Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 4 – January-February 2012

Politics as usual in Africa

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) held presidential, legislative, and provincial elections on November 28, 2011. Five years had elapsed since elections in 2006  made Joseph Kabila President of the Congo in the country’s first exercise in democracy since its independence in 1960.

A lot of people, both inside and outside the Congo, had invested significant hope in these elections. Kabila’s administration has been mostly disappointing, to say the least. The eastern part of the Congo, especially North and South Kivu provinces, remained in a state of anarchy, with independent militias and the official army engaging in plundering of minerals and harassment of the population. There was very little economic development despite high world prices for the Congo’s mineral commodities and high levels of royalties for the government. Governance lacked transparency, accountability and honesty. Human rights violations were flagrant and relatively frequent.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 3 – November-December, 2011

WHO isn’t pleased that Qadaffi’s regime in Libya is no more? But be careful what you wish for: A number of governments in sub-Saharan Africa may have mixed feelings about Libya’s overwhelmingly popular participation in the Arab Spring wave of revolutions.

Within a few years of his coming to power in 1969, Moamar Qadaffi began interfering in Africa’s internal affairs on a large scale. The period of 1975 to 1988 was marked by Qadaffi’s support of revolution around the world. If Libya could have a successful revolution that overthrew a reactionary monarchy, then the people of every other country that yearned for a revolution deserved support and encouragement. So thought the “beloved leader” of the Libyan people.

Qadaffi’s revolutionary vision was combined with an intense hatred for the state of Israel, as well as a tremendous distrust of the United States, Israel’s main source of support. Thus, Qadaffi’s support for revolution overlapped with his financing of anti-Israel and anti-American terrorism. The best examples of Qadaffi’s revolutionary activities outside of the Middle East and Africa were in Northern Ireland, where the anti-British Irish Republican Army (IRA) received money and supplies from Libya, and in the southern Philippines, where Islamist rebels received Libyan help to sustain an insurgency against the national government.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Issue 2 – September-October, 2011

TO begin, here are two questions to test your knowledge of U.N. stability operations in Africa:

1. Where was the first U.N. peacekeeping operation managed from New York headquarters?

2. What percentage of current worldwide U.N. peacekeeping operations take place in Africa?

The answer to the first question is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1960, shortly after independence, the DRC fell into a chaotic situation, with the army in a state of mutiny and several of the provinces fielding their own militias and threatening to secede. U.N. peacekeepers, assisted by U.S. airlift, made sure the country was unified and allowed the central government to consolidate power. Lethal force was used in some instances. U.N. civilian experts also helped administer the government for several years while Congolese civil servants were in training.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 7, Number 1 – July-August, 2011

WITHIN days of the end of Côte d’Ivoire’s decade-long internal power struggle last April, northern neighbor Burkina Faso erupted in mutinies among the various security forces, accompanied by public displays of anti-government sentiment among opposition factions. One of the Sahel region’s most durable and stable regimes suddenly appears to be shaky. What is going on?

There are a number of factors in play.

Burkina’s President Blaise Compaore has been deeply involved in Côte d’Ivoire’s internal power struggles since a military coup removed elected President Henri Bédié in December 1999. With Libyan funding and equipment, Compaore supported insurgent forces based in northern Côte d’Ivoire seeking to undermine President Laurent Gbagbo, who was elected under dubious circumstances in 2002. At the same time, Compaore was designated African Union mediator between the insurgents and the Gbagbo regime. His mediation led to an internationally supervised election in Côte d’Ivoire in December 2010, won by Alassane Ouattara, the former Prime Minister, and champion of the northern insurgents.

Incumbent President Gbagbo refused to accept the election results, and chose instead to hunker down in his palace. This triggered a military offensive by Ouattara’s northern insurgents who managed to defeat Gbagbo’s troops and capture Gbagbo himself during April 2010, thereby installing Ouattara in power. During this offensive, Libyan support disappeared because of the internal struggle in that country.  Compaore was therefore stuck with the bill, which drained funds from his own security forces.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 6 – May-June, 2011

Where is it written in any holy scripture that free and fair elections hold the answer to deep-seated internal conflicts in Africa? It seems to me that if the core reasons for the conflicts are not settled first through negotiations, then elections can actually make matters worse.

When I was running the Africa Bureau in the State Department (1989-1993), we were heavily involved as mediators or helpful observers in seven African internal conflicts. At that time, the various diplomatic players, including us, were accused of perpetuating a syndrome called “signature obsession.” The pattern was that mediators would push the conflict participants to sign a peace agreement that would lead to an election. The details in the peace agreements were not that important – just sign it and have an election.
After that, everything will fall into place.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 5 – March-April, 2011

How can we evaluate Africa’s progress over the past ten years? Is the cup half full or half empty?

Looking at the financial newspapers lately, one sees lots of optimism about Africa. The continent is a great place to make money. Overall growth is between 3.5 and 6 percent per annum. There is a rising middle class with purchasing power. There are more and more Africans with spare cash for shopping. Walmart, the largest American supermarket chain, has acquired the South African equivalent with stores in 12 African countries. This is significant.

China and India are expanding their economies at a rapid rate as they both quickly devour mineral and agricultural commodities. This is resulting in a lot of money for a significant number of African countries that export oil, basic minerals and agricultural products. China, India, Australia and Canada, among others, are investing heavily in extractive industries throughout the continent. An increasing number of African governments are trickling down a modicum of commodity wealth to their populations, although there is still a considerable way to go in overcoming the infamous “resource curse.”

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 4 – January-February, 2011

There are many different and creative ways of rigging an election, but the November 2010 presidential election in Côte d’Ivoire takes the cake.

After spending five years beyond his normal mandate haggling over the definition of voter eligibility, President Laurent Gbagbo finally accepted a compromise election formula proposed by the United Nations. On that basis, a presidential election was held in November to December 2010. The first election round with about a dozen candidates reduced the field to a runoff round with the two leading vote recipients, incumbent president Gbagbo, and opposition leader Alassane Ouattara.

The Independent Election Commission, representing all political groupings in the country, counted the ballots under the supervision of the United Nations and international observers. The final count gave 52 percent to Ouattara and 48 percent to Gbagbo. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the inauguration.

The Constitutional Court, the highest judicial tribunal in the nation, studied the results and declared that a bunch of election districts in the northern part of Côte d’Ivoire had suffered from vote fraud and ballots from those districts were declared invalid. Just by coincidence, the nullified ballots changed the results so that Gbagbo had 52 percent, and Ouattara had 48 percent.

There is a specter beginning to haunt the eastern side of Africa. The name of that specter is “the great 21st Century land grab.”

Within the past five years, world prices for food commodities, especially the essential grains of wheat, maize and rice, have been spiking upward periodically. These short-term price increases have been causing anxieties among the major food-importing countries and regions, including the majority of African nations that can least afford to spend more for their essentials. With both food and oil prices cresting at higher and higher levels, little is left in African treasuries for development.

Upward trends in world food prices are caused by a number of factors. First and foremost, the two billion people in China and India are earning more money, eating more grain, and feeding more grain to their livestock. Secondly, global warming appears to be negatively affecting certain, major grain-producing countries. Because of an extreme drought during 2010, Russia, for example, was forced to suspend grain exports. This event alone caused major increases in world grain prices. In addition, the maize crop in the United States is also expected to be lower than average for 2010 because of excessive rain at the wrong time of the year, as well as the diversion of a high percentage of maize to ethanol production.

The small central African nation of Rwanda held a presidential election in mid-August 2010 that was considered transparent and efficiently run. Incumbent president Paul Kagame was re-elected with 93 percent of the vote. His victory was considered well-deserved by many outside observers because of his fine work in economic development. The country is stable and secure. Kigali, the capital, is clean and full of brand new buildings. Growth rates are between 6 and 10 percent.

And yet, Rwanda appears to be a troubled place. During the election some potential opposition candidates were not allowed to run. Indeed, somewere accused of being “genocide deniers” and placed under house arrest. One critical newspaper editor was mysteriously killed in an automobile “accident” with his head almost severed. An opposition politician was shot dead in front of his house.

In addition to the election restrictions and political assassinations, there appears to be a major quarrel underway within the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front party. Several of Kagame’s top associates, who started the overthrow of the former genocidal regime of President Juvénal Habyarimana with him in 1990, have gone into exile. Those who defected have been targets of assassination attempts in other countries like South Africa and Kenya — they have accused Kagame of hiring the hit men. Kagame has denied the accusations. The former “band of brothers” is disintegrating.

Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 1 – July/August 2010

THE year 2011 will undoubtedly be momentous for the Sudan, Africa’s largest country by area. It will be the sixth and final year of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2006 (CPA) signed by the central Government of Sudan and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM). The latter is the political movement that engaged in a 30-year insurgency against the central government through its Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA). The SPLM/SPLA represents the 8 million Africans living in the southern third of Sudan. Their insurgency was motivated by central government repression, violence and the imposition on the mostly Christian southerners of Islamic practices in education, language and law.

The CPA, which was brokered largely by the Bush Administration, is a complex document, but the main points are as follows: