Taking Minority Rights Frameworks Seriously in Conflict Prevention in Africa
As was the case with the 1993 Mechanism on Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, the new African Union (AU) Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) is premised on conflict prevention as the main strategy for the maintenance of peace and security in Africa.
Solomon A Dersso, Senior Researcher, APSTA Secretariat, ISS Addis Ababa
As was the case with the 1993 Mechanism on Conflict Prevention,
Management and Resolution, the new African Union (AU) Peace and
Security Architecture (APSA) is premised on conflict prevention as the
main strategy for the maintenance of peace and security in Africa.
Accordingly, the Peace and Security Council (PSC) Protocol constituted
the PSC as “a collective security and early-warning arrangement to
facilitate timely and efficient response to conflict and crisis
situations in Africa”.
The challenge for APSA is how to ensure that distant or imminent
threats are timely detected and proportional measures are taken to
prevent such threats from becoming imminent or erupting into violence.
This calls for the institutionalisation of normative frameworks that
provide both relevant conflict analysis tools and conflict prevention
mechanisms.
One such framework recommended in the Report of the United Nations High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
is the framework for minority rights. Similarly, the Common African
Position on the Proposed Reform of the UN otherwise known as the Ezulwini Consensus
emphasizes the need to give particular consideration to all the other
recommendations, but more especially to the recommendation regarding
development of frameworks for minority rights and prohibition of
unconstitutional change of government.
The determination of the relevance of the minority rights framework
is however something that depends on at least two related
considerations. The first is whether the framework reflects and
responds to the nature of existing or future conflicts or threats. The
second is whether it offers relevant tools for conflict analysis and
for conflict prevention.
As relevant AU documents, particularly the Defence and Security
Policy, affirmed, and several recent conflicts show, more often than
not African conflicts have a strong ethnic component. These conflicts
are rooted in experiences of overt or subtle discrimination and
exclusion of groups, skewed patterns of power relations and
distribution of socio-economic goods, and repression or belittling or
ridiculing of the culture, language or religion of some groups.
The international minority rights regime as enshrined in the 1992
UN Declaration is premised on the recognition of these issues and their
effect on peace and stability within and between states. What makes
the minority rights framework particularly relevant for APSA is also
the multiethnic character of the post-colonial African state. Studies
revealed that due to the process of its making, the post-colonial
African state is more diverse than most states in other parts of the
world.
Apart from this direct relevance to many conflicts on the continent
and the character of the African state, there are other reasons that
make it important to take the minority rights framework seriously in
conflict prevention. First, as the study of the London based think tank
Minority Rights Group International titled Minority Rights: The Key to Conflict Prevention
shows the minority rights framework provides relevant tools for
conflict analysis. According to this study, ‘violations of minority
rights are very often a warning sign of an approaching conflict.’ These
violations are expressed through, among others, state sponsored or
tolerated hate speeches, violence targeting members of particular
groups, dispossession of land and other resources on which particular
groups depend, forcing the religion or language of dominant groups on
others, lack or denial of political voice and representation, and
disproportionate level of impoverishment and deprivation of access to
socio-economic goods affecting particular regions or groups. Clearly,
this framework helps the PSC particularly in detecting the signs of the
emergence of grave circumstances as defined under Art. 4 (h) of the
Constitutive Act of the AU.
Second, the minority rights regime defines certain policy and
institutional approaches that transform existing patterns of violations
and institutionalise substantive equality. These relate to the right
to exist, the right to non-discrimination, the right to identity and
rights relating to participation and socio-economic rights. These are
mechanisms that serve as important conflict prevention tools.
If appropriately formulated and adapted to the needs and conditions
of the continent, the minority rights framework can indeed be a
valuable framework for realizing the prevention agenda of the APSA. As
suggested by others before, this is something that should not be
considered lightly if in particular one heeds to the argument by Obiora
Chinedu Okafor that the problem of minorities has been, and will in
the foreseeable future remain, the central problem of the post-colonial
African statecraft.
