Towards an Understanding of Contemporary Armed Conflicts in Africa

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Tom Lodge

Published in Monograph No 36: Whither Peacekeeping in Africa? April 1999

In 1990, it seemed reasonable to predict that the end of Cold War conflict would lead to a substantial reduction in warfare in Africa. In two major regional theatres of warfare, Southern Africa and the Horn of Africa, the breadth and duration of local conflicts had been amplified and extended by the external support received by various governments as a consequence of great power rivalries. The capacity of African states for warmaking was vastly enhanced through their role as Cold War proxies. The end of international bipolar geostrategic competition in Africa should logically have reduced such capacity. Instead, its consequence has been an overall weakening of African states and an intensification of rebellions against their authority.

The aim of this introductory contribution is to try and make some sense of this seemingly anomalous security situation, for it is difficult to deliberate on modalities for conflict resolution without such an understanding. However, the intention is not to confuse the reader with a complicated discourse dealing with the ‘root causes’ of specific conflicts in Africa, for such exercises can be overwhelming in their complexity. The aim is rather to provide an overview of the different types of conflict that Africa has witnessed during this decade, according to their most salient causal origins.

Broadly speaking, a typology of Africa’s armed conflicts since 1990 can be constructed under the following seven issues:

Each is briefly described and discussed below, in the hope that this will provide a simplified map of the seemingly incomprehensible and that this, in turn, will enhance the concerns over the challenges of peace and security in Africa.

The two most prominent examples of such conflict are the wars in Burundi and Rwanda, both featuring struggles for ascendancy between the culturally similar Tutsi and Hutu groups. These conflicts date from the immediate post-colonial period and originate in the encouragement of ethnic rivalries by the former Belgian administration.

During 1993 in Burundi, up to 100 000 people died in the fighting which followed a coup attempt by the Tutsi dominated army after the electoral victory of a mainly Hutu political party. Despite the presence of an OAU contingent that arrived to supply protection for the government in December 1993, clashes between the army and Hutu militias continued. In 1996, the army deposed President Ntibantunganya (a Hutu) and replaced him with the pre-1993 incumbent, Pierre Buyoya (a Tutsi). In reaction, neighbouring countries imposed sanctions on Burundi’s external trade. By 1997, about 750 000 Burundian refugees were encamped across the country’s borders, mainly in Zaire. A truce agreement in July 1998 ended most of the hostilities that had caused some 200 000 deaths, mainly of civilians, in five years.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Rwanda the death in an air-crash during April 1994 of the elected President Habyarimana triggered genocidal massacres of Tutsi communities by the Hutu army. A successful invasion from Uganda by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the installation of an RPF government helped to establish a measure of order, though fighting between RPF units and Hutu militias based in Zairian refugee camps continued. Up to a million people died in 1994. As a consequence of the continuing militia activity in the second half of 1997, 5 000 people were killed despite RPF involvement in the Congolese war which featured massacres of Hutu refugee communities and the destruction of militia bases in Zaire.

Of these rebellions, the most protracted and bloody is the civil war in Sudan which began as far back as 1957. With a single five-year interlude of peace following a settlement in 1972, the rebellion resumed again in earnest in 1983. The modern phase of the war was prompted by a government decision during 1981 to disband the regional administration that had governed the southern part of the country. In contrast to the Muslim north, the six million inhabitants of southern Sudan are mainly Christian or animist, and British imperial policy had accentuated local perceptions of colonial-style domination by the North. The imposition of Sharia laws by the Khartoum government in 1983 added impetus to the smouldering rebellion of the newly formed Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM).

Regional rivalries have helped to sustain the conflict in Sudan. During the early stages, the SPLM and its Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA) received assistance from Ethiopia, Libya and South Yemen, though Libya was to change sides in 1985 with a decision to support Khartoum. During the 1990s, the Sudanese government (now led increasingly by Islamic fundamentalists) has also enjoyed the military support of Iran. By 1988, the United Nations estimated that war-related famine had killed some 260 000 people and displaced many more from their homes.

Since 1996, there has been a resurgence of SPLA hostilities which may be partly ascribed to reinvigorated support from Ethiopia, which was, in turn, prompted by suspected Sudanese complicity in an assassination attempt on Egyptian President Mubarak during a visit to Addis Ababa. In response, Sudan began sponsoring Ethiopian rebels operating across the Sudanese border.

In West Africa, regional rebellions have included:

The Casamance province of Senegal was governed by Portugal before the Congress of Berlin. Its population is drawn from communities which straddle the border with Guinea-Bissau where the insurgent Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC) was based until its expulsion by troops of Guinea-Bissau in 1997. Support for the Casamance separatists had promoted divisions within the army of Guinea-Bissau, following the dismissal of its pro- Casamance Chief of Staff. These tensions sparked off an army mutiny in the country in June 1997, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is still working to resolve the resulting crisis.

In Angola, peace negotiations between União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) and the Angolan government during the course of the 1990s have been accompanied by intermittent warfare. The rejection of the results of the presidential elections in September 1992 by UNITA had as its immediate sequel some of the most severe and extensive conflict experienced in Angola’s thirty-year war. The 1994 Lusaka Peace Accord of 20 November 1994 was intended to launch a process of demobilisation, military integration and the formation of a coalition administration. The ousting of the Mobutu regime in Kinshasa in May 1997 weakened UNITA’s support in the region and helped to explain a more conciliatory predisposition by UNITA leadership at the end of 1997. However, the opposition movement seems to have managed to reconstruct its lines of external support and, since February 1998, there has been a significant upsurge of UNITA attacks in the north and north-east of Angola. In June 1998, the government began registering the 15 to 34 age group for military service.

The protracted character of the Angolan war is attributable to the complexities of a liberation struggle which featured three popularly-based movements competing for ascendancy. It is a reflection of an especially fragmented colonial economy and the historic cultural divisions between a Bakongo business élite in the North, a creolised intelligentsia in the coastal capital, and the leadership of a relatively prosperous peasant community which developed along the Benguela railway. Massive external military assistance to the main contenders in the war after the collapse of Portuguese rule removed any incentives for compromise, accentuating ideological distinctions between them, and hugely expanding the scope of warfare.

A violent climax in South Africa’s liberation struggle was reached in the period between 1990 and 1994 when hostilities between militarised followers of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha movement, accentuated by agent provocateur activities of state-sponsored agencies, caused 14 000 deaths, mainly in KwaZulu-Natal. Political competition between and within different organisations continues to be a source of violent conflict in the province, and this was responsible for about 200 deaths in the first half of 1998.

Some 50 000 people have died in Algeria as a consequence of a civil war which began in February 1992 after the declaration of a state of emergency by the government in reaction to the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the first round of parliamentary elections. The strength of the Algerian Islamic movement was principally a consequence of government policies in the 1970s which included the ‘Arabisation’ of a rapidly expanding secondary school system and the importation of Iraqi, Egyptian and Palestinian teachers trained in modern Islamic theological centres. Accelerating demographic increases, together with the indebtedness which followed the 1985 collapse of oil prices and an increase in unemployment of 200 000 more people per year in the 1980s combined to undercut the National Liberation Front (FLN) government’s legitimacy.

In 1989, in the wake of food riots, a new constitution was adopted, that provided for the establishment of a multiparty system. Of the thirty new parties which were founded, however, most included some kind of affiliation to the notion of Islam as a state religion. The largest party, the FIS, was outspoken in its antipathy not just to secular government but also to liberal democracy.

Militarised Islamic opposition movements are active in several other North African countries, including Egypt and Libya. Muslims do not hold a monopoly on anti-secular rebellions, however. In northern Uganda, for example, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), established by prophetess Alice Lekwana in 1987 (driven into Sudanese exile in 1990) seeks to establish a government in Kampala based on the Ten Commandments. In what was seen as an attempt to discourage Ugandan backing to the SPLA, the LRA was re-armed by the Sudanese authorities in 1996. Since 1996, several thousands of civilians have been killed or mutilated and some 61 000 children have been abducted — many of whom have had to serve as conscripts in LRA units.

The Liberian, Sierra Leone and Congolese conflicts each developed in countries in which state institutions had been weakened by decades of corrupt predatory government and élite factionalism. In the case of Zaire, progressive state incapacity was signified by the deterioration of the country’s communications system. By 1980, for example, the extent of the all-season road network had shrunk to twenty per cent of its 1960 total. Stalled democratisation and inflationary currency reform helped to further reduce the moral and coercive authority of the Kinshasa government during the 1990s, as did a series of army mutinies.

By the middle of this decade, effective administration was in the hands of a number of regional fiefdoms that had been largely built around the control of smuggling routes by military chiefs. The decisive factor in the ending of Mobutu’s dictatorship was the cross-border conflict between Hutu refugee communities and the RPF. Zairian army complicity in Hutu raids prompted Rwandan support for the rebellion led by Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL) and ensured the effective rout of Zairian Army (FAZ) resistance in the path of its victorious march to Kinshasa. President Kabila’s dependence upon external allies has been underlined by the resurgence of rebellion after his repudiation of the Rwandans in mid-1998 and the subsequent internationalisation of the Zairian conflict. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia soon sent soldiers to defend the Kinshasa government against a second Ugandan/Rwandan sponsored invasion.

The Liberian state, as with Zaire, was one of Africa’s leading recipients of United States aid during the 1980s, and by 1990 also exhibited a similar degree of state incompetence. Even so, the resilience of the rebellion by Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) from its inception in 1990 to Taylor’s eventual electoral victory in 1997 was substantially attributable to support received from regional allies. Particularly important was the ability of the NPFL to export Liberian iron ore, rubber and timber from the zones under its control from neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. Taylor’s main customer was France, for whom the NPFL’s ‘Greater Liberia’ became the third source of tropical hardwood. However, French sympathy for the rebellion was probably more motivated by geopolitical considerations than by commercial gain.

Taylor’s rebellion was directed against the government of former army sergeant Samuel Doe, whose 1980 coup had overthrown Africa’s oldest political regime, the True Whigs. The True Whig Party was supported by descendants of resettled American slaves who, by the 1970s, had built an administration entirely around three dominant family clusters. Doe had ‘civilianised’ his administration after an election in which opposition parties rejected the results as fraudulent. The NPFL rebellion was fired by tensions from this period, but also drew support from an increasingly factionalised military.

The Liberian war was complicated, if not contained, by the presence of an ECOWAS peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, mainly of Nigerian composition, that was originally invited into the country by Doe. Since 1997, however, ECOMOG inclined towards Taylor’s movement which, through its control of Monrovia, had succeeded in winning electoral authority. By this stage, the course of the conflict had generated a death toll of 150 000, as well as a series of regionally based warlords jockeying for national predominance through street-fighting in Monrovia.

Liberia’s war was extended to Sierra Leone in 1991, with the creation of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) by Charles Taylor who hoped to discourage the Freetown government from participation in ECOMOG through his sponsorship of a Sierra Leone rebellion. Today, the RUF rebellion against an elected government backed by ECOMOG continues, while the rebels are succoured by Liberia and Burkina Faso. Both these countries seek to contest Nigerian hegemonic predominance in the region. The Sierra Leone war is believed to have displaced over two million people, nearly half the country’s population.

The fourth major conflict arising from state collapse has endured in Somalia since 1991, when the overthrow of President Siad Barré was followed by warfare between military factions led by General Mohamed Farah Aidid and interim President Ali Mahdi Mohamed. As in Liberia, the organisation of state structures around regionally-organised patronage networks based on kinship and clan systems, made it especially susceptible to fragmentation with the removal of external support for central authority. Notwithstanding the presence of a UN-authorised peacekeeping force, totalling 35 000 soldiers at one stage, intermittent fighting between various clan-based military factions has continued up to the present. The human cost has been hideous: by the end of 1992, famine attributed to military operations had killed a quarter of all Somali children under the age of five.

This category should be viewed as an early symptom of state collapse. It is evident, for example, in the June 1998 mutiny of the Guinea-Bissau army, a consequence of Guinean involvement in suppressing the Senegalese Casamance secessionist movement.

In Congo-Brazzaville, feuding between army militias loyal to rival political leaderships persisted between 1993 and 1997. In 1997, Angolan army intervention ensured the supremacy of troops loyal to president Denis Sassou-Nguesso. The Angolans view the incumbent administration in Brazzaville as an ally in their efforts to contain UNITA, which historically enjoyed support from the contending military faction loyal to former President Pascal Lissouba.

In Lesotho, traditional affinity between the army and the Lesotho National Party has helped to ensure hostility between military commanders and the Basotho National Congress government which was elected in 1993, thus intensifying factionalism within command structures. The resulting tensions have generated a succession of violent mutinies, the latest of which elicited a violent response from neighbouring South Africa.

Disputes over the precise location of colonial frontiers have assumed a military dimension in the cases of Nigeria and Cameroon, Eritrea and its neighbours, and Botswana and Namibia. Between 1994 and 1996, Cameroon contested Nigeria’s garrisoning of the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula before both sides submitted the issue of the region’s legal status to international arbitration. Sporadic fighting between Nigerian and Cameroonian soldiers caused an exodus of 5 000 refugees.

In 1993 Namibia and Botswana became involved in a dispute over ownership of the Sedudu Island in the Chobe river. Botswana claimed that its investiture of the island by the Defence Force was in response to Namibian poaching activities. National competition for control over the Okavango/Chobe water reserves is probably the main reason for the tension between the two countries. While the status of the island is now under international review, Botswana has begun an ambitious programme of military expansion.

Finally, in the Horn of Africa, the new state of Eritrea has aggressively contested its boundaries with South Yemen and Djibouti, and most recently, with Ethiopia. In May 1998, large-scale tank and artillery battles between Eritrea and Ethiopia followed the Eritrean military occupation of the Yigra triangle, a barren 400-square kilometre region of desert. Subsequently both countries have mounted bombing raids on each other’s towns. Part of the background to this dispute was Ethiopia’s refusal to accept currency parity after Eritrea’s launch of the Nafka, the related cessation of Ethiopian purchases from Eritrea’s oil refinery, mutual complaints about smuggling, and discrimination against Ethiopians in the Asmara job market.

Some of the most severe and protracted civil wars have occurred in countries in which the state has been especially weak. State weakness is sometimes a consequence of the absence of substantial precolonial political institutions (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia) which is often compounded by a particularly cursory brand of colonial administration (Sierra Leone, Somalia, southern Sudan). These factors are compounded by the absence of a unifying popular mobilisation by anti-colonial nationalist movements (Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, and Somalia).

Another important characteristic of contemporary conflicts in Africa has been their escalation as a consequence of national rivalries within regions, especially over the acquisition of regional hegemonic status. In particular, the ECOMOG intervention in Liberia, largely an expression of Nigeria’s ambitions for regional political ascendancy, has prompted a proliferation and perpetuation of armed struggles in Sierra Leone. The displacement into exile of large refugee communities has been a further source of regional conflict proliferation, one that has been especially important in extending the scope of the conflict in the Great Lakes region.

Religious opposition to secular states is a comparatively new source of serious militarised insurgency in Africa. This is not because Islamic or Christian fundamentalism in itself is especially novel, but rather because powerful governments have proved willing to support such movements since the 1980s. Moreover, the expansion of secondary education and the changing status of youth have vastly increased the constituents of transnational religious movements.

Demographic shifts in favour of young people, struggles over resources (especially land), and warfare itself have seriously eroded patriarchal authority in Africa. One particularly grim consequence of these changes has been the enlistment of very young children as combatants in wars in Uganda, Sudan, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia and, of course, South Africa.

Finally, it is sobering to note that, together with sacred rebellions against the bureaucracies inherited from colonial empires, there is a fresh propensity to challenge the frontiers laid down by the Congress of Berlin and sanctioned for three decades by the Organisation of African Unity. This suggests that even in those regions that are not characterised by state collapse, the authority of the African state system, so remarkably stable over the last century, is facing unprecedented challenges.