B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  But armed factions continue to operate in the eastern borderlands. The Congolese army, cobbled together in good part from insurgent factions, has limited capacities and discipline. The costly international venture in postconflict state-building has had only limited therapeutic effect.82 The human toll, widely estimated at six million, the entrenchment of exploitative smuggling rackets plundering the resources of the eastern borderland, and the intractable obstacles to restoration of effective governance in the affected areas all bear witness to the terrible costs of the Congo wars.

  Uganda

  The Ugandan insurgency of the LRA that began soon after Museveni’s NRA seized power in 1986 is still ongoing, as residual elements continue to sow mayhem in neighboring countries. Its Ugandan operations, as well as attempts at suppression by the Ugandan army, largely took place in Acholiland in the northern region. For two decades, the afflicted region experienced atrocityladen military operations and massive population displacement.83

  The predisposing conditions for the Acholi war originate in the singular dynamic of regime displacement in Uganda and in the ethnic strategies employed in army recruitment. The Museveni march into Kampala in 1986 marked the second time in seven years that armies from the periphery had ousted incumbent rulers; the Tanzanian army with allied Ugandan exile fighters chased Idi Amin from the presidential place in 1979. A number of former Amin and Obote soldiers reformed into rebel militias; at one point in its early years, Museveni’s Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) was fighting twenty-seven different armed factions.84 Obote favored northerners from Acholiland and his neighboring Lango homeland for recruitment; most of the soldiers involved in the murderous campaign against the Museveni insurgent bastion in Buganda in 1982–83 were Acholi. As the Museveni regime moved to consolidate its power in 1986, the new-formed UPDF was largely recruited in the south. Acholiland had ample reason to fear vengeance. Their woes multiplied when neighboring pastoral warriors from Karamoja, heavily armed with weapons looted from an abandoned armory, engaged in devastating cattle raids that decimated Acholi herds.85

  In this climate of fear and uncertainty, a prophetess, Alice Auna Lakwena, formed the Holy Spirit Movement, offering a mystical message combining Christianity with supernatural elements. Her appearance as a spirit medium gave resonance to her call to save Acholiland by a march on Kampala to overthrow Museveni. The ragtag army that answered her call advanced to within fifty miles of Kampala before being defeated at the hands of the UPDF and disintegrating.

  The politico-spiritual energies Lakwena had unleashed found a new incarnation in another spirit-possessed leader in 1987, Joseph Kony, a bizarre, enigmatic, and brutal figure who has constantly eluded contact with outsiders. His movement, soon known as the LRA, was not a direct successor to the Lakwena militia, but the LRA adopted her spiritual discourse and ritual initiation and cleansing ceremony. Kony offered a vague agenda, based on the Ten Commandments, promising a new Acholi people and a society cleansed of evil.86

  Though the LRA purported to speak for the ravaged Acholi population, in fact its daily operations soon deeply antagonized the great majority. The forcible recruitment the Lakwena movement had used on a limited scale became intensified, and spread to the systematic kidnapping of children to serve as soldiers or sex slaves. By some estimates, the LRA had abducted as many as twelve thousand boys and girls by 1997; Heiki Behrend suggests that a child had been stolen from almost every extended family.87 The kidnapped children were often compelled to commit atrocities on their families or communities as a means of enforcing their severance from their home society. Violence exacted on the village population multiplied, as the LRA looted food supplies and other goods.

  In turn, the army response compounded the distress. Unable to protect rural populations and seeking to deny LRA access to supply, by the early 1990s the Museveni regime had compelled much of the population to regroup in displaced persons camps; at the peak, 1.8 million were confined to these settings. Some were able to return by day to their fields, but many were cut off from their homes and livelihoods. Although the camps were provided survival rations by the government and humanitarian relief organizations, the conditions were deplorable.

  Early on, the LRA insurgency got caught up in a proxy war between Sudan and Uganda. Museveni offered supplies to the SPLA, while Khartoum riposted with sanctuary and arms flow to the LRA. In 1999, Sudan and Uganda agreed to cease and desist the proxy war, an accord only partly implemented. In 2002, Khartoum authorized the Uganda army to operate in southern Sudan in pursuit of the LRA. In 2005, the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Accord facilitated joint operations by the SPLA and UPDF. By this time, the LRA had been driven out of Uganda and had retreated to remote redoubts in ungoverned areas of Sudan, Central African Republic, and northeast Congo-Kinshasa.

  Sporadic efforts to mediate a settlement never bore fruit. The reclusive Kony was a difficult negotiating partner, mostly insisting on discussing through intermediaries. A settlement briefly appeared possible in 2006, when distinguished African mediators appeared to have struck a deal with LRA negotiators, mostly from the diaspora. Kony, however, failed to appear for the signing ceremony. His 2004 indictment by the ICC for crimes against humanity is cited by some as one impediment to concluding a settlement.

  The LRA is no longer a threat in Acholiland, and by 2009 all but 190,000 of the 1.8 million once interned had left the camps and resumed rural lives. But the long war in the north devastated and impoverished Acholiland and a brooding resentment toward the Museveni regime remains. Most of the LRA commanders have been killed, and only a few hundred fighters remain, still enough to terrorize the remote areas where they shelter in the neighboring states of Congo-Kinshasa, Central African Republic, and Sudan.

  Angola

  The Angolan war reignited in 1992. One measure of the impact of the war was the place of scrap metal among top exports by the 1990s, a product derived from destroyed military vehicles and armament. By the 1990s, the original ideological content of the war had long vanished; the combat pitted the “totalitarian savagery” of insurgent leader Jonas Savimbi against the “totalitarian presidentialism” of Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos. In the summation of David Birmingham, the war was a “depraved conflict between a corrupt government mesmerized by an inhuman opposition obsessed by power.”88 UNITA could no longer count on external support, but Savimbi quickly gained control of key diamond mines, whose revenues sustained large-scale military operations for a decade.

  The final decisive blow came in 2002 when the Santos regime succeeded in identifying Savimbi’s location and mounted a commando raid to assassinate him. Savimbi’s rule over UNITA had become increasingly tyrannical, punctuated by executions of close collaborators suspected of disloyalty. The diamond mines he controlled were worked by what amounted to forced labor, and the cumulative impact of his brutalities toward villagers in the regions under his control eroded his former support. Thus the sudden removal of Savimbi from the equation brought the war to an abrupt halt. Other UNITA leaders re turned to Luanda, where they were permitted to find mercantile niches.

  Though the return of peace was universally welcomed, the cost to the country of three decades of war was immense. Angola’s large army, hardened by many years of combat and Soviet-Cuban nurture, is a strong institution, but the texture of governance overall has deteriorated. Long vanished are the high-minded ideals of Afromarxism; since the 1990s, an authoritarian regime fueled by the oil wealth that entered the system from the top has entrenched itself in its place, a regime that bears some resemblance to the Mobutu mode of rule but with much more money. Rural areas benefit little from the oil revenues. The ruling entourage has accumulated vast wealth, much of it in Brazil or elsewhere overseas. The IMF tried to compel Angola to account for several billion dollars of missing oil revenues in the 1990s, but the scale of petroleum receipts permits the regime to ignore disciplinary pressures from the international community.

  OTHER LESS INTENSIVE WARS


  Of the remaining seven civil wars not otherwise summarized, all were of limited intensity and consisted of episodic clashes between rebel militias and government forces. Central African Republic was an exceptionally weak state with a slender presence in the northern areas where rebel forces carved out pockets of autonomy. In the northern reaches of Mali and Niger, Tuareg unrest was a recurrent challenge, flaring in the 1990s into open rebellion, with sporadic skirmishing since that time, revolving around grievances related to their marginal status in the national political realm, a challenge that became far more serious at the end of 2011 with the collapse of the Qadhafy regime and the influx of former Tuareg soldiers from the Libyan army and a large flow of weaponry. In Mali a weak and divided army was unable to contain a 2012 revolt by a pair of rival rebel movements, one reviving Tuareg separatist demands and a more extreme Al Qaeda linked Islamist force. An ill-considered military coup in response overturned a seemingly consolidated democratic order, with unforeseeable consequences. In Ivory Coast, the internal battles between 2002 and 2006 involved regional factions of the military; northern troops attempted to seize power in Abidjan by ousting President Laurent Gbagbo and then retreated to create an autonomous bastion in their region. French forces kept the two sides apart, and a UN peacekeeping mission endeavored to hold the ring while interminable negotiations took place for holding national elections that would provide a mechanism for ending the conflict. Burkina Faso mediation produced a compromise interim regime; the long-awaited election was delayed until 2010 by arguments over voter registration and eligibility. Credible elections did take place in November 2010, but Gbagbo refused to admit his clear electoral defeat. Forces aligned with the electoral victor, Alassane Ouattara, spearheaded by French and UN forces, finally ousted and arrested Gbagbo in April 2011, with AU and widespread international backing.

  Congo-Brazzaville and Nigeria were both essentially petro states, oil providing the great majority of state revenue. In Congo, oil revenues nourished the growth of a remarkably overdeveloped state whose population and activity was concentrated in the capital. The civil service roster swelled from thirty-six hundred at independence to eighty-five thousand at the outbreak of civil war; Congo was the sole instance in which the civil strife was concentrated in the capital and essentially amounted to an urban power struggle pitting three ethno-regional youth militias in open combat, especially in 1993–94 and 1997. Angolan military intervention in 1997 in support of one faction, led by Denis Sassou-Nguesso, was decisive; he still held power in 2010.

  In Nigeria, a simmering anger in the Niger delta over the environmental destruction of the region by oil exploitation and the meager benefits to its population produced deepening unrest and violence by the 1990s and militia uprisings by 2004. The armed groups, mostly ethnic, acquired substantial weaponry from “bunkered” (that is, stolen) oil; the disaffection of most of the local population and corruption of the military and government made elimination of the armed gangs difficult. Negotiated settlements, most recently in 2009, foundered on the multiplicity of groups and mutual distrust.

  The Casamance insurgency in southern Senegal, separated from most of the country by the Gambia enclave, is rooted in a long-standing sense of marginality and exclusion on the part of the Diola and some other related small groups from the national community. What Diop and Diouf call the Islamo-Wolof sociocultural integrative model operative elsewhere does not extend to Casamance.89 The Mouvement des forces démocratiques de Casamance (MFDC) launched an independence struggle in 1982. When the Senegal army moved in, elements of the MFDC formed guerrilla bands in the forested countryside. Although the disciplined and effective army easily contained the movement, eradicating its forest bases proved difficult and costly. The difficulties were compounded by the spillover of Diola populations into neighboring Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, which offered sanctuary and supply opportunities.90

  The fissiparous nature of Diola society, which had long blocked incorporation of the region into the national patronage networks, made resolution of the insurgency problematic.91 A peace accord granting autonomy was reached with the MFDC in 1991, but only the leadership accepted the settlement. Since then, there has been a regular pattern of accords irrigated with financial rewards to MFDC leaders, followed by further splintering and renewed small-scale violence. However, with the independence claim mostly abandoned, the peripheral nature of the insurgency and the capacity of the well-ordered Senegalese state to isolate and contain rebel factions meant that the Casamance rebellion had little effect on the country as a whole. By 2010, only one small faction with a few hundred fighters continued the independence struggle.

  CONTEMPORARY CIVIL WARS IN PERSPECTIVE

  A number of overall observations arise from this comparative excursion. The first striking point is the contrast between the number of internal wars and the infrequent outbreak of interstate combat. Setting aside the brief skirmishing over disputed borders that took place pitting Algeria against Morocco and then Somalia against Ethiopia in 1963 and 1964, the only major interstate battles involved (again) Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977–78 and Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1998 to 2000. Somalia since independence has always laid claim to Somali-populated areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti; in 1977, spotting a moment of Ethiopian weakness, the huge Somali army invaded but was driven back by large Soviet and Cuban reinforcements in supply and troops. This humiliating defeat began a downward spiral for the Barre regime in Somalia, leading to the 1991 collapse; the failed invasion is likely the final requiem for the Somali irredentist project. The Ethiopian-Eritrean war was also fought by very large armies, over small areas of disputed territory; its bitterness was a carryover from the Eritrean liberation war. Thus interstate wars have been relatively rare, have occurred within a single theater, and have been of limited duration compared to the decades of combat in some internal wars.

  The second is the diversity of the contemporary conflicts, ranging from the large-scale warfare involving heavy weapons in Angola in the 1990s to the low-intensity regional violence in Senegal and the Niger delta. A number of common patterns may be identified, but few if any apply to the entire universe of contemporary conflict.92 Some of the aspects most firmly implanted in the international imagery—mass rape, astonishing levels of brutality, exploitation of child soldiers, blood diamonds—applied to a number but not all the wars. Ethnicity or religion—passe-partout explanations for African conflicts—were central only in a few cases.

  A factor common to nearly all cases was the weakening of the fabric of stateness, which rendered central institutions incapable of coping with uprisings that were initially of small size. The predatory turn of many states by the 1980s, the spread of neopatrimonial modes of power management, and the associated high levels of corruption delegitimated governments and undermined bureaucratic institutions. Thus an undercurrent of grievance was in variably present; the state as experienced daily by much of the population bore little resemblance to the legal-rational national entity described in constitutional texts.93 Rebelling against a fragmented and weakened state tended to produce movements that mirrored these characteristics, as in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo-Kinshasa.94

  But widespread grievance alone did not make recruitment of followings easy; elementary prudence, mistrust of rebel motives, fear of violence all cautioned reticence. Major urban centers, especially capital cities, tended to remain under closer government control. In rural areas, peasants in most areas had secure access to land and the minimal subsistence it provided; they were especially resistant to recruitment by rebel militias from outside their area.95 But generalized disappointment if not disaffection toward state institutions made insurgency possible. Their often weak hold on the rural periphery made rebellion thinkable.

  In particular, the disaffection of a large fraction of the youth is a major factor.96 The 1950s and 1960s were an era of rising hopes for social ascension, as the multiplication of schools and a momentum of strong economic expansion provided the young genera
tions, especially the educated, ample opportunity. By the end of the 1970s, states had reached their outer limits of public sector expansion and began to restrict new recruitment; the onset of economic crisis shriveled employment possibilities. The rapid growth of cities during this period created a large pool of unemployed youths surviving in the informal economy, the urban “lumpens” highlighted by Jimmy Kandeh and Ibrahim Abdullah as prime militia recruits in Sierra Leone and elsewhere and the thugs widely utilized by political parties in electoral competition.97 But discontents over repressive state behavior, the corrupt enrichment of the political elite, and the social closure youth faced also affected young generations in rural areas.

  The momentum of population expansion in several countries (especially Rwanda and Burundi), along with environmental changes, intensified tensions over livelihoods. These tensions were sometimes further complicated by conflicting needs of herders and cultivators (especially in Sudan and eastern Congo-Kinshasa but also in Mali and Niger) and poisoned by doctrines of indigeneity (Ivory Coast, Senegal, Congo-Kinshasa). Under such doctrines, immigrant agriculturalists or even internal migrants had acquired land rights in a setting of growing scarcity. Although ethnicity per se was infrequently determinant, in a few instances communal solidarities fed into the equation of conflict (especially in Rwanda and Burundi but also in Casamance, Niger delta, Niger, Mali, Sudan, and both Congos, and locally in Sierra Leone and Liberia). Religious ideology was at issue in Algeria, Sudan, and Somalia.