From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Fri Jul 25 2008 - 09:36:16 EDT
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49330 Lost in the Horn Stephen
Marks (2008-07-09)
Human security should come first in seeking conflict resolution in the Horn
of Africa. Favour should be shown to partners that protect their people -
whether they are state or non-state actors - and not just to those who claim
to protect western interests. And all states in the region should be
required to conform to "the normal conventions of international conduct."
These are the main conclusions of a new Chatham House report by Sally Healey
in 'Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa: How Conflicts Connect and
Peace Agreements Unravel.' The conclusions, despite their diplomatic
wording, amount to a clear criticism of outside and especially Western
policy in the region. But the underlying analysis provides a valuable
conceptual tool-kit for challenging the concepts used more widely for
understanding conflict.
The report looks at three peace processes in the Horn - the Algiers
Agreement of December 2000 between Ethiopia and Eritrea; The Somalia
National Peace and Reconciliation Process of October 2004, and the Sudan
Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005.
Each of the three processes is unique, and their most obvious common feature
is that the results are mixed. The Algiers Agreement has not led to a
permanent settlement between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The two instruments
created at Algiers to help reach a permanent peace - the boundary commission
and the UN force - have both run out of steam. At least the two sides have
not returned to open war. But their enmity continues, and is played out by
proxy elsewhere in the region, especially in Somalia.
The Transitional Federal Government created for Somalia by the Mbgathi peace
process still exists and 'enjoys' international recognition and legitimacy,
but has proved unable to establish its authority inside the country. And
Ethiopia's intervention to install its authority by force has simply
provoked an insurgency in response, part anti-Ethiopian and part Islamist.
The result, in Healey's words, has been to create "conditions that are much
worse than those that existed before the peace process began."
By comparison therefore Sudan's peace agreement shines out as a success. The
South has succeeded in establishing its own government with its own
autonomous army as well as participation in government in Khartoum, and the
two sides rely on the agreement text to manage their relations. But border
demarcation, especially in contested oil-rich regions, bode ill for the
future.
Responses to the recently completed census will be vital, and could hinder
progress to the crucial referendum on independence for the South due in
2011. Lack of trust, will and capacity all have caused slippage in the past,
and may again, aggravated by the Darfur conflict.
But despite these differences, common themes emerge. One is what Healey
identifies as "The prevalence of identity politics and processes of state
formation and disintegration." While this may seem obvious, it leads on to
another more specific common thread; the ways in which "interactions between
the states of the region support and sustain the conflicts within them in a
systemic way."
This interplay becomes especially complex if we factor in the global context
of the 'war on terrorism' as an often distorting prism through which outside
powers view conflicts which have other, more complex causes.
The regional institution which might be expected to take the lead in
conflict resolution [IGAD] is hampered, to say the least, by being composed
of the states whose rivalry or incapacity constitutes the problem. Healey
concludes that "In the long term, economic change and growing economic
interdependence...seem the most likely drivers of stability." But economic
change is unlikely to take off without the stability which is supposed to be
its consequence.
Healey's four main conclusions are stimulating, and of wider application.
First, she argues, is the need to take account of "the long history of amity
and enmity" in the region, appreciating that present conflicts are seen by
participants as "part of a long continuum of warfare."
Outsiders should therefore recognise that their influence is limited, and
their goals should be modest.
But it is also important to recognise that the state itself is often the
problem. Conventional analysis in terms of 'weak' and 'strong' states and
the familiar 'state-building' approach can fail to capture key features of
states such as Sudan or Ethiopia. Both these states are built around core
power centres which are certainly not weak and which have historic roots,
but which have been in a state of contestation and struggle, one way or
another, for over a century with populations on the periphery; and in
unstable border zones with a long history of resisting incorporation.
Hence the merits of the "Regional Security Complex" approach which stresses
the way in which each country's security problems interact with and often
exacerbate its neighbours, in ways which make it difficult to seperate
internal motives from 'foreign' policy.
The same two-way process can be seen at work in the influence of global
agendas. As outside superpowers see the region's problems through the tinted
spectacles of their own concerns, so local actors are happy to oblige by
presenting their own home-grown rivalries in terms likely to secure support
from global actors.
The shifting relations of Ethiopia and Somalia to the rival Cold War
superpowers in the 1970s is a case in point. More recently US insistence on
seeing all conflicts in the region, however complex their causes and
dynamics, through one reductionist prism of the 'war on terror' has arguably
only made matters worse.
As Healey concludes: "It has polarised parties and reduced the space for
mediation. Outsiders interested in mediation need to respond judiciously to
the allegations of terrorism levied against various parties to conflict in
the Horn and to seek to develop space for dialogue."
Hence the conclusions - even-handedness to all rather than a double standard
for the West's presumed friends and presumed foes; and human security and
priority for partners that respect it, rather than a military and
state-based conception of security and legitimacy.
Fine conclusions - but to whom are they addressed? Here we run up against
the same paradoxical circularity that Healey identifies in the Somali peace
process. It may seem sensible to seek peace by bringing the various
participants to the conflict together round a table, and labelling the
resulting collective a 'provisional government.'
However distasteful some or all of the participants, realpolitik must surely
dictate their inclusion, as they are the actors with clout on the ground
where it counts. But as they are also the problem, such externally imposed
'solutions' may turn out only to entrench the problem - less violently if
you are lucky, but in Somalia, not even that.
But a human security and civil society based approach, however attractive,
is hardly likely to commend itself to states and would-be state actors whose
power derives from the rejection or perversion of such an approach.
There is no theoretical answer to this dilemma, and the practical answer can
only emerge through civil society organisations and movements themselves
fleshing out the idea of a truly human security-based approach and pushing
it forward, with support from sympathetic elements within structures of
state power. In this process, Healy's report will be a useful resource.
Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa: How Conflicts Connect and Peace
Agreements Unravel. A Horn of Africa Study Group Report by Sally Healy can
be downloaded here (
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/11681_0608hornafrica.pdf ) .
The Horn of Africa Study Group comprises the Royal Institute of
International Affairs [Chatham House], the University of London Centre of
African Studies, the Royal African Society and the Rift Valley Institute.
*Stephen Marks is a research associate with Fahamu
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at
http://www.pambazuka.org/
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