INTERVIEWER: What is the focus of your work with regard to rebuilding wartorn societies?

BALL: The focus of my work really has been on what the international community, and particularly a part of the international community known as the international donor community, can do to assist countries to recover from civil conflict. And by donors, I mean both organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations, which of course are multilateral organizations, international membership, and bilateral aid agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and many of its counterparts in other countries, as well as the nongovernmental development and humanitarian assistance community as well.

INTERVIEWER: And you know we've always had wars but since the end of the Cold War has there been some kind of a fundamental shift in, in the nature of warfare? And, and if so, how has that affected the way the international community provides assistance?

BALL: Well I think that people believe that there has been more conflict since the end of, this end of the Cold War, and it's true that there's been more conflict in places where there hadn't been conflict before. You see it in the former Soviet republics. In other words, as the Soviet Union disintegrated some of the, the republics decided to go to war with each other over various issues. We saw Yugoslavia disintegrate. We hadn't had war there. So that was war in Europe.

We seem to be having more conflicts, some people felt, in Africa, for example. So there's a feeling that there has been, in fact, more conflict, internal conflict since the end of the Cold War.

But actually when you look at the statistics it's a little, a little hard to tell because during the Cold War there were some 40 million people who died as a result of conflicts, and so many of those were interstate conflicts. So I think that we looked at it through the East-West lens and we thought about it as, we didn't think about it in the same way as we do now.

INTERVIEWER: But there has been a trend much more towards civil wars and interstate conflicts. People often cite them, call them ethnic conflicts. Is ethnicity an excuse for these wars? Is it about ethnicity per se, or is it more about political power or other elements?

BALL: I think it's very definitely about political power, and political power gives you access--

INTERVIEWER: Let me interrupt. Say these conflicts are about--

BALL: The, the, the, the--yeah, I would say that these conflicts erupt as a result of struggles over access to the levers of power basically. People want to control governments, and they want to control governments for a variety of reasons. Obviously it helps them control economic resources as well.

Ethnicity comes into this, I think, because it's easy to--well, there certainly are differences that can genuinely occur between different groups in society. And people, and groups can be defined in different ways. Now, ethnicity happens to be one very easy way to differentiate groups. But some groups, for example, in Somalia, where the U.S. was involved for a period of time, or in the former Yugoslavia, or in Bosnia, in specific, are not really ethnic groups. They're, they're, they're defined as such but they really aren't specifically ethnically different.

Now, in parts of Africa you have groups that are ethnically different. But there, even there what you have are disagreements over who's gonna control the government, how the country's going to be run, who's going to control the economic resources. And it's convenient to have in-groups and out-groups, and they might be defined by religion, or by ethnicity, or in, in a whole you know variety of ways.

INTERVIEWER: Your, your book, Making Peace Work, you, you looked at this subject in detail. And are there any overarching conclusions that you can provide? I don't ask you to sum up. But look, but in, in effect, are there some essential elements that, without which peace can't work?

BALL: Well, yes. I, I guess so. The first essential element is that there has to be political will and commitment on the part of the parties to make peace. And you, you saw in the early post-Cold War period, as I, as, as you yourself had said, there were a number of wars that ended in the early 1990s. And that's what spawned this whole industry that we have now. We're talking about post-conflict peacebuilding and so on. But--sorry. I completely lost--

INTERVIEWER: We can always restart.

BALL: Yeah. I'm gonna have to restart--

INTERVIEWER: I won't be, I'll be edited out of this anyway.

BALL: --'cause--

INTERVIEWER: So don't refer to--

BALL: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: --as I said--

BALL: Oh. Okay. Fine.

INTERVIEWER: --earlier.

BALL: Right. You're--

INTERVIEWER: Your statements will stand alone.

BALL: But, yeah. My statements will stand alone. And your question is--

INTERVIEWER: Well, I was asking are there--

BALL: Shit. Sorry about that.

INTERVIEWER: --are there key elements that make peace work in post-conflict regions?

BALL: Right. Okay. Okay. Yes. There certainly are key elements that make peace work in post-conflict situations. And, and the first one is commitment and political will on the part of the parties actually to make peace. In the early post-Cold War period there were a number of conflicts that ended in 1990, '91, '92, and so on and so forth, and they ended with the support, in many cases, of mediation from the international community. But there were different degrees of commitment on the part, a degree of the, on the part of the parties to those conflicts to actually, to making peace. And again, in the case of Bosnia we see mediation by the international community, but not a lot of buy-in on the part of, of the parties.

So in the case of El Salvador (El Salvador is probably the best example), the parties had fought for 12 years. They realized that neither side was going to win through war and they therefore realized that they had to make some compromises. They had to stop fighting and they had to continue on the political plain. They negotiated a very detailed, very good peace agreement which dealt with many of the underlying political imbalances and problems in the country. The challenge for them has been, since 1992, and remains actually implementing that agreement in full. But they had an unusual degree of commitment.

You saw the same thing--now South Africa's a little bit different. South Africa we don't think of as having had necessarily a civil war, but in fact there was a lot of violence in that country in the late, middle-to-late 1980s and early 1990s. They themselves came to an agreement which resolved the conflict. They had both the political will to end the conflict and the commitment to follow through on peace.

Now, places like Cambodia, places like, as I say, Bosnia, there were negotiations that were aimed at really getting the issue off the international agenda and trying to just get a, a fix on it, you know? And the parties themselves didn't really buy in, and these are where we see that we have problems.

So I would say the first thing is absolutely commitment and political will on the part of the parties.

Then there has to be constructive engagement on the part of the international community because even in a country like El Salvador, where people really, really want to make peace--they really genuinely want to make peace--they do need help and assistance to overcome certain kinds of roadblocks.

So it's very important for the international community to learn what are the different elements, what, the different parts, the political actors, the military actors, the aid actors, and so on and so forth, what roles they need to play most constructively to help countries consolidate the peace that they, they, they're starting to make themselves.

INTERVIEWER: We've seen perhaps cases where the international community has a lot of focus on an area when it's at war and sees it through the signing of a peace accord, and then we may see interest drop off.

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: How important is sustained long-term assistance from the international community?

BALL: Sustained long-term commitment on the part of the international community is extremely important. I think that one of the lessons that we have both observed and are trying to learn, I make this distinction between lessons that are observed and learned because people know a lot. We've, we've quote unquote learned a lot of lessons. We've had trouble implementing some of them.

But one of the lessons I think that we really have observed and are, have learned and are trying to implement is the fact that a peace process is not a one- to two-year kind of event. You don't, you don't negotiate a peace agreement, first of all, in you know three weeks, like they tried to do at Dayton. But you certainly don't implement, you don't, you can implement a peace accord maybe over a period of a couple of years, but you need a good ten years or even more actually to change society so that the objectives of the peace agreement really become ingrained in the society. People talk about really a generation of change, and I think that that is really the appropriate way to look at it.

Now that doesn't mean that we have to be spending huge amounts of money and other kinds of resources in these countries. It can be as simple as simply the United Nations or maybe a regional organization having a continuing watching brief over an area. In other words, you have an intensive period of assistance where a lot of different things happen and resources have to go in. But then we have the capacity to continue to, to look at, to monitor the process and step in and say, no, you're going off track, you know, diplomatically.

So it doesn't necessarily require a lot of assistance but it does--financial assistance and material resources. It does, however, require sustained attention. And, and I think that's another very, very important lesson of this process.

INTERVIEWER: What are the distinct phases of post-conflict rebuilding? I know, and perhaps you can describe them with examples from a particular country--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --or countries. But I know you've broken it down into a conflict resolution phase that's got two parts and a peacebuilding phase that has two parts.

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: Perhaps you can just skeletally lay out those cases for us.

BALL: Right. Typically when you have a conflict that comes to an end through a negotiated process you'll have sort of four phases that the country goes through. But I mean it, it, it doesn't necessarily go through them sequentially. You can go, you can kind of go forward and backward and around.

But it starts with the process of negotiating the peace agreement, and signing the peace agreement, and, and, and putting in place a ceasefire so that the war actually comes to, comes to an end. So you, you have a negotiation process and, and then you have a ceasefire process where you can actually separate forces, and, and so on and so forth.

Then you move into, to the, to the real post-conflict period once you actually you know sign the agreement and, and you have the separation of forces. And you have what, I've called the trend the immediate post-conflict transition period, which has tended to be a period of a couple of years because that's the amount of time that the international community has chosen to provide special assistance to these countries, to help them implement the peace agreements basically and overcome the initial problems associated with making peace.

Then there's this longer period which I happen to call the peace consolidation period. You can look at the whole thing as a post-conflict transition period but it's that longer period where a lot of structural changes really need to take place. And, and things that you start in the immediate transition period may take longer to implement than you know the, the transition allows for.

I think one of the important things that we are learning is that, that countries that have gone through civil wars, particularly long or particularly brutal civil wars, are no, they are, they're not like countries that have not had these. And the kinds of assistance and the way in which you have to interact with people in these countries, whether the, the government or, or the people, is different than you are often interacting with people in countries that have, have not had, had a war. So, say, in you know say in, in Tanzania, which has not had a civil war, the kinds of things that you, the way you might interact with the government will be different. Because--say in Rwanda, where we know we had enormous, we had genocide, enormous number of people killed, we lost the whole government and, and you have enormous, and this is the same problem in Cambodia where there also was genocide, enormous human resources that are simply lost and need to be rebuilt.

So these are just some of the kinds of differences that you find in these sorts of countries.

INTERVIEWER: Perhaps you can make a point that we made before we started--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --recording, that it's a misnomer sometimes to use rebuilding or reconstruction--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --'cause you don't want to--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --go back. Can you make that--

BALL: Right.

INTERVIEWER: --point for me? Just right here.

BALL: Right. There're a lot of different terms that people use to describe this process that we're going through. There's peacebuilding, there's post-conflict peacebuilding, there's reconstruction, there's post-conflict recovery and rebuilding, and so on.

The, the words that begin with "re" are a little bit problematic because they suggest that you want to go back to what was before. And the whole point about these conflicts is either that something that you need wasn't there, for example, a functioning judicial system, a police that actually served communities rather than repressed people--those kinds of things might not have been there at all. And you certainly don't want to go back to what you had before, which might be very repressive governments, governments which limited the political rights of people, which committed extensive human rights abuses, where wealth was, was not shared. I mean there's no country in the world obviously where wealth is shared equitably, but where the gaps in, in wealth are, are, are not as enormous.

So rebuilding, recovery, we do use those words but they do, they are a little problematic for those reasons.

INTERVIEWER: Good. Okay. They're doing construction below us. It seems we can't avoid it.

MS. BALL : You can use some shots of people rebuilding.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

BALL: Yeah. Exactly. Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Again, on, on the, the, those terms, rebuilding, or even building, or--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --construction bring to mind very traditional development tasks like--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --bridges, roads, electrical grids, and so forth. I want to give our viewers a sense of the broader range of activities that we're talking about.

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: And one of the--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --I know you, you've broken it down to three different--

BALL: Right.

INTERVIEWER: --categories.

BALL: Sure.

INTERVIEWER: And perhaps you can again give us those broader notions and examples of each--

BALL: Right.

INTERVIEWER: --that they might not have thought of.

BALL: Um hmm. There, there's another problem with using reconstruction or rebuilding because in people's mind that tends to bring up the notion that you're, you're, you're building bridges, you're, you're you know you're repairing roads, and, and you're rebuilding the capacity of the country to, to generate electricity or deliver water, or whatever, and that's part of it. Because one very important part of post-conflict peacebuilding is, in fact, to put the economy back on to some sort of functioning, some sort of, to give the economy some sort of capacity to function properly. So there is a certain amount, literally, of rebuilding that has to go on.

But I think that it's really important to understand that post-conflict rebuilding has at least a couple of other important aspects, one of which is institutional, political institutional strengthening. I mean why do these wars occur? These wars occur because people are arguing about how the country is going to be governed. And very often the kinds of structures, political structures, that exist in those countries do not allow everyone to participate very broadly in the political process so that you have to create new kinds of organizations.

And also there's a, a sort of subset of this, which is the whole security sector area, which is one that I'm particularly interested in. You have to reform the military. You have to create, perhaps, civilian police. In El Salvador, for example--and this is true in many countries--the police initially, at, at the end of the war the police were part of the military. Well, one of the parts of the peace--one of the provisions of the peace agreement was that there would be a new national civilian police, that would be a civilian police that would not be military oriented but that would be you know service oriented and, and really fight crime and, and so on. And the U.S., for--and other countries, Spain and Sweden, in particular, have been very active in helping El Salvador to build up this new civilian police.

There's lots of other kinds of activities under these, under these rubrics, as well. Building judicial systems. Rwanda, for example, has lots and lots of people who committed genocide, and it has literally very little capacity in terms of courts to, to deal with them. And, it has very little capacity in terms of courts to deal with the ordinary day-to-day problems that citizens have. These are very typical for, problems for post-conflict countries.

Another aspect that I just would like to draw attention to quickly is the question of, of political and psychosocial reconciliation, which I think is very important. And it's not really a separate category. Reconciliation is something that has to underlie absolutely everything that you do. And it, it's, it's a way in which you approach whatever issue you're doing in terms of, of peacebuilding. In other words, what you are trying to do is get people who have, until very recently, not even wanted to sit around a table with each other to at least come and sit around the table.

I was in Angola about a year-and-a-half ago where. This is, this was at this time two-and-a-half years after they had completed the most recent round of their civil war. You still had people from the government side and people from the opposition side, UNITA, not even wanting to come and sit around a table together. So one thing the aid workers, humanitarian assistance workers, were doing was literally creating an environment in which people could come together and discuss problems of, of common importance, like what do we do about when demobil--soldiers are demobilized and they return home, which is a very, very important issue.

So you, you have to have this, this kind of capacity to bring people together that will underlie absolutely everything that you, you, you do.

INTERVIEWER: How do you do that? How can assistance programs be designed to foster cooperation or even collaboration among various social groups that were previously at conflict, in conflict with each other?

BALL: Well, it depends on where you are. In the case, in, in many places there are already existing organizations that are working to this end. And again, in places like El Salvador or South Africa you will find more of these kinds of organizations that already exist. And I'm not just thinking of nongovernmental organizations in the way that we think of, of them, or private voluntary organizations, as we often call them in the U.S. I'm thinking of, of citi--community-based organizations, women's groups, and so on and so forth.

The first step, therefore, I think is to look and to try to survey and see who's on the ground doing what--and I mean local capacity--and see whether they need some assistance in, in working on whatever it is that they're doing. And I think that's a very basic thing that we often overlook because it's very time-consuming to have to go out and to try to find who's doing what at the community level, and try to decide whom we're gonna support. But that's a very, very basic thing that we can do.

But then there are specific interventions that the international community can make. For example, in Bosnia it was a bit uncoordinated but many, many international donors supported the media. And I think that was very, very important because one of the problems of countries that have had civil wars and countries that have gone through very authoritarian periods is that the media is, reflects the views of the, of the parties. Sometimes it only reflects you know the, the view of, of one party, even. But you, there's, it's very difficult to get relatively unbiased information.

And so in, in a number of cases, and, and Bosnia is, is one case, newspapers, peace radio, all sorts of things, specific you know television programs one hour a week on it you know, whatever, have been supported. And these have been instrumental in giving people an additional view into what is really going on in their own country, and that's, that's very, very important.

So there are a range of, of activities like this that can be under, undertaken.

INTERVIEWER: You, you've written of a, a new role for donors, or a new model for donor coordination. What has been the problem with regard to donor coordination in the past and, and what do you recommend to rectify that?

BALL: Well, in, in terms of donor coordination, donor coordination is one of those things that when you get a, a group of people who work for, for donor agencies into the same room and they you know, they talk about, they always talk about the need for we have to coordinate better. And then they laugh because, of course, they find it very difficult to coordinate.

But the need for coordination in post-conflict environments is, is really extraordinary because there are so many things that have to happen simultaneously, and they're such difficult things to do. And you, you have, I'm, I, in, in the case of international assistance to the media in Bosnia, for example, there's lots and lots of assistance given to media groups but there was very little coordination so that there were gaps and, and there were overlaps. Some people got more money than they needed, some people didn't get any money, and so on and so forth.

What should donors do? We, we need to have a couple of things. We need to have a lead agency, and we need to have a lead agency that will function effectively. And that agency may vary from place to place and from time to time because in the case of Angola, for example, a lot of the coordination was being carried out by the UN organization that coordinated humanitarian assistance, which is emergency assistance which is not the longer-term development assistance. But it, it was precisely because Angola wasn't in, it, it was still in an emergency situation even two-and-a-half, three years after the peace was signed. So you had this one body that was, was coordinating assistance and had been coordinating assistance during the war as well.

And what you find is that when, when the war is on and when there aren't very many different actors-donors-involved, it's a lot easier to coordinate. But then, as the war winds down and is over and you move further into the transition period, you get lots and lots of new actors and lots and lots of things that people want to do. Sos you have a problem of, of coordination, and they usually turn to the UNDP, the United Nations Development Program, or they turn to the World Bank.

And both of those organizations have their strengths and their, and their weaknesses. I think that what is necessary is for, in any particular country, to assess which is the best organization to do the coordination, and then to really to for everybody to work together with that one organization.

But what you need to be doing is also doing a strategic framework for what you are going to be doing in terms of post-conflict peacebuilding, and that hasn't really been done sufficiently to date. You have a menu of options that the peace accord suggests you should do if you're in a country where there's, where there's been a negotiated settlement. But many of those items don't find, many of the items that you have on your broader peacebuilding menu, many of the political institutional reforms, many of the security sector reforms, simply are not, not there in the peace agreement. In other words, you may need, for example, in Mozambique, ideally to have reformed the police. That wasn't really part of the peace agreement, however, so that's something that began to come in a little bit later.

Well, you really need to take you know a good look at the country and assess what its needs are. Think about what the peace agreement says, but then think about what all of the other needs are and, and develop a kind of framework, and then use that as the basis for assistance that will be coming in from out, outside so that hopefully donors can target their assistance a little bit more effectively.

You know, foreign assistance is declining more or less everywhere. The, the very large multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, still have a fair amount of money but in terms of bilateral programs, and in terms of the United Nations, resources are very, very tight.

There's a misperception in this country that we give a lot of foreign assistance. The fact of the matter is we give a very small proportion of our, of our, our budget and, and of our gross national product to, to what could properly be considered you know foreign assistance. Most of that goes to simply two countries: to Israel and Egypt. There's very little left over, really, for the countries that we're talking about right now.

And so it's very important that we use those resources as effectively as we can. And improved coordination is very, very important. Choosing a lead agency is very, very important. Creating a strategic framework is really critical to this. But these are some of the lessons that we're trying to learn and, and, and implement as we go along.

INTERVIEWER: We've seen--

MS. BALL : We need to change a tape.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

(END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE B)

INTERVIEWER: In the past, and maybe you can correct me if I, this isn't quite right--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --but the World Bank has been criticized for cultural insensitivity and, sometimes, large-scale development projects that may foment a conflict as much as suppress it, or, or resolve it. Now the Bank is in a unique position to take a leadership role in theory and practice of post-conflict peacebuilding. Do you see the Bank making a fundamental change today in the way that it administers aid?

BALL: The World Bank is trying right now to improve its capacity to deliver assistance to countries that have been in conflict. When the current president came, took over a couple of years ago, one of the first major speeches he gave had six, a sort of a six-point agenda. And the sixth agenda item was to improve its work in post-conflict areas, and it has recently done a number of things that are very concrete.

It's approved a post-conflict strategy paper. It has set up a post-conflict unit. I'm not sure exactly how many people work in it now. I think there might be 10, as many as 10 people or so, and, and that's, for a new unit, fairly large. And it has been doing an evaluation of its previous lending in countries that have been in conflict so it can try to learn something. It's established a post-conflict fund which the Bank, the World Bank being a bank, has, it lends money. It lends money on different terms. Some is, some is lower interest rates than others. But it basically doesn't really have grant facilities because post-conflict fund is a grant, is a grant facility. So it is taking certain kinds of steps.

Now, that's you know and in a sense that's a little isolated because you're talking about 10 people in an organization of, of what? Six thousand or, or something like that. You're, you're talking about a very small amount of money compared to all the money that the Bank lends.

The people that work in the post-conflict unit understand that one of the key things that they have to do is to help train the ordinary World Bank staff person so that that person becomes more sensitive to the needs of post-conflict countries. Generally when a conflict occurs, Bank staff leave the country so you do not have a presence, which means that they have a lot of catching up to do. And they are now trying to develop a, something they call the watching brief, which means if there's a conflict in the country they at least talk to other agencies that are present and they kind of you know keep a running file. Somebody is assigned you know one day a month or something to, to gather information on the current situation so that when finally you're in a position to reenter the country you know a little bit about that. So that's, that's something new that they're also trying to do.

They're talking about you know, as I say, training, training staff to become more sensitive. The Bank is well-known for not perhaps being sensitive in a lot of areas. Gender is one, environment is another. The Bank is genuinely changing. And I, when you talk to a lot of the newer, younger staff in particular, people who have a lot of experience in countries like, say, Liberia and Siera Leone where there's been a lot of conflict recently, and other areas, they do understand increasingly that they're in a, in a different kind of environment.

Now, working for the Bank you do have a constraint, which is you are supposed to work primarily with government. Now, the United Nations Development Program has the same program. You're, they are supposed to you know, it's supposed to be organization-to-government. And in a post-conflict environment this is really problematic because you have to be able to bring in the former armed opposition. You have to be able to bring in civil society at large. You want everything to become more transparent and accountable. And so this is a big change that the Bank is, is trying to undertake.

I, I think, I'm encouraged by some of the steps that they, they are taking. But like all donors, they've, they've still got quite a long way to go.

INTERVIEWER: One aspect of their mission is to be apolitical, as I understand it--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --that they don't want to delve into politics. And yet it strikes me that many of these situations it's unavoidable that you deal with the politics in the situation. How do they walk that fine line?

BALL: Well, the Bank, of course the Bank charter says that the, that the Bank--I'm sorry, the Bank Articles of Agreement state that the Bank is not to become involved in the political affairs of any member country, and this does call for some judgment in terms of what is you know, what is becoming involved in the political affairs. But I would like, I would hasten to say that many of the econom--and that economic, the only basis upon which programs can be defined and, and actions taken are on economic considerations. But many of the economic programs I think that we all know that the Bank has been involved in have a very political content. They help define who's in-who's out, and, and so on and so forth. So they strengthen this group they strengthen, or they weaken that group. So I think that anybody who wants to make the argument that the Bank is you know, never can be involved in any sort of, any kind of activity that has political overtones just doesn't understand how the Bank has operated.

Now, therefore, but, but the problem is that in post-conflict environments much of what has to happen is overtly political. And I wouldn't want to suggest that the Bank suddenly gets involved in actually funding a lot of these kinds of programs that maybe are necessary in the area of political reform or economic reform.

The Bank has been involved in financing some judicial--I'm sorry, some legal system reforms, I believe. They've been very involved in helping to reintegrate ex-combatants. But, you see, these are, in the case of ex-combatants it was a, it was a little tricky. The first program was in Uganda, and that was eight years after Uganda's civil war ended. And, in fact, the reason that the Bank got involved was because many of the Bank's main donors were very concerned about the continuing high level of military expenditure in Uganda after the war. I mean they, they felt that the political situation had stabilized sufficiently that the size of the army could be reduced. And so there was a lot of pressure put on, including by the Bank, to reduce the size of the army. And so the president of Uganda very cleverly came back and said, okay, well, if you want me to do that, how about helping you know pay for it? So that's how the Bank and a lot of donors began to get involved really in, in, in post-conflict demobilization and reintegration programs.

Now, the point there is that these sound political. They sound even worse than that. They sound like they're military and security. The fact is that when somebody's being demobilized, and particularly after he's, he or she's been demobilized, they're no longer soldiers. They're, they're civilians. And what you really want to do is you want to make sure that they stay civilians, and that they don't pick up arms again and turn to banditry or, or return to, return to actually to fighting. So these are very, very important programs.

The Bank has been able to get involved in those and I think that there's no reason why there's other kinds of programs they can't get involved in. But I think the Bank ought to, however, be doing is really making an effort to help develop a strategic framework, the overview of what needs to happen in a country.

Simply because you might need to strengthen the legislature in a country as a priority matter doesn't mean that the Bank has to fund programs necessarily, but it has to be on the agenda, particularly in those countries where the Bank is running what is called consultative(?) groups. These are groups of donors that meet regularly with the, with, with government officials to talk about the program of assistance that this country will get. So what is on the agenda is really, really important.

Now, in 1995 the World Bank ran a meeting in Mozambique--on Mozambique in which the donors talked a lot about the need to strengthen the media, to, to undertake legislative reforms, and so on and so forth. The Bank put it on the agenda. The bilateral donors--USAID, the Dutch, the Swedes, and so on--they were the ones to take up the issue and to offer the assistance. And I think that's the right way to do it. What we want is the Bank to make sure that the right things are on the agenda, and then you know others can actually take up the actual implementation of some of those things.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned earlier that the post-conflict unit is just this small fledgling division within a much larger institution, and that there may be a need to educate--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --internally a traditional view of, of many development officials whose been cited that, that peacebuilding is a diversion from-- BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --the true task of development--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --rather than a crucial base for the subsequent development. How does one, or how does anyone go about changing that type of thinking?

BALL: Well, a lot of people do believe that peacebuilding assistance, post-conflict reconstruction whatever you want to call it is a diversion from traditional development work; that what they really are supposed to be doing is helping to strengthen the economic infrastructure of a country, or to improve the health sector, or, or whatever. And, and they don't really understand that in a post-conflict country the terms are a little bit different and you have to approach these in a different way.

Now, how do you, how do you teach people how to, that, first of all that, that they are in a different kind of situation. I mean I think that's the, that's the first thing. And then what do you do when you're, when you're in that situation?

I, I recently attended a meeting at, at the Bank where the new post-conflict unit was asking people, well how do we go about, about doing this? And there were a variety of, of suggestions. I, I personally am not somebody who's expert in terms of, of training, but there are, there were various kinds of, as it were, on-the-job kinds of modules that were you know made available. I mean people, when they, very often when they get to, say, Siera Leone or they get to, to Mozambique or you know they get to Bosnia, I mean they know they're in a different environment. There's, there's no doubt about that. What they need is some sort of assistance in terms of saying, okay, you know these are the differences, these are some of the things that you have to, you have to consider.

It's, it's really, it's really difficult to, to make that switch for some people because people have been told you are you know our expert on, on health care, for example. And you know our, our particular issue in health care may be you know reproductive health or, or mother-child care or, or whatever so you know you have to, you have to do that. And it's difficult for them to see that they, they have to operate in, in different ways. So that training programs that can give examples of, of, of other kinds of programs that have worked in similar situations and, and explain why you know it's, you have to approach it in this way or that way I think can be really, really important.

INTERVIEWER: I want to take just a step back in the process and focus on the immediate post-conflict environment.

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: Traditionally donors have entered the scene after negotiations and cessation of hostilities.

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: What argues for their earlier involvement? I mean is there a critical but brief window of opportunity that is in the immediate post-conflict environment?

BALL: I think one of the lessons that we have, we have begun to learn and to try to implement is that it's very, very important for the donors to be involved not just after a peace agreement is signed but actually during the negotiation of the peace agreement. And there're a variety of reasons why and there're a couple of places where this has happened which underscores the importance of this. And the two that come to mind in particular are Bosnia and, and Guatemala. And what, let's start just generally why, you know why should donors be, be involved.

Well, for one thing, there're a lot of commitments that are made in the course of negotiating a peace agreement which imply that somebody's going to give money to do something. Right? And it's important for the donors not to be surprised because you know they make their plans, and it's important for them to understand what is going to have to happen in these countries so that they can start planning. So from their point of view to, to, to obtain information means that they will be able to gear up faster and deliver better service once the peace accord is actually signed. Because one the peace accord is signed it's, it's inevitably, everything has to happen yesterday you know. It just really has to go really, really fast. So it's an information-gathering point for them.

Also they can provide information on, in some cases, what the needs are, and that's important. For example, in the case of Bosnia I understand the International Monetary Fund had some specific issues in terms of, of how this, of what needed to be done with regard to the central bank, or something along those lines that was very important and, and had to be put into the peace agreement. Before, in the case of Bosnia a team was sent out. It had World Bank, International Monetary Fund, probably USAID people on it, and I'm not sure who else. And they did a survey. This was before the Dayton Agreement was negotiated. And they identified critical areas and they particularly identified areas that needed to be addressed in the peace agreement. So you make a better peace agreement, in a sense, if you have this capacity for the donors to get involved kind of early on.

Another, another important point is that when people have been at war for a long time they, the ordinary people in particular, look forward to peace obviously very, very much. And they also tend to think that peace is going to change the world, and hopefully peace is going to change their world but it's not gonna happen overnight. And so there are enormous expectations.

I mean in Mozambique people, there, there was a tremendous drought that was going on at the same time as the peace agree--accord was being negotiated. And ordinary people apparently thought that the peace accord was going to end the drought. I mean and you may laugh at that, but that, that is actually the degree to which people feel that peace is going to change their lives, all right? The people have a very definite sense that there're gonna be good things that happen.

And it's very important to do two things. One is to reduce expectations about what's going to happen. So to have the donors involved and to have a realistic conversation of what kind of assistance gonna be available so that people don't promise you know too much. People will always promise too much, but maybe they won't promise too, too much. But the other thing is so that the donors, as I said, can get an early start and can be on the ground and deliver something tangible so that people can really you know see yes, okay you know, my, my, my bridge is now, I can now use my bridge because it's been demined, or it's been repaired, or this road you know is now demined and, and repaired. In, in, in Mozambique USAID put a lot of money into demining roads and, and so on and so forth, fixing bridges and, and these kinds of things early on, and to do it quickly to make an impact. And other donors have done similar things.

So those are some of the reasons why it's important for the, for the donors to be involved as early on in the process as, as possible.

But one point I'd like to make is that it's important for the political actors not to think that once you get past the peace negotiation stage and the initial you know kind of initial transition phase that they can kind of fade out. Because very often the, a lot, a whole lot is placed on the shoulders of the donors. You know, they're supposed to bring peace. We've negotiated it, now you implement it. But in fact you really need to have the political actors involved, the international political actors involved so that pressure is placed on the parties to continue to implement important parts of the agreement.

So that if you say you're going to have, as they did in El Salvador, a national civil police in which no member of the former military could serve, and then the El Salvador government tries to put a former military official as the senior person in the national civil police, you know you wave your hand and you, you do a few other things, also, and you get the guy removed eventually. I mean it took six months, I think. But you have to be willing you know to, to, it's not just a mechanical okay, we've now set the process in motion so you donors take over and just implement these programs. The political actors have to be willing to stay involved in various ways for a very long period of time also.

So it's you know, donors in earlier, political actors stay later. Very important.

INTERVIEWER: That's all I've got.

BALL: Okay.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else? I mean there's tons more, but is there anything else that's essential--

BALL: You want to talk anything about the role of the military?

INTERVIEWER: Sure. The U.S. military, or the--

BALL: Well, you want to talk about Bosnia? I mean what are you gonna talk about, about, with regard to Bosnia?

INTERVIEWER: You tell me.

BALL: No, no. You said Bosnia was one of the countries that you were--

INTERVIEWER: Well, we certainly touch on it, yeah.

BALL: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Well, I, I don't mean talking about tribunals and, and the war crimes there. But--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --certainly if you want to address the role of the military in dealing with the security--

BALL: Um hmm.

INTERVIEWER: --internal and external security there--

BALL: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: --that might be a good element.

BALL: Yeah. Okay. I think there's another actor, another set of actors that have a sort of broader role to play than we sometimes think they do, and that is the, the peacekeeping members of the peacekeeping forces. When they're under the UN we call them the blue helmets because they do walk around in you know blue hats and blue helmets. In the case, so that, that would be Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador. In the case of Bosnia, we have NATO forces. They're operating under, of course, a, a UN resolution, but they are NATO forces operating there so we're not calling them blue helmets.

But I think that it's very important to understand that their roles should not be limited to what we traditionally think of as peacekeeping roles. In other words, separation of the parties, disarming them hopefully. In Cambodia unfortunately they didn't manage to disarm them, and that was one of the, the problems. In fact, in a lot of cases disarmament has not been adequate. But that the military has to be involved in a wider variety of roles and be prepared to stay, I think, longer than not just U.S. policymakers but many other policymakers would like them to stay. We also have to think about other ways of providing security in these countries.

The point is that without security for individuals in post-conflict environments, nothing else is going to happen. In Bosnia we hear a lot about refugees who don't want to return. This is also a problem, say, in Angola, where many people moved not out of the country but moved to, to urban areas and simply don't want to return because they don't believe that their personal security is going to be guaranteed.

So you have different ways of guaranteeing security. One is, of course, for the peacekeepers, whether they're blue helmets or, or NATO or whatever, to, to, to undertake certain tasks. For example, in the case of Bosnia, it's very important that the peacekeepers, who are mandated in fact to arrest war criminals, actually start to do that. And they didn't want to do that for a period of time. We begin to see that they're starting to do that. Now we're beginning to see that war criminals are turning themselves over to, to the Hague tribunal. I, I don't think that this is a coincidence. I mean I think that this was always possible. I think that we wasted a couple of years in the case of Bosnia because peacekeepers felt, nah, you know, this is a little dangerous. Well, they're military. It's dangerous, yes. But we've seen that, in fact, they can do this without taking tremendous casualties.

So it's very, very important that they think broadly in terms of what their role are.

Now, another thing that Bosnia is teaching us is that there's, there're sort of three categories of security that we need. We need the peacekeepers who are going to stand there and you know be in full uniform, and, and, and so on, and, and separate the parties, and, and do some of these more difficult things.

We also need the civilian police, who tend to be unarmed. The only case where they've been armed is actually in Haiti. There's, there's a debate on whether they should be armed or not, not armed. But in any case, there are civilian police monitors who are supposed to monitor what goes on.

But there's actually a kind of a middle group that doesn't exist right now that we are in the process of creating for Bosnia, and I hope it's not just a one-off and that we learn the lesson, which is a kind of constabulary force.

In other words, military peacekeepers are very expensive. They often don't want to, and are not necessarily the right kind of force to do some of the policing activities that need to be undertaken. I mean military forces are not police forces. But if the, if the civilian police, international civilian police that we've put in have only a, an, you know sort of a monitoring and observing function and are unarmed, and yet we have real needs in terms of, of criminal activity and, and lack of security in these countries, what are we going to do?

The answer has been, well, it's, it's the responsibility of the local you know police force. But of course the local police forces are either totally inept, corrupt, repressive, or, or whatever. They're in the process of being reformed very often. We're talking now about military police. And it would be, the U.S. equivalent would be military police, but European nations have gendarmes (that's the French term) or carbineiros (the Spanish term). They are more military police kind of. And there is this function that we need. And we, we really need it. And this is something that we are, we're learning this, this lesson.

The implementation of this lesson is, as I say, we're going to see what's going to happen in Bosnia. I very much hope it's not the only case where we do this because there comes a time when you really need to draw down on the peacekeepers, and yet you have a good deal of insecurity still left in the country. And it would be really great to have this kind of middle sort of, of, of force. I think that in, in the case of, of Angola, for example, there is still a need for some people with weapons to be around, and this kind of constabulary force would be, would be very good once the blue helmets are completely withdrawn.

So I think that it's really important to remember that, that you, you have to have, a major condition for these peace agreements to work is you have to have security on the ground for individuals so people can feel that they can go about their business, and that everything, if they try to build up something again, it won't be wiped out. They have to have confidence that main provisions of the peace accord are going to be implemented. So if that calls for, for example, disarming the population or catching war criminals, they have to feel that somebody's going to really do that.

And so the international community really needs to think a lot about the ways, different ways in which it can provide that, help provide that kind of security, and then provide training so that local forces can take over. But again, here we're talking about things that have to go on for 10 or 15 years. And again, they don't have to go on with huge you know allocation of resources for a whole 10- or 15-year period. You know it can decline. But the commitment has to be there.

That would be the only other thing that I'd really want to make sure that you get. Or you can ask other people about that sort of stuff, too, depending on who you interview.

INTERVIEWER: Nicole, thank you very much.

BALL: Oh, my pleasure, as usual.

(END OF TAPE B)