Africa

by Guy Arnold

  A process of negotiations had been started in June 1998; at Arusha in January 1999, though little progress had been made, President Museveni of Uganda suggested that the sanctions imposed by neighbouring states in July 1996 should be lifted. Further talks were conducted in July. In May 1999 five soldiers were found guilty of the murder of the country’s first elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, and six ministers in 1993 and were sentenced to death by the Supreme Court while a further 28 were sentenced to prison. By this time about 300,000 peasants had been moved into ‘regroupement camps’ where the conditions were so awful that aid workers would not stay and the UN Security Council called on the government to abandon the policy. The government replied that it would do nothing until the rebels abandoned their ‘genocidal agenda’. The peace talks were set back when former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, who had initiated them, died. Nelson Mandela replaced Nyerere as chief negotiator in 2000. He criticized Buyoya’s rule and the latter promised to curtail Tutsi domination of military and political life in Burundi. In April 2000 Buyoya promised to dismantle the ‘regroupement camps’. On 28 August 2000 a power-sharing agreement was reached at Arusha between the government, the military and a number of political parties, both Hutu and Tutsi, and signed in the presence of Mandela, US President Bill Clinton and a dozen other heads of state. Buyoya had to balance any agreement against army pressures and the fact that three Hutu guerrilla groups had been absent from the meeting as had several Tutsi groups. Although figures frequently changed, the consensus at the end of the century was that about 200,000 had died in the civil strife since 1993 while about six per cent of the population had been displaced. In February 2001 the peace negotiations collapsed when a majority of the participants refused to accept Buyoya as head of an interim three-year transitional government.

  ERITREA AND ETHIOPIA GO TO WAR

  In 1998 an unexpected war erupted between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Their two leaders, Issayas Afewerki of Eritrea, and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, had worked together to bring an end to the regime of Mengistu in Ethiopia at the beginning of the decade. Now they fell out and the subsequent war between their two countries, which lasted from 1998 to 2000, was bitter, costly in lives and resources. It was fought nominally over a few small stretches of border territory. In fact, it was about more than territory, and not least because the emergence of an independent Eritrea had deprived Ethiopia of its Red Sea coastline and reduced it to the status of a landlocked country. The apparently good relations between the two countries were broken in May 1998 when a border dispute led to violence. Following the deaths of several Eritrean soldiers near the border town of Badme in the Tigray province of Eritrea on 6 May, Eritrean forces seized an area then under Ethiopian control but claimed by Eritrea. Clashes occurred at a number of points along the border and led to several hundred casualties during the month. In June Ethiopian aircraft attacked Asmara airport and in retaliation Eritrean planes bombed Makelle and Adigat. Sporadic confrontations took place over the rest of the year while both sides purchased arms from China and Eastern Europe.

  In June 1998, after the first hostilities, the Ethiopians began to round up Eritreans with military training or members of the Eritrean People’s Front for Democracy (PFD) to expel them to Eritrea and by December both Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin had been deported. Many people were displaced on both sides of the border and there were accusations of mistreatment. Trade between the two countries came to a standstill and Ethiopia diverted its imports and exports through Djibouti. Several problems were behind the confrontation: Ethiopia was angry at the cost of access to the port of Assab, while Eritrea was angry because Ethiopia had insisted that all trade between them had to be conducted in dollars after Eritrea had launched its own currency, the nafka, in 1997. Perhaps the root of the quarrel was the reduction of Ethiopia to a landlocked country by Eritrea, which had been a part of greater Ethiopia: in other words, anger at loss of empire. The OAU, the United States and Rwanda joined in trying to find a peaceful resolution of the dispute but to no avail; Eritrea would not withdraw from territory it had occupied after 6 May, insisting that it had only deployed troops inside its own territory. The US was concerned to resolve the conflict since otherwise it threatened its policy of containing Sudan but it made little progress as both sides adopted increasingly hard stances. At the end of 1998 there was an uneasy stand-off between the two countries and though both their economies were adversely affected, that of Eritrea was harder hit if only because it had so little to fall back on. The port of Assab, whose principal function was to service Ethiopia, was near standstill while the trade gap was widening dangerously with the government’s huge increase in military spending.

  What had begun as a straightforward quarrel between Eritrea and Ethiopia threatened to include Djibouti, Sudan and Somalia and demonstrated both the fragility and underlying hostilities that existed throughout the Horn. In February 1999, after eight months of relative quiet, Ethiopian forces launched a major attack to retake Badme (which Eritrea had seized in May 1998) and then push on 30 kilometres into Eritrea. A subsequent Ethiopian attempt to take Zalembessa failed, however, as did an Eritrean effort to retake Badme. Eritrea tried again in May and June with no greater success. Casualties over these months were heavy on both sides, estimated at 30,000 each. Ethiopian planes bombed both Assab and Massawa and there were artillery exchanges along much of the front, which some journalists compared with the trench warfare of 1914–18. The OAU spearheaded peace efforts and produced a framework that required observers and the demarcation of the border with UN help, with both combatants redeploying their forces outside the occupied areas. The conflict continued while these negotiations were conducted. Eritrea provided support for the dissident Djibouti Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) and encouraged it to sabotage the railway to Addis Ababa. Eritrea also provided arms and training for the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in southern Ethiopia and sent 1,500 fighters to assist OLF through Somalia (by agreement with Hussein Aideed). This move led to joint Ethiopian-Kenya security operations and was almost certainly counter-productive since it strengthened Ethiopian anger at Eritrea. In any case, Hussein Aideed changed sides and in October 1999 paid a visit to Ethiopia. Ethiopia claimed to have killed or captured 1,100 OLF fighters and was joined by Sudan in supporting external Eritrean opposition groups. Meanwhile, 10 Eritrean opposition groups, drawing support from Eritrean Muslims, had launched the Alliance of Eritrean National Forces (AENF) in Khartoum. Later, however, an improvement in relations between Sudan and Eritrea forced the AENF to relocate to Ethiopia. By December 1999 Ethiopia had expelled a total of 65,000 Eritreans. Amnesty International criticized the scale and methods used in these expulsions. At the same time, some 22,000 Ethiopians had left Eritrea. The Ethiopian economy was adversely affected by this confrontation: partly because of the rise in military expenditure, and partly because donors held back aid in an effort to force an end to the fighting.

  There was a lull in the fighting during the first months of 2000 and both sides said they accepted the peace framework negotiated by the OAU although disagreements remained about its implementation. However, proximity talks, which had been sponsored by the United States and Algeria, collapsed in May and despite a UN Security Council arms embargo, Ethiopia launched an offensive and achieved major gains. These included the recapture of Zalembessa and Bada; in addition, its forces penetrated deep into Eritrea to take Senafe and Barentu. Faced with defeat, Eritrea withdrew from the areas it had seized in 1998. Then, under international pressure the two countries agreed to a ceasefire on 18 June. A formal peace treaty was signed on 12 December: this allowed a 4,200-strong UN peacekeeping force to be deployed in a 25-kilometre security buffer zone inside Eritrea until the demarcation of the border had been completed. By the end of December half the peacekeeping force was in place. Repatriation of prisoners began before the end of the year while Ethiopia demobilized 50,000 troops. Despite the peace both sides continued with a war of propag
anda and each supported the other’s dissidents: Ethiopia provided backing for the AENF and Eritrea continued its support for the Oromo dissidents (OLF). Neither side provided any details about the costs of the war although more than 70,000 soldiers had been killed. Both countries had spent several hundred million dollars purchasing aircraft from Russia and other arms from China, Libya and Israel. The social and development programmes of both countries had clearly suffered as a result of the war. Thus, the final Ethiopian advance in May 2000 had badly disrupted the planting season in western Eritrea as thousands of people had fled to escape the fighting while the numbers needing food aid had risen to one million. And in Ethiopia, according to the IMF, the war had caused a sharp fall in expenditure on health, education and development.

  In 2002 the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague issued its ruling on the disputed frontier. This gave Eritrea substantial territorial awards in the western sector of the border and handed some gains to Ethiopia in the centre, including all the disputed towns and villages, such as Zalambessa, Alitena and Badme. Ethiopia had cause to celebrate, Eritrea less so, although the government claimed it had obtained the land that it sought. Relations between the two countries, following the ruling, remained tense. The gains, either way, hardly warranted the loss of 70,000 lives.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - SIX

  Failed States and the Return of the Imperial Factor

  The idea of the ‘failed state’ achieved currency in the late 1990s and the term may be loosely applied to any country where the accepted mechanisms of control no longer operate effectively over the whole territory and all the people. Both the cause but also the result of a failed state may be civil war although the collapse of central power in relation to the peripheries of the state may also create this condition. It is by no means easy to settle upon a satisfactory definition of a failed state: civil war, certainly; rule by a corrupt elite concerned only with its own aggrandizement to such an extent that the population simply ignores the centre and operates independently; breakdown into local power centres, a development most likely to encourage the rise of warlords. Above all, and for whatever reason, a large proportion of the population cease to look to central government to solve or even to try to solve their problems. Once the condition has been accepted, the question then arises: can the people themselves reverse the situation and put a working state structure together again; or will it only be possible to recreate a reasonably functioning state with help from outside? Such outside help may come in the form of peacekeepers or peace enforcers in a civil war and these may be drawn from several sources – the United Nations, regional forces or intervention by a major power. In any case, and all too often, breakdown invites interventions that are predatory as with Democratic Republic of Congo, and neighbours more interested in helping themselves to its resources or pursuing some other political agenda of their own than in assisting the state to recover its authority. In terms of international politics, the failed state acts as an open invitation to interference or straight intervention and as such attracts the major powers. It is no accident that the term has come into vogue in the media of Britain, France or the United States. To speak of a failed state automatically suggests that help is needed and external assistance always comes with a price tag of its own.

  A number of states in Africa, where breakdown appears to have been accepted as a semi-permanent condition, have been designated as failed states – Angola, Burundi, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone or Sudan – are examples. And this brings us to the factor of external intervention. Why did the United Nations and the United States intervene in Somalia and then quit when the job was unfinished and why did France intervene briefly in Rwanda in 1994 when the other major powers were determinedly finding excuses not to do so? As always, the answer to such questions resolves itself into one of interest and despite such discrepancies there were unmistakable signs in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century of the emergence of a new form of imperialism. Sometimes, goaded by a public opinion led by ‘aid’ NGOs demanding that something should be done – the relief of poverty, the forgiveness of debt – there has been a return to nineteenth-century arguments about moral responsibility; more often, realpolitik prevails and interventions are guided by the self-interest of the big powers. Whatever the reasons, there is a discernible readiness on the part of Britain and France in particular, and the United States in a somewhat different fashion, to debate publicly reasons for intervention. Four countries are considered here: Sierra Leone where Britain reinforced a shaky UN operation; Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) and Côte d’Ivoire where France was busy (covertly in the first case, overtly in the second); and Liberia where people have called for the United States to come to the rescue. Whatever their problems, Africans should pause when the big powers proffer assistance. They should recall how they used to regard the Christian missionaries: ‘When the missionaries arrived in Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land; later we found that we had the Bible and the missionaries had the land.’

  SIERRA LEONE

  The tragic collapse of Sierra Leone into anarchy in the late 1990s could be foreseen at the beginning of the decade. In 1991 Sierra Leone was affected by events in neighbouring Liberia when border fighting led to some 5,000 deaths as Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) tried to gain control of the diamond-producing region of southern Sierra Leone. On 30 April 1992 a military coup brought Capt. Valentine Strasser to power. By this time the dissident Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had been formed and operated from across the border where it had established bases in Liberia. Thereafter, Sierra Leone was to be engulfed in a civil war that developed steadily for the rest of the decade. Strasser was ousted in another coup of 1996. Later, following elections, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) was elected president and, following negotiations with the RUF leader Foday Sankoh, a temporary peace was achieved between the new government and the RUF. It did not last. A third coup was mounted in 1997, this time by Johnny Paul Koroma, and Kabbah was forced to flee the country. Subsequently ECOWAS sent a peacekeeping mission (ECOMOG) that was led by a contingent of Nigerian troops to restore order. ECOWAS was already involved in peacekeeping efforts in neighbouring Liberia. Meanwhile, Britain gave its support to the exiled President and Kabbah was invited to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) held at Edinburgh in October 1997.

  By 1998 Sierra Leone faced an uncertain future. In February ECOMOG forces, principally Nigerian, fought their way into the centre of Freetown to dislodge the military regime of Koroma, which was forced out of Freetown and much of the rest of the country, and President Kabbah was restored to power. In Britain a political storm arose over what came to be known as the Sandline Affair, or the ‘Arms for Africa’ affair and whether or not the Foreign Office knew that Sandline International, a British security company, had provided arms and other military assistance to the exiled Sierra Leone government. Sandline was doing precisely that in breach of the UN embargo on supplying arms to any party in the Sierra Leone dispute. Kabbah returned to Freetown on 10 March and faced the task of political reconstruction and economic and social rehabilitation in a situation of general collapse. About 1,300 supporters of the rebel Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) were detained and 30 of them were executed, while others received prison sentences. Koroma managed to escape although the former head of state, Joseph Momoh, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.

  Other rebels fled into the interior and sought to escape across the border into Liberia. These rebels joined the RUF that they had earlier been fighting when it threatened the Koroma regime, demonstrating thereby their principal (perhaps only) motivation, which was to obtain power and a share in the country’s spoils. The RUF then intensified the war. Foday Sankoh, who had been detained in Nigeria, was sent back to Freetown where he was sentenced to death. By October the ECOMOG forces, assisted by village militias (kamajors), were achieving substantial successes against
the rebels who were pushed to the eastern and southern borders of the country. President Kabbah, who received international financial support for the task, was beginning to re-establish a fully functioning administration and repair the huge damage to the country’s infrastructure after seven years of civil war during which 1.5 million people out of a total population of five million had been displaced. By the end of the year, however, the RUF had reorganized itself and been reinforced by several hundred Ukrainian mercenaries while also receiving financial aid from unidentified sources (almost certainly the Charles Taylor government in Liberia).