Healing the Wounds: Post-Conflict Mediation in Sudan
How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT *
This paper examines the civil war in Sudan as an intractable intercultural conflict rooted in religion, ethnicity, ideology and economics, aggravated by the presence of oil and by decades of international inattention. After outlining the conflict between the government in the Muslim north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the largely Christian south, including the catastrophe in Darfur, the author develops a set of practical recommendations for an international neutral working at the community level: dialoguing with genuine curiosity in the sense of Arai, applying the cultural starting points of LeBaron and Pillay, reframing toxic narratives following Sara Cobb, establishing a Sudanese Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled on the South African example, and supporting large scale training of local populations in conflict resolution, as begun by UNESCO. The paper argues that sustainable peace requires bridge building not only between governments and movements but between the northern and southern populations themselves.
KEYWORDS *
Sudan, intractable conflict, intercultural mediation, Darfur, framing, genuine curiosity, dimensions of culture, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, conflict resolution training, peace agreement
INTRODUCTION
Sudan has all the characteristics of an intractable conflict. The roots of the problem run deep into the Sudanese society, heavily influenced by cultural factors, such as religion, ethnicity, ideology, and economics. In this paper, I will describe the major characteristics of this conflict, and use it as a base to suggest and discuss a few recommendations about how an international neutral could go about building bridges among the parties in dispute, especially at the community level. Specifically, I will discuss and comment on Arai’s concept of dialoguing with genuine curiosity, the starting points discussed by LeBaron and Pillay, the ever-present and extremely important concept of framing, argue for the need for a Sudanese Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and applaud the UNESCO-led initiative of providing training in conflict resolution to the local leaders among the populations of the two parties in dispute.
MAIN CORPUS
The characteristics of the conflict in Sudan.
The history of Sudan is filled with the wreckage of failed attempts at foreign intervention, be it for conquest, to help suffering people, or to mediate conflict (Sudan Tribune, 2003, p. 1). The present intercultural conflict in Sudan is the longest-running conflict in the world and one of the bloodiest, where “over two million people have lost their lives during the course of the tragic civil war in Sudan” (Sudan Tribune, 2002, p. 4). Sudan is paradoxical, the largest country in Africa (comparable to about one-fourth of the territory of the United States), and also one of the poorest countries in the world.
The two main parties in the conflict (the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army or SPLA), are both authoritarian and undemocratic and blame each other for not being able to make faster progress in this area. The Government of Sudan, which controls mostly the north of the country, has a heavy concentration of Muslim population and wanted an Islamic state; while the SPLA, which controls the South and is mostly Christian or of traditional African religions, wanted a united and secular Sudan.
The conflict has been made more intractable by the presence of oil in the Upper Nile region, although in a previous and unfulfilled peace agreement, the parties agreed to share the oil resources on a 50/50 basis. The government of Sudan, by selling oil mostly to China, got the necessary financial means to continue the fight, although probably if not China another country such as India or Japan with a great need for oil would have done the same. Therefore, the major obstacles in this conflict are the two internal participants, and some external actors such as China for indirectly cooperating to the perpetuation of the dispute, and the international community, until relatively recently, for paying little attention to what was going on in Sudan.
A tragic example of what has been going on has occurred in Darfur, a remote region in western Sudan, which covers about half a million square kilometers, and which roughly is composed of three zones inhabited by different tribes. The population here is overwhelmingly Muslim, about 6.6 million in 2004. Since the 1970s, the vulnerability of non-Muslim minorities has been exacerbated by ethnic polarization, militarization, desertification, and socioeconomic crisis (Minority Rights, 2008, p. 4), and the situation has been getting worse by the year, or by the minute. In September 2004, the US declared that “genocide” was occurring in Darfur. By this time, thousands of people had been killed and hundreds of villages had been burned down.
The conflict expanded, at least in part, because the international community was not involved in its early beginnings the way it could and should. Morrison & de Waal, (2005) mention that “it is hard to escape the conclusion that the principal parties, regional powers, and main mediators, were comfortable with the ongoing war in Southern Sudan” (Morrison & de Waal, 2005, p. 180). However, in the last couple of years, the international community has finally admitted that it has to do something about the conflict. The US has finally moved in this direction by allocating $ 42 million for a development program focused on agricultural production, education, and local community projects (Sudan Tribune, 2002, p. 3). However, the first American peace proposal was characterized as “arrogance plus ignorance” by the North Sudanese authorities (ESPAC, 2002, p. 1). The government of Sudan expressed its disgust by saying that “a more explicit example of confused, distorted, and poorly-informed legislation would be hard to find” (ESPAC, 2002, p. 2).
However, at the end of a perilous path, a peace agreement was signed and implemented with the aid of UN peacekeepers. In May 2006, the government of Sudan and the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement signed the Darfur Peace Agreement (Srinivasan, 2008, p. 1). Under the peace agreement, Islamic law applies to all residents of the northern states regardless of their religion, but the southern legal system, which is still in the process of development, will not apply Sharia to the Christian populations. The UN took control of the Darfur peacekeeping operation from the African Union on December 31, 2007, but at the time this paper is written, those forces are still struggling to stabilize the situation, which has become increasingly regional in scope (CIA Factbook, 2008, p. 2). Armed conflict, poor transport infrastructure, and lack of government support have continued to obstruct the provision of humanitarian assistance to the affected populations. As recent as April 2007, the “forty eminent mediators actively involved in peace processes were brought to Zanzibar for three days to focus their attention and energy on challenges and solutions” (Press Release Newswire, 2007, p. 1).
A few recommendations to deal with an intractable intercultural conflict
Dialoguing with “genuine curiosity”
Dialoguing with “genuine curiosity”, according to Arai, is to step out of the limitations of our culture and ask the participants about the way they see and make sense of their world. Each individual in this conflict is embedded in his/her own culture, which limits “all possible options available” for the resolution of a problem or conflict. Arai explains that “there is an unknown cultural terrain outside their boundaries” (and the mediator’s boundaries as well), which can only be reached if one is able to dialogue with genuine curiosity, trying to interpret the situation from the other’s viewpoints. In American parlance, the mediator should try to walk in the other person’s shoes.
Although this principle seems intuitively obvious, it is not. In order to understand the viewpoint of one of the parties in the conflict, it is necessary to see the problem from that person’s perspective, which is colored by this person’s culture, and this is discovered only by asking questions guided by genuine curiosity, with the desire to learn from the other person. If the mediator is able to do the same with all parties in the conflict, the mediator will understand what is dividing or separating them, and see through their eyes how they perceive the situation – in a different light because of their different cultures. Then, armed with this new knowledge, comprehending what is pulling the two parties apart, he or she can reach into this unknown cultural terrain which otherwise would not be seen – the place where a mutually satisfying resolution to the conflict may be possible.
Culture provides a framework for the way we see and interpret things. The same author mentions that if a Japanese person is in the hospital it is a very bad taste to bring him or her the presence of a potted plant; because this means that the person is expected to be in the hospital for a very long time. If a person from a different culture –unknowing the manner in which the Japanese interpret this gift- sends a potted plant to a hospitalized patient, this may reduce the relationship rather than improving it, because the two parties will look at the same act with different lenses and make different interpretations. The same is true for northern Muslims and southern Christians in Sudan.
Dialoguing with genuine curiosity brings to light aspects of a person’s culture which are affecting the manner in which he or she perceives the problem, and makes possible the exploration of potential solutions to the conflict.
The Starting Points: The Dimensions of Culture
It would be unthinkable that an international neutral or mediator is not aware of the dimensions of culture, described by LeBaron and Pillay (2006) as starting points, which are like lenses that we could use to make sense of other people’s cultures as well as of our own. These are:
• High context – Low Context • Low Power Distance – High Power Distance • Individualism – Communitarianism • Universalism – Particularism • Specificity – Diffuseness • Sequential time – Synchronous Time
High context cultures are those where people have been interacting for a long time and they have learned to understand the small nuances of their language and behavior which is only understood by them and escape outsiders. The Sudanese societies, both in the north and the south, are high context cultures. In such societies, for example, it may be rude to look at an adult in the eye when he is speaking, because this demonstrates respect and attentive behavior. An outsider from a low context culture, such as the United States, will perceive the same behavior as disrespectful because the person is seen as not paying attention to what he or she is being told. In low context cultures people make relationships of a shorter duration (unfortunately maybe even in marriages sometimes), they move frequently, and communications need to be very specific and to the point. In a high context culture, the manner in which the communication is expressed; what is said or not said, where it is said, and so on, have specific meanings which are understood by people within the culture but not by others.
In a high-context culture, a potential groom comes to ask permission to marry the daughter of a powerful individual. He responds: “I will think about it” rather than saying no, which is considered rude in his culture. However, the potential groom understands that his request has been rejected and there is no need to say it indefinite words.
Power distance means the degree of equality between two or more people. In a high power distance such as Japan, India, Mexico, and some Latin American countries, people are very aware of the inequalities that exist in society, and they communicate to each other taking this social distance into consideration. In Japan, there are several ways in which a person can talk to another depending on the status of each person. A Japanese friend of mine told me that when he meets someone immediately he exchanges business cards because this provides him with the necessary information about how to talk to this other person. Sudan is another high power distance culture. On the other hand, a low power distance – such as the United States – is characterized by the fact that although society realizes that there are social differences among people, they do not emphasize those differences because everybody –at least in theory – is perceived as equal.
Individualism has to do with the way in which society views individual accomplishments and aspirations: the role of the individual in society. In the United States, for example, our mainstream culture pays homage to rugged individualism, individual efforts, and what an individual can achieve. In communitarian cultures, such as those in Asia, the collective is the unit that is emphasized, makes decisions, and takes credit for the accomplishments of its members. Sudan, both the Muslim North and the Christian South, has a communitarian culture, where the group and not the individual is prevalent. It is the group that has to be convinced to support any type of meditation leading to reinforcing the peace agreement.
Universalism has to do with the broad application of rules and laws. In particularism, the cultures take into account the exceptions to the rules and laws. Sudan now does not have the same rules and laws for the whole country, and this was precisely one of the issues of the conflict. The North wanted to impose its laws based on the Sharia on the population of the South, which is mostly Christian. However, although an agreement has been reached in this respect, it is still necessary for the parties at the local level not to interfere with the agreement and make sure that this provision is accepted and implemented.
Specificity means that culture has a low tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Diffuseness, on the other hand, means that culture has little concern about ambiguity and welcomes a variety of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas. There is little specificity in Sudan. The laws exist, but they are applied at the whim of government-appointed judges. There is little precedent as to how a judicial case is going to turn out, even when Sharia is applied in the northern territories of Sudan.
Framing
In any kind of conflict resolution, but probably more so in international conflict resolution, the mediator needs to give an opportunity to the parties to express their opinions and grievances, but then should frame them in a manner that deprives the communication of any stated or unstated blame, criticism, offense, or toxic language. Framing is presenting the story in a new light, one which is neutral but to which both parties can relate. The frame provided by the neutral party presents the problem as it exists, but deprives it of negativity or culpability. It is something that the parties still recognize as to what has happened between (or among) them, but which has been drained of all its poisonous language and, therefore, is easier to accept and built a solution upon this new frame.
Dr. Sara Cobb has mentioned four tools that can be very helpful in framing (or reframing) what the parties have said. She suggested that the neutral party or mediator should assign positive positions to the participants – nobody is doing something to harm somebody else. Everybody is doing or has done something for a reason which can be defended or justified, that has some claim to legitimacy. And this is what it will look like because each person can present his own story without interruption and listen to it with respect. However, it is important to add new dimensions to the conflict, because all conflicts have a past, present, and future, and by creating a story of how the conflict has evolved it is possible to create a new narrative that incorporates all sides of the story. Dr. Cobb also recommends putting in variations and building circularity, which means to show how each side is responsible for the conflict, but without assigning blame.
Hughes and Papavac (2005) mentioned that the reason why we frame some states as failed or rogue states is to give legitimacy (a better frame) to any intervention against those states. Although this example hinders rather than helps in conflict resolution, it demonstrates that frames can be both positive and negative. The role of the mediator is to substitute the negative frame brought by the participants in the conflict and substitute them with positive frames from where the parties can forge a solution. Obviously, this may be quite difficult to do with parties that have been fighting each other for decades as in Sudan and which have inflicted each other great pain in the process. Still, the mediator needs to make an effort to understand the issues and present them in a neutral manner, basically as a problem to be solved.
African conflicts are paid little attention by the United States until they escalate to the level of genocide. One reason may be that they are framed as having no economic interest for the US, as fights between tribal groups, or as a product of corrupted leaders fighting among themselves. All these frames convey the image that it is not worth doing anything, or that our efforts are better spent in other places of higher interest. If the African conflicts could be portrayed in the media as they really are, maybe our country and others would be more likely to provide greater and faster aid in resolving such conflicts.
The need for a Sudanese Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission created new frames to deal with the past history of the country and the multitude of abuses and crimes committed against the majority of the South African population. The Commission used frames that it was possible for someone to recognize his mistakes and be forgiven and that it was also possible and honorable for the community to hear the statements and provide closure, some kind of healing, to the social injuries perpetrated over a long period of time. The South African model could be adapted and reformulated to suit the conditions of Sudan. It is unlikely that the deep physical and psychological injuries on both sides will heal unless there is a process to get the community together in an act of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Massive Training of the Population in Conflict Resolution
At the present time, UNESCO is making an attempt to implement post-conflict mediation in Sudan. The objective of this program is “to develop the awareness and intercultural skills of young people, so that they can become cultural mediators, living and practicing cultural diversity and day-to-day dialogue” (UNESCO, 2008, p. 1). Under this program and under the leadership of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports, representatives from ten states of Southern Sudan are participating in a workshop whose main objective will be to draw up a cultural policy framework within the post-conflict context of the country (Cultural Policies, 2008, p. 1). A similar program should also be implemented in the north.
Also, this training should include a discussion of the various factors about competition and cooperation discussed by Deutsch:
- Effective Communication is exhibited.
- Friendliness, helpfulness, and lessened obstructiveness.
- Coordination of the effort, division of labor, orientation to task achievement, orderliness in the discussion, and high productivity.
- Feeling of agreement and a basic sense of basic similarity in beliefs and values.
- Recognizing and respecting others by being responsive to other’s needs
- Willingness to enhance the other’s power.
- Defining conflicting interests as a mutual problem (Deutsch, 2006, p. 27).
SUMMARY *
The paper portrays Sudan as a textbook case of intractability: a decades long war fed by religious and ethnic division, oil revenues, authoritarian leadership on both sides and international neglect, culminating in the catastrophe of Darfur. Against this background it assembles a practical toolkit for the international neutral working at community level: curiosity driven dialogue that reaches beyond one’s own cultural boundaries, conscious use of the cultural starting points to read high context, high power distance, communitarian Sudanese society correctly, systematic reframing of toxic narratives into workable problem statements, a truth and reconciliation process adapted from the South African model, and broad conflict resolution training of local leaders and youth in both north and south.
CONCLUSION
Concluding Comments
While the conflict in Sudan and many other conflicts in Africa and around the world seems intractable, there is hope that by applying the proper techniques a sustainable peace could be sustained in this part of the world. Those techniques are useful not only to mediate between governments, or between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) but also between members of the northern and southern populations, which have suffered the calamities of the war and which logically have deep resentments against each other.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The recommendations in this paper share a single insight worth carrying further: in Sudan, peace signed at the top has repeatedly failed because it was never built at the bottom. A neutral strategy therefore works on three levels at once, each reinforcing the others.
At the community level, the author’s proposals can be woven into one coherent program rather than parallel initiatives. Local dialogue circles, facilitated by trained Sudanese mediators from both north and south working in mixed pairs, would apply genuine curiosity and reframing to the concrete disputes that keep wounds open: land and grazing rights, water access, the return of displaced families, the status of mixed communities. The UNESCO training model provides the personnel pipeline; the cultural starting points provide the method; and every resolved local dispute becomes a small proof that coexistence is possible. Because Sudanese society is communitarian and high context, agreements must be carried by elders, religious leaders and women’s networks rather than by individuals, and sealed in culturally resonant ceremonies that give them binding social force.
At the national level, a Sudanese Truth and Reconciliation process should follow, not precede, a minimum of security, and should be designed by Sudanese themselves with international support rather than imported wholesale. Its mandate can be phased: first documentation and acknowledgment, giving victims on all sides an official record of what happened; then community hearings in the South African spirit, where acknowledgment and forgiveness are possible but never forced; and finally recommendations on reparation and institutional reform. Crucially, both north and south must appear before it in both roles, as victims and as perpetrators, because a commission perceived as one sided would deepen rather than heal the divide.
At the structural level, the incentives that financed the war must be turned toward peace. Transparent, internationally audited sharing of oil revenues, with a fixed percentage flowing visibly into local development in the most damaged regions, gives every community a measurable stake in stability. External powers that profit from Sudanese resources should be drawn into a guarantee framework in which continued access depends on respect for the peace agreements.
None of these levels succeeds alone. Dialogue without security collapses, truth telling without livelihood improvement embitters, and revenue sharing without reconciliation merely funds the next war. Pursued together, patiently and with the cultural literacy this paper describes, they offer the realistic path by which an intractable conflict is not solved in one stroke but gradually deprived of the fuel, the fear and the silence on which it depends.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
Arai, Tatsushi. When the Waters of Culture and Conflict Meet. (2006). In: LeBaron, Michelle & Pillay, Venashri. Conflict across Cultures: A Unique Experience of Bridging Differences. Boston: Intercultural Press.
Central Intelligence Agency. (2008). Sudan: Country Report. Retrieved on June 5, 2008, from http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/su.html
ESPAC. (2002). Arrogance plus Ignorance: The US “Sudan Peace Act”. Retrieved on June 5, 2008, from http://www.sudan.net/news/press/postedr/197.shtml
Hughes, Caroline & Papavac, Vanessa. (2005). Framing Post-Conflict Framing Post-Conflict Societies: International Pathologization of Cambodia and the post-Yugoslav states. Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 6, September, p. 873-889(17)
Morrison, J. Stephen, and de Waal, Alex. (2005). Can Sudan Escape its Intractability? In: Charles A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall. Grasping the Nettle: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, p. 161-182.
Press Release Newswire. (2007). United Approach to Darfur Essential to Peace. Retrieved on June 5, 2008, from http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/05/prweb525239.htm
Srinivasan, Sharath. (2006). Minority Rights, Early Warning and Conflict Prevention: Lessons from Darfur. Retrieved on June 7, 2008, from http://www.eldis.org/fulltext/MinorityRightsDarfur.pdf
Sudan Times. (2008). Peace, Conflict, and Mediation in Africa: An Historic Opportunity in Sudan. January 7. Retrieved on June 6, 2008, from http://www.sudantribute.com/spip.php?=imprimable@id_article=777
UNESCO. (2008). Cultural Policies and Post-Conflict in Southern Sudan. Retrieved on June 5, 2008 from http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31837&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC.html
How white privilege can be perpetuated in Mediation
How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT *
In this paper the author advances the thesis that white privilege operates within mediation in the United States, arguing that a practice founded on ideals of neutrality and mutual agreement is nonetheless embedded in a society the author characterizes as structurally racist. Drawing on critical race theory and mediation scholarship, the author contends that white privilege is largely invisible and unconscious, that mediator neutrality is unattainable where the parties are unequal outside the mediation room, and that the narrative structure of mediation itself tends to marginalize the story of the weaker party. The paper cites studies suggesting that people of color obtain worse outcomes in mediation than in formal adjudication, presents the argument that procedural formality protects disadvantaged parties better than informality, and closes with the author’s recommendations: mandatory training of mediators in race and privilege, clear procedural rules with review mechanisms, channeling prejudice prone disputes to formal courts, abolishing mandatory mediation, and permitting asymmetrical interventions to balance power.
KEYWORDS *
White privilege, racism, mediation, neutrality, Alternative Dispute Resolution, critical race theory, power asymmetry, racial identity development, procedural formality, United States
INTRODUCTION
White privilege is perpetuated in mediation because racism in the United States is healthy and strong. Racism permeates all aspects of society. Neither the many laws that have been passed to eradicate its effects nor sustained efforts to educate the population have weakened its negative influence. White privilege is a consequence of racism, which is pervasive in all areas of society, although the presence of white privilege sometimes is invisible. Mediation, with all its many good goals and characteristics, is not free from the influence of white privilege because, in most instances, this influence occurs unconsciously or subconsciously. Mediation is part of the American legal system, and as such, is still a long way from eliminating white privilege. In this paper, I will analyze how white privilege is perpetuated in mediation, despite the best intentions of mediators.
MAIN CORPUS
White Privilege
White privilege is everywhere, but because it is an integral part of our social, political, and economic system, it is invisible. White privilege is part of the American culture, because an obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all (McIntosh, p. 105). In addition, white privilege is mostly unconscious, because a white consciousness of whiteness is predominantly unconsciousness of whiteness (Flag, p. 970). McIntosh (1997) described white privilege in this manner: I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in everyday white privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks (McIntosh, p. 91).
White privilege serves several functions in society. Whites tend to look at themselves, others, and society through a distorted lens in which the structural privileges they enjoy and the cultural practices of their group are represented as normal and universal (Bell, p. 12). The main narrative of the American culture implies a white over color ascendancy because it serves important purposes, both psychic and material racism advances the interest of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it (Hardiman & Jackson, p. 17).
The system of white privilege endures, because the benefits obtained by whites are not perceived as such, and because many non-whites, maybe unconsciously, also cooperate with their own oppression, colluding in maintaining the status quo both because they internalize the false belief that the system is correct and as a means of survival (Bell, p. 12).
The judiciary system is heavily biased against non-whites. Persons of color are over-represented in the prison population and frequently receive longer and more severe sentences than whites. However, this is not because persons of color commit most of the crimes in society. Whites, which commit most white-collar and corporate/industrial crime “cause more personal injury, death, and property loss than all street crime combined, even on a per capita basis” (Delgado & Stefancic, p. 43). However, whites fare much better than non-whites in the judiciary system.
The benefits of white privilege in society are pervasive. Numerous studies indicate that whites receive more favorable treatment than blacks in virtually every area of social interaction (Flag, p. 983). In the documentary film (seen in class) John and Glenn were almost identical in age, education, and economic position, except that John was white and Glenn was African-American. John constantly received the benefits of white privilege. He was well-received everywhere, was able to fill out job applications any time he wanted, negotiated to purchase a car at a lower price and with a lower down payment than Glenn, and was not watched carefully when shopping. In addition, when both men pretended to have been locked out of their cars, John received help from a passerby, but not Glenn.
Racism
The system of white privilege is perpetuated because of the existence of racism in our society. Racism is everywhere, including our legal system. Racism is part of the structure of legal institutions (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001, p. xx). The legal system is influenced by white privilege, because all disputes, to a certain extent, are influenced by group membership, such as race, class, and gender (Wing & Rifkin, p. 183). In addition, racism can occur at both an unconscious and conscious level (Definitions of General Concepts I: Racism, p. 165).
Racism can be manifested or expressed in many ways, although social scientists have coined a word for all those racist interactions between whites and non-whites. These events are called micro-aggressions, which, according to Delgado & Stefancic (2001) are those many sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions that mar the days of women and folks of color. Like water dripping on sandstone, they can be thought of as small acts of racism, consciously or unconsciously perpetuated, welling up from the assumptions about racial matters most of us absorb from the cultural heritage in which we come of age in the United States (Delgado & Stefancic, p. 2).
Racism, of course, is not the only form of discrimination in our society, because there are several other discriminated groups, although, in theory, all are equal. Hardiman & Jackson (1997) mention that examples of the unequal treatment of African Americans and poor people of all races by the criminal and civil justice system, housing and employment discrimination against gays and lesbians, unequal access to quality education for the poor and working-class, and exclusion from a social and cultural institution such as civic groups and social clubs that have historically excluded women, men of color, and Jews (Hardiman & Jackson, p. 19) demonstrate the extent of oppression in our society.
The elimination of racism in American society proceeds at a very slow pace. It usually requires not only to pass legislation, but also to have the police, government officers, and the courts enforce such legislation, which is not always done. The net result is that few advances are made because “our system of civil rights law and enforcement ensures that racial progress occurs at just the right slow pace” (Delgado & Stefancic, p. 31).
Neutrality
One of the stated goals of mediation is to provide a neutral setting where the parties can settle their grievances and reach a mutually satisfactory solution. However, this goal of neutrality is illusory, because if the parties are not equal outside of the mediation room they will not be equal in mediation. Rouhana & Korper (1996) said that it seems implausible that equal status in the room, in and of itself, can have a serious impact on the conflicted relationship when the unequal status outside the room remains the status quo (Rouhana & Korper, p. 361). Wing & Rifkin (2001) mention that “the predominant view of mediation reflects a devotion to the concept of neutrality which our approach challenges as impossible and undesirable in an oppressive society” (Wing & Rifkin, p. 182-183). The approach followed by Wing & Rifkin (2001) recognizes oppression’s role in society, that many conflicts are likely to emerge as a direct result of different circumstances that people experience because of their oppression, and that mediation should recognize and deal with those issues.
The mediator comes to the mediation session impregnated with the prevailing culture. Cobb & Rifkin (1991) explored the findings in the conflict resolution field and concluded that mediators could not be neutral (Wing & Rifkin, p. 189). Mediators, like all other human beings, have biases, values, and points of view a mediator’s attempt to remain neutral is to some extent always doomed to failure (Grillo, p. 1587). In mediation, each person is viewing the world through one of the stages of racial identity development (Wing, 1998, quoted in Wing & Rifkin, p. 187). The stages of racial identity development were developed by Hardiman & Jackson (1992) and consist of (a) native/no social consciousness. (b) passive stage of acceptance, (c) resistance, (d) redefinition, and (e) internalization (Wing & Rifkin, p. 186-189).
In the first stage, the person is native or has no social consciousness. The individual is unaware of the rewards and sanctions associated with belonging to a racial group. People in this stage accept that Whites are superior to people of color. In the second stage, the passive stage of acceptance, the person unconsciously accepts white superiority. In the third stage, resistance, the person focuses on understanding and resisting the existence of racism and its multiple manifestations in everyday life. In the fourth stage, redefinition, the person focuses on redefining her own racial group’s history and culture. Lastly, in the fifth and last stage, internalization, people achieve a new sense of racial identity not based on or in reaction to the assumptions and functions of racism, but at this point, they have reached a heightened appreciation for the experiences of oppressed people.
Even if neutrality could be achieved, still this would neglect the needs of people of color and favor white privilege. Cobb & Rifkin (2002) mention that the structure of the mediation process itself contributes to the marginalization of one disputant (the second disputant to tell the story), setting an accusation/justification sequence in place that perpetuates adversarial interactions and reconstitutes one story as dominant (Cobb & Rifkin, p. 60). The mere opportunity to tell a story in mediation does not ensure that one story will not colonize another, marginalizing the disputant, along with their story (Cobb & Rifkin, p. 57). Or worse, in some cases, one side never tells its own story; it simply refutes or denies the story of the other (Cobb & Rifkin, p. 53).
Mediators are not free from their own cultural baggage because they also participate politically in the story transformation by making summaries that recontextualize important events in the plot summaries provide an important opportunity for mediators to shift the semantic frames and moral orders in disputants’ stories (Cobb & Rifkin, p. 56). The same authors mention that in 24 of 30 cases, the settlements emerge out of the initial narrative! This means that 80% of the time, the second speaker never is able to tell a story that is not colonized by the dominant story! (Cobb & Rifkin, p. 61).
Therefore, what mediators understand as neutrality is to follow a symmetrical approach could benefit those belonging to a dominant or higher power group, White Anglos, and exclude and undermine the target or lower power group members, people of color (Bell, 1997, cited in Wing & Rifkin, p. 192). One way in which mediators could balance the relative power of the parties in mediation would be to make asymmetrical interventions to try to help the weaker party tell her story and make it part of the final narrative. Issues of race, ethnicity, and others, should be brought forward by the mediator as legitimate issues that may need to be addressed. Matsuda (1995) reminds us that non-whites feel that lack of legal redress for racist acts is an injury often more serious than the acts themselves (Matsuda, p. 74).
Formality
Many scholars have argued that people of color are more favored by the formality of the court system than by the informality of alternative conflict resolution methods, including mediation. Delgado et al. (1985) expressed that “procedural formality recognizes inequality and attempts to compensate for it by making both parties conform to the same standards… one cannot have equity and informality at the same time” (Delgado et al., 1395-1396). The same authors added that “adversarial procedure counteracts decision-maker bias because it combats the natural human tendency to judge too swiftly in terms of the familiar that which is not yet, fully known” (Delgado et al., p. 1389).
However, this does not mean that white privilege does not exist in the judiciary or court system, only that formality to reduce its effects. Although color blindness, and consequently, white privilege, seems firmly entrenched in the judiciary, a few judges have made exceptions in unusual circumstances (Delgado & Stefancic, p. 22).
One way to make the mediation process more “fair” to non-whites would be to establish more rigorous guidelines or rules that clearly specify the scope of the proceedings, require that such proceedings be open to the public as in the court system, and provide some form of higher review if, after agreeing to a settlement, one of the parties decide that the manner in which the procedures were followed influenced or forced her to accept a settlement that she thought was unfair.
Alternative Dispute Resolution
Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods, which have been advanced as providing an avenue where the parties can talk out their grievances and arrive at a mutually satisfactory solution, because of its informality and neutrality bases, may actually harm non-white parties. Alternative dispute resolution may be speedy and cheap, but if you are a woman or member of a racial minority group, ADR is apt to compound the disadvantages you bring to the bargaining table (Delgado, p. 1395). The mediation centers are reinforcing society’s tendency to treat non-whites differently, because mediators when treating non-whites, avoid employing the deferential responses that they typically provide to white disputants (Cooper, p. 135). Delgado (1997) also mentions that the purpose of alternative dispute resolution systems is not to help the parties in the dispute, but to help the courts and to channel anger out of the courts. He wrote informal alternatives were more or less consciously designed to siphon discontent from courts (Delgado et al., p. 1394).
ADR is also advanced as a method that helps resolve problems and eradicate conflicts, which are seen as aberrations in a civilized society. This view of conflict as abnormal also has been criticized by scholars. Delgado (1997) mentions that an even more basic premise of ADR namely that conflict is pathology, an aberration from a peaceful form or baseline is false. Instead, things are the other way around, and conflict is normal (Delgado, p. 1397). Delgado added that conflict is not pathology, but the ordinary and natural state of affairs in a radical free-market society like ours (Delgado, p. 1402).
The outcomes of mediation demonstrate that non-whites do not fare as well as whites. In mediation, outcomes favor the stronger party even more so than standard, in-court lawsuits (Delgado, p. 1408). In mediation, whites get an advantage as they do in the court system and everywhere else. Hermann (1994) mentioned that an ethnic minority respondent could be predicted to pay twenty cents on the dollar more (Hermann, p. 10). When a non-white party is in mediation, he or she may agree to something because he is nervous, intimidated, exhausted, or frightened (Grillo, p. 1598). The mediation option may deprive the non-white party of what he or she is justly entitled, because you may get no hearing because the mediator and your adversary may marshal an entire constellation of attitudes and prejudices to shut you up and trivialize your pleas (Delgado, p. 1404).
One way to improve not only mediation but also all alternative dispute resolution methods would be to identify those types of conflicts in which the dangers of prejudice are greatest and direct those grievances to the formal court system. In addition, alternative dispute resolution methods, including mediation, should be voluntary. Legislation should be passed banning all mandatory mediations for the reasons mentioned above.
SUMMARY *
The author’s central claim is that mediation, precisely because of its informality and its ideal of neutrality, can amplify rather than neutralize the inequalities the parties bring into the room. In the author’s account, white privilege operates invisibly and often unconsciously, mediators cannot fully escape their own cultural conditioning, the storytelling structure of mediation favors the dominant narrative, and the cited research suggests worse settlement outcomes for parties of color. From this the author concludes that procedural formality, whatever its faults, at least imposes uniform standards, and that certain prejudice prone disputes may therefore be better served in court than at the mediation table. These theses form part of an ongoing scholarly debate; the editorial perspective of this journal is set out in the Potential Solution below, which focuses on strengthening fairness and balanced participation within mediation itself.
CONCLUSION
Concluding Comments and Recommendations
Mediation is part of a racist society and, as such, is permeated by an invisible white privilege which is a detriment to non-whites pursuing this method to resolve their conflicts. However, if mediators could learn to use the proper lens to see white privilege for what it is and eliminate its noxious effects, then they could make mediation work for both whites and non-whites.
Mediation could be improved by, among other things:
Making compulsory the training of all mediators in the race and race-related issues, including the issues of white privilege. Providing rules that clearly specify the scope of the mediation proceedings, require open proceedings, and provide some form of higher review (Delgado et. al. p. 1403). Identifying those areas and types of ADR in which the dangers of prejudice are greatest, and direct those grievances to formal court adjudication (Delgado et al., p. 1404). Eliminating mandatory mediation. Mandatory mediation provides neither a more just nor a more humane alternative to the adversarial system of adjudication (Grillo, p. 1549). Having the mediator make asymmetrical interventions in those cases where there is a non-white party, by raising questions of the race knowing that some participants may not share the perspective that it is a relevant topic (Wing & Rifkin, p. 196).
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The conflict this paper describes is not a dispute between two parties but a structural tension inside the mediation profession itself: a practice committed to party self determination operating within a society whose inequalities enter the room with the parties. A neutral response accepts both truths at once, that mediation has real value and that unexamined neutrality can do real harm, and redesigns the process rather than abandoning it.
First, move from neutrality to impartiality with awareness. A mediator cannot be culturally blank, but can be transparent about process and equally committed to both parties’ ability to participate fully. Codes of conduct should redefine the mediator’s duty not as symmetrical passivity but as active safeguarding of balanced participation: ensuring each party tells their own story first in their own frame, checking whose narrative is shaping the emerging settlement, and naming power differences as legitimate process issues when they distort the conversation. This converts the asymmetrical intervention the author recommends from an individual mediator’s risk into a professional standard.
Second, build structural safeguards around the informal process. Voluntariness must be genuine, with mandatory mediation limited or abolished for dispute types where power imbalance and prejudice risk are highest. Every mediated settlement should carry a short reflection period before it becomes binding, and a review mechanism should exist where a party asserts that the process itself was coercive. Co mediation with diverse panels, so that parties do not face a mediator corps drawn from a single social group, addresses the representation gap at its root.
Third, measure what the field prefers not to see. Mediation services should collect and publish anonymized outcome data by case type and demographic pattern, as courts increasingly do. The disparities cited in this paper became visible only through research; continuous monitoring turns an invisible privilege into a manageable quality problem, and gives training its evidence base.
Fourth, treat training as formation rather than information. A single seminar on bias does not undo a lifetime of enculturation. Certification should require ongoing supervised practice with feedback specifically on cross cultural and power imbalanced cases, in the same way clinical professions require supervision.
Handled this way, the critique in this paper strengthens rather than discredits mediation: a process honest about power is more, not less, faithful to mediation’s founding promise that people can resolve their conflicts in dignity and on their own terms.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
Bell, L.A. 1997. “Theoretical foundations for social justice education. In M. Adams, L.A. Bell & P. F. Griffin (Eds.). Teaching for diversity and social justice. New York: Routledge, pp. 3-15.
Cobb, S. 1994. “A Narrative Perspective on Mediation: Toward the Materialization of the Storytelling Metaphor” pp. 48-63. In New Directions in Mediation: Communication Research and Perspectives, ed. J.P. Folger and T.S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cobb, S. and Rifkin, J. 2001. Practice and Paradox: Deconstructing Neutrality in Mediation. In Chew, P.K. (Ed.). 16 Law and Social Inquiry 35, 52-62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cooper, C. 2001. Mediation in Black and White: Unequal distribution of empowerment by police. In J. Asim (Ed.). Not Guilty: Twelve black men speak out on law, justice, and life. New York: Amistad, HarperCollins, pp. 125-141.
Definitions of General Concepts I: Racism, pp. 88-89. 1997. Racism Curriculum & Design, Wijeyesinghe, C. Griffin, P. and Love, B. Teaching for diversity and social justice, edited by Adams, M., Bill, Griffins, P. Routledge, (Adapted from Hardiman and Jackson, 1980).
Delgado, R. 1997. Alternative Dispute Resolution: Conflict as Pathology: An Essay for Trina Grillo. 81 Minnesota Law Review 1391.
Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. 2001. Critical Race Theory. New York: New York University Press.
Delgado, R., Dunn, C., Brown, P., Lee, H. & Hubber, D. 1985. Fairness and formality: Minimizing the risk of prejudice in alternative dispute resolution. Wisconsin Law Review 953, 1559 (1985).
Flag, B.J. 1997. The transparency phenomenon, race-neutral decision-making and discriminatory intent. 19 Michigan Law Review 953, p. 970-985.
Grillo, T. 1991. The mediation alternative: Process dangers for women. Yale Law Journal, 100, 1545-1610.
Hermann, M. 1994. New Mexico Research Examines Impact of Gender and Ethnicity in Mediation. In Chew, P.K. (Ed). Dispute Resolution Magazine, 10-11 (Fall) American Bar Association
Hardiman, R. & Jackson, B.W. 1997. Conceptual Foundations for Social Justice Courses, in M. Adams, L.A. Bell & P. Griffins (Eds.). Teaching for diversity and social justice. New York: Routledge, pp. 16-29.
Matsuda, M. 1995. Looking to the bottom: Critical legal studies and reparations. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller & K. Thomas (Eds.). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. New York: New York University Press, pp. 63-79.
McIntosh, P. 1997. White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in Women’s Studies. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.). Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror, pp. 291-299.
Rouhana, N. R. & Korper, S.H. 1996. Case analysis: Dealing with the dilemmas posed by power asymmetry in inter-group conflict. Negotiation Journal, October, pp. 353-366.
Wing, L. & Rifkin, J. 2001. Racial Identity Development and the Mediation of Conflicts. In Wijeyesinghe, C.L. & Jackson, B.W. (Eds.). New perspectives on racial identity development: A theoretical and practical anthology. New York: New York University Press, pp. 182-208.
The Conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea: An Assessment and Potential Solutions
How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the border dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia, the decision of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and the difficulties that both parties are having implementing the decision. This conflict may qualify as an intractable conflict. Conflict “is a difference within a person, or between two or more people, that touches them in a significant way” (LeBaron and Pillay, 2006, p. 12). Conflict hurts the most “when their interdependence is so essential that they cannot do away with it despite the difficulties of remaining interdependent, such as for friends or lovers” (LeBaron & Pillay, 2006, p. 88). Such is the case between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Intractable conflicts have endured for a long time and “have refused to yield to efforts” (Crocker, Hampson & Aall, 2005, p. 5). Intractable conflicts “denote conflicts that (1) continue over an extended period of time, (2) are characterized by ever-present tension and violence, and (3) are arenas for many futile attempts at management or resolution” (Bercovitch, 2005, p. 101). They also may be intractable “because they do not matter enough for concerted international reaction” (Crocker et al, 2005, p. 15), or because over “50 percent of all mediation efforts were unsuccessful” (Crocker et al, 2005, p. 116). An intractable conflict is also characterized by the repeated failure of one party to force upon the others a cessation of hostilities, by “the failure of parties to negotiate an ending after trying to do so, and (by) the failure of external intervention to stop or transform the intractable” conflict (Kriesberg, 2005, p. 73).
KEYWORDS *
Eritrea, Ethiopia, border dispute, Badme, intractable conflict, Boundary Commission, Permanent Court of Arbitration, UNMEE, peace agreement, spoilers, Horn of Africa, Algiers Agreement
INTRODUCTION
I. Brief Historical Introduction
a. The Treaty of Peace with the Allied Powers of 1947: In 1890, Italy formally established the Colony of Eritrea and ruled it as its colony until 1941, when the British defeated the Italians in Africa and took over the administration (Eritrea: Foreign Policy & Government Guide, 2007, p. 12). During the period of Italian control, Ethiopia and Italy concluded three boundary agreements that together, addressed the entire common boundary of the Colony of Eritrea and the Empire of Ethiopia. Following World War II, the Treaty of Peace with the Allied Powers of 1947, stipulated in its Article 23 that Italy renounced “all rights and title to the Italian possessions in Africa”, and agreed that “pending their final disposal, the said possessions shall continue under their present (British) administration” (Treaty of Peace with the Allied Powers of 1947, February 10, p. 2-3).
b. The UN General Assembly Resolution 390A(V): In 1950, the United Nations General Assembly by its resolution 390A(V) recommended that “Eritrea shall constitute an autonomous unit federated with Ethiopia under the sovereignty of the Ethiopian Crown” (UN General Assembly Resolution 390A(V), 1952, p. 1-2) The UN also determined that Eritrea should be federated to Ethiopia, but maintaining a certain amount of autonomy such as its own constitution and elected government (Connell, 1997a, p. 29). However, Emperor Haile Selassie’s government systematically violated the rights of Eritreans, banned political parties in 1955, trade unions in 1958, and went as far as dissolving the Eritrean parliament and annexing Eritrea to Ethiopia as its 14th province in 1962 (Eritrea: Foreign Policy & Government Guide, 2007, p. 14). Both Arabic and Tigrinya languages were eliminated from Eritrean education and replaced by Amharic, then Ethiopia’s official language (Eritrea: Foreign Policy & Government Guide, 2007, p. 17). Ethiopia’s heavy rule antagonized both Muslims and Christians in Eritrea. Muslims were squeezed out of public employment, and an entire generation of Eritrean Christian students embraced nationalism and many joined the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in its fight for independence.
c. Eritrea wins its Independence: The armed struggle lasted 30-years, until May 1991, when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) liberated Asmara, the nation’s capital, and established the Provisional Government of Eritrea (PGE) (Connell, 1997b, p. 31). In an internationally supervised referendum in April 1993, 99.8 percent of the Eritreans voted for independence, which was officially declared on May 24, 1993 (CIA, 2007a, p. 2). It was the culmination of a lengthy war of secession. Dougherty (2003) qualified it as a positive story in many respects and said that “the population’s bravery and determination are worthy of respect if not admiration” (Dougherty, 2003, p. 276). On the other hand, Licklider (2005) reminded us that “wars of secession are more likely to become intractable than those involving changing the existing regime” (Licklider, 2005, p. 41)
d. Ethiopia tries to regain control of Eritrea’s seaports: Landlocked Ethiopia, coveting Eritrea’s two seaports, started an early campaign to annex its former colony, claiming that it had always been part of Ethiopian territory. Conflicts -Newman (2006) emphasized- are more likely to be caused by economic opportunities than by grievance (Newman, 2006, p. 138). Herbst (2004) blamed the international community for indirectly financing Ethiopian’s invasion. He said that “the willingness of the international community to provide food relief to Ethiopia meant that the government of Addis Ababa could devote its resources to the war while the international community took on the responsibility of feeding the Ethiopians” (Herbst, 2004, p. 367).
A border clash in 1998 around the town of Badme escalated into a full war killing thousands of soldiers from both sides. The UN Security Council called for a cease-fire and imposed a one-year arms embargo on both countries, but sporadic fighting continued. In 2000, the two countries signed a peace agreement at the initiative of the Organization of African Unity, calling for both parties to withdraw to the positions held before the 1998 war and establishing a boundary commission (Global Policy Forum, 2007, p. 2). Still, the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) with 4,200 troops began patrolling along the security zone (Wallensteen & Sollenberg, 2001, p. 631).
In 2003, the Boundary Commission ruled that the town of Badme lies in Eritrean territory (Global Policy Forum, 2007, p. 3). Ethiopia rejected the Commission’s ruling and filed an appeal which reaffirmed the previous decision (Global Policy Forum, 2007, p. 4). A state of “cold war” continues to our days, with both countries exchanging accusations and insults with each other.
MAIN CORPUS
II. The human and economic costs of the border dispute
a. Ethiopia: Ethiopian casualties in the conflict have been estimated at about 50,000 (Rice, 2006, p. 1), and its already weak economy has been greatly affected because most trades with the outside world was made through the Eritrean ports. In order to substitute for previous exports, Ethiopian companies have been forced to export their products to neighboring countries, mostly Kenya, which has been a great disruption of the Ethiopian economy and at a great cost (Rice, 2006, p. 2).
b. Eritrea: Eritrea sustained great economic damages as a consequence of the war with Ethiopia, in addition to thousands of its soldiers killed. The May 2000 Ethiopian invasion into northern Eritrea caused about $ 600 million in property damage, destroying 55,000 homes and $ 225 million in livestock (CIA, 2007a, p. 6). In addition, more than a million Eritreans were displaced by the war, although nearly all have been resettled (US Department of State, 2007, p. 4). The war also affected the nation’s economy in other ways. Eritrea’s 2006 budget, estimated at $ 485 million, used about $ 185 million for defense (US Secretary of State, 2007, p. 2). The country continues to depend on remittances from Eritreans living abroad, which together with other private transfers contribute about one-third of the country’s GNP (US Department of State, 2007, p. 4). The Eritrean Diaspora is taxed 2% of their income by the Eritrean government and plays an active role in the internal politics of the country, sometimes as spoilers, like many other Diasporas (Shain &Aryasinha, 2006, p. 105)
Although the losses of the conflict are difficult to quantify, the border war “substantially damaged the economic growth and development of Ethiopia and Eritrea and has led to humanitarian suffering on both sides of the border. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost and thousands more have been maimed” (UN Report of the US Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, 1999, p. 1-2). Economic damages and problems are very disturbing to the peace process. Jaroslav (2005) cited ample literature supporting the premise that “a high level of economic development is a key determinant of peace because the satisfaction of economic needs tends to dampen political tensions” (Jaroslav, 2005, p. 552). The persistence of the conflict, obviously, strengthens the authoritarian rule on both sides of the divide and puts a brake on the necessary democratization, facilitating intractability. In this case, as in Sudan, “the continuing conflict has served as a reason for postponing democratization” (Morrison & de Waal, 2005, p. 171).
III. Terms of the Peace Agreement
On December 12, 2000, the parties signed a peace agreement under the sponsorship of the Organization of African Unity. Article 4. 1 of the Agreement stated that “the parties agree that a neutral Boundary Commission composed of five members shall be established with a mandate to delimit and demarcate the border based on pertinent colonial treaties (1900, 1902, 1908) and applicable international law” (Agreement, 2000, p. 18). Article 4.15 of the same agreement explicitly stated that “the delimitation and demarcation determinations of the Commission shall be final and binding” (Agreement, 2000, p. 19).
IV. The determination of the Boundary Commission of the Permanent Court of Arbitration
The Boundary Commission was formed and both parties submitted their claims and counterclaims, providing more than 250 different maps to prove their respective cases. The Commission on its own also did historical research. The Court ruled that a large segment of the Western border should be awarded to Eritrea (near the Yirga Triangle), while other areas in the Central and Eastern Sector and the border town of Tserona were also awarded to Eritrea. In addition, the border towns Zalambessa and Alitena, in the Central sector, and the Bure Danakil Depression, were awarded to Ethiopia. The controversial Badme village, where the conflict started and escalated into a full-blown war, was awarded to Eritrea (Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, 2002, Chapter VIII).
Initially, the Ethiopian government claimed victory (even though it had lost the disputed village of Badme), but later rejected it as “unjust and illegal,” and filed a 21-page memorandum demanding that the boundary commission correct its ruling by awarding Ethiopia the towns found within the Eritrean (Global Policy Forum, 2006, p. 8). However, on November 25, 2004, “957 days after the EEBC ruling, Ethiopia’s parliament voted to accept in principle the ruling of the independent boundary commission that ceded territory along the 600-mile border to Eritrea” (Splinter, 2007, p. 12). This, however, has not been enough because it has been perceived as just a diplomatic gesture to please the international community rather than reflecting the real intentions of the Ethiopian government.
V. Implementation Difficulties
Eritrea hosted a UN peacekeeping operation that is monitoring a 25 km-wide 900 km-long Temporary Security Zone on the border with Ethiopia (CIA, 2007b, p. 2). Relations between the two countries deteriorated in 2003 after the boundary commission found that the town of Badme was in Eritrean territory. Ethiopia’s rejected the Commission’s ruling and Eritrea refused to negotiate a new settlement with Lloyd Axworthy, the UN Special Envoy for Ethiopia-Eritrea (Eritrea: Foreign Policy, 2006, p. 2). In each other’s eyes, the opposing party was spoiling the peace process, but, in reality, both of them were acting as spoilers. Spoiling behavior towards a peace process “represents a form of rejection of some aspect of that process by some groups and their constituencies” (Newman & Richmond, 2006, p. 10). Spoiling is demonstrated when “one side acts contrary to the other side’s perceived goal of the peace process” (Khutsishvili, 2006, p. 293).
On October 5, 2005, Eritrea banned UN helicopters from flying close to the security zone, and any motor vehicle patrolling at night, greatly reducing UNMEE’s ability to oversee the disputed border. Then the following day, on October 6, 2005, Eritrea, claiming frustration at the UN’s lack of progress in having Ethiopia comply with the “final and binding” boundary commission ruling, expelled the North American, European, and Russian peacekeepers from the UNMEE’s Eritrean border, most of which were then reassigned to the Ethiopian side (Global Security, 2005, p. 1). This experience is similar to what has happened in other conflicts such as Colombia because it “served to drive home the fact that when parties to the conflict lack the will, interested third parties cannot leverage a peace process” (Arnson & Whitfield, 2005, p. 232).
On October 17, 2005, the UNMEE decided to reduce the number of posts in the temporary security zone. The UNMEE’s press release mentioned that “the continuing occupation of small posts in isolated places has become untenable and operationally unviable. Out of a total of 40 posts that it has so far maintained, UNMEE decided to vacate 18 of them and one Team Site of military observers” (UNMEE Press Release, 2005, p. 1).
a. UN Security Council Resolution 1640: After receiving reports of troop concentrations along the border, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1640 on November 23, 2005, calling on both nations to remove their troops from the Temporary Security Zone which divides the two countries. Resolution 1640 also called on Eritrea to immediately reverse its decision to ban helicopter flights of the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea and demanded that Ethiopia comply with the boundary commission of 2000. If both sides failed to comply, the Council indicated, it will consider the possibility of economic sanctions under Article 41 of the UN Charter (UN Security Council Resolution 1640, 2005, p. 1-2).
b. UN Security Council Resolution 1670: On April 13, 2006, the Security Council adopted resolution 1670 and extended the UNMEE until May 15, 2006 (Foreign Policy in Focus: Eritrea, 2006, p. 2). The resolution reiterated its previous demands outlined in resolution 1640 – mainly that Eritrea lift the restrictions imposed on UNMEE operations and that Ethiopia accepts the final and binding decision of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission. If both parties fail to demonstrate “full compliance” by this deadline, “the Security Council will consider transforming the peacekeeping operation into an observer mission or withdrawing it all together”. The inclusion of a deadline for compliance seems to indicate that the Security Council is really frustrated with the failure to implement the peace agreement.
c. UN Security Council Resolution 1681: When the deadline came with no progress, the Security Council issued Resolution 1681 on May 31, 2006, extending the mandate of the UN Mission for another four months, asking once again that both parties implement the delimitation decision of the Boundary Commission. However, on July 30, 2008, the Security Council terminated the mandate of UNMEE with effect from the following day as a response to the crippling restrictions imposed by Eritrea on the peacekeeping operation, such as cutting off its fuel supply which made it impossible to continue the operation of its mandated tasks.
SUMMARY *
The Eritrean Ethiopian border dispute displays every marker of intractability identified in the conflict resolution literature: decades of accumulated grievance from colonial partition and forced federation, a secession war, a devastating border war over Badme with tens of thousands of casualties, and a legally final arbitration ruling that one party refused to implement while the other progressively strangled the peacekeeping mission meant to secure it. Both governments acted as spoilers, the international community lacked sustained leverage and interest, and the frozen conflict entrenched authoritarian rule on both sides. Yet the two countries remain deeply interdependent, economically and culturally, and it is precisely this interdependence that keeps a door to resolution open.
CONCLUSION
VI. Concluding Comments and Potential Solutions
Eritrea fears that Ethiopia could ignore the decision of the Boundary Commission, the UN forces patrolling the border, and occupy the small nation by force. A simple look at the map of Eritrea indicates how this could be accomplished if Ethiopia were to push from all points along its border with Eritrea toward the sea. Please see Figure No. 1 below. The narrow Eritrean nation could be swallowed by the larger Ethiopian army, and the United States and the international community may not react as vigorously as they did in Kuwait. Twenty years ago, Woodward claimed that African countries counted as relatively unimportant in international politics, and the situation is not better today (Woodward, 1987, p. 112).
Eritrea claims that the close relations of Ethiopia with the United States have allowed Ethiopia to ignore the commission’s ruling (Global Policy Forum, 2007, p. 1). As in the Palestinian-Israel conflict and other conflicts around the world,” most Americans do not care deeply enough about this issue to propel it to the top of presidential priorities” (Telhami, 2005, p. 371) In addition, “over the years, the United States and other third-parties have been biased toward one side in a number of conflicts” (Crocker et. al, 2005, p. 380).
The media has speculated that Ethiopia may want to invade Eritrea before the November 2008 elections in the US, which could deprive Ethiopia of its present support in the White House. Although always appearing to look neutral, the Bush administration seems to favor Ethiopia, which it considers an ally in its war against terrorism (Chicago Tribune, 2007, p. B-2), while it has accused Eritrea of harboring terrorists. The reason is the presence of Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, an exiled Somali Islamic leader, whom the US suspects of having links to Al Qaeda, at a recent Somalian opposition conference in Asmara (US Department of State, 2007, p. 3). Also, On July 27, 2007, the Associated Press reported: “that Eritrea had been supplying weapons to Somali insurgent group Shabab who is allegedly tied to Al Qaeda” (Associated Press, 2007, p. 1). As Kriesberg already observed, the US war on terrorism also affects the intractability of local conflicts around the world (Kriesberg, 2005, p. 81).
The implementation of the peace process has faced mounting resistance by both parties, displeasing the UN Security Council. On November 5, 2007, the United Nations established that “these neighbors must resolve their borderline tensions by the end of November 2007” (Reuters, 2007, p. 1). So far, this has not happened. However, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the US Congress on July 18, 2003 “Peace processes are always frustrating, always agonizing, and occasionally seem hopeless… but for all that, having a peace process is better than not having one” (Saikia, 2006, p. 316).
In July 2015, President Barack Obama made an official visit to Ethiopia and even addressed a meeting of the African Union, whose headquarters are located in the Ethiopian capital. While the American President referred to the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, he stopped short of asking the Ethiopians to abandon its control over the city of Badme, which constitutes the essential issue claimed by Eritrea before normal negotiations can be held between the two nations (Ogbaharya, 2015, 1). However, the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in 2012 could make it easier for the new Ethiopian government to abide by the determination of the Boundary Commission with fewer political repercussions. The new Ethiopian government is now giving preferential treatment to Eritrean refugees crossing the border into Ethiopia. There are now over 100,000 Eritrean refugees living and studying in Ethiopia, with the Ethiopian government granting over 1,200 scholarships to Eritrean students (Aljazeera, 2013, 2). However, still, there are problems. The new Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn in his address to the Ethiopian Parliament on July 8, 2015, mentioned that Ethiopia would have no choice but to retaliate against Eritrea for what he called “Eritrea’s destabilizing campaign” (Aljazeera, 2015, 1). On the other side of the border, the government of Eritrea continues with its one-mal rule, suspension of both the Parliament and the Constitution, and universal and indefinite military conscription, all justified by the threat posed by Eritrea.
For peace to endure in the border conflict, the international community will need to guarantee the integral sovereignty of Eritrea and calm down its real or imagined insecurity. However, before this happens Eritrea needs to disassociate itself from even the perceived idea that it has anything to do with terrorism because the United States and the West are not likely to commit their power to defend what they consider a terrorist state. Ethiopia and Eritrea need each other and it is this interdependency where hope for peace grows bigger. Of course, democratic changes in Ethiopia (or in Eritrea) could also pave the way for the resolution of this intractable conflict.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The author correctly locates the seed of resolution in the interdependence of the two nations. A neutral pathway can build on that insight in four movements, sequenced so that neither side must begin with its most painful concession.
First, decouple implementation from humiliation. The Boundary Commission ruling is final and binding, so the legal question is closed; what blocks implementation is the political cost of appearing to lose Badme. A face preserving sequence, in which demarcation on the ground proceeds simultaneously with a negotiated package on the consequences of demarcation, allows the ruling to be honored while both governments can present the overall package as a gain. Third party facilitation, ideally by the African Union with a guarantor group of states trusted by both sides, should therefore frame demarcation and normalization as one single agreement adopted on one single day.
Second, trade sovereignty for access. Ethiopia’s deepest material interest is not territory but the sea. A long term port access and transit treaty granting Ethiopia commercially guaranteed, internationally supervised use of Assab and Massawa, with revenue sharing for Eritrea, converts the very asset that fueled the war into the strongest bond of peace. Eritrea’s deepest interest is security of its sovereignty; this can be met by international guarantees, a demilitarized border corridor monitored by a neutral mission accepted by both parties, and mutual non aggression commitments registered with the United Nations.
Third, humanize the border before politicizing it. Divided communities, cross border families and the refugee population are natural constituencies for peace. Reopening crossing points for family reunification, trade at local markets and religious pilgrimage creates facts of coexistence that make renewed war costlier for both governments, and the existing Ethiopian scholarship policy toward Eritrean refugees shows this logic is already available.
Fourth, anchor the process in mutual economic recovery. A jointly administered border development zone around Badme and the other transferred areas, financed by international donors and benefiting populations on both sides regardless of the flag above them, changes the meaning of the boundary from a line of loss to a shared resource.
The history of this conflict, including the rapprochement that later became possible when leadership changed, confirms the underlying principle: where law has spoken, mediation is still needed, not to reopen the verdict but to make living with it bearable, and finally beneficial, for both peoples.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
VII. References
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Peace Operations in West Africa: ECOWAS Successes and Failures in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau
How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to assess and evaluate the ECOWAS peacekeeping efforts in West Africa, specifically its successes and failures in Liberia, Sierrra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Guinea Bissau, using a simplified version of the evaluative framework created by Diehl and Druckman, to accommodate for the type of data that is available for these operations. The paper demonstrates that ECOWAS failed to restore peace and security in all its peacekeeping operations and that there is a lot that the sub-regional organization has to learn to deal effectively with its own conflicts. Nigeria provided most of the financial support and troops for the operations in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, but decided to play a more limited role in the ECOWAS interventions in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau after being severely criticized for its hegemonic role by several ECOWAS members. ECOWAS might be able to play an important role in preserving the security of the region, but only after learning from its mistakes in past operations.
KEYWORDS *
ECOWAS, ECOMOG, peacekeeping, West Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Nigeria, regional security, United Nations, mandate evaluation, Anglophone Francophone divide
INTRODUCTION
None of the ECOWAS peacekeeping interventions in West African countries, although they might have saved some lives, fulfilled their missions, and thus, can be categorized as failures. This paper discuss and analyze several research questions: (a) Which were the most important strengths and weaknesses of the ECOWAS peacekeeping missions in West Africa, such as Liberia (1989-2003), Sierra Leone (1991-2002), Côte d’Ivoire (2002-2007), Guinea (2007-2010) and Guinea Bissau (1998-Present)?; (b) Did they accomplish their objectives according to the criteria set by ECOWAS in each of their respective mandates?; (c) To what degree were they supported by the majority of the member states of ECOWAS, by the African Union and the United Nations?; (d) What was the role of Nigeria in these operations as the region’s hegemon and why was this role opposed by other nations within the ECOWAS organization?; (e) What motivated the serious discrepancies between the Anglophone and the Francophone countries within ECOWAS about these peacekeeping operations?; and (f) Does the evidence justify the hypothesis that Africans should solve their own conflicts as the UN has often proposed? None of these research questions have been addressed comprehensively by any other historian. The methodology used in this paper is a simplified version of the evaluative framework created by Diehl and Druckman to accommodate for the type of data that is available for these operations. Specifically, this paper will compare the results of these operations with the orders provided in the operations mandate, the document authorizing the mission, which is an approach that has been used by a number of researchers.
The historical literature shows a mixture of assessments and opinions from both the UN and ECOWAS participants about the conflicts that occurred in these nations and how they were handled. However, to date, there exists no comprehensive analysis of all ECOWAS’ operations, their successes and failures; and the political environment in which these operations were carried out, with constant antagonism between the different factions within ECOWAS in the case of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and with France in the case of Côte d’Ivoire. This paper attempts to start filling this important gap in the history of these peacekeeping operations.
This paper’s major findings are that none of these operations has fulfilled the objectives established in their mandates; that ECOWAS as an economic organization so far is not prepared to assume the role of the region’s peacekeeping force because of several reasons, including the lack of harmony among the foreign policies of the governments member of ECOWAS, the dependence of the sub-regional organization on Nigeria’s military and economic resources, and the apparently irreconcilable differences between the English-speaking and the French-speaking countries within the organization which, because of their different culture and viewpoints, had opposing policies about how to resolve the sub-regional crises. In addition, the ECOWAS peacekeeping troops were poorly trained and badly equipped to fulfill their missions.
Historiography
The failures of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations to accomplish their mandates in Somalia in 1992 and in Rwanda between 1993 and 1996 challenged the UN capacity to deal with a myriad of complex peacekeeping operations. As a result, the UN chose to pursue an alternative strategy in Africa by calling on regional organizations, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to conduct certain peacekeeping missions. Specifically, the international community promoted the mantra of “having Africans take care of the African problems,” which encouraged regional actors such as ECOWAS, an economic international organization, to assume the role as peacekeepers within West Africa. This “outsourcing” of UN peace operations was both consistent with the UN Charter and the international organization’s past experiences. In addition, it was advantageous for the United Nations, because it relieved the world organization of some regional responsibility and the associated costs. However, in the case of ECOWAS, the UN’s reliance on the West African states to conduct regional peacekeeping proved to be less effective than previous experiences with the Organization of American States (OAS) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Initially, the West African states were proud to prove the slogan that Africans could take care of their own problems. However, as this study reveals, ECOWAS proved unable to “take care of the problems” in West Africa. To put these efforts into historical context, since the late 1990s, the UN was working to the limit of its capacity in relation to peacekeeping operations suffering multiple failures in Africa alone. It was becoming more and more difficult for the UN to obtain the necessary troops to support the near-continuous stream of multiple peacekeeping operations. In fairness to the world organization, it is true that its budget was becoming thinner and that the enthusiasm of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and of the international community in general was declining, suffering of peacekeeping fatigue after having to deal with as many as twenty international conflicts at the same time. As of 1999, the UN was engaged in 19 active peacekeeping operations, and 16 more were started in the years between 2000 and 2013, with a total of 70 UN peacekeeping operations since 1947.
The African conflicts in the post-Cold War produced a proliferation of peacekeeping operations that have generated some interest by a group of both African and Western historians, but with most of them referring to the peacekeeping operations carried out by the United Nations rather than those of ECOWAS. Some of these historians have focused their interests in analyzing the catastrophic UN failures in Rwanda and Somalia. Relatively few historians, however, have addressed the peacekeeping operations carried out by ECOWAS, the West African regional organization, and those have written only about particular interventions, although all of them have concluded that despite the multiple errors committed during the planning and implementation of these peacekeeping operations, that the results would have been worse if ECOWAS had not intervened in these conflicts. The ECOWAS operations have been only analyzed in detail by the ECOWAS organization itself and by a very select group of mostly African historians who have written about specific aspects of these operations, usually one of the five nations where ECOWAS has deployed peacekeepers: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea or Guinea-Bissau. The ECOWAS organization has published two books, one about the organization itself and another about its peacekeeping operations. These documents include detailed narrations about each mission’s objectives, composition and major accomplishments. There are also official statements issued by the organization, minutes of the meetings and internal analyses lauding these operations, as well as some chronologies and journalistic sources, but no analyses comparing the different ECOWAS operations. This may be a characteristic that all relatively recent events may share and that gives a historian the opportunity of putting together information from different sources to make a historical evaluation about what went right and what went wrong in these operations. A comprehensive analysis of such operations that would justify the UN’s and the African Union’s reliance on the ECOWAS sub-regional organization to act as peacekeepers represents a significant gap in the historical literature.
The UN, through its Department of Peacekeeping Operations, regularly issues detailed chronologies about its operations, mostly highlighting the positive aspects of these interventions in an effort to promote the idea that these efforts have not been in vain, but seldom presenting an accurate picture that includes the failures and mistakes of these operations. The United Nations produced a number of scholarly studies not about the ECOWAS peacekeeping operations, but about the United Nations operations that took over for ECOWAS, or had to deploy a parallel mission in a country where ECOWAS was already deployed. These histories were often written by the generals that directed these operations, and although they are important primary sources of the events that occurred after the United Nations got involved in these crises, these sources frequently overstate the need for these United Nations operations, minimize the errors committed by these forces, and in any case, only cover the period after the United Nations became involved in these countries. It is important to note although ECOWAS sent peacekeepers to five nations in West Africa, eventually the United Nations had to take over four of these operations from the regional organization, and the fifth one is the ongoing operation in Guinea-Bissau that as of mid-2014 is shared with the African Union (AU).
The official historical documentation published by the UN, ECOWAS and the countries that participated in these efforts constitute the most important primary sources for this type of historical analysis, keeping in mind that it is in each organization’s best interest to highlight the positive effects of its efforts and to underreport negative outcomes.
Adekeye Adebayo, an African historian, wrote an interesting book analyzing all UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, beginning with the UN mission in the Suez Canal in 1956 and ending with the Sudan crisis. Although his analysis is cursory because he covered a lot of operations in a relatively thin book, he found that all UN peacekeeping operations in Africa could have been improved. He also wrote another book with recommendations about how to strengthen the African security architecture. Adebayo mentioned three main factors that have most often mentioned as having contributed to the success of UN peacekeeping operations in Africa: (1) whether these operations counted with the support of important UN Security Council permanent members. When at least one of the permanent members strongly supports a peacekeeping operation and is willing to provide the necessary financing of the operation and diplomatic support, or to seek approval from the Council and do the operation themselves, such operations are successful; (2) the willingness of the parties in conflict to cooperate with the United Nations to implement peace accords, which is critical, and in cases where cooperation is not forthcoming, the creation of strategies that are effective dealing with potential spoilers that are likely to sabotage the peace process; and (3) the coordinated actions of all the players in the peace process, so that diplomatic, economic and military aspects support the peacekeeping efforts. He also said that it was absolutely essential to ensure that all the economic resources in the war zones could not be exploited to finance one of the rebel factions; that neighboring countries could not provide political, economic or military support to any of the fighting factions and that the UN peacekeeping operations should be managed by well-trained and capable envoys.
Some scholars wrote specifically about a single or at the most two ECOWAS operations. An article by Mortimer gives the viewpoint of Senegal, a Francophone country that initially did not want to become part of the ECOWAS peacekeeping operation in Liberia, but that was enticed to participate by the United States under the wrong belief that Charles Taylor, the leader of the Liberian rebels at the time, would accept the terms of the negotiation agreement if at least one of the Francophone nations would send military contingents to the ECOWAS force in Liberia. Senegal even accepted the presidency of ECOWAS for a period of time, although 80 percent of the ECOWAS forces in Liberia continued to be constituted by Nigerians. Also, there is an account by Byron, a Liberian, who asserts that ECOWAS forces not only suffered attacks by the rebels of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) commanded by Charles Taylor, but the civil war that occurred when ECOWAS fought the NPFL inside Liberia. Yoroms is another Nigerian who wrote a lengthy article trying to prove that the reason why Nigeria formed the ECOWAS force, and took the determination to send troops to neighboring Liberia, was not because of the personal friendship between the Liberian President Doe and the Nigerian President Babangida. The Francophone group had used this argument repeatedly to oppose Nigeria’s peacekeeping efforts. However, it is not disputed the ECOWAS troops were sent to defend Liberian President Doe from a coup, even though President Doe himself had obtained power in another coup a few years earlier. Peter Arthur briefly analyzed the ECOWAS peacekeeping operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and also concluded that the beneficial effects of the ECOWAS peacekeeping operations in these nations greatly surpassed its potential negative consequences, although no criteria was mentioned about what variables or aspects of the operation were included in the analysis. It is clear that the life of every single human being is precious and that ECOWAS might have helped to avoid these conflicts becoming worse catastrophes. However, when a peacekeeping operation favors one of the parties in the struggle for power, it is unclear whether such participation helped or hindered what could have been a more adequate response by the international community. Mamadou wrote an article about the peacekeeping operation in Côte d’Ivoire that reflects the view of the Francophone nations that had opposed the military operation in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
A couple of sources wrote from their own experiences participating in an ECOWAS operation. Belmakki, a Nigerian military officer who attended the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and who brought to light both his experiences in the field and the theoretical instructions he obtained in the academic setting, wrote an analysis of the Liberian operation in which he participated and of the Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire operations (in which he did not participate). Although quite circumspect and accurate, his writing reflects the Nigerian perspective that sees how only this nation is able to bring peace to its neighboring countries. The same is true of the account written by Dr. Adamau, a Nigerian representative from ECOWAS, who glorifies the role of ECOWAS in these conflicts in the same manner that most UN analysts have praised their own peacekeeping operations, generally painting a rosier picture of their interventions than the cruder reality. Still, Adamau’s experiences as an officer of the sub-regional organization provide helpful information about some aspects of these operations.
Other authors wrote about a specific theme related to these operations. William Reno addressed the need to regionalize security, but criticized the regionalization of African security because not all sub-regions in Africa had an organization such as ECOWAS, as if all African regions had their own ECOWAS organization that these institutions could take care of the conflicts within their territories. This seems a light claim to make given what is known about the performance of the ECOWAS peacekeeping operations, and a statement that also ignores that other parts of Africa also have their own regional organizations. Pascal Zachary concentrated his efforts analyzing and writing about the problems that humanitarian organizations confront in providing aid in a failed state, where the government cannot take care of its own security and sometime these humanitarian organizations have to depend for their security on the peacekeeping troops on the ground. In many cases, the peacekeepers themselves have become a handicap to the delivery of humanitarian assistance rather than an asset, and although Zachary’s analysis refers only to UN peacekeeping operations, there is no reason to believe that the situation in the ECOWAS peacekeeping operations was any different. James Giblin, an Iowa University historian, wrote extensively about the manner that the socialist and communist ideas during the Cold War era influenced some important African leaders and how these approaches to build a modern state invariably failed.
A few authors dealt with the overall situation of peacekeeping operations, either in Africa or in general. Sudarsan Raghavan, a journalist, published a chilling account in the Washington Post in January 2014 lamenting that a record number of UN peacekeepers in Africa has been unable so far to stop the African wars. Eric Cooper and Alex de Waal, in two separate articles, discussed the successes (and mostly the failures) of UN peacekeeping operations in Africa based on the mandate of the UN Security Council at the time that these missions were authorized, but their coverage included only UN peacekeeping operations and left out the peacekeeping operations executed by the African regional or sub-regional organizations, such as the ECOWAS. These studies provide good background information although each operation is unique and had to deal with its own set of problems.
Peacekeeping historian Norrie Macqueen mentioned that what just some years in the past was considered “current affairs,” today becomes historical material. This author wrote about UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, emphasized both the negative and the positive aspects of these operations, and concluded that the beneficial effects of these operations for the indigenous populations could not be doubted. Thalif Deen wrote a journalist essay about how more recent UN peacekeeping missions have become more efficient because they have taken advantage of past experiences. This is what ECOWAS supposedly also should be doing. Patrick Manning is another African historian who has written about African and World Historiography and who studied some African conflicts. He observed that to analyze a peacekeeping operation in Africa is necessary to use a broad perspective that includes political, social and economic dimensions, in addition to the military dimension, and to include many of the overlooked variables that sometime are ignored by historians. Herve Ladsous and Knox Chitiyo also made a series of recommendations about how to improve the UN peacekeeping operations, and some of these suggestions might also apply to the ECOWAS peacekeeping operations. Paul Williams wrote about the policy of having Africans take care of the African problems; and concluded that the African governments are not ready to assume these serious responsibilities and that the rich developed nations of the world should not disengage from their responsibility to protect in the African crises. This is a weighty conclusion that this paper also supports.
This paper proceeds first with general background information about the regionalization of security in Africa and specifically in West Africa, the cooperation between the UN and the African regional organization and an overview of the UN operations in Africa. This introduction is followed by three chapters, the first analyzing the ECOWAS operation in Liberia. The second chapter is an analysis of the ECOWAS operation in Sierra Leone that was partly a result of the inefficiently handled operation in Liberia, and the third chapter will discuss and analyze the operations in Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. All these operations failed to fulfill their mandates.
MAIN CORPUS
How ECOWAS’ Role Fits into the UN Charter
The UN Charter authorizes the UN Security Council to address issues which threaten peace and international security. As part of this important responsibility, the UN Security Council has been empowered to delegate on the regional organizations the function of creating and maintaining peacekeeping operations. This method was used with the Organization of American States (OAS) in the Americas and with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the Balkan wars. It has also been used to legitimize peacekeeping operations conducted by the African Union (AU). The creation of the Economic Community of West African States Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) by the ECOWAS organization also fits within this legal provision, although ECOMOG is a sub-regional not a regional organization and is an economic not a political organization. However, while all previous delegated peacekeeping operations had prior authorization from the UN Security Council, ECOMOG did not.
The ECOWAS organization might have had verbal support from the United States and other members of the UN Security Council, but went ahead with its first intervention in Liberia without the proper UN authorization which would have given its peacekeeping operation a measure of legitimacy and credibility. Although ECOMOG was formed without consent, the UN Security Council tolerated the action and two years later welcomed the ECOWAS initiative by issuing a statement, and a few months later by passing its Resolution 813 commending ECOWAS. By going on their own without previous authorization ECOWAS might have violated the UN Charter, because there is no provision in the Charter that authorizes a regional or sub-regional organization to undertake a military action against another country, even if the expressed objective is to provide peace and security by its own initiative. Most legal scholars believe, however, that the absence of condemnation on the part of the UN Security Council can be admitted as a tacit acceptance and approval of the operation.
The Regionalization of Security in Africa
In the African continent, since the early 1960, over forty wars have killed over 10 million Africans and produced another 10 million refugees. More recently, the UN catastrophe in Somalia (1993) and the genocide in Rwanda (1994) led to powerful Western actors abandoning Africa to its own fate. This neglect of the continent forced regional actors such as the OAU (now the AU); the Southern African Development Community (SADC); ECOWAS; the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS); the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), most of them primarily economic organizations, to adopt limited security roles. African regional organizations, such as ECCAS, ECOWAS, IGAD and SADC, on their own initiative and also encouraged by the United States and the international community, went ahead and institutionalized lengthy agreements with the objective of preventing and resolving conflict. Similarly, the African Union (AU) took the extraordinary decision of creating what they called a Continental Early Warning System (CEWS) and an African Standby Force (ASF) composed by 15,000 African troops from its member states.
In 1963, the members of the Organization of African Unity, now the African Union, approved a resolution in which they accepted the borders established by the colonial powers that the African nations had inherited when they became independent. The African leaders within the OUA did so because in the immediate postcolonial period, these leaders needed to focus on the tragic reality that their postcolonial nations were weak and could be easily destabilized. Therefore, the nations that exist in Africa are the result of territories created by the Europeans that colonized the continent starting in the Congress of Berlin in 1885, which had partitioned Africa into units that completely ignored the tribal composition of Europe’s colonies. As a result of this artificial division of territory there are, for example, Yoruba English-speaking communities in Nigeria and Yoruba French-speaking peoples in Benin, divided by an externally-imposed “national” border.
In the post-Cold War period, the African Union sent some missions of several sizes to a number of nations in conflict, from a small mission of observers to Burundi to full peace enforcement operations in a number of African states, such as the Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Darfur, Liberia and Somalia. These last operations were fully integrated operations, which let the organization to improve its administrative, institutional, financial and operational structures for the potential deployment of new missions in the future. These improvements by the African regional organization are noteworthy because, although the organization received financial and technical aid from the developed countries, most of the effort put into these structures was by the Africans. When the economic underdevelopment of the region is taken in consideration, there is no question that the African efforts represented an important step forward, but was made with great sacrifice.
The African Union (AU) for a period of time at the beginning of its creation had limited capacity to intervene to maintain peace because it was prohibited by its own Charter to intervene in the internal conflicts of its member states. The Charter’s Article 3, Clause 2, specifically prohibited the organization from such interventions. As most of the conflicts in the continent are civil wars, this meant that the organization was unable to deal with most conflicts. When sub-regional organizations, such as ECOWAS, made the determination to intervene in Liberia, the AU endorsed such actions.
The AU obviously has gained valuable experience in international security cooperation and, in the cases of Western, Eastern and Southern Africa, has established relatively functioning security mechanisms and structures. In 2008, the AU limited its official collaborators to seven regional organizations with which it approved a Memorandum of Understanding about security cooperation. These organizations cover a few countries in Northern and Central Africa and the totality of all countries in Eastern Africa. Belonging to two or more regional organizations obviously is difficult, especially for poor countries with fewer educated people. The financial burden may be onerous, the implementation of policy decisions may be confusing and sometime maybe even contradictory, and the schedule of the meetings might conflict with others. The existence of so many organizations, some of them with overlapping responsibilities, can promote competition rather than cooperation and fragmentation of support, as the member states have to comply with several requests for resources.
At first sight, Africa’s institutional landscape appears perilously disordered. There are at least 19 regional and two continental organizations that count security cooperation among their reason d’etre, and states often belong to several of them. In fact, of the 53 current member states of the African Union, 26 are members of two regional organizations and 19 are members of three. Two countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Swaziland even belong to four, while only six countries are members of only one organization. The co-existence of several different regional security organizations also holds a number of obvious risks. These organizations could be addressing the same issue, thus duplicating unnecessary efforts and resources. They could come to different solutions that may need to be negotiated or re-negotiated with any other regional organization that has addressed the same issue. Other issues might be completely ignored, or might be incorrectly perceived to belong to another organization. It also makes more difficult for the international donors and contributors to know which is the organization to deal with in a specific country or situation. Furthermore, some organizations might be better financed than others and, thus, may have more resources to study and deal with a specific problem or conflict.
Africans Take Care of the Africa’s Problems
The idea of letting Africans take care of their own problems, applauded and encouraged by the developed nations, might have been an idea that might work had the UN member states, especially the developed nations, provided the UN or the regional or sub-regional organizations in Africa with the material resources that were needed to guarantee the success of such missions. However, in all cases, serious logistical challenges, poor training of the participating troops and slow commitments on the part of the countries contributing to the UN peacekeeping forces, have challenged the effectiveness of these operations.
Since the end of the Cold War, after the disintegration of the former Soviet Union during the early 1990s, West Africa has become one of the least politically stable areas of the world. Small military operations against the governments have occurred in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and others forming an interconnected web of chaos. The West African nations were forced to make an attempt to manage their own conflicts.
ECOWAS was created as a regional economic organization. It was only much later that the organization found itself engaged in issues concerning security. The West African leaders, after all, saw a very close relationship between economic development in the region and security. It was in this vein that the organization established two protocols in relation to security. The 1978 Protocol Relating to Non-Aggression, the first protocol issued by the organization, had as its main goal ensuring an environment of peace without infringements or attacks by one member state against another. The 1981 Protocol on Mutual Assistance on Defense, the second protocol, approved by the organization at a special meeting held in Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone on May 29, 1981, expressed that any aggression or threat of aggression against one of the state members of the organization would constitute an aggression or threat of aggression against all the nations in the community.
ECOWAS started in May 1975 as an economic organization for the sub-region. It represented the materialization of diplomatic efforts made mostly by Nigeria to promote the economic development of the region and to facilitate trade among the African nations. The organization faced daunting tasks: the region’s transportation system was primitive and it was difficult to get from one African capital to the others. In addition, most of the products in the region were the same, or of the same kind, what made trade among the organization members more difficult. The 16 founding member states were Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. However, in this early beginning the organization restricted itself only to economic issues. This tradition changed in 1990, when ECOWAS decided to intervene in the civil war in neighboring Liberia. The economic organization re-hatted itself as a security organization with the objective of making and enforcing peace. Making peace involved negotiation, mediation and arbitration. Enforcing peace involved the deployment of a 3,000-strong military force to supervise the ceasefire in August 1990. In 1999, Mauritania withdrew its membership, leaving the total number of member states in the organization at 15.
However, ECOWAS was not equipped to play a military role. It did not have the institutions or the capacity to deploy military forces on the ground with the objective of enforcing any peace agreement, even if all the parties to the agreement cooperated and did what they said they would do. ECOWAS was an economic organization, financed mostly by Nigeria, still poorly integrated in relation to decision-making and execution. Until that moment, ECOWAS had been mostly a forum where the African delegates could express the economic problems of their respective nations, where important resolutions were passed but where little economic development actually occurred. When ECOWAS decided to create a Cease-Fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), in 1990, the serious political divisions between the Anglophone nations led by Nigeria and the Francophone nations represented by Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire became apparent. This division, which eventually included most Anglophone countries on one side and most of the Francophone countries on the other side, not only hindered the implementation and the effectiveness of the operation, but also strained the cohesion of the organization.
ECOMOG was the name given to the force created by ECOWAS to intervene as peacekeepers in the sub-region’s conflicts. ECOMOG was created in a meeting of the organization in Banjul, capital of Gambia, on August 6-7, 1990, with the objective of intervening (citing humanitarian grounds) in the civil war in neighboring Liberia. It was the first attempt by a sub-regional organization to effect the mantra of Africans taking care of their own problems. However, not all the member states of ECOWAS were in agreement about the roles and functions of ECOMOG, or even whether it was reasonable for the organization to intervene in one of its member states.
The Anti-Coup African Policy
In 1999 in Algiers, the Heads of State of the West African governments passed what was called the Algerian Declaration. This became an important document by which the nation members decided to take a no tolerance stand against coups, which had become quite frequent in the region and that threatened many countries in the organization. Esterhuysen published a list of military coups in Africa in the period from 1960 to 1969 and came up with 33 coups that took place in West Africa. After the military coup in Côte d’Ivoire in December 1999, ECOMOG represented an effort to show that military coups in West Africa would not be further tolerated. This policy continued with ECOWAS’ response to the coup d’état in Sierra Leone, where both Nigeria and ECOWAS severely criticized the takeover. After this statement ECOWAS started taking actions against all member states that had been the target of coups. These coups were condemned and the countries where the coup had occurred were suspended from membership in the organization.
In 2005 in Togo, after the death of the president, the army put in power the ex-president’s son Faure Gassingbe. However, this succession was not legal under the Togo Constitution. Instead, it was considered a plot to usurp power and install a hereditary kingdom. Many international organizations, such as the UN and the AU condemned the coup, and ECOWAS joined in this condemnation, as did France and the United States. Similarly, in early 2009 in Guinea, after the death of the president Lansana Conte, another coup took place. ECOWAS suspended Guinea’s membership in the organization and announced that national representatives could not participate in its meetings until democratic elections were conducted and the Constitution was restored. The African Union joined in the condemnation, announcing that unless the Guinea military junta committed itself to democratic elections before the end of the year, the provisions of the Lome Declaration would be enforced by having Guinea suspended from the continental organization.
In March 2012, in Mali, another coup overthrew President Amadou Toure. The militaries that overthrew him claimed that the government had proven unable to face the ongoing Tuareg rebellion and that this was the reason why they decided to overthrow him. ECOWAS reacted by issuing a strongly worded statement, saying that the organization’s position about coups was clear and that it would not tolerate the use of violence to resolve problems.
UN-AU Cooperation
In April 2008, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution on peace and security in Africa that stated that the capacity of regional and sub-regional organizations should be improved, so that they could deal with their own crises. These organizations should develop the ability to resolve and manage their own conflicts. The document also emphasized the need to establish more flexible financing arrangements when any of such organizations had to deploy a military force as a peacekeeping operation under a mandate of the United Nations. About a year later, a combined panel of the UN and the AU (led by former Italian prime minister and former president of the European Commission Romano Prodi), submitted a report to the UN making some recommendations about how to improve the cooperation between the UN and the AU. The report suggested improving the strategic relationship between the UN Security Council and the African Peace and Security Council; having the UN provide resources to AU peacekeeping in a sustainable way; funding UN-authorized AU missions for six months before the UN takes over such missions; and establishing a multi-donor trust to finance such missions. In July 2009, the UN issued a document titled “A New Partnership Agenda: Charting a New Horizon for UN Peacekeeping, which adopted these recommendations.”
Overview of UN Operations in Africa
During its first 45 years after its foundation, the United Nations was involved only in one peacekeeping operation in Africa, the operation in Congo between the years 1960-1964 that was so much criticized by the international community. This is the peacekeeping operation that was in Congo during the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The United Nations did not come back to Africa for another 25 years after this infamous event and it did so to oversee the withdrawal of military forces of South Africa from Namibia and to supervise the first democratic elections in Namibia in 1989. However, throughout the next decade, a total of 17 peacekeeping operations were deployed by the world organization to Africa, with different degrees of success or failure depending on the variables used to analyze the missions. Mazrui and Ostergard have classified the operations in Namibia and Mozambique as relatively successful according to the fulfillment of their mandates, but those in Angola, Rwanda and Somalia as complete failures using the same criteria. In both Somalia and Rwanda, the poor performance by the United Nations had more to do with the members of the Security Council that failed to provide clearly specified mandates and with the lack of the dedicated political and material resources needed to meet the responsibilities in these conflicts.
Between 1948 and 2011, approximately 40 percent of the peacekeeping and observer missions in the post-Cold War era (27 out of a total of 65) were deployed to the African continent. At its peak in 1994, the UN deployed 75,000 peacekeepers to 17 conflict spots in the planet at a cost of $ 3.6 billion, reflecting the optimism of the era. The UN failures in Bosnia, Angola, Somalia and Rwanda (and the associated unpaid peacekeeping dues) quickly dampened this euphoria and led to a retrenchment of peacekeeping missions between 1995 and 1998, so that by 1999, only 19,000 peacekeepers were deployed around the world. In August 2000, the UN published the Brahimi Report on Peacekeeping. The report repeatedly warned the international community that the only missions that the UN should deploy are those which meet all specified conditions to be successful, but this tone was perceived in Africa as a code for avoiding all African conflicts after the catastrophes of Somalia in 1993 and of Rwanda in 1994. It was out of these discussions that the “third generation” of UN peacekeeping operations started to be deployed in 1999 and that were sent to some African conflicts, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia-Eritrea and later Liberia, Burundi and Sudan.
It is not surprising that the large majority of the UN peacekeeping operations have taken place in the African continent, because this area of the globe has counted with the largest number of conflicts in the post-Cold War period. Although the first large interventions of the world organization in Africa in this period of time were the unsuccessful operation in Somalia and the inability to stop genocide in Rwanda, the eruption of other conflicts in the continent eventually led the world organization to become very active in this area of the world. During the 1990s, more than three-quarters of all UN peacekeeping troops were stationed somewhere in Africa.
However, most of these interventions have not been extremely successful. With the notable exemption of the withdrawal of South African and Cuban troops from Namibia and Angola and the organization of the transition to democracy in Namibia in 1991, most of the other UN peacekeeping activities have been only partially successful. A relatively successful operation which fulfilled its mandate was the one deployed at the end of the long civil war in Mozambique, where UN peacekeepers monitored Mozambique’s first democratic elections in 1994.
In the 21st century, the conflicts in Africa increased considerably and they did at a time when the international community was not much interested in Africa. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, in mid-1990s, observed that, if there was some kind of consensus in relation to the attention given by the international community to Africa, it was that there was no attention whatsoever. However, while it is true that the end of the Cold War saw a sharp decrease in the attention paid by the developed countries, especially the remaining hegemon the United States, to the problems in Africa, this assessment is not completely accurate, because at this time the United Nations was also spending about three-quarters of its resources and of its peacekeepers in African conflicts. These conflicts were of several kinds and included not only the overthrow of democratic governments by military groups or by rebels, but also the displacement of populations, the assassination of civilians, climate change, diseases, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and humanitarian crises. In addition, occasionally, some permanent members of the Security Council have deployed small numbers of their own troops in non-UN peace operations in Africa, such as the UK in Sierra Leone in the year 2000; the United States in Liberia in 2003; and France in Côte d’Ivoire in 2003, the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003 and 2006 and in Chad in 2008.
Poor Performance of Other Sub-Regional African Organizations
In the case of Africa, two sub-regional organizations, ECOWAS and SADC, have deployed military troops to deal with their sub-regional conflicts. Despite whatever failures these operations might have had, arguably they helped to some degree. However, whole sub-regions of Africa, such as its northern, central and eastern sub-regions have sub regional organizations, but still do not have working sub-regional arrangements to deal with their own conflicts. Furthermore, it seems that the African nations together have a limit in relation to how many troops they can deploy in peacekeeping operations at a given time, with 30,000 being a number that is widely believed to be the maximum. As at any given time the African nations are contributing 10,000 peacekeepers to ongoing UN peacekeeping operations throughout the world, it is clear that not many additional human resources are left to be used in their own sub-regional initiatives. Although much aid has gone to the African nations from the developed nations during the last decade, the African military is still poorly equipped, badly trained and ineffectively managed. Overall, the peacekeeping capacity of the whole continent is equal to what might be needed in just one large peacekeeping operation.
Responsibility to Protect
In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly, after lengthy debates, approved the principle that each member state was responsible for the security within its own borders, but that when there were reasons that made impossible for them to assume such responsibilities, that it was the duty of the international community to intervene and assure that the lives and rights of the populations in danger were respected. In other words, the international community could no longer stay calm when an intra-state conflict raged anywhere in the world.
The UN was always willing to intervene to prevent international conflicts. The problem comes with interpreting and acting to protect. Until this important step was taken, the Charter article 2.7 restricted the organization from acting “in matters which are essentially with the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” This principle of the “responsibility to protect” was applauded as a great step forward by the international community, but in practice so far has not changed very much the manner that the world organization takes care of conflicts.
CHAPTER I: Peacekeeping in the Midst of Civil War: Liberia (1989-2003)
The Liberian Civil Wars: 1989-1996 and 1999-2003
The Liberian conflict has its origins in the private American Colonization Society that was started to “free men of color to the dark continent.” For 24 years after the 1947 Liberian independence, this nation had only one president, William Tubman, who ruled what was effectively a one-party state. His party, the True Whig Party, was the focus of all the political, economic and social activities and was at the center of a patrimonial network. Political power was firmly in the hands of the Americo-Liberian elite and political activity was either discouraged or suppressed. Beginning in the 1960s, every leading family had to have one of its members in government, because public employment alone secured agency contracts and sinecure jobs. After Tubman died in office in 1971, he was succeeded by his long-time vice-president William Tolbert. This new government made an attempt to integrate the interior of the country into the national politics, but his period in power was eclipsed by the oil crises of the 1970s. In 1979, the so-called “Rice Riot” was followed in April 1980 with a coup d’état in which 17 semi-literate soldiers of the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) murdered William R. Tolbert Jr., the 19th president of Liberia, then the Chairman of the Organization of African Unity (OUA) and the standard bearer of the ruling True Whig Party (TWP).
The successor to the government of Tolbert was the regime of Doe, which destroyed the officer corps of the AFL and its integrity and professionalism. The coup d’état intensified Liberia’s endemic political instability, thoroughly undermined an already weak government, exacerbated perennial fiscal indiscipline, aggravated economic mismanagement and expanded capital flight. By the end of the 1980s, Liberia was a police state with some of the world’s worst human-rights abuses. Eventually, the brutal suppression and worsening poverty led to a civil war, in which four warring factions waged reciprocal tribal vendettas, looted public and private assets and destroyed the nation’s infrastructure. By mid-1990, Liberia had become a “slaughterhouse.”
Samuel Doe was the first non-Americano-Liberian leader. He was a member of the Krahn tribe and head of the People’s Redemption Council; as soon as he took power he suspended the Constitution and assumed dictatorial powers. He did not fulfill the promises that the people expected and proved himself “incompetent, capricious and corrupt.” He made enemies of a large part of the indigenous population as well as of the Americo-Liberian elite by the blatant manner in which he favored the members of his Krahn tribe. His behavior led the U.S. to end American aid to Liberia, aid that the country had become greatly dependent since the early 1980s. This caused grave repercussions for the Liberian economy. The standard of living continued to decline and opposition to Doe’s regime grew.
On December 24, 1989, a rebel force called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) invaded the north-east of the country from Cote d’Ivoire led by American-educated Charles Taylor, who had been prominent in the Doe regime as Director General of the General Service Agency before being dismissed in 1984 for corruption. Taylor was a member of the Americo-Liberian elite and the brutality of the Doe regime allowed Taylor to gain supporters among Liberia’s Armed Forces. Other segments of the Liberian population, such as the Gio and Mano tribes, also supported Taylor. Unfortunately, the NPFL action began a bloody civil war that lasted over eight years and resulted in more than 200,000 deaths and a refugee population of about one half of Liberia’s 2.5 million population.
The armed rebel groups of Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson entered Liberian territory in Dadane and Nimba County from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire with the expressed objectives of overthrowing the dictatorship of Samuel Doe and conducting free democratic elections. On May 7, 1990, after suffering several losses, the Liberian President made an appeal to Nigeria and Togo for help, which led on August 25, 1990 to the creation of a West African peacekeeping force. Initially, ECOWAS responded by creating a Standing Mediation Committee on 28 May 1990 to mediate the conflict. On July 6, 1990, this Committee produced a peace plan that provided for an immediate cease fire, the creation of a peacekeeping mission, the creation of an interim government for Liberia and the holding of fair and free elections within a year under the supervision of the international community, a plan which would return Liberia to peace. This peace plan became the mandate of the ECOWAS operation and, while its specific steps were implemented, peace was not achieved until the UN took over from ECOWAS several years later. The ECOWAS operation did not produce permanent peace which made this operation unsuccessful according to the simplified Diel and Bruckman framework.
On July 20, 1990, almost immediately after the ECOWAS Committee approved its peace plan for Liberia which included sending troops, Charles Taylor rejected this plan and proceeded to capture roughly 95% of the Liberian territory; and on July 27, 1990, declared himself as President of Liberia. The international community, however, did not recognize Taylor as President and ECOWAS proceeded to form an interim government that did not include any of the leaders of the fighting factions pending free and fair elections. The reaction of Charles Taylor, as expected, was extremely hostile.
When the Liberian civil war erupted, action in the UN Security Council was blocked by three African members: Côte d’Ivoire, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Ethiopia. These nations opposed UN intervention in what they considered the internal affairs of a member of the Organization of African States (now the African Union). Although the African nations cannot veto any action of the UN Security Council, the members of the Security Council generally defer to their African peers when discussing issues related to Africa. Côte d’Ivoire also opposed any intervention because it was supporting the rebel faction of Charles Taylor. It was only after ECOWAS had taken the decision to intervene in Liberia and sent its mission called ECOMOG to Liberia that the UN Security Council issued a statement praising the efforts of ECOMOG in January 1991 at the request of Nigeria. At that point some ECOWAS countries, such as Nigeria, strongly opposed a potential UN presence in Liberia because they thought that the UN was going to take the glory from the sacrifices made by ECOWAS. In reality, the glory of the operation was more a Nigerian perception than a reality.
In 1989, following the rebellion of Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson against the government of President Samuel Doe, Liberia was finally plunged into a terrible civil war. The ECOMOG intervention, according to some scholars and member states, ran counter to the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of states, as stipulated in the first paragraph of the ECOWAS’ Protocol in relation to mutual assistance and defense.
At the beginning, Charles Taylor had the support of Houphouet-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso and Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya. Also, Taylor was able to use the natural resources of Liberia to entice the cooperation of American and French business interests, and he also obtained support from these governments. In addition, ECOWAS was not able to control the borders of Liberia or ensure that the NPFL did not receive weapons or military support. Taylor was able to export minerals and timber and receive armed shipments through Côte d’Ivoire.
Although dictator Samuel Doe was unpopular within Liberia and had antagonized large segments of the Liberian population, he counted with a special relationship with the president of Nigeria. He also had good relations and received support from the governments of both Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. Then, after ECOWAS was already entertaining the idea of intervening in the Liberian conflict, one of Taylor’s lieutenants, Prince Yormie Johnson, broke away to form a rival independent faction, the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL). In August 1990, with the war now having reached the capital city of Monrovia and with no apparent prospect of settlement in sight, ECOMOG was deployed.
To end the fratricide, the ECOWAS Standing Mediation Committee (ESMC) held its first meeting in Banjul, Gambia on August 6-7, 1990 calling for a national conference of all the Liberian political parties and other interest groups to be held as soon as possible for the “establishment of an interim government of Liberia.” Charles Taylor, the leader of the NPFL rejected Gambia’s invitation to participate in the First All Liberia Conference, although six political parties, ten interest groups and a number of individuals accepted the invitation and participated in the event. Taylor felt he would achieve military victory imminently and upon withdrawing from the mediation meetings, he vowed to attend the June 1991 OUA Summit as President of Liberia, but his absence from the previous conference raised questions about his political objectives in the civil war.
In Liberia, ECOMOG (established as a “peacekeeping force”) intervened to restore peace – since there was no peace agreement in place to “keep.” In the initial ECOMOG operation, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria contributed troops. Later, Benin, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger and Senegal also participated. However, throughout the operation, Nigerian management and dominance raised questions about whether Nigeria should emerge as the more powerful actor within ECOMOG and within West Africa.
The initial commitment of 3,000 soldiers for the ECOMOG peacekeeping operation was made without a proper analysis of the real situation that these soldiers would have to confront on the ground. The first ECOMOG contingent, a few hundred soldiers and supporting staff of a later estimated force of 3,500 were contributed by Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Guinea. It was led by Ghana’s Lt. General Arnold Quainoo as Force Commander and landed at Monrovia on August 24-25, 1990. Taylor called the ECOMOG force “a foreign occupation force,” fired on the first ECOMOG contingent as it attempted to land and killed a number of soldiers and civilians. However, in respose to Taylor’s demand that he would cooperate with ECOMOG if it integrated some Francophone nations, Senegal sent a large contingent in late 1991, and a little bit later, Mali also supplied troops. However, although ECOMOG in August 1992 was 9,000-troops strong, full hostilities broke out again in September 1992. As reported by the UN Secretary General, ECOWAS troops had to be withdrawn from Liberia several times because they were menaced by numerically superior rebel troops. Indeed, during most of its presence in Liberia, only about 16% of ECOMOG troops were fully deployed.
Many Liberians perceived ECOMOG as an occupation force that was protecting a president they no longer wanted. After President Doe was captured at ECOMOG headquarters and subsequently assassinated by Prince Johnson, ECOMOG redefined its mission. The killing of President Doe severely undermined the credibility of ECOMOG, because the peacekeepers did not act to save Doe. Also, ECOMOG undertook the enforcement action and intervention action in Liberia before obtaining authorization from the Security Council, which set a dangerous and disturbing precedent for international law.
ECOWAS declared an economic embargo against the NPFL on November 7, 1992, which was followed by a Security Council arms embargo. After both of these steps were taken, Charles Taylor was isolated both territorially and diplomatically. In mid-1992, Ivorian President Houphouet-Boigny began limiting arms shipments from Ivorian territory to the NPFL, and as a result, ECOMOG became more successful monitoring the embargo.
At the height of the Liberian civil war at the beginning of the 1990s, there were about eight different rebel groups struggling for power, some of them supporting factions along ethnicity or personalities and others either supporters of the Doe regime or groups financed by neighboring countries with interests in the civil war. It was in this chaotic environment that ECOWAS showed its best colors by being able to have the different groups reach out to each other and sign a peace agreement in September 1996. This Agreement had both a military and a political component, which formed the basis of subsequent arrangements for ending Liberia’s civil war. The military section called for an immediate cease-fire, followed by disarmament, encampment and demobilization of the warring factions, to be monitored by the Joint Cease-Fire Monitoring Committee (JCMC), composed of representatives of the warring factions, ECOMOG and the UN. The agreement also called for the formation of a transitional government to rule the nation for six months followed by free and fair elections. The elections were held on 19 July 1997 and Charles Taylor won the presidential elections with his National Patriotic Party winning 21 of the 26 seats in the legislature with 75.3 percent of the total vote. On August 2, 1997, Charles Taylor was sworn as President of Liberia.
The ECOMOG peacekeeping operation was characterized by its troop composition, which included mostly Nigerian and Ghanaian troops, a characteristic that hindered its capacity to secure effectively the cooperation of the rest of the members in the organization. When the peacekeeping operation started in August 1990, it was launched without any agreement among the Anglophone and the Francophone blocks within the organization. It was precisely for this reason that the United States and other countries supported the participation of troops from Senegal in this operation, on the belief that by expanding the number of participating countries the operation would gain more legitimacy, plus Charles Taylor had also said that he would accept ECOMOG if at least one Francophone nation would join this operation. The United States used an American private company named Pacific Architects and Engineers to provide drivers and trucks. The Americans also transported some of the ECOMOG troops in five C-130 Hercules. However, the decision on the part of ECOWAS to deploy a military force in Liberia to intervene in the conflict created a serious disagreement among its nation members. On one hand, the Anglophone countries, led by Nigeria, strongly supported the intervention; while the Francophone nations opposed the operation. Thus, on one side, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and on the other Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Togo, each group pulling in opposite directions. The Francophone opposition to the intervention had several reasons, but the reason most advocated at the international meetings was that they were against the violation of the sovereignty of one of the member states.
In reality, the Babangida/Doe friendship limited the capacity of the former. He was unacceptable to the NPFL as a mediator. The NPFL alleged that Nigeria had supplied Doe with arms and was one of the last countries condemning Doe’s brutalities; and that these actions demonstrated a Nigerian alliance with Doe. In addition, NPFL antipathy aside, Babangida probably would have found it difficult to rally the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) of Nigeria for what seemed, even then, a daunting undertaking. President Houphouet-Boigny and many senior Ivoirians were personal friends of Tolbert and his colleagues killed on April 22, 1980 by the Doe regime. Personal antagonisms between Houphouet and Doe intensified when AFL soldiers dragged Houphouet’s foster son-in-law, Adolphus B. Tolbert, from the French Embassy in Monrovia and killed him in 1980.
Burkina Faso declared its opposition to the ECOWAS intervention as did Côte d’Ivoire, but in a more measured tone. These two nations helped the Charles Taylor’s guerrilla rebels. Senegal also expressed its reservations about the military intervention and complained about the lack of consultation in the decision-making process. The absence of ECOMOG troops from any Francophone country, with the exception of a minuscule contingent from Guinea, was a distinguishing characteristic of the West African force that landed in Monrovia at the end of August 1990. When Senegal, in September 1991, decided to commit a major contingent to ECOMOG, this action was seen as an important and significant event in the regional attempt to bring peace to Liberia. The U.S. government was behind this measure, with initially Herman Cohen, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and later the Secretary of State James Baker and President George Bush urging Abdou Diouf, the President of Senegal, to commit troops to ECOMOG. When the President of Senegal travelled to Washington D.C., the U.S. administration pledged to pay a significant portion of the material costs of the operation. Up to that time, the U.S. had contributed some financial support to ECOMOG, estimated at about $ 2.8 million. The U.S. expressed its intention to increase its financial contribution by an additional $ 3.75 million “to support the Yamoussoukro peace process.” In addition, the U.S. allocated $ 1 million to each Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal; $ 500,000 each to Ghana, Guinea and Sierra Leone and $ 250,000 to Gambia. Furthermore, the U.S. government took advantage of its prerogatives under the Section 506b provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, which gives the Pentagon the authority to supply materials and ammunitions from its inventory to help other governments in their peacekeeping operations. In this manner, the U.S. Government awarded the government of Senegal about $ 15 million worth of military equipment; and this decision probably convinced President Diouf that he should support the ECOWAS peacekeeping operation in Liberia despite what looked as a failed enterprise. Furthermore, when it was discovered that American military jeeps bought by the Doe government were still in transit in Dakar, the U.S. also gave them to the government of Senegal for use in his army. The Washington Post noted that in addition to all these material contributions to Senegal that the U.S. Government also forgave this country’s debt to the United States in the approximate amount of $ 42 million, as it was also doing with the external debt of other nations that had participated in the American-led Gulf War.
However, the participation of the troops from Senegal did not fulfill its political and military objectives. By mid-1992, it had become apparent that the assumption on which Senegal had agreed to join ECOMOG was no longer valid. The emergence of the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO) as a force in the conflict deterred Taylor from cooperating with ECOMOG’s disarmament mission. The civil war, rather than decreasing in intensity, became bloodier. Senegalese General Seck soon concluded that an intervention in the Liberian war was a failed effort and started to ask President Diouf to withdraw the Senegalese troops from the operation. Initially, Charles Taylor said that he would cooperate with ECOMOG as soon as a Francophone country would join the peacekeeping operation, so that the leadership of Nigeria could be somehow neutralized, but it was clear at the time that Taylor had mislead the international community and the United States specifically. At long last, the U.S. Government also realized that they had acted upon false premises. Both Assistant Secretary and ex-President Jimmy Carter expressed concerns that ECOMOG could not operate as a neutral force within Liberia and that it was necessary to engage the United Nations in the crisis. After about a year supporting ECOMOG, the military troops of Senegal were sent home without its participation achieving any of its objectives. Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal and the non-ECOWAS member of Libya accused Nigeria of sponsoring ECOMOG as part of its “Paix Nigeriana” policy in the sub region without consulting the heads of state and the governments of ECOWAS.
The Ivorian President then accused the governments of neighboring Burkina Faso and Liberia of fomenting the rebellion in his country while Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia, accused Côte d’Ivoire of backing a faction of the Liberian rebels called Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). Reportedly, soldiers from both Liberia and Sierra Leone were fighting on both sides of the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire. Overall, about 125,000 refugees from Côte d’Ivoire sought refuge in the neighboring countries of Liberia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso. Côte d’Ivoire, thus, provided a border base for the rebels to infiltrate Liberia through Nimba County. Burkina Faso served as training and transit point for arms transfers from Libya to the rebels in Côte d’Ivoire, and Libya served as a recruiting and training axis for the rebels.
The Role of Nigeria
Nigeria was financing about 80 percent of ECOMOG’s cost in Liberia. A report published in the Financial Times stated that the government of Nigeria was spending from $ 250 to $ 500 million of oil windfall from the Gulf War in the Liberian operations. The government of Nigeria reported that it was spending much less, because each Nigerian soldier was on a daily allowance of only five dollars.
The failure of Nigeria to evacuate its nationals, as all other countries were doing before the landing of the ECOMOG troops in Liberia, received great criticism from the Nigerian media. Nigerians were worried that their government had sacrificed their fellow citizens for the safety of President Doe. The situation worsened when arms supplied by Nigeria to President Doe’s army were captured by the rebel forces of Charles Taylor. This singular act appeared to confirm the close friendship of President Babangida of Nigeria with President Doe and the conclusion that Nigeria was in Liberia to protect Doe. Both individuals had met while attending the Nigerian Defense Academy at Kaduna.
AU Participation and the UN Take Over
As ECOMOG proved incapable of settling the situation, the African Union arranged for the participation of a non-ECOWAS element in the operation in the form of troops from Tanzania and Uganda and also sought the approval of the United Nations for the modified operation. As this approach did not succeed, in September 1993, the UN Security Council gave authorization for the establishment of the UN Observer Mission in Liberia (UNOMIL). The UN was going to embark on its first military mission in cooperation with another already established peacekeeping operation launched by a sub-regional organization. This approach looked, at the time, to be a new model for peacekeeping operations. However, one of the mandated functions of UNOMIL was to supervise the role of ECOMOG in the provision of security and the collection and destruction of arms. It was also to monitor the West Africans’ behaviors in relation to human rights and international law. This inevitably led to cross-organizational distrust. Within six months, it was clear to UN personnel that UNOMIL could not fulfill any of its two main mandates. At the same time, UNOMIL was perceived as naïve and not sufficiently robust to deal with the various factions within Liberia, particularly with the NPFL. The United States, which had been quite generous in funding the peace process, started to disengage, citing concerns about the political and military behavior of the ECOMOG commanders. However, as the combined UN-ECOWAS operation confronted even greater difficulties on the ground, the United States slowly realized that it had to play a more active role. The ECOMOG peacekeepers became so notorious for stealing the country’s resources that the acronym ECOMOG came to mean “every car or moving object gone.” One of the most blatant acts of thievery by the ECOMOG forces was the dismantling and sale of the Buchanan iron ore plant while it was under the control of ECOMOG troops. Sometimes the ECOMOG troops physically assaulted civilians in the population. A victim said, “They were just as bad as anyone else. Maybe even more. They will see you and beat for nothing, and there is not anything you or anyone can do about it.”
ECOWAS had requested technical assistance from the UN for its mission in Liberia in 1990 when it decided to establish its peacekeeping force, but at that time the UN Secretariat in New York did not respond positively, although James Jonah, the Sierra Leonean UN Undersecretary General for Political Affairs, was dispatched to regional meetings and became an advisor for the ECOWAS leaders and an advocate within the Secretariat. At the 14th ECOWAS Summit in Abuja, Nigeria on July 4-6, 1991, the chiefs of state set up a committee of five members states to aid the Standing Mediation Committee seeking a solution to the conflict in Liberia. One week earlier, a consultative meeting of Heads of State and Government was held in Yamoussoukro where the mission of ECOMOG was redefined and a commitment was made by the interim government of Liberia and the NPFL to honor the cease fire. Present at the meeting were Amos Sawyer, President of the Interim Government of Liberia, Charles Taylor, Chief of the NPFL and the representative of the International Negotiations Network (INN) former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
In addition, although the African nations including the ECOWAS countries did not want the UN to intervene at that point, they requested the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo against Liberia’s warlords. In 1992, nine ECOWAS foreign ministers travelled to New York to lobby the UN Security Council about this matter. This is the same year that Boutros Boutros-Ghali published his landmark “Agenda for Peace” document which called for an increase in the cooperation of the UN and its regional organizations.
In July 1993, the UN appointed Trevor Gordon-Somers as the Special Representative of the Secretary General to take the lead from ECOWAS in the peace negotiations in Liberia. Also, the UN sent an UN-Observer mission in Liberia (UNOMIL) to work along with the ECOWAS mission. In reality, what the UN was doing was sending a group of military observers to police the ECOWAS peacekeepers and ensure that its 16,000 strong mission abide by the cease fire agreement and use force only if attacked. Under the terms of the Cotonou Agreement, signed on July 25, 1993 (between the interim government of Liberia, the NPFL and ULIMO), UNOMIL was responsible for monitoring the cantonment, disarmament and demobilization of the Liberian combatants as well as overseeing the UN-imposed arms embargo of 1992. UNOMIL was also mandated to work with ECOMOG, with the latter holding primary responsibility for disarming military factions. UNOMIL was further mandated to report on human rights violations and to coordinate humanitarian assistance. ECOMOG was also responsible for ensuring the security of the civilian and unarmed military personnel of the UN mission.
Problems between ECOMOG and UNOMIL started right away. The troops of ECOMOG, poorly equipped for the mission, started to complain that UNOMIL did not lend them its vehicles and helicopters and felt that they had to do the most difficult jobs while the better paid UN observers were doing the easy tasks. The problems became worse when the UN Secretary General, in a report in October 1994 to the Security Council, informed the Council that ECOMOG had collaborated with anti-NPFL combatants during a fighting that occurred in Gbanga in September 1994. The officers of ECOMOG thought that these allegations detracted from all the praiseworthy activities that they were doing, such as escorting the humanitarian convoys to the rural areas of the country and providing security to displaced people in the capital city of Monrovia and in Tubmanburg. However, the collaboration of ECOMOG forces with anti-NPFL combatants, which started at the beginning of ECOWAS’ intervention in Liberia, was not in dispute.
There were five key areas of friction between ECOMOG and UNOMIL. First, ECOMOG soldiers, who earned on average $ 5 a day and were often irregularly paid, were irritated that UNOMIL observers were earning $ 100 per day for performing less strenuous and less risky activities. Second, ECOMOG wanted UNOMIL to strictly “observe” rather than “supervise” the disarmament. Third, ECOMOG’s officials were frustrated by what they regarded as UN special representative Gordon-Somers’s unilateral disarmament negotiations with the parties without proper consultation with ECOMOG staff. The fourth area of disagreement involved UNOMIL’s chief military observer, General Opande and ECOMOG’s Nigerian field commander General Mark Inieger during 1993-1996, who held different views about disarmament strategy. Opande asked Charles Taylor be given the benefit of the doubt in his offer to disarm his combatants unilaterally and talked of the NPFL’s “good faith.” Inieger and his officers considered this view naïve and regarded Taylor’s offer as an attempt to avoid close scrutiny of his arms and military positions. The final area of disagreement involved ECOMOG’s criticism of UNOMIL for deploying some of its military observers without consultation with the West Africans who were mandated to protect them. UNOMIL said that it had obtained the consent of the factions to deploy and that it could not fulfill its mandate by remaining in the capital of Monrovia. The UN also accused ECOMOG of violating its mandate by not protecting UNOMIL personnel and by restricting their freedom of movement.
The central paradox of the joint UN-ECOWAS mission was illustrated in both Freetown and Monrovia. In the intensity of the battle, just where effective monitoring of ECOMOG behavior and human rights observance was most necessary, UNOMSIL was largely useless because only 40 of the planned 70 military observers had been deployed before the peace process disintegrated with the RUF offensive at the beginning of 1999, and even this small presence was quickly overrun. In a report to the Security Council in January 1999, Secretary General Kofi Annan reported the arbitrary execution of suspected rebels and their supporters as well as the indiscriminate use of air power by ECOMOG.
Assessing the ECOMOG Operation
In addition to the failures of the ECOMOG intervention in the areas of peacekeeping, peacemaking and peace enforcement, the intervention had an impact on Liberia that will adversely affect its political, economic and cultural development for a very long time. The most significant consequence of the participation of ECOMOG in the civil wars in Liberia has been the prolongation and spreading of the war. To Nigeria, it cost at least 600 killed and $ 1 billion above normal operating costs, at a time when Nigeria’s own external debt stood at $ 35 billion. It also contributed to the coup in Gambia that overthrew Sir Dauda Jawara. In Sierra Leone, it promoted the formation of ULIMO, which was formed in Freetown in part to neutralize the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and to keep Charles Taylor away from the sources of diamonds in the west. Obviously, the worse effects were in Liberia, which suffered massive devastation and looting of natural resources; death, displacement, and violation of human rights of populations; political, economic, social and cultural dislocation of society, and reduction of opportunities for agricultural and industrial development.
Many ECOMOG commanders also seem to have gone into business for themselves. ECOMOG, for example, collaborated with Alhajr Kromah in mining operations in the Bomi area, and jointly operated timber projects and rubber plantations with George Boley from the Liberia Peace Council (LPC) near the Ivorian border (estimated at about $ 1.5 million a year). In addition, underpaid and ill-equipped ECOMOG commanders became involved in diamonds and iron products and were even been known to have been involved in stripping some of the country’s assets, such as railroad stock, mining equipment and public utilities, to sell these to expatriate companies. Also, the destruction of limited industrial plant caused by the fighting and the uncertainties associated with long-term returns on industrial activity will limit investments in that area for some time because, as a consequence of the civil war, the physical infrastructure of the country was downgraded and the productive sectors of the economy were practically paralyzed.
The control that the NPFL exerted over the economy of Liberia allowed it to engage France, which welcomed the opportunity to be able to import a billion tons of high grade iron ore to the Mount Nimba of Guinea. Private actors from France, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia exploited the natural resources of Liberia, especially its minerals. During the conflict, Charles Taylor was able to finance resistance to ECOMOG’s efforts at peacekeeping and peacemaking because he had access to $ 200-$ 250 million dollars a year from the sale of timber, rubber and other natural resources. A French mining company by the name of Sollac and the American-headquartered Firestone Tire and Rubber Company were implicated in illicit commercial transactions. La Tribune, a Paris newspaper, in its edition of September 2, 1992, mentioned that Jean Christophe Mitterrand was replaced as his father’s advisor on African Affairs in the summer of that year because of media pressure against his personal business relationship with Charles Taylor.
The first of all regional or sub-regional peacekeeping operations was the ECOWAS operation in Liberia in the period 1990-1998, and this was an operation that was deployed only with the financial resources, troops and military equipment from the organization’s member countries, mostly Nigeria. It was also in this operation that the United Nations, for the first time, sent a group of military advisors to support and cooperate with an ongoing peacekeeping operation from a sub-regional body. In the Liberian conflict, both Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso provided financial and military assistance to Taylor’s NPFL because Samuel Doe, the President of Liberia, had killed the son-in-law of Côte d’Ivoire dictator Felix Houphouet-Boigny in 1980. The Liberian conflict itself, which was a demonstration of the contradictions within Liberia’s ethnic politics, was complex and involved a number of competing groups. This conflict extended the resources and the resilience of the sub-regional economic organization to the limit. However, ECOMOG accomplished a degree of success. Free elections were held in August 1997 in which Charles Taylor became President of Liberia, and for the next year the violence was greatly reduced.
Liberia’s Second Civil War (1999-2003)
The election of Charles Taylor as President of Liberia demonstrated the hope of the Liberian people for peace and stability. However, Taylor distributed positions among his supporters and did not make an effort to include wide segments of the Liberian population, which quickly became disappointed about the government they had elected. Within a year, Liberia reverted to civil war and the neighboring countries of Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire were back in the business of supporting rebel groups, with Guinea supporting the Liberian United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) group and Côte d’Ivoire supporting the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). By 2003, the two rebel groups had gained control of a large swath of Liberian territory and started to get close to the Liberian capital. Taylor was making a desperate effort to stay in power, but his situation was greatly weakened because the Sierra Leone Special War Crimes Court had indicted him for war crimes during Sierra Leone’s civil war.
ECOWAS deployed its second force on August 4, 2003 to Monrovia, renamed the Mission in Liberia (ECOMIL), with troops not only from Nigeria, but also from Senegal and Mali. A week after this deployment, Taylor resigned and accepted an offer by Nigeria to grant him political asylum as part of an ECOWAS-brokered peace agreement. Later, Nigerian authorities handed Charles Taylor over to the Special Court of Sierra Leone, where he faced 11 counts of war crimes, grave breaches of the 1949 Convention regarding crimes against humanity based on Taylor’s role in the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
This second ECOWAS intervention in Liberia also faced problems of organization and resources, but this time the intervention was made with full support from the United States and the international community. On August 18, 2013, the Liberian rebel groups reached an agreement in Accra, Ghana, where they agreed to create a transitional government in Liberia to rule the government for two years and supervise the demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of the rebel groups into civil society and prepare the conditions for new elections. In October 2003, the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) took over the operations from ECOMIL.
The ECOWAS experience in Liberia is a rare experiment for conflict resolution in post-Cold War Africa. It was largely an unsuccessful attempt by the West African states to undertake the management and solution of conflicts in their own region. However, it was a demonstration of self-reliance that eventually could lead to the development of African organizations with the political will, capabilities and skills to establish some kind of Paix Africana in the continent.
However, most of the methods used by ECOWAS failed to produce the desired outcomes. These failures were due to the fact that, by and large, the organization was not completely informed about the many supporters behind the civil wars’ diverse factions. The organization also did not receive accurate information from the field about its major problems and weaknesses. Nevertheless, the effort made by the organization was considerable. Overall, ECOWAS was involved in 14 mediation attempts, 12 of which were immediately unsuccessful. The only two that had a chance of success were the Cotonou and the Abuja II Accords, although even these two presented serious implementation problems that doomed them to failure. ECOWAS was never able to maintain the trust of the factions, and in the beginning of the peacekeeping operation, it was widely believed that ECOMOG was a Nigerian effort to assist General Doe and destroy Taylor. This led to ECOMOG losing a necessary attribute of any successful peacekeeping effort. Under these conditions, the warring factions had very little incentive to surrender their arms because they viewed ECOWAS as having taken sides in the struggle.
ECOMOG also was unable to fulfill its mandate to establish effective enforcement machinery due to its inability to achieve a consensus among its members. In Liberia, the conflict revolved around issues of ethnicity and resources. Soon after the war broke out, Taylor realized that control over areas rich with timber, rubber, diamonds and other resources was more important than the immediate capture of Monrovia. In Liberia, the fact that ECOWAS was observed fighting with different factions at different times promoted extreme distrust on the part of the factions, thus inhibiting the ability of ECOWAS to communicate effectively with them. At the beginning of the conflict in 1990 there were four contending factions in Liberia: the NPFL, the INPFL, the AFL (Armed Forces of Liberia) and ECOMOG/IGNU. In 1991, ULIMO joined the latter group. By 1995, several other factions emerged to include the Lofa Defense Force (LDF), the Bong Defense Force (BDF) and the Liberia Peace Council (LPC). By the end of the conflict there were more than ten participating factions.
As an economic organization, ECOWAS did not have any political or military experience. The ECOWAS Secretariat was not knowledgeable about Liberian political culture beyond the simplistic indigene vs. settler cleavage. Like other African dictators before him, such as Amin, Bokassa and Doe, Taylor was another greedy dictator, not a liberator. His decision to hold the nationals of West Africa hostages, to attack ECOMOG as it was landing and his non-cooperation and eventual withdrawal from the Second All Liberia Conference, demonstrate that he was guided only by personal ambitions and not by the desire to improve the lives of the Liberian people. Even the President of Côte d’Ivoire, which had supported Charles Taylor all along must have been personally embarrassed because of Taylor’s erratic behavior.
Liberia was the first test of fire for ECOWAS. However, such test was not successful. Rather than bringing permanent peace to the war-torn country, the ECOWAS peacekeeping forces became another party in the conflict. It was only with the establishment of UNOMIL by the UN Security Council that the international community as a whole reacted to the tragic events in Liberia. The mandate of UNOMIL, established by UN Security Council Resolution 866 of 1993 and adjusted by Resolution 1020 of 1995, eventually brought peace to Liberia.
CHAPTER II: Sierra Leone: Blood and Diamonds (1991-2002)
Background Information
The ECOWAS peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone was a consequence of the Liberian civil war getting out of hands. It was a consequence of ECOWAS’ inability to control the situation in Liberia. The crisis started when a group of rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) entered into the Eastern border of the town of Bomaru in Sierra Leone. The incursion was believed to have been promoted by Charles Taylor as revenge against the decision of the government of Sierra Leone to support the Nigeria-led ECOWAS operation in Liberia. Charles Taylor’s control of Liberia was deliberately extended into the southern part of Sierra Leone. His objective was to control the region’s diamond resources to finance his rebellion. By making Sierra Leone’s collapse into instability and insecurity, Taylor attempted (somewhat successfully) to relieve ECOMOG pressure on his own troops.
Foday Sankoh, the leader of RUF, and Charles Taylor, the leader of the NPFL, had agreed in 1991 to cooperate with each other in their objectives of overthrowing the respective governments of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The leaders of the two organizations knew each other and both of them had received military training in Benghazi, Libya and had been supported by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Foday Sankoh was a retired corporal from the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLMF), who in the 1970s was implicated in a coup plot that was later linked up with the leadership of a Ghana group that was organizing the Benghazi trips. According to the account written by Adeleke, most of those who trained in Benghazi had a troubled educational and social background and were heavily involved in drugs. Their lifestyles were described as lumpen, or raray men in the local parlance. The movement recruited marginal youth engaged in artisanal mining (san san boys) and alienated rural youth who were contemptuous of traditional authority; it also abducted and drugged children to produce vicious behavior.
Early Developments in the Sierra Leone Crisis
In April 1992, after 20 years in office, the All People’s Congress (APC) was overthrown in Sierra Leone. The president at the time was Joseph Saidu Momoh, who had been in power for the last six years. Members of the RUF rebel organization installed themselves in power and proceeded to create a government called the National Provisional Ruling Council headed by Captain Valentine Strasser. This head of state ruled as part of the interim government for only a few months, from May 1992 until July 1992, and thereafter installed himself in power permanently as head of the Supreme Council of State. However, the new government confronted rebel groups in the Eastern and Southern sectors of the country and had to create a militia to aid the army to fight these groups. Pressure against the government to conduct elections intensified, not only internally but also from the international community. Although there were problems between the army and the militia, these were manageable. The military installed in power a new man, Brigadier Julius Maada Bio, with the objective of preparing the conditions for the country’s transfer to democracy. The Brigadier rapidly opened negotiations with the RUF, and in February 1996, national elections were celebrated which Tejan Kabbah won. The transfer of power to Kabbah required the retirement of the top cadres of the NPRC from the army to return the balance of power to what it was under the APC.
In November 1996, President Kabbah, on behalf of the government and Sankoh, as the leader of the RUF forces, signed a peace agreement in Abidjan, but later backed down. On May 25, 1997, the military overthrew the government of Kabbah installing in power an obscure major named Johnny Paul Koroma who was in jail awaiting trial on an accusation of trying to overthrow the government. The Sierra Leone military then asked the RUF to join the new government, Sankoh was made Deputy President and a few members of the RUF organization were given posts in the new government. In November 1996, as a result of the Abidjan Peace Accords, the RUF for some time gained some legitimacy. As part of the agreement, all members in the military organization were absolved of any crimes they might have committed during the civil war and were given an opportunity to participate in the democratic process by becoming recognized political fighters. RUF rebels were either integrated into Sierra Leone’s new army or were helped to obtain civilian jobs. The organization was permitted to send representatives to the peace and electoral commissions. However, this situation was not going to last. After the RUF and the Sierra Leone military overthrew the elected government in May 1997, the RUF again became an illegitimate organization, whose members were the targets of a global travel embargo imposed by ECOWAS and the UN Security Council.
In March 1998, when a coup overthrew the government of President Kabbah, an ECOWAS peacekeeping operation put back in power his deposed government. This was, in fact, the mandate of the operation. However, although the government was reinstated to power temporarily, the situation did not last. The Diel and Bruckman analysis framework also would characterize this operation as unsuccessful, because although the government was reinstated for a short period of time peace was not achieved. On January 6, 1999, the RUF military groups, together with a group of soldiers from Sierra Leone’s military forces, occupied Freetown and overthrew the country’s government for the second time. A year earlier, in 1998, ECOWAS had restored the government of Sierra Leone to power after a coup, but now the president was overthrown again. This was the second time that the government of Sierra Leone had been overthrown in a coup within the last two years. The occupation of the city was a bloody endeavor, resulting in more than 6,000 deaths; the abduction, maiming and physical abuse of a large number of civilians and the burning of a considerable number of public properties, mostly houses and buildings owned by the government.
President of Liberia Charles Taylor several times sent troops to chase members of the rebel group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) that entered Liberia to attack the Liberian army and then sought refuge in neighboring Sierra Leone. In addition, the war in Côte d’Ivoire, which will be analyzed in Chapter III, also spilled into Liberia as the rebel bands led by Laurent Gbagbo fighting the Côte d’Ivoire government of Alassane Quattara, crossed the border to seek refuge in Liberia after attacking facilities in Côte d’Ivoire. In Sierra Leone, at least 6,000 of the fighters were children under 15, and 10,000 were aged 15 to 18. In many cases, the children had been inducted into war by being kidnapped or removed from their families and drugged into submission. The tragedy in Sierra Leone is another example of failure of leadership, both regional and international.
The ECOWAS Foreign Ministers in Conakry on June 27, 1997 decided to overturn the military coup again, and on August 28-29 in Abuja, at the organization’s Summit Meeting, the organization increased the scope of ECOMOG to include activities in Sierra Leone. The main countries contributing troops to ECOMOG in Sierra Leone were Nigeria and Guinea. Ghana, which had stood with Nigeria in the peacekeeping efforts in Liberia, backed down and criticized the operation in Sierra Leone and other Francophone nations also did the same, although all of them supported the embargo imposed against the new military and RUF-led Sierra Leone regime because such embargo had been declared by the UN Security Council by its Resolution 1132 of 1997.
A number of disaffected elements from the country’s elite, left out by the government led by Kabbah, joined or supported the AFRC. The population in Sierra Leone was no longer sympathetic to RUF and this organization was seen more and more as illegitimate and destructive. Especially in the Southern and Eastern parts of Sierra Leone, the general perception was that the RUF was a rebel group created in the North of the country with the goal of exterminating the peoples in the South and the East, mostly the Mende. This idea, although not true, was reinforced because Foday Sankoh himself was a Northerner and led to the incorrect popular perception that the majority of the combatants in these group came from the North.
The Myopic Participation of the United States in Sierra Leone
Since the fall of Freetown, the United States was working to negotiate a peace settlement with Sankoh. In late 1997, the Clinton administration appointed Reverend Jesse Jackson as its Special Envoy of the President for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa. Jackson’s primary objective was to bring peace to Sierra Leone. The Clinton administration and Jackson undoubtedly knew about Sankoh’s record, but negotiated with him anyway on at least two occasions in 1998. It was in this manner that the U.S. became deeply involved in what became one of the most absurd peace agreements ever negotiated, the Lome Peace Agreement in the spring of 1999. Despite the well-publicized barbarity of the RUF campaign to seize Freetown, Jesse Jackson and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright forced the Sierra Leone government to pardon Sankoh and offer him a post in a new government responsible for Sierra Leone’s diamond mines, where he could continue stealing the country’s natural resources for his own benefit. RUF members were also offered amnesty for all crimes. ECOMOG troops were to leave the country and a large UN peacekeeping force, the UN Assistance Mission for Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) would be deployed to help monitor the peace agreement.
However, UNAMSIL was a poorly run and incompetent peacekeeping force that made the situation worse. In 2000, some UNAMSIL troops tried to position themselves in areas occupied by the RUF insurgents and were taken prisoners, deprived of their weapons and according to some accounts even of their clothes because these troops, primarily from Kenya and Zambia, immediately surrendered. The RUF was also significantly strengthened by stealing UN weapons and vehicles. Just in May 2000, the RUF took 500 UNAMSIL troops hostages. In June 2000, UNAMSIL and Freetown would have been overrun if it were not for the deployment of 800 British marines who made a show of force and drove the RUF forces back. The UNAMSIL hostages were then released, although more hostages were taken later on. By mid-2001, the government of Sierra Leone controlled Freetown and limited areas of the interior of the country. UNAMSIL protected these areas.
ECOMOG in Sierra Leone
The involvement of ECOMOG in the civil war in Sierra Leone was a necessary part of its efforts to bring peace to Liberia. It was from Liberia in March 1991 that the RUF had started its operations and from where this rebel group launched an offensive against the government of Sierra Leone with full cooperation from Charles Taylor and his NPFL.
The ECOMOG operation in Sierra Leone strengthened in May 1997 when Nigerian General Sani Abacha, who was leading the peacekeeping operations in Liberia, diverted his troops to Sierra Leone after the operation in Liberia was terminated. The objective was to overthrow what they considered the illegitimate government in Sierra Leone that had obtained power by overthrowing the previous legitimate regime. This was indeed what happened. In February 1998, the ECOMOG troops overturned the coup and restored the previous president and his government into power. Nevertheless, this was not the end of the story. In January 1999, once again the rebels invaded Freetown and got control of the government, a clear demonstration that ECOMOG was unable to bring security and stability in Sierra Leone.
ECOMOG remained a regional hope for security, but one that was deprived of the necessary funds and training and that could get into problems once the warlords refused to cooperate. Under these circumstances, Nigeria’s President Obasan decided to withdraw his participation from the ECOMOG operation. Once again the United Nations was stepped in to take over, this time as the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) which included 3,500 “rehatted” Nigerian peacekeepers from ECOMOG. Also, the United Nations Security Council authorized a more international peacekeeping force to continue the efforts made by ECOWAS. Thus, in 1999-2000, the ECOWAS operation in Sierra Leone, (financed and manned by the organization’s members) just as they had in Liberia, ended up being taken over by the United Nations.
Most accounts about the ECOMOG participation in Sierra Leone conclude that without ECOWAS’ intervention Sierra Leone would have remained under the violent rule of the AFRC/RUF or that the war would have become an ethnic war. However, the limitations of the regional intervention were many. ECOMOG lost much of its deterrence value after its highly successful ejection of the AFRC from power because it was expected not only to defend all towns and villages, but also to fight the rebels in all corners and bushes of the country. The problem was not only with the tremendous difficulties but with faltering resolve. Nigeria, the main country participating and financing the troops, grew uneasy as the difficulties started to mount. A series of factors contributed to this cooling down of Nigeria’s resolve. In March 1999, all of Nigeria’s three most important political parties criticized the involvement of Nigeria in the civil war in Sierra Leone, and Abdulsalam Abubakar, the Nigerian leader, also started to have second thoughts about the Nigerian participation in the operation. The great reduction in the prices of oil, which were of about 40 percent in the last part of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, severely affected the commitment of the Nigerian army to succeed in the operation in Sierra Leone.
The Nigerian army gave several reasons about why ECOMOG had failed to protect the capital city of Freetown, and thus, been unable to avoid the second coup. They said that the rebels made fighting against them more difficult because they had used defenseless civilians as shield to protect themselves when they came into town; that a Nigerian lieutenant colonel had failed in his duties by abandoning his post at the important entry point of Kissy and had to be court martialed and sent back to Nigeria; and that the operation in Sierra Leone lacked appropriate military equipment such as Mi-24s and other helicopter gunships.
In Sierra Leone, the ECOMOG mission had its weaknesses exposed through allegations of illegal arms transfers to loyalist forces, its inability to provide effective security in rural and urban areas and the incursion into Freetown of supposedly defeated rebels. The attack on ECOMOG troops by the NPFL rebels reflected the absence of an effective cease-fire before ECOMOG sought to enforce peace. In addition, ECOMOG soldiers were accused of human rights abuses and sexual exploitation of women and children, of lack of discipline and of accountability. ECOMOG displayed a complete disregard for the principle of impartiality and violated one of the key principles of peacekeeping, the others being consent and the use of force only in self-defense. It is clear that no peacekeeping mission can succeed when the intervention force has a vested interest in the conflict, which is true for any peacekeeping operation. However, peace enforcement missions always take sides (as do most military operations), the difference is that a peacekeeping mission must maintain “impartiality” and there must be a genuine desire by the majority of parties for a peace to “keep.” If these elements are missing, there can be no peacekeeping operation, only peace enforcement operation. The war in Sierra Leone caused numerous coups and counter coups, killed at least 15,000 people and created 1.5 million refugees, one quarter of the country’s population.
As a result, in May 2000, the U.K. decided to send 800 troops to help stabilize the faltering UN mission and used its position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to prioritize the conflict in Sierra Leone, mobilize donor contributions and increase the UN peacekeeping mission to 20,000 personnel the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world at the time. Neither ECOMOG nor UNAMSIL on their own had been able to bring peace to Sierra Leone.
CHAPTER III: Côte d’Ivoire (2002-07) and (2010-11); Guinea (2007-10) and Guinea Bissau (1998 -Present)
Côte d’Ivoire
Although operating under an autocratic rule from 1960 through 1993, the Ivorian President Houphouet-Boigny managed the political system with intelligence and adopted an enlightened policy toward the country’s large Burkinabe and Malian immigrant populations, estimated at 25 percent of the country’s population. However, as his cocoa-based economy declined from the 1980s onwards, his internal problems erupted into the open. Although his country was pressed by important social and economic needs, the failing leader decided to build one of the largest churches in the world, the “Basilica in the Bush” in his hometown of Yamoussoukro, an act that demonstrated how his mind was no longer focused on his country’s many social and economic problems.
When the Ivorian leader died in December 1993, his heirs, all family relatives that included Henri Konan Bedie, General Robert Guei and Laurent Gbagbo, did not have the political acumen and negotiating skill of their predecessor to manage the complex political system in Côte d’Ivoire. The new leaders instituted a xenophobic policy of favoring the Ivorites, but relegated citizens born of mixed families to a status as foreigners. These included the large populations of Burkinabe and Malian immigrants that the previous leader had managed through political acumen. The decision to disallow former Ivorian prime minister Alassane Quattara (who had one of his parents born in Burkina Faso, and thus was considered foreign under the new laws) from participating in the presidential elections antagonized many Muslim voters in the north of the country. Laurent Gbagbo, who won the flawed elections, as soon as he achieved power, also dismissed about two hundred northern Muslim soldiers from the army. The tensions ended in an attempted coup by mostly military officers from the north in September 2002 and the creation of three rival factions: the Mouvement pour la Justice et la Paix (MJP), the Mouvement Populaire Ivorien du Grand Ouest (MPIGO) and the Mouvement Patriotique de la Côte d’Ivoire, which later became known as the Forces Nouvelles and still later as the Republican Forces. The 2002 civil war in Côte d’Ivoire started when a rebel faction from the country’s Christian south tried to disqualify a presidential candidate from the north from contesting the presidential elections. The civil war that followed divided the country into two halves: the Christian south and the Muslim north.
In this case, the mediation by France and ECOWAS proved successful and in January 2003 the rebel groups and the government signed the Marcoussis Peace Accord. This agreement provided for an immediate cease-fire and the creation of an inclusive interim government charged with the responsibility of reinstating full citizenship for all locally born Ivoirians as a prelude to the celebration of national elections. The agreement also included the deployment of the ECOWAS Forces in Côte d’Ivoire (ECOMICI), composed mostly of troops from the Francophone nations but also including a contingent from Ghana to work along with UN and French forces (LICORNE) in the stabilization of the country. Although ECOWAS troops participated in the implementation of the peace agreement, it was the presence of UN and French troops which proved essential in establishing the peace, with ECOWAS playing a secondary mostly legitimizing role. The stability was sustained by 4,600 French troops (reduced to 900 by 2010) backed up by 8,000 UN peacekeepers.
Guinea
Under its Mechanism for the Prevention, Management, Resolution of Conflicts, Peacekeeping and Security, ECOWAS also took actions in two fragile countries in the region, namely Guinea and Guinea Bissau. These actions, however, were unsuccessful and did not bring permanent peace to these countries.
Guinea obtained its independence from France in 1958, but subsequently was governed by autocratic rulers that contributed to make Guinea one of the poorest nations in the sub-region and in Africa in general. During the first 50 years after independence, Guinea was ruled only by two presidents, the last one President Lansana Conte. By 1994, the ongoing conflicts in neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone had forced more than 50,000 people to flee to Guinea mostly from Liberia. By the end of 1998, this number increased to over 270,000 refugees from both countries. However, Guinea was not a neutral observer in the conflicts for Liberia and Sierra Leone. The government of Guinea had allowed Charles Taylor, the most prominent figure among the Liberian rebels, to establish training camps in Guinea Since 2003, the Guinean president’s failing health became a concern for the region.
President Lansana Conte decided to run for a third time in the presidential elections held in December 2003, allowing only an obscure candidate of the opposition, representing a party that nobody had ever heard before. Obviously, Lansana Conte won the elections with over 95% of the votes. However, the situation throughout the country was so deteriorated that demonstrations and protests started to occur almost everywhere. The civil servants also demanded higher wages. This unstable situation, however, lasted for three years, until January 10, 2007, when the trade unions started a well-organized protest in the most important cities and called for a general strike. The leaders of the trade unions Rabiotou Serah Diallo and Ibrahima Fofana, the representatives of the two largest unions, were detained when they were organizing a peaceful demonstration in the capital city of Conakry and allegedly brought in front of President Conte, who told them that they either desisted in their subversive activities or they would face death. These events catalyzed a number of anti-government demonstrations demanding the resignation of the President, which were attacked by the police, the security forces and the special battalion of the president’s security. These incidents resulted in 59 civilians killed.
In these tragic circumstances, ECOWAS decided that it could not allow Guinea, one of its member states, to harbor another civil war and launched a conflict resolution initiative to mediate between the trade unions and the government. The unions suspended the strike and a new prime minister was appointed to lead the government under powers delegated by the president. The agreement also provided for the apprehension of all the responsible parties in the killing of civilians. However, the weakness of this agreement was that President Conte remained in power. He nominated as Prime Minister Eugene Camara, his minister for presidential affairs, clearly a person that he could control. The country spiraled into chaos.
ECOWAS once again attempted mediation. The prime minister was removed and replaced by Lansana Kouyate, who had been Executive Secretary of ECOWAS in the period 1997-2002 and who at least was not perceived as being closely associated to the president. However, when the changes that the public demanded did not materialize with the speed that the Guineans expected, new crises ensued. The Guinean elite, which supported President Conte, also reacted negatively toward the new prime minister, whom they thought was planning to become a presidential candidate in the next elections and solidify himself in power. The international community remained concerned that the potential death of President Conte could be followed by a military coup. Next, Prime Minister Lansana Kouyate was replaced by another government minister, this time Tidiane Souare, another close assistant to the President. In May 2008, Guinean army personnel mutinied in demand of the payment of their salaries, something that had become habitual during the previous months because of the dismal state of the country’s budget.
In December 2008, the expected death of President Conte arrived and with it, as also expected, a takeover by the military. On the same day that the death of the President was publicly announced by the Speaker of the National Assembly Aboubacar Sompare, who according to the Constitution was supposed to substitute the President after his death, a group of young military officers announced the formation of a military junta called the Council for Democracy and Development or CNDD, headed by Captain Dadis Camara. Camara immediately proceeded to fire 22 generals and to arrest some of them. ECOWAS rejected the military take-over and demanded that the country return to democracy by conducting elections in 2009 and declared that the officers of the CNDD were banned to become candidates in such elections.
On September 28, 2009, demonstrators once again demanded the return to democracy and the military government opened fire against the demonstrators killing or maiming 156 civilians. ECOWAS obviously had to do something, and in addition to condemning the killings, the organization asked for the formation of a Commission of Enquiry, together with the African Union and the UN Commission for Human Rights, to identify and apprehend the perpetrators of the massacre. The military junta appointed General Sekouba Konate, a close associate of Dadis Camara, as temporary Head of State. Dadis Camara, supposedly ill, spent some time in Morocco, but later was involved in the peace agreement signed in Ouagodougou in Burkina Faso on February 17, 2010, in which the temporary President would allow the nomination of a new Prime Minister proposed by the so-called Forces Vives, the main opposition group that included the trade unions and other organized sectors of civil society.
Guinea-Bissau
The root of the conflict in Guinea-Bissau was the struggle for power between President Joao “Nino” Viera and the chief of the Armed Forces Ansumane Mane, and was produced in a political environment in which Guinea-Bissau changed its international orientation from Portugal, the colonial power, to France and the Francophone states in the region. When President Viera suspended Ansumane Maneas of his responsibilities in the armed forces, (supposedly because the later had been involved in the supply of weapons to one of the fighting groups in northern Senegal – the Mouvement des forces democratiques de la Casamance) the civil war started. The people of Casamance in Senegal have cultural and ethnic ties with the Diolas of northern Guinea-Bissau and it was widely believed that this rebel group was obtaining its resources from the illicit arms trade in Guinea-Bissau.
In June 1998, members of the military rebelled against the government and attempted to get control of the government. To contain the situation, the neighboring countries of Guinea and Senegal sent contingents of 2,500 and 500 soldiers respectively to support the government of Guinea-Bissau. These troops did not deploy under an international mandate, but they were able to neutralize the situation on the ground. In November 1998, the military rebels agreed to a peace agreement that included a cease-fire, the withdrawal of the foreign troops of Senegal and Guinea and the acceptance of ECOWAS peacekeepers. In March 1999, the foreign troops departed and were replaced by the ECOWAS contingent. At this point, the United Nations endorsed the ECOWAS initiative giving the operation the character of an internationally approved intervention. However, the function of this ECOWAS operation was limited to provide security to the country’s international airport and to assist in the delivery of humanitarian aid. The mission was also charged with the disarmament of the rebel group, but was unable to that. The general mandate of this operation was to monitor the cease-fire and to facilitate the holding of elections. However, the ECOWAS troops were not experienced in this type of operation and suffered from lack of logistical support. General Mane, sensing the weakness of the ECOWAS peacekeeping mission, broke the cease-fire agreement and removed President Viera from his office, what made ECOWAS withdraw from this country. The Diel and Bruckman framework would again characterize this operation was unsuccessful because its long-term objectives of bringing permanent peace to this country were not achieved.
On May 6, 1999, the Mane junta launched an offensive to disarm Viera’s soldiers and took Guinea Bissau the following day, putting an end to the almost two-decade long presidency of Vieira. These events rendered the activities of ECOMOG irrelevant. In its ministerial meeting held in Lome on May 24-25, 1999, the ECOWAS organization explained that the reasons why they had decided to withdraw their troops just five months after their deployment was because of their own financial difficulties and because of the coup d’état. Overall, 712 ECOWAS troops from Benin, Gambia, Niger and Togo intervened unsuccessfully in Guinea Bissau in February 1999 before being withdrawn four months later. Once again, as in previous peacekeeping operations, ECOMOG was relieved by another UN peacekeeping operation authorized by the UN Security Council, this time UNOGBIS, the Peace Building Support Office in Guinea Bissau, which continues through 2014. The UN did not deploy any military personnel into Guinea Bissau and the country did not experience the same level or duration of protracted conflict as the other cases. The Security Council has informed that Guinea-Bissau has had two rounds of the presidential elections that are perceived as fundamental to restore the country’s constitutional order.
SUMMARY *
Across the five interventions examined, the author identifies a consistently recurring pattern: ECOWAS, an economic organization without military institutions, deployed peacekeepers into active civil wars, achieved what the paper describes as partial and temporary successes, such as defending capital cities and restoring deposed governments, but in the author’s assessment was unable to produce lasting peace in any theatre. The structural weaknesses the paper names are the Anglophone Francophone split within the organization, dependence on Nigerian troops and funding, insufficient training and equipment, allegations of partiality and misconduct, and the ability of armed factions to finance themselves through natural resources. The author notes that in four of the five countries the United Nations ultimately took over the operation, while the fifth remained a shared responsibility with the African Union.
CONCLUSION
The 1990s was a difficult decade for the nations in West Africa. Not only they confronted very serious demographic and societal issues with criminal gangs and drug lords threatening their security, but environmental conditions also contributed to the scarcity of resources. These were compounded by the erosion of state institutions, the increased porosity of international borders and the creation of private security and military companies that arose to protect those individuals or groups that could afford to pay for such protection. It was in this chaotic environment that ECOWAS took the gigantic step of establishing its first sub-regional peacekeeping operation.
In West Africa, the crises in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire spread into each other’s territories through rebels, arms and refugees. The failure of ECOWAS to restore peace and security in all its peacekeeping operations showed that there is a lot that the sub-regional organization has to learn to deal effectively with its own conflicts. Nigeria has provided most of the financial support and troops for these operations, and as such, has been perceived not only as the region’s hegemon, but also as a bully. Without Nigeria’s participation, the ECOWAS peacekeeping operations had no chance of ever being deployed. Therefore, a place to start would be to have Nigeria more clearly express why it proposes the operations that it does and have it do it consistently, although Nigeria did not send a military contingent to the last two peacekeeping operations in Guinea and Guinea Bissau. ECOMOG, the military arm of ECOWAS was able, despite its serious shortcomings, to protect the capital cities of Monrovia and Freetown from the rebels in 1992 and 1999 respectively. ECOMOG also was able to defend Monrovia in 1990 from Charles Taylor’s NPFL and in 1997 and 1998 to restore the deposed president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah back in power in Freetown.
Both Liberia and Sierra Leone endured a full decade of civil wars that resulted in approximately 300,000 deaths and one million refugees that spilled across Liberia’s borders into neighboring countries. The civil war in Liberia lasted from December 1989 until early 1997 and was fought by eight to ten factions. The elections held in July 1997 were won by Charles Taylor, the most powerful warlord. However, elections did not bring peace to Liberia. Once again in 1999 the conflict resumed, and ended only with the enforced exile of Taylor to Nigeria in 2003.
The conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone demonstrate the interrelationship that exists to secure the West African sub-region. The Liberian crisis not only produced cracks within the ECOWAS organization, because of the split between the Anglophone and the Francophone nations, but from Liberia the civil war spread to neighboring Sierra Leone, after starting as a military incursion originated from Côte d’Ivoire. The expanded conflict involved most of the region, with some countries either promoting peace or supporting one or more of the groups fighting for power. Libya, a non-ECOWAS member, also contributed to the crisis by providing military training and financial support to both the NPFL and RUF. The conflict in Guinea was not only internal, but was ignited when the rebel group of LURD operating from Guinea crossed the border into Lofa County in northern Liberia. The governments in both Monrovia and Conakry, in fact, were supporting rebel groups fighting against the regime of each other.
Although elections were held in Sierra Leone in 1996 and in Liberia in 1997, they proved to be disastrous for the peace process in the absence of a strong disarmament plan. However, after the successful disarmament in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the stage was set for holding elections and peace.
The Role of Nigeria in the ECOWAS Peacekeeping Operations
The ECOWAS peacekeeping operations were financed largely by Nigeria. It has been estimated that the combined operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone cost Nigeria over US $ 12 billion. Prior to the United Nations taking over the operation from ECOWAS in Sierra Leone, Nigeria’s daily spending for its troops in Sierra Leone was over $ 1 billion a month. These tremendous expenditures obviously meant that Nigeria was unable to use these amounts for the economic development of Nigeria itself, despite its grave social and economic problems. Furthermore, Nigeria lost more than 1,000 soldiers in the ECOMOG operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
West Africa’s regional hegemon, Nigeria, closely supported by Ghana, played an important role in Liberia and Sierra Leone, providing the military backbone and financial support for both missions. However, some of Nigeria’s neighbors accused it of pursuing a national interests and dominating the agenda . Countries such as Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Liberia sometimes obstructed peace efforts, forging alliances with domestic warlords –as did Nigeria – which prolonged the conflicts.
The United Nations encouraged ECOWAS to deal with its own conflicts, but later on, when ECOMOG proved unsuccessful, eventually had to take over from the sub-regional organization in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea-Bissau. The United Nations did not enter into the fray until the sub-regional organization had failed to resolve these conflicts. The program of re-hatting the ECOWAS forces basically made them an integral part of the UN peacekeeping operations. It meant that while the troops were the same, under the UN arrangement, the United Nations reimbursed the ECOWAS contributing countries for the troops, equipment and services that they provided to the UN mandated peacekeeping operation.
On the other hand, Nigeria’s political and socioeconomic problems, and the opposition of the Nigerian public to future expensive operations, may become the major limitations for any civilian government’s participation in future regional peacekeeping operations, as opposed to the military brass that launched the interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Nigeria withdrew 8,500 of its peacekeepers from Sierra Leone in 2000, and insisted that the UN take over the Nigerian-led mission in 2003 after three months’ notice, as a condition for re-deploying. This action reflected the growing frustrations of the West African country with carrying a disproportionate burden of regional peacekeeping.
In the peacekeeping operations in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria played a political and diplomatic role, but left the fighting to other countries. The intervention in Guinea was mostly funded by the international community and the one in Guinea-Bissau by France, leaving Nigeria free to play the more comfortable role of mediator and negotiator. Most ECOWAS countries, on the other hand, recognize the need for Nigeria’s leadership, but remain unconvinced about the manner that Nigeria has used its power to impose its will on the rest of the members of the organization that do not have similar military and financial resources. In the future, Nigeria needs to become aware of this important political limitation of its power and act in such a way that its behavior in peacekeeping operations is perceived as emanating from the organization from where it draws its legitimacy.
The Re-hatting of the ECOWAS Forces by the UN
The re-hatting of the ECOWAS forces continued to have the same serious problems that the forces had before re-hatting. Changing the leadership of the forces could not improve issues related to lack of preparedness, although some equipment issues were improved. The ECOWAS Mission in Liberia (ECOMIL) in 2000 became UNMIL. ECOMOG became part of the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) in 2003 and in Côte d’Ivoire; the ECOWAS Mission in Côte d’Ivoire (ECOMICI) was transformed into the UN Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI). The UN also took over the mission of the African Union in Burundi and the ECOWAS mission in Côte d’Ivoire in 2004 as well as the AU mission in Darfur in 2007. In each of these cases, the UN had less than two months to prepare and execute the transformation. In Liberia, DAF trucks from UNPROFOR donated by the United States could not be serviced because parts for such trucks were no longer manufactured. In both Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, the troops at the beginning received insufficient provisions such as rations, water, fuel and lubricants. There were insufficient vehicles early in the mission to support logistics as well as operational tasks.
The UN expanded peacekeeping operations and the ECOWAS intervention were not the answers to resolve the Liberian crisis. The only solution that had some possibility of success would have been a military operation to invade the country and arrest Charles Taylor, which was an action too radical for the international community to take. Absent the political will to do that, the international community attempted to resolve the crisis using less costly methods. On the other hand, a case can be made that if ECOWAS, and later the UN, had stayed out of Liberia and simply let Charles Taylor get power, that thousands of Liberian lives would have been saved. The UN and ECOWAS did not improve the situation in Liberia. The civil war killed between 100,000 and 150,000 people and forced 700,000 to seek refuge in neighboring countries. As in Rwanda (1994-5), but on a smaller scale, murderous elements in Liberia benefited from weak regional and international leadership and neglect.
In Liberia, the UN played a limited, but useful, role by monitoring the West African force, ECOMOG, and providing oversight for the country’s 1997 elections. The world organization, pressed mostly by the United States, also sent a mission to Liberia which had been plagued by two decades of civil war. In Sierra Leone, the world body played a similar important role, as it had done during the first intervention in Liberia when it took over peacekeeping efforts from ECOMOG in 2000. British troops also helped stabilize a crumbling UN mission in 2000. In Côte d’Ivoire, the UN took over ECOWAS’s peacekeeping responsibilities in 2004, while between 900 to 4,600 French troops supplemented UN peacekeepers. These were not the only cases where European troops helped to stabilize conflicts in Africa. In 2003 and 2006, an EU force also helped stabilize parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The idea that Africans should take care of their own problem sounds good because theoretically, Africans understand their environments and politics better than anybody else, but such hypothesis yields at least two negative results: (a) it provides an excuse for the developed Western states to leave the fight to the Africans and avoid sending their well-trained and equipped soldiers to fight other people’s wars; (b) it isolates African dictators from international oversight and potential criticism. Rather than making the Africans responsible to solve their own crises, the international community should make a serious attempt to use its financial and technological muscle to develop effective solutions for the complex issues created by Africa’s armed conflicts.
A major lesson learned during the West African conflicts is that conflicts tend to easily spread across the national boundaries and quickly grow to become a region-wide threat. The crisis in Liberia, for example, had a “domino effect” on its closer neighbors such as Sierra Leone and Guinea, and affected even the coups that occurred in Guinea Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire and Gambia. Rebels from Liberia and Sierra Leone were involved not only in the crises in their respective countries, but also in the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire. The security problems in West Africa will not be solved until ECOWAS and the international community realize that socio-economic aspects of development, such as high unemployment and mortality, and poverty in general, constitute fundamental aspects of security.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The record assembled in this paper suggests that the question is not whether West Africans should manage their own security, but under what architecture they can do so credibly. A neutral path forward rests on a division of labor in which each actor does what it is structurally able to do.
First, assign ECOWAS the role it has actually performed best: mediation, early warning and political pressure. The organization’s genuine achievements, brokered accords, anti coup diplomacy, suspension of illegitimate governments, belong to the political rather than the military register. A permanent, professionally staffed ECOWAS Mediation and Facilitation Division, engaging conflicts at the first signs of crisis rather than after armies march, would institutionalize this comparative advantage. Neutrality must be structural: mediation teams should be drawn in balanced Anglophone and Francophone pairs, precisely to convert the organization’s internal divide from a weakness into a guarantee of impartiality that no single hegemon can dominate.
Second, when force is unavoidable, deploy it under shared authority from the outset. The repeated sequence, ECOWAS deploys alone, struggles, and the UN takes over years later at greater cost, should be replaced by a standing tripartite arrangement among ECOWAS, the African Union and the United Nations in which Security Council authorization, UN logistics and funding, and African troops arrive together on day one, with clear mandates, defined success indicators and independent oversight of troop conduct. This removes both the legitimacy gap of unauthorized intervention and the resentment produced by one country carrying eighty percent of the burden.
Third, attack the war economies directly. Every conflict studied here was financed by diamonds, timber, rubber or iron ore. Regional certification and tracing regimes, coordinated border controls and targeted sanctions on the commercial networks of armed factions address the fuel of these wars in a way no infantry battalion can.
Fourth, treat prevention as the primary security policy. Since the paper’s own conclusion identifies unemployment, poverty and weak institutions as the root soil of these conflicts, a fixed share of regional security spending should flow into youth employment, demobilization with genuine reintegration, and support for constitutional transitions, so that the next Taylor or Sankoh finds fewer desperate recruits.
Under such an architecture, the slogan of African solutions to African problems ceases to be either an excuse for Western disengagement or a burden crushing one hegemon, and becomes instead a genuine partnership in which regional legitimacy, continental coordination and international resources reinforce one another.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
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Bangura, Yusuf. “Strategic Policy Failure and State Fragmentation: Security, Peacekeeping and Democratization in Sierra Leone.” In Ricardo Rene Laremont (Ed.) The Causes of War and the Consequences of Peacekeeping in Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002.
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UNAMID and MONUSCO, the Two Most Expensive UN Peacekeeping Operations: How Close Are They to Achieve Their Objectives?
How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT
UNAMID and MONUSCO (previously MONUC) have been the two most expensive peacekeeping operations in all UN history. Started in 2007 and 1999 respectively, the mandate of both operations have been repeatedly extended and expanded, but they are still far from achieving all of their objectives. Although the environment in each operation is extremely complex, these operations have manifested weaknesses in the implementation of their respective mandates, including lack of coordination, equipment and training, discipline, priorities and support by the host governments. This paper analyzes in some detail the two most complex UN peacekeeping operations ever launched and investigates the reasons why most of the two operations’ mandates have remained unachievable and elusive.
KEYWORDS *
UNAMID, MONUSCO, MONUC, United Nations, African Union, peacekeeping operations, Darfur, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, mandate implementation, protection of civilians, hybrid missions, Security Council
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I – INTRODUCTION
Since 2007, UNAMID in Darfur and since 2010, MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have struggled to manage a complex political and military situation with mixed results. At this time, both operations are still a long way from achieving their objectives. This dissertation will discuss and analyze these two peacekeeping operations and point out the difficulties that they are encountering in fulfilling their respective mandates. This study will identify the obstacles that have made these operations so lengthy, complex and expensive; and forecast how long these peacekeeping operations may have to stay in the ground if they are to achieve their mandate.
Most of the efforts made by the United Nations (UN) peacekeepers are concentrated in the African continent. Today, the UN manages a total of 18 active peacekeeping operations worldwide, with 10 of these in Africa. Among the African peacekeeping operations, two of them, UNAMID, the UN – African Union (AU) Mission in Darfur and MONUSCO, the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), consume 43% of the US $ 7 billion annual peacekeeping budget. These two operations have complex mandates and confront several difficulties to implement such mandates and achieve their objectives. The unstable environment in South Sudan and Congo for the last many years has shown the great limitations of the UN peacekeeping force to keep the peace. UN peacekeepers have learned to adapt to multiple and complicated situations, and have gone through five generations of peacekeeping operations but still, the current operations face a number of problems and difficulties which have impeded the successful accomplishment of their goals.
The end of World War II precipitated a number of wars throughout the African continent, some of them liberation movements fighting against the countries’ colonial powers and others were civil wars. Since 1960, more than 40 wars have resulted in more than 10 million deaths plus another 10 million refugees. In more recent times, the catastrophic civil wars in Somalia in 1993 and in Rwanda in 1994, and the inefficient and late response by the UN, contributed to disengage the powerful Western nations from African affairs, leaving the continent to take care of its own problems without sufficient human or material resources. This temporary neglect by the international community forced a group of regional organizations headed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU), to play a more decisive role in the deployment and management of peacekeeping operations. A number of African organizations, mostly organisms that had been initially created with the objective of developing the African economy, such as ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States; the ECCAS, the Economic Community of Central African States; SADC, the Southern African Development Community, IGAD, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development and AMU, the Arab Maghreb Union, had to assume some security responsibilities. Some of these organizations, such as ECCAS, ECOWAS, IGAD and SADC, pressured by the unstable conditions developing in their regions, and on their own initiative but with the encouragement of the international community, adopted lengthy agreements assuming responsibility for the prevention and resolution of their regional conflicts. In the same manner, the AU took the important decision of creating CEWS, a Continental Early Warning System together with ASF, an African Standby Force, made up by 15,000 troops from the participating member states.
The Organization of African Unity, now the AU, early on passed a resolution in which the member countries agreed to accept the borders that were established by the European colonial powers, and which these nations inherited after their independence. The leaders throughout the continent understood that they had to face very serious political, social and economic problems, and that most of them were so weak that they could not afford the luxury of asking for, or demanding, a rectification of their frontiers. In this manner, the African nations accepted the partition of the continent created by the 1885 Congress of Berlin, which divided the African territories according to the whims of the European powers, and with no consideration for the ethnic or tribal composition of the African colonies. This artificial partition created a situation where Yoruba communities in Nigeria were forced to speak in English and Yoruba communities in Benin were forced to speak in French, as the same community was partitioned between two “national” frontiers.
Findings
This study will show that both UNAMID and MONUSCO have suffered important weaknesses in the implementation of their respective mandates, including:
a) Lack of coordination. Despite the existence of historical experience from other peacekeeping operations about how to coordinate efforts with other international organizations, the UN and the AU still do not seem to have learned to work effectively with each other.
b) Lack of equipment and training. Most of the peacekeepers in both UNAMID and MONUSCO come from other African countries. These soldiers are being paid by the UN for their service, which is based on an average of what a trained military troop would cost regardless of from where it came. However, a large majority of the peacekeepers participating in these operations lack the necessary skills, training or even equipment.
c) Lack of discipline. There have been gross violations of the AU and UN rules and regulations among the peacekeepers, but the military commanders have been unable or unwilling to discipline the soldiers that have committed the violations. The AU and UN peacekeepers have behaved unethically or even engaged in criminal activities, including rape, and have avoided punishment. This lack of discipline hinders the activities, the functions and the legitimacy of the combined AU/UN peacekeeping operations.
d) Lack of priorities. Both peacekeeping operations have lengthy and complex mandates, which dilute the resources and the efforts of the peacekeepers, and makes difficult or impossible for the peacekeepers to focus on specific mandates or specific areas. The net result is that few, if any, of the missions’ goals have been fulfilled.
e) Lack of support by the host government. The government of the DRC has repeatedly requested the AU and UN to begin withdrawing their peacekeepers, with the idea that this will accelerate the country’s return to normality. The government of the Sudan, for a long period of time, was against the idea of deploying peacekeepers in Darfur and accepted them only after intense pressure from the international community. After the formation of the independent government of South Darfur, the mission has been welcomed by the host government, although the Government of Sudan continues to resent the operation.
However, despite all the weaknesses and problems, it is probably true that the situation probably would have been worse without the presence of the AU/UN peacekeepers, although this conclusion is difficult to prove or to measure.
UNAMID
On May 5, 2006, the Darfur Peace Agreement seemed to have inaugurated a period of peace in South Sudan. Sponsored by the UN and the AU, the agreement called for the establishment of UNAMID, the largest peacekeeping operation in the world, with the main goals of facilitating humanitarian aid, protecting civilians and creating an environment conducive to peace. This operation is also charged with monitoring and reporting about the implementation of the peace agreement and about how the parties to the conflict deal with human rights, especially in the unstable border area with Chad and the Central African Republic. The AU was the first international organization to intervene in the conflict in 2006 by sending a peacekeeping mission to Darfur, which in 2008 was substituted by UNAMID, an AU/UN hybrid peacekeeping force.
MONUSCO
On July 1, 2010, the UNSC passed its Resolution 1925 establishing MONUSCO, a peacekeeping operation with newer and broader mandate than its predecessor MONUC, which for the previous 11 years had been deployed to Congo with mixed results. MONUSCO is a powerful and well-manned peacekeeping operation with over 20,000 police and military personnel and observers, and with the mandate to use all available means, including force if necessary, to protect civilians and protect human rights and humanitarian personnel. It also counts with larger economic resources than its predecessor. Still, this gigantic UN effort has been criticized since its beginnings for still being too small for its complex mandate. Critics have highlighted that Congo is a huge country, of the size of Western Europe combined, and that even if all the authorized troops of the mission are deployed, that still this will represent about one peacekeeper per 12 square kilometers. In addition, another major limitation is that practically since its start this peacekeeping operation has been rejected by the government of the DRC, which repeatedly has requested that the peacekeepers be withdrawn, under the false assumption that such departure could improve the conditions and help the country return to normality. In response to this permanent soft opposition by Congo, the UN has been authorizing MONUSCO for one year at a time, fully aware that such short period of time is not sufficient to fulfill its complex and difficult mandate. However, in retrospective, it is clear that even if the operation had been deployed initially for a longer period of time, such as five years, that still the mandate could not be fulfilled.
Methodology
In general, peacekeeping operations are considered positive steps that the international community takes to avoid worse humanitarian catastrophes. However, all completed peacekeeping operations to-date have been subject to intense analysis and evaluation with the objective to learn from the committed mistakes and avoid such errors in the future. As neither UNAMID nor MONUSCO have been completed, no overall evaluation of such peacekeeping operations exists, other than the historical traces left by UN memoranda, reports and correspondence and the analysis made by journalists covering these operations.
The methodology used in this study was developed by Diehl and Druckman. It is a framework which takes into consideration the mandate of each peacekeeping operation and the level of completion of such specific mandate. However, as neither UNAMID nor MONUSCO are completed operations, some adjustments to the methodology have been made to use whatever information is available up to this point. Other authors also have used the Diehl and Druckman methodology or framework in their analysis, but had to adapt such methodology to the specific circumstances of each case and to the data that is available. In this study, some adjustments were made to the framework to adapt it to the specific characteristics of UNAMID and MONUSCO and their complex mandates, which so far have been only either unfulfilled or just partially fulfilled. Most of the two operations’ mandates have remained unachievable and elusive.
In addition to this introductory chapter, this dissertation consists of a chapter about an overview about conflict and security in Africa, two chapters specifically to analyze the specific situation of UNAMID and MONUSCO, the two peacekeeping operations subject of this study, a discussion chapter and some concluding comments.
MAIN CORPUS
CHAPTER II – BACKGROUND INFORMATION – CONFLICT AND SECURITY IN AFRICA
Right at the end of the Cold War there was a short period of time in which it seemed that the newly found peace between the superpowers would exert a very positive influence in the rest of the world. The two superpowers, which before the Cold War were in constant antagonism about practically everything that was discussed in the SC, finally could agree on issues such as the withdrawal of Cuban troops from the People’s Republic of Angola, or to help Namibia obtain its independence. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, after many years in jail and in 1994 became the President of South Africa. The Ethiopian civil war, which had lasted 20 years, ended in 1991. Eritrea, also after many years of struggle, declared its independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The 32-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire ended in 1997 and the country changed its name to the DRC. Still, the end of the Cold War did not mean the end of crisis in Africa. If anything, these crises were going to grow very rapidly. Many African nations were being destroyed by the AIDS epidemics. Most African countries had accumulated large debts which they were unable to pay. There were hundreds of environmental problems, the product of benign neglect or the rapid diminution of arable lands and forests.
This means that at the same time that some problems were being resolved in Africa, others started to appear in many places. In Somalia, in 1991, the collapse of the dictatorial government of Mohammed Siad Barre engulfed the country in chaos. In 1994, Rwanda saw the killing of hundreds of thousands of Hutu moderates and Tutsi. In 1998, Congo was the focus of a regional war which eventually involved seven countries and over 50 ethnic groups; a tragic event which would eventually need the deployment of MONUSCO; and in 2003, Darfur was in flames, which eventually moved the UN to deploy UNAMID.
After the end of the Cold War and the end of the struggle between the two superpowers for influence in Africa, the AU made a serious attempt to take care of its own problems, although still with meager resources. The African regional organization sent out missions of all sizes to conflict areas, from a relatively small mission of several observers to Burundi to a full scale operation in a number of African nations, such as Somalia, Liberia, Darfur, Côte d’Ivoire and Comoros. These peacekeeping or peace enforcing operations allowed the organization to improve its operational, financial, institutional and administrative functions and prepare the organization for the deployment of even more complex operations later on. These operations were a necessary experience for a regional organization that later would be called to deal with much more complex situations. The improvements and enhancements of the regional African organization are important because although the AU continued being the recipient of technical and financial help from many developed nations, almost all of the participants in these operations were Africans. If the economic conditions of the member countries of the AU are taken into consideration, it is possible to realize the magnitude of the efforts made by the Africans to take care of their own problems, even when these efforts have not always been successful.
In the past, the AU was even forbidden by its own Charter to participate or to intervene in the conflicts of other African states, because this was believed to be an interference into the internal affairs of a member country. Article 3, Clause 2 of the AU Charter made it clear that the organization was precluded from participating in any of such conflicts. As the large majority of the conflicts in the African continent did not involve wars between two or more states but conflicts within a single country, some kind of civil war, this meant that the organization could not participate in the solution of any of these conflicts. However, when ECOWAS, the regional economic organization of the West African states declared that it would intervene in Liberia to avoid the carnage going on in this nation, the AU supported that measure.
The AU gained experience from the conflicts that occurred in Southern, Eastern and Western Africa, such as those of Burundi, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Somalia, where it established some structures and mechanisms to strengthen the security of some member countries. In addition, in an effort to improve continental security, the AU negotiated and approved certain Memorandums of Understanding with other seven regional African organizations about issues related to cooperation in the area of security. These regional groups included some nations from Central and Northern Africa, as well as all nations in Eastern Africa. However, there was duplication and redundancy in some of these organizations, as many organizations dealt with security in one form or another. Some countries were forced to belong to more two or more of these organizations, something that was costly and detrimental for poor nations with not many well-educated citizens. In addition, the burden of financing more than one security organization must have been considerable, and the implementation of each organization’s policies may have overlapped or even been contradictory. These organizations in reality were sub-regional organizations, but they were not only established to cover a specific geographic area but sometime were created because of language similarity or other reason. Some diplomats have complained that sometime the two or three organizations to which their country belonged had held meetings at the same time, which made impossible for the same diplomat to attend all the meetings. The mere existence of many security organizations, or organizations dealing either directly or indirectly with security issues could make more difficult the implementation of any strategy. Furthermore, such decentralized approach could generate competition and not cooperation among the organizations, as well as fragmentation in the ability of the member states to respond to the different requests coming from the different organizations.
The UN, especially its SC, has encouraged the AU and other African regional organizations to assume responsibility for the solution of any conflict that occurs in its geographical area. The idea is that Africans should be responsible for solving their own problems because they are closer to the conflict and are in a better position to understand the motivations of the parties in the conflict and the manner in which any problem could be resolved. The Africans have attempted precisely to do that, but invariably the peacekeeping efforts they have launched have had logistical deficiencies, the personal has been poorly trained and the African member states have been slow to provide the necessary personnel and equipment for such operations.
The fact that the large majority of the UN peacekeeping operations are sent to Africa is not surprising because it is in this continent that most of the larger conflicts of the post-Cold War have occurred. While the first large peacekeeping operations in Africa were unsuccessful: the withdrawal of the American peacekeepers from Somalia first and then of all the peacekeepers; and the failure to avoid Rwanda’s genocide despite the presence already of a small contingent of peacekeepers in the country, the UN was forced to play an essential role trying to establish and maintain peace in the African continent. Throughout the 1990s, more than 75% of all UN peacekeeping operations were deployed in the African continent, although many of these operations have been barely successful. Most scholars agree that practically all peacekeeping operations in Africa have been only partially successful and that the only really successful UN peacekeeping operation was UNAVEM I, which supervised the withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops from Angola and Namibia, and UNTAG, which oversaw the first democratic elections in Namibia, mostly because these two operations occurred right after the end of the Cold War, which created a short window of opportunity for the UNSC permanent members to work together and accomplish great deeds.
The next chapter deals with the literature review and offers an explanation of the methodology used in this paper.
CHAPTER III – LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY
Literature Review
Peacekeeping includes a wide spectrum of operations, but it is generally agreed that its function is to facilitate the end of hostilities and the start of peace. The term has won the characterization that it is a halfway between war and peace. Peacebuilding is a new term in use since 1992, which either attempts to prevent the conflict through diplomacy or attempts to establish peace after the termination of a conflict. Peace enforcement includes the activities conducted to establish peace in a specific area, usually as a result of an agreement reached earlier by the parties in conflict. However, there is still some confusion about the use of these terms in the literature. Responsibility to protect is the obligation of the international community to intervene in a conflict to protect civilians from acts such as ethnic cleansing, war crimes or genocide when the state is unable or unwilling to do so.
Although the practice of peacekeeping has been around for over five decades, “one could hardly call the body of work a literature until the explosion of interest in the 1990s.” The efforts before the Cold War had the main intention of offering suggestions to make peacekeeping operations better, usually based on individual cases. There were two multiple-books compendiums providing detailed information about all UN peacekeeping operations conducted before such publications. An important segment of the post-Cold War literature addressed ways to make peace and avoid hostilities. Some authors attempted to address the issue of how to prevent war once a peace agreement is in place. Others analyzed the differences between the traditional peacekeeping operations and the more robust, multidimensional operations. Most studies have dealt with peacekeeping operations carried out by the UN, but there were a few studies written about the operations implemented by regional organizations or groups of states.
During the golden age of the UN peacekeeping operations, there were a plethora of publications analyzing such operations, but most of these emphasized the weaknesses, mistakes and failures rather than the successes. Only two studies focused on successful peacekeeping operations. In relation to African peacekeeping operations, no author has surpassed the works of African historian Adekeye Adebajo, who has described and analyzed all the UN peacekeeping operations in Africa since the first mission in 1956 during the Suez Canal crisis up to the Darfur crisis. While the author covered a lot of ground and some operations may not have been analyzed with the necessary depth, still he concluded that in Africa all UN peacekeeping operations were unsatisfactorily launched or managed and that there was ample room for improvement. In the same work, the same author made some recommendations about how to improve the security framework for the African continent. He said that there were three factors which he thought would greatly contribute to the improvement of future UN peacekeeping operations: (a) the degree of support that these peacekeeping operations had from the five permanent members in the UNSC. If even only one permanent member was not interested in the operation, it would not succeed, but if all five members were determined to fund and support an operation, then it would invariably succeed; (b) the ability and the willingness of the parties in the conflict to abide by the peace agreement they have signed. In general, the UN will not send a peacekeeping operation to any conflict area if it does not obtain first the consent of the host country and the affirmative approval of all the parties to the conflict; and (c) the efficient coordination of all the aspects of the peacekeeping operation, not only its military and police aspect, but also its economic and diplomatic efforts. These three conclusions continue to be valid and relevant in the cases of UNAMID and MONUSCO. Both of these operations had at least an important party to the conflict not providing the necessary support to the operations, the Government of Sudan in the case of UNAMID and the Government of the DRC in the case of MONUSCO. A peace operation suffers when any party to the conflict does not support the peace process, but much more if the not supportive party is the host government to the operation. Adebajo also mentioned that it was imperative to guarantee that the natural or economic resources of the country in conflict could not be used improperly by of the contenders to finance its operations; that neighboring nations should abstain from supporting any of the fighting factions and that the operation should be directed, executed and managed by capable and well-trained individuals.
Once again, MONUSCO is another example where the natural resources of the country has been used, and continue to be used, to finance some of the parties in the conflict with the implicit approval of some of the neighboring nations, as will be explained later in this paper.
Other scholars also have mentioned as relatively successful the peacekeeping operation to monitor the elections in Mozambique in 1994, after a long period of civil war in this country.
Since the start of the 21st century, the conflicts in Africa have greatly increased, and did so at a time when the international community was already tired of financing mostly unsuccessful peacekeeping operations to this continent. In mid-1990s, the International Institute for Strategic Studies mentioned that if the international community had reached any kind of consensus about the conflicts in Africa, was that they did not deserve any attention. However, this conclusion is only partially correct, because although the United States certainly was no longer interested in Africa, during all this time the UN was still spending about three-quarters of its peacekeeping budget in Africa.
Methodology
The methodology used to evaluate both UNAMID and MONUSCO is the Diehl and Druckman methodology which lists all the mandates of each operation and then assesses the completion level for each mandate. However, as both peacekeeping operations are still ongoing and not completed, an adaptation has been made to the Diehl and Druckman framework so that each specific mandate is evaluated as to whether it is “less than 50%” or “more than 50%” completed, based on the latest UN official report for that specific mission. In the case of MONUSCO, the latest assessment report was issued on January 12, 2015. In the case of UNAMID, the latest official report was issued on May 26, 2015.
Addendum A shows the Estimated Mandate Completion for UNAMID and Addendum B shows the same evaluation for MONUSCO. While the determination of whether any specific mandate has been fulfilled less or more than 50 percent may be somewhat unprecise, it still gives an idea about how far from completion these two peacekeeping operations are. In both cases, most of the specific mandates have been evaluated at less than 50 percent completion, which means that these two operations could remain in the ground for a very long time. This is not unusual for a peacekeeping operation. UNMOGIP, the peacekeeping operation observing the line of control that separates India from Pakistan was launched in 1949 and still is active. UNTSO, the military observation mission in the Golan Heights in Syria was set up in 1948 and is still active. UNDOF, the observer force supervising the ceasefire between Israel and Syria was established in 1974 and remains to our days.
There are some limitations in this methodology. One, the methodology was created to evaluate peacekeeping operations that had been completed. In the current two cases the operations are still ongoing with no definite date for termination. Second, the evaluation of each of the specific mandate is ascertained based on the latest official documents, but these reports express the viewpoint of the highest UN officer in the ground who has a good interest to present his work in the best manner. Third, these reports do not evaluate mandate by mandate, but make general comments about the military, political, economic and social situation which lets the reader know how well each specific mandate has been performed and provides an indication about whether that mandate is less or more than 50 percent complete.
The next two chapters will analyse in some detail UNAMID and MONUSCO, the two peacekeeping operations studied in this paper.
CHAPTER IV – UNAMID
By 2003 the fighting in Darfur between several armed groups and the Government of Sudan and its militia had become a civil war, and in the process thousands of people had been killed and 1.8 million people became refugees. Since this time, the conflict in Darfur started to become a topic in the agenda of most meetings of the UNSC and efforts were made trying to find a lasting settlement of the conflict. On May 5, 2006, the parties in the conflict signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, which seemed to have produced a breakthrough, although some smaller armed groups decided not to sign the agreement. There was then a great diplomatic effort to convince these groups to sign the peace agreement so that a permanent peace could be obtained for the people of Darfur. As part of the agreement, a Transitional Darfur Regional Authority was established as an interim regional government for the area in conflict. In addition, the agreement also included that the AU deployed a peacekeeping mission to Sudan, which in 2008 was replaced by the joint AU-UN Hybrid operation in Darfur (UNAMID), actually the largest peacekeeping operation ever deployed, and whose mandate has been modified and expanded many times. By 2008, the population of Darfur had grown to about 7.5 million people, of which more than half are 16 years of age or younger. As of June 2015, the mission counts with 17,754 military and police personnel and 3599 civilian, which means the participation of over 20,000 personnel. In January 2011, the population of Southern Sudan, which includes Darfur, held a referendum to determine whether they wanted independence or continue united to Sudan. The results showed that 99% of the voters selected independence, and although Sudan’s President Omar Al Bashir, under the enormous pressure from the international community, seemed to accept the decision to let one-third of the territory of Sudan to become another nation, in reality, he was not resigned to lose a large portion of his country’s territory.
UNAMID has gone through a series of mandates, all refined to the changing situation in the ground, although always emphasizing the need to protect civilians, ensure the fulfillment of the peace agreements and ensuring that humanitarian aid gets to all the needy people. The mission makes its presence felt by conducting over 200 daily patrols through the three states of Darfur.
The mandate of UNAMID is extensive and has been modified several times. The words protect, support, contribute, assist, monitor, facilitate, liaise, participate, promote, coordinate, ensure and provide are used many times in the lengthy document. UNAMID is supposed to provide security, support the peace process, assist in the establishment of governance and the rule of law, protect human rights and facilitate humanitarian assistance. These are functions that most governments aspire to offer, but which the constant tension has made impossible for the new government of South Sudan to provide its citizens.
UNAMID Mandate
The UNAMID Mandate was first established by Resolution 1769 of July 31, 2007. This Resolution gave UNAMID two main responsibilities: (a) the protection of all personnel, facilities, equipment and installation “to ensure the security and freedom of movement of its own personnel and humanitarian workers,” and (b) support the implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement, prevent any potential disruption in its implementation and protect civilians “without prejudice” to the Sudanese government. It is difficult to determine to what extent UNAMID has fulfilled these two main objectives. The fact that the UNSC had to strengthen UNAMID’s mandate by approving the recommendations of the joint report issued by the SG and the Chairperson of the AU Commission (S/2007/307/Rev.) of June 5, 2007 means that the two vague mandates remained unfulfilled and required more clarification.
In fact, in this modification of the mandate, the SC added another 8 main points to the mandates, added a section with seven points about the functions that UNAMID had to play in the peace process and good offices, 11 main points related to security, 7 main points related to the rule of law, governance and human rights and one main point about humanitarian assistance. Overall, the mandate of the peacekeeping operation went from two points to 34. However, all these points are written in a manner that is impossible to quantify. All the points start with the phrase: “to contribute”, “to monitor”, “to assist”, “to support” “to participate” “to ensure” “to liaise” “to promote” “to coordinate” “to provide” or “to facilitate,” which leaves undetermined what outcome will be acceptable. The fact that UNAMID has remained in place up to our days means that these objectives, if they have been fulfilled, have been fulfilled only partially, because otherwise the operation would have been terminated. As recent as July 30, 2013, the SC passed its Resolution 2113 in which it mentions the need for UNAMID to emphasize the protection of civilians.
UNAMID IN 2015
Abiodum Oluremi Bashua, the current UNAMID head, has declared that “if the government creates the necessary conditions” the peacekeeping operation could leave within a year. However, there have been increases in the attacks to both civilian and peacekeepers in recent weeks, which clearly show that the first mandate listed in Addendum A, the protection of personnel, facilities, installation and equipment and the fourth mandate, the protection of civilians still are not under control. Edmund Mulet, the deputy chief of the operation in June 2015 testified in front of the UNSC and said that there have been negligible progress in Darfur’s peace efforts, blaming the current situation to a new military campaign by the Government of Sudan called the Decisive Summer Military Campaign, which is a renewed effort to eliminate the presence of the armed groups, but which have resulted in new waves of displaced individuals of close to 130,000 people so far in this year. The activities carried out by the Government of Sudan, one of the signatory parties to all peace agreements, also demonstrate the lack of cooperation by a neighboring country and the difficulty of implementing mandate No. 26 of the same Addendum about “support the Government of Sudan to maintain public order,” when precisely the soldiers of this government are responsible for the reactivation of the crisis.
UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon recently informed that in the quarter ending in May15, 2015 there have been 60 “incidents and hostile attacks” against the peacekeeping force compared with only 46 in the same period last year. This statistic shows how difficult has become for UNAMID just to protect itself, although the majority of the attacks have been unsuccessful. In February 2015, Human Rights Watch accused Sudanese troops of having been involved in the sexual assault of at least 221 women and girls in the town of Tabid in three waves of attacks lasting 36 hours. The same report mentions that the Government of Sudan has not allowed UNAMID to conduct a full investigation of this incident. Once again, the behavior of the Government of Sudan makes impossible the fulfillment of mandates dealing with the protection of civilians, the promotion of human rights and confidence or the creation of the necessary security conditions, specifically mandates Nos. 4, 8, 17, and 22 in Addendum A. The International Criminal Court has already indicted the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes, but he not only continues in power but got re-elected in a recent fraudulent election. It must be very difficult for the UNAMID officers to support the Government of Sudan, as mentioned in mandate No. 26, given the illegitimacy of the current government. At the end of last year, the Government of Sudan ordered two UN officers to leave Sudan: Ali Zaatari, coordinator of the UN Development Programme and Yvonne Helle, country director for the same program. The latest reports about the operation continue to show lack of objective prioritization, lack of discipline and lack of support on the part of the host government, variables that have plagued this operation practically since its beginning.
On June 29, 2015, the UNSC passed its Resolution 2228, extending the mandate of the Mission in Darfur for an additional year, up to 30 June 2016 and prioritizing, for the first time, “civilian protection” while also charging it with mediation between the parties that have not signed yet the peace agreement and the Government of Sudan. A few days earlier, on June 10, 2015, Edmund Mulet, the Assistant SG for Peacekeeping Operations had announced the additional displacement of over 78,000 people since the beginning of this year. Earlier on the same day, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court had briefed the UNSC about its work in Darfur, explaining that the ICC had to suspend its investigations in Darfur “due to the Council’s inaction in this issue” and concentrate the Court’s limited resources in other areas and leaving Darfur for a more appropriate time, although the Court would continue monitoring the violation of human rights in Darfur. Up to this moment, the ICC has issued warrants for the apprehension of Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, the Minister of Defense of Sudan, Ahmed Harun, the governor of the state of North Kordofan and Ali Kushayb, a previous Janjaweed leader and Abdallah Banda, the leader of another faction.
As of August 2015, the security and humanitarian situation in Darfur remain chaotic, with little or no advances in the political area. On July 14, 2015 there were fights between the South Sudan communities of Reizregat and Habaniya, which started because of a cattle incident and resulted in dozens of deaths. These clashes among diverse communities have also occurred in North Darfur, mainly between the communities of Zayadia and Barti and resulting in the displacement of more than 2,500 people and the burning of some villages. The national dialogue process which started in April 2014 so far has produced no results. A meeting scheduled for March 29-30 in Addis Ababa had to be cancelled after the National Party Congress announced that it would not participate.
CHAPTER V – MONUSCO
The former Belgian Congo, what today is known as the DRC, is a nation that has tremendously suffered the effects of armed conflicts for over two decades. Probably these internal conflicts can be characterized more as a civil war than by any other word. This nation has also seen a tremendous effort on the part of the international community trying to reduce and eventually eliminate the conflict among the contending parties and bring peace to the greater Great Lakes region, but so far peace in the region remains elusive.
The DRC attained independence from Belgium on June 30th, 1960 under the leadership of Emery Patrice Lumumba, whose party won parliamentary elections. This independence was followed by political crises and instability that weakened governance and the culture of democratization. Under the leadership of Moise Tsombe, with support from the former colonial power, the southern province of Katanga declared independence from Congo less than two weeks after the country had achieved independence. The ongoing rivalry between the superpowers as a result of the Cold War contributed to the escalation of the conflict, which forced the UN to intervene with a peacekeeping operation responding to a request from the Congolese Prime Minister. The conflict was brought to an end in 1963 with a lot of pressure from the UN mission and support for Congolese territorial integrity.
With the UN Peacekeepers already in Congo, Lumumba was arrested, tortured, shot, and killed by opponents, seemingly with complicity from Western nations who accused him of working with the Soviet Union. The Prime Minister’s death had serious repercussions on the leadership of the country as it became difficult to establish a legitimate and acceptable government for all political actors. A combination of factors, including but not limited to political instability at the top of the government, secessionist movements that broke into outright civil war, and influences of the Cold War in the region, led to the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko, who received significant support from the United States and lead military coups both in 1960 and 1965.
After Mobutu took power in 1965, the following three decades were characterized by a dictatorship that violated basic human rights, developed a personality culture, and became increasingly corrupt leading to the collapse of the country’s economy. With the end of the Cold War, Mobutu lost the support he enjoyed from Western countries and was compelled to launch a democratic process with multiparty system. However, his regime had no political will to undertake the needed reforms and to open the political space for other stakeholders. Tensions kept increasing, undermining the authority of the government and its power to lead and control the country.
The conflict in the DRC attracted the attention of the international community for a number of reasons, of which three deserve to be noted. First of all, conflicts in the DRC started in 1996 as a contamination from Rwanda. After the 100 day genocide in Rwanda, about two million Rwandans from the Hutu ethnic group, including the former Rwandan armed forces and the militia Interahamwe, found safe havens in eastern DRC. The new Tutsi dominated government in Kigali considered them as a major threat to Rwanda’s national security, pushing Rwanda, with support from Burundi and Uganda, to attack the DRC and attempt to topple the government. The international community, having failed to act to prevent and stop the genocide in Rwanda, felt guilty and accepted Rwanda’s claims, falling short of supporting its invasion into the DRC.
The civil war in the DRC has involved several armed forces and militias, creating humanitarian crises of catastrophic dimensions, contributing to the killing of over five million people, and turning the Eastern DRC into the world capital of violence against women especially the use of rape as a weapon of war. While the Congolese rebels were fighting a proxy war against their governments, the UN understood that the DRC had no chance to achieve peace without putting things in order with its neighbors especially Rwanda and Uganda.
The DRC is a very huge country that enjoys enormous reserves of natural resources. It is two-thirds the size of Western Europe and the second biggest country in Africa, after Algeria, and it shares its border with nine countries. The eastern and southern parts of the DRC are very rich in precious minerals, such as copper, gold and diamond, among others. The DRC also has oil and natural gas, plus immense forests that provide quality wood. As the conflicts endured, it became clearer that beside political claims the conflict in DRC was also about the control of natural resources.
MONUSCO Mandate
On November 30, 1999, the UNSC passed its Resolution 1279 creating the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) to observe the ceasefire and keep contact with the parties to the ceasefire agreement. The mandate of this peacekeeping operation was later expanded in a series of resolutions to include a multitude of additional responsibilities.
On July 1, 2010, the UNSC issued its Resolution 1925 renaming the Congo peacekeeping operation as the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) and expanding its mandate to include the use of force if necessary to protect civilians, humanitarian workers and human rights activists. The mandate also included the termination of the military operations in the Oriental provinces, as well as in North and South Kivu. However, these efforts were not sufficient, as Congo’s Eastern provinces continued to witness great violence, including gender-based and sexual violence and a permanent humanitarian crisis. The peacekeepers, mostly coming from African countries, were poorly trained and equipped to use force against the rebel groups. The transfer of the AU to the UN of the military contingents in the ground proceeded as planned, but with poor coordination and in an inefficient manner. Both Congolese nationals and foreign armed groups continued to take advantage of the lack of control to continue stealing the natural resources of Congo and sending the country into lawlessness and disorder. Specifically, the resolution mentioned that no progress had been achieved in reducing the smuggling of gold, ivory and wildlife out of Congo, a situation which has continued to our days, making impossible the fulfillment of the peace agreement or the implementation of security conditions throughout the country. In April 2012, a major violent crisis with mass killings occurred in the town of Beni in North Kivu.
On March 28, 2013, once again the UNSC passed another Resolution, its No. 2098, not only extending the mandate of MONUSCO until March 31, 2014, but also creating an intervention brigade to support the peacekeeping operation. This brigade was to be headquartered in Goma, be under the command of the Force Commander of MONUSCO, and include three infantry battalions, one artillery and one reconnaissance and special force company. This was a clear demonstration that MONUSCO’s mandates remained unfulfilled, that the long list of objectives carefully worded in New York by the diplomats of the permanent members of the SC remained unmet objectives. The SC expressed that this brigade would operate for only an initial period of a year, and that it should have a clear exit strategy. In addition, the SC named and condemned the rebel groups that had violated the peace agreements and continued the violence and the gross violation of human rights: the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the Lord’s Resistance Army and the 23 March Movement. The rebel groups continued to violate the peace agreement and refused to demobilize, contributing to insecurity rather than to peace. It was clear that 14 years after the UN’s intervention in Congo that the situation had gone from bad to worse and that all the complex mandates remained unfulfilled.
In December 2013, the UNSG wrote its fifth report to the SC about the situation of children and the conflict in Congo. It included six new grave cases of violations against the rights of children occurring in the period from January 2010 to December 2013 and blamed all parties in the conflict for these violations. It was another demonstration that the mandate No. 6 listed in Addendum B about protecting the civilian populations had not been achieved. In other communications, the SG mentioned Burundi’s violation of UNSC Resolution 1533 of 2004 for failing to inform the SC about the deployment of a military contingent of the Burundian army in the province of South Kivu, and China’s similar violation for failing to report a delivery of arms and ammunitions to the Congolese government in 2012. Arms and ammunitions from the national government are routinely diverted to the different armed groups operating throughout the country, once again, making impossible for MONUSCO to protect its own peacekeepers as mentioned in mandate No. 5, or to contribute to peace and security as specified in mandate No. 1 of Addendum B.
On March 28, 2014, the UNSC passed its resolution 2147, extending the mandate of MONUSCO to 31 March 2015 and renewing the mandate of the Intervention Brigade “on an exceptional basis and without creating a precedent or any prejudice.” On March 26, 2015, the UNSC issued its Resolution 2211 extending MONUSCO’s mandate to March 2016. The latest mandate of this peacekeeping operation, as in the UNAMID case,also includes a lot of unquantifiable verbs, such as “emphasizing” “protecting” “supporting” “encouraging” “reinforcing” or “combating,” which again make impossible to determine to what degree, if any, these mandates have been fulfilled. The fact that MONUSCO has been in the country for 16 years and that there is no clear exit strategy in sight, means that it is still far off from reaching its goal of establishing peace and stability in the DRC.
MONUSCO IN 2015
On March 13, 2015, the SG submitted a report to the UNSC about MONUSCO and the situation in Congo in general. He noted that the region was at a crossroads between peace and cyclical instability, that the implementation of the Nairobi Declaration had been slow, that there had been lack of meaningful progress disarming the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and that mistrust among all signatories continued. This was a clear admission that MONUSCO was a long way to achieve its objectives. He suggested to “redouble” the efforts to disarm, demobilize, reintegrate or repatriate the combatants and that he was “deeply worried by the low turnout” in the last meeting of the Regional Oversight Mechanism and the absence of some signatories to the Technical Support Committee. Lastly, the SG once again mentioned that the illegal exploitation of the natural resources in the region was a continued contribution to instability. In 16 years in the DRC, the peacekeepers had not been able to secure the natural resources which were financing the rebels and creating insecurity throughout the country. On May 6, 2015, the UNSC issued its latest press release about MONUSCO, condemning attacks against the peacekeepers the day before, in which two peacekeepers from Tanzania had been killed and others were injured. This means that just a few months ago MONUSCO still was unable to protect itself from the rebel groups and fulfill its most essential mandate. If the peacekeepers cannot protect themselves it is not likely that they may be able to protect the civilian populations or to protect human rights and the rule of law.
The Hutu guerrillas have resisted putting down their weapons and reintegrating to the civil life. MONUSCO and the Congolese government gave them an ultimatum to do that, but the date passed without anything having been accomplished. At the UNSC meeting on July 14, 2015 to discuss the situation about the DRC, Martin Kobler, Special Representative of the SG for the DRC, told the Council that he saw “a ray of hope” because he has noticed some cooperation between the armed forces of the government of Congo with those of MONUSCO. Speaking some time in French and other times in English, the Secretary’ representative dedicated most of his hour-long speech to self-congratulatory remarks and diplomatic niceties, such as congratulating almost every officer that have been promoted and even “express my best wishes to all Muslims during this month of Ramadan” and congratulate New Zealand for holding the presidency of the Council. It was clear that he did not have much to say. However, he also informed the Council that Congo will hold presidential and legislative elections in November 2016, but clarifying that these elections alone would not guarantee this country’s peace and stability. Toward the end of his speech he pointed out four main difficulties: (a) lack of a budget for the new to be elected Congolese government; (b) Unrealistic calendar for the celebration of elections; (c) Lack of update of the voters’ registry to account for all young adults that have reached voting age, and (d) lack of political space for opposition and civil society. He also remarked that in the past two months Burundi had fallen into violence and that over 140,000 people had fled into neighboring countries, including about 13,000 to the DRC. As the resurgence of conflict in any part of the region has grave repercussions for security and peace, this recent event adds another layer of complexity and difficulty to the operation’s mandates.
After many years in the ground, MONUSCO continues to suffer many of the same problems that has plagued this operation practically from its early beginnings, such as the lack of support by some of the parties in the conflict and by the host government, lack of coordination between the military and the civil branches of the operation, and general failure in implementing the mandates. The next chapter will expand the analysis and discussion of the two operations.
CHAPTER VI – OPERATIONS DISCUSSION
UNAMID Discussion
UNAMID started its operation as a result of the UNSC Resolution 1769 which took over and consolidated the AU mission in Darfur with UN contingents to create an almost 21,000 peace operations composed mainly by Africans. However, the number of troops deployed in the ground still is short of what may be needed, which has been roughly estimated to be about 26,000. Since its moment of highest crisis in 2003-2004, the conflict in Darfur has left more than 300,000 people dead and displaced other 2.7 million to neighboring countries.
This operation continues to lack the support of the Government of Sudan, which has made every possible attempt to frustrate the efforts by the operation. The UNAMID commander repeatedly has complained that he lacks helicopters, communication equipment and logistics to cover an area as large as France and with very few roads. The Western powers have been busy elsewhere, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving little choice to the unprepared and untrained African soldiers to do what they can. Analysts have claimed that President Bashir’s unwillingness to have friendly relations with Darfur is analogous to the resistance of Ethiopia to establish healthy relations with Eritrea, its former province.
In 2014, journalist and writer Aicha Elsbari, who used to be UNAMID’s spokesperson, resigned his position and published a series of incriminating allegations against the peacekeeping operation of which he had been a part. He said that UNAMID had lied to the UN and that it had engaged in a web of half-truths, lies and omissions to present the viewpoint that it has been working hard to enforce its mandate, when in reality it has done all the opposite. While it is possible that Elsbari may have had personal reasons to disparage the current administration and management of the operation, some of the information he cites clearly shows that reports addressed to the UN have omitted fundamental issues regarding many weaknesses of the operation, such as lack of coordination among their units and lack of discipline among the troops.
On October 31 and November 1, 2014, there were press reports about incidents of mass rape occurring in the town of Tabit by members of the regular forces of Sudan. However, when UNAMID sent a team to the place to investigate the allegations, it found “no evidence” that such events ever took place. As one of the mandates of UNAMID is precisely the protection of civilians, not finding evidence of violations may help create the illusion that the situation in the ground is better than really is. Osman Kibir, the current governor of North Darfur, in a meeting with a delegation of UN and AU representatives in March 2015, mentioned that the troops of UNAMID have been unable to protect themselves against the Sudanese police, and that rather than helping to bring peace to Darfur, what many UNAMID soldiers are doing is spreading crime throughout the new country through hijacks, robberies and counterfeiting currency. If this is the opinion of an officer of the Government of South Sudan, it seems that UNAMID has been unable to establish the best relations with the host country.
MONUSCO Discussion
The 1994 Rwandan genocide greatly contributed in destabilizing the geopolitical situation in the African Great Lakes region in general and the DRC in particular. As the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) seized power in July 1994, the former Rwandan Armed Forces, the militia Interahamwe, and many Hutu civilians left the country and found refuge in the North and South Kivu provinces in neighboring DRC. Military activities, with the purpose of attacking Rwanda, were conducted in refugee camps and other areas without any attempt to stop them. Also, since the last quarter of 1993, there were also military activities by some Burundian rebels. In 1996, a rebel movement with massive support from the Rwandan, Burundian, and Ugandan governments launched attacks against DRC in a seven months war which ousted President Mobutu and in 1997 handed the leadership of the country to Laurent Desire Kabila. This change of power in Kinshasa brought hope for many people in the region who expected the new leadership to usher in a period of good governance, freedom, and progress for all.
However, after one year in office, the new government in Kinshasa disappointed all observers. President Kabila started to have conflicts with his former Rwandan and Ugandan allies whom now he suspected of attempting to overthrow him. When he ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan officials who had been helping his government to leave the country, these two countries sent troops to Eastern Congo to help rebels who started fighting against the Congolese government. In August 1998, the second Congolese war started. The conflict involved eight countries: Angola, Chad, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Namibia, whose armies supported the Congolese government; and Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, whose armies supported the rebels. In addition, there were at least 25 militias. This conflict has rightly been considered as Africa’s First World War. Each country involved in the conflict had its own reasons to participate in the conflict, such as economic interests in mineral exploitation, revenge or fear for its own security.
A few months later, on July 10, 1999, a major milestone was made as countries involved in the Congolese war signed a ceasefire agreement in Lusaka, which recommended inter-Congolese political negotiations to make peace within the Congo after making peace outside of Congo.
Although the 2005 multi-party elections were expected to bring an end to instability and bring a new era of peace, security, and development, this hope was short-lived. Laurent Nkunda, a former rebel who became General in the Congolese army, mutinied and established his base in North Kivu. In 2007, he organized the Conseil National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) as his political party established its headquarters in Masisi, North Kivu. In what has been called the North Kivu conflict, Nkunda’s forces attacked Congolese forces and threatened to take over Goma, the capital of North Kivu; causing a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions. In addition, a leadership conflict erupted within the CNDP between General Nkunda and his ally General Ntaganda. The former fled to Rwanda and was subsequently arrested before being put under house arrest in January 2009. General Ntaganda took over the leadership of CNDP and, aided by the former Presidents of Nigeria and Tanzania, Olusegun Obasanjo and Benjamin Mkapa; negotiated peace with the Congolese government before signing an agreement in Goma on March 23, 2009.
The fall of the city of Goma, capital of North Kivu in eastern DRC in the hands of the the March 23 Movement (M23), one of the rebel groups, and the experts’ reports that the rebels were being supported by Rwanda and Uganda threatened peace and security in the DRC, with fear that the escalation of the conflict would endanger the entire region. The international community responded by negotiating a new peace agreement for the DRC and the region. After three months of intense negotiations with a lot of pressure from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the AU, and the UN, eleven countries signed on 24 February 2013 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Peace, Security, and Cooperation Framework for the DRC and the region. Although there were many doubts about the implementation of this agreement, it played a significant role in ending the M23 rebellion.
The new peace agreement established responsibilities for the DRC, the region, and the international community. The UN was asked to continue supporting the DRC strengthening the UN Stabilization Mission (MONUSCO). Four weeks after signing the Addis Ababa Framework, the UNSC adopted Resolution 2098 on 18 March, 2013 creating an intervention brigade, consisting of 3069 troops, with the mandate of conducting offensive operations against rebel groups. Two months earlier, the UNSC had approved “the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to provide reconnaissance of militia activity.” It was expected that these decisions had the potential of changing the situation in the DRC for better.
Within a few months the intervention brigade was operating in eastern Congo with peacekeepers from Malawi, Tanzania, and South Africa. A General from Tanzania was appointed to lead the force which was and still is in the country “to reverse the trajectory of one of the world’s most horrific and complex conflicts, one that has killed more than 5 million people since 1998, the deadliest war since World War II.” A few months after the force was deployed, this hope started to materialize as the Congolese army, heavily backed up by the intervention brigade, successfully defeated the M23 in a fight that lasted for 12 days. This victory over the M23 restored the authority of the government in many towns of North Kivu that had been occupied by the rebels for more than year. Furthermore, they restored the image of the UN peacekeeping force, which was humiliated several times as they failed to protect civilians and watched from their camp as the city of Goma was falling in the rebels’ hands one year earlier. This move was greeted by world leaders as it signaled a new change of direction for the country.
After its military defeat, the M23 announced to have brought an end to its insurgence in the DRC and declared its readiness to pursue its goals through political means. This was indeed an end of an era in the DRC thanks to diplomatic efforts and new ways of operating by the UN. However, by November 2013, the Final Report of the Group of Experts on the DRC concluded that the situation still remained unstable and dangerous, citing several foreign and Congolese groups still operating in the Katanga, North and South Kivu and Orientale provinces. The report mentioned new acts of mass killings in October 2013 in the town of Mutarule in South Kivu and in November 2013 in Beni, in North Kivu, and continued attacks on schools and hospitals. There was still overspread efforts to kidnap, recruit and train child soldiers by practically all rebel groups, and a variety of cases of sexual violence, enslavement and even torture, facts which demonstrated the continued inability of MONUSCO, even with the aid of the intervention brigade, to provide security to the DRC. The report also mentioned that the illegal exploitation of natural resources continued, as well as its smuggling across the borders to neighboring nations, situations which had persisted since the early days of the peacekeepers in the DRC. The situation has not changed much since 2013 and the peacekeepers continue to struggle with many of the same difficulties they encountered at the beginning of the operation. The next chapter will offer some concluding comments about the two peacekeeping operations.
SUMMARY
CHAPTER VII – CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Both operations (UNAMID and MONUSCO) are what scholars call fourth generation operations, which are very complex operations involving not only military personnel, but also police, coordination with humanitarian workers, gender issues, relationships with the civilian population and others. These types of operations are supposed to fulfill a number of objectives and bring peace to these territories. However, the fact that they have been ongoing for many years and that their mandates have been extended makes clear that these complex operations have not solved the problems they were charged to solve.
In current times, South Sudan and the DRC have both witnessed great horrors and suffering. In Congo alone, the civil war has resulted in over five million deaths and has been the scenario where the forces of nine nations have fought with each other in a variety of ways. Throughout a long period of time, and with the aid of numerous organizations, but mainly the UN and the AU, the parties in the Congolese conflict have made peace agreements, violated them and made new ones.
This analysis has demonstrated that both UNAMID and MONUSCO have suffered important weaknesses in the implementation of their respective mandates, including:
Lack of coordination. Despite the existence of historical experience from other peacekeeping operations about how to coordinate efforts with other international organizations, the UN and the AU still do not seem to have learned to work effectively with each other. It is clear that some learning has occurred after being in the ground for over a decade, but that the frequent change of the troops and police participants has compounded the lack of coordination, as the new entrants many times are left without clear procedures about how to link the efforts of the two parts, although nominally all the operations are under the command of a single officer. The variety of spoken languages and the different training levels also make coordination difficult, especially in war or semi-war conditions.
Lack of equipment and training. Most of the peacekeeping in both UNAMID and MONUSCO come from other African countries. These soldiers are being paid by the UN for their service, which is based on an average of what a trained military troop would cost regardless of from where it came. However, a large majority of the peacekeepers participating in these operations lack the necessary skills, training or even equipment. The developed countries over time have rectified many of these problems, but they have not been completely eliminated. The members of the peacekeeping operations rotate periodically, and some of the new units still arrive without the necessary equipment. The provision of training and equipment to the participating troops and police personnel is a vital factor to guarantee the success of any peacekeeping operation.
Lack of discipline. There have been gross violations of the AU and UN rules and regulations among the peacekeepers, but the military commanders have been unable to discipline the soldiers that have committed the violations. The AU and UN peacekeepers have behaved unethically or even engaged in criminal activities, including rape, and have avoided punishment because they have covered up to avoid punishment or the officers in charge may have even participated in the atrocities committed. This lack of discipline hinders the activities, functions, and legitimacy of the combined AU/UN peacekeeping operations. In addition, these sporadic incidents demoralize the peacekeeping forces, which although composed of members from several dozen countries, are heavily composed by Africans themselves.
Lack of priorities. Both peacekeeping operations have lengthy and complex mandates, which dilute the resources and efforts of the peacekeepers and make it difficult or impossible for the peacekeepers to focus on specific mandates or specific areas. In addition, in both operations, all the mandates have equal weight and there is no mandate that has priority over any other mandate. The prioritization of the mandates is left to the commander in the ground, who should use his best judgment to determine which mandate, if any, has priority over the others. The net result is that few, if any, of the missions’ goals have been fulfilled. Both peacekeeping operations remain in the ground because the conflict continues, and although probably they have been somewhat beneficial, in a certain respect they have aggravated the conflict, as when the peacekeepers have engaged in abusing civilians or in criminal activities. These activities would not have occurred if the peacekeepers were not there, but on the other hand, it is impossible to estimate how much good these operations have done if any, or how much worse the situation could have been in the absence of the peacekeepers. Judging from what is known about these operations so far, it seems that overall these operations have made a positive impact, although none of them have been able to fulfill any of their mandates at one hundred percent.
Lack of support by the host government. The government of the DRC has repeatedly requested the AU and UN to begin withdrawing their peacekeepers with the idea that this will accelerate the country’s return to normality. The UN, however, has kept a presence in the ground fearing that the situation could become even worse in the absence of the peacekeepers. The situation is very complex, with many participants and the involvement directly or indirectly of all of Congo’s neighboring countries. The government of Sudan, for a long period of time, was against the idea of deploying peacekeepers in Darfur and accepted them only after intense pressure from the international community. After the formation of the independent government of South Sudan, the mission has been welcomed by the host government. While the situation has not been completely stabilized, it seems that UNAVID, the South Sudan peacekeeping operation may be closer to fulfill its objectives than MONUSCO.
CONCLUSION
The obvious recommendations then become to achieve improvements in these weak areas, something that is easier said than done. Some of these weaknesses, such as the lack of training and equipment, or lack of support by the host government, are factors about which the UN has little control and which depend on the level of military sophistication of the sending country. The most promising areas for improvement are in the areas of establishing priorities, improving coordination, and ensuring discipline, although it is clear that all the areas are tremendously important.
However, despite all the weaknesses and problems, it is probably true that the situation would have been much worse without the presence of the AU/UN peacekeepers, although this conclusion is difficult to prove or to measure.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The five weaknesses this study identifies, coordination, training and equipment, discipline, priorities and host government support, are not five separate problems. They converge in one structural flaw: mandates are written as open ended aspirations for which nobody can be held accountable, in environments where a key party, often the host government itself, has no interest in their fulfillment. A neutral solution therefore has to change the architecture of the missions rather than merely their resources.
First, replace aspirational mandates with a sequenced compact. Each mission should operate under a short list of three to five prioritized objectives, each with measurable indicators and a review date, agreed in a tripartite compact between the Security Council, the African Union and the host government. Renewal of the mandate would depend on a published assessment against these indicators, applying the logic of the Diehl and Druckman framework prospectively rather than retrospectively. This gives the host government a defined path toward the withdrawal it publicly demands, converting its obstruction into an incentive to cooperate.
Second, institutionalize mediation as the political core of the mission. Peacekeepers can freeze a conflict but only a political settlement ends one. A standing joint mediation cell, staffed by the UN, the AU and credible regional mediators, should work continuously with all parties, including non signatories, rather than convening occasional conferences that collapse when one actor boycotts them. Sustained, low profile mediation is cheaper than a single month of military deployment and addresses the cause instead of the symptoms.
Third, target the conflict economy. Since natural resources finance the armed groups, a certification and tracing regime for minerals, gold and timber, enforced jointly with neighboring states and backed by targeted sanctions on smuggling networks, attacks the material base of the violence that no number of patrols can suppress.
Fourth, create independent accountability. An external inspectorate with authority to investigate misconduct by peacekeepers, publish findings and require troop contributing countries to prosecute, would restore the legitimacy on which protection mandates depend, while pre deployment training and equipment standards should become conditions for participation, supported by a standing UN logistics fund so that willing but poorly resourced contingents arrive operational.
None of these steps requires more money than the missions already consume. They require the international community to define success before deployment, to negotiate as persistently as it patrols, and to hold every actor, including itself, to the standards it proclaims.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
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Gender Differences in Communication
How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT *
This article introduces elder and adult care mediation as a timely response to the family conflicts that accompany an aging population, such as disputes over driving safety, financial management, assisted living and nursing home care. Drawing on typical cases from an eldercare mediation practice in Texas, the author explains how mediation differs from negotiation, arbitration and litigation, and why it is particularly suited to family disputes in which relationships must continue after the conflict. The article identifies five features that distinguish elder care mediation from other family mediations, including the direct participation of the elder, flexible venues and formats, and the goal of strengthening rather than fracturing family communication. Practical guidance is offered on costs, guardianship pre conferences, and the training and certification a qualified elder care mediator should hold, together with a caution that the absence of formal licensing requires families to select mediators carefully.
KEYWORDS *
Elder care mediation, adult care mediation, aging, family conflict, guardianship, Alternative Dispute Resolution, confidentiality, mediator certification, Texas, family communication
INTRODUCTION
With the population aging at an unprecedented rate, families are more frequently encountering strained situations about how to best care for a loved one who no longer is able to drive, live alone, requires assistance with daily living, or requires a new level of medical care. Even in the best of families, communication can shut down or never open up to quality decision-making.
“My brother has been handling mom’s money the past two years, but my sisters and I think that he is using mom’s money for his benefit. How do we find out? Can you help us?”
“My father is 92 and still wants to drive. He can hardly see over the wheel. Every time my siblings and I bring up the matter, dad screams that it is none of our business. However, it will be our business if he gets killed or he kills someone else with his car. What can we do?”
“My mom needs assisted living, but won’t leave her house. How can we convince her?”
“My parent is in a nursing home and isn’t getting medications on time and has developed new health issues. The administrator told me that I’m crazy. I want to sue them. Can you help?”
These are typical calls to my eldercare mediation practice. These family dramas need immediate resolution, not a lawsuit that could possibly take years. Mediation is an opportunity to provide families guidance and timely assistance in having a quality conversation that can address, negotiate, and resolve issues related to aging and family communication.
MAIN CORPUS
What are elder and adult care mediation?
Mediation has been recognized in Texas and nationally for over twenty years. In the past few years, most cases that go to family and probate courts are requested by the judge to be mediated first. Mediation is an informal, confidential process held in a private setting in which a neutral third party, a mediator, helps people to better understand their individual interests and needs. An experienced, certified mediator can empower families to recognize and implement workable solutions to their problem(s).
Mediation is different than other alternative dispute resolution processes in the following ways. The basic idea behind mediation is that a dispute is resolved through an agreement among the parties, instead of a resolution mandated by a judge or negotiated by attorneys. First of all, the parties establish their own outcome, so the result fits their cultural expectations, needs, and family nuances. It provides an opportunity for a win-win outcome: There doesn’t need to be a winner and a loser. Negotiation involves a third party that physically separates the contending parties and shuttles ideas between them. Arbitration uses one or more third-party neutrals that hear the facts and make a decision on how to resolve the conflict for the parties like a judge might. Litigation is far more expensive and time-consuming than mediation and involves a judge who makes the final decisions for the parties with the aid of attorneys representing the involved parties.
In mediation, whether it is voluntary or court-ordered, the parties might, or might not, be represented by attorneys. Usually, parties attend mediation without an attorney, if they even have hired an attorney. Then, if an attorney attends the mediation, their role is of advisor, not as a direct participant in the conversation. Mediation is a process for the parties to talk to each other and to make decisions that will work for them. The mediation is confidential in either case and the mediator does not impose or make decisions for the parties or offer legal advice. Using mediation as a means of discovery is forbidden.
The mediation process has several advantages. The main advantage is that the parties retain control over the decision(s) they choose to agree to in writing. Also, results are generally win-win because outcomes fit the needs and interests of the opposing individuals or family. Because the outcomes also reflect the party’s choices and priorities, in turn, there is a higher level of compliance with the written agreement than with court judgments.
Why is Elder Care Mediation Different from Other Family Mediations?
First of all, in elder care mediation, the issue involves the care, safety, and comfort of someone over 50, although usually much older. End-of-life issues are not hidden. There have been cases that the “senior” was under 50 years old but impaired by a stroke, heart problems, or early dementia.
Second, the case usually is initiated by the children of the senior. The scenario is that the kids see a downward spiral in their family’s communication, or new communication skills need to be established. End-of-life decisions are unchartered territory for most families.
Third, the mediation might not take place in a business office. It is not uncommon for eldercare mediators to convene the mediation in a long-term care facility or the family living room. Some elder care mediations are held at the family dinner table with favorite foods on hand. Sometimes the elder might be in bedclothes.
Fourth, flexibility is a key to a successful mediation. The children might be in different parts of the country, so video cams, conference calls, and email might be tools for communication during the mediation. Mediations can also be held in the evening and on weekends to accommodate family schedules and to lessen the burden on parties.
And, fifth, but by no means conclusive, elder care mediation’s goal in finding resolution embraces strengthening family communication, not pitting one family member against the other.
Since elder care mediation involves working through the established patterns and dynamics of a family, the mediator eases communication among family members for whom the elder-care dispute may reopen decades of old wounds and, often, dysfunctional communication. All family members have roles, postures, and personal issues that have developed over lifetimes. A qualified mediator helps to bring out the best in everyone. Sometimes an apology may be all that is needed for resolution. Forgiveness, complemented with new ways of listening and understanding, maybe the fruits of the mediation.
In eldercare mediation, the elder is strongly encouraged to participate. Their opinions, needs, and interests are heard directly. The children don’t talk about their parents; they learn to communicate with their parents.
Pre-conferences for guardianship are also included under elder and adult mediation. Mediation allows award or potential ward to possibly participate in arrangements that allow for maximizing independence or as an alternative to guardianship.
The cost of mediation over litigation is also convenient in dollars, as well as in time. Mediations can be scheduled within hours or days. Court cases take weeks, months, or, unfortunately, sometimes years. Sometimes, the elder person doesn’t have time on their side, so the immediate implementation of mediation is important.
Every mediator has their own price structure, but, on average, the cost is between $300 to $500 dollars per hour. Manousso Mediation in Houston, Texas, charges $300 per hour, which is divided by all the parties, although very often, the parent pays the hourly fee for the family. There is also a pre-conference meeting on the process, billed at $150 per hour. Many eldercare mediations are multi-party and require facilitation and negotiation before the actual mediation. A spouse, children’s spouses, grandchildren, neighbors, friends, caregivers, physicians, nursing home administrators, and tax consultants might also be in attendance or need to be included somewhere in the process. In general, the cost would be a fraction of a legal battle tied up in litigation. Costs are usually under $2,000. Some employee assistance programs (EAP) share or cover the costs.
Finding a Mediator
Since elder care mediation is relatively new as a genre, there is a small national pool of qualified mediators well versed in aging issues, but the field is growing steadily. Family mediators generally have been those who have been working with Children’s Protective Services and handling divorces. However, adult and elder care mediation needs a different orientation with depth and scope into family issues with community senior resources.
An eldercare mediator should have completed the state’s 40 hours certification course in basic mediation, a 24 hours course in family mediation, and a 24 hours course in elder care mediation. In addition to this core training, the mediator should have practice hours in mediation, in general, and involvement in professional organizations with advanced mediation training in guardianship and elder issues. Some Texas courts, since 2007, will only appoint elder and adult mediators who are Nationally Registered Guardians. Pursuant to Texas Government Code sections 111.002 and 111.042c, the Court adopted the rules governing the certification of guardians. Even if the mediator does not act as a guardian, through the certification process, the court is assured that the mediator is familiar with aging and guardianship issues.
Unfortunately, anyone can hang out a shingle and hold themselves out as a mediator, since there is no formal licensing. A lawyer is not automatically a mediator. Mediation is a profession in its own right, so a lawyer would need certification and mediation training in addition to law school unless the certification hours were earned in the course of their legal studies. Therefore, as a precaution, a mediator should be selected from a rooster that only uses well-trained and professional mediators. Ask questions. Review resumes.
Elder and Adult Care Mediators should have 40 hours of basic mediation training that includes cultural diversity, psychology, theory of mediation, mediation skills to implement a successful process, and opportunities to practice those skills in role plays. In most parts of the country, thirty hours of family mediation training that informs on family dynamics, family laws, and the special skills needed in family cases where familiarity heats the conflicts to a higher degree than relationships in civil cases. Then, there is a minimum of 20 to 24 more hours in issues related to aging and physiology of aged. All three courses have advanced ethical considerations for the genre addressed. These three courses are the minimum requirements for elder and adult care mediators worldwide.
SUMMARY *
Elder and adult care mediation offers families a confidential, flexible and affordable process for resolving the disputes that arise around aging, from finances and driving safety to housing and medical care. Its distinguishing features are the direct participation of the elder, adaptable venues and formats, a focus on repairing family communication rather than assigning blame, and outcomes that the parties design themselves, which leads to higher compliance than court imposed judgments. Because the field is young and mediators are not formally licensed, careful selection of a properly trained and certified mediator remains essential.
CONCLUSION
In Texas and recognized nationally, Manousso Mediation provides training courses in elder care mediation and basic and family mediation certification. Barbara Sunderland Manousso is a popular speaker and international lecturer on Elder Care Mediation: The New Horizon in Family Practice.
Manousso Mediation training and workshops meet the requirements for continuing education for lawyers, psychologists, social workers, nurses, hospice workers, and other professionals. Eldercare mediation training could also provide paralegals with valuable insight and resources to complement their profession.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The conflicts described in this article share one structural root: decisions about an aging person are increasingly made about that person rather than with that person, while adult children carry old family patterns into a new and frightening situation. A neutral resolution path can be built on four elements.
First, place the elder at the center of the process from the outset. Whatever the topic, finances, driving, housing or medical care, the elder participates directly wherever capacity allows, and the guiding question of every session is which arrangement preserves the maximum of the elder’s autonomy consistent with safety. This reframes the dispute from “convincing” a parent to jointly designing the least restrictive workable option.
Second, replace accusations with neutral facts before positions harden. Where children suspect financial misuse, the family can agree in mediation on voluntary transparency, for example a shared review of accounts by an independent professional, before anyone alleges wrongdoing. Where driving is contested, an independent driving and vision assessment provides an objective basis that no family member has to argue for personally. Neutral information converts a loyalty conflict into a solvable problem.
Third, agree on a graduated decision ladder. Families commit in writing to a sequence: regular family council conversations as the normal forum, facilitated mediation when the council stalls, and court proceedings such as guardianship only as a last resort after mediated alternatives, including supported decision making and partial arrangements, have been documented and tried. This ladder protects relationships, keeps costs low and satisfies courts that less restrictive options were genuinely explored.
Fourth, build in review and safeguarding. Every mediated agreement on elder care should carry a fixed review date, since capacity and needs change, and a clear safeguarding clause: if concrete indications of abuse, neglect or exploitation arise, protective authorities are involved without delay, because mediation presupposes safety and cannot substitute for protection.
Handled this way, the typical calls quoted at the beginning of the article, the finances, the car keys, the move to assisted living, the nursing home complaint, become entry points into a structured family process rather than opening moves in litigation.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES *
- Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, Chapter 154 (Alternative Dispute Resolution Procedures), State of Texas, 1987.
- Texas Government Code, Sections 111.002 and 111.042 (certification of guardians), State of Texas.
- Uniform Mediation Act (2001), National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, United States.
- Radford, M. F. (2002). Is the Use of Mediation Appropriate in Adult Guardianship Cases? Stetson Law Review, 31, 611.
- Grant, J. (1999). Guardianship Mediation. Marquette Elder’s Advisor, Vol. 1, Issue 2, Article 7.
- McCann Beranger, J. (2013). Exploring the Role of Elder Mediation in the Prevention of Elder Abuse. Department of Justice Canada, Ottawa.
- Association for Conflict Resolution, Elder Decision Making and Conflict Resolution Section, Washington, D.C.
- National Guardianship Association, Standards of Practice, Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.