Is Letting
Them Fight It Out in
Angola the Only Choice?
By JONATHAN
POWER
Jan. 27th, 1999
LONDON - The UN has now decided to give up on
peace-keeping in Angola, the site of Africa's second
longest-running civil war in a continent where it's
difficult to measure the worst. It certainly proves what
Clausewitz wrote, that everything in war is simple, but the
simplest thing is difficult. An Angolan peace was arbitrated
as long ago as 1991. It couldn't have been more
straightforward--giving both sides a share in running the
country. Yet human malevolence and personal greed is now so
out of control that the antagonists don't want peace. They
want the spoils of war, in this case diamonds and oil, and
they want it all. Again, to paraphrase Clausewitz, war is
not just an act of senseless passion. Belligerents often
calculate the relative costs of continuing the conflict
versus reaching some kind of compromise agreement.
We know very little about how to make peace. Compared
with the study of war and the machinery of war, both
practitioners and scholars have given it scant attention.
But what we do know can be discouraging. In about 50% of
cases negociated settlements have led to renewed war within
five years. Most civil wars in history have ended with the
outright victory of one side or another, and the most stable
peace settlements in civil war have been achieved by
military victory, rather than by negociation.
Perhaps the UN is right to pull out of Angola. Could it
be that it's a wise world world that folds its arms and lets
the war run its course? After all this is what the Security
Council effectively did when the Hutus massacred the Tutsis
in Rwanda and the Tutsis took their revenge by chasing the
Hutus into Zaire and toppling the government that gave them
succor; or when the Eritreans and Tigrayans felled a
murderous dictatorship in Ethiopia; and when Yoweri
Museveni's warriors drove out the equally evil dictatorship
in Uganda. Perhaps, gruesome though the carnage of war was,
those countries are now more stable than if the UN had
entered the ring and tried to separate the contestants. Yet,
apart from the uncertain morality of the hands-off
approach--and even President Bill Clinton has publically
apologised for America's stance during Rwanda's
pogrom--there are rarely such quick victories. More usually
war is a long drawn out affair in which atrocities, economic
turmoil and environmental degredation are the fuel for even
more rabid hatreds and more no-holds-barred fighting. As in
Bosnia, peace after negociation may be only partial (and it
is easy to argue the Dayton Agreement has settled nothing),
but it does create some space for wiser counsels to be heard
and non-militaristic modes of behaviour to see the light of
day.
If peace-making is an infant industry, then that is all
the more reason to try and fashion some new tools. While
outsiders may have little leverage on the central elements
of irrationality, contested values and identities that
propel the conflict, they can work at the margins to build
incentives that will dampen down the violence. In this way
it is possible to influence the calculations of belligerents
on the pluses of a negociated settlement.
Cambodia has been Asia's most intractable civil war, even
worse than Angola in many respects. The "killing fields" of
the Khmer Rouge were more systematic and more total than
anything Angola has experienced. Yet, while the UN was
marginalised in Cambodia, after successfully negociating
peace and organising elections, when Hun Sen destroyed
democracy with his coup, the international community stayed
engaged. It did not buy the argument that Hun Sen's victory
was a quick road to stability. It has continued to act as if
it believes peace is more than an absence of war. Hun Sen,
desperate for foreign aid and investment, has gradually been
wooed to compromise, creating more political room for his
rivals. And he has apparently given the green light to the
UN team now about to report on the workability of a war
crimes tribunal to bring to justice those who led the Khmer
Rouge-led genocide. The UN human rights team, headed by
Thomas Hammarberg, the former secretary-general of Amnesty
International, has given witness not just to personal
bravery but to the virtue of perseverence.
We assume too blithely that wars happen despite the
intentions of rational people. In truth they happen often
BECAUSE of the intents of rational people. War, to
paraphrase Clausewitz one last time, has increasingly become
the continuation of economics by other means. It is not, as
we outsiders see it, a breakdown of the system. It is a way
of creating an alternative system of profit and power.
It is because the framers of the Oslo accords understood
this they were able to successfully bring Yassir Arafat
along. He and his cabal of officials who run the Palestinian
Authority have gained tangible economic and financial
benefits from peace.
Economic incentives probably can't be used in Angola,
where diamonds and oil are at hand. Therefore we should
think of how to deploy economic penalties. One way, used
surprisingly rarely as a weapon of diplomacy, would be to
deny its political leaders and their families access to
foreign bank accounts and overseas travel. Colombia's
decision to freeze guerrilla bank accounts and confiscate
their deposits seems to have been more effective than years
of military engagement. If the warlords of Angola have no
foreign bank accounts and, moreover, were deprived of their
markets for diamonds and oil, their vested interest would be
radically transformed.
This is no time to despair of Angola. There are other
methods besides traditional UN peace-keeping for edging the
protagonists towards peace. Peace making has to be a
creative business. We have to study war a little less and
peace a little more.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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