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Semantics and Conflict Resolution

Mohan Bir Singh Bajracharya
National News Agency

War propaganda gained a new dimension with the advent of radio and cinema. Winston Churchill, the great wartime prime minister of England, was able to use radio to enormous effect in mobilizing a dispirited nation for the war effort against Hitler's unstoppable armies. His broadcasts over the BBC to the nation and to the British Empire beyond, calling on them to fight in the fields, on the beaches, in the hills and to never surrender are now legend and lore. It has since come to light that Churchill actually used an actor to impersonate him on the radio, which only shows what a clever man he was. (Almost as effective was the use of cinema in war propaganda. A classic example is the footage of Hitler doing a jig on learning of the conquest of Czechoslovakia by his troops. That jig sent jitters across Europe. It has since come to light that the jig effect was produced by making the film reel jump a stop. But no matter.)

Radio's powerful reach was demonstrated again by the British during the brief but bloody Falkland Islands war in l982. Soon after the Argentines annexed the disputed islands by force, the British sent down a formidable naval task force. And one of the first things they did when they reached the South Atlantic was set up a radio station on one of their island possessions off the south west coast of Africa to broadcast to the Argentines about the futility of their annexation.

The British also managed to keep details about the unfolding combat under careful control. This was facilitated by the fact that the isolated islands were well out of reach of the prying eyes of journalists. The only reliable account of how the war was going was what was put out by the ministry of defense spokesman in London some nine thousand miles away.

The Vietnam war in the l960's and 70's is said to have been lost by the Americans in the living rooms of middle class America where television brought the war home to them in graphic detail, casualties and all. It was the first war during which television came into full play. No previous war had been so thoroughly covered by the news media.

The North Vietnamese, who suffered far greater casualties than their American adversaries, had no need to face any problem with the news media. They were thus able to fight the war with unflagging morale, and eventually win. Keeping the lid on media coverage was the equivalent of medieval men-o-war in battle sending their casualties down into the hull where they would be out of sight of the rest of the sailors on board and still fighting.

Factuality also becomes contentious when conflict resolution is under way. Conflict resolution comprises in part the resolution of differences over what words and expressions mean. It is only after this that the parties can go on to decide what the facts are. One of the reasons why the cold war dragged on for so long was because of the differences between the two opposing sides on what some key words and concepts meant.

The most notorious among these words was democracy. Democracy for the Americans and their allies meant multiparty democracy with freedom of the press, free elections, an independent judiciary, etc. For the Soviets and their camp it meant something else altogether. It meant freedom to obey the party, to join that party and freedom to vote for that party and its program. Western style democracy was only an illusion, with the real power remaining in the hands of the exploiter classes.

Another notoriously contentious expression has been human rights. Again, to go back to the cold war, human rights was a concept much used by the western powers as a tool with which to needle the communist block. With their emphasis on individual rights and freedoms, the west took the Soviets to task at every turn over the lack of such rights in their dispensation. The dissident Russian writer Alexander Solzenitsin became a cause celebre in the west and was lionized wherever he went during his travels there. He eventually sought political asylum in the United States where he remained until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another champion of human rights whose cause was taken up by the west was the Russian scientist Andre Zhakarov.

The Russians took a dim view of all this. To them holding the Soviet Union together and holding the price line (the price of bread had remained unchanged since the time of Stalin) was more important than the freedom of expression of Messrs Solzynitsin and Zhakarov.

The same dichotomy is now repeating itself in face-offs between the west and the People's Republic of China. Human rights and individual freedoms of expression and religious practice have become a bone of contention. Here again the Chinese do not see what the fuss is all about. It is more important to hold Chinese society together, and that means political stability above all else. Hence the need to quell the Tienanmen Square demonstrations in the late l980's with much bloodshed.

In our own region the word terrorist has taken on similar ambiguity. The Tamil Tigers are terrorists for the Sri Lankan authorities. For the Tigers themselves, they are freedom fighters fighting for self -determination in their part of the island nation. It's the same story with the Kashmiri militants fighting against Indian forces in that disputed state. They are freedom fighters or Mujahideen for the Pakistanis and terrorist infiltrators for the Indian authorities. In other ways too there is much semantic divergence between the Indians and the Pakistanis. The only thing they seem to agree upon is the meaning of the Line of Control dividing Kashmir between the two countries.

It all boils down to a question of definition. Someone once observed that the study and understanding of science is ultimately a matter of understanding the definitions of the various concepts and notions in science. This seems to be true of the language of conflict and conflict resolution also. Conflict resolution then is to a large extent a process of narrowing the semantic gap between two opposing sides. Once that first step is out of the way, the two sides can go on to the process of establishing the facts on the ground. It is only on the basis of how those facts are established that differences can be composed.

A good example of this transition to the second stage, and one that is still unfolding, is the Bhutanese refugee problem between Nepal and Bhutan. Bhutanese of Nepalese origin were driven out of that country under a process that has been described by its critics as ethnic cleansing. These refugees crossed over into Nepal and have been camped there for the past decade. The Nepalese government took the matter up with the Bhutanese authorities to bring about their repatriation. But nine rounds of ministerial level talks between the two sides made little headway. The stumbling block was again a matter of definition.

For the Nepalese government it was all quite simple and straightforward. All l00,000 or so people in the half a dozen refugee camps were Bhutanese refugees. Not so said the Bhutanese. As far as they were concerned, only those who were forcibly thrown out of Bhutan and were bona fide Bhutanese nationals at the time could be considered genuine Bhutanese refugees, and the Bhutanese government had no objection against repatriating this category of displaced persons. As for the rest, they were people who left Bhutan voluntarily, those who had criminal records and presumably wanted to put themselves beyond the reach of Bhutanese law or those who were simply in search of better economic opportunities. These latter categories the Bhutanese authorities were not interested in taking back to Bhutan. In their way of looking at the problem these were not refugees at all, but only migrants.

But in the last few years Bhutan came under pressure from sections of the international community including the aid donor community. The Bhutanese authorities have now come around to accepting the wider definition of refugees that encompasses all those who left Bhutan for exile in Nepal, for whatever reason.

Now that the definition of refugees has at last been settled, the Bhutanese and Nepalese authorities are getting down to the business of establishing the facts, establishing just who among those in the refugee camps are genuine Bhutanese. The problem here has been more procedural than anything else. The Bhutanese authorities at first insisted that each refugee had to be identified and verified individually. This would have taken an inordinate amount of time.

But under renewed pressure from the international community culminating in a visit to Bhutan and Nepal by two junior ministers in the U.S. State Department in the last days of the Clinton Administration, the Bhutanese have agreed to verification of the refugees on the basis of interrogation of the heads of refugee families alone. They have also agreed to the setting up of a Joint Verification Team (JVT) with the Nepalese authorities. The JVT has now set up an office in the vicinity of the refugee camps and started the verification process.

Critics say the verification process is very slow, with only ten families at most being verified on a given day. Bhutan's reluctant willingness to participate in the process has also been attributed to various political factors that have nothing to do with the refugees themselves. But whatever the circumstances, a conflict situation is at last beginning to be resolved. A lesson that can be drawn from these examples is that reconciliation of conflict situations is in substantial part a meeting of minds at the semantic level.