B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  The southern rebellion may be traced to 1955, with a mutiny of the Equatoria Corps, the main security force in the south. Its enlisted ranks were all southern, while most officers were northern. With rumors of mutiny swirling, administrators called for the dispatch of northern troops; a portion of the Equatoria Corps was ordered to Khartoum. Those facing transfer were convinced they would be slaughtered on arrival, amid reports of a massacre of southerners in the main regional center, Juba. This triggered a mutiny against the northern officers; the mutineers disappeared into the bush, soon to form an initial core of the southern insurgency, which began to gain momentum from 1963 on.

  The revolt was a loose-knit movement, with multiple centers, fragmented structures, and ambiguous ultimate goals. By 1960, many southern politicians and intellectuals had fled into exile. Legal political parties in the south were banned by the military regime. Many schools were closed, and those remaining were placed under northern schoolmasters; most of these were shuttered in 1964, by which time Christian missionaries were expelled. Oduho and Deng wrote in 1963 that “from the present Northern Sudanese attitude and policies applied to the South, we are irresistibly led to the conclusion that their aim is to destroy the African Negroid personality and identity in the Sudan and to replace it with an arabized and islamicised South.”19 Plans to resettle 1.5 million Arabs in Upper Nile province in the south were announced at the time.

  Separate poles of southern resistance took form. The most externally visible were the exile politicians, operating from neighboring countries under a multiplicity of labels. Groups of guerrillas scattered through the south served as energizing centers of rebellion, which acquired the name of “Anya-nya” (guerrilla forces). Their struggle was conducted in almost total isolation; no sanctuary was available, nor were the various groups in close communication. They had very limited armament, consisting in weaponry occasionally captured from the army and a trickle from Israel and Ethiopia late in the game. The actual guerrilla numbers appeared to be no more than ten thousand, though twenty thousand emerged to claim integration into the Sudanese army at the time of the 1972 peace settlement.

  Beyond the desire to drive out northern occupation and, for many, to achieve separation, there was little articulated political agenda. Only at the very end did Joseph Lagu, a Madi from Equatoria, emerge as titular leader. But rebel weakness was offset by the limited capacities of the Sudanese army, which initially numbered only 18,500. With few roads over a vast expanse, Khartoum could control only a few towns and administrative outposts.

  The ouster of the military regime in 1965 by a popular uprising in Khartoum brought a brief moment of hope for a negotiated settlement. However, political factionalism in Khartoum, the multiplicity of southern voices, and the hydraheaded nature of Anya-nya at the time made this impossible. However, by 1972 Any-nya had a single voice in Lagu, a new military regime under Jaafar Nimeiri had accepted the fact of stalemate, and the skilled mediation of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie had fashioned a settlement. The north won the preservation of a single Sudan; the south gained full autonomy and the right to fashion its own cultural policy. The Anya-nya fighters obtained incorporation into the Sudan army, and Lagu became its deputy commander. The 1972 accord gave the south its only decade of peace since independence before the descent into renewed warfare in 1983 examined later in the chapter.

  REFORM INSURGENCIES: UGANDA AND ETHIOPIA

  During the 1980s, a fourth pattern of pre-1990 insurgency emerged in Uganda and Ethiopia. With tightly disciplined and highly ideological leadership, beginning with a mere handful of fighters, the insurgents proposed an ambitious agenda for remaking states now in crisis. Employing sophisticated methods of guerrilla organization drawn from established liberation movement doctrine, these movements actually succeeded in defeating large and well-equipped though demoralized national armies. In both reform insurgencies, initial radical ideological commitment gave way to conformity to “Washington Consensus” dictates, and an effective state reconstruction project followed military triumph.

  In Uganda, after a 1980 election widely believed to have been rigged re turned Milton Obote (ruler from 1962 to 1970) to power, several small rebel groups took up arms. The most durable was led by Yoweri Museveni, steeped in the radical ideology then dominant at the University of Dar es Salaam where he had studied and that had guided him when he served as a guerrilla with FRELIMO liberation forces.20 Developing a base area in Buganda (not his home territory), he expanded his forces with minimal external support, armed them with captured weapons, and developed local councils as a support system offering quasi-governmental structures.21 Repeated regime offensives failed to dislodge the Museveni National Resistance Army (NRA), though they did produce an estimated three hundred thousand casualties.22 As word of the brutality of the campaign seeped out, donors disengaged, and the Obote regime became increasingly isolated. A military coup took place in July 1995, but the Acholi generals who replaced Obote were demoralized and discredited; the NRA marched triumphantly into Kampala in January 1986.

  The Ethiopian insurgencies of the 1980s took form in the later 1970s but achieved critical mass after 1980. An array of armed movements took the field to resist the military Afromarxist autocracy that had supplanted the imperial dynasty in 1974. The consolidation of its power triggered a murderous power struggle culminating in the “Red Terror” (1975–77). The insurgent leaders were mostly products of the radical Ethiopian student movement, who were steeped in Marxist-Leninist discourse and imagined a society purged of its quasi-feudal structures. The most important was Meles Zenawi, who abandoned his university studies to take part in organizing a revolutionary insurgent movement in his Tigre homeland. His movement, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), was the most consequential of the regional insurgencies that also emerged among Oromo, Somali, and other groups to combat the Mengistu regime.

  In the words of its best chronicler, Gebru Tareke, “The political success of the insurgent leadership lay in its ability to bridge the gap between its own political ambitions and the material needs of the population. In other words, the ethnonationalist movement was propelled to victory by a combination of the insurgent leaders’ frustrated political and educational expectations and popular hopes for the abolition of socially repressive conditions.”23 He adds that in leading the ouster of the Mengistu regime the TPLF “relied on accurate, timely information, secrecy, patience, their intimate knowledge of a landscape that generally did not lend itself to mechanized warfare, the support of the people, their incredible hardiness and stamina and an extraordinary talent for improvisation,” all of which contributed to the TPLF’s eventual success.24

  1960–90 CIVIL CONFLICTS: COMPARATIVE REFLECTIONS

  A comparative glance at these pre-1990 conflicts yields several general observations. In my view, several common patterns sharply demarcate these struggles from most of the post-1990 civil wars. First, with the sole exception of the Chad conflagration—the only one to which the “warlord” label has been applied—the wars were all linked to a legible normative objective, recognizable not only to the participants but also to the external gaze. The call for separation, whether made in the name of ethnic self-determination or national liberation of constituted colonial partition territories, “reform insurgency” such as that proposed by the NRA in Uganda or the TPLF in Ethiopia, or pursuit of a “second independence,” as in Congo-Kinshasa, was rooted in a recognizably moral purpose; so also was the campaign by national governments to uphold the “territorial integrity” of the state.

  Second, the grotesque atrocities and human rights abuses so characteristic of contemporary internal warfare were much less in evidence. Insurgents were rooted in a local support base, and they usually were not motivated to assault the populations in their zone of operation. Combat always brings suffering and death to innocent civil populations, and these wars were no exception; the 1963–65 Congo rebellions probably saw more massacres of civilians than any other of this era,
and the Biafran struggle produced an abundance of deaths from starvation and disease, but there was much less willful assault on village populations. Rape doubtless occurred but never rose to a level seeming to suggest that it had been intentionally chosen as an instrument of warfare. Nor did one see the deliberate use of child soldiers before the 1980s, when RENAMO auditioned this technique (it was also sometimes used by Museveni’s NRA). This tactic and other frequent atrocities gave RENAMO a sulfurous reputation; in this respect the Mozambique insurgency was a precursor of the post-1990 species of rebellion.

  Third, the earlier conflicts never turned into resource wars, whereby high-value commodities—gold, diamonds, timber, coffee, coltan—became an instrument of insurgent finance. In part this reflected the availability of other kinds of funding, above all by cold war–driven calculus. The thesis that greed, not grievance, lay at the root of conflict, so widely debated in connection with contemporary civil wars, was not yet “thinkable.”25

  Fourth, at least until the 1980s most African states were not yet weakened to a point that would permit even small insurgent militias to readily operate; only in Congo-Kinshasa and Chad was this the case. Nigerian security forces, once expanded, could overcome the Biafran secession and restore central control, but they proved unable to master a much smaller challenge from Niger delta insurgents in 2003. African armies threatened regimes with coups, not with an inability to cope with small uprisings. The fragility of hinterland administrative presence was not apparent, and the swift collapse of government resistance so evident in the 1990s in Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Congo-Kinshasa was not within the realm of imagination.

  Fifth, cold war psychosis induced substantial external financial, military, and intelligence participation in several of the conflicts. In the extreme case, the scale of Soviet and Cuban military backing for the Afromarxist Angolan regime and the importance of resources furnished to its insurgent opposition, UNITA, by South Africa and the United States, seemed at moments to transform the country into a proxy battlefield for a global struggle. Deep American intelligence and other involvement in the 1960 and 1964 Congo-Kinshasa crises played no small part in the outcome.26 Other national interests besides the cold war shaped external power involvement. In addition to providing military and intelligence protection to much of the sub-Saharan Franco-African zone, France was also a sub rosa supporter of the Biafra secession and an active participant at moments in the Chad civil wars, countering a major Libyan intervention. Libya for some time sought annexation of the northern strip of Chad and in 1980–81 briefly pursued annexation of the entire country.27

  Sixth, the moral purposes of insurgents attracted some external backing. Scandinavian states saw the case for southern African liberation as providing normative grounds for nonmilitary assistance to some of the movements. Human rights and humanitarian groups in the West responded to the warnings of impending genocide in Biafra with vocal support for the Biafran cause, which constrained (though did not alter) U.S. and UK government tilt toward Nigeria.

  However, more important than the limited external backing for some up risings was the reflexive backing of the international system and global institutions for the national governments in which the insurgencies were occurring, a factor that has continued to operate strongly in the contemporary period. For most, the sanctity of state sovereignty far outweighed any sympathies a given insurgency might attract. Except in Western Sahara, the African state system resolutely backed the territorial integrity of existing countries; as unspoken corollary, this principle included the idea that legitimate authority belonged to existing regimes. A comparable disposition was the natural tendency for the world at large, reinforced by a deference to African positions.

  Lastly, another factor common to early and contemporary conflicts was the impact of the ethnic variable. Although the majority of armed liberation struggles managed to unify their constituencies, ethnicity was a visible divider in Angola and Zimbabwe, as well as in Guinea-Bissau and even Mozambique in a more subdued way. Igbo ethnic solidarity drove the Biafran secession but like all other early insurgencies did not overtly frame the struggle. Still, closely inspected, all the postindependence conflicts reveal the entanglement of ethnicity in uprisings even if identity politics was not their original cause, most explicitly in Ethiopia. The stakes are raised for identity in the context of violent conflict, posing daily ethnic security dilemmas. Ethnic consciousness provides a cognitive screen, distinguishing likely friend from possible enemy.

  CONTEMPORARY CIVIL WARS: CRUCIAL FACTORS

  The political moment around 1990 proved a crucial watershed in the character of African internal wars. Within Africa, the most visible harbinger of a new configuration of political dynamics at the time was the democracy wave examined in chapter 6. That chapter reviews a number of cases in which failures of transition (Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi) or deeply flawed elections (Kenya) led to large-scale violence. But democracy per se was not an intrinsic driver of civil conflict. Indeed, the reverse appears the case; countries with consolidated democratic transitions proved less vulnerable.

  Identifying the factors that altered the way conflicts were framed must begin with the end of the cold war and its reconfiguration of the international order. The removal of any projection of great power rivalry onto the African arena transformed the parameters for conflict participants. Soviet withdrawal from Africa was all but complete by 1989; the counter-Soviet premise of American African policy vanished soon after. Once-protected clients such as Mobutu in Congo-Kinshasa or Samuel Doe in Liberia were now on their own. Jonas Savimbi of UNITA could no longer rely on external funding or supply.

  Profound mutations in the language of conflict also occurred. Marxism-Leninism evaporated from the discourse of insurgency, as did socialist currents more broadly, erasing a key idiom for legitimating revolt. The 1989 independence of Namibia and 1991 Eritrean triumph over Ethiopia, taken together with the demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa, announced the end of an era of primacy of national liberation struggles and its cognate doctrines; only the isolated and lonely POLISARIO struggle in Western Sahara remained, a long dormant combat.

  Ideology reappeared as a conflict driver in a different form: a rise to new salience of radical Islamist currents. In both Algeria and Sudan, these became crucial political vectors in 1989. In Algeria, the emergence of FIS and its electoral force precipitated the 1992 military intervention and ensuing civil war. In Sudan, a military faction linked to the National Islamic Front (NIF, an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, later the National Congress Party [NCP]) seized power in 1989, and has imposed a more integral Islamic regime that sheltered Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda until 1996. Throughout Islamic northern Africa, Islamism in the last two decades has been a more potent ideological challenger, vigorously repressed in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. The Qadhafy Green Book and its loose amalgam of ultrapopulism and Islamism had broader reach; it was possible for sub-Saharan radicals to appropriate its populism and leave off the Islamic component.

  The range of internal war outcomes widened substantially after 1990, ranging from total enduring state collapse in Somalia to the Rwanda genocide. These two disasters suggested previously unimaginable extremes in the scope of possible catastrophe. A new zone of civil war in Darfur in Sudan in 2003 and the massacres of civil populations by Khartoum-armed irregular marauders that parts of the human rights community (and the US officially) labeled genocidal demonstrated that such tragedies could recur.

  The sheer number of substantial violent internal conflicts in the last two decades is striking. By my count, there have been eighteen such cases, listed in table 7.1, in addition to the major interstate war pitting Ethiopia against Eritrea from 1998 to 2000. A map of these conflicts shows two large zones of contiguous conflicts, many interpenetrating. The largest such region extends from the Horn of Africa in a southeastward arc to Angola and the two Congos. The other region covers West Africa, from Senegal to Ivory Coast.

  Among the ep
isodes of internal violence, twelve were either of high intensity or long duration or both (Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Liberia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda). Two (Senegal and Sudan) involved unresolved claims of separation or regional autonomy. The remaining seven conflicts were briefer and of smaller scale (Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria).

  Separatism was the motivating factor in only two cases (Senegal, southern Sudan), though regional grievances were important in several others (Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Darfur in Sudan, Uganda). Ethnicity as noted inevitably became implicated in the fabric of violent conflict once ignited and affected the composition of the militias. Although the majority of the wars did not directly involve ethnic agendas per se, Burundi and Rwanda, discussed in chapter 6, are major exceptions; in Mali and Niger, too, regional grievances (on the part of Touareg) provoked the uprisings. In Congo-Brazzaville, the urban warfare primarily involved ethnic militias, and the Casamance separatist struggle in fact mainly featured a single though fragmented ethnic group, but the objective was always couched in regional terms. Still, in the broader pattern of contemporary African conflicts ethnicity cannot serve as master explanatory factor.28 Ethnicity is salient in most African countries, yet in only a few does it operate as key precipitant of insurgent uprising.

  TABLE 7.1. African Civil Wars, 1990–2010

  Country Intensity* Protracted (over three years active conflict) Regional autonomy/separatist Neighboring state involvement** Violent conflict continues

  Algeria High Yes No No No