̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Justin Pearce

Opinion: Mozambique's unexpected truce still hangs in the balance

ljm67 — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 15:03:52 +0000

Christmas tidings of peace and goodwill in Mozambique seemed almost too good to be true after four years of sporadic but escalating civil conflict.

On December 26, Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the Renamo opposition movement, told the media that he and President Felipe Nyusi had spoken by phone and agreed to a provisional ceasefire.

A week later they agreed to extend the truce by a further 60 days. ̽��ֱ��good news was unexpected given that international mediators had recently packed up and left Mozambique after six months of stop-start talks that made almost no progress.

A further oddity of the conflict is that the Renamo guerrillas as well as its parliamentarians are under one man’s leadership – Dhlakama. This means he leads a guerrilla force as well as parliamentarians who debate against the Frelimo government in the National Assembly.

Dhlakama was brought into electoral politics as a result of the 1992 peace accord. But by 2009 he was disillusioned with his party’s declining performance at the polls and relocated to the northern city of Nampula, a place where Renamo has long had solid support.

It was there that his bodyguards – a force he was allowed to retain in the terms of the peace accord – exchanged fire with the police. Following the shootout, Dhlakama moved again, this time to Satungira, his old wartime redoubt in the Gorongosa National Park in Sofala Province of central Mozambique.

Renamo soldiers, mostly ageing civil war veterans who had not received the demobilisation benefits they expected in 1992, began to gather and form encampments at locations across central and northern Mozambique.

Talking peace

Renamo ambushes on the main roads and exchanges of fire with government forces became more frequent through 2013 and 2014.

Elections in October 2014 brought a truce. But from late 2015 government forces started attacking Renamo positions and targeting civilians suspected of supporting Renamo. During 2016 at least eight Renamo officials were assassinated. Renamo in turn became less restrained in attacking civilian targets, including local government officials.

Dialogue mediated by Mozambican civil society groups secured the truce before the 2014 elections, but failed to find a more enduring settlement. Renamo had been pushing for international mediators and foreign teams arrived in Mozambique in July 2016.

̽��ֱ��government and Renamo each got to pick members of the mediation team. ̽��ֱ��government called on the Southern African Development Community and on Jonathan Powell, a former chief-of-staff to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Renamo got the Catholic Church and the European Union on board. When the mediators left in December after half-a-year of stop-start talks, they made it clear that there was little point in them being there when little progress had been made towards common ground.

̽��ֱ��main sticking point involved a political demand put on the table by Renamo: that it be granted the power to appoint provincial governors in the provinces where it claims to have won an electoral majority. Which provinces Renamo won is a further matter of dispute.

This solution would involve a shift away from today’s centralised politics, whereby Frelimo, as the winner of the elections at national level, gets to appoint all the provincial governors.

But it’s also not exactly a gain for democracy: the proposal is not for the provinces to choose their own leaders, but for Renamo, rather than Frelimo, to appoint governors in certain provinces on the basis of previous election results.

At one point during the negotiations, it looked as though the government might be about to make concessions on the crucial issue of decentralisation, only to backtrack. This apparent dithering reflects differing opinions within the party.

On the one hand, a centralised state is an article of faith for party hawks, who also fear that Renamo appointments to provincial governorships would create centres of patronage for Renamo and represent cracks in Frelimo’s dominance of state power.

But another tendency within the party, likely including Nyusi himself, believes Frelimo has little to fear from decentralisation. This more flexible position on Nyusi’s side could explain why a couple of ad-hoc phone chats between him and Dhlakama have managed to keep alive the idea of a peace just weeks after the mediation process fizzled out.

A question of sovereignty

Yet the terms of the ceasefire remain unresolved, and this poses an immediate threat to the truce. Renamo has promised to continue operating patrols within a 3km radius of its bases. ̽��ֱ��government refuses to keep its distance from Renamo bases, which Renamo sees as provocation.

This is not a trivial issue, but goes to the heart of a question about sovereignty and political legitimacy. ̽��ֱ��same disagreement over where government forces can and cannot go derailed the peace talks in August 2016 when the mediators tried to negotiate a security corridor for them to visit Dhlakama at Satungira.

̽��ֱ��government has maintained the position that its sovereign prerogatives allow it to deploy its forces wherever it will, and that there is no such thing as Renamo territory.

Renamo, on the other hand, portrays the war as a conflict between equals and insists that it has the right to defend its positions against what it speaks of as government aggression. As things stand now, a skirmish between soldiers of the two sides could easily be seized upon by Dhlakama or by a Frelimo hawk as a reason to declare the truce null and void.

Whether or not the ceasefire holds, Mozambique’s leaders are only starting to face up to the consequence of the country’s financial crisis. In October, Mozambique acknowledged it could not pay its debts.

This is the outcome of a mounting scandal that broke earlier in 2016, when Mozambique revealed that it had US$1 billion in undeclared debt: the result of government bailouts for two part state-owned companies.

Major lenders promptly halted loans. ̽��ֱ��government also continues to be haunted by the disappearance of $600 million in bonds issued by the state fishing company supposedly to buy new boats. There are suspicions that the missing money was channelled into the war effort.

This squandering of state resources has had consequences for Mozambique’s development indicators: half of rural people live below the poverty line, a figure barely reduced since 2003. Although Renamo is in no position to give farmers a better deal, it has won some sympathy for its cause by exploiting a sense of resentment in the largely rural provinces of the centre and north.

Justin Pearce, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Politics and International Studies & Research Associate of St John's College Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

After four years of escalating civil conflict, a truce has unexpectedly arisen in Mozambique. But what are the chances of this ceasefire lasting, asks Justin Pearce, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Politics and International Studies & Research Associate of St John's College.

Adrien Barbier

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��war that fed itself - and the hollow democracy it left behind

tdk25 — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 07:37:39 +0000

̽��ֱ��voices of ordinary people who lived through Angola’s devastating, 27-year civil war have been captured in a damning study that reassesses both how the conflict happened, and the nature of the country’s so-called democracy today.

From 1975 until 2002, hundreds of thousands of Angolans were killed and millions more displaced in a brutal conflict that was described by the United Nations as “the worst war in the world”. By the time it ended, it had become synonymous with child soldiers, human rights atrocities, landmine victims and blood diamond economics.

̽��ֱ��bloodshed has usually been seen as the result of ethnic divisions in Angolan society, which mixed with Cold War politics as international powers intervened.

In a new book that draws on extensive interviews with those caught in the crossfire, however, Dr Justin Pearce – a former BBC correspondent in Angola who is now a Research Associate at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge – brings the political motivations of Angolans themselves to the centre of the analysis. He reaches a bleak conclusion: This, he suggests, was a war that for most people meant nothing when it started, and then found reasons for existing as it developed, almost as if it were feeding itself.

His study challenges conventional views about why the devastating conflict happened, and considers what it means for Angola today – a supposed democracy which, Pearce says, is for all practical purposes a one-party state.

“We think of most wars as starting with two groups with antagonistic interests,” he said. “Probably the most surprising finding was that this conflict didn’t arise from a broad identity split across Angolan society; it created it. Its end marked the culmination of a process whereby firepower, bloodshed and starvation were employed to transform the possibilities of what Angolans considered imaginable.”

̽��ֱ��roots of the Civil War pre-date Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. Amid abrupt decolonisation, the rival movements that had opposed colonialism began fighting for the right to rule the new state. ̽��ֱ��Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took control in the capital, but the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) contested the power of the MPLA government.

Despite the intervention of Cuba and South Africa, with the support of the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, the resulting struggle was frequently ignored in the West. In the mid-1990s, when the daily casualty rate was higher than in Bosnia, Margaret Anstee, the United Nations’ special representative to Angola called it “the forgotten tragedy”. “Even now it is difficult to lift the veil of silence,” she wrote in 1996. “ ̽��ֱ��argument is that there is no public interest – and apparently no desire to awaken it, either.”

Pearce’s study seeks to fill a gap by examining what motivated ordinary Angolans to participate in Africa’s worst conflict: did they believe in a cause, it asks, or did they really not have a choice? Focusing on the Central Highlands region, he spoke to many of the country’s poorest people – rural peasants – as well as town dwellers, farmers, soldiers and politicians.

In part, their personal accounts add to what is already known about the war’s horrors. Some gave examples of the extreme tactics with which UNITA and the MPLA sometimes controlled the population – tales of public executions, kidnappings, forced marriages, and even the burning of alleged “witches”.

In addition, however, their accounts show that the ideological divisions associated with the Cold War meant little to ordinary Angolans. Instead, Pearce found that after years of political suppression by the Portuguese, few Angolans were engaged with politics in 1975. As the MPLA and UNITA seized parts of the country, the locals simply accepted their military domination as legitimate political power.

For most, therefore, the war began not for a cause, but as a reality that was imposed upon people. Many of Pearce’s interviewees described their lives under UNITA and the MPLA as if they had been “owned” by the warring factions. “People lost the notion of being independent,” one interviewee told him. “People became possessions.”

̽��ֱ��study found that such political affiliations were often fluid. When territories changed hands, “UNITA people” simply became “MPLA people” instead, and vice-versa. In one particularly extreme case, Pearce was told about a train journey in which the passengers switched allegiances at different stations, to avoid being executed by the opposing militias.

That situation made a mockery of attempts by the West during the 1990s to end the war through democratic means. As the war went on, however, the study suggests that it developed its own reasons for existing. Control was founded upon force and fear, but it was maintained by means of persuasion. Both parties created jobs and provided local services. They also used education programmes to strengthen their claims to rule, while cultivating a fear of the adversary.

Gradually, these strategies turned many Angolans into die-hard supporters of either UNITA or the MPLA. Citizens came to depend on their local party for their livelihoods, and came to define their sense of national identity with the fight against the other side.

Pearce suggests that the consequences were disastrous, because this made the conflict a “zero-sum game”, in which one side had to undermine the other’s ability to support its people in order to win. ̽��ֱ��MPLA government’s counter-insurgency operations, which intensified in the late 1990s, finally achieved peace on this basis – in the process causing widespread starvation, large-scale population displacement and appalling suffering.

Seen through the prism of this bleak recent history, the book argues that 13 years later, Angola’s supposed democracy remains the result of a war that was won through domination.

Since its end, the MPLA has implemented a reconstruction programme on the back of an oil boom that is now stalling. While Pearce says that this has created “the most disgusting rich-poor gap imaginable”, he also notes that the government still suppresses political opposition using repressive tactics that echo the war itself.

“It goes through the rituals of multi-party democracy, but I would say it’s a strongly authoritarian state with the trappings of a democracy that doesn’t really function,” Pearce added.

“It’s as if the channels simply don’t exist for the expression of an alternative vision. Even now, with the economy suffering from plunging oil prices, all you see are occasional, small, street protests by a few disaffected young people. It’s hard to see how that alone is going to chip away at the edifice of power, and the government’s response has been brutal. Fifteen activists were imprisoned without trial in June this year, and their mothers were beaten by police when they demonstrated for their sons’ release. I fear that there is going to have to be some sort of severe crisis in Angola before things really get better.”

Political Identity And Conflict in Central Angola, 1975-2002, by Justin Pearce, is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press. Dr Pearce is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and a Research Associate of St John's College.

Inset images: (1) UNITA troops during a handover of their weapons to government monitors at the war's end in 2002; (2) Civilians carry sacks of food flown into Kuito during the humanitarian crisis of 2001; (3) Landmine clearances in Angola, one legacy of the conflict. All images credit Justin Pearce.

A new study using extensive eyewitness accounts re-examines the causes and legacy of Angola's brutal 27-year civil war, once described by the United Nations as "the worst war in the world".

Probably the most surprising finding was that this conflict didn’t arise from a broad identity split across Angolan society; it created it. Its end marked the culmination of a process whereby firepower, bloodshed and starvation were employed to transform the possibilities of what Angolans considered imaginable.

Justin Pearce

Justin Pearce.

Angolan civilians walking past the remains of tanks in 2004. Relics of the conflict still litter the Angolan countryside.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes