FEATURE: Liberia Civil War

As big powers hold back, continent works to strengthen its capacities

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Caught in the crossfire of a raging civil war, residents of Monrovia became increasingly vocal throughout July in appealing to the US and other major world powers to send peacekeepers to Liberia. To dramatize their plight, they laid out in front of the US embassy more than a dozen bodies of civilians killed by shelling.

By early August three US warships were anchored off the coast, but except for several units sent into the city to protect the US embassy, the 2,300 marines on board did not step ashore. Instead, on 4 August, the first contingent of Nigerian troops arrived in Monrovia, the advance guard of a West African peacekeeping force that eventually grew to 3,600.

The Nigerians received a rousing welcome. Some of their officers were hoisted aloft by cheering crowds. Women swept their head wraps along the road in front of the Nigerian troop carriers in a gesture of greeting, while children leaped to touch the hands of the peacekeepers. A man yelled at a US journalist, ”Where’s the American troops?”

Such scenes in Monrovia reflect the reality of peace efforts in Africa today. In league with the UN or on their own, African mediators, troops and civil society activists are playing an increasingly active and central role in trying to resolve the numerous conflicts that afflict their continent. They do so out of a growing sense of commitment that Africans must take the lead in resolving their own problems. At the annual summit meeting of the African Union (AU) in Maputo, Mozambique, in early July, Africa’s heads of state expressed their ”determination to address the scourge of conflicts in Africa in a collective, comprehensive and decisive manner,” through the AU.

”Africa is coming of age in handling its own affairs,” comments Prof. Maria Nzomo, head of the University of Nairobi’s Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies. ”There’s a new sense that Africa ought to be refereeing its own disputes.”

Yet Africans also are shouldering more of the burden through sheer necessity. The permanent members of the UN Security Council — which have the armies, equipment and financial resources to mount large-scale peacekeeping operations — appear very reluctant to become directly embroiled in African conflicts. Several thousand European and US troops are currently engaged in peace missions in Africa, but for the most part under their own ad hoc arrangements and for very specific assignments, not as part of comprehensive UN peacekeeping operations.

Meanwhile, the African Union and African sub-regional organizations ”can play a variety of important roles” in African peacekeeping, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan last year told representatives of the South Africa-based civil society group, the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD). ”They can help ensure that regional peace efforts are closely integrated with the approach of a [UN] peace operation,” he said. They can also identify personnel for such operations and develop long-term peace-building strategies to stabilize African countries emerging from conflicts. ”And, of course, they can build their own peacekeeping capacities.”

However, with severely limited budgets and insufficient training, equipment and transport, Africa cannot quickly develop such capabilities on its own. As ACCORD Executive Director Vasu Gounden points out, ”there is a special need for strategic partnerships to develop between Africa and the international community.” In peace and security, as in economic development and other spheres, he notes, this notion of partnership lies at the heart of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the continental strategy promoted by African leaders (see box 1, below).

’Leave peacekeeping to others’

Since the early 1990s, Africa has been swept by a proliferation of armed conflicts, as many of the continent’s established military and one-party regimes have been undercut by the end of the Cold War, the growth of pro-democracy movements and an eruption of ethnic and other social tensions. From Somalia and Rwanda to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Burundi, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), hundreds of thousands have been killed outright and millions more have succumbed to war-related epidemics and starvation. All but a fraction of the victims have been civilian.

”Traditional” peacekeeping missions were not well suited to dealing with these kinds of conflicts, since they were generally set up to monitor peace agreements between established armies holding separate territories. Only the 1998-2000 border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea matched that model. Instead, most of Africa’s recent conflicts have been civil wars or insurgencies, with multiple armed factions and grievances rooted in poverty and inequality. Even when peace accords have been painstakingly negotiated, not all political and military leaders have been able to fully control their followers. In some countries, local warlords who profited from the chaos of war saw little immediate advantage in laying down their arms.

The difficulties confronting international efforts in Africa were dramatically demonstrated by the losses suffered by US forces in Somalia in 1993, prompting that country’s unilateral withdrawal. This seriously weakened the UN peacekeeping mission, which ultimately ended without restoring national political order. The ”Somalia effect” — combined with the preoccupation of the US and other NATO powers with events in the Middle East and the Balkans — led to a marked decline in big-power participation in UN peacekeeping missions generally, but especially in Africa. When the genocide in Rwanda erupted in 1994, the small UN mission already there was far too weak to do anything to stop it.

At the start of 1991, eight of the top ten contributors to UN peacekeeping missions were developed countries. By the beginning of August 2003, one transitional country (Ukraine) was in the top ten. All the rest were from the developing world, including four African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa). In the five UN peacekeeping missions then under way in Africa, troops, police and military observers from the Security Council’s five permanent members comprised only 2 per cent of the total personnel.

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The US government in recent years has explicitly redefined its global military role in a way that minimizes any direct peacekeeping responsibility. Secretary of State Colin Powell has told the US Congress that ”it is often best to use American GIs for the heavy lifting of combat and leave the peacekeeping to others.”

Africa’s major former colonial powers have remained somewhat more active in the continent, notes Mr. Jackie Cilliers, executive director of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. However, they ”now intervene on their own terms, for limited duration, or where their intervention is uncontroversial, cheap and largely symbolic.”

As developed countries have pulled back from multilateral operations, African participation in UN peacekeeping has grown. Up to 1988, only a dozen African countries had ever contributed troops or police to UN missions. Since then, the total number that has provided peacekeepers to at least one UN mission has tripled.

At the beginning of September, 24 African states had nearly 10,000 nationals serving under the UN flag. They constituted 26 per cent of all UN peacekeepers worldwide. But nine-tenths of them were posted in Africa, where they made up 35 per cent of the five UN peacekeeping operations then under way in the continent (a sixth was subsequently established in Liberia). In the DRC, African troops constituted nearly half of the total.

A top priority for AU

As this participation in UN peacekeeping reflects, African leaders place a high value on such internationally authorized multilateral missions. They not only bring financial, material and logistical support, but also the political credibility of the UN flag. In African conflicts where neighbouring countries support or favour one side or another, the UN sometimes is perceived as more nonpartisan and therefore better able to bring the belligerents together.

At the same time, African leaders are emphasizing the need to build up the continent’s own peace capacities. These include not only the ability to mount peacekeeping missions, but also to mediate political disputes before they erupt into war, broker peace talks in ongoing conflicts and better coordinate support for countries just emerging from war.

”Conflict resolution,” South African President Thabo Mbeki told the July summit, ”is a top priority for the [African] Union. As a consequence, conflicts that have been raging for many years are being tackled with increased determination and many African countries are committing their own resources to conflict prevention, management and resolution.”

This was not always so. In the 1970s and 1980s, the AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), engaged in several mediation efforts and even a couple of military missions (Chad and Zaire). But for the most part the OAU Charter’s emphasis on national sovereignty and its prohibition against African states’ interference in the internal affairs of other member states made such initiatives quite difficult. The non-interference clause, in particular, was ”invoked as an excuse for inaction,” comments Prof. Severine Rugumamu, of the organization’s Conflict Management Centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

By the early 1990s, as more conflicts erupted across the continent, such notions began to change. According to Mr. Rugumamu, the idea of national sovereignty was gradually redefined. To some extent, it became less categorical by considering massive human rights violations and population displacements resulting from domestic conflicts as regional security threats. Simultaneously, the concept of ”security” was broadened to include not just state security but also human security, a shift that ”tends to augur well for multinational interventions conducted to arrest anarchy, restore order and protect innocent civilians.”

In 1993, the OAU set up its Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution. It included a Central Organ capable of making decisions faster than most other OAU institutions, and it had a separate fund of about $40 mn (about two-thirds provided by donor countries) to quickly finance mediation and observer missions. It sent emissaries to try to mediate disputes in a number of African countries and mounted five small military observer missions (Rwanda, Burundi, Comoros, DRC and the Ethiopia-Eritrea border), most lasting two-to-three years. The OAU’s efforts were particularly fruitful in the Ethiopia-Eritrea war, and paved the way for the UN peacekeeping mission established in 2000.

With the transformation of the OAU into the AU, conflict resolution and security have taken on an even higher priority. The AU’s Constitutive Act explicitly gives the organization the authority to ”intervene in cases of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” Among the AU’s new institutions will be a 15-member Peace and Security Council, which President Mbeki has called ”a collective security and early-warning arrangement to facilitate timely and efficient responses to conflicts and crisis situations in Africa.”

Meanwhile, the AU’s development strategy, NEPAD, has spurred the establishment of a new African Peer Review Mechanism. It is designed to promote good governance within African countries, seen as one of the best ways to prevent domestic political conflicts from leading to coups, insurgency or civil war.

Spotlight on Burundi

One of the first tests of the commitment of the AU — and of Africa’s external partners — will be in Burundi. The AU’s most recent undertaking builds on the OAU’s earlier experience there, including intensive mediation efforts by two former African presidents, the late Mr. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Mr. Nelson Mandela of South Africa, which eventually yielded a ceasefire agreement between the government and several major rebel groups, although some fighting has continued. In January 2003, the AU authorized the dispatch of a small military observer mission to monitor the ceasefire.

A month later, an extraordinary AU summit decided to approve a larger peacekeeping mission, the African Mission in Burundi (AMIB). By August, about a third of the authorized force of 3,500 troops had been deployed to Burundi, largely from South Africa. Because of financial constraints, the dispatch of the remaining troops from Ethiopia and Mozambique was delayed.

”It would be a tragedy,” Mozambique’s UN Ambassador Filipe Chidumo informed the Security Council, ”if the international community were to miss this window of opportunity….” If the AU mission’s financial and logistical constraints are not addressed, he warned, that shortfall would ”have the potential to undermine both the effectiveness of the mission and the prospects for achieving lasting peace in Burundi.”

By early September, with financial support from South Africa, the US, UK and France, Mozambique finally was able to send a contingent of nearly 230 troops. Noting Mozambique’s own efforts to consolidate peace after the end of a long civil war in the early 1990s, President Joaquim Chissano said, ”Conflicts, particularly violent conflicts between and within states in other parts of Africa, and in the world in general, are also a danger to our peace and tranquillity. Helping other peoples keep and maintain peace is also a way of defending our own peace.”

ECOWAS transformed

So far, most African-led peace missions have been spearheaded not by the OAU/AU, but by one of the continent’s several sub-regional organizations. Since some of Africa’s most intractable wars spill across the borders of neighbouring countries — as in the Great Lakes region or the Mano River countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — this kind of engagement is particularly appropriate for dealing with the conflicts on a regional level.

One of the first such efforts was a Nigerian-led military mission to Liberia at the start of that country’s civil war in 1990. Authorized by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the force remained for six years, but had great difficulty containing the conflict, which displaced more than half the country’s population. With support from the UN, ECOWAS eventually promoted a peace plan that led to elections in 1997, won by the strongest of the warlords, Mr. Charles Taylor.

The ad hoc character of that intervention, combined with some missteps by the ECOWAS forces, spurred the organization to systematize and strengthen its overall approach. In 1993, ECOWAS revised its founding treaty to shift from a virtually exclusive focus on economic integration to the inclusion of peace and security issues. At the end of the decade, ECOWAS went a step further to create a new Mediation and Security Council, with the authority to authorize military deployment by a two-thirds vote. Beyond peacekeeping, the regional group also has devoted considerable attention to related security issues, such as combating the recruitment of child soldiers and the proliferation of illegal small arms.

As these changes were under way, ECOWAS dispatched a new peacekeeping force to Sierra Leone. That country was afflicted by a brutal insurgency by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), supported by Mr. Taylor in neighbouring Liberia, and in 1997 suffered a military coup. The West Africa force, which arrived that year, pressed the military junta for the restoration of the elected government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. When the junta refused, the ECOWAS troops overthrew it and reinstated the ousted president in March 1998.

The following year, the Security Council established the UN Mission to Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). Most West African contingents were eventually absorbed into UNAMSIL, and the ECOWAS mandate ended in 2000. By early 2002 the UN mission succeeded in essentially ending the war: the disarmament of tens of thousands of former fighters, new elections (again won by Mr. Kabbah) and the first steps towards post-war recovery.

ECOWAS mounted a third peacekeeping force in 1998-99, following a brief civil war in Guinea-Bissau. Then after the outbreak of war in Côte d’Ivoire in September 2002 it authorized a mission there, by June 2003 reaching more than 1,300 troops. Working in conjunction with a small UN political and military liaison mission and a larger French force, this ECOWAS operation is helping to monitor compliance with a peace agreement between the Ivorian government and rebel forces.

’Fast track’

And now ECOWAS is simultaneously fielding a force in Liberia. The intervention responded to a sharp deterioration in the situation in July, as rebels converged on the capital prior to Mr. Taylor’s resignation and departure from the country the following month. Rather than waiting to outfit and transport fresh ECOWAS units, Nigeria agreed to re-route to Monrovia a national contingent that was set to return home from Sierra Leone. This placed some peacekeepers on the ground at a critical time, as the larger West African force was still being assembled.

The relatively quick action in Liberia reflects Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s vision of a ”two-track policy” for ECOWAS. When a few member states are ready, he says, they should act right away. Other countries that require more time will move later. ”Nigeria intends to join the fast track.” Given the size and experience of the Nigerian armed forces and the government’s ability to devote relatively significant funding to regional conflict resolution initiatives, this commitment is an important asset for ECOWAS as a whole.

Insufficient resources remain a problem for the group, however. In August, Mr. Annan alerted the Security Council that the ECOWAS force in Côte d’Ivoire was facing ”financial difficulties” that could potentially hamper its efforts to oversee ex-combatants’ disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. He urged the international community to assist ECOWAS ”on an urgent basis.”

From Bangui to Maseru

Other regional organizations also have been taking initiatives in conflict resolution and peacekeeping. There currently are around 380 troops from Gabon, Republic of Congo and Chad in the Central African Republic, under the auspices of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central African States (CEMAC). Some contingents arrived in November 2002, as the government of President Ange-Félix Patassé was facing armed opposition from his former army commander, General François Bozizé. The CEMAC troops, however, were too few to prevent General Bozizé from seizing power in March 2003. In the chaotic situation now facing the country, its mandate has been limited to controlling looting and other violence around the capital, Bangui.

In East Africa, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) underwent a transformation similar to that of ECOWAS. Originally devoted almost entirely to economic development and combating drought, the seven-country group became increasingly involved in conflict resolution in the early 1990s.

In Sudan, IGAD has taken the lead in mediating between the government and rebel forces in the south. Although under way for more than a decade, these efforts have made greater progress since late 2002, with the opening of direct talks between the protagonists. In late September, the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed a security agreement that could help pave the way towards an overall political settlement.

IGAD also has been busy trying to broker talks among the various factions in Somalia, which still lacks an authoritative, nationally recognized government in Mogadishu. An IGAD envoy, Mr. Bethuel Kiplagat of Kenya, is working with the UN and others to broaden participation by various Somali groups in a new round of reconciliation talks currently taking place in Mbagathi, Kenya.

In 1998, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) authorized troops from South Africa and Botswana to restore order in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. This followed a highly contested election, an upsurge of popular protests and a coup attempt. Although scores of lives were lost, including a dozen South African soldiers, the situation was soon contained, and eventually new elections were held in May 2002.

The complex war in the DRC — itself a member of SADC — has drawn in various neighbouring countries, exposing political divisions within the regional organization over how to react. Three countries (Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe) initially sent military forces to support the government in Kinshasa, and received formal SADC approval after their troops were already there (those forces have since been withdrawn).

Other SADC members judged that the best response was to mediate among the government, the rebels and the neighbouring countries (Rwanda and Uganda) supporting the rebels. Retired Botswana President Sir Ketumile Masire has functioned as the main mediator, with Zambia and South Africa also playing important roles. In April 2003, virtually all parties to the conflict came to peace talks in Sun City, South Africa, and concluded an agreement that led to a coalition transitional government.

South African role

By far, South Africa is the biggest economic and military power within SADC, and its approach to conflict resolution will heavily influence the broader regional group. But South Africa is a relatively recent participant in African peacekeeping efforts. Before the end of apartheid and the first democratic election in 1994, the country was itself a major instigator of wars — in Angola, Mozambique and other neighbouring countries. After the institution of majority rule, the new government, preoccupied with carrying out sweeping domestic reform, was reluctant to commit itself to costly and time-consuming foreign entanglements.

By the late 1990s, however, South African leaders began to recognize the need to engage more actively in conflict resolution elsewhere in Africa. As Mr. Jackie Selebi, a former director in the Department of Foreign Affairs, put it, ”We cannot talk of an African renaissance, or even achieve a better life for people in South Africa, if around us countries are in conflict. . . . If Africa disintegrates, there will be no South Africa.”

In 2001, South Africa committed its first 100 or so military officers to the DRC to serve as part of the UN peacekeeping mission. It currently has 1,400 troops there, in addition to the more than 1,000 South African troops in Burundi under the auspices of the AU.

But there are limits to South Africa’s capacities. Its military was restructured relatively recently, in the 1990s, and not very many units have extensive peacekeeping training. Moreover, as part of South Africa’s domestic reforms, the defence budget has been drastically reduced, so that it now stands at only around 1.5 per cent of gross national product, compared with 4 per cent in 1990.

Multiple partners

Larger African countries such as Nigeria and South Africa are able to mount modest peacekeeping activities in a few countries, but not the kind of sustained, large-scale operations required by the continent’s more complex conflicts and humanitarian emergencies. For that, Africa needs to be able to draw on the financial resources, equipment, logistical support — and troops — of its external partners.

Ideally, as African leaders often insist, this should come under the auspices of a UN peacekeeping mission. The ECOWAS force in Liberia, for example, was able to arrive quickly and managed to help restore a semblance of order to Monrovia. But to extend that security throughout the country and to help implement the extensive provisions of the Liberian peace agreement, a larger and more robust UN mission is being put together (see box 2, below). The West African troops already in Liberia will then ”be blue helmeted and become UN peacekeepers,” the Secretary-General’s special representative for Liberia, Mr. Jacques Klein, commented in Monrovia on 5 September.

As in Sierra Leone and the DRC, many of the non-African troops in the Liberia peacekeeping mission will most likely come from other parts of the developing world. But even though the major powers are less willing than a decade ago to commit large numbers of troops to UN operations, there still are possibilities for limited, specific interventions in some countries, alongside the UN or an African force. Africa has seen several examples of this in recent years:

The UK’s dispatch of more than 1,000 troops to Sierra Leone in 2000.
France’s ”Operation Licorne,” involving 4,000 troops in Côte d’Ivoire.

A French-led multinational European force of 1,200 troops in the city of Bunia in the DRC.

The posting of 2,300 US marines off the Liberian coast during August-September 2003.

In some cases, such forces played crucial military roles. The British contingent in Sierra Leone, for example, held off rebel forces at a critical time while the UN peacekeeping mission was still building up its strength. The European force in Bunia helped reduce ethnic fighting around that town before formally handing authority back to the UN’s broader DRC peacekeeping mission on 1 September. Even when such forces do not directly confront belligerents, their very presence has given greater credibility to other peacekeeping forces and encouraged the various sides to negotiate more seriously.

According to Mr. Alex de Waal, director of Justice Africa, a London-based non-governmental organization active in human rights and peace issues, these kinds of partnerships represent the emergence of a form of pragmatic ”ad hoc multilateralism” in Africa. They involve the US, European powers, UN and African peacekeepers, ”each playing different but complementary roles.”

Meanwhile, the US, France, UK and other countries are also providing peacekeeping training to dozens of African armies, to improve their skills and coordination for either UN or African-led missions. The industrialized countries’ Group of Eight agreed at their June summit meeting in Evian, France, to help finance the creation, training and equipping of African standby brigades by 2010, under the direction of the AU and African regional organizations.

To some extent, such efforts respond to the concerns expressed by African leaders at the AU summit in Maputo. They acknowledged that the ”lack of resources to implement African initiatives” means that efforts to resolve conflicts on the continent will require more than African determination and resolve. They also will need ”the full support of the wider international community.”