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Celigny reality

Bookmakers didn't have to give numbers on it, but odds were stacked against early success in the Celigny round of peace talks. Every forecaster and analyst almost, turned out a Cassandra, which meant that the new administration had the advantage of being underestimated by one and all - big player, prognosticator, oppositionist and pundit.

But, the gloom and doom apparently couched reality, and now we are able to say that the sensitive indicators, the barometers that are today's gauge for the health of the nation, looked at the end of the week a bit silly for not having got it right in the first place.

Now they tell us that the markets have registered an upturn. It's probably as a result of the fact that the indice-makers had been enveloped by gloom and doom of their own making, whereas the peace-reality was of a different and less presumptive variety.

The hardsell was that it was a hardliner pitted against a group of armed fanatics fast losing their marbles, an assessment not entirely unjustified if you are to go by media perception created due to the sensational nature of breaking-news analysis. Breaking news was that Rajapakse was a hardline president, and that the LTTE was thoroughly mad, to go by every sense of that word from dictionary meaning to colloquial.

It's these TV-mass-market and multi media perceptions that cannot be managed, but there can be some control over the arc of actual process. The managers of the peace effort couldn't control public opinion, but could manage a variety of other variables such as influencing their immediate partners in the peace effort.

One aspect of this peacebuilding exercise for instance was the fact that there was a perception that despite what enemy detractor and alien had to say about it, the Sri Lankan representation at talks was displaying some authentic character.

Earlier, the delegations had been genteel but not the genuine article, to the extent that these chaps who went in the team-bus wore Colombo shaped millstone round their necks while they imbibed western liberalism along with their wine and finger food. That made it easier for the foreign press and the diplomatic corps to relate to them, but the peace that was being made was of an ersatz variety. Their kind of peace was brittle to the extent that it simply didn't have the approval of the mainstream - the core of public opinion - in this country.

It may look sweeping, this assessment, but its only another way of saying that there was a need for authenticity in the peace process, which meant that this was time for more truth-telling and less pantomime. To that end, it was shocking to the western liberal right wing pundits particularly of the disruptive extremist neo-UNP variety to believe some of this current delegation's early submissions, for instance the one that castigated the LTTE, in the glare of the international spotlight, for scuppering the 2005 presidential election.

That was something meant for the UNP to say, going at least by the analysis, not incorrect, that it was the UNP that had to gain if the LTTE had allowed a free vote! This level of candour was a first on international community and detractor alike, and even if that may not have been the cause of the serendipitous outcome of agreeing on a second round of talks in April, it has to be noted that its difficult to keep a good peace effort down and out in the cold for too long.

The media process

Peace is a process, not an event says the conflict resolution specialists and that's said regularly as if they are imparting learning gleaned from the fountainheads of wisdom. To this has been added the sublime piece of advise now that peace or at least peacemaking, has to be transparent.

Professor G. L .Peiris said this at a seminar held this week, at which he was forced to take a somewhat uncharacteristically short ten minutes to describe the UPFA peacemaking experience with the LTTE under the voluble Kumaratunge leadership.

Meeting the press was as common and as routine as breakfast, going by professor's Peiris's rendering of events during that peace outing. This he said, gave the 'process' maximum transparency, even though he added it's arguable whether meet-the-press was in fact done a little to excess.

The implication of that, without doubt, being that the peace process under his captaincy of it was transparent to the hilt, in comparison with a 2006 peace process that we are told, would concentrate more on peace than press.

Transparency can sometimes be another word for showboating, even though we are not accusing professor Peiris of deliberately putting the peace process on display as on the ornament on the top-shelf when he was in charge of the action.

Isn't it axiomatic that peace goes with quiet? Not so to the Professor we are tempted to say. Nimal Silva's peace isn't of any specially minted variety, but by not feeding the press with frenzied hour on the hour pronouncements, the peace effort is being deliberately kept at a sedate, sober and manageable level. Expectations are kept trim.

That's a good thing.

Granted that a compromise has to be made between the need for transparency and the need for avoiding overgrown expectations. The right assumption of the UNF peace team was that peace is not an event, which makes it axiomatic that it shouldn't be put in the same ballpark as a one-day cricket match. In other words, peacemaking does not need a ball-by-ball commentary.

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