Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2006
PROFESSOR PAUL
COLLIER
Q100 Ann McKechin:
Your theories seem to stress that there is a strong link between
levels of growth and per capita income as a determinant of the
likelihood of conflict. What do you believe to be the implications
in terms of donor policies? Some may say that this is an interesting
theory but it may not necessarily apply in every single situation
that a donor comes across?
Professor Collier: Nothing in
social science applies in every single situation. One could talk
about propensities but it would be crazy to say that it applied
everywhere. It is a pretty good guide to general policy lessons,
but it is not the only one. One must always know the particular
circumstances. I should emphasise that the relationship between
income and especially growth and the risk of conflict is not just
a theory; it is as good as we can establish empirically. The link
between growth and conflict risk is not just my work; there is
some very distinguished studies by other people. The top article
in the top economics journal in the world established rigorously
a link between growth and lower risk of conflict, so it is as
good as we know. Doubtless there will be exceptions as you say,
but it is there. It is not theory; it is as robust a relationship
in social science as we can reasonably get.
Q101 Ann McKechin:
In effect, it would be a risk assessment strategy?
Professor Collier: Yes. The implication
of it is that economic development will be a major component of
any longer-term strategy to reduce the global incidence of civil
conflict. Without economic development other strategies look very
difficult. They are working on the margins, whereas with economic
development one can basically get away with a lot of poor governance.
Q102 Chairman:
You said that resources could fuel a rebellion. If one takes a
poor country like Malawi which does not have any resources or
economic growth, nobody suggests that that country is about to
burst into civil war. There is the counter-argument, is there
not, that if one does not have any resources or money one is less
likely to have conflict? That is not a very encouraging one for
the people.
Professor Collier: Basically,
there are three economic components of risk: low income, low growth
and natural resources. If one comes up with all three cherries
one is in trouble. Malawi has two out of three, so there is still
a risk. Cote d'Ivoire managed to get two out of three and look
what happened. It had peace for a long time. Nobody in 1990 would
have said that that was a country at risk. Africa is distinct
in its endowments, not its risks, but a lot of it has all three
cherries: low income, economic decline and richness in resources.
The resource richness is becoming more important as one has more
and more discoveries in these fragile states and a price boom.
Q103 Ann McKechin:
You say that economic development in relation to income can be
a high risk. I take it from that you say it must be directly related
to employment?
Professor Collier: You misheard.
I am saying that economic development and growth will bring down
risks.
Q104 Ann McKechin:
Provided it is linked to employment, because in some cases it
is not?
Professor Collier: The presumption
should be that growth will reduce risks. That is the normal relationship.
Therefore, normally if there is growth it is good news; it will
promote peace. Can one think of ways in which one gets growth
that does not help? Of course one can. Take Equatorial Guinea
and Chad. Oil is discovered and the Government wants to spend
the money on the army. It shows up in the figures for GDP because
oil will be a big part of it but it does not do any good.
Q105 Ann McKechin:
But there is a link between economic growth on the one hand and
employment on the other. The third factor which you mentioned
earlier is the question of taxable income streams collected by
governments. It is the correlation between those three factors
which is essential to avoid conflict, not just economic growth
and nothing else?
Professor Collier: Undoubtedly.
I am not saying that it is economic growth and nothing else. I
am saying that there is a presumption that economic growth is
good for peace and is peace-promoting, unless there is a form
of economic growth which is pretty weird. One comes across cases
of pretty weird growth and I have given the two current examples
of Equatorial Guinea and Chad. The growth statistics show that
the economy is growing, but nothing is happening on the ground
except that oil is coming out of it.
Q106 Ann McKechin:
One can say the same of the Middle East where there is a lot of
economic growth but high unemployment and a high risk of strife?
Professor Collier: That is right.
It is the non-oil economy that must benefit in some way. The most
likely mechanism as you suggest is the labour market. I do not
disagree with that, but I do not want to get away from the fact
that the normal presumption is that growth is beneficial for peace.
Q107 Richard Burden:
The word "inequality" has not entered your vocabulary
so far. Whilst there is evidence that high levels of growth can
reduce inequality, do you think that inequality is a relevant
factor in all this?
Professor Collier: It seems to
be much less important than I expected. When I started all this
work seven or eight years ago I thought that what would leap off
the page was the idea that inequality caused conflict. It does
not. Statistically, it is not a very strong factor. I would like
to tell you—it would make a lot of sense—that if you
reduced inequality you would get rid of the problem. It is just
not there in the data. There is some evidence that where there
is a lot of inequality once a conflict begins it goes on for longer.
In my view, the factors that are over-emphasised in conflict resolution
are inequality and elections, and the matter which is under-emphasised
is basically economic development, which may emerge as jobs, but
the political fixes through elections do not seem to reduce the
risks of conflict. We have a lot of examples of conflict in very
equal societies and examples of the absence of conflict in some
extremely unequal ones.
Q108 Ann McKechin:
What would be an example of a very equal society?
Professor Collier: Sri Lanka is
one of the most equal societies around.
Mr Singh: The Tamils do not think so.
Professor Collier: It is economically
equal. If you look at income distribution in Sri Lanka it is very
equal compared with most other places. One of the factors that
has sustained the conflict in Sri Lanka is external finance from
the Tamil diaspora, not from natural resources. We know that the
Tamil diaspora has been massively funding the Tamil Tigers. For
example, the bomb in Colombo that killed and injured 1,400 people
was traced back to finance from the Tamils in Canada. There is
currently a move within the European community to try to get the
Tamil Tigers declared a terrorist organisation, and I think we
should do that. The diaspora financing statistically seems to
be one of the factors that makes countries more prone to conflict.
We should discipline the diasporas to try to curb that financing.
Chairman: On the issue of resources,
we have looked at the Kimberley process and extendibility. Mr
Singh has a couple of questions on that matter.
Q109 Mr Singh:
I think that others will ask questions on the issue of grievance
and rebel movements. One of the matters you identified in the
strategies to reduce the risk or try to stop conflict was the
squeezing of the resources available to rebel movements. I think
that you see the Kimberley process as a model of international
action. I know that that process is to be reviewed after three
years, but in your view has that process been an unqualified success
to date, or does it have problems?
Professor Collier: I think that
the whole tension around conflict diamonds produced results and
helped to squeeze UNITA. I have seen interviews with the top UNITA
leadership that describe how basically it started to run out of
money and guns in the closing years. By the time it was defeated
it was starving, and that was a transformation from a few years
earlier. In the run-up to Kimberley one had much greater scrutiny
which helped to make a big difference. De Beers, which had been
saying that there was no problem and it had nothing to do with
it, withdrew from the diamond market. That was a massive switch
in its policy. That killed rebel access. It is not just the moment
that Kimberley starts; it is the build-up to it. In my view Kimberley
is getting better as time goes on. The next technology in Kimberley,
as I understand it, is the use of smartcards for miners in alluvial
diamond areas which can do a lot to track the source of diamonds
within a very small area. New technology is making feasible a
lot of things that were not in the original Kimberley agreement.
I am very hopeful. It is a model of what can be done in timber,
perhaps even in oil. Oil-bunkering, as it is called, in the delta
region of Nigeria involved rebel groups stealing a lot of oil
from the pipelines and selling it. Trace elements in the oil can
make it much harder to sell it, if there is proper certification
and scrutiny. The object is not to make it unsaleable but to create
a deep discount in the price at which rebels can sell it.
Q110 Mr Singh:
You are talking about legitimate and illegitimate products?
Professor Collier: Yes. One is
creating an illegal market for a product that is legitimate, and
one differentiates the markets by some identifiable measure. In
diamonds it would be the certification process; in oil it would
be a trace element in the product; and in timber it would be an
attempt to trace the source of the trees.
Q111 Mr Singh:
Could the process be made more effective by, for example, the
United Nations applying sanctions to particular areas, for example
Cote d'Ivoire, which are rebel-held to make sure that resources
from those areas cannot be traded?
Professor Collier: Yes. Sanctions
go hand in hand with information that makes the sanctions enforceable.
Q112 Mr Singh:
Do sanctions work in this kind of area?
Professor Collier: I think they
can. One does not want them to get too far ahead of the technology
that provides the information; otherwise, they are discredited,
but the technology that provides the information really is advancing,
so these measures are becoming much more feasible.
Q113 John Battle:
I want to ask about the role of rebel groups. It is almost trite
to say that some rebels become the leaders of the country later.
Therefore, there is not always clarity in motives. I spent some
time today meeting people from Sierra Leone and listening to them
at a very basic family level. If your argument is that part of
the Kimberley process will lower the price that rebel groups rather
than governments get for commodities, does it not assume that
the rebels' grievances are not the real issue? The real issue
is simply that they can get their hands on the dosh and worm their
way into power and keep control. Therefore, there is a dichotomy
between rebels and government but once they become government
their motives are not the same?
Professor Collier: I believe that
it is very dangerous to go down the route of saying that rebels
and governments are equal. In most developing societies lots of
people have legitimate grievances against governments. Most of
them by our standards are pretty poor, rough governments, so there
are a lot of legitimate grievances. Usually, these legitimate
grievances do not translate into armed violence, but sometimes
they do. Basically, armed violence does not appear to be closely
related to the level of legitimate grievance. There is always
a strong case for addressing legitimate grievance. There is no
evidence that armed violence promotes the redress of grievances;
on the contrary, the legacy of armed conflict is far deeper problems
than one starts with. Even where one has legitimate grievances
and the rebels are addressing them, which is a big assumption
because usually the rebels are no better than the government,
it is a lousy way to do it because the cost of the violence far
exceeds the usual redress.
Q114 John Battle:
As I have been listening to you I have heard a completely counter-argument.
As part of my background I have been heavily involved in Northern
Ireland and the conversation has been quietly in the background.
I have been listening to what you say within that template. For
example, one has Boston funding the IRA and its move into drugs
and the rest of it. A lot of my time was spent making comments
on the ground in West Belfast to the effect that perhaps it was
better to get round the table and talk about the weather than
kill each other in the street, including relatives and friends
in the post office down the road. Provided they are sitting round
a table having a conversation they are not out on the streets
shooting people. Therefore, the aim is to try to get a conversation
going to end the conflict, because in my experience once people
go down the road of armed conflict to get them back to conversation
is the most difficult of political tasks. I just wonder what would
be the overriding objectives if we wanted to reduce and eliminate
conflict, because it might mean compromise. To pretend that rebels
and governments are equal forces and should even be respected
equally, or to say there is a moral equivalence between them,
might not be appropriate, but in the practical world of politics
it might be important to get them round the table and listen to
the rebels and understand that sometimes their grievances are
not actual but perceived grievances which still need to be dealt
with?
Professor Collier: One would want
to make a distinction, in that where a rebellion is going on as
a practical matter one has to try to deal with the rebel group
to get peace. That is a massively difficult thing to do for a
variety of reasons. One is that the rebel group becomes an organisation
that gets used to conflict. It knows how to swim in conflict and
peace becomes some sort of mythical thing with which it is not
very comfortable. When the FARC finally met the Colombian Government
a few years ago the Government said, "This is a private meeting.
What do you want?" The FARC leaders did not know what they
wanted; for years they had been used to fighting. The major reason
why it is very difficult to achieve peace is that once peace is
arrived at governments become progressively more powerful relative
to rebels. Rebel forces disintegrate during peace. Therefore,
governments have an incentive to promise the movement and then
renege on it. Because rebels know that one cannot get peace in
the first place. The rebels will not be duped into peace. There
is no offer the government can make that is credible. External
actors like ourselves have a role in trying to guarantee peace
settlements.
Q115 John Battle:
Does that include listening to the rebels, or someone engaging
with them?
Professor Collier: Of course it
does. Once one has a rebel group, no matter how awful it is, it
must be given an interest in peace, which means that sometimes
it has to be literally bribed into peace. RENAMO[4]
in Mozambique was bribed into peace because Italian aid agencies
were sufficiently cavalier in their accounting that money could
be diverted into setting up the leadership of that organisation.
For the best of reasons DFID could not have done that.
Q116 John Bercow:
A few moments ago you said that in your judgment there was fairly
conclusive evidence that the use of violence did not result in
the redress of grievances. It does not follow from that statement,
even if it is true, that the non-use of violence by aggrieved
persons, whether as a result of a calculated choice not to deploy
it or because of an insufficiency of weaponry or numbers of troops
to do so, would achieve any better result. In other words, whether
there is use or non-use of violence the grievances might not be
redressed. What is the significance in that sense of a multilateral
intervention from outside, if that takes place; or do you suggest
that the use of rebel violence is more likely than not to discourage
an external actor from becoming involved? In the event of such
intervention is it more likely than not that not merely will one
achieve peace but that the government whose behaviour has caused
the violence and multilateral intervention will be prepared to
come to an agreement which at least in part resolves those grievances?
Professor Collier: I caution you
against assuming government behaviour which has caused the violence.
In these low-income and low-growth but resource-rich societies
sometimes, no matter what the government does, the opportunities
for violence are so great that one will have violence. In southern
Sudan a terrible government has bought peace with the SPLA[5].
There are 30 armed groups in southern Sudan. It is so easy to
be an armed group in southern Sudan, and with oil coming out it
will be so profitable to be an armed group. It is a desperate
situation. There are some environments in which even with good
governance the opportunities for violence are just too great.
You ask about the scope for external intervention. "Intervention"
is a broad word. Of course, in these environments one has struggles.
One has brave local heroes, for example John Githongo in Kenya,
who are peacefully sustaining a force for reform, and it is our
proper business to do everything we can to strengthen their position.
Usually, that will be non-military. Our opportunity for military
intervention is post-conflict or in the very late stages of conflict.
Our intervention in Sierra Leone both to establish and guarantee
was absolutely brilliant. In my view, that is the future. I just
hope that the difficulties in Iraq will not lead us to learn the
wrong lesson, just as the difficulties in Somalia led to the wrong
lesson—not to intervene—which produced Rwanda within
a year. If we draw the lesson from Iraq that we should never intervene
we will have another Rwanda.
Q117 John Bercow:
In your experience, is the presence or absence of television cameras
during a conflict a relevant variable which points conclusively
in one direction or another in terms of the likelihood of conflict
being resolved and grievances redressed, or is the picture too
varied and unpredictable to allow a conclusion to be drawn?
Professor Collier: I have not
studied it statistically. It probably cuts both ways. Clearly,
there are situations in which the presence of the external media
disciplines government behaviour. We must also not forget that
the media are used by rebel groups to try to stimulate their own
financing. One notices that all of the public relations of a lot
of rebel groups is done in English. The audience of the rebels
is us, not their own people, because they are appealing to a diaspora
which harbours ancient grievances. Diasporas tend to be less forgiving
than the local population. Quite often the local population comes
to a modus vivendi, whereas the diasporas just want vengeance
for some real or imagined past slight.
Q118 Chairman:
Does it imply that the Department for International Development
should reconsider some of its policies? Some of us went to Uganda.
I think of a meeting that Quentin Davies and I had with the Prime
Minister of Uganda. There is an unresolved conflict and general
belief that it suits the Prime Minister of Uganda to keep it unresolved,
and yet we are providing direct support to him and his state.
We are giving his Government support; the international community
is providing policing and medical aid in northern Uganda. I think
that Quentin Davies will confirm that when he and I met the Prime
Minister and asked about the relationship with the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC) he sneered contemptuously and said
that that was not a serious country and Uganda had every right
to pursue anybody it wanted as far as it liked. As you know, reparations
have been awarded but I imagine they will never be paid. The question
is: is it right for our own Department to continue to provide
support to Uganda which is not fulfilling its responsibilities
in the north even though it has jurisdiction there and is effectively
freely invading its neighbour?
Professor Collier: I think that
in a lot of these countries it is legitimate for us to try to
influence both the level of military spending and the conduct
of the governments. One simple reason for that is that we are
financing a lot of African military spending. On average about
11% of aid leaks into military spending. When one adds that up
it means that in Africa about 40% of its military spending is
inadvertently financed by aid. What is more, unfortunately aid
seems to increase the risk of a coup d'etat. That is the
honey pot effect. Aid is a little like a natural resource. The
greater the aid the bigger the incentive for armies to try to
capture power. In response to the high risk of a coup d'etat
governments tend to spend more on the military to try to buy it
off; they buy off the military in part with our money because
we are financing so much of it. Therefore, it is entirely legitimate
that we try to place demands on governments in the areas of security,
behaviour and military spending. In the particular case of Uganda
the history is more complicated because for years Sudan has financed
the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). It is hard to see the LRA as
other than a deeply warped phenomenon and it is not easy to negotiate
a peace arrangement with it. The south sent a clergyman to negotiate
and the LRA killed him, so negotiation is not easy.
Q119 Richard Burden:
If we can go back to Sierra Leone for a minute, one problem is
the large number of unemployed youth which is closely related
to instances of conflict. Reading your analysis, is it right that
you attribute to that unemployed youth, who arguably do not have
very much, the motivation of greed?
Professor Collier: No. I see them
more like cannon fodder. My advice is that we should not get too
hung up on motivation. Most of these phenomena have very complex
patterns of motivation: grievances, lunacy, the allure and glamour
of violence and the frustration of desperate circumstances. The
cocktail of motivations is very complicated. As implied by the
question, when one has a lot of unemployed youth with no hope
what does one expect? One wants to try to create jobs for those
people and kick-start the economy in these post-conflict situations.
Unfortunately, economic recovery takes time to deliver significant
effects. It will take a decade to rebuild an economy and the risks
are the here and now. That is one major reason why one needs an
external military presence for quite a long time just to keep
the lid on whilst one is rebuilding the economy and providing
the jobs so there is less cannon fodder for opportunists to use.
4 Resistência Nacional Moc"ambicana (Mozambican
National Resistance). Back
5
Sudan People's Liberation Army. Back
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