating the PBC’s performance thus far have been united in the view that the PBC has allowed itself to play a rather limited role in its first five years, far short of the aspirations and visions of 2005, and that a higher degree of assertiveness and leadership is now required.
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When it comes to bringing together relevant actors, and developing best practices and integrated strategies, all of which are listed among the “main purposes” of the PBC, one area where the PBC could potentially play a stronger role is in developing synergies between DDR and transitional justice, two different staples of
post-conflict peacebuilding.
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Both areas serve as an example of the kind of work that the PBC could be doing in helping to avoid a “separate-tracks” approach to peacebuilding going forward, and also serve to illustrate some of the challenges.

Peacebuilding, Transitional Justice, and the Quest for Accountability

While the range of factors that shape the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict is clearly very broad, “chief among the challenges of contemporary peacebuilding is that of addressing demands for some form of accountability, often termed transitional justice.”
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Many of the practices associated with the modern field of transitional justice have deep historical roots. Nevertheless, transitional justice as a domain of policy, practice, and academic study largely emerged in the 1990s with the wave of transitions in both Eastern Europe and Latin America that followed in the wake of the end of the Cold War.
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It encompasses the diverse ways in which societies attempt to grapple with a legacy of widespread human rights abuses as part of their transition to more democratic and less authoritarian forms of government.
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Transitional justice is at once backward looking, insofar as it is preoccupied with abuses committed by various factions prior to the transition or conflict, and forward looking, insofar as it attempts to prevent recurrence and lay the groundwork for long-term positive peace. The most iconic mechanisms associated with transitional justice are undoubtedly prosecutions and truth commissions. Beyond this, however, the field has broadened a great deal since the early 1990s to include a range of mechanisms and practices designed to encourage reconciliation and differing forms of accountability. Thus, fostering community-level dialogue between former perpetrators and survivors of human rights abuses, and the construction of public memorials to preserve memory of the conflict, are today as much a part of transitional justice as a prosecution before a war crimes tribunal.

The quest for accountability within local governments and security forces is often the lynchpin of a host of reform initiatives, including SSR, and judicial and other rule-of-law reform measures. Failure to address accountability deficits within the security and judicial sector can impede progress with respect to both development and security, and ultimately weaken the legitimacy and efficacy of reform initiatives, giving the appearance of sanctioning prior conduct.
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The principle of accountability—that a government will have to answer for its actions before its own people—underlies the most basic principles of democracy and good governance. By contrast, “[n]o sector is spared the ramifications and effects of corruption and impunity.”
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Corrupt judges, abusive police services, and impunity leading to lack of faith in the legal and security system all threaten the prospects of success for peacebuilding initiatives.
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Transitional justice is tightly linked with this reform of formerly abusive state institutions. Elements of SSR, including vetting and dismissals of rights abusers
from their posts, judicial reform, and other rule-of-law initiatives could arguably be considered to fall under the rubric of transitional justice.
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Many of these reforms and processes are, of course, not solely concerned with accountability, even though they ultimately remain closely linked.
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It could be difficult, for example, to pursue broader accountability and institutional reform initiatives in the absence of stabilization, which often entails some initial success in DDR and SSR reform. By the same token, DDR and SSR cannot be successful in isolation, but are linked to numerous other elements of the recovery process, including broader governance and accountability reforms. In these ways, the accountability that can be achieved through various transitional justice mechanisms is hard to separate from broader institutional reform efforts that often form the backbone of post-conflict peacebuilding initiatives. As one example, possible overlap between transitional justice and the implementation of DDR in Burundi will be explored later on in this chapter.

Transitional Justice and the United Nations System

Though many transitional justice initiatives are nationally created, owned, and implemented, the United Nations system as a whole is a deep repository of accumulated transitional justice experience. The first international war crimes tribunals since Nuremburg, the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), were created by the Security Council. In Sierra Leone, East Timor, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Lebanon the UN created hybrid international tribunals that were adapted to the country context. Today, the UN agency with the lead responsibility for transitional justice issues is the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, having supported transitional justice programs in some 20 countries.
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In a smaller way, the Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery (BCPR) at UNDP also works to support transitional justice efforts by national actors by facilitating dialogue and developing capacities.

For its part, the PBC does not have an explicit mandate to engage in the work of transitional justice. It must be noted, however, that the mandate it has been given to “propose integrated strategies for post-conflict peacebuilding and recovery,” coupled with the Security Council’s emphasis on the need for “reconciliation with a view to achieving sustainable peace,” is very broad.
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As previously discussed, the current working definition of the term “peacebuilding” does little to narrow the field of possibilities.
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What can be said, however, is that transitional justice and peacebuilding are both open-ended concepts with substantial overlap “contrived in order to achieve a common purpose”: long-term positive peace.
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Both seek to rebuild social trust and social capital, and attempt to address problems of governance, accountability, and the need for institutional reform. The PBC cannot be expected to do everything, and one must be wary of overreach. That said, given the mainstreaming of human rights throughout programming across UN agencies, and high-level UN commitments to justice and accountability, it would be a strained reading of the PBC’s mandate that excluded
transitional justice and other accountability-related initiatives as a subset of the PBC’s peacebuilding work.

Indeed, in practice the PBC has already confirmed the relevance of transitional justice to its work in Burundi, one of the first two countries added to its agenda. In Burundi, the PBC identified a lack of accountability for human rights abuses as a cause of the conflict, and continued impunity as a factor contributing to potential relapse into conflict.
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With this in mind, support for transitional justice initiatives forms one of the pillars in Burundi’s strategic framework for peacebuilding today.
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In practice, however, the transitional justice mechanisms themselves, which are supposed to include both a truth and reconciliation commission and a tribunal, have been greatly delayed.
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Despite the broad public support for truth and justice mechanisms reflected in “national consultations” on transitional justice conducted in 2009, the Burundi government’s commitment to implementation appears weak, possibly owing to the integration of a number of former rights abusers into government.
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In the near term, retributive justice therefore appears unlikely, though transitional justice mechanisms built around concepts of restorative justice may prove more feasible.