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South African Journal of International Affairs

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Pax Africana in the age of extremes

Adekeye Adebajo & Chris Landsberg
a b a b

Research associate at the International Peace Academy, Oxford University, New York Deputy director of the Centre for Policy Studies, Oxford University, Johannesburg

Available online: 11 Nov 2009

To cite this article: Adekeye Adebajo & Chris Landsberg (2000): Pax Africana in the age of extremes, South African Journal of International Affairs, 7:1, 11-26 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10220460009545285

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Pax Africana in the Age of Extremes

Adekeye Adebajo and Chris Landsberg1

Introduction ric Hobsbawm described the bloody 20 th century as the age of extremes. One hundred years of troubles saw Europe drag the rest of the world into its two civil wars and suffer through communism, fascism, and a genocidal holocaust. Post-colonial Africa has experienced its own age of extremes. Since 1960, more than 32 African wars have resulted in over seven million deaths and spawned more than nine million refugees. Ali Mazrui, the foremost academic prophet of Pax Africana, was one of the earliest analysts to articulate the need for Africans to take on the responsibility of policing their own continent. Kwame Nkrumah was an early political visionary who unsuccessfully pushed for an all-African army to keep peace on the continent. African leaders were too busy attempting to transform their newly-independent states into nations; their sovereignty was still too tenuous to cede to a supranational military body. But with conflicts continuing to rage in parts of the African continent, the need for a Pax Africana is as pressing today as it was four decades ago.

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This essay will argue that Africa's conflicts have both internal and external roots. We will situate the causes of African conflicts in both contemporary and historical structures and events. Focusing on post-Cold War Africa, the essay will examine the various methods and actors available for extinguishing local brushfires hegemonic pacification, balance of power, concert of powers, regional security mechanisms, coalitions of small states, eminent elders, civil societies and judge their efficacy. We will challenge calls by Western analysts for mercenaries and private security outfits to be introduced into African conflicts as an alternative to Africa's weak armies. This is an option that we regard as irresponsible and illegitimate. Instead, we

ADEKEYE ADEBAJO is a research associate at the International Peace Academy in New York. CHRIS LANDSBERG is deputy director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg. Both were Rhodes scholars at Oxford University and Hamburg fellows at Stanford University.

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suggest that while regional security efforts by African actors have been far from perfect, supporting such efforts, as well as strengthening the African state, is still the most effective means of managing conflicts on the continent.

The causes of Africa's conflicts Colonialism and its legacies Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, noted in his 1998 report on 'the causes of conflict and the promotion of durable peace and sustainable development in Africa' that the causes of African conflicts are multifaceted and include historical, external, and internal factors. Scholars like Mahmood Mamdani have also stressed the profound effect of colonialism and the Cold War in shaping the African state system. Crises of legitimacy, a lack of political accommodation, and the existence of weak states are major factors contributing to African conflicts. Colonialism created the conditions for many of the ethnic grievances of the post-independence era, through arbitrarily drawn colonial boundaries which merely reflected the political compromises of European colonial overlords rather than the political consensus reached by African peoples. British colonial policies in Sudan and Nigeria, Portuguese policies in Angola and Mozambique, and Belgian policies in Burundi and Rwanda sowed the seeds for future conflicts. Unresolved disputes concerning inherited colonial borders resulted in postindependence conflicts between Burkina Faso and Mali, Nigeria and Cameroon, and Morocco and Algeria. Irredentist claims have been made by Morocco in Western Sahara, Somalia in Ethiopia, and Libya in Chad. European imperialists embarked on a scramble for the riches of the African continent, imposing autocratic colonial rule that only belatedly and halfheartedly undertook political and socio-economic reform to prepare the new African states for independence. Tanzania and Zambia had fewer than 100 university graduates at independence; Zare had fewer than 10. No durable institutions were built to manage conflicts and to facilitate effective governance. The entrenched colonial trading patterns and continuing political ties, particularly in Gallic Africa, further limited the options available to African leaders. As the late Claude Ake noted: at independence, African leaders were in no position to pursue development; they were too engrossed in the struggle for survival and the need to cope with the many problems threatening their states and their power. Non-alignment and selfsufficiency became mere slogans, representing more hope than reality.

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The Cold War circus in Africa The Cold War affected the African state system by prolonging destabilising liberation wars and creating military stalemates. Following independence, Africa became a strategic playground for the superpowers and the French gendarmerie. The early difficulties encountered by the UN in putting the Zairean Humpty Dumpty back together again amidst superpower rivalry led the global body to avoid entanglements in African civil wars. The African continent was flooded with arms, leading to a continuation of conflicts in Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, and the delaying of the liberation of Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. After the Berlin wall fell and communism collapsed, the West abandoned African autocrats who had served as reliable Cold War allies. The departure of the Cold Warriors from Africa has combined with the indifference of the West to African suffering following the Somali dbcle in 1993. The clearest sign of this indifference was the stalling of action by Western powers to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994. As Sudanese scholar, Francis Deng correctly observed, Africans have now been forced to recognise that the world does not care much about them and that they must take their destinies into their own hands. Even as the foreign aid that sustained Cold War clients in power was cut off, their trading networks came under escalating challenges from armed rebellions, which increasingly replaced military coups as the main method for removing sitting regimes. Economic reforms mandated by the Bretton Woods institutions further eroded the control of African autocrats, as urban riots and social instability accompanied cuts in health and education, and the removal of government subsidies on food and fuel. In an increasing number of states, governments could not exercise the normal state functions of providing security, order and social services to their citizens, and lost control over the monopoly of violence and state bureaucracies. Africa's erstwhile strongmen revealed themselves to be emperors without clothes. Street protests led to multiparty reforms of varying degrees of transparency, while warlords led popular rebellions from the countryside to topple Cold War dinosaurs like Zaire's Mobutu, Somalia's Barre, and Liberia's Doe. Strong rulers, weak states Besides these external sources of conflict, Africa's post-independence leaders, notably through their brutal power struggles and politics of social exclusion, have also contributed to conflicts on the continent. Federation
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and the conceding of autonomy to minority groups were rejected by many nation-builders, who argued that one-party states were the only means to avoid destabilising ethnic wars and to preserve the unity necessary to build their nations. Ghana, Guinea, Tanzania, Kenya, Zare, Malawi, Algeria, Senegal and Cte d'Ivoire were some of the early pioneers. In South Africa and Rhodesia, racist white regimes obdurately maintained their atavistic albinocracies. The African state became a highly contested arena, and spawned an era of personalised rule. The centralisation of state power by autocrats preserved their own rule but eventually led, in cases like Ethiopia, Liberia, Zare and Somalia, to injustices that perpetuated the very conflicts they claimed to be attempting to avoid. Ethno-regional differences were exacerbated by nepotism and favouritism in appointments to military, political, and bureaucratic positions. The state became a cash cow to be milked for political patronage. Urban bias in development policies also created an aggrieved countryside full of a ready army of unemployed youth who have today become the cannon fodder of Africa's warlords. The era of personal rule in Africa was carried to absurd levels of tragi-comic farce as tyrannical 'presidents-for-life' like Emperor Bokassa, Field Marshall Idi Amin, MasterSergeant Samuel Doe, Mobutu Sese Seko and Macias Nguema squandered their countries' wealth and murdered their own citizens. Africa's military 'men on horseback' also made a spectacular entry on to the political stage, led by Egypt's Nasser in 1952. There was too much military in politics and too much politics in the military. But Africa's military brass hats failed as spectacularly as the politicians to transform their societies in any fundamental way. They often relied heavily on powerful civil servants and opportunistic political classes to rule, and their claims to legitimacy were even more threadbare than those of the politicians they displaced. In Africa's four post-independence decades, 80 successful military coups d'tat were staged, and over two dozen leaders assassinated.

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African solutions to African problems Old conflicts, new actors There are several factors that have hampered efforts at finding African solutions to Africa's post-Cold War conflicts. Domestically, some belligerents were never really interested in resolving conflicts despite signing peace agreements. They were more interested in other rationales: the belief in the possibility of total victory and their desire to inherit the entire state; the
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economic benefits they derived from the exploitation of economic resources; the desire to secede from a territory as the only long-term method of achieving security. At the subregional level, many states have failed to agree on a common strategy to resolve conflicts. Some have developed parochial political and economic interests in the crises and supported individual factions, leading to neighbourhood rivalries in efforts to preserve subregional power balances. This has resulted in the questioning of the legitimacy of regional peacekeepers, and sometimes to the withholding of external support for their efforts. Finally, Africa's weak armies still lack the. logistical and financial means to act effectively in enforcing or keeping the peace. The end of the Cold War and the political liberation of Africa have changed both the role and nature of African actors seeking to resolve the continent's conflicts. Regional actors like the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD), many of them primarily economic organisations, have had to adapt to new realities, and carve out niches for themselves in Africa's evolving security architecture. Internal conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), CongoBrazzaville, and Lesotho have seen interventions by neighbouring states. New actors and new mechanisms of security, both collective and unilateral, such as aspiring hegemons, small states, eminent elders, civil societies, and greedy mercenaries have all emerged as players in African conflicts. With the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Somalia and Rwanda, the powerful members of the UN Security Council became unwilling to bolster the role of the UN in managing African conflicts. The world's sole 'hyper power', America, not only urged the UN to disengage from Africa, but also contributed to disempowering the world organisation by irresponsibly contributing to its financial crisis. With the West unwilling to send its boys to die in Africa, former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had little choice but to stress the importance of Africa's regional organisations in keeping the continental peace. Pax Africana became a matter of practical necessity rather than a forlorn hope.

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Regional hegemons The two African states that have demonstrated the potential to act as regional hegemons in post-Cold War Africa are Nigeria and South Africa. The ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone were the most visible manifestations of an attempt at hegemonic pacification. A Nigerian-led force intervened in former American and British spheres of influence that had become areas of indifference to much of the world. The diminished French role in Africa after dbcles in Rwanda and Zare seemed to offer the chance for Nigeria to fulfil its leadership ambitions in west Africa. But the financial and logistical difficulties experienced by ECOMOG, the opposition of several francophone states to what they condemned as a Nigerian attempt to dominate the subregion, and the continuation of fragile and precarious security situations in Liberia and Sierra Leone, revealed the shortcomings of Pax Nigeriana. Facing more pressure than his military predecessors, the new Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, has already responded to the hostility of the Nigerian parliament, press and public caused by the high costs of the missions in west Africa by starting a military withdrawal from Sierra Leone. It is unlikely that Nigeria will continue its subregional fire-fighting role unless the burden is more equitably shared with other regional and extra-regional actors. South Africa is potentially Africa's most effective hegemon. But Pretoria carries historical baggage: it used its power destructively during the apartheid era by destabilising its neighbours. This inheritance, coupled with pressing domestic problems, caused Nelson Mandela to shy away from attempting to impose a Pax Pretoriana on regional conflicts in the postapartheid era. A blushing South Africa eventually lost its peacekeeping virginity by sending armed forces to Lesotho in 1998, along with Botswana. Despite the mission's inauspicious start, which led to widespread looting and killings, a fragile peace was eventually established, allowing for political dialogue. Like Nigeria, South Africa as hegemon would face challenges from states like Zimbabwe and Namibia, which have already pursued their own independent policies in the DRC in defiance of Pretoria's wishes. Unless Thabo Mbeki builds regional alliances and coalitions with countries such as Zimbabwe and Namibia, he will find it difficult to realise his regional objectives.

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Balance of power During the 19ch century, Europe's Great Powers attempted to keep the continental peace through an intricate system of alliances in which states threw their weight behind others to oppose challenges to the regional order, in an effort to balance the strength of an expansionist state or rival alliance. A similar pattern of security may be evolving in central Africa. Military alliances, secret agreements, and regional congresses are the stuff of balance-of-power politics in this subregion. But this system of security is notoriously unstable. Measuring a balance is rarely an exact science, and states usually prefer an imbalance of power in their own favour. It is however worth keeping in mind that the rules of central Africa's balance of power game have still not been fixed, the players do not even consciously talk of themselves as engaging in such a game, and no territorial adjustments to satisfy interested parties have yet been reached. In the DRC, three SADC members intervened militarily to come to the rescue of beleaguered President Laurent Kabila. During Mobutu's end-game in Zare, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Angola were deeply embroiled in the war and eventually delivered Kabila to power. Following tensions between Kabila and Kagame, Rwanda and Uganda sought to replace Kabila with a more pliant client. Not only did these actions break the important post-independence African taboo on non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states, they also served to balkanise the entire central and southern African subregions. Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Chad reacted by sending troops to assist Kabila in an attempt to restore the regional balance of power and to help maintain their own influence in the region. Kagame and Museveni's Bismarckian delusions were embarrassingly exposed, and their support for separate rebel factions has led to military clashes between their troops in Kisangani. A similar security pattern may be emerging in Angola, where a Congo-style intervention by Zimbabwe and Namibia is a distinct possibility. Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and Congo have signed a mutual defence pact formalising their anti-Uganda/Rwanda alliance. Amid these conflicts, South Africa has conducted a policy of not-so-splendid isolation under Mandela. Unlike Britain, which maintained the European balance in an earlier age, Pretoria has been reluctant to throw in its weight militarily to maintain a regional equilibrium. Instead, it has tried to rely strictly on diplomatic tools. But even if only to provide military peacekeepers to guarantee negotiated settlements, Pretoria will eventually have to shed its reluctance to put its military muscle where its diplomatic mouth is. Mbeki has already agreed to send South

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African troops to enforce a peace agreement in the DRC, perhaps marking a major shift from the Mandela era.

A concert of African powers A concert of African powers, modelled on Metternich's European concert of the 19 lh century, would see the continent's potential great powers Algeria, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa come together in a bid to impose regional order by maintaining a consensus of the strong against the weak, backed up by unassailable military might. But the difficulty of this approach is that Africa's giants do not yet perceive common interests in such a security system, and some of them Algeria, DRC, Ethiopia are facing internal and external military threats that continue to sap their strength. But ad hoc coalitions of some of these states could still act in concert to promote continental stability. The most obvious example is the evolving alliance between South Africa and Nigeria. Evidence suggests that these two African powers collectively have the potential to fill the vacuum created by the departure of external powers. South Africa and Nigeria are responsible for over half of sub-Saharan Africa's economic strength and have two of the continent's largest armies. Obasanjo has already called for deeper and wider co-operation between ECOWAS and SADC in conflict resolution. During the recent OAU summit in Algiers, Mbeki and Obasanjo articulated what amounted to an emerging African doctrine: the denunciation of military coups d'tat as a form of regime change in Africa. These leaders are essentially promoting the need for a politics of democratic contestation in Africa. They put potential putschists on notice by warning that they will consider putting in place punitive measures against the perpetrators of coups in Africa. They toyed with the 'yellow card', 'red card' football analogy as forms of punishment: a warning would first be issued to putschists and efforts made to persuade them to reverse course; if this failed, automatic moves would be made to expel the putschists from the OAU, and economic sanctions would eventually be slapped on them. The articulation of this emerging African doctrine came in the wake of several statements by both Mbeki and Obasanjo that their two countries need to cement a special relationship in the interest of the promotion of democracy, peace and stability in Africa. Both countries are in the process of establishing a bi-national commission that will be led by their two presidents. Under Mbeki, South Africa will have to be activated to play a

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more active diplomatic, economic, and military role in Africa. Burundi's Buyoya has already successfully approached Mbeki to help mediate his country's six-year conflict, while Kabila has asked for Pretoria's assistance in reconstructing his shattered economy. Nigeria could become instrumental in nudging South Africa into becoming more activist in keeping the continental peace. Both countries could end up being the conductors directing the tuneful symphonies of Africa's security concert. A significant African alliance may be in gestation. Regional security mechanisms Regional security mechanisms are systems of'collective security' in which states are expected to participate as roughly equal partners in efforts to stabilise their neighbourhoods. The disadvantage of some of these mechanisms is that subregional states tend to have an interest in the conflicts, support different factions, and are often regarded with suspicion by the belligerents. The clear advantage is that such states tend to understand their subregions better than others and have a real stake in resolving the conflict, not out of sheer altruism or moral obligation, but due to the threat of instability affecting their own countries. Even in cases of conflicting interests, the existence of regional mechanisms gives local actors a forum in which to attempt to narrow their differences and forge common positions. The UN and OAU could send peacekeepers and envoys to make subregional efforts more neutral, as has occurred in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The ECOMOG experiences in west Africa and SADC's difficulties in central Africa serve to illustrate the importance of building permanent security mechanisms in Africa. The OAU has historically been weakened by financial and capacity constraints. In the post-Cold War era, it increasingly sees itself as a bridgebuilder between various African regional organisations. The OAU Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, and Resolution stresses the early detection and prevention of conflicts before they erupt. It has created military and political institutions to improve its logistical effectiveness and decision-making process. In recognition of its own organisational limitations, the OAU has left large-scale peacekeeping missions to the subregions and the UN, deploying instead military and electoral observers and special envoys to conflict areas like Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Comoros, Gabon,Zambia, Zare, Togo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The OAU still has staffing problems and can sometimes be too politically cautious. Its links with subregional organisations need to

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be strengthened, and it must design a proper division of labour with them whereby it can lend legitimacy to interventions through its special envoys and observers, while co-ordinating the deployment of troops and information-sharing between subregions. In west and central Africa, subregional leaders have agreed to the creation of a security mechanism to manage conflicts. They have committed to strengthening the powers and decision-making bodies of their subregional secretariats, ECOWAS and ECCAS, in the security field, and establishing early-warning systems involving information bureaux. Both subregions have signed non-aggression pacts. In southern Africa, the fledgling SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security has been embroiled in regional politics, with its Zimbabwean chair accused of taking unilateral decisions. With a recent agreement having apparently been reached on the rotation of the chair and consultation with other states, there are hopes that SADC members will ratify the draft protocol to render the Organ operational. Joint military exercises have already been conducted by the armies of all three subregions. ECOWAS has gone a step further in proposing a stand-by force of brigade size consisting of national units for use in future interventions. Despite these encouraging steps, subregional divisions still continue to hamper efforts to manage conflicts in the DRC and Sierra Leone. ECOWAS, ECCAS and SADC, like the OAU, will also have to ensure that they hire a professional staff to run their security mechanisms and that their members pay their dues. There have been efforts to create security mechanisms in two other African subregions. On the Horn of Africa, IGAD has been spectacularly ineffectual in efforts to resolve the Ethiopia/Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan conflicts. The Sudan conflict has been caught up in subregional splits similar to those which bedevilled efforts in west and central Africa. The support of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda for the SPLA rebels has made compromise difficult. In North Africa, Algeria and Morocco have used the Western Sahara as a stage for pursuing their regional rivalry in the Maghreb, with Algeria backing POLISARIO independence fighters against the Moroccan occupation. Though the identification of voters by the UN fora planned referendum in Western Sahara in 2000 is nearing completion, it is still unclear whether the vote will ever take place. This 25-year dispute, coupled with the bloody civil war in Algeria, has hampered the effectiveness of the subregion's Arab Maghreb Union (AMU). Another difficulty in establishing Africa's security mechanisms has been the role of external actors. America, Britain, and France have been divisive in

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their assistance to Africa's security mechanisms, raising suspicions among Africans of Western efforts to maintain indirect 'spheres of influence' in Africa. Each country has supported military exercises and set up training schools without much co-ordination among contributing countries or consultation with African states. This led to fierce opposition to the American 'African Crisis Response Initiative' (ACRI), which has so far involved a select group of favoured recipients in peacekeeping training and logistical support. The financial and logistical assistance of these external actors will still be crucial for Africa's cash-strapped armies, but for such assistance to be effective, it must be given after consultation with Africans to determine their needs. Small states, big conflicts
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If the conflicts currently raging in Africa are anything to go by, then other approaches to managing conflicts besides hegemony, concerts of powerand security mechanisms should also be considered. One possible approach is to focus on building ad hoc coalitions of 'willing' small African states to complement security mechanisms. A precedent was set in February 1997 when Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Mali, Senegal and Togo sent a peacekeeping mission, eventually under UN auspices, to monitor the conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR). Though there are continuing tensions in Bangui that have periodically had to be defused by the peacekeepers, the peace appears to have held. Events in CAR suggest that conflicts on the continent can sometimes be managed through such partnerships rather than through the development of ponderous and ambitious structures that are unable to respond flexibly to crises. A coalition of small states could provide another dimension where subregional solutions are not viable or fail to provide a solution to a crisis. Apart from the CAR example, it should be remembered that many small states on the continent have helped to keep the peace. Several such states have reasonably good infantry units. Over 20 African states have been involved in UN peacekeeping missions abroad: Ghanaians have kept peace in Lebanon; Senegalese in Kuwait; Botswanans in Somalia; Zambians in Mozambique; Ethiopians, Malians and Malawians in Rwanda; and Tanzanians and Namibians in Angola. To improve their armies, these states need serviceable weapons, good communications equipment, tactical mobility, logistical support, and knowledge of basic doctrine. The main advantage of a coalition of small states is that it avoids the political

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baggage and interests that regional hegemons carry into such interventions. It can help allay suspicions about the motives of the ntervenors and help reassure belligerents of the neutrality of the mission. But the Guinea-Bissau case also exposes the weaknesses of this approach. Senegalese and Guiean soldiers were no more successful than Gambian, Bninois, Nigrien and Togolese troops in imposing a political settlement on the warring factions in Guinea-Bissau. The issue was settled by military force only in May 1999, leading to the exit of the peacekeepers. The absence of Nigeria from this intervention deprived the mission of vital logistical and financial support sufficient to keep ECOMOG alive in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Lacking the regional Gulliver, the Lilliputian peacekeepers had to withdraw from Bissau after the capital had been overrun by General Mane's forces. The two cases serve to stress the point that peacekeepers can achieve their goals only when the parties to the conflict are genuinely ready to stop fighting, and have not just accepted the force for purely tactical reasons. Of wily wise men, eminent elders, and civil societies It is important to note that military solutions can be only short-term bandaids to more complex and deep-rooted social, economic, and political domestic problems. External military power can provide peaceful conditions to work out differences between parties, but viable institutions for managing conflicts and preventing them from becoming violent will still have to be built. The weapons of the weak in Africa may turn out to be smart diplomats to undertake preventive d plomacy and negotiate astute accords, rather than smart bombs to undertake humanitarian war. There are other non-military approaches to managing conflicts. The OAU has created several aa1 hoc committees of 'wise men' to mediate conflicts in the Western Sahara, Chad/Libya and Senegal/Mauritania. 'Presidential mediation' has also been undertaken by several African leaders: Haile Selassie and Modibo Keita in the Morocco-Algeria conflict; Omar Bongo, Blaise Compaor, Idriss Deby, and Amadou Tour in the CAR; Julius Nyerere in Burundi; and Mandela and Mugabe in Lesotho. Africa's regional mechanisms all support the idea of a Council of African elders, consisting of former heads of state and prominent leaders, to promote peace and democracy in Africa. Aside from eminent elders, Africa's civil society actors women's groups, religious leaders, journalists, the business community and academicshave also been involved in efforts at promoting local justice and national

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reconciliation, socio-economic reconstruction, integration of child soldiers into society, and collecting information ior early warning systems. Women's groups in Mali have been involved in efforts to mediate the Tuareg problem, religious groups in Liberia devised the first peace plan to resolve the civil conflict, and women's groups in Sierra Leone pressured the military to cede power in 1996. But despite these noble efforts, it should be acknowledged that civil society's influence on conflicts has not always been benign. In Rwanda, the media was involved in 'hate radio' inciting the killing of Tutsis, while local groupsfrom Somalia to Angola have been involved in arms trafficking. One should also not overestimate the ability of civil society actors to temper the excesses of warlords in civil conflicts: in Liberia, religious groups proposed but the warlords disposed; in Sierra Leone, the women were able to push out the soldiers but not defeat the rebels. In both cases, power largely flowed from the barrel of a gun rather than from local elders, civic groups, or traditional chiefs.

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White mercenaries, black armies Turning now to the role of mercenaries in Africa, it is clear that while the Cold War's end has forced Africans to seek indigenous solutions to the continent's conflicts, post-Cold War vacuums have also encouraged some non-state actors to promote anachronistic solutions to the continent's conflicts. Many Western academics, humanitarianists, and journalists have pushed for the use of mercenaries, recruited main ly from former white South African and European soldiers, to be deployed in African conflicts to save the 'natives' from themselves. Many Africans are critical of this practice and have instead focused on developing their own regional security mechanisms. Even governments like Angola and Sierra Leone that have employed the services of mercenaries over the past five years, have abandoned their use following political pressure. We provide four arguments against the use of mercenaries and in favour of strengthening regional mechanisms. First, regional security mechanisms are far more representative and accountable than mercenary outfits. ECOMOG, for instance, had to send reports to ECOWAS and the UN and account for its actions in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Its interventions sought and eventually obtained international legitimacy, which mercenaries, with no international legal standing, have little chance of obtaining.

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Second, regional security systems can more easily be democratised and even legitimised with the participation of extra-subregional actors and local civil society actors. ECOMOG may have been considered a Nigerian-dominated effort, but Nigeria did not prevent Burkinab, Ivorian, Malian, Nigrien, Senegalese, Ugandan, Tanzanian and UN peacekeepers from diversifying the military presence in Liberia. The UN and OAU also sent their own special envoys. In both Liberia and Sierra Leone, domestic civil society groups played an active role in the peace process. Third, mercenaries in Africa have deservedly acquired a reputation as psychopathic 'dogs of war' after committing atrocities against civilians. They cannot be held accountable for such actions in the way that members of national or international forces can, since they have no legal status and the governments who hire them are often unwilling to offend those on whom they depend to provide security. Mercenaries typically have little knowledge of, or desire to get to know, African societies and their people, and enter conflicts not so much to bring and keep the peace, but to build and keep their bank accounts. Some ECOMOC troops committed atrocities in Liberia and Sierra Leone, as did their Western counterparts in Somalia. Because international pressure was brought to bear on the ECOMOG High Command it was ultimately forced to justify its soldiers' actions. In some cases, individuals were actually punished for crimes committed. Fourth and finally, it is in the interest of mercenaries to prolong conflicts. In contrast, for Africans the fact that conflicts directly affect the security and stability of most African states through refugees, arms trafficking and border incursions gives them an incentive, in many cases, to try to end the conflicts.

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Conclusion
The approaches to conflict management outlined in this essay are, of course, not mutually exclusive and can sometimes be used in combination. A concert of powers has historically operated a balance of power system, and even within the 'collective security' system of the regional mechanisms, there is scope for the prominence of powerful actors. Without regional hegemons lending their diplomatic weight, economic resources, and military muscle, it is hard to imagine a regional security mechanism succeeding in west or southern Africa. The use of trouble-shooting eminent elders can also be combined with regional security mechanisms or concerts
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of power. Africa's security systems are still in the process of being worked out. The continental security architecture for the next millennium is still being painstakingly built, block by block, almost unconsciously. This essay has captured only some of the trends and possibilities of Pax Africana. We argued at the start that the legacy of colonial borders has been one of the main factors contributing to African conflicts. Some prominent Africans like Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka have asked that the continent's coloniallyinherited map be redrawn to reflect better the ethnic realities of its societies. However, these borders cannot be so easily changed through another Berlin conference in Africa: entrenched lites and new states are unwilling to give up their privileges and territories. The OAU's founding fathers froze the colonially-imposed map of Africa in 1963, not because they were content to live happily with externally-ordained frontiers, but because they saw no other practical solutions to preserving the peace on a fragile continent of unconsoldated and insecure states. With no consensus existing to change the borders at the negotiating table, it was clear that such efforts would occur on the battlefield. With all states vulnerable to such challenges, universal maintenance of the status quo appeared the best way of establishing predictable rules of conduct and avoiding perennial border claims. Current events between Ethiopia and Eritrea seem to confirm the wisdom of opposing secessionist efforts in Katanga and Biafra. But new leaders like Charles Taylor, Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame, who achieved power largely through armed force, seem less inclined to observe this post-colonial norm. We also argued that the end of the Cold War left security vacuums in Africa which regional actors have attempted to fill. But the inability of African soldiers and mediators to defeat the ambitions of local warlords has led to efforts to include them in peace agreements. The appeasement of warlords and the power-sharing arrangements that have been reached in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and Angola have so far been unsuccessful. Only in Mozambique does the deal appear to be holding. It is therefore important that peace agreements not simply restore the status quo ante bellum and the structures that led to the conflict in the first place; inclusive institutions must still be built and grievances corrected to ensure durable peace. One must always remember, however, that African peacemakers, unlike policy boffins and armchair critics, inhabit a practical world, where resources are short and options limited. It is no good calling for the

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South African Journal of International Affairs: Articles

exclusion from negotiations and the trial of warlords if the counterforce needed to achieve these goals simply does not exist. A NATO-style humanitarian intervention combining awesome military prowess with multilateral diplomacy seems decades away in the African context. For now, African states have to be content with their low-tech alternatives that seek to stem the destabilising flows of refugees and arms across borders. They will have to manage the sources of conflicts through their modest diplomatic and military tools, while hoping that the international community provides the resources for humanitarian assistance, strengthening institutions, and reconstructing and rehabilitating war-torn societies. A central aspect of understanding contemporary African politics is to see it primarily as a crisis of the state. Many observers of African politics have tended to ignore the degree to which neither democracy nor stability are possible unless the state functions effectively, as analysts like Adebayo Olukoshi have noted. The state is not merely an instrument of public management, or consumer and distributor of goods; it is fundamentally also a manager of disputes and conflicts. Indeed, the state's primary function is to maintain order. The continuation of conflicts in Africa should therefore be seen as a sign of the weakness of the state. The inability of many African states to maintain effective order and resolve conflicts has been a primary motivation behind the militarisation of the African state. It is therefore vital that the African state be strengthened as a means of resolving conflicts. Elections in Angola, Burundi, Liberia and Sierra Leone have failed to bring lasting peace, and in some cases even led to renewed fighting. Post-independence Africa has experienced both successes and failures. The political, military and diplomatic energies of African leaders and states have paid off in the liberation of the entire continent from foreign rule. The more representative forms of government that arose in the 1990s encourage hopes for a more democratic future for the continent. But contrasting with these positive developments have been the spate of conflicts, rebellions, refugee crises and the continuing impoverishment of Africa's masses. The two forces identified at the start of the essay as having crippled African states at birth colonialism and the Cold War have now receded into the past. But their legacies remain to haunt the present. If Africa is to have a future worth celebrating in the next millennium, fulfilling hopes for a renaissance, a new generation of Africans will have to muster the ingenuity and courage to make the dream of Pax Africana a living reality.

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Volume 7, Number 1, Summer 2000