Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 132)
THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2006
PROFESSOR PAUL
COLLIER
Q120 Richard Burden:
That is where I have trouble. In relation to Sierra Leone I would
not particularly disagree with you. You have already answered
the question that I was going to ask about whether some conclusions
needed to be drawn about employment, but you appear to apply the
same prescription across the board. It may well be that in particular
situations, not necessarily in Sierra Leone, the grievances, whether
they be lack of employment or high levels of poverty, are real
and the government bears a large degree of responsibility for
them. That is where I have difficulty in your comment about being
careful about assuming an equivalence between rebels and governments.
Surely, does one not have to judge that on a case-by-case basis?
There is nothing which says that a government is more or less
legitimate than a rebel group unless one relates it to the circumstances
of the particular country and what the conflict is about. Let
us say that people take up arms in Burma. How does that fit with
your analysis? You say that there is no equivalence because there
is a Government in Burma and we need to think of it in an entirely
different way from the people who are complaining about what is
going on to the extent of taking up arms?
Professor Collier: I guess the
point is that in Burma on the whole people have not, have they?
Burma is about as bad a Government as one can get and yet the
circumstances there are such that it has not provoked violence.
In most low-income societies lots of people have genuine grievances
which ought, therefore, to be addressed by definition. Where one
has violence which is usually related to factors other than grievances,
unless they are total idiots, the people who lead those rebellions
will say that they are doing it because they have legitimate grievances,
and they will be perfectly legitimate grievances which they can
speak of. Do not be duped into thinking that this conflict is
caused by unusual grievances. That is what they want you to think.
Q121 Richard Burden:
By "conflict" do you mean the point at which they take
up arms?
Professor Collier: I mean violence.
Conflict is endemic to all societies; it is healthy. One has rebellions
where one has large-scale sustained and organised killing on a
freelance basis. They are private armies killing people. If one
regards that as having moral equivalence with the government one
makes a big mistake. Let us all sign up for the grievances that
they allege. I was the one who found shelter for John Githongo
because I believed that his grievances were right and we had better
support him. I passionately believe in the redress of grievances.
If one has some damned armed group in Kenya organising a few hundred
people with Kalashnikovs it will use the language of John Githongo
but it is unlikely to be John Githongo.
Richard Burden: Do you say that there
was no moral equivalence between the Milosevic Government in Kosovo
and the KLA[6]?
I do not argue for the KLA, but do you say that the Milosevic
Government was on a different moral plane?
Q122 Chairman:
You are taking morality out of the argument?
Professor Collier: I am saying
that the KLA was not the answer to the problem.
Q123 Richard Burden:
That is not the answer to my question.
Professor Collier: Just because
there were manifest, powerful and legitimate grievances in that
situation does not mean that we should endorse the KLA as the
solution. The KLA was a classic diaspora-funded violent organisation
which created as many problems as it solved.
Q124 John Barrett:
I want to touch on an initiative which was mentioned at the start:
employment as part of the post-conflict strategy to reduce the
likelihood of a recurrence of violence. One of the things we saw
in action by donors in Sierra Leone was the training of a pool
of young men as mechanics, carpenters or bricklayers, but, as
you mentioned, if the economy does not take off at the same time
one then has a group of unemployed skilled people. What can donors
do to reduce the likelihood of an increase in frustration and
grievances? It is bad enough to be unemployed and unskilled, but
one can imagine that the grievance increases when skills go up
and unemployment remains?
Professor Collier: Absolutely.
One key to post-conflict recovery is some sense of confidence
that in future there will be a sufficient period of peace. One
of the big phenomena that happen during conflict is the flight
of capital. Huge amounts of the economy's own capital leave the
country for obvious reasons. Usually, in post-conflict situations
that capital flight continues. Sometimes it is reversed. The big
success in post-conflict Uganda is that it managed to get capital
coming back in instead of going out. For a start, that was a matter
of re-establishing property rights. The typical post-conflict
situation carries a high risk of returning to conflict. If one
had assets parked abroad and one lived in a society where there
was a big risk of a return to conflict one's calculation would
be whether to bring that money back or keep it abroad. The more
one can do to make the post-conflict peace credible the more the
economy is likely to revive, because the essence of revival is
that people start to bring their own money back into the economy.
To my mind, our security guarantees to make that peace credible
are a vitally new instrument. The long-term guarantee that we
have given in Sierra Leone is the right instrument alongside sustained
aid. The typical aid story in the past decade was that aid came
in in a rush and left much too quickly. That problem is now being
rectified. Donors recognise that mistake and aid programmes are
being sustained for longer. The security guarantees are very new,
and I believe that that is the model for the future. The normal
way in which governments try to maintain post-conflict peace is
by having big eyes. On my statistical analysis that is not the
solution; it is part of the problem. The quid pro quo for
our security guarantees is deep military downsizing by the post-conflict
government itself. I refer to the sort of thing that the Government
of Mozambique did post-conflict. It massively slashed its army,
which most post-conflict governments do not do. Spending typically
post-conflict looks very much like spending during the conflict.
Q125 John Barrett:
You said earlier that 40% of military spending in Africa was financed
through aid. Where does that come from, because clearly that arises
in the post-conflict situation? If there is a transfer of that
kind the potential for a recurrence of the problem remains?
Professor Collier: You have got
it in one. These post-conflict situations are appropriately times
when we want to put in a lot of aid. Most aid does not leak into
military spending, but on average about 11% does. That is enough
to worry about but is not sufficient to cancel the aid programmes.
However, it is enough to give us a legitimate role in saying,
"You're spending too much. If we are to provide you with
security guarantees you will spend less than you want." That
is the quid pro quo, and it is entirely legitimate if only
because we are paying for its army.
Q126 Joan Ruddock:
You said in a previous publication[7],
and repeated it today at one point, that essentially there was
often too much concentration in post-conflict situations on democracy
and elections, trying to bring about new political institutions
when really economic growth was required. If we look at very familiar
examples, I know a little about Afghanistan. I entirely sympathise
with what you have said. We have these institutions and have spent
all this time and effort. We think it is great that so many people
have turned out to vote, but actually on the ground very little
has changed. The situation in Iraq and many countries is similar.
You also said that it would take a decade to develop or rebuild
an economy. What do you do in the meantime?
Professor Collier: You keep the
lid on it as best you can.
Q127 Joan Ruddock:
But how?
Professor Collier: With an external
military presence or guarantee. Obviously, I am not against trying
to build democratic institutions. One has to do that. But we fool
ourselves if we pretend that just by holding an election we have
eliminated the risks and, therefore, our army is not needed. I
believe that shortly the Committee is to go to the DRC. That is
exactly the discourse that is needed now in the DRC. There is
a big external military force: 17,000 men are keeping the peace
at the moment. The clock is ticking towards an election and it
is quite likely that as soon as the election is over the governments
that provide that external military force will say goodbye. I
believe that that would be a big mistake. I have tried to see
what effect post-conflict elections have on risk. The tentative
findings are that in the year before an election post-conflict
that election reduces the risks; in the year after the risks are
increased, and the net effect is about zero. Elections overall,
therefore, do not reduce risk but shift it into the future. You
may remember that before the elections in Iraq we were told that
the high level of violence was because it was a run-up to those
elections. Then we had the elections and the level of violence
went up, not down. That is consistent with commonsense. If one
has an election coming up there is hope that one can gain power
legitimately. If one has just lost it one goes back to war. Of
course we have to build these political institutions, but let
us not kid ourselves that that is the short-term solution because,
being new institutions, they do not have much credibility with
the very people who have the choice of going back to violence.
Q128 Joan Ruddock:
What you are saying is incredibly significant particularly in
relation to Iraq. It sounds as though you are predicting that
what is there already is most likely to result in civil war. Many
have suggested that it is civil war. Do you say that the risks
have been increased by concentration on the electoral process?
Professor Collier: I never predict
individual civil wars.
Q129 Joan Ruddock:
But your theory suggests it?
Professor Collier: The sort of
work that I do and the use that can be made of my material is
concerned with propensities and hence the direction of a policy
regime. If one wants to apply it to any particular situation one
has to know a lot about it as well, because the particular is
always important. My stuff is useful in guarding against false
generalisations from the particular.
Q130 Joan Ruddock:
How realistic is it to try to implement what you are arguing for
which suggests to me that the international community has to spend
a decade in every post-conflict state without any perceived political
legitimacy?
Professor Collier: As you will
have found, Britain was pretty popular in Sierra Leone in providing
security. The more that is internationalised the more that role
is usually welcomed, not by everybody because there are always
spoilers in these situations that want violence. But the damage
done by these civil wars is so horrendous and the risks of going
back to more civil war so high, that it is really legitimate for
the international community to say that it is going to do something
about these situations. The cost of civil war both to the country
itself and its neighbourhood is enormous. The cost to the neighbourhood
is even greater than the cost to the country itself. The external
world has a legitimate interest in saying that it is going to
have peace for a sufficient time to give the country a real chance
of rebuilding the economy to a level at which peace is more likely
to be sustained.
Q131 Chairman:
This is a fascinating study. The primary responsibility of this
Committee is to call its own department, the Department for International
Development, to account and hopefully make constructive recommendations.
We are major donors in these conflict areas. I think that we are
about to become the biggest donor in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo. We are a major donor in Uganda, and we are a major
aid force in Darfur and so on. What would be your recommendation
as to the key policy instruments that DFID should use in these
conflicts? What can we do about resources in terms of diverting
them away from the funding of rebels? Can you identify what you
believe to be the key policies that we should pursue?
Professor Collier: DFID is already
much further along the road than any other bilateral development
agency, but the key step that it needs to be encouraged to continue
is to think of itself as a development agency, not just an aid
agency. The essence of post-conflict work is to get joined-up
thinking across military and security interventions, governance
interventions, aid and possibly also trade. We are now learning
how to use the instrument of security. Where we have been weakest
is on the instruments of governance. We have been afraid to use
what I call governance conditionality because of the abject failure
of policy conditionality 10 years ago. Then we tried to tell governments
what economic policies they should adopt, and that was stupid;
it was a confusion of legitimacy. Who were citizens supposed to
hold to account if we dictated to the government? Governance conditionality
is quite different; it is much more legitimate. What we as donors
try to insist on by governance conditionality is that the government
be accountable to its own citizens. That struggle for accountability
to citizens has always been internationalised, so it is legitimate
that we play a role in that now.
Q132 Chairman:
The Committee is about to visit the DRC. You have already said
that the danger in the DRC is that an election is coming up and
that lowers the temperature. There are lots of armed groups which
post-election are ready to re-engage. Should one of the things
to be done is to say, for example, "You must lower your military
involvement and we will support police reform"? Is that the
kind of priority?
Professor Collier: Absolutely.
We will probably need enough control of the mechanics of the budget
process to ensure that money is not diverted. The government should
be free to decide on what to spend it and choose its budget, subject
to the military aspect where we have a legitimate concern, but
we should have a role in scrutinising the actual execution of
that budget, basically empowering civil society to do its own
scrutiny. The Chad model was not a bad one on which to build.
International, external actors insisted that the government empower
its own civil society to scrutinise what it was doing. International
society, as it were, shadowing civil society for a decade or so
gives civil society both the protection and the skills to discipline
its own government. That is a legitimate role which is only in
its infancy.
Chairman: The Committee has a good deal
of food for thought. I see that a colleague wishes to cut in,
but we are quite a bit over time. We have another session. Thank
you very much indeed for coming today.
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