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Volume 23 1996 Issue 67 Review of African Political Economy No.67:3-5 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 1996 ISSN 0305-6244; RIX#6701 The Cunning of Conflict Chris Allen This issue was not planned and commissioned around a single theme, but is drawn from submitted articles (as one issue in each volume usually is). There is however one thread that links three of the main articles: the complexity of the politics of conflict in post-cold war Africa. While each of Reno, Harrison and Sesay have a distinct and different central theme, they are concerned with the ways in which actors exploit or depend upon violent conflict to sustain or promote their political positions. Thus, Reno argues that the international financial institutions' insistence on privatising or contracting out African state functions to private firms on grounds of the promotion of efficiency and the reduction of the potential for patronage (or 'spoils') politics has produced perverse results in Sierra Leone. Here the Strasser regime, and presumably its recent successor, the Bio regime, used private firms such as Executive Outcomes and a series of mining companies, to help consolidate and centralise power. This has been achieved through their role in creating reliable sources of revenue under central control, in denying access to resources - notably diamonds, but also bureaucratic resources - to political rivals, and providing mercenary forces to combat the RUF of Foday Sankoh. 'Good governance' and civil society are undermined, not enhanced, by these activities, while conflict is if anything sustained. Similarly, while the great bulk of literature on the civil war in Mozambique has concentrated on Renamo's external origins, its brutality and its destructiveness, Harrison shows how it has been able to exploit the impact of the war on communities and on the Frelimo government (in combination with other related but older features of Frelimo, such as its rural development strategy and authoritarianism), to its electoral advantage. Renamo has been able to play upon local divisions and resentments to create an electoral base, in ways foreshadowed in earlier commentar- ies by Young (1990) and Cahen (1993). Sesay, in his article in the Liberian civil war, concentrates on the role of the ECOMOG intervention in shaping the course of conflict and negotiation since 1990. A subsidiary but significant theme, also touched on by Reno, is the functionality of conflict to almost all the parties concerned, not simply as a means to gain territorial or other advantages and thus influence the outcome of negotiation, but as an element of their political dynamic. As Stephen Ellis (1995) argues, warlordism in Liberia involves the use of armed groups to seize control not so much of territory per se, but of exploitable assets such as timber, whose sale provides the means to reproduce the loyalty of the group and to enrich the warlord. Senior officers on the 'other side' - the ECOMOG forces - behave in the same fashion, using their command positions and access to transport etc. to loot and extract resources from areas which they dominate by force. Reno sets this in a wider context: 4 Review of African Political Economy Nigeria's military rulers find new ways of extending patronage rewards to a slimmed down elite network through exploiting commercial opportunities associated with army interventions in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Gambia. Studies of conflict since 1990 (see e.g. Furley 1995, Zartman 1995), while sensitive to the influence of past external intervention and conflict promotion and to the persistence of cold war attitudes (as in Angola) have tended to elaborate three themes: (a) new factors underlying local-regional conflicts, and especially warfare; (b) the intensity of conflict, and its political, social and economic destructiveness; and (c) the need for and means of conflict resolution, very largely seen in terms of international responsibilities and implementation. Discussion of the Somali conflict, for example, has stressed the clan basis of the warring militias (while often ignoring the extent to which the clan system was politicised and transformed under Siad Barre), and the degree to which local social and political institutions were damaged or even destroyed during 1988-94, in addition to the destruction of services and the deaths arising from war, famine and the theft of land and other resources. African Rights' massive and moving account of the Rwandan massacres (now available in a an enlarged second edition (African Rights, 1995b), while discussing the role of a constructed ethnic divide, lays more stress on the Habyarimana government's planning for massacre, the role of ethnic propaganda (notably by private radio stations) and the government's fear of loss of power and loss of immunity through the introduction of political reforms. Studies in the Horn have focused on the arming of local militias by governments and their opponents, especially in Sudan, and the transformation of what were once ordered and limited conflicts over access to grazing, water, land or cattle into attempts wholly to deny such access to entire communities, or even to destroy them (see, for example, African Rights' report on attacks on the Nuba in Sudan, which they characterise as genocidal (African Rights (1995a)). The rapidly growing literature on conflict resolution in Africa is associated with expanding activity in the field by the UN, by regional organisations, and by an extraordinary variety of NGOs, new and old. They, and the literature (with a few exceptions like Macrae and Zwi) see conflict as at root dysfunctional, as an aberration, even when in part it arises from resistance to human rights abuses or intervention, or defence against violent attack. There is a parallel here between this narrow conception of conflict and the treatment of all but formally democratic regimes, or of non-market and especially socialist economic strategies, as aberrations: the important thing is to promote - at all costs - peace, multi-party competitive electoral systems, and neo- liberal economic policies. There is therefore a tendency to avoid seeing conflict as a part of the political process, either as struggle or - no less commonly now - as an essential element within an organisation's or a regime's political dynamic. Thus it may be mistaken to view the Sudanese government, or Unita in Angola, as necessarily having more to gain from external mediation and a negotiated settlement than it has from continued conflict. To see conflict in this fashion not only forces one to reconsider the validity of much of contemporary justification for and methods of conflict prevention, mediation and resolution, and of their imposed character, but also the stability of what has apparently been achieved. The lesson of Somalia may be less that the US and UN were ill-prepared and ill-informed, or that they adopted the wrong strategies etc., but that local resolutions have been achieved not through their actions but in their absence, both in the north (Somaliland) and more recently in parts of the south. Editorial: The Cunning of Conflict 5 Editor's Note An unfortunate error crept into the editorial for issue 66, for which the Managing Editors wish to apologise. The substantial role in planning and creating that issue of a non-member of the Editorial Working Group, Gloria Thomas-Emeagwali, was left unrecognised; she should of course have been included in the editorial credits, with Alfred Zack-Williams and Giles Mohan. This editorial, however, is solely the responsibility of Chris Allen. References African Rights (1995a), Facing Genocide: The Nuba of Sudan, London: African Rights; African Rights (1995b), Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, London: African Rights (2nd edn). Cahen, M (1993), 'Check on Socialism in Mozambique: What Check? What Socialism?', ROAPE 57: 46-59. Ellis, S (1995), 'Liberia 1989-1994: a Study of Ethnic and Spiritual Violence', African Affairs, 94, 375: 165-97. Furley, O (ed) (1995), Conflict in Africa, London: Tauris. Macrae, J & A Zwi (1994), War and Hunger: Rethinking International Responses to Complex Emergencies, London: Zed. Young, T (1990), 'The MNR/Renamo: External and Internal Dynamics', African Affairs, 89, 357: 491-509. Zartman, IW (ed) (1995), Collapsed States: the Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, Boulder, Lynne Rienner. Student Subscriptions are available at a reduced rate. Please write or e- mail the ROAPE office for details: Box 678, Sheffield SI 1BF, UK; e-mail: [email protected]. Review of African Political Economy No.67:7-18 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 1996 ISSN 0305-6244; RIX #6702 Ironies of Post-cold War Structural Adjustment in Sierra Leone William Reno Africa's creditors stress 'capacity building' measures to strengthen bureaucratic effectiveness to reverse economic and political decline (Dia, 1993). World Bank officials point to the East Asian example of success at using government policies and institutions to promote 'market friendly' growth policies insulated from the pressures of clients demanding payouts as a positive example for Africa (World Bank, 1993a). Analysts recognise, however, that decades of patron-client politics and intractable rent-seeking (the use of state resources for personal gain) behaviour among state officials limits short-term prospects for increasing revenue collection. With little internal financing for market boosting policies, World Bank programmes prescribe extensive civil service layoffs. Subsequent reductions in unproductive expenditures will reduce
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