by Guy Arnold
There were further refugee problems in West Africa: Algeria (in the Tindouf area) was host to refugees from the war between Morocco and the POLISARIO in Western Sahara; the border dispute between Senegal farmers and Mauritanian pastoralists uprooted 255,000 people of whom 65,000 became refugees, while 90,000 Senegalese in Mauritania and 100,000 Mauritanians in Senegal were returned to their countries of origin even though many of them had been living in the other country for years. The civil war in Liberia that started in 1989 had produced 180,000 refugees by April 1990. The upheavals resulting from these refugee movements created enormous economic burdens throughout the continent.1
PARTICULAR CONFLICTS
Throughout the 1980s certain conflicts demanded and obtained a great deal of attention from the OAU or neighbouring states though all too often with little apparent success; lack of success in resolving these conflicts had more to do with their intractable nature than incompetence on the part of would-be mediators. The root cause of these conflicts – in Western Sahara, Chad, Namibia, South Africa – could be traced back to the pre-independence dispositions made by the colonial powers.
The seventeenth Assembly of Heads of State, due to meet in July 1980, postponed a decision on admitting the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), which had been proclaimed by POLISARIO (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro) in Western Sahara (former Spanish Sahara) which was claimed by Morocco after Morocco threatened to leave the OAU if any such recognition were granted. In September 1980 the OAU Committee on Western Sahara announced a six-point ceasefire plan to include a referendum to be organized by the OAU assisted by the United Nations. In June 1981, at the Eighteenth Assembly of Heads of State, Morocco agreed to hold a referendum in Western Sahara. In February 1982 the Committee on Western Sahara empowered President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya to conduct negotiations for a ceasefire between Morocco and POLISARIO. However, at a meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, the admission of a representative of the SADR prompted a walkout by 19 countries. Then, during March and April 1982, the ordinary business of the OAU was disrupted because boycotts by supporters and opponents of POLISARIO meant that three ministerial meetings lacked a quorum of members and subsequent discussions by a special group of nine countries failed to resolve the deadlock. The dispute was to disrupt the working of the OAU throughout 1982 and the Nineteenth Assembly of Heads of State that was to be held in Tripoli, Libya, had to be abandoned when it failed to achieve a quorum due to the boycott by 19 states. A five-member committee was set up to try to convene another summit before the end of the year but only in June 1983 did the Nineteenth Assembly finally convene in Addis Ababa. The SADR representatives agreed not to attend in order to avoid a boycott of the meeting by their opponents although they said they would attend the next Assembly of Heads of State. The Assembly repeated its call for a referendum to be held in Western Sahara and for direct negotiations between Morocco and SADR. The Twentieth Assembly was held in Addis Ababa during November 1984 and Nigeria then became the thirtieth OAU member to recognize the SADR, thus giving the SADR the necessary majority, and a delegation representing the SADR was admitted to the Assembly. Morocco immediately withdrew from the OAU (the withdrawal to take effect after a year) and Zaïre gave its support to Morocco by also withdrawing from the meeting. The dispute highlighted the weakness of the OAU. A powerful member – Morocco – that was transgressing the key OAU principle of self-determination for its own ‘imperial’ reasons of aggrandisement, was not able to exercise a veto, so it simply resigned from the organization. It did not rejoin and the SADR dispute was to continue with equally ineffective UN mediation attempts to resolve it until the end of the century.
The civil war between north and south in Chad also occupied the OAU through the decade. This war was hugely complicated by the interventions of Libya and France, the former intervening in the north where it aimed to annex the uranium-rich Aozou Strip, and the latter assisting the official government in the south in order to prevent Libya’s Gaddafi obtaining a stranglehold on the country. As in other such wars these interventions prolonged the conflict rather than solving it. In January 1981 the OAU held a conference to consider the relations between Chad and Libya; it condemned Gaddafi’s proposal that the two countries should merge and demanded the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Chad (Libyan and French) and decided to send an African force to maintain peace and subsequently to supervise elections. In November 1981 the first members of the OAU peacekeeping force, consisting of troops from Nigeria, Senegal and Zaïre – arrived in Chad to replace the Libyan troops which had been supporting the government against the opposition. In February 1982 the OAU Committee on Chad established a timetable for a ceasefire, negotiations, a provisional constitution and elections in Chad, and announced that the OAU peacekeeping force’s mandate would be terminated at the end of June.
The long-running Chad dispute had wider repercussions for the OAU whose well-meaning attempts at mediation did little to bring the conflict to an end or prevent Libyan and French intervention. Chad, as well as the SADR, caused the abandonment of the Nineteenth Assembly of Heads of State due to be held in Tripoli, Libya, in November 1982 since there was a dispute as to who should represent Chad. Gaddafi opposed the presence of President Hissène Habré in favour of the former Chad President, Goukouni Oueddei, but this led 14 moderate states to boycott the meeting. Talks held in Addis Ababa by the rival Chad factions in January 1984 came to nothing, mainly because of the refusal to attend by President Habré. In July 1986 the OAU resolved to continue efforts under the OAU Chairman to bring about a reconciliation between the parties in Chad and to further this aim a council of ‘wise men’, comprising former African heads of state, was established to mediate, when necessary, in disputes between member countries. In July 1987 the OAU renewed the mandate of the special OAU committee, which had been attempting to resolve the dispute between Chad and Libya, and called a meeting for 24 May 1988 to discuss the sovereignty of the Aozou region. On the eve of the summit, however, Col. Gaddafi, who had boycotted all previous OAU ad hoc meetings, announced that he would not attend. Then on 25 May Gaddafi announced that he was willing to recognize the Habré regime in Chad. Following mediation by Togo, Chad and Libya issued a joint statement on 3 October 1988 expressing their willingness to seek a peaceful solution to their territorial dispute and to co-operate with the OAU committee that had been appointed for the purpose. By the end of the decade it appeared likely that Gaddafi and Habré would come to more or less amicable terms but this was not to be since in November 1990 Habré was forced to flee from Chad when Idriss Deby took power.
Although it made pronouncements about Namibia the OAU had little impact upon events there for the South African grip on the territory was as firm as ever when the 1980s began. In response to a situation it had little power to alter, an OAU meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of February 1981 supported proposals for an intensified guerrilla war by SWAPO in the Caprivi Strip while calling for mandatory sanctions against South Africa to persuade the Pretoria government to negotiate on Namibian independence. In reality, developments in Namibia depended upon the United Nations and the Western Contact Group and when in 1989 the situation had at last changed sufficiently for the United Nations to prepare a UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) to supervise the independence process, the immediate OAU contribution to the process, in February, was for its Council of Ministers to criticize the UN Security Council’s decision to limit the size of UNTAG. Then, in July, the Assembly of Heads of State urged the UN to ensure that the coming Namibian elections would be fairly conducted. After some cliff-hanging crises Namibia did become independent in March 1990 but it was a US/UN achievement and the OAU contribution had never been more than marginal.
Throughout the 1980s, as events unfolded in Southern Africa, the pressures of the front-line states, the wars in Angola, Mozambique and Namibia and the widening gap that was becoming ever more apparent between the demands of an expanding S
outh African economy, essential to the country’s development, and the rigid demands of apartheid that were totally incompatible, constituted between them the real forces for change. That change was finally signalled in 1990 first by President de Klerk’s speech of 2 February when he unbanned the ANC and then on 21 March when Namibia became independent. In the preceding 10 years, however, South Africa had pursued its policy of destabilization against its neighbours with cross-border raids that, apparently, demonstrated its overwhelming military and regional hegemony. Destabilization had a disastrous impact upon both Angola and Mozambique, where it reinforced the wars in those two countries and made any meaningful economic progress impossible. The repeated RENAMO attacks upon the Beira Corridor as a supply line to Zimbabwe made that country increasingly dependent upon South Africa. In response to these South African tactics the Southern African states were obliged to increase their military expenditure through the decade and remained vulnerable to South African raids and economic pressures. Apartheid and the consequent confrontation between South Africa and its neighbours acted as major impediments to economic development in the region. In May 1986 the Twenty-second Assembly of Heads of State of the OAU called for comprehensive economic sanctions against South Africa, and strongly criticized the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States for opposing sanctions. In February 1987 the OAU Chairman, President Sassou-Nguesso of Congo, undertook a tour of Europe to discuss the possibility of a negotiated settlement in Chad, the political situation in South Africa and African debt. In July 1987, once again, the Assembly of Heads of State reiterated its demands that Western countries should impose economic sanctions on South Africa. These and comparable OAU initiatives served only to emphasize Africa’s inability to take decisive action to solve its problems and its continuing dependence upon the former colonial powers and the United States to exert pressures for change. Following de Klerk’s dramatic speech of February 1990 and the real possibilities for change that had suddenly opened up, the OAU set up a monitoring group to report on events in South Africa and urged the international community to continue imposing sanctions upon South Africa.
Where the conflicts were on a smaller scale and major external powers were not involved, the OAU had a greater chance of mediating successfully, as it attempted in the conflict between Mauritania and Senegal that erupted in 1989. Following a border incident in April Mauritanians resident in Senegal (there were an estimated 300,000) were attacked and their businesses ransacked. Similar attacks were then made against Senegalese in Mauritania where some 30,000 resided. By early May 1989 several hundred people, mainly Senegalese, had been killed in Mauritania. Later that May the Chairman of the OAU, President Traoré of Mali, undertook a mission of mediation to try to resolve the ethnic conflict that had arisen between the two countries. In September the newly elected OAU Chairman, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and the newly appointed Secretary-General of the OAU, Salim Ahmed Salim, attempted to mediate and in November a mediation committee comprising representatives of six countries visited Mauritania and Senegal. Further OAU attempts at mediation were initiated in early 1990 but these were cut short by military action on the Mauritania–Senegal border. Later initiatives were equally unsuccessful and by July 1990 all transport links as well as telephone links between the two countries had been suspended. As with so many conflicts mediation was not supported by power to enforce a solution.
ECONOMIC QUESTIONS
Awareness of the continent’s economic weakness was a matter of abiding concern to the OAU throughout the decade. At its May 1980 summit the OAU had resolved to take steps towards the establishment of an African Common Market by the year 2000 and adopted the Lagos Plan of Action as a move in this direction. In November 1984 the OAU Assembly concentrated its attention upon economic matters: it discussed Africa’s balance of payments problems, debts and the drought which was affecting many countries. An emergency fund was established to combat the effects of drought and initial contributions were made to it of US$10 million each by Algeria and Nigeria. In July 1985 the Twenty-first Assembly of Heads of State was held in Addis Ababa and devoted its time to economic topics. The result was the Addis Ababa Declaration in which members reiterated their commitment to the Lagos Plan of Action. They adopted a priority programme to cover the next five years and emphasized the need to rehabilitate African agriculture, agreeing to increase agriculture’s share of public investment to between 20 and 25 per cent by the year 1989. The meeting also expressed its concern at Africa’s heavy external debt, which was expected to reach a total of US$170,000 million by the end of the year, and called for a special conference of creditors and borrowers to seek a solution to the problem and an increase in concessional finance resources. In May 1986, at a special session of the UN General Assembly called to consider the economic problems of Africa, the OAU, represented by its Chairman, presented a programme prepared jointly with the ECA calling for debt relief and an increase in assistance for agricultural investment. By November 1987, when a summit was held in Addis Ababa, Africa’s external debt was estimated at US$200,000 million. This meeting, though only attended by 10 heads of state and government, issued a statement requesting the conversion into grants of past bilateral loans and a 10-year suspension of debt service payments, reduction of interest rates and the lengthening of debt maturity periods. The meeting also asked that creditors should observe the principle that debt servicing should not exceed a ‘reasonable and bearable’ percentage of a debtor country’s export earnings. A contact group was established to enlist support for an international conference on African debt. However, the Assembly recognized that no conference on debt was likely to be held until 1989, owing to the reluctance of creditors to participate.
In July 1989 the Assembly of Heads of State again requested that an international conference on Africa’s debts should be held. The Assembly reviewed the implications for Africa of recent socio-economic and political changes in Eastern Europe, and of the European Community’s progress towards monetary and political union. Addressing the fiftieth ordinary session of the Council of Ministers in Addis Ababa in July 1989, the chairman (Zimbabwe’s Foreign Minister) Nathan Shamuyarira, said: ‘We would like to feel that the steps we have outlined and the measures proposed will play an important part in consolidating our economies and making sure that the decade of the 1990s is not lost like the decade of the 1980s as far as economic development is concerned.’ At the close of the 1989 summit, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak referred to Africa’s foreign debt, which by the end of 1988 had surpassed US$230,000 million, representing 24 per cent of its total income, and called for an international conference to discuss the crisis confronting the continent.
THE NORTH-SOUTH INTERFACE
By the mid-1980s development prospects in Africa, especially in the vulnerable Sahel and equatorial regions, appeared at best to be at a standstill, at worst to be in accelerating decline. The question was, why? World recession during the decade had had a devastating impact on fragile economies largely dependent upon commodity exports while the small size of most African economies provided them with scant room to manoeuvre or resources to fall back upon in bad times. Further, African development strategies were often over-ambitious and over-rigid. Moreover, they had usually been planned by outsiders, who took too little account of local conditions, and were over-dependent upon income derived from particular export staples. Much of this income was not ploughed back into the economy but used for ruling elite purposes such as presidential grandeur or unnecessary and often ultimately dangerous military establishments. International aid had become a major problem: partly because donors too often insisted that it should be channelled into developments that suited their views of how Africa should develop; still more because, by the 1980s, aid had come to be seen as a permanent addition to national budgets and was in consequence relied upon so that it developed a dependency attitude that undermined real efforts to achieve self-reliance; and, most insidious, because corrupt rulers and their elites
regarded aid not as a means of development so much as a resource to bolster their hold on power since it enabled them to tax their people less and have a scapegoat when developments went wrong.