Monograph 36: Whither Peacekeeping in Africa?, Edited by Mark Malan

From 21 to 23 September 1998, the Institute for Security Studies presented, in conjunction with the Faculty of Military Science (University of Stellenbosch) a symposium on International Peace and Security: The African Experience. This event was hosted at the South African Military Academy in Saldanha, in support of the United Nations’ programme of activities to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of UN peacekeeping.

The symposium was attended by some 150 international, regional and local participants from 25 countries. It focused on past, present and future African contributions to the maintenance of international peace and security. This monograph can neither do justice to the full range of more than thirty papers that were delivered at the symposium, nor to the rich debate that was stimulated by these presentations. Indeed, this is not the intention. The aim of this monograph is rather to provide a brief but vivid overview of contemporary efforts to keep the peace in Africa, by publishing an edited version of those papers that dealt most directly with the subject within its contemporary context. Other papers with a more historical content will be published by the Military Academy.

The six papers are of uneven length and depth of analysis, but this adds to their overall accessibility and provides a refreshing blend of practitioner reflection and scholarly analyses of possible futures for peacekeeping in Africa. Tom Lodge begins with a deceptively brief, but thorough explanation of the causes and course of conflict in Africa since the Cold War. He provides a typology of latter-day African conflicts that helps to locate the further discussion of crisis and response, and to ameliorate any accusations of inadequacy in the latter. While there is little new in his analysis, Lodge provides an essential backdrop to any discussion on conflict prevention, conflict management and peacebuilding in Africa where communities at war are often divided into numerous factions, there is sometimes no state to speak of and agreements are of limited value in the absence of compliance mechanisms. In this context, classical peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and diplomacy face challenges that are closely related to the collapse of the African state and the nature of African societies.

Ami Mpungwe follows with an atypical analysis of the crisis and response in Rwanda during the early 1990s. Instead of focusing on the failure of the international community to prevent the genocide of 1994, Ambassador Mpungwe concentrates on the conflict resolution efforts of Rwanda’s regional neighbours. He relates positive elements from his personal experience as a negotiator during the process that led to the signing of the Arusha Peace Agreement in August 1993. Despite the collapse of this agreement a few months later, and the tragic consequences, it is apparent that there are a number of very pertinent lessons to be learned by contemporary peacemakers in the Great Lakes region.

The international response to the conflict in Rwanda is but one of the African peace missions discussed ‘with ruthless brevity’ by Christopher Clapham in an analysis that is somewhat less complimentary of the Arusha peace process. In defence of the UN mission in Rwanda, Clapham asserts that the Arusha accords amounted to a settlement that "rested on an extraordinarily naive assumption that parties engaged in an intense conflict, who had agreed to participate in peace talks for essentially tactical reasons, could be expected to abide by the provisions of a complex agreement that required them to work closely and harmoniously together."

By no means an apologist for UN peacekeeping in Africa, Clapham nevertheless does not argue in favour of disengagement from Africa. To the contrary, he concludes with the conviction that the insistence on international consensus as a precondition for undertaking a peacekeeping operation, would be equal to giving a veto to any reticent state over UN participation. "Sometimes it may be necessary to jump in and — without self-delusion — hope for the best."

According to Margaret Vogt, one of the most important post-Cold War innovations in the management of international peace and security is the concept of shared responsibility between the UN and regional organisations. She highlights the challenges of creating viable regional security regimes to deal with conflict resolution in Africa, and explores the evolving relationships between such organisations and the UN. The focus is not only on the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), but also on the contributions of so-called ‘subregional’ organisations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Eboe Hutchful continues on the theme of subregional mechanisms for conflict resolution with a detailed and very forthright account of peacekeeping operations under the auspices of ECOWAS, as conducted by the ECOWAS Monitoring Group known as ECOMOG. The ECOMOG operations conducted in Liberia and Sierra Leone serve to illustrate the difficulties and pitfalls of regional peacekeeping in Africa. Despite helping to bring an end to the Liberian crisis, the ECOMOG experience warns against conflating regional security with human security. Without the ability to impose acceptable standards of governance in the West African region, Hutchful concludes that "... the regional security mechanism is likely to degenerate into a protection racket for autocrats."

In the final contribution, Mark Malan echoes many of the observations made by the other authors. He points to the ubiquity of complex emergencies in Africa, to the perceived failure of UN peace operations in Africa, and to the trend towards relying on subregional organisations such as ECOWAS to ‘do something’ in order to terminate contemporary African wars. He also calls for an honest, no-nonsense appraisal of these trends, which must surely lead to the admission that latter-day multinational peace operations in Africa are enforcement operations that have little in common with the purpose and principles of peacekeeping. If this is so, Malan argues, then the key challenge lies in articulating appropriate principles and a set of acceptable rules for these robust interventions. The solution may lie in conceiving peace enforcement as international law enforcement and in devising a related military doctrine to ensure compliance with international resolutions.

Collectively, the contributors thus provide a clear and concise picture of the status of peacekeeping in Africa — past and present — and point to some hard choices that will have to be made if future multinational peace operations are to make a real difference by creating stable environments upon which to build more lasting peace. Images of the troubled African continent are thus mitigated by the idea that something meaningful can be done if there is sufficient resolve to break through the hypocrisy that often surrounds efforts at conflict resolution in Africa.