Common ground between Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone and Colombia

Jonathan Steele, Guardian News Service, London

Forget the Middle East for a moment, and ignore Kashmir. Take your eyes off the Pentagon's unfinished hunt for Osama bin Laden and the bombs which still fall on Afghanistan. So far this is a very good year for peace.

Two of the world's longest wars have taken big strides towards a settlement and a third shorter one has been declared over. Not bad for a single month, though in the contemporary culture of anxiety where good news is no news, you can be forgiven for not having noticed.

In Sri Lanka the government and the Tamil Tiger guerrillas have each announced unilateral ceasefires after 19 years of war. A Norwegian team of diplomats has been invited to shuttle between them and formalize a peace agreement with a separation of forces and international monitors. Talks on a political settlement should follow by March.

In Colombia, where a civil war has gone on for 38 years, both sides have agreed to reach a ceasefire by early April. United Nations-led mediators will then help them resolve the underlying problems which sparked the conflict. In Sierra Leone anti- government rebels have laid down their arms and agreed to take part in elections this spring.

Every war has its own complex mixture of causes, and the dynamic of struggle depends on many factors. Pressures for peace also emerge in different ways. Sri Lanka has suffered a classic ethnic conflict in which a minority group, the Tamils, decided they could only defend themselves against discrimination by the majority Sinhalese if they controlled part of the land. Theirs was a war of liberation and secession. What has changed the equation on the Tamil side in recent months is a new combination of unity and flexibility. The moderate Tamil parties which rejected violence and sought change through parliament came out behind the Tigers, declaring the guerrillas to be the sole Tamil representatives with whom the government must talk. This destroyed the long-standing Sinhalese strategy of divide and rule. For their part the Tigers started to hint that their goal of a "homeland" could be satisfied short of formal secession.

Among the Sinhalese growing concern in the business community over the war's damage to investment and tourism, and disappointment with the government's failure to respond to earlier Tiger ceasefires, led to its defeat in last month's elections. The new prime minister is going all-out for peace, and has relaxed the army's blockade on the region where most Tamils live. Food and medicine are going in at last. Full-scale talks on a permanent settlement will not prove easy and should not be allowed to drag on, but the position is more hopeful than at any time in the past decade. A sense on both sides that the war was stale-mated is playing a major role.

In Colombia the conflict centers on land and justice and has minimal ethnic content, but there are two players beyond the government and the rebels. The United States has pumped in massive military aid and a right-wing force of army-linked paramilitary death squads is growing bolder. If in Sri Lanka the concept of a ceasefire preceded talks, in Colombia the government and guerrillas have been talking for three years without a ceasefire. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) argued they could not consider laying down their arms since the paramilitaries were not part of any ceasefire agreement.

Now, in the face of a hardening of attitude by the government, which threatened to send the army and paramilitaries into the huge zone where guerrilla control had earlier been conceded, Farc has changed its line. Otherwise it would have had to withdraw from fixed positions and resume hit and run operations from jungle hideouts. Farc is also offering to discuss a halt to kidnappings, one of its main sources of income. In return the government is promising to discuss putting controls on the paramilitaries and finding ways to lessen the unjust effect of IMF-mandated economic policies.

Involvement by UN mediators is a new and helpful factor, which creates trust and moral pressure. Whether the UN gets sufficient support from Washington's European allies and has the strength to push the U.S. away from its one-sided involvement will be the main issue in the weeks ahead. The U.S. has a long history of backing, and indeed creating, armies of repression in foreign conflicts centered on social justice. So the omens cannot be too good. There is at least a framework for a ceasefire and comprehensive talks in Colombia, which did not exist before.

In Sierra Leone, where the disarmament process in the civil war was declared complete last week, there have also been differences between the UN and a major outside power, in this case Britain. But they have been far less relevant, and the British role in training the government army has been broadly positive, even if its success is not as glorious as the triumph which Tony Blair will no doubt trumpet in Freetown next month.

Members of the current Sierra Leone government have grim records of killing but the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) regularly committed atrocities and has little ideology other than its leaders' enrichment. If those rebels who have not decamped across the border to friendly Liberia have disarmed, it is not the result of defeat by Britain or the British-trained army. The soft terms of the now revived Lome peace agreement were a factor, along with the increase in UN peacekeepers, which has become the largest such force in the world. The RUF was also driven back militarily when it tried to destabilize Guinea. But Britain did at least send troops, unlike other European states with well-run armies or indeed South Africa. The problem was that the troops were not put under UN command.

One thread runs through the very different wars in Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Sierra Leone -- the role of outsiders. Sri Lanka has been blessed by no big-power military interference. India burnt its hands during an earlier peace effort which went wrong, and Sri Lankans have since been on their own until they called in genuinely impartial mediators from Norway. In Colombia the baleful role of U.S. military intervention has delayed a settlement and now threatens to impose an unjust pacification rather than peace. If unresolved, burning issues will explode later.

Only in Sierra Leone has the UN been given a genuine chance to lead. The UN record in Africa is far from perfect. It failed to prevent genocide in Rwanda, and in Angola it allowed the electoral process which it had itself brokered to be destroyed by the party which lost. But it has done less harm than when large nation-states intervene. That is also a piece of usually unnoticed good news.