In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

On June 30, Noynoy Aquino will take his oath of office for a six-year term as president of the Philippines. He faces many challenges, not least the resolution of some of the longest-running insurgencies in the world.

He succeeds President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who served almost nine and a half years after President Joseph Estrada was ousted in 2001. President Estrada launched an “all out war” against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in 2000. By contrast, when Mrs. Arroyo took office, she declared a policy of “all out peace,” and over the years, peace talks with the MILF have reached several agreements and a cessation of hostilities has generally held, despite notable exceptions in February 2003 and August 2008. The latter breakdown was associated with the abortive Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD), declared unconstitutional by the Philippine Supreme Court. Several hundred thousand people were internally displaced from the resulting return to violence, and only began to return to their homes in July 2009 when both sides agreed to cease hostilities.

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In the larger debate about the relationship of development assistance to security, the gap between normative assertions and empirical evidence yawns. Since the 1990s, the concept of “rule of law” has been enthusiastically embraced by international development actors and touted as the key to consolidating peace in post-conflict societies. Rhetorical overuse of the term has been matched by a proliferation of rule of law programs purporting to cover everything from legislative, judicial, and police reforms to land and property administration and market reforms. These programs, with their oversized ambitions, rely on a contested definition of what constitutes rule of law and what can be accomplished through international assistance. Such cookie-cutter, pre-packaged rule of law programs are unfortunately routinely favored over more strategic and carefully designed programs that apply very specifically to country and local-level environments and people’s needs on the ground. And much of development funding tends to go to formal institutions like judiciaries that are assumed to have the capacity and strength to deliver positive development outcomes. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case, especially in many developing countries where formal institutions are run by the elite, and local conflicts are more reliably resolved in informal institutions.

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• After Unrest, Deep Divisions Still Persist in Thailand

• Will a New ‘Hybrid’ Negotiating Process Save Nepal’s Prospects for Peace?

• Afghanistan’s Governors Address On-the-Ground Realities

• Timor-Leste Looks to Use Oil Revenues to Kick-Start Economy

• Can Afghanistan’s Traditional Jirgas Bring Hope for Peace?

• Slideshow: Asia’s Fragile Corners

Often, when the prospect of peace is moving forward at the national level, citizens continue to experience the impacts of conflict, particularly at the local level. This is very much the case in Nepal today – emerging from nearly a decade-long open civil war – as the Constituent Assembly struggles toward a peace process at the national level. These trying and tragic local-level impacts  range from the resettlement of displaced people, disputes over private property, and recovery from trauma, to an increase in the culture of violence and vengeance. And given that even the most successful national efforts to peace can easily be derailed by local outbursts of discontent, chaos, and violence, a holistic and durable approach to peacebuilding must respond to post-conflict crises at the local level in order to consolidate peace at the national level. This requires a simultaneous and multifaceted focus on preventing, resolving, and containing conflict, as well as trauma recovery and a process for reconciliation.

Recognizing this need, the community mediation program in Nepal, pioneered by The Asia Foundation, has provided a platform for local people to respond to local conflicts and address their underlying causes.

Nepali lawmakers recently averted a constitutional crisis by extending the Constituent Assembly’s tenure by one year. But it’s unclear when political parties will resolve their differences and focus on drafting the new constitution. In fragile, post-war climates, community mediation, like this reconciliation between divided neighbors (at right), is critical.

Since its inception, the program has contributed significantly toward ameliorating conflicts in the 118 localities where it has been implemented. One indicator of its success has been the surge in the number of cases referred to mediation, which can be attributed to the fact that this is a community-based program and the ownership has largely been realized by the locals.

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In the Philippines on June 3, special elections were held in seven towns in the southern Lanao del Sur province, and in some other areas predominately in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). The regularly scheduled national elections, held on May 10, had been declared as “failed” in these towns. As noted during the 2007 general elections, clan conflict over political power regularly overwhelms the electoral system in the ARMM; indeed, the vast majority of voters who experience “failed elections” are in the ARMM.

Representatives from the locally-based organization, Mindanao Dynamic Culture of Peace, were accredited as election monitors through the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting and helped monitor the June 3 special elections in Bayang.

Bayang was among the seven towns forced to hold special elections, even though the peace convention held there last February had seemed successful: it had culminated in local candidates signing a covenant promising to support a peaceful and honest electoral process.

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The president of Timor-Leste, José Ramos Horta, was in Canberra yesterday to inaugurate what the BBC calls a “gift embassy” – the new Embassy of Timor-Leste to Australia was entirely financed through charitable contributions through the government of Australia. But the five-day visit comes amid strained relations between the eight-year-old nation and Australia, its largest aid donor. A bitter standoff between Timor-Leste’s government and an Australian oil company has reinvigorated debate over how best to use the country’s petroleum wealth to fuel development, and the role outsiders play in the country’s affairs.

Timor-Leste remains in dire need of infrastructure development, and health and education have suffered under Portuguese colonial rule and then Indonesian occupation, and from the civil strife in the years since the 1999 referendum on independence from Indonesia. Photo by Conor Ashleigh

The subject of the dispute – which follows on years of acrimonious negotiations over access to petroleum found beneath the Timor Sea – is the potential location of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing plant.

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During last year’s presidential election, Hamid Karzai promised to call a jirga to promote peace and reconciliation for Afghanistan’s future. After two postponements, the peace jirga finally took place in early June with 1,700 delegates gathering in Kabul. Some in the Afghan and international press have criticized the results, but the primary goal of the jirga – to take initial steps toward peace – was largely accomplished.

Nearly 1,700 delegates gathered in Kabul for a peace jirga in early June.

Many involved in organizing the jirga adhere to an old Afghan proverb: Blood cannot be washed by blood. According to a 2008 report by the International Council on Security, the Taliban now hold a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan. This has contributed to a shift within some in the Afghan government and the international community to think that inclusive negotiations are imperative to achieving peace and stability; and that reconciliation will not come if fighting continues.

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The vision of a world free of nuclear weapons was boldly initiated three years ago by four U.S. senior statesmen – Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn. To achieve the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and to bring the world back from the tipping point, the vision aims to reduce nations’ reliance on nuclear weapons, prevent them from falling into dangerous hands, and to rid the world of nuclear weapons as a threat.

We highly appreciate the initiatives taken by these four wise men that have helped to make progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons. We also appreciate President Barack Obama’s efforts to courageously translate this vision into specific policy measures. In his historic Prague speech in April 2009, Obama emphasized America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. In April 2010, President Obama signed a New START agreement with President Medvedev of Russia, in which the leaders solemnly declared their joint commitment to eliminate all nuclear weapons globally and agreed to substantially reduce their respective strategic nuclear weapons.

Our support for these efforts is directly related to the grim reality we face in Korea and the vision of the Korean Peninsula without nuclear weapons.

The above is an excerpt of a statement published on June 23 in JoongAng Daily made by former Prime Minister and Asia Foundation Trustee Lee Hong-ko;, Ambassador Han Sung-joo, former Foreign Minister of South Korea, a member of the Board of Directors of the Friends of The Asia Foundation in Korea, and head of the Northeast Asia task force on The Asia Foundation’s America’s Role in Asia project; along with two other prominent Koreans. The statement was timed for the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. Read the full statement.

Conflict and fragile governance present enormous challenges for development and security in Asia. In places where violence is widespread and government ceases to function, the pace of development falls dramatically and conditions can deteriorate to extreme levels. Conflicts often include disaffected minorities or marginalized populations at odds with the central government and political establishment. Other elements that can heighten conflicts include limitations on local identity and culture, a lack of accounting for past abuses, and poor access to justice and security.

The Asia Foundation has a long history of working in fragile or conflict-prone areas, including in Afghanistan, Mindanao (Philippines), Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Aceh (Indonesia), Southern Thailand, and Timor-Leste. Our long-term presence and extensive networks allow us to interact with key actors and support programs in highly challenging and sensitive environments.  Watch the slideshow.

In Timor Leste, the UN mission is meant to officially hand over law-and-order responsibilities to the national police force (PNTL) by the end of this year. While questions have been raised about what exactly is being handed over, an equal number of questions have been raised about how to measure the preparedness of the PNTL to provide security.

However, in a nation-wide poll conducted by The Asia Foundation on law and justice in Timor-Leste, more than three out of four people held that community leaders were still responsible for the rules that govern their daily lives in Timor-Leste and were also primarily responsible for maintaining security in their locality. On top of that, Timor-Leste boasts an astonishingly low crime rate.

If local communities are largely self-sufficient and crime is low, then what role is left for police to play?

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