Africa
In 2008 the Pentagon plans to activate the new Africa Command (AFRICOM) as a full-fledged Unified Command on a par with the other five geographical commands (European, Central, Southern, Pacific and Northern) into which Washington has partitioned the globe. This new Command will build on the foundation and relationships established by the current Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) – in Djibouti. This new emphasis, together with the volatility and number of African armed conflicts and potential for renewed conflicts, suggests a closer look at Africa than in the past.
History attests to the proposition that the most fragile realities known to humankind are cease-fires, armistices, power-sharing and other arrangements short of formal treaties between warring nations that are designed to stop violence. And among the identified major ongoing conflicts, those touching the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) best illustrate this fragility.
The DRC’s size (about the same as the United States east of the Mississippi River) and central position on the continent give it borders with nine other countries, most of which have emerged from their own internal violence only within the last 20 years. Particularly in east and northeast DRC, Kinshasa’s writ is quite weak despite the presence of some 17,000 UN peacekeeping troops who are frequently the target of Congolese rebels seeking to overthrow the regime of President Joseph Kabila or of foreign rebels using eastern Congo as a “safe haven” as they pursue efforts to overthrow regimes in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Southern Sudan. In mid-October, a particularly severe attack by one of the many warring factions sent 30,000 refugees streaming from their camps in pouring rain. The UN High Commissioner for refugees estimates that 375,000 Congolese are internally displaced.
One group whose leaders hide in eastern DRC is the Lord’s Resistance Army, which terrorized Uganda for two decades as it tried to overthrow the government of President Yoweri Museveni. Peace talks continue in Juba, Southern Sudan, but so far there is little progress. Museveni has set a Jan. 31, 2008 deadline for LRA chief Joseph Kony to accept the current government proposal. A complicating factor is that the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for the top four LRA leaders (one of whom recently was killed). On the other hand, violence has decreased significantly over the last year as many LRA fighters have gone into rehabilitation camps, learned civilian skills, and are reintegrating into Ugandan society.
A year ago it appeared as if the intervention of the Ethiopian army (with soto voce U.S. backing) had succeeded in crushing Somalia’s ruling Council of Islamic Courts (CIC, formerly the Union of Islamic Courts). Kenya sealed its border with Somalia to prevent fleeing CIC leaders from escaping the Ethiopian-U.S. onslaught, but not all were killed or captured and, with the help of “foreign fighters,” continue to resist.
Meanwhile, the UN-recognized, but fractious Transitional Federal Government of President Abdullahi Yusuf is dangerously close to restarting the clan warfare that has plagued Somalia for 15 years. Yusuf is seen as favoring his Darod clan in naming ministers of state, prompting Mogadishu’s more numerous Hawiye clan to take up arms. Severe sustained rocket, artillery and mortar attacks drove an estimated 34,000 Somalis from Mogadishu between February and April 2007. Fighting continued through the summer, and in August the CIC and Hawiye militias formed the Alliance for the Liberation of Somalia (ALS) to drive the Ethiopians out of Somalia.
The African Union and the UN have committed to send 8,000 peacekeepers to Somalia, but so far only 1,700 troops from Uganda and an advanced party from Burundi have arrived, and they are maintaining a low profile. In October, renewed shelling struck Mogadishu, presumably fired by the newly-integrated ALS fighters, among whom the U.S. State Department reportedly has identified known al-Qaeda operatives. In November, President Yusuf appointed a member of the Hawiye clan, Nur Hassan Hussein, as prime minister. As the year ended, Hussein dissolved the cabinet and moved to redistribute ministerial portfolios, but it is unclear what effect this might have on opposition Hawiye clansmen whose chief issue is the continued presence of Ethiopian troops in Somalia. As it is, Ethiopian forces have pulled out of a logistics and communications hub astride the main highway from the Ethiopia- Somalia border to Mogadishu.
While the Bush administration has backed Ethiopia in Somalia, it has had to take a harder line on Addis Ababa’s continued rejection of the findings of the Boundary Commission established to resolve the border disputes with Eritrea that cost more than 10,000 lives in the 1990s. Eritrea has worked closely with the United States to oppose Islamic “extremism” in Africa, making it a key ally in a region where the U.S. presence and motives are highly suspect.
Washington’s position in Africa was further eroded in the last days of 2007 when violence broke out after elections in Kenya, considered one of the few “gems” to have emerged from colonial rule and dictatorship. Everyone in or interested in Kenya knew the election for president could be close between the top two (of nine) candidates, incumbent president Mwai Kibaki, and Raila Odinga. (In the Kenyan system, most of the power rests with the president; he appoints the cabinet and most provincial officials. The parliament has virtually no authority or any way to influence policy because there is no prime minister from the parliamentary majority to check presidential power.)
International observers at the balloting stations saw an orderly process even with an extremely heavy turnout. But the process broke down at the regional and then the national level when it became apparent that Kibaki was not going to win. At the regional level, electoral officials suddenly were unavailable and international observers lost transparency of the vote counts. Some officials disappeared with the aggregate results. The Election Commission slowed, then stopped, the count, citing “unrest” in the country. Nonetheless, the following morning the head of the Election Commission announced that Kibaki had won reelection by 200,000 votes (out of an estimated 10 million cast), and within 30 minutes Kibaki was sworn in. In less than 30 additional minutes, rioting broke out, and the first ethnic-based killing began. (Kibaki and Odinga are from different ethnic groups.) As 2008 opened, neither side seemed in the mood to compromise despite more than 350 dead, more than 200,000 displaced, and the real danger that Kenya will fall into deeper chaos.
Another fragile “peace” struggles along in Cote d’Ivoire in western Africa. In October 2005, Laurent Gbagbo unilaterally extended his term as Cote d’Ivoire’s president. The UN acceded to the declaration with a stipulation that elections had to be held by October 2006. That too did not happen, but in March 2007, the government and rebels reached a power-sharing accord under which all sides were to prepare for elections in January 2008. With a history of missed deadlines, it is still not clear whether this latest one will actually be met. If elections are not held, the mandate for the UN peacekeeping contingent, set to expire in mid-January 2008, will have to be renewed. The caution in last year’s World at War remains pertinent as 2008 begins: Renewed large scale violence in Cote d’Ivoire will resume and the country will fall back into the major wars category for the 2009 report.
(Cote d’Ivoire’s neighbor Liberia has been able to move from civil war five years ago to free elections with UN support. In renewing the mandate of the UN peacekeeping force until September 2008, the Security Council set in motion a phased drawdown of troops and police – an alternative model for UN operations that more often end with the complete withdrawal of troops and police trainers and advisors before political integration of the various factions is achieved. And without some residual support, the structures and institutions of governance in many instances have been unable to survive stress, resulting in renewed instability and even political collapse.)
Elsewhere in Africa, three separate conflicts in the upper Sahel (the area just below the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea) have become intertwined:
The bloodiest “killing fields” outside of Iraq and Afghanistan continues to be in Western Sudan’s Darfur region and the refugee camps dotting both sides of Sudan’s international borders with Chad and Central African Republic (C.A.R.). At the start of 2007, the estimated aggregate death toll – noncombatant and fighters—was as high as 200,000, with another two million in refugee camps or internally displaced.
With diplomatic support from Beijing, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir resisted the proposed 17,000 (later increased to 26,000) combined UN-African Union peacekeeping mission. The procedural logjam over which organization would be in command of the mission was broken when Khartoum dropped its demand that the AU be in charge. Even so, by year’s end, some five months after Khartoum’s change of heart, the UN Secretariat was still waiting for UN member states to supply the forces to carry out the Security Council’s mandate. Meanwhile, the estimated aggregate death toll at the start of 2008 had climbed to 300,000.
Fighting in Western Darfur seems to be directed increasingly toward terrorizing refugees who fled their homes in earlier fighting that pitted rebels against government-backed Janjuweed militias and the Sudanese army. Reports from the area clearly show a pattern by Khartoum of forcing camps in southern Darfur to close, forcing inhabitants north to other already overburdened camps. The “why” behind this tactic is unclear, although there are unconfirmed sightings of a military buildup by government troops in Northern Darfur.
Often where armed conflict persists, adjacent countries get drawn into the fighting. This has happened to Sudan’s western neighbors bordering Darfur, C.A.R. and Chad, which is bearing the brunt of Sudanese-backed rebels in the latest iteration of 49 years of civil unrest. Security conditions have deteriorated to such an extent in both C.A.R. and Chad that humanitarian workers are being attacked by both government and rebel troops.
In late September, with many world leaders in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, the Security Council approved a separate combined European Union military force of 3,700 men, half of whom would be French (Paris already has 1,000 soldiers in Chad and provides military equipment, including helicopters), along with 1,000 UN police trainers for Chad and C.A.R.
Follow-on negotiations held October 27-28 in Sirte, Libya, may not have helped resolve outstanding issues. Khartoum’s delegation showed up with a unilateral, if temporary, cease fire. Agreement was reached between Khartoum and the Movement for Resistance and Change, the National Accord of Chad, and two dissident groups from the United Force for Democracy and Development (UFDD), but this still left nearly a dozen factions that refused even to attend. Heavy fighting resumed a week later between Chadian government troops and at least two rebel organizations, the Rally of Forces for Change and the main UFDD, but the lack of access to the conflict area precludes independent verification of claimed battle casualties. (Each side claimed it had killed 200 or more enemy combatants.)
Finally, Nigeria did mange to hold elections in April, but the verdict of every foreign electoral monitor was that this election reached new lows, even for Nigeria, in the extent of corruption and voter fraud present. More than 200 died in election-related violence – and that was just during the balloting.
