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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL ARTICLE: Volume XVII, No 2, SUMMER 2000 War and Mercy in Africa [Go to interactive discussion forum] In the modern history of humanitarian action dating from civilian relief during the Second World War, never before has the legitimacy of the enterprise been so profoundly and publicly challenged, while at the same time never have the services of humanitarian organizations been more in demand. Many of the strongest critics are humanitarians themselves, or their longtime boosters in academia and journalism, who have witnessed the dirty little wars that spawn large-scale famine, massive human rights violations, and forced migration.1 That such a crisis of conscience is striking the humanitarian movement just now cannot readily be attributed to an unprecedented scale of suffering. Without minimizing recent horrors in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, nothing in the last decade has exceeded the sheer scale of famine in China, genocide in Cambodia, or forced migration in Afghanistan during the Cold War. The faltering faith of global rescuers is rooted in other factors. First, as the Cold War wound down a string of successes including mediated resolution of wars in El Salvador and Namibia, and armed rescue of displaced Kurds in Iraq after the Gulf War raised expectations to unrealistically high levels. Unshackled by the Cold War, it was believed, the combined powers of humanitarianism, diplomacy, and multilateral military prowess would create a world that was not only more orderly, but also more fair to the weakest groups. When diplomatic and military efforts miscarried, as in Somalia and Bosnia, or were withheld, as in Rwanda, the second factor came into play. Confused Western governments threw humanitarian organizations into the front lines of these crises, where the agencies could bring no decisive solution, but where they did have greater access than ever before to witness and report atrocities in real time. Finally, some of the humanitarians began to discover and publicize how their own presence in the war zones became incorporated, and morally implicated, in warrior tactics of violence. Each humanitarian organization has been chastened by unique experiences. In eastern Zaire during 1995, for example, camps for a million Rwandan refugees were controlled by the same ethnic militias who had carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and who were skimming international aid to rearm in preparation for returning to Rwanda to complete the genocide. Among the multitude of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) providing aid in these camps, one agency attempted to evade the system of militia control by recruiting its own team of young refugee “scouts” to distribute food aid on the basis of need. The scheme seemed to work, until one scout had an altercation with a militia member. International NGO staff stood by helplessly as the scouts were assassinated one by one, and the aid program again fell under the sway of the militias. Searing experiences such as this have provoked the humanitarian community to undertake an unprecedented project of self-scrutiny, and analysis of the military and political contexts in which they find themselves. With the major exception of former Yugoslavia, most of the cases of spectacular humanitarian failure have come out of Africa, where states are weakest, interests of the major powers are most peripheral, and perpetrators of violence appear to be least amenable to international leverage. Largely missing from this humanitarian examination of conscience has been penetrating analysis of how strategies of warfare have shifted since 1990, particularly in Africa. The findings of such analysis may not be reassuring, however. When analyzed strategically, much humanitarian action appears not only to fuel particular wars, but also to help constitute the international architecture that institutionalizes the most irresponsible warrior strategies. The Changing Face of War War and mercy in Africa have been closely linked since independence. The predominant strategies of internal conflict have shifted from military coup in the 1960s, to protracted war in the 1970s and 1980s, to warlordism in the 1990s. In addition, the practices of humanitarians have evolved in tandem with these warrior strategies to reinforce them in hidden ways. Driven out of the cities, armed opposition groups desperately sought alternate strategies. Many turned to some form of Maoist insurgency-protracted war from a rural base. Using this strategy, a revolution could begin with only a small band of fighters cultivating political support among peasants in the countryside. The next step was to provoke the central state to overplay its advantage in the tools of coercion. By launching hit-and-run attacks against government military and economic targets, and then blending back into the peasantry, insurgent strategy was designed to call down a hail of government violence on the heads of its own peasant supporters. The net political effect, the insurgents hoped, would be to drive the peasants into their hands. Because they began from a position of weakness, insurgents intentionally protracted war over years or decades in order to buy time to build themselves up and wear the government down. To a would-be revolutionary, the appeal of protracted war was its adaptability to a variety of ideological colors and political purposes. In Africa, it served successfully in anti-colonial struggles against France in Algeria, against Portugal in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, and against the white government of Rhodesia. Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia sponsored insurgencies against each other in the Horn of Africa. The African National Congress attempted to use insurgency against the apartheid regime of South Africa but failed to establish a territorial base within the country. Instead, South African Defense Forces turned the tables by sponsoring insurgencies against the front-line states of Angola and Mozambique that supported the ANC. Insurgency has always required an ideological component. In spite of the Maoist genealogy of the strategy, however, it need not be drawn from the political left. Nationalist, anti-communist, or ethnic ideologies would often do. The strategic face-off between rebel insurgents and government counterinsurgents produced the distinctive features of war in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s: rural locus of violence, large-scale famine, and massive population movement. Both sides used the rural civilian population as weapons and targets. This explanation challenges the conventional view that attributes African war during the period to arbitrary colonial borders and superpower interference. The inherited colonial boundaries were indeed arbitrary. But no one has drawn an alternate “peace map” of Africa that could command general consensus and end conflict. In addition, the same boundaries have seen several different waves of military strategy come and go. Outside powers indeed amplified and financed African internal conflicts by providing weapons, training, and finance to favored proxies However, the sponsors did not dictate the strategy. When they had the opportunity during the first decade after African independence, outside powers preferred to compete using cheaper, quicker techniques, such as assassination, military coup, and mercenaries. Instead, the face of war in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s reflected the clash between the strategy of protracted war chosen by rebels of widely varied ideologies against corrupt police states that lacked control of the countryside and the strategy of counterinsurgency with which those governments responded. Humanitarian Analog At any historical moment, “humanitarianism” is both a loose network of government, U.N., and NGO actors, and also a normative regime of principles and discourse used to justify action. The humanitarian network of the 1970s and 1980s was well developed in the fields of relief and refugee assistance. This material assistance-whether it was delivered bilaterally, multilaterally, or through NGOs-strongly favored recognized governments over their rebel challengers. Rebels were simply not legitimate recipients of humanitarian aid until the late 1980s. In addition, African governments gained advantage from the virtual absence of human rights scrutiny of warfare, particularly in the rural areas where insurgency was fought. The systematic bias toward governments operated irrespective of whether they were clients of Soviet, American, or French sponsors. This bias was embedded in the pervasive, postcolonial normative consensus on the sanctity of sovereignty, and institutionalized in the procedures of the United Nations and the diplomacy of both newly independent states and superpowers. The refugee regime also favored governments during the 1970s and 1980s. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in partnership with receiving countries and NGOs, played its familiar role intercepting refugees as they crossed borders and corralling them into camps near their country of origin. The system ensured that people in danger could leave home but that they would not get far. They would not overwhelm the cities of receiving countries, and only a small fraction would be resettled in the developed world. The immediate political consequence was to protect each government from the destabilizing spill-over of the internal wars of its neighbors. The cumulative political consequences for the continent have not been fully recognized, however. The refugee regime gave each African government license to use indiscriminate violence against its own citizens without having to live with the destabilizing results. Troublesome populations could be driven out of the country into the arms of the humanitarian network, destabilizing neither their home government nor neighboring governments. Used against a Maoist style insurgency in which fighters depend on the rural population for essential material support such as food, intelligence, and transport, the tactic of forcibly displacing the population was devastatingly effective. The 1970s refugee regime carried another unforeseen, long-term implication. The international system relieved African governments of responsibility for one of the political tasks of modern statehood-holding the population within the boundaries of a designated territory. At issue here is not the moral responsibility of a government to its citizens, but the political responsibility of each government to the international club of states. Relieved of the task of holding on to their own populations, many African leaders learned political skills better suited to coercing their citizens and driving them away than to negotiating with them. An entire generation of African leaders was schooled in this environment. The pattern of governments relying more on international partners than on their own populations was reinforced in the 1970s by a relatively benign world economy that encouraged state-controlled export industries, and by Cold War foreign aid. The political, economic, and humanitarian rents that governments could collect from the international system relieved them of the necessity to organize an efficient state bureaucracy, to promote a thriving private economy as a tax base, or to negotiate taxation with the citizenry. Few outside analysts recognized the full extent to which patronage ties held African countries together in this period.3 Resources gleaned from the international system were distributed by African leaders to placate domestic groups and individuals, and to repress those who could not be placated. Foreign aid in particular purchased strategic stability for major powers at the price of political debility for African leaders. Even when it made little impact on the national economy, foreign aid typically supplied a large proportion of the government resources available to maintain political support. Most leaders learned the politics of getting aid, not the politics of getting organized. Such externally oriented client states were exceptionally vulnerable to challenge by the strategy of insurgency. As the conflict strategies of insurgency and counterinsurgency spread throughout Africa, they were reinforced and institutionalized by both Cold War foreign aid and humanitarianism. Before 1990, humanitarian practices in Africa simultaneously strengthened governments materially by favoring them as recipients of relief and refugee assistance, and weakened governments politically by making them unresponsive to their own populations and therefore more vulnerable to the challenge of insurgency. The net result of humanitarianism was to institutionalize internal war in Africa. Mercy shaped war. Privatized War After insurgency, the new face of violence in Africa is privatized war, featuring the figure of the warlord. Warlord military strategy eschews any ideological claim to serve the goals of the people, frankly using violence for profit. Whether stealing from the people and the humanitarians, mining precious metals and gems, or smuggling illicit materials, a warlord political economy requires no political bargaining for the population’s support. Violence is directed toward no broad political purpose. Warlord politics and state collapse are two sides of the same coin.4 State collapse means that the government no longer provides basic security and economic infrastructure as public goods. Behind this is a warlord political economy in which rival politicians fund private patronage networks through access to international commercial ventures, and provide their own security either by fielding their own militias or hiring international mercenaries.5 Sub-Saharan Africa is unique in its concentration of the world’s weakest states. The G-8 debt forgiveness plan targets 33 countries that are least able to pay, 27 of which are found in sub-Saharan Africa. In the weakest states, internal war now takes the form of warlord conflict. The extreme examples from the last decade are Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo-where electricity and water systems go out in the capital city, and violence between rival warlords creates humanitarian catastrophe. But tendencies toward state collapse and warlord politics are more widespread than these four obvious cases. Most vulnerable are areas that can be easily plundered of highly portable commodities such as diamonds. Somalia, however, has never fit this pattern. Since the UN withdrawal in the mid-1990s, Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed has financed his private militia by operating a large banana plantation for international export. The fragmentation that accompanies warlord formations may be spreading, without the accompaniment of spectacular headlines. For example, national militaries have recently broken up into competing warlord factions in Congo-Brazzaville and Guinea-Bissau. Any government held together by the political glue of patronage is liable to collapse into warlordism. Kenya today should be seen as moving-very slowly, and not yet irreversibly-in the direction of state collapse. It could take another decade before this tendency either erupts full force or is decisively reversed. Nigeria is perilously close to collapse, with only a narrow window of opportunity for the new democratic regime to turn the corner. Significant areas of Angola and Sudan are already run as warlord economies, with widespread officer privateering conducted under the tenuous authority of rebel or government forces. The Warlord Strategy On several occasions, stronger militaries have confronted warlords under the umbrella of multilateral humanitarian intervention-American marines in Somalia, French troops in Rwanda, and Nigerian forces in Liberia and Sierra Leone under the Economic Community of West African States. These experiences suggest that there is little future for outright humanitarian intervention in Africa. Peace enforcement against warlords tends to escalate the violence against civilians. All classes of potential interveners-superpower, former colonial power, or regional power-when acting for humanitarian goals rather than national interests, lack either the political determination or the military capacity to accomplish the task. A Field of Schemes Ironically, as humanitarian responsibility increases, state capacity decreases. The two phenomena are mutually reinforcing. Humanitarianism structures the context within which warriors choose their strategies. It does so even more powerfully than before 1990, however, because other international inputs are greatly reduced. The humanitarian community has begun to acknowledge its influence on internal wars.6 With few exceptions, however, the humanitarian self-critique has remained superficial. It has been tamed into a new conventional wisdom according to which any problem can be repaired with more workshops, exhortations, codes of conduct, and toolboxes of policy options. The debate is limited almost exclusively to the tactical level. A broader, strategic analysis is needed to discern the indirect links between war and mercy. Because running an African war is so much cheaper than before 1990, the material resources that can be stolen or redirected from humanitarian organizations is often quite sufficient. In addition, NGOs and UN agencies now crowd into any well-publicized emergency in such large numbers that they cannot bargain effectively with a warring party to reduce the diversion of resources. If one organization withdraws, another is always ready to take its place. The humanitarian network also mobilizes powerful normative resources. By simply meeting with a warlord in order to negotiate relief access, humanitarians elevate him to a status of legitimate representative, give him international publicity, and reserve a place for him at the table for any future peace talks. But this sword cuts both ways. Human rights NGOs also scrutinize and publicize abuses by each adversary, potentially harming international alliances. Both the material resources and the normative legitimacy generated by the humanitarian network become stakes in the conflict that are routinely manipulated by warring parties. American policymakers are savvy about these realities, which can sometimes be marshaled to serve U.S. interests. In Sudan, for example, where the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum is seen as something of a security threat, the most consistently effective tool for bolstering the southern Sudanese rebels has been to promote the robust engagement of the humanitarian network throughout the whole country, in both North and South. Simply by following its routine practices, the humanitarian network benefits the rebels through four indirect paths. First, relief aid keeps internally displaced southern Sudanese people on the land, where they can better support the rebels. Second, the same aid prevents large refugee flows from destabilizing neighbors friendly to the United States in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. Third, low accountability in the delivery of aid allows Sudanese leaders in both North and South to divert resources to serve military goals, which disproportionately benefits the weaker party-the South. Finally, information from aid agencies on both sides of the war feeds the diplomacy of shame against Khartoum by exposing its policy of genocide against the South. Seen in this light, the recent legislation permitting the Clinton administration to deliver US food aid directly to rebel soldiers in the South, however disturbing its implications as a normative precedent, is not a radical departure from long-standing American policy.7 It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to draw the blanket conclusion that “all aid is political.” Most humanitarian organizations adopt the discourse of neutrality, without taking seriously the logic that in war true neutrality means generating no influence on the strategic interests of the adversaries . In operational practice, only the International Committee of the Red Cross consistently meets this standard. A strategic analysis leads to the conclusion that the humanitarian network as a whole has never been neutral in African internal wars since 1990; it always fuels such conflicts. But a strategic analysis leads still further. Not only does the humanitarian network insert resources and legitimacy into the fray, it also maintains the very arena within which internal wars are fought; it is a crucial bulwark of African statehood itself. Maintaining African Statehood This argument on the origins of African statehood can also be applied to its maintenance. In the past decade, we have seen collapsed states in Africa with no central authority, yet whose territory, population, and recognition hold together. What is holding together Somali statehood when there is no Somali state? An important part of the answer is the irrevocability of recognition. At the UN General Assembly in New York, a seat-literally a chair and a nameplate-is reserved for Somalia, though no one is seated in it. Abstract recognition of Somalia’s statehood is irrevocable, though none of the 25 or so warlords currently active within Somali territory enjoy the perks of governmental recognition. Somali territory also appears to be irrevocable in the sense that no outside military moves in permanently to occupy, colonize, or annex any part of it. For collapsed states like Somalia and Sierra Leone, therefore, the coherence of territory, population, and recognition-that is, statehood itself-is maintained by the international system, sometimes bypassing entirely any central government authority. This is no accident. It is in the interests of most governments to maintain the basic conventions of the international state system at a minimal level even in the weakest states. For the United States as sole superpower, maintaining the state system in peripheral regions is a national interest that is remote but strategic, diffuse but vital. The collapsed states of Africa provide empirical evidence that minimal state maintenance does not require functional governments, but does require a vigorous humanitarian network. In practice, international humanitarianism functions as the default state maintenance system for the weakest, most war-torn regions of Africa. The implications are far-reaching. For example, some observers ask whether African governments can organize international institutions in a regional security regime to end the cycle of warfare. The question misunderstands fundamentally the relationship between states and institutions in the region. Africa’s weakest states do not create international institutions; instead, international institutions create and maintain African statehood itself. What are the consequences of this configuration for warrior choices? When the international system takes responsibility for holding together a nation’s territory, population, and recognition, its warriors are free to choose strategies that squander, consume, and scorn those legacies. They can drive away the population with massive violence, or simply ignore it. They can protect only the slivers of territory that provide mining income. They can deride the norms of the international community because their UN membership is permanent. The humanitarians, in the process of rescuing the victims of war, also rescue the warriors from living with the political consequences of their strategies. At the extreme, these consequences might include loss of recognition, flight of population, and conquest of territory. Africa will pull out of its decline where and when African leaders find it in their own interests to organize effective bureaucracies and fashion encompassing political pacts with the local population. This has occurred to a significant but limited extent in several countries, including Uganda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, by the path of war, and Ghana and Botswana by idiosyncratic paths. Warlords move politics in precisely the opposite direction-they destroy effective government bureaucracies and slough off responsibility for populations in favor of relying on international commercial allies. The Deep Dilemma Humanitarian engagement in Africa will continue because major powers are committed to minimal maintenance of the state system, and their publics will demand some response to well-publicized suffering. Moreover, both legitimate firms and criminal enterprises in the global market will continue to extend the kinds of commercial offers that warlords cannot refuse. The future of humanitarian policy in Africa is not clearly charted. Where humanitarians move in with large-scale operations, they will probably both relieve suffering and fuel conflict in the short run, while also setting the stage for more warlord politics in the next generation by internationalizing responsibility for maintaining coherent statehood. However, a new trend of partial disengagement from sections of Africa may be emerging. Driven by disparate events, and against the will of humanitarians, this trend follows at least three distinct patterns. The first is seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), where large swaths of the huge country are inaccessible to international humanitarians due to lack of roads and ongoing warfare. There is no relief aid, no human rights monitoring, and no effective government in much of the country. The various armies marching across Congo are more interested in mining than in governing. Neither the international humanitarians nor the government takes responsibility for the population. A second pattern is found in Eritrea, where the government insists on taking responsibility for maintaining the country’s hard-won statehood. Eritrea zealously guard sits borders (to the point of fighting a costly war with Ethiopia) and keeps humanitarian organizations at bay or under state control. Here the government takes responsibility for keeping the population at home, to the partial exclusion of the humanitarians. Somalia represents a third pattern. If the creation of refugees is taken as a gross indicator of the level of violence in a country, Somalia may on the whole be less violent with no internationally recognized government than it was with one. By this measure, in the early 1990s-both when President Siad Barre was fighting for survival as the “mayor of Mogadishu” and later when UN troops became the focal point of warlord contention-Somalia was more violent and dangerous for its population than it has been for the past five years. Today, Somaliland and Puntland have established regional administrations in the north; elsewhere, when a clan is displaced by fighting its survivors flee to other areas where the clan is strong. Somalia has been rated last among 175 countries in the Human Development Index compiled by the UN Development Programme. But Somalis may be no worse off than the people of southern Sudan, or Angola-areas where recognized states conduct wars at yet higher levels of violence. And the Somali people have one great advantage. They and their leaders are more free to decide what is really worth fighting for, rather than clashing over the perks of international recognition. Thus international humanitarians may be losing access to large sections of Africa’s territory and population. Human suffering will increase, and with it the possibility of a rough form of political accountability for local leaders. Humanitarians will neither rescue victims from the violence of warfare nor leaders from the political consequences of that warfare. This scenario of war with no mercy can hardly be regarded as progressive. But it may provide a very small window of opportunity for African leadership.
1. For critiques of humanitarianism ranging from modest to radical, see Thomas G. Weiss, “Principles, Politics, and Humanitarian Action,” Ethics and International Affairs, vol. 13 (1999), pp. 1-22; David Rieff, “The Humanitarian Illusion,” The New Republic, March 16, 1998, pp. 27-32; Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1997); and Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: Free Press, 1997). 2. The most notable exceptions were the annual incursions by South African Defense Forces into Angola to fight Angolan and Cuban troops, which were sometimes commanded by Soviet generals. See Anthony Clayton, Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa Since 1950 (London: UCL Press, 1999). 3. For contrasting contemporary views, see Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Carol Lancaster, Aid to Africa: So Much to Do, So Little Done (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 4. See the pathbreaking analysis in William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner, 1998). 5. Abdel-Fatau Musah and J. `Kayode Fayemi, ed., Mercenaries: An African Security Dilemma (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 6. John Prendergast, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa (Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner, 1996); and Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid can Support Peace-or War (Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner, 1999). 7. Jane Perlez, “Using Food Aid to Rebels, Clinton Mounts Strategy Against Sudan,” International Herald Tribune, November 30, 1999. 8. Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg, “Sovereignty and Underdevelopment: Juridical Statehood in the African Crisis,” Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (1986), pp. 1-31. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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Notes 