Rebels and Robbers Violence in Post-Colonial Angola

Rebels and Robbers Violence in Post-Colonial Angola Assis Malaquias NORDISKA AFRIKAINSTITUTET, UPPSALa 2007 Indexing terms: Violence Social structure Obstacles to development Political aspects Political power Civil war Peace Nation building National security Post-conflict reconstruction Angola Language checking: Elaine Almén Index: Margaret Binns Cover photo: Angola War. Military training for members of Movement for the Liberation of Angola in Kinknzu, Zaire. August 27, 1973. © Tramonto ISBN 978-91-7106-580-3 © The author and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet 2007 Printed in Sweden by Elanders Gotab AB, Stockholm 2007 Dedication To my mother Amélia Ussova Malaquias and to the memory of my father Mimoso Nelson Malaquias, for their inspiration To my daughters Chyara Malaquias and Nafela Malaquias, for their love Contents Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………… 7 Preface …………………………………………………………………… 9 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 11 1. Background Legacies of diversity, wealth, and colonialism …… 23 2. Violence and Fractured Nationalism …………………… 45 3. External Interventions and Internal Violence ……… 72 4. UNITA’s Insurgency Mutations and self-mutilations …………………………… 91 5. The Problematic Post-Colonial State …………………… 115 6. War Termination as Survival Strategy …………………… 137 7. Post-Conflict Challenges Identity and governance …………………………… 169 8. Toward a Citizen-Friendly State ………………………… 189 9. External Dimensions of Positive Peace …………… 207 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………… 238 List of Acronyms ……………………………………………………………… 243 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………… 245 Index …………………………………………………………………………………… 259 5 6 Acknowledgements I owe an immense debt of gratitude to many people who, over the years, have encouraged me to write this book. Many of them were fel- low African(ist) graduate students at Dalhousie University who were at- tracted to Halifax by our dynamic and devoted mentor, Professor Tim Shaw. Under Tim’s guidance, this group – including David Black, John Inegbedion, Abilah Omari, Sandra McLean, the late Joshua Mungenyi, and Larry Swatuk – became an informal think tank where impromptu, lengthy, and intense discussions about Africa regularly took place. I learned much from those discussions, often held at the Grad House. I am most thankful to this group of friends and colleagues for the cama- raderie and all the help and encouragement they gave me. I am also indebted to my colleagues in the Department of Govern- ment at St. Lawrence University. For the past decade, this extraordi- nary group of individuals – Patti Ashlaw, Alan Draper, Gus diZerega, Fed Exoo, Sandy Hinchman, Grace Huang, Joe Kling, Val Lehr, Laura O’Shaughnessey, Ansil Ramsey, Karl Schonberg, and Bob Wells – have provided me with the perfect environment to write this book. Their encouragement and support played a critical role in my ability to con- clude this project while fulfilling my various other responsibilities as a member of the department and within the wider St. Lawrence com- munity. This book received its final touches while I was on sabbatical at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa in the fall of 2004. I am very thankful to the head of the Department of Political Studies, my friend and colleague Keith Gottschalk, for ensuring that I had an office and a computer to finish my manuscript. In addition to provid- ing me with the material conditions to finish the book, he regularly 7 dropped in to offer a cup of coffee and his brilliant insights about the complexities of the regional context of which Angola is an important part. Sonja Johansson of the Nordic Africa Institute quickly recognized the project’s potential and played a critical role in guiding it through the final stages. I thank her and the anonymous reviewers who care- fully read the manuscript and offered constructive comments on both form and substance. Above all, I am most thankful to the many Angolans who gener- ously shared with me their insights about the conflict analyzed in this book. 8 Preface After more than four decades, violent conflict has been absent from Angola for four years. The key challenge for this richly endowed coun- try in the decades ahead is to undertake the arduous transition from negative to positive peace. Given the legacies of colonial and post-colonial violence, the achievement of positive peace is by no means guar- anteed – at least not in the foreseeable future. This book highlights this challenge by analyzing some of the critical historical and contemporary factors hindering the attainment of positive peace in Angola. The book had a long gestation period.I t is the culmination of years of research and writing about the political economy of Angola’s turbulent transitions: first toward independence and statehood and, later, toward peace. Over the years, the focus of my research has expanded from the relatively narrow relationship between oil and conflict to the political and economic dynamics of transition away from a system dominated by a single political party overseeing a command economy toward a system based on multiparty politics and free-market economics. I had not, initially, set out to write a book. But the number of requests I regularly received to write and speak about the conflict in Angola sug- gested that there was sufficient interest among scholars, students, and the general public to justify writing a book on the subject. The book’s long gestation also reflects its ambitious scope. When analyzing Angola’s conflict, it is not difficult to fall into the temptation of reducing the conflict to a single major analytical variable: whether ethnicity, ideology, resources, personality, and so on. Such variables can, admittedly, be useful as lenses through which Angola’s recent challenges can be viewed. Undoubtedly, ethnicity played an important role in creating the conditions for the long civil war. Likewise, the ideologi- 9 cal rivalries that developed in the context of the wider global conflict between East and West during the Cold War contributed to the length, intractability, and lethality of Angola’s conflict. But ideology alone can- not explain why this particular conflict lasted for several decades.E ven when, ideology was no longer a major factor fueling global instability, Angola did not follow international trends deemphasizing ideological differences as a way to resolve conflicts. Instead, Angola’s conflict only came to an end after the death of one its key personalities. This would appear to confirm the centrality of the personal level of analysis in un- derstanding the dynamics of the conflict. But a focus on the personalities is not sufficient to fully explain the causes, dynamics, and length of the conflict.P eace, even of the negative kind, was delayed because war was too profitable for too many key domestic players. In other words, the availability of economic resources played a key role as well. The book recognizes that multiple factors must be taken into ac- count to gain a clear view of the big picture. Such factors are all pieces of a complex puzzle. The process of putting all the pieces together was both challenging and enjoyable. Admittedly, this is not a static puzzle because it is shaped by changing challenges facing Angola. Canton, N.Y., October 2006 Assis Malaquias 10 Introduction Violent conflict has been the dominant feature in the last four decades of Angola’s history, making it one of Africa’s worst post-colonial tragedies. Once justifiably regarded as a potential sub-regional leader in southernA f- rica, due to its considerable natural resources, it flirted instead with the possibility of becoming a ‘collapsed state’ for much of the first quarter cen- tury of its existence as an independent state. What started out in 1961 as a national liberation war to destroy an oppressive colonial system gave way, during the decolonization process in 1975, to a protracted civil war that over nearly three decades, mutated through various, increasingly violent, stages. These changes were primarily a consequence of the domestic participants’ changing strategies for achiev- ing power. These changing strategies were, in turn, pragmatic responses to various regional and international developments such as foreign military interventions, the superpowers’ Cold War calculations, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, and the end of apartheid in 1994. But beyond the strategic calculations, there were also real “greed and grievance” factors motivating the participants and sustain- ing the conflict.I n many respects, both grievance and greed have motivated the participants in the Angolan conflict. Thus, if the anti-colonial phase of the conflict was driven mainly by the struggle over political and civil rights as well as economic opportunities denied by the colonial system to indig- enous populations, the post-colonial phase was a consequence of the in- ability of three nationalist groups – divided by ideology, ethnicity, region, social class, and race – to find a workable agreement on how best to share power and wealth after independence. Two major consequences arose from this failure to share power and wealth: first, the new state was regarded as less than legitimate by a significant portion of the population that had no 11 Assis Malaquias political voice within a highly restrictive political system and consequently did not receive tangible benefits from it.S econd, it legitimized violence as a means to destroy what was perceived by those excluded from the system as an artificial,

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