19.4: Post-conflict Conditions Today

The Oslo Agreement outlined a path to peace for Israelis and Palestinians in 1993, ending the First Intifada begun in 1987 following the deaths of four Palestinians in a car hit by an Israeli Defense Force truck in the Jabalia refugee camp. South Africa began its transition to democracy in 1994. The Dayton Accords ended four years of civil war among former Yugoslav republics marked by violations of the Geneva conventions, the laws of warfare, and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Troubles in Northern Ireland ended with the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Twenty to twenty-five years have now passed. How much progress toward conflict transformation has been made in these four cases? What follows is a view from 15,000 feet.

South Africa Today: Two Countries, Two Stories

As most people know, under apartheid, Black South Africans were forced to live in townships in dormitory-style housing originally built for same-sex (male) workers but later even more overcrowded when their families were moved in with them. Many others lived in informal housing or makeshift shanties. The post-apartheid government built more housing in the townships and many people moved to informal settlements on the outskirts of urban areas. The government defines formal and informal dwellings this way:

Formal dwelling refers to a structure built according to approved plans, i.e. house on a separate stand, flat or apartment, townhouse, room in backyard, rooms or flatlet elsewhere. Contrasted with informal dwelling and traditional dwelling… [An] Informal dwelling is a makeshift structure not erected according to approved architectural plans, for example shacks or shanties in informal settlements or in backyards. (Stats SA, 2016, p. 73)

The number of people living in informal housing is in decline, from 16.2% in 1996 to 13% 10 years later. About half of the Black South African population lives in townships, with Soweto, near Johannesburg, being the largest at 1.3 million. Black South Africans make up about 80% of the total population. Nearly 34% of South Africans lack reliable access to sanitation and for 6.8%, access to safe drinking water is a concern (World Population Review 2019). The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliationreported in 2010 that “the country is exposed to high levels of violence as a result of different factors.” These include the normalization of violence which is viewed as a way of resolving conflict, a criminal justice system struggling with inefficiency, corruption and a subculture of criminality. These factors together with economic and community distress, including high rates of poverty, the report said, put many Black South African children at higher risk of becoming involved in criminality and violence. The report also notes that males are inclined to believe that coercive sexual behavior toward women is legitimate (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 2010).

An online weekly newsletter entitled South Africa: the Good News, paints a rosier picture with its “Fast Facts” covering thirteen categories of data including political, economic and business, education, environmental, and corruption. It reports improvements in literacy rates, steadily increasing from 90% in the early 2000s to 94.3% in 2017; a drop in the percent of the population with no formal education; and a majority of South Africans regarding their health as “good or better” over the past 15 years. They also report that the number of households with electricity is growing (from 76.7% in 2002 to 84.4% in 2017) and improvement in access to sanitation with “the number of households with no toilet” declining from just over 12% to around three percent between 2002 and 2017. The ‘good news’ is also that hunger-vulnerable households has been cut by more than half, from 24.2% to 10.4% over the same period.

Are things better? When the author visited Kkayelitsha township near Cape Town in 2001, many people said that “for all I know apartheid has not ended. I don’t see any change in my living conditions.” At that time, in that township, there was one source of running water for about 19,000 people. More recently, a township resident said, in 2017, that she had:

envisioned escaping the townships, where the government had forced black people to live. She aimed to find work in Cape Town, trading her shack for a home with modern conveniences.

More than two decades later, Ms. Sikade, 69, lives on the garbage‐strewn dirt of Crossroads township, where thousands of black families have used splintered boards and metal sheets to construct airless hovels for lack of anywhere else to live.

“I’ve gone from a shack to a shack,” Ms. Sikade says. “I’m fighting for everything I have. You still are living in apartheid.” (Goodman, 2017, n.p.)

In 2014, Archbishop Desmond Tutu had this to say about the success of conflict transformation:

I didn’t think there would be a disillusionment so soon. I’m glad that (Nelson Mandela) is dead. I’m glad that most of these people are no longer alive to see this,” a reference to a host of chronic problems such as corruption and poverty. (More, 2014, n.p.)

And here is a story from Khayelitsha just a few years ago, 20 years after the end of apartheid:

Outside her makeshift home in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, on the eastern edge of Cape Town, barefoot children play on the banks of an open sewer, while cows roam next to an overflowing rubbish heap. Panyaza shares this tiny cabin with her two daughters and four grandchildren, a family of seven with two beds between them. “We can’t sleep at night because of the smell,” she says, speaking in Xhosa, a language peppered with clicks that echo the droplets beginning to drum on the corrugated metal roof. “I’m worried that the children are always getting sick.”

Twenty minutes’ drive to the west, the seventh course is being served at a banquet of assembled journalists, here to celebrate Cape Town’s title of World Design Capital 2014 on the terrace of a cliff-top villa. An infinity pool projects out towards the Atlantic horizon, as the setting sun casts a golden glow across the villa’s seamless planes, their surfaces sparkling with Namibian diamond dust mixed into the white concrete. Guests admire how the bath tub is carved from a solid block of marble, while security guards keep watch in front of a defensive ha-ha down below, ringed by an electric fence.

Apartheid may have ended 20 years ago, but here in Cape Town the sense of apartness remains as strong as ever. After decades of enforced segregation, the feeling of division is permanently carved into the city’s urban form, the physical legacy of a plan that was calculatedly designed to separate poor blacks from rich whites. (Wainwright, 2014)

Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska: Two Entities, One State

The conservative US think tank, the Heritage Foundation, gave Bosnia and Herzegovina (including both entities) a score of 61.4 out of 100 on its economic freedom assessment in 2018 and ranked it 91^st out of 186 countries, showing an unemployment rate of 25.8%. Factors influencing the Foundation’s assessment including that the country’s economy has been driven primarily by reconstruction, its government’s complexity and continued ethnic divisiveness has deadlocked political institutions, which has inadvertently fostered a “large informal economy,” and that nationalist parties exert too much influence over both the judicial and executive branches of government (Heritage Foundation, 2018).

The two entities use two different scripts, Cyrillic and Latin, and, for all purposes, two languages—Bosniak and Serbian. Although banned by the national Constitutional court and condemned by the EU and US, Bosnian Serbs celebrated “Statehood Day” on 9 January 2018. January 9 was the date in 1992 when Bosnian Serbs declared the founding of Republika Srpska and a precipitating event in the violence that escalated into the multi-front, multi-party civil war and wars of secession. Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik who has repeatedly said that the Bosnian Serbs’ remain committed to eventual secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina, declared that “The Serb people have two states – Serbia and Republika Srpska – and we want to be one,” according to a Radio Free Europe report (RFE/RL Balkan Service, 2018). Nationalist rhetoric and “open questioning of Bosnia’s continued existence as a state” also marked the 2018 elections (Higgins, 2018).

Things are not much better in Serbia’s relations with Kosovo, which in many ways is where the flames of toxic nationalism were first inflamed by Slobodan Milosević. In December 2018, Kosovo’s legislative assembly voted unanimously to convert its emergency response force into a professional armed force with the 15 minority Serb members of the body boycotting the vote. While Kosovo’s sovereign independence is widely and internationally recognized, many consider this move to be provocative toward its former enemy, Serbia (RFE/RL, 14 December 2018).

A public opinion survey commissioned by the United Nations had this to say about how Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs assess present conditions when asked about reconciliation:

Almost 20 years after the end of the war, ethnic tensions are still immanent in BiH society. Within the survey, respondents were asked some questions in regards to this process – how they perceive the current state on this issue, what they think that needs to be done to end it successfully and how much time this process would take.

In general, respondents do not think that the process of reconciliation in BiH has been completed. The majority of the respondents think either that there was no reconciliation in BiH, or they describe the extent of reconciliation as small or partial. Serbs are more prone to state that reconciliation had no or had only a little progress in BiH, in comparison to Bosniaks and Croats. On the contrary, Bosniaks and Croats state more often than Serbs that there is a certain progress in reconciliation in this country, whereby Croats are more convinced in this than Bosniaks. (Prism Research, 2013)

Northern Ireland

One of the great challenges to conflict transformation in Northern Ireland is the de facto economic and social segregation of the two groups party to the conflict brought on by the independence of the Republic of Ireland and the partitioning of the North under the control of the United Kingdom. Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants still think of themselves as ‘Indigenous Irish’ and ‘citizens of the UK.’ For example, in the 2011 census, 39.9% of respondents identified as “British only” 25.3% identified as “Irish only,” and 20.9 identified as “Northern Irish only” (2011 Census, Northern Ireland, 2012). Catholic/Irish and Protestant/British inhabitants often live in segregated neighborhoods, attend different churches, and are often economically segregated by jobs that correspond with more or less education – labor and management, for example. In other words, people have few opportunities to interact with one another in normal roles of daily and civic life – churches and neighborhoods, shopping districts and in their working lives.

In a study of 18 young people from Northern Ireland over the period from 1997 to 2010, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that:

In the context of Northern Ireland, the concepts of security and risk take on meanings that are historically and locally specific, associated with conflict, policing, paramilitarism and territorialism. Although the ceasefire remained in place, sectarianism and paramilitary activity continued to have a significant impact on the lives of young people, particularly those living in working class areas. Their experience of space, place and mobility is often coloured by the fear or threat of violence or sectarianism, or the legacy of such experiences in their community. How they are able to use and move through the spaces and places of their local environment is central to their coping and survival strategies while growing up, and – as data from this project suggests – early experiences of conflict and sectarianism can influence future transitions. (McGrellis, 2011, p. 5)

The same report disturbingly notes the strong connection between the conflict – the Troubles – and present day identities:

There is evidence from this study and from other reports (BBC News, 28 July 2010) that some young people believe they have ‘missed out’ on the Troubles. Listening to older members of the community romanticizing or glorifying this period in Northern Ireland’s history (or, as Cynthia put it, “lapping up” the stories about the “good old days”), young people are being enticed into paramilitary groups and gangs, hoping to attain similar status, respect and position within their community thirty years from now. Community workers in Belfast report hearing young people wish they had been in jail, and observe that sections of society in Northern Ireland are becoming more divided and sectarian over time. (McGrellis, 2012, p. 26)

Ironically, one effect of the UK’s struggle with the Brexit move has spawned increased support for a united Ireland, according to an Irish Times story on recent polling: “The most recent opinion polls taken in the North shows…support ranging from 45 percent to 55 percent, and averaging around the 50 percent mark” (White, 2018).

Israel-Palestine

It is hard to imagine that any Palestinian, including Mahmoud Abbas, would have signed an agreement to allow an Israeli military occupation of the West Bank (and until 2005, Gaza as well), much less an occupation that would last 26 years so far and shows no sign of ending. True, Areas A and B are not internally occupied, but movement out of most of those areas when they border Area C, particularly, is entirely controlled by the Israeli government.

While the first, relatively peaceful intifada is often credited with bringing parties to the Oslo table, the failure of the Oslo Accords to move Palestinians toward self-determination and eventual statehood certainly played a role in precipitating the second, more violent intifada that started in September 2000. By 2002, the Israeli government responded full force in Operation Defensive Shield, which the Israeli government initiated following a suicide attack in Netanya that killed 30 vacationers. The Israeli government arrested some 2500 people in February and another 6000 by the end of March (Whitaker 2002). The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) entered and occupied six major cities in the West Bank, declaring them to be militarily closed and, according to a UN Report, both sides put Palestinian civilians at high risk, in some cases with civilian deaths equal to the deaths of combatants. Over 17,000 were left homeless with 878 homes destroyed and another 2800 damaged in the refugee camps.

The same year, Ariel Sharon approved the building of the wall or barrier, now 70% complete. In the words of Moshe Arens, the Prime Minister authorized the wall in “a moment of panic, a time of hysteria” (Arens, 2013). The former Minister of Defense opined that the decrease in Palestinian attacks on Israelis since then was more attributable to Operation Defensive Shield and the continued presence of the IDF in Areas B and C. The military offensive and occupation, he said, were “quite possibly the primary, and possibly the only reason, for the suppression of terrorist activity” (Arens, 2013, n.p.).

The two state solution is increasingly elusive in light of the “swiss cheese” jurisdictional arrangements in the three areas. Some on both sides advocate a one-state solution, though for varied and sometimes antithetical reasons. The Israeli right-wing no doubt would like to annex all of Area C and this is a strong motivator for continuing illegal settlements including roads from settlements directly to urban centers in Israel that entirely bypass and prohibit use by Palestinian villagers. But this would leave Areas A and B in a more or less Bantustan status. Others, including some of the more radical Israelis, support a single secular and democratic state.

Most or even all attacks in recent years were not carried out by any organized Palestinian opposition, according to the Israeli intelligence service the Shin Bet. Rather, individuals are motivated by despair. Although there is a committed and growing peace movement led and supported on both sides, it is difficult to see how its anti-occupation activity can be translated into political action since no center-left or left coalition in the Knesset has been able to produce a majority that can viably challenge the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Looking to the future, there seems to be no end to occupation, denial, and despair.