Cabinet ministers, senators and MPs from Ghana, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Vietnam, to name a handful, quietly sequestered themselves to the university grounds and Hatley Castle for four days of strategy sessions and high-level networking.
Ethopian MP Ababi Demissie Sidelil discusses conflict managment strategies with Ghanian MPs Edward Adjaho and Doris Seidu during a Commonwealth Parliamentarians Association/World Bank Institute conference at Royal Roads University.
Hosting such a conference is something of a minor coup for Royal Roads. Held under the auspices of Commonwealth Parliamentarian Association and the World Bank Institute, such international forums usually take place at Wilton Park, an estate in southern England harking back almost 1,000 years to William the Conqueror.
Andrew Imlach, the CPA’s director of information services, said this was the first CPA-WBI conference that focused primarily on poverty, corruption and conflict mediation. Royal Roads University, he said, provided a relaxing, pristine locale for parliamentarians to “get away from it all.”
“We wanted everyone together to focus on the issues, and all together to establish a rapport, communicate effectively and openly, to generate a feeling of camaraderie,” Imlach said.
Greg Cran, director of the School of Peace and Conflict Management at RRU, through advising governments around the world on conflict management, and after hosting Thai parliamentarians at Royal Roads two years ago, caught the eye of the CPA-WBI last year.
Cran said hosting the conference would help expose Royal Roads to up-and-coming world leaders, but stressed the focus wasn’t about the university’s international standing. Notably, the media wasn’t notified and security was kept low-key to avoid undue attention.
“Many countries would love to have this opportunity. But my focus is if Royal Roads has the capacity to assist on key issues, rather than the issue of bringing prestige to the university,” Cran said. “There is great interest on how we look at conflict, poverty and corruption.”
That said, Cran said Royal Roads won out over institutions around the world to host the United Nations forum on Online Dispute Resolution in June 2008. “The nature of how we develop our programs and platforms put us in a unique standing,” Cran said.
Discussions at the parliamentarian’s conference were largely technical in nature, but headline-grabbing world events underscored the talking points. Political upheaval in Bangladesh, the rise of religious fundamentalists in Pakistan, and east African border wars, among others, couched the hard realities many delegates faced on their return home.
“We listened to each others’ problems and shared our problems, and tried to figure out processes for better functioning of parliament,” says Shamsuddin Mahmood Khondker, a lawyer and academic from Bangladesh. “It is important to exchange views while enriching the members of parliament. At the same time, this meeting impacts national governments as an external source of pressure.”
Khondker, as the other delegates, helped develop action plans that the CPA and WBI will eventually recommend to the respective national governments. Good ideas for good governance couldn’t come at a better time for Bangladesh — the country is operating under an emergency government after the army intervened to halt the infighting between its leading political figures Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, both women.
Indeed, veteran Pakistani senator Ilyas Ahmed Bilour warned the Bangladeshi delegation that political instability could provide the wedge for religious fundamentalists to gain influence. “The fundamentalist advantage will be more if you don’t get the two ladies [to cooperate],” Bilour said. “Your future will be like our fate.”
The conference explored the developing world’s most intractable problems, but was more a venue for relationship building among mid-level political leaders, and for those leaders to understand the reach of their power.
Ababi Demissie Sidelil, an MP from Ethiopia, which is still seeking a stable peace with Eritrea after its largely ignored border war in the late 1990s, said the conference helped him better understand how parliamentarians can pressure for greater transparency from all branches of government.
Sidlel said he would be educating fellow lawmakers in Ethiopia how to better scrutinize the presidential office in particular. “The conference gave a clear picture how parliamentarians can play a role to combat corruption, poverty and to manage conflict,” he said.
Monohar Ramsaran, the minister of sport and youth affairs for Trinidad and Tobago, said resource development, in this case oil and gas, drives corruption in his government and robs the public purse. “Corruption is eating away at the country’s wealth that should be shared with the poor,” Ramsaran said.
Sri Kadarwati Aswin, a regional house representative from Indonesia, said land dispute is the root of separatist uprisings and grinding poverty in the vast archipelago of her country. “We see similar problems across all countries” said Aswin, a member of an elected non-partisan parliamentary body formed in 2004. “Poverty is similar and conflict is similar … It is about land use, a problem of all countries. Conflict over land we can see is a global issue.”
Royal Roads University - News and Events
Royal Roads University - School of Peace and Conflict Management
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