Leonard Woolf arrived in Sri Lanka almost exactly a century ago. Not yet married to the more illustrious Virginia, the young colonial officer admitted in his autobiography: "I had entered Ceylon as an imperialist. The curious thing is that I was not really aware of this ... I was a very innocent, unconscious imperialist."Observing racist British rule from the inside turned him against it within months. During his six years on the island he became an astute observer of its traditions. His novel The Village in the Jungle shows as deep an understanding of Sinhalese peasant superstitions as EM Forster's more celebrated Passage to India (published 10 years later) does of the middle class in a different part of the subcontinent.
For a time Woolf worked in Jaffna, the heartland of Sri Lanka's Tamil community, and his rare combination of experience in north and south led him to the view that only federalism could solve the conflict between the island's two main population groups. "Consideration should be given to the possibility of ensuring a large measure of devolution or even of introducing a federal system on the Swiss model," Woolf wrote in a memorandum for the Labour party in 1938. Of course, the Swiss model is tripartite, and Woolf took the unusually broad view that Sri Lanka's Muslims also deserved to have their rights protected.
The British did not take Woolf's advice, and how little have things changed since then. Indeed they have got much worse. The Sinhalese-dominated government and the rigidly controlled Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been at war for 23 years. They hold a new round of peace talks in Geneva tomorrow, but the solution that seemed obvious to Woolf - and many of Sri Lanka's best analysts today - is not on the table.
The LTTE has dropped its goal of independence, but its current call for undefined "autonomy" sounds much the same. The government talks of devolution within a unitary state. Neither is willing to embrace the compromise of federalism, either in Quebec-style asymmetric form (which would give the Tamils a province with a special status) or on the Swiss pattern of equal cantons.
While talks have been deadlocked, fighting has intensified, with heavy casualties on both sides. The LTTE, the world pioneers of suicide bombing in the modern era, no longer tend to go for civilian targets as al-Qaida do. They recently hit buses full of soldiers and sailors, as well as Sri Lankan navy boats. In retaliation the army used artillery and aircraft, mainly intimidating civilians.
Conventional wisdom hails the two sides' willingness to meet (under Norwegian mediation) as positive, though few expect much from the latest talks. From a wider perspective, the phenomenon of talks-plus-war raises important issues for the growing science of comparative peace processes.
If two parties are really ready for compromise, they can quickly find a way to begin talks. It is not necessary to have a phoney dialogue in place in the hope that it will suddenly be invigorated by an onset of sincerity. Does a talks process, therefore, only increase all-round cynicism? Why do parties talk if they have nothing serious to say? Is it to hoodwink donors, whether foreign governments or the rival diasporas, by proving they are "committed to the search for peace"?
What of the facilitators, in this case the Norwegians? Are they merely trying to maintain their reputation, tarnished as it increasingly is by the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians, which turned out to be disappointing and a diversion from the core issues?
These are not easy questions, as there is a natural reluctance to declare talks dead as long as there is the slightest sign of life. Many civil wars do not have the "luxury" of talks, since one side insists on a military solution or refuses to recognise the very legitimacy of the other, demonising it as an insignificant minority or a bunch of terrorists. Sri Lanka's long-running crisis is better than that.
Much depends on the talks' agenda, coupled with the mediators' agility. Can they find new ways of presenting key issues? Are they able to insist on transparency, so that negotiators keep pace with public opinion? In the talks that produced peace deals in south Sudan and Darfur, the international mediators approached the central issues slowly and creatively. They organised expert seminars for the warring parties on how power- and wealth-sharing operated in other countries. In Darfur the deal did not work, partly because the civilian victims displaced by the war were not adequately consulted. There were other reasons for failure, not least the fractured nature of the rebel groups and their leaders' ambitions and rivalries.
In the Sri Lankan case the best tactic for the Norwegian mediators may be to highlight the issue of human rights. Arguing over the myriad violations of the 2002 ceasefire, and especially any effort to apportion blame, would guarantee failure at Geneva this weekend. It would be more useful to focus on minimising casualties among civilians and helping displaced people to go home, safely and under guarantee of protection, before yet more camps are created.
In a recommendation that could apply to other conflicts, Professor Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, urged the general assembly this week to appoint international human rights monitors for Sri Lanka. He pointed out that each side, directly or through proxies, has used assassinations to weaken the other, or to enforce discipline. At various times both have targeted civilians.
Recommending that the current international monitors (now under Swedish control) also investigate rights abuses, Alston wants the new team to be separate from the one that looks into ceasefire violations. Breaches of international humanitarian law are different from, and in many cases more serious than, violations of a particular time-bound and locally negotiated ceasefire. The investigators must be forensically trained, Alston says, and have the right to name suspects so that the current practice of denying atrocities is weakened.
These are excellent suggestions that should be followed up in Geneva. The LTTE and the government both claim not to be involved in attacks on civilians. Here, at least, there is common ground. Flesh could be put on that pledge by having them invite human-rights monitors to check it out. Whatever doubts there are about the value of the Geneva meeting, it will not be in vain if it makes progress here. The talks could even become a model for resolving or at least ameliorating conflicts in other countries.
Jonathan Steele