Liberation struggle was at low ebb in 1974 when the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship suddenly brought independence into view. The three main movements sprang into renewed activity; the external patrons of the MPLA (Soviet Union and Cuba) and the FNLA (United States and CongoKinshasa) rushed to supply their allies. African diplomacy and the OAU as well as the new Portuguese military regime urgently sought to create a coalition between the three movements, and they briefly succeeded in early 1975. But the accord soon fell apart, and by March 1975 a civil war raged in Luanda, with the MPLA emerging victorious. UNITA found a new ally in South Africa; by October 1975 South African units had crossed the border, advancing up the coastal road with UNITA forces toward Luanda. On 10 November the last Portuguese governor sailed away, abandoning the country to civil war. Cuban forces and Soviet military supply enabled the MPLA to repulse the FNLA and UNITA; by early 1976 South African and Congolese forces had withdrawn.
Though the MPLA won the military battle, it soon proved incapable of effective management of the new state. The Afromarxist ideological enthusiasms of its ruling cadres were not matched by administrative competence. The flight of the Portuguese bureaucrats and the paralysis of the important coffee sector handicapped government operations. A bitter power struggle within the MPLA in Luanda in 1977 brought the capital to the verge of civil war, and then in 1979 MPLA leader Agostino Neto died, replaced by Eduardo dos Santos. Corruption began to appear, and services to the countryside were meager to nonexistent. These developments provided an opening to the Jonas Savimbi-led UNITA to regain momentum.
The FNLA was never again a major player. But UNITA by 1981 found renewed external backing sources from a clandestine American supply through the CIA and more open South African support. The advent of the Reagan administration in Washington, with its more confrontational cold war policy and deep anti-Cuban obsessions, and the new South African “total strategy” destabilization policy toward the African Afromarxist states to its north provided the doctrinal underpinning for the newly aggressive policies.
By the mid-1980s, UNITA had driven the MPLA out of a good part of the south, expanding beyond its Ovimbundu home territory. The fighting increasingly took on the aspects of a conventional war, in which large armies armed with tanks and heavy weaponry were pitted against each other in fixed battles rather than mobile guerrilla warfare. The culmination of this trend was the epic 1988 battle at Cuito Carnavale in which as many as fifty thousand Cubans plus their Angolan allies fought against numerous UNITA fighters reinforced by a substantial South African regular army force. Though there was no decisive winner, the South African-UNITA force failed to drive their adversaries from the major base they had established. Both sides experienced heavy losses, which pushed them toward peace negotiations.
A 1991 peace accord opened the way for the first real peace the tormented country had experienced since independence. The agreement called for the opening of the political arena to competing parties and for national elections, which were held in 1992 and supervised by a UN peacekeeping operation. The elections were peacefully conducted, and observers were unanimous in providing a “free and fair” stamp of approval. But rather than the triumph expected by Savimbi on the basis of his Ovimbundu ethnic base of nearly 40% (whose unity he overestimated), the MPLA won two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, and dos Santos was close to an absolute majority in the presidential balloting. Savimbi refused to take part in the presidential runoff and returned to the bush to resume the armed struggle, which lasted for another decade. I return to this final phase later in the chapter.
In the Congo-Kinshasa case, the national domain of a badly weakened state was restored under international tutelage by UN military suppression of the Katanga secession in January 1963. But the UN peacekeeping operation ended in 1964, exposing a still fragile polity to armed challenges it could not master. Even before, at the end of 1963, rebellion broke out in the Kwilu area of southwestern Congo. Multiple, hydraheaded uprisings then followed in 1964 in eastern Congo; by late that year government authority had vanished from the northeast quadrant of the country. An enfeebled state, widespread in the 1990s but unusual in the 1960s, could not halt a snowballing spread of the rebellion, until its army was stiffened by foreign mercenaries and eventually direct Belgian and American military support.
A few observations relating the Congo rebellions to the 1990s internal wars are pertinent here; the nature of its violence foreshadowed some of the patterns widespread in the contemporary conflicts. The logic of the cold war operated powerfully to precipitate American intervention in partnership with Belgium. They were able to block further the rebels’ advance, and subsequently they seized their key base. Although the rebellions were under no initial Soviet influence, they attracted backing from radical African states and Communist sources at a time when they appeared to enjoy some success. Left-leaning African states—especially Algeria and Egypt—attempted to ship arms through Sudan in the fall of 1964, but to the dismay of Khartoum the shipment was intercepted by southern Sudanese insurgents. The misadventure of intervention on the eastern border by a small Cuban expeditionary force under Ernesto “Che” Guevara had no connection with the Soviet Union but readily fit a Western policy template assuming global Communist bloc expansion ambitions.11
Whereas the leaders in a number of the 1990s militias had previous army experience, rebel leaders in Congo-Kinshasa in the early 1960s entered the fray with no military knowledge or skills. Nor did they perceive the possibilities so crucial in the 1990s of exploiting the treasure trove of natural resources to finance the rebellions; they did seize and export to Uganda a gold stockpile at the Kilo-Moto mines in the far northeast but never benefited from the proceeds. Insurgent finance relied entirely on liquid resources seized in the towns occupied (especially vehicles and cash), a nonrenewable treasury quickly squandered.
Finally, let us note a consequence of the Congo rebellions that may be come visible in contemporary postconflict situations. The human toll of the rebellions was very great; Herbert Weiss estimates a death toll of a million. Folk memories of the terrible costs of the violence and disruption, especially in the affected regions, remained vivid for many years afterward. Many fled the towns and hid in the bush for weeks. The long public quietism in spite of growing dissatisfaction with the Mobutu regime was partly attributable to an abiding fear of renewed violence, an incubus unhappily realized in the east after 1996.12
The other instance of civil warfare triggered by early state failure was Chad, already profiled in chapter 5 and needing only brief reference here. Several aspects of the prolonged Chad disorder, like the Congo rebellions, were forerunners of patterns that became widespread in the 1990s. The weakening authority of the state gave rise to a multiplicity of armed bands, surviving by plunder; “warlord politics” were born in Chad. Shifting alignments shaped by clan and ethnicity defined the low-intensity warfare. External players were drawn into the conflicts, especially Libya, Sudan, Nigeria, Congo-Kinshasa, and France. Chad was an early domain for the expansive visions and interventionist dispositions of Qadhafy; he occupied the northernmost part of Chad (the Aouzou strip) in 1973 and by 1980 had sent his units further south in pursuit of a greater Libya, retreating in 1986 after French military backing helped a Chad army to push back and then abandoning his claims on the Aouzou strip. Nigeria led repeated unsuccessful African mediation efforts to create a coalition government before a militia striking from Sudan sanctuary led by Hissein Habré reestablished a single authority in 1982.
SEPARATIST UPRISINGS: BIAFRA AND SOUTHERN SUDAN
The Biafran secession (1967–70) arose out of the interplay of the first round of flawed Nigerian elections, ethnoregional party politics, episodes of communal violence, and a deepening sense of exclusion on the part of a major ethnic group, the Igbo. As overlay, an unstable federal arrangement pitted the three major ethnic groups against each other, each dominating one of the three regions. In each of the regions, roughly a third of the popu
lation were “minorities,” and an electoral arithmetic weighted toward the Hausa-Fulani dominated Northern Region was in place. The innumerable electoral malpractices and venal political behavior of the First Republic had produced serious disenchantment by the mid-1960s. When a group of radical majors tried to seize power in January 1966, much of the public initially applauded; the rebels assassinated the federal prime minister, two of the four regional governors, and a number of senior officers. But the coup unraveled, and a rump cabinet surrendered power to the army commander, General J. T. Ironsi. An ethnic selectivity in leadership and targets became visible. Six of the seven majors were Igbo, and of the seven senior officers assassinated, only one was Igbo, while only non-Igbo regional governors were killed.
General Ironsi, also an Igbo, deepened tensions with insensitive leadership. He relied on an inner core of coethnic senior civil servants; promotions to replace the fallen officers, though based on seniority, saw nine of twelve slots go to Igbo. The sudden declaration of a unitary state in May 1966 was the final detonator; a wave of anti-Igbo riots swept northern cities. In July 1966, another coup took place, this time by northern officers, accompanied by a wave of killings; the victims included Ironsi, 39 officers, and 191 other ranks, mostly Igbo. The remaining Igbo military regrouped in the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region, along with many ranking professionals and intellectuals. Estimates vary of the fatalities in the attacks on southerners, especially Igbo, in northern cities, ranging as high as fifty thousand; up to two million fled southward. Demands for secession now crystallized, posed in terms of cultural survival. Finally, a sovereign state of Biafra was proclaimed on 30 May 1967.
The separatist claim was always framed in the name of the long-established Eastern Region, never as an ethnic demand for Igbo self-determination. Such a framing was indispensable for possible international acceptance. In addition, this provided the secession with an established set of administrative and political institutions. At the same time, it proved a fatal weakness; the non-Igbo “minorities” in the Niger delta and along the coast were at best reticent and soon defected to the federal side.
More than for any of the other early African postcolonial civil wars, except Western Sahara, the diplomatic front for the Biafran struggle was critical. Nigeria urgently required an arms supply (its army had only seven thousand men and no tanks or aircraft) and denial of international recognition for Biafra. The secession likewise needed weapons and the crucial legitimation that external blessing for sovereignty would supply. Nigeria had the resources and foreign exchange reserves to undertake large arms purchases; the Soviet Union, previously suspicious of Nigeria as a Western client state, now saw an opportunity and was a generous provider. Biafra managed to secure some aging aircraft and other arms, along with a large flow of humanitarian assistance. The Biafran information services, their work abetted by a large and active diaspora, skillfully exploited the claim that genocide awaited the Igbo if the secession failed. Remarkably, Biafra diplomacy did secure formal recognition from four African states (Ivory Coast, Gabon, Tanzania, and Zambia), plus Haiti. But at the end of the day the African state system rallied behind Nigeria; three successive OAU conferences condemned the secession.
So also did the rest of Nigeria. Opinion swung behind the federal cause and its slogan “To Keep Nigeria One Is a Job That Must Be Done.” The Nigerian armed forces mushroomed to 250,000 and seized the oil-producing coastal strip of Biafra. But the shrinking Biafran redoubt hung on for thirty months, until the last airstrip permitting resupply was captured. The Biafra war was almost entirely a combat between organized armies; within its diminishing zone of control the secessionist regime operated as a regular government.
However bitter the civil war and the communal violence preceding it had been, the haunting fear of genocide did not materialize, nor did the threatened guerrilla resistance, for which no preparation had been made. On the contrary, federal troops remained disciplined, wreaking no vengeance on the population. The Igbo civilian losses during the war were heavy; there were as many as a million casualties. Igbo elites had lost their leading positions in the federal bureaucracy, as well as much urban property, especially in Port Harcourt in the Niger delta. But the postconflict mood of reconciliation yet stands as a model.13
Still, a sense of loss remains among many in the Igbo community; so great a trauma cannot vanish without leaving indelible marks on society. As Daniel Smith observes, especially after the 1999 democratic transition, a renewed Igbo sense of marginalization entered public psychology, fueled by the transformed perceptions of the Nigerian polity and the pathways to wealth since the civil war. Igbo have remained largely absent in the top ranks of the federal government, the military, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. This exclusion is much more than symbolic; “in Nigeria’s military and oil-dominated postcolonial history, controlling the center has translated into controlling the preponderance of the nation’s wealth and power.”14 The civil war marked a turning point in this process; corruption made its appearance in the First Republic but on a limited scale and then metastasized in the 1970s. In 2000, a new movement devoted to the cause of a Biafran state was launched: the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB). Though a rejuvenated dream of secession is viewed as distant by most Igbo, the movement has a substantial following in the diasporas of the United States and Britain and serves as one focal point for expression of discontent within Nigeria.15
The second example of civil war with separatist tonality is the southern Sudan rebellion against the center, which unfolded in two prolonged chapters from 1955 to 1972 and then again from 1983 to 2005. The separatist alternative was always present as a subtext, and many clearly preferred it; it was ultimately realized in 2011. Thus I include southern Sudan as an instance of secessionist warfare, even though during much of the long struggle key insurgent leaders clung to an official goal of a single Sudan in which the ethnically distinct southern regions would have a large degree of autonomy and would be culturally recognized. I discuss the first phase of the civil war here and return to the contemporary act later in the chapter.
The key cleavage in Sudan divides the north, overwhelmingly Muslim with Arabic as vehicular medium (though only 40% of the Sudanese population is Arab by maternal language and genealogy), from the southern third that is of diverse ethnic origin but shares a regional sense of distinctiveness, greatly sharpened by protracted civil war.16 Anticolonial nationalism was rooted in the Khartoum-centered north, which has completely dominated all postcolonial regimes. From the outset, the embrace of an Arab-Islamic identity for the state by the northern rulers triggered cultural fears in the south, most of whose elites and a growing number of others are Christians. In addition, a deeply embedded historical memory of large-scale nineteenth century slave raiding by armed bands operating on behalf of Khartoum merchants remains alive; so also does a racial scorn of southerners implanted in the northern mentality. Thus a racialized discourse became prevalent, objectifying southerners as “black” or African (even abid, or slaves), despite the slender phenotypical differences. Southerners in turn internalized the “African” label as unifying the region, in contrast to an “Arab” north, rejecting Arabism as an assimilative pole.
This consciousness of difference was exacerbated in colonial times by a separate administrative policy for the south pursued by the British. The “Southern Policy,” which took form in the 1920s, gave strong encouragement to Christian mission engagement, to which education and health responsibilities could be delegated. Northern presence was discouraged, and after 1929 it was barred when a slave-trading ring was uncovered. In the interwar period, there was some speculative talk about attaching the region to Uganda, perceived by a nascent nationalism in the north as further evidence of British cunning duplicity. The south by 1960 had only three secondary schools, and a mere sixty students at Khartoum University. Southern Sudan was a colonial backwater, with minimal economic development.17
By 194
7, the decision to move Sudan toward decolonization as a united territory had been made; independence appeared on the horizon far more swiftly than anticipated, amid growing southern apprehensions. These redoubled in 1954 when northern leaders, concerned with restiveness in the south, warned that “they shall use the force of iron in dealing with any southerner who will dare attempt to divide the nation.”18 Shortly after, a list of five hundred nominations for senior government posts slated for Sudanization was published containing only four southern names. With the prospect of postcolonial marginalization thus dramatized, southern political leaders demanded a federal constitution. Although northern parties promised careful consideration of federalism in order to gain southern support for early independence on 1 January 1956, by 1957 the northern-dominated regime was insisting on a unitary state with Arabic as national language and Islam as state religion. The following year, with rumblings of support for federalism audible in the northeast Beja area, Darfur, and the Nuba mountains as well as the south and a fracturing Khartoum political arena, the military assumed power, committed to the unitary formula.
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