Roadmaps to nowhere
By Phar Kim Beng
KUALA LUMPUR - Words are instruments of persuasion, but they can become instruments of confusion if overly simplistic. While they seek to focus the minds both of the policymakers and the targeted audience on the salience of certain issues, they can invoke images that are removed from the reality on the ground.
When the US journalist Walter Cronkite used the phrase "Cold War", it stuck - this despite the fact that at the periphery of this struggle between the superpowers were numerous "hot" conflicts. In Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and Afghanistan, this phrase invented in the relative safety of urban America failed to reflect the local dynamics.
The most current political concept - invented in Washington, DC - to hit the world, especially the Middle East and Asia, is the idea of a "roadmap". The idea is that parties engaged in conflict, if allowed to "travel" together with clear compliance to mutual goals and mutual expectations, would be able to reach their destination, no matter how tortuous the journey.
Guiding them are, of course, the great powers - in the case of Israel and Palestine, the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, known as the Quartet.
The "roadmap" idea is guided by a geographical metaphor: that the politics of what some political scientists called "enduring rivalry" (conflicts that last for more than 50 years) is riven with dangerous contours that need to be carefully maneuvered - indeed with much tenacity and determination, not unlike making an assault on a mountain range.
Hence the plotted journey (of the roadmap) is not so much akin to walking hand in hand on a flat, arid and barren surface, deprived of water and physical sustenance, as it is to climb a treacherous and jagged mountain together, even if both sides hate each other for the duration of the expedition.
Indeed, the "roadmap" idea is not so much focused on understanding what each side wants and expects from the other as it is to perform a series of steps toward well-defined goals. For instance, in the Israeli-Palestinian roadmap, the appended phrase "performance-based" serves as an adjunct to the concept to allow the creation of two states at the end of the process. The destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005, as presented in US President George W Bush's speech of June 24, and welcomed by the EU, Russia, and the UN in the July 16 and September 17 Quartet Ministerial statements.
In East Asia, latching on to the new idiom, the governments of Thailand and now South Korea have also spoken of the necessity of having "roadmaps" to help Myanmar and North Korea, respectively, find their way out of the morass they have gotten themselves into over the past few decades.
To shield their roadmaps from criticism, however, both Thailand and South Korea have only vaguely testified to the existence of any formulas, although they clearly exist in the official thinking of both countries' policymakers.
Elites, both in academe and think-tanks, have spoken of the need to shepherd the hermetic leaderships of Myanmar and North Korea to the open, anarchical field of global politics and market economy. Yet both Bangkok and Seoul must exercise caution regarding "roadmaps" that are unilinear in nature. Hard-nosed reality in politics cannot easily be altered by formulas or roadmaps, especially those imported from abroad.
The pitfalls that bedevil any political journey of two antagonists are not merely proverbial, but physical and psychological. Radical elements often try to exploit these perils by terrorist or suicidal attacks. Their goal is to derail the peace process by creating a spiral of violence every time there is a peaceful lull.
Israel and Palestine have accepted the "roadmap" idea floated by the Bush administration because both sides are desperate. Israel, for one, realizes that its declining birthrate does not allow it to hold occupied territories permanently in Palestine, as Palestinian birthrates viz Israeli ones are at the rate of 6:1. A solution, interim or otherwise, is therefore needed to redress this anomalous demography.
Conversely, neither the Myanmar nor the North Korea regime, even when faced with the specter of a collapsing economy or international sanction, is as hard pressed to reach for a solution. North Korea in particular has had a field day with its threats to build a nuclear arsenal. Myanmar, even with the relatively moderate Khin Nyunt as its new prime minister, is not necessarily averse to reneging on any "performance-based roadmap", as it can continue to count on the support of China and India.
Performance-based roadmaps have been used not merely as nifty formulas, but also as a sequenced mechanism to guide the conflicting parties to the desired destination. Yet such roadmaps, even granted the necessary structure, timetable, phases and great-power support already built into the policy, will not necessarily succeed, as they often appear too late, when conflicts have become far too endemic and entrenched to allow the introduction of any neat solution.
The politics of enduring inter- and intra-rivalry, as seen in Israel, Palestine, North Korea and Myanmar, is extremely complex. When external actors intervene to redeem the situation, their solutions are either too little, too late, or a combination of both.
Therein is the tragedy of enduring conflicts. Roadmaps, formulas, and timetables can be laid down, but conflicts will continue to play out until all sides are too tired to go for each other's jugulars. This is called the peace of exhaustion.
The leadership in Myanmar and North Korea still feel virile. There is no indication that they want to cave in to any external pressure. So the idea of a roadmap, while sound on paper, may fail in practice.
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